Robert Walser

Based on Wikipedia: Robert Walser

The Writer Who Vanished

On Christmas Day, 1956, children playing in the snow near a Swiss sanatorium discovered the body of an old man. He lay face-down in a white field, his arms stretched before him as if he had been reaching for something just beyond his grasp. The man was Robert Walser, and he had spent the last twenty-three years of his life in mental institutions, refusing to write a single word.

What makes this death so haunting is not just its lonely circumstances. In his first novel, written half a century earlier, Walser had described almost exactly this scene: a man lying dead in the snow. It was as if he had written his own ending before he had even properly begun.

And yet, for a time, Robert Walser was one of the most admired writers in the German language. Franz Kafka kept Walser's books by his bedside. Hermann Hesse championed his work. Robert Musil, another giant of modernist literature, once dismissed a Kafka story by calling it merely "a peculiar case of the Walser type"—as if Kafka were the imitator and Walser the original.

So how did one of Europe's most celebrated writers end up dying alone in a snow-covered field, forgotten by the world?

A Childhood on the Border

Robert Walser was born in 1878 in Biel, a Swiss city that straddles the border between German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland. Growing up bilingual in this linguistic frontier gave him an unusual sensitivity to language—to the way words carry different weights and colors depending on which mouth shapes them.

His family was large and troubled. His mother was what contemporary documents carefully described as "emotionally disturbed." She spent long periods under medical care before dying when Robert was just sixteen. Of his siblings, one brother would later die in a mental institution, and another would take his own life. Mental illness ran through the Walser family like a dark thread, and Robert would eventually find himself caught in its pattern.

But there was also creativity in this family. His brother Karl became a celebrated stage designer and painter, and the two brothers' lives would intertwine professionally for years. Karl's connections in the art world would open doors for Robert, though Robert himself seemed perpetually ambivalent about walking through them.

As a boy, Walser was captivated by theater. His favorite play was Friedrich Schiller's "The Robbers," a drama about a young nobleman who becomes the leader of a band of outlaws. There exists a watercolor painting of the teenage Walser dressed as Karl Moor, the play's protagonist—a young man playing at rebellion, dreaming of grand gestures. The irony is that Walser's own literary rebellion would be conducted in whispers, not shouts.

The Education of a Clerk

When Walser was fourteen, his family ran out of money. He had been attending the progymnasium—a preparatory school that would have led to university—but he had to leave before his final examinations. This early ejection from formal education marked him. He would spend the rest of his life working jobs that required no credentials: bank apprentice, office clerk, butler, secretary, inventor's assistant.

These weren't jobs he resented. Quite the opposite. Walser became fascinated by what we might now call the white-collar experience—the peculiar life of the salaried employee, that new creature of industrial capitalism who sells not physical labor but time, attention, and obedience. He was among the first Swiss writers to make this invisible world visible, to treat the office clerk not as comic relief but as a subject worthy of serious literary attention.

After his banking apprenticeship in Biel, Walser drifted to Stuttgart, where his brother Karl was establishing himself in the art world. Robert took jobs at publishing houses. He also attempted, without success, to become an actor. When that dream collapsed, he walked home—not took a train, not hired a carriage, but walked, on foot, back across the border into Switzerland. This would become characteristic. Walser was a walker. He would eventually be known for his extended rambles, often at night, through unfamiliar neighborhoods. Walking became both his method and his subject.

The Berlin Years

In 1905, Walser made an unexpected detour. He enrolled in a training course to become a butler, at a castle in Upper Silesia. The experience was brief, but it lodged in his imagination. The theme of serving—of subordination, of the strange intimacy between servant and master—would run through his most important work.

That same year, he moved to Berlin, following his brother Karl into the city's vibrant artistic scene. Karl introduced him to writers, publishers, and theater people. Robert occasionally worked as secretary for the Berliner Secession, an association of avant-garde artists who had broken away from the conservative mainstream.

Berlin was where Walser became a novelist. In quick succession, he produced three books that would eventually be recognized as masterpieces: "The Tanners" in 1907, "The Assistant" in 1908, and "Jakob von Gunten" in 1909. The publisher Bruno Cassirer issued all three, with Christian Morgenstern—himself a respected poet—serving as editor.

"The Assistant" drew directly from Walser's experience working for an inventor. "Jakob von Gunten" was a dreamlike novel set in a school for servants, where the curriculum consists entirely of learning obedience. These weren't conventional novels with driving plots and dramatic climaxes. They meandered. They circled. They paid as much attention to the quality of afternoon light as to any human conflict.

The critics noticed. Walser gathered admirers: Kurt Tucholsky, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka. He was compared to Heinrich von Kleist, the great German romantic whose crystalline prose had been a century ahead of its time. Some scholars now call Walser "the missing link between Kleist and Kafka"—the writer who connects nineteenth-century German romanticism to twentieth-century modernism.

The Art of the Small

But novels weren't really Walser's natural form. He was drawn to something smaller: the prose sketch, the feuilleton, the brief observation that expanded in unexpected directions.

The feuilleton was a popular form in German-language newspapers of the time—a short, often humorous piece that might describe a walk through the city, a conversation overheard in a café, or a meditation on some minor aspect of daily life. Walser took this modest form and made it strange. His sketches were playful and subjective, written from the perspective of a poor flâneur—that French word for an urban wanderer who observes the city with detached fascination.

He published hundreds of these pieces in newspapers and magazines across Germany and Switzerland. Collections appeared with titles like "Essays," "Stories," "The Walk," and "Seeland." They became his trademark. And they were, in a sense, perfectly suited to his temperament: small, apparently modest works that contained hidden depths.

Return to Switzerland

In 1913, Walser left Berlin and returned to Switzerland. He stayed briefly with his sister Lisa, who worked as a teacher at a mental institution in Bellelay. There he met Frieda Mermet, a washer-woman, with whom he developed a deep friendship that would last for years. Then he moved to Biel, his childhood city, and took a room in the mansard of a hotel called the Blue Cross.

His father died the following year. Then came the war.

World War One isolated Switzerland. Though the country remained neutral, communication with Germany—where most of Walser's publishers and readers lived—became difficult and eventually nearly impossible. Walser was called up repeatedly for military service. His income, never stable, became precarious.

And then his brothers began to die.

In 1916, Ernst died in the Waldau mental institution after a period of mental illness. In 1919, Hermann, a geography professor in Bern, killed himself. The family's dark thread had claimed two more.

Walser withdrew. He continued to write—indeed, he worked ferociously—but he could barely support himself. In 1921, hoping for more stable employment, he moved to Bern to work at the public record office. He lived alone, changing lodgings frequently, growing ever more isolated.

The Microscripts

And then something strange happened to his handwriting.

During his years in Bern, Walser developed what he called "the pencil method." He began writing in a minuscule script—letters measuring barely a millimeter in height—using a form of old German cursive called Kurrent. He wrote on scraps of paper: the backs of business cards, torn envelopes, whatever came to hand. The resulting documents looked, to casual observers, like abstract patterns or perhaps some kind of code.

For decades after his death, scholars assumed these "microscripts" were either meaningless doodles or written in some kind of personal cipher that could never be cracked. It wasn't until the 1970s that researchers Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte finally deciphered them, publishing a six-volume edition called "From the Pencil Zone."

What they found was astonishing. Walser had written poems, prose pieces, dramatic sketches, and several complete novels in this nearly invisible hand. One of these novels, "The Robber," was among his finest work. The microscripts represented some of the most productive years of his literary life—and almost no one knew they existed.

Why did he write this way? Scholars have speculated. Perhaps the tiny script was a way of escaping the permanence of ink, of making his words feel provisional and therefore less frightening. Perhaps it was a symptom of his deteriorating mental state. Perhaps it was simply economical—he could fit more words on less paper.

Whatever the reason, the effect was to create a secret body of work, hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone patient enough to decode it.

The Breakdown

In early 1929, Walser's sister Fanni convinced him to enter the Waldau mental institution in Bern. His medical records note that "the patient confessed hearing voices." He had been suffering from anxiety and hallucinations for some time. The diagnosis was catatonic schizophrenia.

Initially, hospitalization seemed to help. His mental state stabilized, and he continued writing and publishing from within the institution's walls. He produced microscripts at a furious pace. But in 1933, he was transferred against his will to a sanatorium in Herisau, in his home canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden.

And there, he stopped writing entirely.

When asked about this, years later, Walser gave an answer that has become famous among his admirers: "I am not here to write, but to be mad."

Twenty-Three Years of Silence

What does a writer do when he stops writing?

In Walser's case, he walked. The sanatorium allowed him considerable freedom, and he spent his days wandering the countryside around Herisau. In 1936, an admirer named Carl Seelig began visiting him, and the two men would take long walks together. Seelig later published a book about these excursions called "Walks with Robert Walser."

Seelig became Walser's champion. He reissued selections of Walser's work. He tried to spark new interest in a writer the world had forgotten. When Walser's brother Karl died in 1943, and his sister Lisa in 1944, Seelig became his legal guardian.

But Walser refused to leave the sanatorium. He had been free of obvious symptoms for years—staff noted he was sometimes crotchety but otherwise seemed perfectly sane—yet he would not go. Perhaps the institution had become the only home he trusted. Perhaps he feared what waited for him in the outside world. Perhaps he simply preferred the walking.

In 1955, a year before his death, something remarkable happened. His novella "The Walk" was translated into English by Christopher Middleton. It was the first English translation of any of his work, and the only one that would appear in his lifetime.

When Walser learned of the translation, he responded with characteristic deflection: "Well, look at that."

The Second Life

For two decades after Walser's death in 1956, he remained obscure. Carl Seelig's editions appeared almost exclusively in Switzerland and attracted little attention. The microscripts sat undeciphered in archives.

Then, in the 1970s, scholars began the painstaking work of transcribing the tiny scripts. A complete critical edition of Walser's work was undertaken. And slowly, readers discovered what Kafka and Hesse and Musil had known half a century earlier: that this strange, modest, perpetually self-effacing writer was one of the great originals of modern literature.

Today, Walser is recognized as a key figure in European modernism. His influence runs through contemporary German literature—writers like W.G. Sebald, Peter Handke, and Thomas Bernhard have acknowledged their debt to him. In 2009, the Robert Walser Center was established in Bern, dedicated to preserving his work and promoting scholarly research.

Other artists have responded to his life and work. In 2004, the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas published "Doctor Pasavento," a novel about Walser and what Vila-Matas calls "the wish to disappear." In 2012, a book called "A Little Ramble: In the Spirit of Robert Walser" collected artistic responses to his work.

What draws people to Walser now is perhaps what made him difficult to appreciate in his own time. He wrote about smallness, about service, about the desire to be overlooked. In an age of grand gestures and heroic artists, he chose to disappear into his own sentences. His prose can seem almost too modest—until you notice the strange angles, the sudden drops into melancholy, the way an apparently simple description of a walk can become something like a prayer.

The Snow

There is one more detail about Walser's death that bears mentioning.

The children who found his body in the snow—the photographs were taken, the newspapers ran brief notices, and then the world moved on. But those who knew his work recognized the scene. In "The Tanners," his first novel, Walser had described a man lying dead in the snow, his arms outstretched, his face toward the cold earth.

Had he imagined his own ending? Had he, in some sense, written it into being? Or was it simply that a writer who spent his life walking through snow-covered landscapes would naturally find his rest in one?

We cannot know. But there is something fitting about the image: a man who wanted to disappear, who wrote in letters so small they seemed designed to evade reading, who refused to be anyone's idea of a great writer—this man, at the end, becoming part of the landscape he had walked through all his life. The snow covered his tracks. The world forgot him. And then, decades later, patient readers began the work of deciphering what he had left behind.