Robert Walser: Berlin Stories

Having attracted all sorts of notice and acquired the justification to circulate casually among persons worthy of respect by no means assured me, however, of a proper, innocuous income. While laboring with as much vigor as I could muster, I committed errors. Wrestling with ignorance and inability, I came to know my limits and was forced to realize that many things could not be as swiftly accomplished as I would have liked to imagine. Enervation and exhaustion set in. My strength failed me on more than one important occasion. Instead of contenting myself with the lucrative, I ran after unattainable goals, which wasted a great deal of time as well as good courage. Exertions carried out in vain rendered me effectively ill. I destroyed much that I had created with great effort. The more earnestly I longed and strived to put myself on a firm footing, the more clearly I saw myself teetering on the brink. I believe I have never deceived myself particularly in matters of this sort, and since I felt a compulsion to attain a certain tidiness of affairs with regard to my own person, above all to be at one with myself again, I resolved to carefully detach myself from an existence in which I could not place my trust and to return. It seemed to me advisable to bite into insight, which is well known to have a bitter taste. To be sure, I felt and saw the eyes of a beautiful woman looking questioningly at me. This tie, and other ones as well, now had to be shaken off. Slowly I made my way home. Later, I thought, I would be freshly serviceable once more.

On my way home, which struck me as splendid, it was snowing in thick, warm, large flakes. It seemed to me as if I heard homeland-like sounds ringing out from afar. My steps were brisk despite the deep snow through which I was assiduously wading. With every step I took, my shaken trust grew firmer again, which filled me with joy the way a child rejoices. All former things bloomed fragrantly and youthfully in my direction, like roses. It almost appeared to me as if the earth were singing a sweet Christmas melody that was at the same time a melody of spring.

In the darkness a gray, tall figure was suddenly standing there on the road before me. It was a man. How gigantic he seemed to me. “What are you doing standing here?” I asked him. “I am rooted here. What business is it of yours?” he replied.

Leaving behind me this man whom I did not know, who after all surely knew what it was his duty to do, I went on. At times it seemed to me I had wings, though I was working my way forward laboriously enough. Courage and optimism enlivened me on my difficult path, for I was able to tell myself I was heading in the right direction. Almost never did I look forward to the future, even though I was making a humble retreat. Yet at the same time I by no means considered myself crushed, rather I had a notion to call myself a conqueror, which then made me laugh. I was not wearing a coat. I considered the snow itself a splendidly warm coat.

Soon I would hear the language of my parents, brothers, and sisters being spoken once more, and I would set foot again upon the dear soil of my native land.

1917

ROBERT WALSER (1878–1956) was born into a German-speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while writing his poems, novels, and vast numbers of the “prose pieces” that became his hallmark. In 1933 he was confined to a sanatorium, which marked the end of his writing career. Among Walser’s works available in English are Jakob von Gunten (available as an NYRB classic), The Tanners, Microscripts, The Assistant, The Robber, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932.

JOCHEN GREVEN is the author of first German-language PhD dissertation on Robert Walser and the editor of Walser’s collected works in German. As a graduate student in the 1950s, he recognized that Walser’s “microscripts” (manuscript pages covered with tiny handwriting discovered after Walser’s death) were not written in secret code but were in fact literary texts in standard German. Greven has devoted more than fifty years to studying and editing Walser’s work.

SUSAN BERNOFSKY is the translator of six books by Robert Walser as well as works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. The current chair of the PEN Translation Committee, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College (CUNY) and is at work on a biography of Walser.

“Tobold (II)”—the roman numeral indicates that this is the second story Walser wrote with this title — appears in my translation in Masquerade and Other Stories (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 80–100.

“Kleist in Thun” can be found, in Christopher Middleton’s translation, in Selected Stories of Robert Walser (NYRB Classics, 2002), 17–26. “The Battle of Sempach,” in my own translation, appears in Masquerade and Other Stories, 37–42.