Robert WalserBerlin StoriesTranslated by Susan Bernofsky(New York: NYRB Classics, 2012)Until recently, readers of Robert Walser have had to be persistent or lucky—most of the time, they’ve had to be both. There are writers who announce themselves as front page news, and writers who circulate like rumors. For the vast majority of the twentieth century, Walser was a rumor. Available in small, difficult-to-find (but lovingly produced) editions, he passed from hand to hand and ear to ear, an open secret whose mysteriousness seemed to resist even the most enthusiastic attempts at popularization. And there were attempts. I remember buying my own first Walser book in college: a beetle-colored paperback with a blurb by Susan Sontag on the front and three more on the back from the unlikely trio of Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and Hermann Hesse. A single notice by any of them would have been enough to pique my interest—but all three together? I grabbed the book, muffling the chorus of pan-Germanic praise against my sweater-vest. Later, I turned the volume over in my hands: tall and thin, it looked less like a book and more like a stamp-plastered envelope that had suffered delays but now reached, at last, its intended recipient. All I had to do was read it.The distance that a given book travels to find its reader is of course only half the journey; the other half are the steps that the reader must then take to find the book. Reading Walser turned out to be harder than I thought—though not because he was difficult. On the contrary, when I finally did open his stories, I found them surprisingly, disconcertingly easy. After reading through a handful of pages I returned, confused, to those massive blurbs. The book they described was deeply serious—but the stories I had read didn’t seem serious at all! Their direct address and lack of irony were miles away from the puzzleworks I was used to. They seemed more like romantic poems, but if they were poems, then where were the rhyme schemes and allusive references? Where were the footnotes and Chinese characters and untranslated passages of Italian to puzzle through, word after torturous word? Walser’s playful, unclassifiable prose-poem/essay/stories eschewed the modernist difficulties that I’d come to expect from literature. His joy (which in retrospect I can see resembled my own mood at the time much more than Kafka’s patience or Thomas Mann’s irony) was embarrassing to me: a fire hose of indiscriminate enthu- siasm, rather than the leonine “strength in repose” that I agreed with Keats was the true mark of genius. Later, I discovered Guy Davenport’s description of Walser as a “master of happiness”: a verdict that sealed the deal. For what could be more ordinary, and therefore boring, than happiness?One of the strangest things about reading Berlin Stories, the most recent collection of Walser’s works to be translated into English (though the first to be published in German), is discovering how much more mysterious this happiness has become to me. Is this because I’m less happy now in my thirties than I was in my twenties? My first impulse is to say yes, of course. . . . But in doing this, I perform the very human move of letting the good parts of good times obscure the bad parts, which were also there. Like Walser himself in “The Park” (a story written in Berlin in 1907, in the middle of a period that he would later look back on as the most creative in his life), I explain my disappointment by turning my past into a golden age:This marvelous boredom that is in all things, this sunny seclusion, this half- heartedness and drowsiness beneath the green, this melancholy, these legs, whose legs, mine? Yes. I’m too indolent to make observations, I gaze down at my legs and march onwards. I mean it: Sundays only exist around the family table and on family walks. The single adult person is deprived of this pleasure, he might as well, like Kutsch, set off for Africa at a moment’s notice. Besides, what a loss it is to have turned twenty-five. There are compensations, but at present I want nothing to do with them. I’m on the street now, smoking, and step into a respectable pub, and here I am at once master of my surroundings. Beautiful park, I think, beautiful park.Nostalgia may seem like an odd thing for a twenty-five-year-old master of hap- piness to be feeling, but Walser doesn’t just succumb to his bad mood: he rides it out (and writes it out), by focusing his attention outward, toward parks, pubs, and streets—the real world, with all its beautiful handles for the reeling writer to holdonto. And then it is here, in its grateful appeal to reality, that “The Walk” really does move like a poem: not a lyric gem or modernist pastiche, but one of the stereoscopic travelogues written by those other depressive walkers of genius, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The biggest difference is that while they took to the country, Walser leaves it—but the point of the move is the same. As Walser writes in “Berlin and the Artist”:Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each dawning day brings with it a new, agreeably disagreeable attack on complacency, and this does the general sense of indolence good. An artist possesses, much like a child, an inborn propensity for beautiful, noble sluggardizing. Well, this slug-a-beddishness, this kingdom, is constantly being buffeted by fresh storm-winds of inspiration. The refined, silent creature is suddenly blustered full of something coarse, loud and unrefined. There is an incessant blurring-together of various things, and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding.Walser’s Berlin is a cross between a fairy tale and an encyclopedia: a book belong- ing to nobody and everybody. His readings take personal experience as a starting point for general observation—for, like many lonely people, Walser is obsessed with the communal. He dreams in public, about trams, parks, theaters, markets, but his protagonist of his dream is always some version of “us”: citizens, theater-goers, Berliners—even Berlin itself.But what happens when the party is over, and the twenty-five-year-old becomes thirty, or forty, or sixty-five? He leaves, of course—if not the literal city then at least the beating heart that he was young in. He becomes a country boy again, or part of the city itself, like a nail swallowed by a tree trunk. The transformation is usually figured as depressing, a letdown; but for Walser, the natural reaction of someone who’s been lucky enough to experience this kind of life is not regret, but gratitude. “Above all else,” he says in “Homecoming in the Snow,” the book’s final story, “I would like to demonstrate how greatly I aspire to be able to recognize that there is no more desirable pleasure in life than reaping acknowledgement and saying yes to the various benevolent phenomena one has been permitted to see and experience.” Berlin is gone, but the spirit of Berlin lives on, portable as a paperback.-Josh BillingsBerlin Stories was reviewed in The Literary Review. "The Lives of Saints" Fall 2012
This collection of essays begins in beguiling and exuberant fashion with wonderfully enthusiastic, wide-eyed descriptions of rambles around Berlin; time spent in idle observation of the inhabitants of the city as they drink in a bar, or travel on a tram, or walk around a park. He notices the rich and poor, the elegant and the delicate, the raucous and the roguish. Walser's spirit of wonder and delight continues through his writings on the theatre and ballet (there's a "ravishing" piece about Anna Pavlova), but in the final third of the book the sun begins to go down, and the shadows begin to lengthen. His writing becomes a little caustic, more knowing and he admits to his own feelings of melancholia. In a fictional story, "The Little Berliner", he skewers the kind of self-satisfied arrogance that seems, almost always, to accompany great wealth. The narrator is the daughter of such a man, who can see no wrong in her father's behavior and by describing his many virtues, informs us of just what an odious person he is: "Father boxed my ears today, in a most fond and fatherly manner, of course", the story begins. Of particular interest are two pieces about the women he meets when he rents an apartment, "Frau Wilke" and "Frau Scheer". The former is the owner of the house when first he lives in the decrepit room where, sometimes, overcome by depression, he stays in bed all day. Not long after he takes up residence there, Frau Wilke's health deteriorates and she dies. The new owner is Frau Scheer, an immensely rich woman who has devoted her life to amassing more money, and avoiding both society and pleasure. Despite his own state of poverty, he in no way resents this woman or her pointless wealth - indeed he finds her circumstances both pitiful and fascinating - befriends her and becomes her secretary (an experience that must have been useful for writing his excellent novel "The Assistant"). The collection ends with his return, in the snow, to Switzerland, leaving me curious about one thing in particular: in all his time in Berlin, did he never realise that the country was positioning itself to enter war? Not once is this alluded to.
Do You like book Berlin Stories (2012)?
a good deal of the stories in this selection have some sort of malignancy sequestered behind the soft cheer of living in berlin at the turn of the century... ex:"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 to go laugh in someone's face, I must go for a walk. Ah how lovely, how very lovely it is to be alive." what i mean is you get this sense that if someone was depressed and taking prozac- these are the kind of stories they would write. i'm glad i read the assistant before this, because i was able to pick out the roots of walser's emotion a lot more clearly. i read this collection while i was in berlin, and the streets were crawling with the ghosts of characters from walser's stories for the next week & a half after. also important, is that he's a fucking prophet;"Our Berlin will soon burst at the seams with newness. Father says that everything historically notable here will vanish; no one knows the old berlin anymore."-- written in 1909, 30 years before Berlin got completely destroyed. it's said that walser is the god of small things, and you understand why he went mad because of this. ex:"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."in short, these are painfully wonderful.
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More Walser is always welcome and more is coming but NYRB has the distinction of publishing some of his greatest short pieces so far. Alongside "Selected Stories" this reaches the same heights of brilliance. There's been much written about Walser by some great critics and that's not always to the benefit of the reader. Benjamin's claim that Walser has no style has been openly debated with good reason. Sebald's claim that Walser is the clairvoyant of the small is only half true to me. Sure Walser spends much time observing the minutia of life - extracting meaning from the simplest experiences but his focus is often on the larger concerns of a life well-led. I think sometimes there is a tendency to think of Walser as an unscholarly outsider but this group of stories should undo some of those notions. There is an illuminated sense of compassion and sensitivity in Walser that seems almost Buddhist at times. Like Hamsun's Pan - Walser chooses his own path and is rarely comfortable when his social interactions are more complex than that of the observant flaneur or the familial intimate. Walser is a great thinker who produced some of the most compelling writing I know - and while his observational skill might be somewhat secondary to his introspective awareness his writing really takes flight when he combines these elements into an almost religious reverence. Death, love and identification are frequent themes that in Walser's hands turn into fascinating reflections that are unique and very important. Readers that know his biography should be astounded at the closing "story" beautiful executed and intelligently edited as the last words of this edition of Walser - I don't want to spoil it - but the clairvoyant claims are more than justified by these closing words. Walser writes of food, nature and the stages of life with the detail of a watchmaker, the love of a father and the frustration of creator struggling to better understand his progeny. There is much to be learned from Walser: walk a lot, judgmental bitterness and pride are horrible afflictions, and you're probably going to feel the best when you can tune your senses to a heightened awareness that reveals the beautiful details of life. Walser, while not simple, is one of the easiest and most rewarding writers I know. His wisdom is amazing, his prose is simple yet elegant and his insight illuminates some of the most endearing vistas I know.
—Chuck LoPresti
A collection of essays, newspaper columns, and short stories praising and gently mocking (and sometimes not so gently mocking) the city of Berlin in the late Imperial years. At times, he is almost gushing about his time in the theater or the street markets, and in others he is vicious. God most be the opposite of Rodin, he says, for who else would willingly create something so ugly and strange as people? And here he shows us strange, piteous, and somewhat sad creatures. This collection is a strange hodgepodge. There are some brilliant pieces here, but some are the dullest conventions that would not even grace the best-seller list of the New York Times or Reader's Digest. Is this deliberate? Is this really the same author which made Kafka howl in laughter?
—Hadrian
