Robert Walser: Berlin Stories

It is prohibited for the conductor to converse with the esteemed passengers. But what if prohibitions are sidestepped, laws violated, admonitions of so refined and humane a nature disregarded? This happens fairly often. Chatting with the conductor offers prospects of the most charming recreation, and I am particularly adept at seizing opportunities to engage in the most amusing and profitable conversations with this tramway employee. It pays to ignore certain regulations, and summoning one’s powers to render uniforms loquacious helps create a convivial mood.

From time to time you do nonetheless look straight ahead again. After completing this straightforward exercise, you may permit your eyes a modest excursion. Your gaze sweeps through the interior of the car, crossing fat, drooping mustaches, the face of a weary, elderly woman, a pair of youthfully mischievous eyes belonging to a girl, until you’ve had your fill of these studies in the quotidian and gradually begin to observe your own footgear, which could use proper mending. And always new stations are arriving, new streets, and the journey takes you past squares and bridges, past the war ministry and the department store, and all this while it is continuing to rain, and you continue to behave as if you were a tad bored, and you continue to find this conduct the most suitable.

But it might also be that while you were riding along like that, you heard or saw something beautiful, gay, or sad, something you will never forget.

1908

Some of the streets in the historic city center appear strangely deserted; a cathedral in its venerable glory, monotonous barracks, and an old castle serve only to heighten the sense of stillness and isolation. In the dimly lit, stolidly middle-class beer halls, a few evening guests sit at the tables reading newspapers; the waiter stands idle, a napkin clamped beneath his arm. In another district a few streets away, people are hurrying along shoulder to shoulder and at each other’s heels; no one is chasing them, but, as it appears, no one is beckoning them either. These hundred hurriers have similar destinations and are coming from places that very much resemble one another, and all of them maintain a measured gravity admirable in its way. The trees are strangely green, not like in other cities. A silent cemetery from olden days borders one of the busiest streets upon whose bumpy pavement hackney cabs, horse-drawn carts, and omnibuses ceaselessly roll. In various Aschinger branches, beer is ceaselessly poured into glasses, and all these glasses being filled one after the other find takers and drinkers. The managers of these places of entertainment comport themselves like officers on the field of battle, and officers are seen going about their business, silent, staid, sedate, and modest, as though they’ve tired of putting on a show of valor, as is surely the case for some of them. When you cross from one sidewalk to the other, you must take care not to get run over, but this caretaking goes unnoticed, it has become a habit. How this great city both hinders and feeds on the movements of human beings. People who live in its northern districts have gone perhaps a full year now without setting eyes on the bright, elegant districts to the west, and it’s difficult to see what might prompt a lady residing in a western district to visit the neighborhood surrounding Schlesischer Bahnhof in the east unless she had some quite particular cause.

You rarely see the frail and infirm hereabouts, and this is no doubt above all because invalids and the weary have every reason to avoid this constant stream of traffic and instead keep to the quiet of home. The people you find circulating on the street are more or less hardy and energetic, and display a gay-hearted vivacity, if only because they sense that propriety requires this, and because all who live and walk here rise to the occasion with a certain unobtrusive courtesy. Sulky or despondent persons are forced to dampen their sulkiness and despondency if only out of purely practical considerations; hotheads are compelled to cool their heads; an individual tempted to laugh aloud for sheer delight instantly comprehends that this is not allowed; and one whose eyes well up with tears quickly turns to gaze into a shop window as if oh so fascinated by what he sees there. The flirt avails himself of the simplest and at the same time subtlest measures. Although you might have the impression that strangers shy away from one another in the streets and squares and trams, assiduously avoiding every contact or emotion, a great many lovely, sweet exchanges do nonetheless occur, more than the observer might suspect or the nonlocal manage to observe, precisely because the one undertaking or planning something acts as though he were just aimlessly daydreaming or pondering. Should some minor unpleasantness occur — be it that a horse loses its footing on ground often smooth as glass and falls, be it that a brawl or something of the sort erupts — a generally attractive clutch of onlookers immediately gathers about the novelty, responding neither with indifference nor with any sort of vehemence to the interruption.

Everything is clean. Shop windows gleam with the same meticulous cleanliness as the utterances of the people, the schooled and unschooled alike; the maidservant takes on the bearing of her employer, and the lady of the house leaves all dignity and aloofness behind when she exits the door of her home. The droll, innocent schoolboy brings his report card home on the very same “electric” that is also transporting the harlot or a person who is using this time to hatch criminal plans, and not one of them bristles at the others’ presence. Many eyes shine with secret longing, many lips are pressed tightly together, many souls are trembling, but everything wishes to be seemly and correct, to take its logical course; everything can and will preserve itself. The streets resemble one another just as human destinies do, and yet every street has its own character, and you can never compare one destiny to another. As for elegance, one generally seeks and understands it best by choosing not to cultivate it; the greatest charm of elegance lies in a certain negligence, approximately like the noblesse of thought and feeling that is lost the moment it begins to struggle for expression, or like style in language, which fails when it tries to come to the fore.

In the greatness and pride of this city lies a certain unmistakable stillness; and all its sounds are crowned with a soundlessness so powerful that when a person has spent some time in rural silence and retirement, he longs to hear it once more to refresh his soul. And it is clear beyond all doubt that in the metropolis a pronounced need to avoid all superfluous rushing and haste predominates. Eating and drinking well count for a great deal here; the hungry feel anger toward their fellow men and therefore are always running up against others everywhere they go, be it with a sharp elbow or the scowls on their aggrieved, disgruntled faces. Disgruntlement is an enemy of mankind and also of the pointlessly languishing disgruntled person himself, and because it is impossible to avoid this feeling when many people find themselves pressed together in close proximity, one might say that every city, once it grows into a metropolis, gradually rids itself of this or that percentage of the annoyance that fruitlessly grieves and groans out its days there, as grudging grievers generally cannot stomach the company of others. Oh, certainly! Often we are filled with anger, fury, or hatred, but then we go and dilute ourselves, in other words seek out human company, and behold: the ills afflicting our souls quickly vanish. A sort of noble, far-seeing socialism is gaining ground here in a quite natural way, and class hatred appears no longer to exist outside the newspapers that paint its portrait. Every lowly worker or day laborer who excels in mental and physical health can calmly triumph, noting the appearance of wealthy folk who suffer physical complaints, a circumstance they are often unable to conceal; and so it is the sickly, not the poor who must be pitied, and the disenfranchised are the ones in poor health, not those who happen to have lowly origins. The metropolitan street teaches us this lesson quite convincingly. Oh Lord, enough for now, I have to go out, have to leap down into the world, I can’t stand it any longer, I have got to go laugh in someone’s face, I must go for a walk. Ah, how lovely, how very lovely it is to be alive.