Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 23 November–14 December 1974 [Paperback]

In late November 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog received a phone call from Paris delivering some terrible news. German film historian, mentor, and close friend Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and dying. Herzog was determined to prevent this and believed that an act of walking would keep Eisner from death. He took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag of the barest essentials, and wearing a pair of new boots, set off on a three-week pilgrimage from Munich to Paris through the deep chill and snowstorms of winter.

Of Walking in Iceis Herzog’s beautifully written, much-admired, yet often-overlooked diary account of that journey. Herzog documents everything he saw and felt on his quest to his friend’s bedside, from poetic descriptions of the frozen landscape and harsh weather conditions to the necessity of finding shelter in vacant or abandoned houses and the intense loneliness of his solo excursion.

Includes, for the first time, Werner Herzog’s 1982 “Tribute to Lotte Eisner” upon her receipt of the Helmut Käutner Prize

"Herzog's existential journey through a hostile winter landscape is one of the great modern pilgrimages—a record of physical suffering, of hallucination and ecstatic revelation, of portents and animals, of the wreckage of history and myth.Of Walking in Icehas the eerie power of the best fairytales. It hits you with the force of dreams and leaves you with the taste of snow-filled air."—Helen Macdonald

"Surely the strangest, strongest walking book I know, it tells the story of a winter pilgrimage, made in desperation and in hope. At once a diary, a blizzard of weather and memories, and the record of a ritual: only Herzog could have written this weird, slender classic."—Robert Macfarlane

"Herzog's pilgrimage is a fugue and an absurdist comedy as rich as anything in his cinema."—Iain Sinclair