Of Walking In Ice

Of Walking in Ice is Herzog's existential journey through a hostile winter landscape, one of the great modern pilgrimages. It is a record of physical suffering, hallucination, ecstatic revelation, portents and animals, and the wreckage of history and myth. The work has the eerie power of the best fairytales, hitting you with the force of dreams and leaving you with the taste of snow-filled air.

Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk, winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction

Of Walking in Ice is a poetic meditation on life and death by one of the most renowned and respected filmmakers and intellectuals of our time.

In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was told that his mentor Lotte Eisner, the filmmaker and critic, was dying in Paris, he set off to walk there from Munich, 'in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot'. Along the way, he recorded what he saw, how he felt, and what he experienced, from the physical discomfort of the journey to moments of rapture.

This is a remarkable narrative—part pilgrimage, part meditation, and a confrontation between a great German Romantic imagination and the contemporary world. This edition of the book is being published for the first time as a classic piece of proto-psychogeography, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the legendary director's walk.