A Common Reader » swiss fiction

Review: Some German-language short stories

Tom — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:24:27 +0000

I recently read two books of short stories by early 20th century German writers – Selected Stories of Robert Walser (actually a Swiss national, but writing in German), and Boys and Murderers by Hermann Ungar. These writers are almost equally strange. Hermann Ungar was a Czech Zionist who died at the age of 38 in 1929 and who, although he never met Kafka, was given posthumous membership of the “Prague Circle” of writers who transformed Czech-German literature of the period. Robert Walser spent the latter years of his life in a mental hospital and is renowned for his microscripts: “narrow strips of paper covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high” which have recently been published in a volume containing both facsimiles and transcriptions.

Robert Walser's Microscipts - (grabbed from amazon.co.uk book listing)

I won’t go into the life-stories of these two eccentric authors as Hermann Ungar’s life is described well in this biography on the Twisted Spoon website and Robert Walser’s in this excellent article by J M Coetzee on the New York Review of Books website.

Walser’s Selected Stories is a very satisfying little volume containing some very short stories and a a smaller number of longer ones. The most substantial story seems to be The Walk. Walser specialises in descriptions of his over-sensitive state of mind and delights in writing about banal, trivial events but with a level of descriptive writing which reminds me slightly of a Buddhist writings which exhort one to value the present moment (“mindfulness”) and to meditate on little things as a way to enlightenment.

In this story, the narrator wakes up in a relaxed state of mind and sets out on a long rambling walk, partly to conduct a couple of items of business but mostly to experience the flow of daily life around him.

I found myself, as I walked in the open, bright and cheerful street, in a romantically adventurous state of mind, which pleased me profoundly. The morning world spread out before my eyes appeared as beautiful to me as if I saw it for the first time. Everything I saw made upon me a delightful impression of frienliness, of goodliness, and of youth. All sorrow, all pain, and all grave thoughts were as vanished, although I vividly sensed a certain seriousness, a tone, still before me and behind me.

The narrator proceeds to visit a bookshop, a bank, a tailor, a tax office. Along the way he encounters various people who he stops to talk to. In one sense, the “story” is completely pointless other than as a vehicle for the narrator’s meditations on life and current affairs (his intense dislike of motor cars for example). But I believe the “point” as such is as I mentioned above, to take a certain joy in the simple routines of daily life. I was reminded of Henry David Thoreau, who when asked if he was much travelled, replied, “I have travelled much in Concord County”. A man who could live by Walden Pond for two years would surely have appreciated the writings of Robert Walser.

With an introduction by Susan Sontag, Selected Stories would be a good introduction to Walser’s work and is a very attractive book to dip into.

As an aside, I’d like to include this painting of the Robert Walser’s death, by British artist and novelist Billy Childish. Robert Walser was found dead in the snow while walking near the asylum in which he spent the last 27 years of his life. Childish produced this memorable painting which I am allowed to reproduce here due to its inclusion in Wikimedia.

Hermann Ungar’s book of stories Boys and Murderers is a much less innocent volume of stories than Robert Walser’s. Ungar’s tone is sinister, even disturbing, and when we embark on reading one we never know what strange people we are going to encounter there. In The Story of a Murder for example, we read of a hunch-backed barber Hascheck, who cruelly manipulates the narrator’s pathetic father by encouraging him in a series of lies about his past, and then suggesting that he is about to be exposed as a fraud. It is not so much the emerging story which holds the reader’s interest, fascinating though it is, as the dark thoughts and convoluted reasonings of the characters.

Similarly, in A Man and Maid, we learn of a young man’s obsession with an older house-maid despite her unattractiveness and her complete lack of personal qualities. As he rises in his career and becomes wealthy, he persuades her to travel with him to America where he eventually installs her in a brothel – for disreputable reasons which are only partly elucidated by Ungar’s description of his inner dialogue.

Despite the unpromising material of many of these stories, Ungar created a unique collection quite unlike anything else – with the possible exception of other writers of the Kafka school of writing.

I took these two books on holiday with me – neither qualified as typical holiday reading but they were good to dip in and out of and are definitely two small volumes which will remain on my shelves rather than ending up in my usual charity-shop book boxes.

Review: Institute Benjamenta – Robert Walser

Tom — Thu, 27 May 2010 06:00:12 +0000

Institute Benjamenta is the third Robert Walser novel I have reviewed on A Common Reader, the other two, The Tanners and The Assistant, sharing with this one, a common theme of “servanthood”.

W G Sebald wrote of Robert Walser (1878-1956), “The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. . . he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways”. It can be seen that Institute Benjamenta springs naturally from such a life, being the story of a man who undergoes a lengthy course of training in becoming little more than a nothing.

The book is written in the first person by Jakob von Gunten, a 17 year old boy who enrols in a private academy for servants, the Institute Benjamenta. The Institute is like a boys’ boarding school, run by an eccentric couple, Frau and Fraulein Benjamenta who teach the basics of a servant’s behaviour and duties such as entering a room, behaviour towards women and waiting on table etc. But more importantly, they also attempt to train their pupils in the inner attitude of a servant which seems to consist of a daily personal humiliation in which the servant’s character is moulded by an almost Christian principle of denying oneself.

The writing of Institute Benjamenta is characterised, like so much of Walser’s work, by its description of an inner world of feelings and impressions. Events happen around the main character Jakob, but they are subordinated to the processes of inner development which is far more important to him than any material progress. Walser is interested in Jakcob’s state of mind, and on more than one occasion he allows Jakob to describe significant dreams, even on occasion admitting that he finds it hard to distinguish between dreaming and waking.

The inner development in the case of Institute Benjamenta is about abasement. The job of a servant is to put himself to one side, to live a life so unobtrusively that he merges into the background. The whole Institute is designed to achieve that state of mind where servant-hood is not a professional facade but a permanent revolution in which the servant is constantly annihilating his own wishes and desires in order to serve his master or mistress better. Even the practical side of the classes is unutterably boring. The students perform the same small tasks over and over, and when they are finished, they have literally nothing to do.

From three o’clock in the afternoon we pupils are left almost completely to our own devices. Nobody bothers with us any more. The Benjamentas are secluded in their inner chambers and in the classroom there is an emptiness, and emptiness that almost sickens one. All noise is forbidden. One is only allowed to scurry and creep about and talk in whispers. . . I usually practice standing on one leg. Often for a change, I see how long I can hold by breath . . . one suddenly feels how painful existence can be.

It is not hard to see passages like these as fore-runners of existentialism, the last phrase almost being like something from Jean Paul Sartre when he writes of the meaningless of life and the nausea of existence.

The students at Institute Benjamenta are taught modesty. They are taught not to look around them, and to act with a humility which borders on the self-abnegation taught by the saints of old. I was reminded at one point of Jakob’s namesake, the Jacob of the Book of Genesis who after depriving his brother Esau of his birthright, fled to his Uncle who made him serve many years of servitude, repeatedly deceiving him of his prospects until with his character moulded, he returned, bent over his stick, to his brother Esau and apologised to him. Walser’s Jacob reflects on his training in similar vein,

We are educated by being compelled to learn exactly the character of our own soul and body. We are given clearly to understand that mere discipline and sacrifice are educative, and that more blessings and more genuine knowledge are to be found in a very simple, as it were stupid, exercise than in the learning of a variety of ideas and meanings. Perhaps we’re being stupified, certainly we’re being made small. The law which commands, the discipline which compels, and the many unmerciful rules which give us a direction and give us good taste: that is the big thing, not us pupils.

As with other books by Walser, the mistress of the house (in this case Frau Benjamenta) attracts an almost masochistic worship from her charges:

How beautiful she is! What a luxuriance of raven hair! These eyes with their shining darkness seem to say nothing and yet to say everything unspeakable, they are so familiar and yet so unknown. When one looks at Fraulein Benjamenta’s cheeks one has mo more joy in living, for one has the feeling that life must be a turbulent hell full of vile crudities. Recently we heard her, right there in the schoolroom. We were all trembling like aspens. Yes, all of us, we love her. She is our instructress, our higher being.

Despite the apparent wish to obey his superiors and to be the perfect servant, Jacob is fundamentally a decadent character, the Institute a sham. A young man of 17 should not be annihilating himself but rather finding opportunities to develop himself. Jacob’s lack of ambition is a turning away from what he is meant to do, a sort of inner laziness in which a state of nothingness is preferable to the effort of having to forge his way in the world. I suspect that Waler was well aware of this of course, and Institute Benjamenta can be seen as a satire on the pretensions of the people around him who sought position and prosperity in the fast-developing world of the early 20th century.

As a novel, the book works well despite its peculiar theme, but probably today it would only be of interest to Robert Walser fans (of which I am one). To my mind it is not as satisfying as The Assistant which portrays a much more developed world and a more realistic set of relationships, but I was pleased to read this book as a way of learning more about this unusual writer.

As a final note, I couldn’t help but notice some similarities between Institute Benjamenta and Wilhelm Genazino’s much2001 novel, The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt. The Shoe Tester also wants little out of life other than to live simply with the most undemanding of jobs so that he can devote himself to his real quest – to find “inner authorisation” for his life. Genazino’s book is also one in which the inner thoughts of the narrator are more important than the events that happen around him, and like Walser, Genazino writes of a state of mind rather than a set of circumstances.

Note added 2/6/2010 – A very interesting article on Walser can be found on Balloon Journey

Review: The Tanners, Robert Walser

Tom — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:20:46 +0000

I have had a very busy week and have been suffering mild literary withdrawal symptoms due to the demands of visitors preventing me from updating A Common Reader for the last few days, or even responding properly to those who have commented on my reviews – apologies to those.

However, I’ve managed to snatch some reading time and have enjoyed reading The Tanners by Robert Walser. The only other book I’ve read by Walser is The Assistant, which I enjoyed greatly so I came to this newly published edition of The Tanners with a sense of anticipation.

Swiss writer Robert Walser wrote during the first part of the 20th century, and was a unique writer and as his Wikipedia entry says, “A characteristic of Walser’s texts is a playful serenity behind which hide existential fears. Today, Walser’s texts, completely re-edited since the 1970s, are regarded as among the most important writings of literary modernism”. Walser led an outwardly limited life, never marrying and ending his years in an asylum. He died while out for a long lonely walk in the snow

Robert Walser is an important writer for those with an interest in this period and in writers who followed in his wake such as W G Sebald. Sebald in fact provides a critical biography of Walser in his 36 page introduction to this edition of The Tanners which is worth the purchase price in itself, beginning with the words,

The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. . . he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways.

Walser wrote in minute pencil text, with letters barely 1mm high, and a facsimile of a couple of pages is provided in the introduction. Apparently these pages had to be painstakingly deciphered before his works could be published.

The Tanners tells the story of three brothers and a sister,Simon, Kaspar, Klaus, and Hedwig who together comprise the Tanner family. As the cover says, the story concerns “their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a year or two”. The story focuses on Simon, a strange young man, devoid of ambition who fails to see the need to make progress in the world and drifts from on temporary job to another, finding accommodation with a variety of women who he seems to charm into unconcern about prompt payment of rent.

He has no difficulty with landing himself on the charity of others but wraps around himself a cloak of philosophical musings which help him justify his dependency. He soon loses interest in the clerical jobs he takes on and makes long-winded speeches to his employers explaining why they have disappointed him.

A long section of the book is taken up with his prolonged stay with his sister Hedwig, who is employed as a teacher in a remote village. In this situation Simon comes into his own as a poetical son of the soil who charms his sister into providing for him while he muses on the fulfilment of living simply in rural surroundings.

When eventually Hedwig managed to free herself from her limpet-like brother, Simon returns to the city where he takes a position as a servant to a widow with an invalid son. Simon, always seeing the positive in any situation takes to his new position with enthusiasm, adopting an almost masochistic delight in the restrictions of his new life:

How glad I am to be so hemmed in, so confined, so encloused. Why should a person always be hankering for wide open spaces, and isn’t longing so restrictive a sentiment? Here I am tightly squeezed in between four kitchen walls, but my heart is wide open and filled with the pleasure I take in my modest duty.

Simon’s masochism soon reaches its extreme when the lady of the house drops a beautiful piece of crockery and is so incensed that Simon has observed her act of clumsiness that she orders Simon to pick up the pieces and stands over him while he scrambles around on the floor, not knowing that Simon’s through-train is far from servile:

My cheeks are brushing against your dress. Every shard I gather up says to me, “You wretched creature”, and the hem of your dress says to me, “O happy one!”. I’m intentionally taking my time about gathering up the shards. Does it now fill you with fresh rage to be forced to notice? I’m finding is amusing to have been the miscreant. I like you when you’re angry with me. Do you know why your anger so pleases me? You’re only angry because I witnessed your clumsiness. You the grand lady in the presence of ignoble me. Whit what enchanting rancour you bade me gather up the shards. And I’m not even hurrying as I do so: for I wish you to become utterly furious and incensed over my taking so long. . . Your silk dresss is beautiful when one considers that it contains a female body capable of trembling with excitement and weakness. Your hands are beautiful hanging down towards me in all their length. I hope you’ll box my ears with them some day.

By the end of the book, we realise that Simon is never going to amount to much in this world. He drifts on to more rented rooms and more temporary jobs. He meets people in inns, goes out for walks with whoever wants to accompany him and he lecture them at length about the joys of the simple, uncommitted life, despite its aimlessness and its deprivations.

Clearly there is much of Walser in this book, the sense of alienation from the concerns of others, and the existential anxieties that underlay the lifestyle of a drifter. We somehow feel that anxiety on behalf of the people Simon encounters, for sooner or later they are going to be disappointed in him and find that his charm is thinly laid.

For myself I have been reminded of the importance of this writer and will now go on to read his other books in translation, of which there are now quite a few.