Robert Walser (; 15 April 1878 – 25 December 1956) was a German language Swiss writer noted for writing four novels (one published posthumously) and a large number of feuilletons, short stories, and causeries. His unconventional, sometimes enigmatic works were appreciated by contemporaries such as Walter Benjamin, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Kurt Tucholsky. He additionally worked as a copyist, an inventor's assistant, a butler, and in various other low-paying trades.
After marginal early success in his literary career, the popularity of his work gradually diminished through the 1920's, making it increasingly difficult for him to support himself through writing. He eventually had a nervous breakdown and spent the remainder of his life in sanatoriums. His work underwent a rediscovery in the 1970's with the deciphering of the microscripts, and a large portion of his work was first translated into and published in English in the 2000's and onward. Walser is now considered one of the important German-language authors of the 20th century and a significant figure in modernism.
Life and work
1878–1897 Born Robert Otto Walser, he was the second-youngest of eight children of Adolf Walser (1833–1914), a trained bookbinder who owned a workshop producing stationery goods and picture frames, and his wife Elisabeth (Elisa) Walser (1839–1894). Walser grew up in Biel, Switzerland, on the language border between the German- and French-speaking regions of Switzerland, and grew up speaking both languages. He attended primary school and progymnasium, which he had to leave before the final exam when his family could no longer bear the cost. From his early years on, he was an enthusiastic theatre-goer; his favourite play was The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller. A watercolor by Karl Walser depicts Robert in costume as Karl Moor, the protagonist of that play.
In the 1880's, Walser experienced several traumatic experiences including a brother's death, his father's business collapsing, and his mother's decline into psychological illness. In 1884, Walser's brother Adolf died at age 15 after an illness, when Robert was 6. His mother became inconsolable. His father's business collapsed around this time and he lost his prestigious Nidaugasse shop location, and the family was forced to move to worse area. Robert's mother Elise was traumatized by Adolf's death and the economic misfortune in the family business, partly because she had deeply affected by witnessing her own mother's poverty and struggles in her childhood. She became physically weak and afraid to leave the house. Multiple works from Walser's later career depict a mother who is deeply unhappy, psychologically ill, embittered, or whose family members are cautious about setting her off, e.g. "The Merchant", "Portrait of Father", The Assistant, "Felix Scenes",
From 1892 to 1895, Walser left school to apprentice at the Bernischer Kantonalbank in Biel, as his father's business was dwindling and he wanted Robert to have a secure work and financial life unlike his own. Afterwards Robert worked for a short time in Basel. Walser's mother Elisabeth (1839–1894) had a mood disorder that was labelled in contemporary terms as gemütskrank. She died in 1894 after a prolonged illness during which she had been cared for by her elder daughter, Lisa Walser, and was either thought to have had a stroke or to be at risk of a stroke. The Swiss Germanist Peter von Matt has argued that Walser's relationship with his mother was constitutive for his literary work. Robert was 16 when his mother died, and had already left school long before this point.
In 1895, Walser went to Stuttgart where his brother Karl lived. He worked as a clerk in the advertising department of the Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft and also at the Cotta publishing house. He tried unsuccessfully to become an actor, auditioning for an actress at the Stuttgart Hoftheater. Two of his later short pieces, "Wenzel" and "The Audition", portray a protagonist who attempts to be an actor but is harshly criticized by established actors judging his skill, who are thought to represent Eleonore Benzinger-Wahlman and by longstanding legend in Walser scholarship, Josef Kainz, though Kainz was never historically recorded as being in Stuttgart. Around 1896, he wrote in a letter to his sister that he wasn't going to become an actor, but a poet instead "if God so wills it." On foot, he walked approximately 140 total miles to Zurich, by way of Tübingen, Hechingen, and Schaffhausen. On September 30, 1896 he registered as a Zürich resident. In the following years, he often worked as a "Kommis", an office clerk, but irregularly and in many different places. As a result, he was one of the first Swiss writers to introduce into literature a description of the life of a salaried employee.
1898–1912 In 1898, the influential critic Joseph Victor Widmann published a series of poems by Walser in the Bernese newspaper Der Bund. This came to the attention of Franz Blei, and he introduced Walser to the circle of Art Nouveau figures centered on the magazine Die Insel, including Frank Wedekind, Max Dauthendey and Otto Julius Bierbaum. In 1899, several of Walser’s poems appeared in Die Insel (The Island), a four-year-old journal that had also published works by Dostoevsky and Baudelaire. The August 1 issue contained Walser, Edgar Allen Poe, and Tolstoy, among others. His first published prose work was "Lake Greifen" in 1899, which appeared in the Sunday supplement of Der Bund. "Lake Greifen" was also Walser's first work about a walk. Die Insel published several short dramas by Walser around 1902.
Around 1902, Walser experimented with writing in dialect in a play titled The Pond: Scenes (Der Teich. Szenen), which was not published and is the only surviving work written in his native dialect, the Bernese German variety of Swiss German spoken in Biel. It contains the line "Was isch jetz für Zit? Scho drü? Alee, pressier, pressier", which is Alemannic German for "What time is it? Already three? Come on, hurry, hurry." Much later in life, Walser told Carl Seelig that he didn't write in dialect because it was "an unseemly way of ingratiating oneself to the masses."
Until 1905, Walser lived mainly in Zürich, though he often changed lodgings and also lived for a time in Thun, Solothurn, Winterthur and Munich. In 1903, he performed recurring mandatory military service, which involved several periods of infantry training and refresher courses. In the summer, he became the "aide" of an engineer and inventor in Wädenswil near Zürich, Carl Dubler. This episode became the basis of his 1908 novel Der Gehülfe (i.e. "The Handyman," titled in English publication as The Assistant), where the main character works for an inventor "Carl Tobler." In 1904, his first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher's Essays), appeared in the Insel Verlag with eleven illustrations by his brother Karl.
At the end of 1905 he attended a training school for servants, probably the school run by a G. Manthei. (Walser later described his servant project as being similar to Don Quixote’s knighthood.). He became a servant at the castle of Dambrau in Upper Silesia, partly due to his fluency in French, and entered the employ of Count Konrad von Hochberg, Baron of Fursteinstein, an extremely wealthy aristocrat. His 1917 story “Tobold” is thought to reflect some of his experiences at this time. The theme of serving would characterize his work in the following years, especially in the novel Jakob von Gunten (1909). In 1905, he went to live in Berlin, where his brother Karl Walser was already living and working as a successful theater painter. Karl introduced him to artistic social circles in Berlin, including figures in literature, publishing, and the theater. Occasionally, Walser worked as secretary for the artists' corporation Berliner Secession.
In Berlin, Walser wrote the three novels The Tanners (Geschwister Tanner), The Assistant (Der Gehülfe) and Jakob von Gunten within a three-year period. They were issued by the publishing house of Bruno Cassirer. The Tanners had been rejected by Cassirer but Christian Morgenstern, one of Cassirer's editors, persuaded him to publish it. Apart from the novels, Walser wrote many short stories, for example sketching popular bars from the point of view of a poor "flaneur" in a very playful and subjective language. Robert Musil and Kurt Tucholsky, among others, stated their admiration for Walser's prose, and authors like Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka counted him among their favorite writers.
Walser published numerous short stories in newspapers and magazines, many for instance in the Schaubühne. They became his trademark. The larger part of his work is composed of short stories – literary sketches that elude a ready categorization. Selections of these short stories were published in the volumes Aufsätze (1913) and Geschichten (1914).
1913–1929 In 1913, Walser returned to Switzerland. He lived for a short time with his sister Lisa in the mental home in Bellelay, where she worked as a teacher. He met Frieda Mermet, who worked as washer-woman there, and developed a close friendship. After a short stay with his father in Biel, he went to live in a mansard in the Biel hotel Blaues Kreuz. In 1914, his father died.
In Biel, Walser wrote a number of shorter stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines in Germany and Switzerland. Selections of which were published in Der Spaziergang (1917), Prosastücke (1917), Poetenleben (1918), Seeland (1919) and Die Rose (1925). Walser, who had always been an enthusiastic wanderer, began to take extended walks, often by night. Many of his stories from this period are narrations by a wanderer walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods or playful essays on writers and artists.
During World War I, Walser was mobilized in the Swiss military in a call that included all able-bodied men, which was about 425,000 men in the first phase. Germany invaded Belgium the day after this call-up. He participated in marches and maneuvers to strategic areas, creation of fortifications, target practice, and air attack watches at secret locations. At the end of 1916, his brother Ernst died after suffering from mental illness in the Waldau asylum. In 1919, Walser's brother Hermann, who was a successful geography professor in Bern, committed suicide. Walser himself became isolated as there was almost no communication with Germany because of the war. He could not easily support himself solely as a freelance writer. At the beginning of 1921, he moved to Bern in order to work at the public record office. He often changed lodgings and lived a very solitary life.
In 1920, Walser walked to Zurich from Biel for a reading of his work, but during rehearsal the Literary Circle decided that someone else should read Walser's work rather than himself, apparently because of discrimination against his Swiss accent. In "A Letter to Therese Breitbach" (1925), Walser quoted them as saying he "had still not learned to speak German."