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In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters' galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram.
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Robert Walser was a Swiss writer. He has been recognized as German Switzerland's leading author of the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps Switzerland's single significant modernist.
Background
Robert Walser was born on April 15, 1878 in Biel, Switzerland; the son of Adolf Walser, a merchant, and Elisa (Marti) Walser. His brother Karl Walser was a well-known stage designer and painter. Robert grew up on the language border between the German- and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and spoke both languages.
Education
Robert Walser attended primary school and progymnasium, but he had to leave it before the final exam when his family could no longer bear the cost.
Career
By 1892, when Walser was fourteen, the family fortunes were such that he had to leave school for good and go to work as a bank clerk. Following his apprenticeship, he left home at seventeen to work in Basel and later Stuttgart. Thus began a period of wandering which would last for the next thirty-four years, until his institutionalization in 1929.
Though he first published in 1898, when he was twenty, Walser would earn little from his literary efforts, and he worked a variety of jobs. His early work attracted the attention of influential critics and editors, including Hugo van Hofmannsthal of Die Insel, a Munich periodical which published several of his stories. During the years from the turn of the century until 1905, Walser lived in various places, including a stay near Bern with his sister Lisa. He worked during 1903 as a secretary to an engineer in Waedenswil on the Lake of Zurich, an experience which formed the basis for his later novel Der Gehuelfe. In 1904, Walser published his first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsaetze, a collection of fictional essays by a schoolboy. Though Fritz's reflections on the role of the office employee would inspire Franz Kafka, and though it attracted the attention of critics such as Max Brod, the book did not sell well, and his publisher chose not to release a second volume by Walser.
In March, 1905, Walser joined Karl Walser, his brother, in Berlin, where he would live until 1913. (The only exception was a period in the fall of 1905, during which time he attended a school for servants - material for Jakob von Gunten - and waited tables for nobility in Upper Silesia.) By then a successful artist, Karl introduced his brother to Paul Cassirer, cousin to philosopher Ernst Cassirer, and publisher Bruno Cassirer. The latter published Walser's Geschwister Tanner in 1907, a novel drawn from the author's experiences as a bank clerk in Zurich.
Walser published numerous short stories in newspapers and magazines. Selections of these short stories were published in the volumes Aufsätze (1913) and Geschichten (1914).
In his later years, Robert began to drink heavily, and in 1913, he moved back to Switzerland, where he would spend the remainder of his life. At thirty-five, Walser still had forty-three years left, during the first twenty of which he continued to write prolifically; but his career was long past its very minor high points. Living with relatives in Biel, and later at a temperance hotel, Walser's existence was like the romantic cliche of the writer in Bohemian poverty: his feet wrapped in rags to keep out the cold, he continued to scribble away in his garret room, and the world continued to ignore his work.
During World War I, Walser did his military service. In 1921, Walser moved to Bern, where he entered a period of enormous productivity; but most of this work failed to find a publisher, and in total nine different books were rejected. The only significant publication from this latter phase of Walser's career was Die Rose (1925), which appeared in Germany to poor reviews. He wrote two novels during this period, the unpublished "Theodor" and Der Raeuber ("The Robber"), which appeared in Der Gesamtwerk, an edition of his collected works published in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1929, Walser - who had been drinking heavily, hearing voices, and contemplating suicide - checked himself into a mental hospital in the town of Waldau. He continued to write for the next four years, until 1933, when he was taken by force to another institute in the town of Herisau. In 1936, he made the acquaintance of Carl Seelig, who would ultimately become the executor of his will and editor of several works. To Seelig, he made perhaps the most famous statement of his life, one often quoted by reviewers: "I am not here to write, but to be mad." True to his words, he did not write for the last twenty-three years of his life.
A characteristic of Walser's texts is a playful serenity behind which hide existential fears. Today, Walser's texts, completely re-edited since the 1970s, are regarded as among the most important writings of literary modernism. In his writing, he made use of elements of Swiss German in a charming and original manner, while very personal observations are interwoven with texts about texts; that is, with contemplations and variations of other literary works, in which Walser often mixes pulp fiction with high literature.
Quotations:
"That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles."
"Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls."
"One is always half mad when one is shy of people."
"I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad."
"How uninteresting interesting things can become."
"With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings."
"That lovely things exist is a lovely thought."
"The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
In 1929, Robert was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia and lived the last twenty years of his life in hospital.
Walser died of a heart attack.
Interests
theatre
Writers
Friedrich Schiller
Connections
Walser got to know Lisa Mermet, with whom he developed a close relationship, in Bellelay.
Father:
Adolf Walser
Mother:
Elisa (Marti) Walser
Brother:
Karl Walser
Friend:
Carl Seelig
Partner:
Lisa Mermet
References
Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter
In Narratives Unsettled, Samuel Frederick proposes a new conception of narrativity that can accommodate unwieldy forms of digression. By way of close readings of three German-language writers from different historical periods, Frederick demonstrates that digression, far from being a non- or anti-narrative interruption, contributes to what makes these writers' works fundamentally narrative. In the process, the author counters several foundational assumptions of classical narratology, including the conviction - rooted in Aristotle - that narrative without plot is logically impossible, and that anything deviating from narrative's teleological imperative is either destructive or insignificant.