Legging It for Lotte

A few years ago I published an anthology on walking, to show why we set off on foot. What are the reasons for booting up? Well, maybe those who moved across the pages could tell us something. William Wordsworth beat out a metre and communed with nature. Charles Baudelaire communed with Paris. Then Søren Kierkegaard composed his pensées, and Bruce Chatwin, ever a self-dramatizer, encountere  trouble en route. I steered two hundred into that book and one of the last was one of the best, because he failed to fit my tidy categories. He was a romantic roamer who even trod out the winter months – November, December, ugh! – another excuse to recall him now.

Werner Herzog, the German film-maker, was friends with the late Chatwin (on the subject of walking they once compared legs together). He is known for such expansive and luminous works as Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and recently Grizzly Man, as well as some eye-catching stunts in real life. He pulled a ship through jungle and pointed a gun at an actor. But that winter journey? The resulting book? It appeared rather slimly, all of eighty-eight pages. Vom Gehem im Eis, translated as Of Walking in Ice, outdoes his other exploits by a country mile. Herzog’s own reason for booting up was typically high-blown:

A friend from Paris called and told me that [the German scholar and film critic] Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death. I took a jacket. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.

He may have talked legs with Chatwin; he might also have adapted Kierkegaard’s lovely idea of ‘walking ourselves into wellbeing’. Walking Lotte into well-being meant leaving his home town of Munich for the French capital, and that earlier ‘ugh’ refers to freezing fog over France and Germany in November 1974. He took the back tracks, carrying a duffel bag, which held one map, one compass – few surprises there. And I wonder if part of the trek isn’t a little idealized, with mention of quaint-sounding villages . . . Pesternaker, Rottenacker and Bitz (for bandages). The Black Forest is crossed, the Rhine skirted and, entering France, ditto the Seine for a while. Next it’s Poissons and Sailly, Chassy and Charmes (for a lift!) before pushing on to Paris. Herzog loves the early days, full of fog. It allows him to dress things up as unreal, unlikely. A tree is ‘sweating’ and a hill ‘mythical’, and dulled visibility renders sharper sounds: the screech of hawks and the grunt of farmers shifting manure. These could come from one of his films, with our author in a starring role. He is an outsider who makes villages quieten and ‘feign death’. He is a vagabond who breaks into empty houses to sleep. And always the concern – ‘Lotte Eisner, how is she? Is she alive? Am I moving fast enough?’ It’s likely, for at full pelt ‘steam is rising’ from his trousers. Great images. Drab fields and drabber settlements are transformed into – call it a Herzogian world. Yet Of Walking in Ice isn’t just for movie fans, beguiled by a strange pilgrimage. It speaks so universally, so humanely of the act of putting one foot in front of the other that one might say . . . here is the little black book of, herein lie the secrets of. It speaks to all pedestrian types. Yes, he hurries to Lotte, but he responds like any of us on more modest walks. It’s often about being close. Very close, via those back roads, where a director’s eye picks out frozen apples at Bilhaufen and roses trimmed at Munderkingen. Some basic truths emerge, such as: ‘you pass a lot of rubbish when you walk’ and ‘we have turned into the cars we have become’, which may sound cryptic, Herzogian perhaps, but we know what he means about motorists, even in the Seventies. Then, at a place called Gedaechtnishaus (south of Bilhaufen), he offers a theory to cherish. Lost once: hello hardship. Lost twice, and the walker will return to the right road again. However, isn’t there a point when we stop looking at nature and turn inward? Kierkegaard did, as a philosopher, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau blanked the beautiful hills of Chambéry to search his soul for God. At various times – with rhythm strong and blood a-buzzing – Herzog’s mind also flies. Fantastically so on the French leg. Near Chatenois he has ‘walked walked walked’ himself into reverie, believing the land heats up and creatures are actually white: a white hare, a white dove . . . a white peacock. Later comes an odd attempt to find an arrow in a tree – his friend Claude’s arrow. And later still, a family fable is recounted about ‘grandfather’s boots’. Arrow and grandfather are fragments from childhood memory, so perhaps the further we travel, the further back we delve?Wordsworth and Shelley said this. One thing always jars, though – pain. A lot of pain runs through Of Walking in Ice; but where’s any walker without the feet’s afflictions, making him or her heroic? Herzog’s own niggles are named and declaimed. My favourite pain-lines are: ‘the Achilles tendon is rather irritated, as I’ve been walking all day on the left side of the asphalt and twisted a little with every step. So tomorrow I’ll switch roadsides now and then.’ Pain also runs through the Herzogian highs – white ones included – and points to a compelling tension in his story. On an implausible mission, he must calm down a bit, even go shopping for bandages. He must deal with the real world again and again. Physical closeness. Flights of fancy. A romantic roamer floored. But why else tuck the book into your knapsack? It’s good he doesn’t boast about the miles covered (those anthologized Victorians) or bang on about equipment used (very Edwardian). It’s good, too, he misses his baby son: ‘the little one must be lying in bed now, clinging to the edge of the blanket’ – which proves another reality check. And I like the way his lines reflect the progress made. When moving well they fairly sweep along. When walking badly, the lines stack up, stutter. This connects us to Herzog, as if we’re out there following his every footstep. Then, on 7 December, he enters the suburbs of Paris amidst a thinning fog (of course). Like Wordsworth he considers the smallness of man against nature; unlike the poet he uses a single word. Pedestrians go ‘unprotected’, he says, limping towards a café. They are enthralled by the sights and sounds, waylaid by feelings. It might be the only adventure left. Paris also means Lotte’s bedside. But readers should discover for themselves the effect of being walked into well-being. Is a Herzogian finale due? An end scene? Of course, it’s really about the trials of getting there, to the Champs Elysées, the last place named by Herzog, who has added brilliantly to the ‘ped-lit’ genre. Better than that, though, his lines make us look up, put the book down, find some boots. Even in December – ugh!

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 16 © Duncan Minshull 2007