Robert Walser (writer)

Robert Walser (*April 15 1878 near Biel/Bienne, Switzerland; ? December 25 1956 near Herisau, Switzerland, was a German-speaking Swiss writer.

Life and Work

1878 - 1897

Walser was born in a family with many children. His brother Karl Walser was a well-known stage designer and painter. Walser grew up bilingual in Biel which lies on the language boundary between German and French. He assisted primary school and progymnasium which he had to leave before the final exam since the family couldn't afford it any more. From his early years on, he was enthusiastic of theatre; his favoured play was The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller. There is a Watercolor painting that shows Walser as Karl Moor, the protagonist of that play.

Related Topics:
Karl Walser - Stage designer - Painter - Language boundary - French - Progymnasium - Theatre - Friedrich Schiller - Watercolor painting

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From 1892 to 1895, Walser made an apprenticeship at the Bernische Kantonalbank in Biel. Afterwards he worked for a short time in Basel. Walser's mother, who was "emotionally disturbed", died in 1894 after a long time of needing medical care. In 1895, Walser went to Stuttgart where his brother Karl lived. He was a bureau worker at the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt and at the Cotta'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, and successlessly he tried to become an actor. Walking he went back to Switzerland where he registered 1896 in Zürich. In the following years, he often, though inordinately and in many different places, worked as a "Kommis", that is, as a bureau worker and bureau writer. Consequently, he was one of the first German writers to introduce the topos of a salary employee's life into literature.

Related Topics:
Apprenticeship - Basel - Stuttgart - Zürich

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1898 - 1912

In 1898, the influential critic Joseph Victor Widmann published a series of poems by Walser in the Bernese newspaper Der Bund. This came to the attention of Franz Blei, and he introduced Walser to the Art Nouveau people around the magazine Die Insel, among which were Frank Wedekind, Max Dauthendey and Otto Julius Bierbaum. Numerous short stories and poems by Walser appeared in Die Insel.

Related Topics:
Joseph Victor Widmann - Bern - Der Bund - Franz Blei - Art Nouveau - Die Insel - Frank Wedekind - Max Dauthendey - Otto Julius Bierbaum

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Until 1905, Walser lived mainly in Zürich, though he often moved houses and lived also for some time in Thun, Solothurn, Winterthur and Munich. In 1903, his military service ended, and beginning in the summer, he was the "aide" of an engineer and inventor in Wädenswil near Zürich. This episode should become the story of his 1908 novel Der Gehülfe ('the aide'). In 1904, his first Book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze, appeared in the Insel Verlag.

Related Topics:
Thun - Solothurn - Winterthur - Munich - Wädenswil

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At the end of 1905 he attended a course in order to become a servant at the castle of Dambrau in Upper Silesia. The thematic of serving would characterize his oeuvre in the following, especially in the novel Jakob von Gunten (1909). In 1905, he also went to live in Berlin, where his brother Karl Walser, who worked as theater painter, introduced him to other persons of literature, publishing and theater. Occasionally, Walser worked as secretary for the artists' corporation Berliner Secession.

Related Topics:
Upper Silesia - Jakob von Gunten - Berlin - Berliner Secession

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In Berlin, Walser wrote his novels Geschwister Tanner, Der Gehülfe and Jakob von Gunten. They appeared in the publishing house of Bruno Cassirer, where Christian Morgenstern worked as editor. Apart from the novels, he wrote many short stories, sketching popular bars from the point of view of a poor "flaneur" in a very playful and subjective language. There was a very positive echo to his writings. Robert Musil and Kurt Tucholsky, among others, stated their admiration for Walser's prose, and authors like Hermann Hesse or Franz Kafka counted him among their favourite writers.

Related Topics:
Bruno Cassirer - Christian Morgenstern - "flaneur" - Robert Musil - Kurt Tucholsky - Hermann Hesse - Franz Kafka

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Walser published numerous short stories in newspapers and magazines, many for instance in the Schaubühne. They should become his trademark. The most part of his oeuvre are short stories?literary sketchs that elude a proper categorization. Selections of these short stories were published in the volumes Aufsätze (1913) and Geschichten (1914).

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1913 - 1929

In 1913, Walser returned to Switzerland. He lived for a short time with his sister Lisa in the mental home in Bellelay, where she worked as a teacher. There, he got to know the washer-woman Lisa Mermet with whom he developed a close friendship. After a short stay with his father in Biel, he went to live in a mansard in the Biel hotel Blaues Kreuz. In 1914, his father died.

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In Biel, Walser wrote a number of shorter stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines in Germany and Switzerland and selections of which were published in Der Spaziergang (1917), Prosastücke (1917), Poetenleben (1918), Seeland (1919) and Die Rose (1925). Walser, who had always been an enthusiastic wanderer, began to go on many enormous walks, often by night. In the short stories of that time, texts written from a wanderers perspective walking as a stranger through the foreign nearbies alternate with playful essays on writers and artists.

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During World War I, Walser repeatedly had to go to the military service. At the end of 1916, his brother Ernst died after a time of mental illness in the Waldau mental home. In 1919, Walser's brother Hermann, geography professor in Bern, committed suicide. Walser himself became isolated in that time when there was almost no communication with Germany because of the war. Even though he worked hard, he hardly could afford his living as a free writer. At the beginning of 1921, he moved to Bern in order to work at the public record office. He often changed rooms and lived very solitarily.

Related Topics:
World War I - Bern

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In the Bernese time, Walser style radicalized. In a more and more condensed form, he wrote "microgramms" (Mikrogramme), called thus because of his minuscule pencil hand that is very difficult to decipher: poems, prose, dramolets and novels?The Robber (Der Räuber). In these texts, his playful, subjective style has densified into a higher abstraction. Many texts of that time work on multiple levels?they can be read as naive-playful feuilltons or as highly complex montages full of allusions. Walser absorbed influences from the high literature as well as from the formula fiction and retold for example the plot of a pulp novel in a way that the orginal (he never tells which it is) cannot be recognized. A big part of Walser oeuvre was created in these very productive years in Bern.

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1929 - 1956

In the beginning of 1929, Walser, who had suffered from anxieties and hallucination for quite a time, went to the Bernese mental home Waldau, after a mental breakdown, at his sister Fani's urging. In a medical protocole it says: "The patient confessed hearing voices." Therefore, this can hardly be called an act of volunty. Being in the mental home, his state of mind normalized quickly and he went on writing and publishing. More and more, he used the way of writing he called the "pencil method": He wrote poems and prose in a diminutive Sütterlin hand, the letters of had measured about a millimeter of height by the end of that very productive phase. Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte were the first ones who dared trying to decipher these writings. In the 90s, they published six tomes Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet ('from the pencil area'). Only when Walser was, against his will, dislocated into the sanatorium of Herisau in his home canton Appenzell Ausserrhoden, he quit writing?presumably also because with the raise of the Nazis in Germany, his texts couldn't be published any more.

Related Topics:
Sütterlin - Herisau - Appenzell Ausserrhoden - Nazis

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In 1936, his admirer Carl Seelig began to visit him. He has written the book Wanderungen mit Robert Walser about their talks. Carl Seelig tried to make known again Walser's almost forgotten oeuvre with republications. After the death of Walser's brother Karl in 1943 and of his sister Lisa in 1944, Seelig became legal guardian of Walser. Being crotchety yet without any signs of mental illness since a long time, Walser repeatedly refused leaving the sanatorium.

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Robert Walser loved long, lonely walks. On the first Christmas day of 1956 he died of a heart attack on a walk through a snow field. The photographs of the dead walker in the snow almost eerily remind of a similar image of a dead man in the snow from Walser's first novel, Geschwister Tanner.

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