A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

by Robert Walser

  Wyß the rector is as tall as a tree trunk and holds himself like a soldier. We fear and respect him; these two upstanding feelings are a bit boring. I can no longer imagine the rector of a progymnasium as being anything other than just like Rector Wyß. Incidentally, he has an excellent understanding of corporal punishment. He takes you across his knee and thrashes terribly but not quite barbarically away. The blows from Wyß have something proper and fitting about them; while you are tasting his lash you have the pleasant feeling that this is a reasonable, just punishment. Nothing horrific happens. The man who knows how to beat a student so masterfully must be to a certain extent humane. I believe that too.

  A very strange figure and a rare example of teacherhood, it seems to me, is Herr Jakob, the geography teacher. He is like a hermit or a brooding old poet. He is more than seventy years old and has big, shining eyes. He is a handsome, splendid old man. His beard reaches down to his breast. Think of all the things this breast must have felt and fought for! I, as a schoolboy, find myself unintentionally trying to imagine it and so I share in his experience in my thoughts. It is truly monstrous to think how many boys this man has already inculcated with the noble art of geography. Many of these boys are already grown men by now; they are long since right in the middle of life and some of them might have been able to put their geographical knowledge to use. The map hangs on the wall right next to old Herr Jakob—we call him Kobi, by the way—so that it’s utterly impossible now to picture Jakob without his accompanying map. There stands torn, multicolored, variously shaped Europe; big broad Russia, far-reaching Asia, dainty Japan like a bird with a beautiful tail, Australia hurled up out of the ocean; India and Egypt and Africa, which feels dark and unexplored to you even on the disembodied map; finally North and South America and the two mysterious poles. Yes, I have to say, I love geography class with a passion and I learn the lessons there without needing to try at all. It is as though my mind is a ship captain’s mind: It goes that smoothly. And old Herr Jakob understands so well how to make the class interesting by weaving in adventurous stories he has read about and experienced in person! His old, big eyes roll meaningfully back and forth, and it seems like this man has seen every country and every ocean on earth with his own eyes. There is no other class that fills us students to bursting with sympathetic imagining in the same way. There we really experience something every time; there we sit quietly and listen; obviously—an old, wise person is talking to us and that automatically makes you pay attention. Thank God that in this progymnasium we don’t have any young teachers. That would be unbearable. What can a young man who has barely seen anything of life himself have to communicate and impart? A person like that could only give a cold, superficial knowledge, unless he is a rare exception and knows how to be captivating with his mere presence. To be a teacher: It’s a hard job, that’s for sure. God, we schoolboys are so demanding. How abominable we are really! We even make fun of old Herr Jakob now and then. Then he gets terribly angry, and I don’t know anything more sublime than the rage of this old schoolmaster. He trembles horribly in all his fragile limbs, and afterwards we’re involuntarily ashamed of ourselves for having worked him up and made him angry.

  Our drawing teacher is named Lanz. Lanz should be our dancing instructor: He can hop back and forth so magnificently. Speaking of which: Why don’t we get any dance instruction? It seems to me they don’t do anything to teach us grace, posture, and good behavior. We are real brats and likely to stay that way. But back to Lanz: He is the youngest and most confident of all our teachers. He believes we respect him. I hope the idea makes him happy. Incidentally, he has absolutely no sense of humor. He’s not a schoolteacher, he’s an animal trainer; he should work for the circus. Hitting us gives him, as far as we can tell, spiritual pleasure. That is brutal: reason enough for us to tease him and despise him. His predecessor, old Herr Häuselmann, nicknamed Hüseler, was a pig; one day he had to stop teaching. This Hüseler permitted himself some very peculiar things. I myself can still feel on my cheek his old, bony, repulsive hand, with which he used to stroke and caress us boys in class. Then, when he took the liberty of doing what no pen can describe, he was removed from his position. Now we have Lanz. One was an abomination, but this one is vain and uncouth. Not a teacher! No real teacher could be so taken with himself.

  Our brashest and most hilarious classmate is named Fritz Kocher. This Kocher stands up from the school bench, usually in math class, mutely raises his index finger in the air, and asks Herr Bur, the math teacher, if he may please be excused: He has the runs. Bur says that he knows what Fritz Kocher means by his runs, and tells him to just sit down. We others all laugh dreadfully loud, of course, and—miracle of miracles!—here’s a teacher who simply laughs along with us. And strangely: that fills us practically on the spot with respect and affection for this rare man. We stop laughing, because Bur understands brilliantly how to bring our attention back to serious matters. His teacherly seriousness has something captivating about it, and I think it’s because Bur is a man of extraordinarily strong and upright character. We listen eagerly to his words, since he seems almost mysteriously intelligent to us; also he never gets mad, on the contrary he is always lively, happy, and cheerful, which gives us the happy feeling that this man finds his classroom duties pleasant. That flatters us mightily, and we think that we should feel grateful to him for not seeing us as tormenting spirits who embitter his life, and so we behave ourselves. How funny he can be when he wants to be! But we also feel in such cases that he is acting a little for our benefit, to let us have some innocent fun. We see that he is practically an artist; we can tell that he respects us. He is a truly great guy. And you grasp and learn so much in his class! He knows how to give the most disembodied, abstract things shape and sense and content, so that it’s a real pleasure. He likes Fritz Kocher for how unbelievably bold his crazy ideas are, while another teacher would curse and persecute him. That seems important to me: that such a competent, experienced man can sympathize with rascally behavior. He must have a great and noble soul, Bur. He possesses goodness and serenity. He also has a lot of energy. He turns almost all of us into sharp little arithmetickers in a relatively short time. And he treats the more stupid students among us gently. It would never occur to us to pester this Bur; his behavior never even lets us so much as think of such a thing.

  Herr von Bergen used to be our gym teacher, now he is an insurance agent. I hope he does well! He could probably tell that he wasn’t cut out to be an educator. A highly elegant appearance. But what does a schoolboy care about well-tailored pants and flattering jackets? He wasn’t bad, incidentally; only he liked to give out “canes” a little too much. A butcher’s son always had to hold his poor little paw out to Herr von Bergen for a sharp, severe caning. I can still remember, and only too clearly, how that infuriated me. I could have chopped off that finely dressed, perfumed torturer’s head myself.

  I would like to end my portrait gallery of notable teachers with Doctor Merz. Merz seems to be, out of all the teachers, the most cultured; he even writes books. But that does not stop his students from finding him ridiculous sometimes. He is our history teacher and also our German teacher; he has an exaggeratedly elevated idea of everything classical. Now and then his behavior is also classical. He wears boots as though about to ride off into battle, and in fact real battles often do take place in his German class. He is short and unassuming, physically; with the artillery boots on top of that, you have to laugh. “Sit down, Junge. F!” Junge sits down, and Herr Merz writes out a cruel, report-card-disfiguring F. One time he even gave the whole class a big universal F, and on top of that screamed: “So, you are insubordinate, you little scamps? You dare to refuse me? Moser, are you the ringleader here? Yes or no?” Moser—a brave boy, we practically worship him—stands up and says in an outraged, unspeakably funny tone of voice that, well, he wouldn’t call himself the ringleader. We die from laughter, then come back to life again and die a second time. Merz, though, seems to have lost hi
s classical reason; he conducts himself like an insane person, dashes his erudite head against the wall in despair, waves his hands around, and screams: “You make my life hell, you ruin my lunch, you drive me crazy, you scoundrels! Admit it: You’re out for my blood!” And he throws himself down flat on the floor. It’s horrible! You wouldn’t have thought it was possible. And we, who ruin and oversalt his lunch, we also receive from him the noblest and most stimulating ideas. When he tells us about the ancient Greeks, his eyes shine behind his glasses. We are definitely very unjust to bring this man to such wild outbursts. The sublime and the ridiculous are united in him, the high and the stupid, the superb and the pitiful. What can we do about the fact that a grade of F has no special power to scare us? Are we obligated to die of sacred reverence whenever one of us has to recite “Das Glück von Edenhall” by Ludwig Uhland? “Sit down, that’s an F for you!” That’s how it goes in German class. How will it go in later life? I wonder.

  December 1908; 1914

  HANSWURST

  THERE he is, they call him Hanswurst because he is such a stupid lump, no good for anything. I know him well, this dissolute and idiotic young man. I have never in my life run across anyone to whom I would more readily say, “You are a scoundrel,” and also none who has so compelled me to laugh at him. If stupid and unhealthy ideas earned interest he would be a rich man, but the truth is, he is poor as a country mouse. A sparrow has greater prospects of making something of itself in the world than he does, and yet he knows nothing but good cheer, and it has never once been granted me to discover a hint of displeasure in his rascally face. One time, someone wanted to help him advance, but Hanswurst took flight from advancement as though from a calamity—that’s how dumb he acted in the most important moment of his life. He is and always will be a child, a blockhead unable to tell the important from the unimportant, the valuable from the worthless. Or maybe, in the end, he is smarter than he himself realizes and has more wit than he himself is capable of acknowledging? Remain, dear question, nice and unanswered, I beg of you. In any case, Hanswurst is happy in his own skin. He has no future, but also doesn’t want any such thing. What will become of him? Say a little prayer for him! He’s too dumb to.

  1914

  SCHOOL VISIT

  NOW DIDN’T the schoolchildren of a certain village get quite a surprise recently? Someone came walking down the street with bouncing steps; he came to a stop before the schoolhouse, knocked, and introduced himself to the surprised, questioning teacher. She led him inside and offered him a chair; down he sat. How? With great gravity and still at the same time very simply, as though he had the most extensive imaginable practice visiting schools. He was visibly pleased. Who doesn’t like to see a gaggle of schoolchildren sitting happily at their desks? And the little ones, for their part, enjoyed this uneveryday character too. How attentively he looked at them, like he was giving them a test! What was the purpose of his visit? Again and again he smiled. Apparently he did so out of a kind of sympathy for the instruction, and then again probably for no other reason than that the children were smiling at him too. How cozy the classroom and the lesson seemed to him! He liked all of it: the brownish clay, the coarsely rural old-fashioned hue, the snug little room, the large stove, the diagrams and the few pictures on the wall, the way the teacher taught, but especially the adorable, clever, thinking and listening little faces, the little hands, the jolly expressions, the naïve gestures and the eyes and the speaking voices. What was the subject? First, math. It went like clockwork. Only one disproportionately overgrown boy got stuck, but the kindly teacher helped him as affectionately as a mother would have. It was lovely to see how happy the children were when they realized that she had truly understood and fulfilled her duties. How free and easy, pure and open young souls are. The stranger was simply enchanted by the innocent, proper movements and gestures. Was it not possible that the children thought he was a school inspector? Presumably. Then it was time for singing, no first came reciting poems in the charming local dialect. That was great. Every last one of them could say it perfectly. The teacher called forth the childish eagerness, intelligence, and abilities of her charges almost like a sorceress. Her work seemed easy, but the observer remarked to himself that there must be a lot of effort, a lot of prior organizing and leading, great patience, and much self-sacrificing consideration and insight lying behind this smoothly functioning, well-rounded perfection. She took everything that happened with such beautiful relaxed calm; she was clearly a master, and the man who had come to pay this visit esteemed her highly. At a single word from her, the boys and girls put away their slates, books, and pencil cases. “You may go now.” As they filed out, they held out their hands to their teacher, one student after the other; some of them held out their hands to me too. So then was it I who had paid a visit to the school on this occasion? Can it really be true? Oh yes, it most certainly can.

  February 1921

  HAT-CHITTI

  AS BOYS we all used to play a game that truth be told was utterly mean-spirited, nasty, and wicked, which we called hat-chitti (furious anger over a hat). A boy’s hat would be snatched off his head in the most devious way and thrown into the bushes. “I see!” he would say, “I’m not going to pick up that hat,” and he would walk home, or at least halfway home, next to the boy who had done him this small or large injustice, feeling chittious, or, as they say in proper English, furious. After he had walked for some time feeling good and angry, without saying a word, he would finally think better of it and turn around and go back to the place where his poor hat was lying, where he “preferred” to pick it up meekly and quietly “after all” and put it properly back on his head, during which proceedings his fury, stemming from wounded pride, knew absolutely no bounds. Now if he went back to that rascal the other boy, he would be horribly laughed at for his desperate, out-of-control rage or chitti, which so exacerbated the humiliation under which he was already suffering that he would practically break in two from chitti.

  Oh, how terrible this chitti is! Grim inner hatred and deep quiet rage are very, very bad things. Not only boys can bear grudges against other boys in such a way, so too just as well can grown-ups against grown-ups, mature adults against mature adults, and, I would venture to say, nations against nations. A vengeance or revenge can collect in the heart of a nation due to self-regard that has been injured in various ways, and it grows and grows, without end, becomes more and more pressing, more and more painful, rises up like a high mountain no longer to be cleared away, obstructs any mutual understanding, inhibits warm, healthy, reasonable reciprocal communication, turns into twitching nervous fury, and is so tyrannical and degrading that it can one day no longer be reined in and cries out wildly for bloody conflict. That is how wars arise between nations that could have a wonderful friendship with each other if only the one nation could get over the humiliation it has received and the other refrain from reminding the first of the wound, humiliation, and insult it has been given. Yes, that is chitti, hat-chitti: unburied inner hatred; it will not be soothed, cannot be stilled, cannot sleep, and that, don’t you think, my dear fellow human beings, that is sad, that is wicked.

  November 1915

  THE ROWBOAT

  I THINK I have already described this scene but I want to write it again. In a rowboat in the middle of a lake sit a man and a woman. The moon is high overhead in the dark sky. The night is still and warm, perfectly suited to this dreamy, amorous adventure. Is the man in the boat a kidnapper? Is the woman the happily captivated kidnappee? That we do not know; we see only how the two of them kiss each other. The dark mountain lies like a giant in the glittering water. A castle or manor house stands on the shore with one lit window. No noise, no sound. Everything is sheathed in sweet black silence. The stars flicker high in the sky and also up from far below in the sky that lies reflected in the water. The water is the moon’s lover, she has pulled it toward her and now they are kissing, the water and the moon, like lover and beloved. The beautiful moon has plunge
d into the water like a bold young prince into the thick of battle. It is reflected in the water the way a beautiful, loving heart is reflected in another heart longing greedily for love. It is magnificent, the way the moon is like a lover, drowning in pleasures, and the way the water is like the happy beloved, hugging and clasping the neck of her royal darling. The man and the woman in the boat are perfectly quiet. A long kiss holds them captive. The rudder sits carelessly on the water. Does it make them happy, will it make them happy, the two of them there in that boat, the two of them kissing, the two of them lit by the light of the moon, the two of them loving each other?

  1914

  ASCENT BY NIGHT

  EVERYTHING seemed so strange, as though I had never seen it before and were seeing it now for the first time in my life. I was taking a train through the mountains. It was twilight and the sun was so beautiful. The mountains seemed so big and so powerful to me, and they were too. Hills and valleys make a country rich and great, they win it space. The mountainous nature struck me as extravagant, with its towering rock formations and beautiful dark forests soaring upward. I saw the narrow paths snaking around the mountains, so graceful, so rich in poetry. The sky was clear and high, and men and women were walking along the paths. The houses sat so still, so lovely on the hillsides. The whole thing seemed to me like a poem, a majestic old poem, passed down to posterity eternally new. Then it grew darker. Soon the stars were gleaming down into the deep dark chasms and a white shining moon had stepped forth into the sky. The road that ran through the valley was as white as snow. A deep joy took hold of me. I was happy to be in the mountains. And the pure, fresh, cold air. How splendid it was. I breathed it in with passion. And so the train rolled slowly on, and eventually I got off the train. I surrendered my things and continued on foot, up into the mountains. It was so bright and at the same time so black. The night was divine. Tall fir trees towered up before me and I heard springs gurgling and murmuring, it was such a precious melody, such a mysterious saying and singing. I myself sang a song into the night as I ascended ever higher on the bright road. The road came to a village, then went on through an absolutely dark forest. I bumped into roots and stones with my feet, and since I had lost the straight path I often banged my wanderer’s head into trees, hard. But I could only laugh about that. Oh, how magnificent it was, this first ascent by night! Everything so quiet. There was something holy about everything. The sight of the black fir trees made me deeply happy. It was midnight when I reached the little dark house up in the high valley; there was light in the window. Someone was waiting for me. How beautiful that is: to reach a desolate natural spot at high altitude in a silent rustling night, on foot, like a traveling, wildly racing journeyman, and to know that you are awaited by someone dear to you. I knocked. A dog started barking, so loud that it echoed far and wide. I heard someone hurry down the stairs. The door was opened. Someone held up the lamp or lantern in front of my face. I was recognized, oh how beautiful it was, it was so beautiful—