Book of a lifetime: Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog

From The Independent archive: Duncan Minshull reflects on the German auteur’s epic journey

Action man: Herzog filming ‘Rescue Dawn’ in 2006 (Alamy)

Simple acts of walking are threaded through the fiction of many writers, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, who put their characters on the road for compelling reasons. So it seemed an idea to round them all up, and steer them into an anthology called The Burning Leg. Twenty authors gathered. Except my favourite was missing, because his words are non-fiction, though they flow fantastically.

Quest, myth and even farce colour the pages of his rich and remarkable diary – the sort of diary that invites you to stop reading before pulling on your Timberlands. Film director Werner Herzog has a certain reputation. He makes ethereal and outlandish works. He once dragged a ship up a mountain and aimed a gun at an actor. But these are small fare compared to a journey he took in 1974, from Munich to the bedside of an ailing friend near Paris.

It was deep winter and Herzog believed that tramping through adversity would help the friend. The sheer effort of the walk would “bring her back” to health. This is announced at the start of Of Walking In Ice, published a few years after his self-styled pilgrimage. Yes, Munich to Paris – in three months. That’s a map, compass and little else in a small duffel bag. He sticks to the back routes and skirts the Rhine, the Black Forest and the Seine, then parts of urban France and on to the capital.