Two weeks into the journey, he was overcome by “severe despair. He was plagued by horseflies, and his duffel bag rubbed a hole in his sweater. He endured pain in his knee and an Achilles tendon that swelled to twice its size. His feet, in new boots, blistered and ached. He sustained himself mostly on milk and tangerines often, he was parched with thirst. Sometimes, he broke into vacant homes, taking brief refuge. Like a Romantic hero, Herzog finds that nature echoes his state of mind: “Dusky desolation in the forest solitude, deathly still, only the wind is stirring.” He walked through blizzards and suffered bone-chilling cold, and when he could not find an inn for the night, he buried himself under hay in barns.
Originally published in 1978, this raw, emotional account of his three-week journey, from late November to December, reveals an astute observer, a painterly writer, and a man desperate to achieve his goal. Dozens of works, including Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), lay in the future.
Later, perhaps, when we allow it.” At that point in his career, he had completed only one movie, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). “When I’m in Paris she will be alive,” he told himself. In 1974, when he was 32, acclaimed film director, writer, and producer Herzog ( Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, 2010, etc.) set out on foot from Munich to Paris with the goal of saving a dying friend, the film critic and poet Lotte Eisner. For Herzog, walking was an exercise in magical thinking.