At 8.30 a.m. on a crisp autumn Sunday a group of 20 huddled on King’s Cross station’s platform nine and three-quarters — empty but for a smattering of camera-toting Japanese Harry Potter enthusiasts — ready to embark on a journey inspired by the iconoclastic German film-maker Werner Herzog.
In the harsh midwinter of 1974, Herzog made a gruelling pilgrimage, walking 500 miles from Munich to Paris in a bid to fend off the death of the distinguished film critic and historian Lotte Eisner, who had suffered a stroke. Herzog felt that he and his fellow German film-makers owed an immeasurable debt to Eisner who, by giving her blessing to their work, restored to it a legitimacy that had been stripped away by the barbarism of Nazism. ‘I walked against her death,’ he said, ‘knowing that if I walked on foot she would be alive when I got there.’
Our journey, organised by the theatre company 1st Framework in association with the Goethe-Institut London, comprised a train ride to Welwyn Garden City, a seven-mile walk to a village hall in Kimpton, where we had lunch, and then a screening of Herzog’s 1974 documentary The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, followed by a 45-minute dramatised performance by 1st Framework of extracts from Of Walking in Ice, the diary he wrote during his long walk. This book, Herzog has said, is closer to his heart than all his films put together.
We emerged from Welwyn Garden City station to the improbable and unattractive sight of a fountain spouting pink water before following our guide John in an obedient snake through the town’s socially engineered streets, across the A1(M), and out into the fields beyond. Herzog has said that he does all the essential things in life on foot — he walked 1,000 kilometres across the Alps to propose to his wife — and our walk, though of rather less epic proportions, was designed to mirror his three-week marathon.
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