On the trail of Herzog

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.