Robert Walser

Born Robert Otto Walser on April 15, 1878, in Biel, Switzerland, the second-youngest of eight children of Adolf Walser, a bookbinder who ran a small stationery and picture-frame workshop, and Elisabeth Walser, who suffered from a mental affliction her contemporaries called gemütskrank and died when her son was sixteen, Robert Walser grew up on the language border between French- and German-speaking Switzerland and was bilingual from the start. He had to leave the progymnasium before his final examinations because his family could no longer afford the fees. He apprenticed in a Bernese bank, drifted between Stuttgart, Zürich, and Munich working as a Kommis or office clerk, briefly trained as a butler at a castle in Upper Silesia, and assisted an inventor in Wädenswil, the episode that would become his novel The Assistant (1908). Joseph Victor Widmann published his poems in the Bern paper Der Bund in 1898, the first sign of literary life. In Berlin, where his brother Karl was a leading stage designer, he produced the three novels for which he is remembered, The Tanners (1907), The Assistant (1908), and Jakob von Gunten (1909). Kafka, Hesse, Musil, and Tucholsky read him with reverence. Returning to Switzerland in 1913 he wrote the late, microscopic prose called the Mikrogramme, drafted in pencil at letters barely a millimetre high, only deciphered between 1985 and 2000. He entered the Waldau asylum in 1929 with what was diagnosed as catatonic schizophrenia, was transferred against his will to Herisau in 1933, and stopped writing. I am not here to write, he told his visitor Carl Seelig, but to be mad. He died of a heart attack in a field of snow on Christmas Day 1956, aged seventy-eight.

In 1905, with a first book already in print, Walser enrolled at a training school for servants in Berlin. That winter he served at Dambrau castle in Upper Silesia, in the household of Count Konrad von Hochberg, taken on partly for his French. The school he sat in became the Benjamenta Institute, where Jakob von Gunten trains to serve.