Robert Walser: Berlin Stories

1910

Strains of regimental music are drifting over from the zoological garden. You stroll along like this, unhurried as you please. Is it not Sunday, after all? How warm it is. Everyone seems astonished to find it suddenly so bright, so clear and warm, as if touched by a magic wand. Warmth alone can give things color. The world in all directions is like a smile, it’s enough to put you in a feminine frame of mind. How glad I would be (almost) to be carrying a baby in my arms, playing the role of a devotedly solicitous serving girl. What a tender mood this just-beginning, heart-beguiling spring inspires. I could practically be a mother, or so I imagine. In the spring, it seems, men and manly deeds suddenly become so superfluous, so foolish. No deeds now! Listen, linger, remain rooted to the spot. Be divinely touched by something slight. Gaze into this blissfully sweet, childhood-like green. Ah, Berlin and its Tiergarten are so lovely just now. The park is overrun with people. The people are dark moving spots in the delicate, fleeting sun-shimmer. Up above is the pale-blue sky that touches, dreamlike, the green that lies below. The people walk softly and indolently, as if they feared they might otherwise slip into a marching step and act coarsely. There are said to be people to whom it would never occur — or who might be too prim — to sit on a bench in the Tiergarten on a Sunday. Such people are robbing themselves of the most enchanting pleasure. I myself find the crowd on a Sunday in all its obvious, harmless Sunday pleasure-seeking more significant than any journey to Cairo or the Riviera. Hardness becomes obliging, rigidity dulcet, and all lines, all commonplaces blur dreamily together. A universal strolling like this is ineffably tender. The walkers lose themselves — now one by one, now in graceful, tightly knit clusters and groups — among the trees whose high branches are still breezily bare, and between the low bushes that constitute a breath of young, sweet green. The soft air trembles and quivers with buds that seem to sing, to dance, to hover. The image of the Tiergarten as a whole is like a painted picture, then like a dream, then like a circuitous, agreeable kiss. Everywhere one is lightly, comprehensibly enticed to gaze and linger. On a bench beside the shipping canal, two nannies are sitting in their imposing snow-white caps, white aprons, and bright red skirts. Walking, you find yourself satisfied; sitting, you are perfectly calm and gaze with composure into the eyes of the figures walking past. These include children, dogs being led on leashes, soldiers with their girls on their arms, beautiful women, coquettish ladies, men who live, step, and stroll all alone, entire families, bashful lovers. Veils are streaming in the air, green ones, blue ones, and yellow. Dark and light clothing passes in turn. The gentlemen are for the most part wearing those unavoidable, uninspiring stiff hillock hats of medium height upon their cone-shaped heads. You feel an urge to laugh while remaining solemn all the while. Everything is simultaneously droll and sacrosanct, and this makes you feel solemn like all the others. Everyone is displaying the same appropriate, mild solemnity. Is not the sky doing the same with its expression that appears to be saying: “How marvelous I feel”? Now, like friendly specters, wind-like shadows flit through the trees and across the sunlit white paths, and going where? No one knows. You can scarcely see it, that’s how delicate it is. Painters draw our attention to such tidbits. At a certain gentle distance, red-wheeled hackney cabs are rolling through the mild green fabric, as though a red ribbon were gliding through a bit of delicate female hair. Everything is emanating womanliness, everything is bright and balmy, everything is so wide, so transparent, so round, you turn your Sunday head in all directions to fully relish this Sunday world. It’s really the people that comprise it. Without the people, you wouldn’t see, notice, or experience the beauty of the Tiergarten. What’s the crowd like here? Well, it’s a mixed bag, all sorts of people tumbled in together, the elegant and the simple, the proud and the humble, the gay and the grim. I myself, by my very presence, add to the colorfulness of the scene and contribute to the mix. I’m certainly enough of a mixture myself. But where is the dream? Do let’s take one more look at it. Upon a roundly arched bridge many people are standing. You stand there yourself, leaning lightly and in the best of spirits against the railing to gaze down into the delicately blue, glimmering warm water where boats and skiffs, filled with people and adorned with little flags, drift quietly about as if drawn on by good premonitions. The ships and gondolas shimmer in the sunlight. Now a piece of dark velvet-green breaks from the brightness, it is a blouse. Ducks with colorful heads are swaying upon the ripples and quiverings of water that sometimes shimmers like bronze or enamel. How splendid it is the way the field of the water is so narrow and circumscribed and yet so packed with gliding pleasure boats and hats in all the colors of joy. Everywhere you look, a lady’s hat gleams and bursts from the bushes with red and blue and other pleasures for the eye. How simple it all is. And where should one go now? To a coffeehouse? Really? Can one really be so barbaric? Indeed, one can. Such things a person does! How lovely to be doing something that another person is doing as well. And how lovely the Tiergarten is. What resident of Berlin could fail to adore it?

1911

Riding the “electric” is an inexpensive pleasure. When the car arrives, you climb aboard, possibly after first politely ceding the right of way to an imposing gentlewoman, and then the car continues on. At once you notice that you have a rather musical disposition. The most delicate melodies are parading through your head. In no time you’ve elevated yourself to the position of a leading conductor or even composer. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.

Meanwhile you have rolled yourself a cigarette, say, and inserted it with great care between your well-practiced lips. With such an apparatus in your mouth, it is impossible to feel utterly without cheer, even if your soul happens to be torn in twain by sufferings. But is this the case? Most certainly not. Just wanted to give a quick description of the magic that a smoking white object of this sort is capable of working, year in and year out, on the human psyche. And what next?

Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the “electric.”

People do, after all, tend to get somewhat bored on such trips, which often require twenty or thirty minutes or even more, and what do you do to provide yourself with some modicum of entertainment? You look straight ahead. To show by one’s gaze and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with a quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn’t that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead.