Berlin Stories

by Robert Walser

  Nowadays anywhere there is nature, trains are also found. Soon there will no longer be a single colossus of a mountain that people have not yet begun to pierce for the sake of transport, civilization, and pleasure. There is no shortage of cable cars, and all of this is good, for it sets hands and minds in beneficial motion. To be sure, traveling by train for pleasure or business can also be quite perilous, as recent accidents have taught us; bridges can collapse, tracks can suddenly jut up in a fury and fling the train about, two trains can, owing perhaps to an oversight on the part of a single responsible official in the middle of a forest where no human habitations can be found far and wide, crash into each other—what horrific things! Or a fire can suddenly break out within a flying train, or else the train can—in holy Russia for example—be attacked by bandits. These are things that, it appears to me, display a blanched, solemn visage, but at least occurrences of this sort are met with only very rarely. Mankind cannot, after all, abandon something so advantageous just because of certain dangers, and the steam locomotive with all the cars hanging on behind does represent an unmistakable advantage. Many a person has already been liberated from torments, worries, and annoyances by his peaceful journey in a quiet compartment, using the railway to put his pressing plans and thoughts more or less in order in the course of long, possibly nocturnal journeys. Here the foolishnesses and pettinesses of quotidian life fall silent, triumph as they may in their usual milieu. Today one can rest while completing a journey. But one can also easily experience the most tender adventures, above all on express trains. How? This is something every person must discover on his own. I now come to a close, looking forward to the train trip I shall soon be making. To be honest, I don’t travel much, and this is why the thought of travel fills me with such longing.

  1907

  What Became of Me

  I am, by birth, a child of my country, by trade I am poor, my social status is that of human being, my character that of a young man, and by profession I am the author of the present autobiographical sketch. My upbringing went like this: From time to time my beloved Papa sent me out to Ridau. Ridau is a charming, ancient little town with only a single street—though a nice wide one to be sure—and a towering Gothic castle.

  Ridau is home to Herr Baumgartner. I would go running off to Ridau so as swiftly to pass on to Herr Baumgartner Papa’s greetings and best regards. Such was my upbringing.

  My schooling and education took the form of attending a Progymnasium or junior high school. The Progymnasium is a classical seat of learning, for it was established under Napoleon the Great and First, or at least under his influence. After this, harsh Life flung me upon the path of a practicing feuilletonist. Oh, if only I had never written a feuilleton.

  But Fate, which remains perpetually inscrutable, willed it thus, and would appear to have made of me a perfumed and mincing know-it-all and write-it-all, and all the oh so precious innermost cores of my being that pluck at the heartstrings of my patriotic sentiment have had—as I lament with weeping eyes and deep within my hollowed-out soul—to go by the wayside. What a cruel fate I am bound to!

  And yet everything can take a turn for the better, and naïve rusticality will perhaps, who knows, return to me someday, and then I shall once more be allowed to wring my hands in isolation. For the time being, however, I appear to be sunk deep in the Gomorrah of simpering, capering correspondenthood, and very little hope persists—possibly none at all—that I shall ever again in all my days be capable of emitting a yodel such as, for example, the literarily so enterprising and worldly Ernst Zahn lets rip in so splendid and earthy a manner. Ernst Zahn and other equally shrewd individuals are champions at underscoring that they love their homeland.

  Such manufacture has always eluded me. The world is wide, and human beings are a mystery, and Napoleon was a great man, and Ridau is a delightful little town, and the core of a human being never goes entirely by the wayside. What silly bigotry, these Old Auntie gossipings from the South. Berlin is such a lovely city, and its inhabitants are such hardworking, upright, and courteous human beings.

  1912

  Food for Thought

  How uncertain, how difficult people make one another’s lives! How they belittle each other and are at pains to suspect and dishonor. How everything takes place merely for the sake of triumph. When they leave things undone, this occurs because of external exigencies, and when they err, it is never they who are at fault. Their fellow men always appear to them as obstacles, while their own person is always the highest and most noble of creatures. What efforts people make to disguise themselves with the intention of causing harm. How often we long for open, honest rudeness. At least during a fit of rage the heart chimes in. It’s strange how quick people are to dismiss one another, to invoke a scornful tone, trifling with what is most noble, precious, and meaningful. And how they never grow weary of finding fault, how it never occurs to them simply to hope there might be greatness, goodness, and honesty on earth. The notion that the earth itself is honorable is something they cannot quite grasp, obvious as it appears. Only their own trifling concerns seem to them deserving of the respect that in fact they owe the world, this majestic church. How seriously they take their own sins, and how convinced they’ve been throughout their adult lives that nothing more refined or heed-worthy than they can possibly exist. How they persist in worshiping something utterly undeserving of worship, the ancient golden calf, the expressionless monstrosity, how industriously they believe in the unbelievable. The stars mean nothing to them: in their opinion, stars are for children; and yet what are they themselves if not unruly children intent on doing what should not be done. How good they are at spreading fearfulness all around them, well aware that they themselves are constantly beset by dark, dull, foolish fears. How fervently they long never to do anything foolish, and yet this ignoble longing is itself the most foolish thing that can be felt under the sun. They wish to be the cleverest of people, but they’re the most miserable ones imaginable. A thief has done something, he’s been seduced into doing something illicit and bad—but these people have never done anything at all, neither something base and heinous nor something tenderhearted and good, and they firmly resolve never to do anything that could possibly arouse attention. Indeed, they give us something to think about.

  How they misapprehend themselves in their narrow-minded conviction that they are worth more than others. Out of sheer naïveté they refer to themselves as cultivated, turning up their snub noses at one another. The poor things. If only they knew how uncultivated and unschooled pride is, how poorly brought up the one who is ruled by his own incapacity to judge himself. “Come, let’s go find a quiet corner where we can experience remorse on account of all the presumptuousness and lovelessness whose influence we haven’t been able to break free of.” This is how a person would speak if he were sensible of the slightest cultivation. “Would you like to come? There’ll be a temple standing there, a holy, invisible one. Do come. You’ll see, it will give you pleasure, and will do both our hearts good!” Such or similar words would be exchanged among fellow human beings. What barbarians these are who speak of culture, of all these marvelous things, of beauty that will remain forever alien to them as long as they cannot will themselves to practice beauty. All practice and motion are so far from them. They just talk and talk and talk, and for just this reason sink ever deeper into the midnight of unrefinedness, for only action is refined; talk is murky and dark, as unclean as hell itself. How they squander their time and the light, golden, fluid worth of their existence by passing hours on end in places where they exhaust their ears and minds speaking about things that a sensible, hardworking person would give a swift thought to, soon reaching a conclusion. Apparently by speaking they are attempting to come to terms with certain significations, but in this they will never succeed. No, they don’t even wish to succeed, they understand perfectly well that they are indulging in a sort of linguistic gourmandizing. They’re just gluttons. But gluttony cannot be anything ot
her than an abomination; a sin committed against one’s parents and children; an injustice against every other living being; an atrocity against oneself. The nights, the holy temples of life, how unspeakably they are devalued, dishonored, and desecrated by lines such as this: “Come with me, let’s dash over to such-and-such a place!” The cultivated person is constantly having to dash somewhere or other, and why? This is something he himself honestly doesn’t know. How ceaselessly they chase after pleasures even a blackamoor would disdain, hungering after diversions that would make even a Kalmuck shrug her shoulders in unimaginable scorn. What indignation they display when confronted with the outrageous expectation that they might calmly observe the wending of the weeks, quietly perform devotions of a sensible, lovely sort or, quite simply, go to church. Oh, by God—the Invincible One—church can make a person forget the horrors he has on his conscience and entice him to submit. Enough of all the emptinesses, loathsomenesses, soul- and heartlessnesses brought about by this garrulous modernity.

  And how they suffer. You have to have lived among them, you have to have partaken in the follies they pay homage to, whose charms have been plucked bare and are no longer able to invigorate either the mind or the senses, in order to understand how they suffer. Their consolation is that it is they who set the tone in the world. What a consolation. Their pride is that they are mentioned in the press. What a thing to be proud of. Their triumph is to stand at the forefront of what people love to call progress. What an accomplishment. And beside them one sees these weary, withered, half-alive men, these soulful women whose entire souls have been eaten up and destroyed by furious, hopeless, half-mad dissatisfactions. Unfortunate women poised at the pinnacle of culture, where they dally; unenviable men; impoverished human beings. And they half admit they are impoverished. But how did they get so poor? They are dear human beings. Yes, truly. But why is it they in particular who are so unreliable, so out of sorts, withered, and querulous? This too might give us something to think about.

  Spirits and gods no longer speak to them. Their lives are based solely upon sensual pleasures and trinkets when they should be founded upon reason and solid thought. They want to take striving as their basis, but this empty ascent from step to step is not a just, honorable foundation and ground. This striving would have to be conjoined in a forward-thinking way with valor and nobility, but this is not at all the case, in fact the opposite is true: schism, disintegration, unraveling. High above, nothing remains. The upper regions have been strangely depleted of development. There’s no making headway, and so we are obliged to turn back—which in and of itself is something to think about.

  1910

  Looking Back

  Remembering The Tales of Hoffmann

  I was living in the tranquillity of rural, provincial isolation, in the flat countryside where fields and forests lie about motionless and mute, the plains and plots of land appear endless, broad wide regions often prove to be only narrow strips, and vast estates slumber peacefully one beside the other.

  Brown, yellow, red autumnal foliage, fog that mysteriously wrapped the wintry earth in veils; large, wet, fat snowflakes tumbling down into a morning-dark courtyard, a white park covered in snow, a winter village with village lads and village women and geese in the village street—all this I had seen.

  I’d seen a poor, sick, unhappy day laborer forgotten by all the world, lying in her squalid bed of sufferings; I heard her sighs.

  Forests, hills, plains silent and wordless in the dull hush of the gleaming winter sun. Here and there a solitary person, an insignificant little word, an isolated sound.

  One day I left all this remoteness and all this silence behind and set off for the seductive gleam of the capital, where soon thereafter I saw The Tales of Hoffmann at the Komische Oper.

  I felt like an astonished hayseed amid all that gleaming intoxication, the graceful, sense-beguiling tumultuousness and the blindingly elegant society gathered there.

  But when the interior of the grand edifice became as silent as a tiny chamber filled with reveries and fancies of the soul, as the might and art of sound opened their divine mouths and began to sing, ring out, and resound, beginning with the overture that wheedled its way into all our souls with its bright and dark, gay and earnest melodies, only to entwine them—now constricting, now liberating from constriction—with heavenly bliss, and then soft warm song burst from the lips of the singers and songstresses, images brimming with delicate, noble, magical colors and magical figures lightly and gaily emerged to delight the eye and taste, music and painting most beautifully took possession of every heart, eye, and ear, and everything became suddenly quiet as a mouse, only to resound once more as if it wished never to stop so beautifully resounding and conquering its listeners with its desired, delightful force: pain and sounds of joy mirroring the adventure of existence, exemplifying the meaning of life, and soaring up and down the scales like angelic figures ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder …

  Oh, everything was so regally beautiful and luxurious all about our tear-filled, feverish eyes and in our hearts. All of life could now cease outright or else begin utterly anew.

  What a presence to partake of! Thousands of hours flowed together to form this one single hour. Yes, what a beautiful, good, meaningful evening this was.

  1916

  The Tanners

  The intoxicating gleam of the dark, metropolitan streets, the lights, the people, my brother. I myself, living in my brother’s apartment. I shall never forget this simple two-bedroom dwelling. It always seemed to me as if this apartment contained a sky complete with stars, moon, and clouds. Marvelous romanticism, dulcet forebodings! My brother would spend half the night at the theater, where he was making the stage sets. At three or four in the morning he would come home, and I would still be sitting there, enchanted by all the thoughts, all the lovely images wafting through my head; it was as if I no longer required sleep, as if thinking, writing, and waking were my lovely, restorative sleep, as if writing for hours and hours at my desk comprised my world, my pleasure, relaxation and peace. The dark-colored desk, so antiquated it might have been an old magician. When I pulled open its delicately worked small drawers, I imagined that sentences, words, and maxims would come leaping out. The snow-white curtains, the singing gaslight, the elongated dark room, the cat and all the becalmed waves of the long nights filled with thoughts. From time to time I would go visit the merry maids down at the girls’ tavern, that was also part of it. To speak of the cat once more: she always sat on the pages filled with writing that I had laid to one side and would blink at me with her unfathomable golden eyes so strangely, with such a questioning look. Her presence was like the presence of an odd, silent fairy. Perhaps I owe this dear, silent animal a great deal. How can one know? The further I progressed in my writing, the more I felt as if I were being watched over and protected by a kindly entity. A soft, delicate large veil floated about me. But at this juncture I should also mention the liqueur that stood upon the sideboard. I partook of it as freely as I was permitted and able. Everything all around me had a soothing, invigorating influence. Certain states, circumstances, and circles are there only once, never again to appear, or else only when one is least expecting it. Are not expectations and presuppositions unholy, impertinent, and indelicate? The poet must ramble and rove, he must courageously lose himself, must always venture everything he owns, and he has to hope, or rather he is permitted: permitted to hope. —I recall that I began writing the book with a hopeless flutter of words, with all sorts of mindless sketchings and scribblings. —I never dreamed I might be capable of completing something serious, beautiful, and good. —Better ideas and, along with them, the courage to create arrived only gradually, but also all the more mysteriously, rising out of chasms of self-contempt and flippant disbelief. —It was like the morning sun rising up in the sky. Evening and morning, past and future and the so delightful present seemed to lie at my feet; before me the countryside quickened with life, and I felt as though I cou
ld grasp human activity, all of human life in my hands, that’s how vividly I saw it. —One image gave way to another, and the thoughts that occurred to me played with one another like happy, graceful, well-mannered children. Filled with rapture, I clung to my joyful main idea, and as I industriously went on writing more and more, its context came into view.