Berlin Stories

by Robert Walser

  I wish the night would swallow me. Again

  I have been wandering in the moonlight unawares.

  Have the daggers been polished, buttons shined, stones hewn, benches cobbled together, curtains painted, moldings gilded, shirts pressed, manners scrubbed, heads washed, bodies steeled; are the senses fresh, the shoes free of holes, and all hearts in good fettle? Let’s assume so. How will the gentlemen make their entrances? Clad in armor or suit jackets? And the ladies? Will they wear velvet gowns or else dress-reform garments? In the end it’s a matter of complete indifference how they stand out, provided they know how to make a grand entrance—for this, I believe when I gaze innovatively into space as I am doing at this moment, is all that truly matters.

  I crept into the garden here exhausted

  And when the night enfolded me so sweetly—

  Lovely, isn’t it?

  1907

  On the Russian Ballet

  How ravishing, the Russian ballerinas from the Imperial Theatre in Petersburg. They dance very well, and now in Berlin they have garnered much acclaim and are enjoying great success that they are generally felt to deserve. Perhaps this is revealing, perhaps not, but in any case we were very satisfied, very pleased, and for the most part even enchanted. A few of the dancers dazzled us. Among these Russians there is one great artist, Anna Pavlova, a very conscious, very intelligent, and up to certain limits doubtless also brilliant artist. Local papers have dubbed her the queen of dance, and apparently that’s what she is. She’s just marvelous. Ah, this Berlin with its love and understanding of the arts, how peculiar it is in so many respects! And then success itself—how odd it often is! But enough of this. Let us speak of dulcet, dancerly things, and not of such foolish ones, such—I almost want to say—thickheaded, clumsy matters as success and its manufacture. Let us be merry, rich, light, earnest, courteous, virtuous, and well-mannered.

  There’s no doubt a touch of parvenu effrontery in this desire on the part of someone of my ilk, who has never studied dance, to engage in scribbling and scrabbling on the theme, topic, and subject of dancing. And yet my sympathies are so vibrant that I cannot possibly bring myself to say: “No, I shall not write.” And what harm does it do, when one’s breast is filled with pleasurable sentiments, to make a bit of a fool of oneself? Yes, pleasurable sentiments, ravishing faces, lovely, beautiful gestures, dulcet memories, reasons for gratitude and veneration have all been bequeathed to us as a gift by the Russian ballet. There’s one perfectly ridiculous piece: Harlequin’s Millions. Anna Pavlova sits like a youthful regent upon a rickety, implausible, small balcony, gazing with wonderful gestures upon the crowd below—Italians apparently—who apparently are indulging in all manner of nocturnal, adventuresome, serenading, troubadourish pastimes. And perhaps daintiest, most dazzling, and loveliest of all was this magic spell of a balcony.

  Clearly the play’s burden is the triumph of tender love over greed and the attempts of old age to act foolish and young. Or something of the sort. Item, we then see this balcony splendor glide to the ground, and now she begins to dance sweetness and greatness. “Now that is dance,” a highly enthused person said to me during intermission. “No doubt,” I replied, and this dissembling dryness pleased me. “Stupendous,” a second person said. I couldn’t help laughing. Oh, this Berlin when its enthusiasms are aroused. Naturally I am of the deeply felt conviction that it is quite nice, quite lovely to be capable of enthusiasm. Novelty enthuses. And these Russian dancers and danseuses struck us as utterly novel and unprecedented. Their traditional dances appeared bold, unique, and new. We were dazzled by an art that the mature and intelligent among us had believed dead and buried.

  Is this ballet the future? For a dance to live on beyond the one tumultuous success, pieces must be written that correspond to our time and its spirit. As for the rest, it isn’t at all necessary to understand the art of dance. We don’t have to know what a certain delightful movement of the hand and arm signifies. All we have to do is feel it and see it, and for this reason thinking about the future of this dance that’s been passed down to us is rather philistine. But often it’s not a bad idea to practice a bit of philistinism.

  Utterly marvelous and downright uplifting are the solo dances performed by these people from the realm of czars, the national and folk dances. Even just the costumes themselves. And then this beautiful wildness ennobled by discipline and tact. It’s enchanting, and here the dancer Eduardova must be mentioned. She represents sensual beauty, while Pavolva stands for spiritual enchantment.

  It was clearly apparent that this tremendously, prodigiously modern Berlin no longer possesses a ballet audience. A ballet is the sort of spectacle that ought to be enjoyed coolheadedly or at any rate with a great deal of gentlemanly and gentlewomanly sophistication: fleetingly, poshly, coldly, elegantly, and solemnly—in the midnight hour, for example, between clever repartee and a rousing bottle of wine. After all, it’s not an Ibsen play, not a Wagnerian opera being performed. And since here in Berlin it’s been a long, long time since we’ve experienced “something of the sort”—in other words, since we are no longer used to seeing a ballet as something purely and delightfully pleasurable—we’ve been thinking of it as somehow anxiety-provoking and thus, I believe myself justified in saying, as almost too, too significant. Well, one ought not speak so philistinely. But it was profound to see how it enflamed us to witness this display of grace. Have we been thirsting for grace? It would seem so.

  Beauty has caught us off our guard once more. A real ambush. And the detractors attended so as to blissfully, besottedly worship the objects of decades of surfeit. This is a sign of the age we live in: extreme wavering—in any case with regard to what is known as bon ton, our understanding of art, and taste. It all sends us whirling, and so we whirl! That we are still capable of feeling joy and the most heartfelt delight, and feeling them without warning, should give us a certain satisfaction. What blusterers we are! But perhaps this is necessary. And this too should be stated: We owe thanks to the people who had the idea of inviting these talented Russian dancers to try their luck once more in the capital of the Reich. After all, last year we virtually snubbed the noble Pavlova along with the rest of her band of artistes, or in any case heaped on them the frost of halfhearted accolades.

  I thought it would be fitting to try to underscore all these things. Relating how beautifully she danced, this great artist Anna Pavlova, is beyond me. She inspires the poet to write poems, the painter to sketch out paintings, the musician to envision new musical works. She is at once delicate and audacious, grand and humble, beautiful and significant. Ah, her smile, and her magnificent sweeping stride. Her miraculous arms and legs. Just look at the balcony. There she sits, gesturing in a way that would befit a fairy-tale queen, toward all these eyes and hearts filled with loving admiration. Does she not resemble a seductive enchantress casting a spell that makes it appear to us that sweetness and nobility can never entirely die out in this world?

  1909

  Portrait Sketch

  It’s as if I saw him before me, the Prince of Homburg. He’s had period costume slapped on him and now appears to be piquing himself on the colors of this garb, that’s how vain a fellow he is. He’s also quite a talent, incidentally: he speaks well, and this gives him one more thing to pique himself on. He has tall, gleamingly polished boots on his firmly planted legs, and, good heavens, chivalric gloves on his hands, which not everyone has; a mere bourgeois, for example, would not be wearing any such thing. Upon his head sits a wig, and his mustache is fabulously curly—this alone being enough to ensure artistic success. All he has to do now is stamp his soldierly leg on the ground in vexation to sweep away all malevolent critiques; he does so, and from this moment on this Monsieur Prince of Homburg is a divinely gifted artist. Moreover, he’s learned his lines by heart, which is utterly superfluous, and has made a note of the passages where his entire princely Homburgly nature is to shine through—an absolute lack of artistic unselfconsciousness. He doesn’t
have to be able to do anything, in fact it’s even good if he can’t, as a true actor opposes learning—his abilities are inborn. After all, that’s what laudably separates this lofty profession from all other earthly professions: one simply stomps to the fore in one’s boots, rattles one’s dagger about, gesticulates, and reaps applause. It isn’t an ordinary person who can succeed in saying:

  Balanced upon your sphere, oh most vast Fortune—

  Such words cannot be spoken by a doctor, mechanic, journalist, bookbinder, or mountain climber, nor would such a person, as God is my witness, have any reason to utter them. The eyes of the Prince of Homburg roll frightfully within their sockets, he speaks these lines more with his rolling eyes than with his lips. He speaks these lines badly, by the way, which demonstrates that he is a good person, that he has a soul, a wife and child, that he has character, and it demonstrates as well—yes, this has only now struck me—that he has thought very, very deeply about his role. This Prince of Homburg displays an enchanting Arcadianism when the time comes for him to say:

  Pah!—As a rogue would write it, not a prince.—

  I’ll find some other turn of phrase.

  He might possibly bellow these words. And now he expects applause, but he feels himself to be aristocratically exalted above the burgher whose applause he desires. Well, after all, he is an aristocrat, a landowner with property along the Rhine:

  And there I’ll work at building and tearing down.

  My goodness, he really does lose himself in the part he is playing. Talent is something possessed by the cobbler who measured him for those high-shafted boots, not by him, or in other words: Why, of course he has talent, but what does any of this mean to a burgher of simple birth?

  1907

  On Staging Lies

  We are living now in a peculiar time, though all times may perhaps have had their own timely peculiarities. Indeed, this time of ours strikes me as highly, highly peculiar, especially when—as I am doing just now—I place one finger alongside my nose so as to reflect upon the actual nature of this life that we are now forcefully thrusting and squeezing onto the stage. We give the stage life to eat, and it appears to be well fed. Even the most obscure, sequestered dramatist presents the theater with his scraps of obscure, sequestered life. If things continue at such a clip, life will soon be lying flat on its back like a consumption-wracked crone, sucked and pumped dry to the ribs, while the theater will be as plump, portly, and stuffed full as, say, an engineer who’s struck gold with his patented enterprises and is now in a position to allow himself all the pleasures the world affords.

  The stage needs life! True enough, but plague and pox confound it, where is all this good, wholesome, veritable life supposed to come from? From life, no? But then is life really so inexhaustible? In my view it is inexhaustible only insofar as we let it keep on following its natural course—tranquil, fluid, and broad—like an untamed, beautiful river. But it may soon appear incontrovertible that we erudite numskulls are merely exploiting and pummeling life, no longer its natural children. It’s as if life were a large, dusty carpet that now, in this age of ours, is to be hung out and given a good whacking. Even dentists who’ve gone to see Lulu have begun to study the features and muscles of life as though it were necessary to cut open an old cadaver and hurl pieces of it onto the stage.

  Here’s the thing: the more vivid and natural things look at the theater, the more anxious, guarded, vexed, and upholstered things will appear in everyday life. When the stage bangs out its truths, it exerts an intimidating influence; when, however, it spins out golden, idealized falsehoods in an oversize, unnaturally beautiful form—as it used to do at least a little in former eras—the effect of this is provocative and heartening, it fosters the beautiful, crass vulgarities of life. Then we can say we’ve been to the theater and luxuriated in a foreign, noble, beautiful, gentle world. Watch out with those unbridled nature plays of yours, lest life trickle away unawares. I’m all for a theater of lies, Lord help me.

  1907

  Do You Know Meier?

  Meier spelled with an “ei”? No? Well, in that case I should like to permit myself to humbly draw your attention to this man. He is currently appearing at Café Bümplitz, which is situated on some street I can no longer recall. There, amid bad and unseemly tobacco fumes, rude remarks, and the clatter of tankard lids, he performs night after night and will go on doing so until one day perhaps some clever theater management will scoop him up, which I don’t doubt for a moment will shortly occur. This man, this Meier, this fellow is a genius. It’s not just that he can make you laugh harder than twenty men can laugh in all their added-together lives, make you laugh till you split your sides or, what am I saying, till you roll in the aisles, or wait a bit, till you die laughing, oh what a simpleton I am if I cannot pound a better comparison from the quarry of my authorial cranium, it’s not just that but also that, how confusing this is, yes, quite right, but also that even the quite natural inducement of a tragic frisson is by no means beyond his reach, in fact he finds it all too easy. So have I actually finished my sentence now or not? If not, what a lovely pretext for going on.

  Meier also performs music-hall ditties with a fabulous don’t-mind-if-I-do-ishness, speaking a language that is surely the most unimpeachable there is, for he lets it drop, nugget by nugget as it were, such that a person listening to him might take a notion to kneel at the man’s feet to gather up the morsels. The tone of this voice—I’ve studied it in considerable depth—reproduces in sound the approximate impression made on the eye by the progress of a snail, so resplendently languorous, so lazy, so brown, so very reptant, so slimy, so gluey, and so terribly if-not-today-why-not-tomorrow. A pleasure pure and simple. I can recommend it in good conscience.

  This Meier, one should know if one does not know it already, plays a theater usher, the role he most shines in, a figure with horrifying trousers, a tall hat, a stuck-on nose, a box beneath his arm, holes at his elbows, cigar in mouth, and not just a lip on him but a proper maw, and a bundle of bad jokes on his dunderhead tongue. This figure is beyond delightful. I for my part have seen him, just a sec, I think a good fifty times now and still have not tired of the act. Of course not! One never tires of gazing upon excellence.

  A small stage, harsh lighting, upon the stage a table and beside it a chair—this is to represent the office of a management director. The manager herself, a slender, youthful female, announces that she now has everything she needs to launch a cycle of performances, the only thing still lacking is an usher, this is a problem, but she has already had advertisements placed in the newspapers and is eager to see who will respond.

  And who should enter now like a wraith from the underworld? Meier! Why of course, devil take it, what else was to be expected, but look, the wonderful part is that you nonetheless find yourself utterly astounded by the novelty with which this Meier spelled with an “ei” is capable of trouser-legging his way up the stairs, in a manner that leaves you no choice but to think he must have done something it would be improper to say aloud in good company.

  He reports to the horrified lady, who surely has read Oscar Wilde, with a circumlocutoriness that would be unsuitable on any other lips, he asks and does the most foolish things, then asks yet other things, is about to take his leave, then enters once more, leaves again, but only in order to appear all over again, always with greater impudence, always more indecorous in his demeanor, speech, manner, gestures, tone, and bearing. And all the while he displays the most astonishing talent for uttering some well-timed bit of filth, and uttering it how? How is something you have to have heard with your own ears. Evening after evening, a good twenty or thirty patrons, on Saturdays and Sundays eighty, one hundred, or one hundred and fifteen, or even one more than that come to hear him.

  I’ve already pointed out that Meier can also make a tragic impression. In order to achieve this, he quite simply changes his voice and throws his hands in the air, a strategy that until now has always worked. Then he becomes a madm
an, a King Leer—not Lear but Leer, because during this production he looks at the audience in such a way that all present do exactly what is described in the line: And in haste betook them home. I alone am in the habit of remaining. And then I experience what it means to feel terror when suddenly the voice of a human being becomes a towering edifice, as is the case with Meier’s, an edifice at whose open windows and doors some unknown monstrosity is bellowing. How I shake with fear on each and every occasion, and how glad I am when this Meier with all his terrifying “oho”s and “ha”s and “hey”s once more becomes simply a Meier with an “ei.”

  1907

  Four Amusements

  1.

  On the top floor at Wertheim’s, where people have coffee, something delectable is currently on view: the dramatic poet Seltmann. Perched atop a small cane stool upon an elevated pedestal, an easy target for passing glances, he ceaselessly hammers, nails, pounds, and cobbles together—as it appears to all observing him—lines of blank verse. The small, rectangular pedestal is tastefully wreathed with dark-green fir twigs. The poet is clad respectably: tailcoat, patent-leather shoes, and white cravat are all represented, and no one need feel embarrassed to give this man his full attention. What’s marvelous, though, is the splendid shock of russet hair arching from Seltmann’s head past his shoulders and plummeting to the floor. It resembles the mane of a lion. Who is this Seltmann? Will he liberate us from the ignominy of seeing our theater in the hands of so many saltpeter factories? Will he write our national drama? Will he someday appear to be the one we’ve been pining for so black-puddingishly? In any case we must be grateful to the directors of the Wertheim department store for putting Seltmann on display.