Berlin Stories

Introduction

The young Swiss writer Robert Walser moved to Berlin in the summer of 1905, at the age of twenty-seven. He’d just published his first book, the outlines of a successful literary career were beginning to unfold before him, and the moment seemed ripe to leave behind the relative peace and safety of his native land for the stimulation and excitement of the German capital. Then as now, Berlin was the destination of choice for young German-speaking writers eager to tap into the pulse of the avant-garde, and his brother Karl, who’d made the move several years before and quickly established himself as the city’s foremost stage-set designer, had been encouraging Robert to join him. Karl’s celebrity secured his younger brother entry into the most exclusive artistic circles, where he met actresses and painters, theater directors and publishers, some of whom took an interest in him.

Berlin in those days was hopping. The city had undergone a period of intense growth in the final decades of the nineteenth century — its population swelled to two million by 1900—and was the site of one of the liveliest high societies in Europe. While factories had bred slums in the city’s northern and eastern districts, the elegance of several of its neighborhoods rivaled that of Paris, though Berlin was more densely packed than the French capital with its brightly lit Grands Boulevards. But Berlin had splendid avenues of its own: Unter den Linden to the east, lined with a double row of the linden trees it was named for, and the swank Kurfürstendamm to the west, as well as a capacious park called Tiergarten, a former hunting ground full of well-tended serpentine paths for Sunday strolls. Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s busiest intersection (and the one Curt Bois reminisces about in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire), was a tangle of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, automobiles, omnibuses, and electric streetcars; by 1908, thirty-five streetcar lines stopped here. Subway cars began to run in 1902, two years earlier than in New York, and people hurried in and out of newfangled restaurants designed for rapid service, like those of the Aschinger chain Walser writes about in two of the stories included here. At Aschinger, one ate standing up, and unlimited free rolls were served to anyone buying a beer. The city’s headlong dive into modernity soon became its trademark. Walser’s acquaintance Walther Rathenau — who later would become foreign minister of Germany — quipped that Berlin’s oldest palaces dated to the early Wilhelmine period, i.e., the late nineteenth century, and dubbed Berlin “Parvenupolis.”

Among Berlin’s would-be parvenus were any number of young artists. The city appeared to reward youthful rebelliousness. Its philharmonic orchestra was formed in 1882 when a group of musicians broke away from the ensemble at a music hall that provided military-band-style entertainment along with ham sandwiches; they moved into a renovated roller-skating rink and soon began performing a repertoire that included Brahms, Wagner, and the young composers Felix Weingartner and Richard Strauss. In the visual arts it was no different: a group of artists removed themselves from the official Association of Berlin Artists in 1892 after the association succumbed to pressure from Kaiser Wilhelm to shut down a show featuring Edvard Munch. The Berlin Secession, as this group soon dubbed itself, quickly rose to prominence and included such luminaries as Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann, Max Slevogt, Walter Leistikow — and Karl Walser. Robert Walser himself served as secretary to the Secession for several months in 1907, as he reminisces in his story “The Secretary.” There were theaters everywhere (their number swelled to thirty-seven by the 1920s), not to mention the many variety shows and cabarets for which the city was to become famous.

Walser had been to Berlin before, twice in fact: in 1897 as a lad of nineteen, and again in 1902; but each time he had fled back to Zurich after only a few weeks, in large part because he felt he would be unable to support himself as a writer in the German metropolis. In 1905, though, he held out for nearly three months before traveling back to Zurich, and after only a few weeks there found himself missing the bustle and excitement of the city so much that he returned, overflowing with newfound optimism. In a note to a friend in Biel, he wrote, “I’m about to write so much that Hesse and Co. will be terrified.” Berlin was to be his home for more than seven years, and the books he wrote here firmly established him as one of the most singular and original voices of European modernism.

For Karl Walser, 1905 was a watershed year. He had recently begun a series of collaborations with the era’s most famous theater director, Max Reinhardt, and in January they put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream together at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. In November a grand new opera house, the Komische Oper, opened its doors with a Reinhardt production that one prominent reviewer dubbed “The Tales of Hoffmann — A Walser Dream.” Karl’s stage sets were fanciful, mysterious, and full of romantic gardenscapes and hanging trees, images that also appeared in the paintings he exhibited at Berlin Secession shows. That year he drew the cover illustration for Christian Morgenstern’s collection of humorous poems Gallows Songs, and the book became a surprise best seller. In the middle of the summer, just as Robert Walser was on his way back from Switzerland, Karl packed up his paints and brushes and set off for the elegant neighborhood of Grunewald at the wooded edge of town, where Samuel Fischer, one of the most powerful publishers in Germany, had hired him to paint a series of frescoes in his freshly renovated villa.

For Robert Walser, his brother’s heady rise to fame and fortune must have been as overwhelming as it was unexpected. After all, his brother — only one year his senior — had himself arrived in Berlin penniless, an unknown provincial with a thick accent and inexperienced in the rituals of high society. But while Karl was able to swim with ease in the waters of Berlin’s beau monde, it soon became clear that his social circles were only partially permeable to the younger Walser brother. Robert, who was living as a guest in Karl’s apartment in the tony Charlottenburg district, soon developed a reputation as a big drinker and a sometimes too enthusiastic prankster. He walked up to Hugo von Hofmannsthal in a restaurant and asked the celebrated dramatist, “Can’t you forget for a bit that you’re famous?” Robert and Karl once teased Franz Wedekind — for whose Spring Awakening Karl designed the sets — so persistently that Wedekind fled a dinner party to escape them, only to get stuck in a café’s revolving door, where the brothers cornered him once more, shouting “Schafskopf!” (muttonhead) as he whirled past.

In a letter to their sister Fanny, Robert describes his attempt to assimilate to his elegant new surroundings and social life:

So little soup was served that afterwards the vegetables and the roast meat were doubly appealing. After lunch I passed the hours gazing at myself in four beautiful mirrors that were hung up in the blue living room, and yet came no closer to making sense of myself — on the contrary, I became stupider and stupider. Then I went calling and always returned home famished. You had to take the train, and that was splendid. I grew accustomed to hackney cabs, waiters, and refined ladies. I wore an elegant, long, black, close-fitting frock coat, a vest, silver-blue in color, trousers that didn’t fit so well, a tall hat and a pair of gloves balled up in my hands. I looked magnificent, for a coat like this makes one a human being. But I resolved to remain an honest man, and so I threw off these dainty coverings. I packed my miserable carpenter’s bag and sailed off.

As fond as he may have been of that coat — no doubt borrowed — which his brother’s roomful of mirrors encouraged him to admire, he seems not to have considered it anything more than a costume by means of which he might blend in. The camouflage seems not to have worked: Karl once received a dinner invitation that instructed him to bring his brother along “only if he isn’t too hungry.”

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.

Some of the stories in this collection previously appeared — in translations by Christopher Middleton in two cases, Harriett Watts in one — in the 1982 collection Selected Stories of Robert Walser. In another case I inadvertently retranslated a story, “The Tanners,” that Middleton had published under a different title in his lovely Walser collection Speaking to the Rose: Writings 1912–1932 (University of Nebraska Press, 2005); I decided to let my translation stand so that the curious reader will have two versions to compare. Middleton’s translations of Walser, the earliest of which date to the mid-1950s, are spirited and alive in every sentence, displaying the depth and range of Walser’s imagination. I have done my best, in my own translations, to re-create the playful wit and profound sagacity that speak from every page of Walser’s prose.

— SUSAN BERNOFSKY

New York, September 2011