Robert Walser

Robert Walser (Biel, 1878 - near Herisau, 1956) was a Swiss writer in German whose unusual work stayed in the shadows for decades. He wrote mostly short prose pieces, though he also published novels, and today he is counted among the most important German-language writers of the twentieth century.

He was born into a middle-class family, the son of a bookbinder and stationery dealer whose business was slowly failing. His mother's psychological illness and death in 1894 left a deep mark on the household. Walser had to leave school for lack of money and became an apprentice at a bank in Biel. He dreamed of acting, and his favourite play was Schiller's The Robbers. After failed attempts to make a career in the theatre, he walked back to Switzerland in 1896 and settled in Zurich, where he worked for years as a clerk, copyist and assistant bookkeeper. These jobs gave him a close knowledge of low-ranking employees, who later became central figures in his writing.

His literary career began in 1898, when the critic Josef Victor Widmann printed his first poems in the Sunday supplement of the Bernese paper Der Bund. Franz Blei then brought him into the circle of the magazine Die Insel in Munich. In 1905 he moved to Berlin, where his brother Karl, a painter and stage designer, introduced him to artistic society. That same year he worked as a butler at a castle in Upper Silesia, an experience that shaped his fascination with service and subordination. Between 1907 and 1909 Bruno Cassirer published his three major novels, The Tanners, The Assistant and Jakob von Gunten. Still, his most distinctive voice emerged in short forms: sketches, feuilletons and tiny dramas.

His style is marked by digression, gentle irony towards social conventions, and a preference for modest characters who watch the world from below. The Swiss critic Peter von Matt has stressed how central his relationship with his mother was to his writing. Admired by Kafka, Hesse, Musil and Tucholsky, Walser saw his readership shrink during the 1920s. In 1913 he returned to Switzerland and, after a breakdown, spent the rest of his life in sanatoriums and psychiatric institutions. He stopped writing around 1933 and died in 1956. Recognition came late: in the 1970s his microscripts, the tiny pencilled texts of his final years, were deciphered, and since the 2000s much of his work has appeared in English. He is now read as a precursor of a free, ironic and fragmentary prose.