Robert Walser (writer)
| Robert Walser | |
|---|---|
Robert Walser in the 1890s
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| Born |
15 April 1878 Biel/Bienne, Switzerland |
| Died | 25 December 1956 (aged 78) near Herisau, Switzerland |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
Robert Walser (15 April 1878 – 25 December 1956) was a German-speaking Swiss writer.
Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. "Indeed," writes Susan Sontag, "At the time [of Walser’s writing], it was more likely to be Kafka [who was understood by posterity] through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, when he first read Kafka pronounced [Kafka’s work] as, 'a peculiar case of the Walser type.'" Walser was admired early on by writers such as Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, and was in fact better known in his lifetime than Franz Kafka or Walter Benjamin, for example.
Nevertheless, Walser was never able to support himself based on the meager income he made from his writings, and he worked as a copyist, an inventor's assistant, a butler and in various other low-paying trades. Despite marginal early success in his literary career, the popularity of his work gradually diminished over the second and third decades of the 20th century, making it increasingly difficult for him to support himself through writing. He eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, and spent the remainder of his life in sanatoriums, taking frequent long walks. A revival of interest in his work arose when, in the late twentieth century and the early 2000s, his writings from the Pencil Zone, also known as Bleistiftgebiet or "the Microscripts," which had been written in a coded, microscopically tiny hand on scraps of paper collected while in a Waldau sanatorium, were finally deciphered, translated, and published.
Walser was born into a family with many children. His brother Karl Walser became a well-known stage designer and painter. Walser grew up in Biel, Switzerland, on the language border between the German- and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and grew up speaking both languages. He attended primary school and progymnasium, which he had to leave before the final exam when his family could no longer bear the cost. From his early years on, he was an enthusiastic theatre-goer; his favourite play was The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller. There is a watercolor painting that shows Walser as Karl Moor, the protagonist of that play.
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