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

by Werner Herzog

On the orange-colored plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten, to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing. Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation. A dense cloud of flies and a plague of horseflies swirl around my head, so I’m forced to flail about with my arms, yet they pursue me bloodthirstily nevertheless. How can I go shopping? They’ll throw me out of the supermarket,

Review quote : surrealism .

along with the insect plague swarming around my head.

Is the Loneliness good? Yes, it is. There are only dramatic vistas ahead. The festering Rankness, meanwhile, gathers once again at the sea.

Review quote

No one has the vaguest idea just how many mice there are in the world, it’s unimaginable. The mice rustle very lightly in the flattened grass. Only he who walks sees these mice.

Review

I headed toward a fire, a fire that kept burning in front of me like a glimmering wall. It was a fire of frost, one that brings on Coldness, not Heat, one that makes water turn immediately into ice. The firethought of ice creates the ice as swiftly as thought. Siberia was created in precisely this manner, and the Northern Lights represent its final flickering. That is the Explanation. Certain radio signals seem to confirm this, especially the intermission signals. Likewise at the end of the daily television programming, when the set buzzes and the screen is filled with snowy dots, implying the same thing.

Review

Bruno flees, at night he breaks into an abandoned ski-lift station, it must be in November. He pulls the main lever for the cable car. All night long the ski-lift runs nonsensically, and the entire stretch is illuminated. In the morning the police seize Bruno. This is how the story must end.

Stroszek

Harvest machinery was standing for sale by the roadside, but there were no more farmers. A flock of jackdaws was flying south, much higher in fact than jackdaws normally fly. At a basilica, a bucolic one, right nearby, an unknown Merovingian king is buried. Out of the old grey woodland came a voice from within.

Review

I saw birds rising from an empty field, increasing ever more until the sky at last was filled with them, and I saw that they were coming from the womb of the earth, from very deep down, where gravity is. That’s where the potato mine is, too. The road was so endless, I was overwhelmed by fright.

Review

the cranes are a metaphor for him who walks.

I could swim the rest of the way. Why not swim along the Seine? I swam with a group of people who fled from New Zealand to Australia, in fact I swam in front, being the only one who knew the route already. The only chance the refugees had of escape was to swim; the distance, however, was fifty miles. I advised people to take plastic soccer balls with them as additional swimming aids. For those who drowned, the undertaking became legendary before it even began. After several days we reached a town in Australia; I was the first one to come ashore, and those who followed were preceded by their wristwatches, which drifted in half-underwater. I grabbed the watches and pulled the swimmers ashore. Great, pathetic scenes of brotherliness ensued on shore.

Review