For reasons that have never become as clear as we might like, Walser decided several months after his arrival in Berlin to enroll in a monthlong course of study at the Herrschaftliche Dienerschule (Aristocratic Servants School) located at Wilhelmstrasse 28, not far from Unter den Linden and the fancy shopping street Friedrichstrasse. The curriculum at this school included such topics as waiting at table, cleaning, carving roasts, keeping the household accounts, napkin folding, handling “nervous persons,” and massage. By 1911, the list was updated to include instruction in the use of electrical lights, central heating, and telephones.
Almost nothing is known about Walser’s experiences at the servants’ school. Its pupils were adults, and Walser remembered some of them decades later as possessed of “the delicacy of page boys.” The school also appears, radically transformed, as the boys’ school “Institute Benjamenta” in Walser’s 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten. All that is directly recognizable is the basic structure of the curriculum: Jakob notes that the lessons are both “practical” and “theoretical” in nature. After Walser graduated, he served for the length of one winter as an assistant butler at a count’s castle in upper Silesia, an adventure that goes strikingly unrecorded in the stories dating from this period. Walser did not write about this interlude until more than a decade later, in the 1917 story “Tobold.”[1]
In any case, Walser soon returned to Berlin, where he worked odd jobs; lived in part with his brother, in part in a series of furnished rooms; and wrote a large number of short prose texts for publication in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, including the Berliner Tageblatt, the Vossische Zeitung, and the Frankfurter Zeitung. While we tend to call these texts “stories,” Walser himself described them as “prose pieces”; this hybrid of story and essay remained his genre of choice for most of his writing career. He also published three novels: The Tanners (1907), The Assistant (1908), and Jakob von Gunten. Only the last of the three is set in Berlin — though even in this book the city goes unnamed. But his short prose texts offer clear evidence of his love affair with the metropolis.
The stories collected in this volume were chosen by Walser’s long-time German editor Jochen Greven, mostly from among the 120 or so pieces Walser wrote during his Berlin years. Greven has arranged the book as a four-part symphony, the final movement of which comprises texts that look back on Walser’s Berlin experiences at a remove of several years. And although Walser wrote stories about a great range of subjects while living in Berlin (including the beautiful historical fictions “Kleist in Thun” and “The Battle of Sempach”),[2] Greven has — quite appropriately — limited his selection to stories that take Berlin as their subject matter. From them a portrait of the city emerges that speaks of bustling streets, technology-fueled haste, social and artistic striving, and a certain melting-pot quality seen above all in the public parks where many levels of society intersect.
The Berlin of these stories is a land of artistic possibility, where poets produce immortal works, virtuoso actors stun their audiences, and painters find inspiration. The narrators often seem to be bursting with an openhearted enthusiasm that at times can sound naïve. But we are also shown a handful of failures: spurned lovers, unsuccessful artists, and people whose behavior causes them to live as outcasts among their neighbors. “The metropolitan artist,” Walser writes in “Berlin and the Artist,” “has no dearth of opportunities to see and speak to no one at all. All he has to do is make himself unpopular among certain arbiters of taste or else consistently fixate on failures, and in no time he’ll have sunk into the most splendid, most blossoming of abandonments.”
A number of the stories in this collection are devoted to the theater, which Walser knew not only through his brother but through his own early aspirations. He’d once dreamed of becoming an actor, and as a seventeen-year-old had traveled to Stuttgart, where his brother was living, and had an audience with an actor he hoped would mentor him. Nothing came of it. Gertrud Eysoldt, the actress mentioned in passing in “Four Amusements,” was at the time the star of Stuttgart’s Königliches Hoftheater and later worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Walser’s favorite playwrights included Friedrich Schiller (author of The Robbers) and Heinrich von Kleist, whose final play, Prince Friedrich of Homburg, is quoted in both “A Person Possessed of Curiosity” and “Portrait Sketch.” While living in Berlin, Walser attended not only the grand theaters where his brother designed the stage sets but also — as we see in several stories here — the shabby little variety shows that offered entertainment to working-class Berliners.
Walser’s view of the “capital” and “metropolis” is consistently a modest one. He writes far less of the grand soirées he witnessed than of much humbler experiences of city life — in keeping with W.G. Sebald’s view of him as a “clairvoyant of the small.” The chirpy delight some of his narrators take in the city’s hum and bustle also reflects his own status as an outsider who enjoys blending in with the crowd. He occasionally thematizes his Swissness, for the most part humorously. In “Something About the Railway” he describes a waitress as being clad in Oberländertracht—the traditional costume worn in the Oberland or upcountry region outside Bern — a bit of cultural specificity likely to have eluded his fellow Berliners. His funniest allusion to Swissness is lamentably invisible in translation; it comes at the end of “What Became of Me” when, after poking fun at his countryman Ernst Zahn — author of sentimental Alpine romances — for exploiting his nationality for commercial success, Walser concludes by praising the Berliners as schaffig, using a Swiss dialect word for “hardworking.” Walser’s playfulness also comes out in his stories about his writer colleague Kutsch (a name charmingly close to “kitsch”) — this being a pseudonym under which Walser himself published several stories. And the humor of his sketch “Mountain Halls”—a description of a variety show located on Unter den Linden — made this piece a favorite of Kafka’s. Max Brod describes Kafka collapsing in paroxysms of laughter while reading the story aloud.
The final stories in this collection allude more or less obliquely to the difficulties Walser experienced near the end of his Berlin years. While his three novels had been well-received by reviewers and other writers, not one of them sold well — a circumstance he found highly discouraging. Toward the end of his time in Berlin, he suffered a psychological crisis accompanied by severe writer’s block that plagued him for a good two years. Eventually he was able to write again thanks to the “microscript” technique he developed for composing his rough drafts. This technique, which he would continue to rely on for the rest of his literary career, is described in detail in my introduction to Robert Walser, Microscripts (New Directions/Christine Burgin, 2010). The effect of this crisis can be seen in the relative dearth of texts from 1910 and 1911, though by 1912 Walser was back to writing at his usual level of productivity. It would be years, however, before he wrote another novel. In March 1913, after the death of the landlady described in the story “Frau Scheer,” he returned to Switzerland for good.
1
“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.
2
“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.