On Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog (translated by Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg).
Title: On Walking in Ice.
Author: Werner Herzog (translated by Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg).
Genre: Non-fiction, diary, travel.
Country: Germany.
Language: German.
Publication Date: 1974, 1982 (this edition 2015).
Summary: In late November 1974, the author and director set off on a three-week walk from Munich to Paris as a pilgrimage to save the life of his close friend and fellow filmmaker Lotte Eisner. This is his beautifully written account of everything he saw and felt on his journey to his friend's bedside, from descriptions of the landscape and harsh weather to practical concerns about where to find lodging to the intense loneliness of his solo excursion. The book also includes Tribute to Lotte Eisner (1982), the speech Herzog gave in honour of Lotte Eisner on the occasion of her receiving the Helmut Käutner Prize for her contribution to German film culture (she was the first person to be given this award).
My rating: 9/10.
My review:
♥ Sunshine, like a day in spring, that is the Surprise. How to get out of Munich? What is going on in people's minds? Mobile homes? Smashed-up cars bought wholesale? The car wash? Meditating on myself makes one thing evident: the rest of the world is in rhyme.
One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me.
♥ While walking, so many things pass through one's head, the brain rages. A near-accident now a bit further ahead. Maps are my passion. Soccer games are starting, they are chalking the center line on plowed fields. Bavarian flags at the Aubing (Germering?) transit station. The train swirled up dry paper behind it, the swirling lasted a long time, then the train was gone. In my hand I could still feel the small hand of my little son, this strange little hand whose thumb can be bent so curiously against the joint. I gazed into the swirling paper and it gave me a feeling, as if my heart was going to be ripped apart.
♥ Only if this were a film would I consider it real.
♥ Now all of a sudden the whole place looks in one direction, without anything being there. After these last few miles on foot I am aware that I'm not in my right mind; such knowledge comes from my soles. He who has no burning tongue has burning soles.
♥ Alling, five kilometers. For the first time a fear of cars. Someone has burned illustrated papers in the field. Noises, as if church bells were ringing from spires. The fog sinks lower; a haze. I am stock-still, between the fields. Mopeds with young farmers are rattling past. Further to the right, toward the horizon, many cars because the soccer match is still in progress. I hear the ravens, but a denial is building up inside me. By all means, do not glance upward! Let them go! Don't look at them, don't lift your gaze from the paper! No, don't! Let them go, those ravens! I won't look up there now! A glove in the field, soaking wet, and cold water lying in the tractor tracks. The teenagers on their mopeds are moving toward death in synchronized motion.
♥ How much we've turned into the cars we sit in, you can tell by the faces.
♥ A cornfield in winter, unharvested, ashen, bristling, and yet there is no win. It is a field called Death.
♥ This hill here invites No One to Nothing. Just below me, a village nestles in its lights. Far to the right, almost silent, there must be a busy highway. Conical light, not a sound.
♥ ..with every movement wary like an animal, I think I possess the thoughts of animals as well.
♥ A hunter, with a second hunter nearby, asked me what I was looking for up there. I said I liked his dog better than I liked him.
♥ At the entrance to the village I saw an old woman, small, bowlegged, madness etched across her face; she pushed a bicycle, delivering the Sunday papers. She stalked the houses as if they were The Enemy.
♥ What a sunrise behind me. The clouds had split open a crack; yes, a sun like that rises bloodied on the day of Battle.
♥ The village is dead silent, telling of deeds done from which it refuses to wake.
♥ The clouds are drifting against me. My God, how heavy the earth is from the rain.
♥ When I looked out the window, a raven was sitting with his head bowed in the rain and didn't move. Much later he was still sitting there, motionless and freezing and lonely and still wrapped in his raven's thoughts. A brotherly feeling flashed through me and loneliness filled by breast.
Hail and storm, almost knocking me off my feet with the first gust. Blackness crept forth from the forest and at once I thought, this won't end well. Now the stuff's turning into snow. On the wet road I can see my reflection below me. For the past hour continual vomiting, only little mouthfuls, from drinking the milk too fast. The cows here break into a gallop quite unexpectedly. Refuge in a bus stop of rough stained wood, open to the west so that the snow blows into the most distant corner, where I am. Along with the storm and snow and rain, leaves are swirling as well, sticking to me and covering me completely. Away from here, onward.
♥ The villages feign death as I approach.
Just before Mickhausen (Muenster?), turning further west, following my instincts. Blisters on the balls of my toes give me trouble; had no idea that walking could hurt so much. High on a telephone pole a repairman was hanging by his straps undaunted, shamelessly staring down at me, the Man of Sorrows, entrusting his weight to the taut strap while smoking a pipe. His glance followed me for a long time as I crept past below. Suddenly I stood rooted by my feet, then turned on my heel and stared back. All at once a cave in the craggy slope behind me howled down to the sea with its mouth wide open. The rivers streamed converging to their end in the sea, with the Grotesque also cowering in a crowd on the coast, just like everywhere else on this Earth. Overwhelming all was a sudden, strange, otherworldly whistling and whining in the air, from the gliders circling over the slopes. Further on, toward the rising sun where the thunder of faraway guns was rumbling, a radar on a mountaintop, mysterious and forever taciturn, like a huge eavesdropping ear, yet also emitting shrieks that no one can hear, reaching into fathomless space. Nobody knows who built the station, who runs it, to whom it addresses itself. Or does the repairman strapped to the pole have something to do with it? Why is he staring after me like that? The radar station is often shrouded in clouds, then they scatter and the sun goes down, days passing as I stand there, and still the station glares fixedly at the ultimate edges of the universe. Over the mountain forest outside Sachrang, in the last days of the War, an aeroplane dropped a metal device that was visible in the treetops by its flag. We children were certain the flag was wandering from tree to tree, that the mysterious device was moving forward. During the night some men went off and, when they returned at daybreak, they refused to divulge information concerning what they had found.
Beautiful hilly countryside, a great deal of forest, all is still. A hawk screeches. On the prayer cross behind me is written:
Ere night falls, all can swiftly change
And have a different face form early morn.
On earth a restless stranger was I born
In mortal danger, though in the midst of life.
Through Christ's blood for me my God pray send
Some good end to all this strife.
Our time is high, Eternity draws nigh.
♥ The man at the petrol station gave me such an unreal look that I rushed to the john to convince myself in front of the mirror that I was still looking human. So what-I'll let the storm blow me around the petrol station until I get wings.
♥ Bridge spanning the Iller, path in the direction of Beuren through a forest, all at once a vast clearing. Everywhere the forest was staring, vast and black and deathly, rigidly still. From the pit of the woods came the screech of the buzzard. Beside me a water-filled ditch, the long grass in it flattened down. The water's so transparent that I wonder why the ditch hasn't frozen over, I kicked a bit of frost onto it with my boot and, yes, there was a thin layer of ice on top after all, as transparent as an aquarium's walls. A loneliness like this has never come over me before.
♥ The wind worries the woods outside. This morning Night was drowned on cold, grey waves.
♥ The children are devoured by the school. Sparrows are melting from the roof in drops. There are still some frozen apples in the naked trees uphill.
♥ Why is walking so full of woe? I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me.
♥ Geisingen, tired humans in neglected villages who no longer expect anything more for themselves. Snowy silence, the black fields once again peeking out bleakly from beneath the snow. For years the doors of Genkingen have been banging in the wind. I saw sparrows on a dung heap that has stopped steaming. Melting snow trickles into a drainage hole. The legs keep going.
♥ I am a ski jumper, I support myself on the storm, bent forward, far, far, the spectators surrounding me a forest turned into a pillar of salt, a forest with its mouth open wide. I fly and fly and don't stop. Yes, they scream. Why doesn't he stop? I think, better keep on flying before they see that my legs are so brittle and stuff that they'll crumble like chalk when I land. Don't quit, don't look, fly on.
♥ All around there are cornfields, which calls for more thinking.
♥ I'm so dramatically wet that before entering an inn I hesitate outside for quite a long time. But necessity forces me to overcome my worst fears. Haile Selassie was executed. His corpse was burned together with an executed greyhound, an executed pig, and an executed chicken. The intermingled ashes were scattered over the fields of an English country. How comforting this is.
♥ In Truchtelfingen I become aware that there's no way to proceed, the snowstorm's becoming a Madness. ..A standstill all day long, no movement, no thoughts, I've come to a standstill. The town is awful, quite a lot of industry, cheerless Turks, just one telephone booth. Very pronounced loneliness, also. The little one must be lying in bed by now, clinging to the edge of his blanket. Today, I'm told, they're already showing the film at the Leopold; I do not dare to believe in justice.
♥ I manufactured napalm along with Farocki, and we experimented with it out in an open field of rubbish; we needed it urgently for a demonstration of terror. We were seized but we lied about it.
♥ He says he'll have to ask first, giving his negate judgment a head start from beyond the door. Everything's taken, he says coming in, whereas everything's free. The regulars seem to side with him in not giving someone like me a room; who knows if he has any money, a sheepishly dull face exclaims. I'm too soaked to think this through.
♥ For the first time some sunshine, and I thought to myself this will do you good, but now my shadow was lurking beside me and, because I was heading west, it was often in front of me as well. At noon, my shadow, It cowered there, creepingly, down around my legs, causing me in truth such anxiety.
♥ The forest opened into an elevated valley, then past the last farmhouse it climbed steeply through wet snow to the Gedächtnishaus, reaching the road again beyond the height. An elderly woman gathering wood, plump and impoverished, tells me about her children one by one, when they were born, when they died. When she becomes aware that I want to go on, she talks three times as fast, shortening destinies, skipping the deaths of three children although adding them later on, unwilling to let even one fate slip away-and this in a dialect that makes it hard for me to follow what she is saying. After the demise of an entire generation of offspring, she would speak no more about herself except to say that she gathers wood, every day; I should have stayed longer.
♥ The eye is inevitably drawn to empty forms, to boxes, refuse. My feet keep going. Elzach, telephone calls; shall I turn back?
♥ A ladies' bicycle, nearly brand new, was thrown into a brook; it occupied my thoughts for quite some time. A crime? The scene of a fight? Something provincial-sultry-dramatic has taken place here, I suspect.
♥ No one, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact, with petrol. It's flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-colored plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten, to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing. Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.
♥ Is the Loneliness good? Yes, it is. There are only dramatic vistas ahead. The festering Rankness, meanwhile, gathers once again at the sea.
♥ Flat countryside, only the crows, shrieking all around me-I suddenly ask myself seriously whether I've lost my mind, as I hear so many crows but see so few. There is dead silence around me, as far as I can hear, and then there's the shrieking of crows. Mistily the heights of the Vosges Mountains are penciled along the horizon. On the plain below, two amusement parks: ferris wheels, a haunted house ride, a medieval castle, utterly deserted and closed down. It looks permanent.
♥ The war memorials are my resting place. The farmers' wives talk a lot to each other. The farmers themselves are dead tired. I'm always seeing empty buses. All right, I say, keep it going.
♥ ..I had no qualms in accepting the lift since it gave me the chance to buy a compass before the shops closed. The compass is hydraulic, but it doesn't have my friendship yet.
♥ I might walk along the River Aube, I heard somewhere the Aube is good. The wit of the people here stems from settling in one place for a thousand years.
♥ I see ever so many mice. No one has the vaguest idea just how many mice there are in the world, it's unimaginable. The mice rustle very lightly in the flattened grass. Only he who walks sees these mice. Across the fields, where the snow lay, they've dug tunnels between grass and snow; now that the snow's gone the serpentine traces still remain. Friendship is possible with mice.
♥ I headed toward a fire, a fire that kept burning in front of me like a glimmering wall. It was a fire of frost, one that brings on Coldness, not Heat, one that makes water turn immediately into ice. The firethought of ice creates the ice as swiftly as thought. Siberia was created in precisely this manner, and the Northern Lights represent its final flickering. That is the Explanation. Certain signals seem to confirm this, especially the intermission signals. Likewise at the end of the daily television programming, when the set buzzes and the screen is filled with snowy dots, implying the same thing.
♥ All day long the most perfect solitude. A clear wind makes the trees up there rustle, the gaze travels very far. This is a season that has nothing to do with this world any more.
♥ Steep slopes and slashing wind, empty ski-lifts. I can hardly see my hand before my face; this is no proverb, I can scarcely see it. Hath this brood of adders venom? Aye, thou speakest sweet, whilst thou are wicked withal. I yearned to kindle a fire; I would love nothing more than to see it already ablaze. 'Twould fill mine heart with dread lest thou break salt unto me. Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path.
♥ ..surrounding me the youthful village loiterers lounged. One of them played pool so poorly that he cheated, even though he was alone.
♥ Beside me in the restaurant, which was otherwise empty but for two cleaning women, the waitress was taking breakfast, and together we looked in the same direction, the direction of the street. I wanted to look over at her; but neither of us dared direct our gaze at one another, for due to a secret, compelling reason this wasn't allowed. I'm sure she was under the same compelling urge. She stared rigidly ahead, the urge urged us both.
♥ Everything's grey on grey. Cows loom astonished. During the worst snowstorm on the Swabian Alb, I encountered a provisional enclosure for sheep, the sheep freezing and confused, looking at me and cuddling against me as if I could offer a solution, The Solution. I've never seen such expressions of trust as I found on the faces of those sheep in the snow.
♥ Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, only rain, I can't recall anything more.
♥ There was a lot of traffic and then it really began to rain, Total Rain, a lasting-forever winter rain that demoralized me even more because of its coldness, so unfriendly and all-penetrating.
♥ At Domrémy I went inside Joan's house; so this is where she comes from, it lies right by the bridge. There is her signature, before which I stand a long time. She signed it Jehanne, but most likely her hand was guided.
♥ An old man crosses the bridge, unaware that he's being watched. He walks so slowly, and ponderously, pausing again and again after short, hesitant steps; that is Death walking with him. All is shrouded still in semi-darkness. Low clouds, it won't be a good day.
♥ The village was sluggish yesterday, like a caterpillar in the cold. Today, on Sunday, it's already become the chrysalis. Because of the frost, the earthworms unable to cross the asphalt road have burst. Underneath the eaves of tin, where one can sit outside in the summer, loneliness is crouching now, ready to spring.
♥ Utter loneliness, a brook, and its dell are my companions. A grey heron flies in front of me for many miles, then settles until I come close, when it flies further ahead again. I shall follow him wherever he flies.
♥ Apples lie rotting in the wet clay soil around the trees, nobody's harvesting them. On one of the trees, which seemed from far like the only tree left with any leaves, apples hang in mysterious clusters close to one another. There isn't a single leaf on the wet tree, just wet apples refusing to fall. I picked one, it tasted pretty sour, but the juice in it quenched my thirst. I threw the apple core against the tree, and the apples fell like rain. When the apples had grown still again, restful on the ground, I thought to myself that no one could imagine such human loneliness. It is the loneliest day, the most isolated of all. So I went and shook the tree until it was utterly bare. In the midst of the stillness the apples pummeled the ground. When it was over, a haunting stillness grabbed me and I glanced around, but no one was there. I was alone.
♥ A Spanish priest was reading mass in bad English. He sang in awful tones into the over-amplified microphone, but behind him was some ivy on the stone wall, and there the sparrows were chattering, chattering so close to the microphone that one couldn't understand the priest anymore. The sparrows were amplified a hundredfold. Then a pale young girl collapsed on the steps and died. Someone daubed cool water on her lips, but she preferred Death.
♥ Today I often said "forest" to myself. Truth itself wanders through the forests.
♥ Burro fell from the tenth floor because the balcony had holes that didn't belong there, and he died immediately. The owner of the hotel, fearful for his good reputation, and recognizing the vastness of my pain, offered me nineteen thousand marks for my education. Education for what, I said, that's Judas's money, that won't revive a soul.
♥ Just past Piney I was stopped and checked by astonished patrolmen, who wouldn't believe a word I said and wanted to take me with them right away. We came to an understanding only once the city of Munich was mentioned. I said Oktoberfest, and one of the policemen had been there and remembered the words Glockenspiel and Marienplatz; he could say this in German. After that they became peaceful.
♥ Then some cranes flew over me in perfect formation. Against the strong wind they flew scarcely faster than I was moving on foot. There were twenty-four of them, big, grey, and every so often one of them gave a hoarse cry. Whenever a gust of wind upset their formation, some of them soared, while others who had been torn away from the unit fought back to their original positions; it was magnificent how they regrouped. Like the rainbow, the craned are a metaphor for him who walks.
&heart; I am wondering about the smugness with which people move about. I haven't been in a big town in such a long time. ..The big cities hide their dirt..
♥ At the market was a boy on crutches, leaning against the wall of a house as my feet refused to cooperate anymore. With a single, brief exchange of glances we measured the degree of our relationship.
♥ All I see in front of me is route.
♥ In the obscurity I went to the cathedral, and when I, the Gloomy One, had crept around it, I gave myself a push and went inside.
♥ The region was very disconsolate, like outskirts that refuse to stop, interspersed with a few farmhouses. The electrical cables howled and swayed in the storm; I walked bent forward a bit to avoid being blown off my feet. The clouds were no higher than three hundred feet at most, just one big chase.
♥ Fortified by the weather, it was easier to confront faces today.
♥ Walking endlessly up to Provins, I decided to eat prodigiously, but a salad is all I can get down. When I have to get up now, a mammoth will arise.
♥ All kinds of things are written on the menu, but the waitress always says, we're out of this today, and that's just finished, and there's nothing left in the way of pork, the butcher's been remiss with his deliveries. Only fish remains, several varieties, and it's been like this every day since the restaurant first existed.
♥ The hill in the city is the accumulated debris from the age of Louis XIV, at which time it was open countryside, and the filth has piked up so high that there is a regular mountain in the city today, with paved streets and skyscrapers on it.
♥ In the morning I had reached the edge of Paris, but it was still a half-day to the Champs-Élysées; I walked there on feet so tired that I had no more consciousness left. A man wanted to walk through the forest and never appeared again. A man went for a solitary stroll on a broad beach with his big dog. He had a heart attack and, since the chain was wrapped around his wrist, he was forced to walk on and on, as the dog was very rash and wanted to run. A man had a live duck in his shopping bag. A blind beggar played the accordion, his legs covered with a zebra-striped blanket below the knee. The woman beside him was holding the aluminum cup for the money. Next to them they also had a shopping bag, out of which peered a sick dog. A sick dog attracts more money. Often my gaze strayed through a window on to a vast sandy beach. There were powerful waves, pounding surf, and nothing but haze at daybreak. Hias says he sees to the end of the world. We were close to what they call the breath of danger.
♥ As afterthought just this: I went to Madame Eisner, she was still tired and marked by her illness. Someone must have told her on the phone that I had come on foot, I didn't want to mention it. I was embarrassed and placed my smarting legs up on a second armchair, which she pushed over to me. In the embarrassment a thought passed through my head, and, since the situation was strange anyway, I told it to her. Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish. Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately, and since she knew that I was alone on foot and therefore unprotected, she understood me. For one splendid, fleeting moment something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. I said to her, open the window, from these last days onward I can fly.
~~On Walking in Ice.
♥ Lotte Eisner, I will not keep secret here that shameful moment when you cowardly wanted to steal away from us and out of this life. That was 1974 and we, the New German Cinema, were still just a delicate plant, lacking deep roots in the ground, still riduculed as "movie kids." We could not allow you to die.
..Lotte Eisner, we want you with us even when you are a hundred years old, but I herewith release you from this terrible incantation. You are now allowed to die. I say that without any frivolity, with deep respect for death, which is the only thing we can be sure of. I also say it because we have been strengthened through you, because you have made our connection to our own history possible. And even more important: because you have given us legitimacy.
♥ You gave us wings, I mean that quite literally.*
*The original German word is beflügeln, which means "to inspire." Because it contains the German word for "wing," it can be literally rendered as "to be-wing."
~~Tribute to Lotte Eisner.