This book, which was originally published in German in 1978 (the first English translation was published in 1980) is Werner Herzog’s diary of his three-week walk from Munich to Paris in November and December 1974, which he undertook after hearing that his close friend, the film critic Lotte Eisner, was seriously ill. “I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith,” he writes, “believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.” The book’s daily entries are a mix of descriptions of the outside world and Herzog’s thoughts and imaginings and interior landscapes; passages of straight description are followed by passages that are almost hallucinatory, seeming to be about actual events until suddenly it becomes clear that they aren’t. I like the cinematic strings of images that Herzog records, like this, from the first day of his journey:
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. (2)
Or this, from close to the end:
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. (97)
For much of Herzog’s walk, the weather is miserable: he writes a lot about rain and snow and slush and cold. He writes about breaking into empty holiday cottages to sleep: in one, he says, he finished a crossword puzzle that was sitting on the kitchen table. In the same cottage, he says, he peed in a rubber boot. He does not come across as the most social individual: right after mentioning the boot, there’s this: “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” (12). And walking by himself for three weeks doesn’t exactly help: he’s alone, and lonely; at multiple points he worries about how wild he looks, and checks his reflection in mirrors to make sure he still looks human. He writes about the difficulties of walking, about the blisters and aches. He writes, on day three, that he “had no idea that walking could hurt so much” (18). Later: “At a sharp turn my left leg suddenly tells me what a meniscus is, as heretofore I’d known it only in theory” (32-33).
Given that I really like walking and am interested in art about walking, it is not surprising that I liked this book rather a lot. I suspect I would have liked it even more if I’d seen more of Herzog’s films (Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the only one I’ve seen, which maybe is a problem I should rectify), but still, this was a very satisfying read.
Elsewhere/longer: I really like Jenny Hendrix’s piece on this book on slate.com.
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