The general’s name was in everyone’s mouth.
Hans went to the woods one more time, to say goodbye.
“Am I now supposed to leave behind all good, beloved, and beautiful dreams?” he said, “and cast aside ineluctably everything that was once precious to me? Is what was valuable to me now to be valueless, what was intimately familiar and closely related to be alien and strange, the significant utterly insignificant, the known unknown, the important unimportant, and everything I used to keenly observe from now on invisible? Must beauty fade and everything that was once recognizable be henceforth entirely unrecognizable? Can for that which is worthy of yearning never again be yearned and that which is desirable never again be desired? Shall all this be as though it had never been noticed at all?
“Well, so be it. Onwards, then, to do one’s duty as a brave soldier, to salute the flag I already see fluttering in the wind. Now let the land among whose sons I number be served and my soul be a soul that loves its fatherland.”
He took the train to Bern to enlist.
1920
Biographical Notes
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 Berlin Stories and Jakob von Gunten (both available as NYRB classics), Thirty Poems, The Walk, The Tanners, Microscripts, The Assistant, The Robber, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932.
DAMION SEARLS has translated many classic twentieth-century writers, including Proust, Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Hans Keilson, and Hermann Hesse. For NYRB Classics, he edited Henry David Thoreau’s The Journaclass="underline" 1837–1861, translated Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories, and will retranslate André Gide’s Marshlands. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cullman Center fellowships and is currently writing a book about Hermann Rorschach and the cultural history of the Rorschach test.
BEN LERNER is the author of three books of poetry and a novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and a fellow of the Howard and Guggenheim Foundations.