The robber

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Der Räuber is a novel by Robert Walser that was written in Bern in July and August 1925 , but was only published (posthumously) by Jochen Greven in 1972.

The draft of this novel is one of the so-called micrograms that Robert Walser wrote with a pencil in a miniature font, which was a microscopic reduction of the German current font ; the entire draft of the “robber” novel had space on 24 manuscript pages (for comparison: the Suhrkamp edition comprises 191 printed pages). Due to its difficult legibility, Walser's miniature script was often incorrectly referred to as “secret script”. A first transcription of the “robber” manuscript was made by Jochen Greven with the assistance of Martin Jürgens , a revision by Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang . The prevailing opinion in literary studies is that Robert Walser's novel was never intended for publication . The manuscript also had no title.

content

The "robber" is a bohemian, idler and penniless writer who is marginalized and ridiculed by society for his inability and unwillingness to fit in and who "might be happy if someone had believed in his robbery". The narrator of the novel appears to be an author commissioned by the robber; he should write his story, which would actually be quickly told: The robber lived abroad for a while, but had to return to Bern after he had forfeited the donations from his patron; in Bern, partly supported by his landlady, partly doing occasional office work, he lives during the day and has numerous encounters, especially with women, although it is always a rather fleeting rapprochement. He first falls in love with a middle-class girl named Wanda, then with a maid (waitress) named Edith. When the robber is supposed to give a public lecture about love in a church and humiliates Edith with his remarks, he is shot by her, but survives the injury.

This rather sparse plot is only a framework for countless digressions and, above all, for the narrative process depicted here, which is the actual theme of the novel.

shape

The text is a representation of a continuous writing process (even if it is divided into 35 text segments), in the sense of a narrative process, which as such is thematized in a self-referential manner and runs chronologically, while the narrator is free and responsive to the events he is reporting on seemingly disordered or according to its own order.

The text begins with the sentences “Edith loves him. More about this afterwards ”(7), which introduces an important level of structuring, namely a network of references and puzzles, right at the beginning. This network plays with the reader's expectations, represents a lead around: some of the references remain unredeemed, others relate to events that are or are completely irrelevant for the progress of the event (which is not important anyway) not related to each other as implied. “But now, with all due respect, from a maid and a knee kiss and a book that was left in a chalet” (24), it is said, for example - but it then turns out that the episodes have nothing to do with each other: “He asked him Boy: 'May I be your maid? That would be cute for me. ' (...), and now this predatory maid kissed the boy's knees. (...) When the book was handed in, it was like this: A book had been lent to the robber by a lady with white hair who felt very youthful inside. "(27)

In addition to the confusion, the network of references also has the function of making the process of narrating and structuring a subject matter visible - the narrator almost constantly remembers what still needs to be dealt with - and at the same time an orderly narration, as in novels of the nineteenth century takes place to satirize. An expectation of the reader to find an orderly story is assumed; the narrator triumphs when he - purely formally - complies with this expectation: “And now I have kept my promise. I promised to talk to the robber's amours. Many consider us forgetful. But we think of everything. ”(120) The demand for a coherent narrative with interrelated plot elements is satirized by the narrator pretending to have exactly this as his goal:“ Genfergasse and Portugal, how do I relate these divergent opportunities? What difficulties I am facing. ”(29) In the narrative flow, narrative dramaturgical tricks are made explicit and thus travestated:“ We want to save everything in the interest of cautious interest. ”(46 f)

Constant digressions are both formal and substantive principles of the novel; In doing so, a connection is often asserted, among other things through the network of references: “And now I come to talking about needlework and say the following. For writers, speaking is work, but for manual laborers, speaking is chatty, hence an attempt to celebrate ”(85). Sometimes, however, the digressions also take place without a connection being apparent, as simple jumps in thought: “At lunchtime there was usually spaghetti, oh yes, and he always loved to eat it. How peculiar it sometimes struck him that he never tired of finding them tasty. Yesterday I cut off a crop. "(11)

The narrator takes the liberty of mixing his own story with that of the robber and then calls himself back to order: “Poor robber, I am completely neglecting you.” (15) Starting from the story, he also arrives at an abundance general sentences: "Lovers are stupid and at the same time sly, but to us it seems improperly spoken." (32) Such a withdrawal and limitation of the narrator is programmatic and arises from the continuous flow of writing. Impulses and momentary stimuli that result from the narrative flow are picked up and used as a text engine; the narrator comments on himself, his moves in the narrative flow: “And now I'll tell you something picturesque” (58) or: “Once he ate a chicken in that other little room and drank dole with it. We're only saying this because we can't think of anything relevant right now. A pen prefers to speak something inadmissible than to rest even for a moment. ”(77) At one point he explicitly formulates that“ something impulsive must come into writing ”(77), which is understood as the poetological concept of the novel can.

The extent to which the narrator keeps the reins in his hand in all of this varies. Sometimes the narrator speaks as if he had to orient himself to the objective realities of the world about which he was reporting and to do justice to them; in other places, however, he treats the robber as a literary figure that he can dispose of at his own discretion: “And afterwards the robber finally has to see a doctor for me. I can't possibly watch him any longer as he evades every examination. If I can't find a suitable match for him, he has to go back to my office. ”(88) In addition to such demonstrations of authorial freedom, there are uncertainties about what is to be told:“ (...) or did her fiancé died? We do not know and should not know and neither do we want it ”(174). In the narrative process, the interaction between the outside world, from which the narrator draws his impressions, and his own, arbitrary decisions is shown. Since the narrator also admits untruths ("Our above allusion to the delicacy with which he was taught to play the piano may have sprung from a whim and lacks probability" (29)), the references become blurred; Imponderables can lie both in the outside world and in the narrative process itself. It should be noted that the text is just a network or coordinate system, with lots of blank spaces that the author has no knowledge of. And this, too, is satirized by the narrator emphasizing that he does not know minor details: "(...) and now one evening she smiled at him like a siren, I don't know for sure what time." (130)

In the second half of the book, the narrative flow is increasingly interrupted by longer insertions, which are monologues by the characters or long, exaggerated character speech, but also an anonymous letter and the robber's public lecture in a church. These insertions, however, do not show any character-characteristic speech, but rather, like the narrator's speech, are structured in the sense of a sequence of impulses: “Do you have no memory of what the officers achieved in the war, impossible? By doing their best, they did the impossible and presumably did not eat their subordinates' bread so much as they sold the bread they were obliged to give the soldiers to dealers in order to get champagne (...) . But what am I saying in the perfect absent-mindedness? "(156)

language

General

Many linguistic registers are pulled - casual tone of voice, irony, cheeky play on words, parodies of lofty tone. Since the text is written in the form of a continuous narrative stream, these different tones merge into one another. Formal analogies, similarities, rhymes and associations are often played with: “The sexual or intellectual had woken him up” (138), “We did not fail to reprimand him. By the way, you don't seem to know the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea ”(75),“ Holdheit und Goldheiten ”(188). Thomas Bolli points out in his work “Staged Narrating” (Bern 1991) that the high linguistic cohesion of the text goes hand in hand with an incoherence in the report - transitions often take place in a playful manner on the formal-linguistic level, with daring leaps in thought and subject matter .

The text is pervaded by tautologies, such as “suitable place and place” (66), and the formation of synonyms; the robber, for example, is referred to as “our connoisseur of the area around Pontarlier” (10), “our often and much French reader” (11), “our Petrukio” (12), “the lover of chocolate sticks” (18) etc. Bulky neologistic compound words such as “der Weniginbelachtfallende” (23) and deliberate inconveniences and clumsiness in the choice of words such as sentence structure are also typical: “no attacks on women and other desirable things” (60), “So with the pistol of love for this girl with the gold eyes in his chest the soul-kind robber moved further and further away from the city ”(89).

Descriptions often seem to arise from the desire for the flow of language rather than actually referring to what is being described: "The skin was warm and cold, dry rubbed and damp at the same time." (53) Walser lets his stylistic devices collide, for example when he, as here , Belittling and exaggeration collide: “The derogatory smile [of two gentlemen at the robber] was like a fountain that made the robber's nose well wet. Fortunately, however, he did not die of the wetting. ”(24) Attributes and verbs are often related to something to which they do not seem to fit, for example, there is talk of“ carrying and lugging the title lady ”(153).

Characteristic is the inappropriateness of the language to the narrative subject - through trivialization ("The world war broke out and the pension soon began to make itself known to foreigners" (128)) as through cumbersome paraphrasing of simple objects or facts (if for example from "Wife's everyday objects" (23) the speech, a spoon is meant) or by a description of everyday actions in a lofty tone: "The robber was busy lighting a lamp and stood on a chair for this purpose" (77). Lyrical pathos is also parodied: "She was silent and got something that hovers on a female figure by Dürer, something so shy of nocturnal birds, overflying the seas in the darkness, something whimpering down in itself." (40) In the choice of "unsuitable" language one can see a certain attitude to the world expressed: an inability to choose the right social codes, which goes hand in hand with a feeling for the ridiculous of social codes per se.

Meaning of the term "robber"

The term “robber” refers to an assessment of the bourgeoisie, who judge the poor artist as a beneficiary, and at the same time expresses a self-assessment of the writer who sees himself as a robber of, for example, “landscape impressions” (32) and “inclinations” (32) . Here, too, a certain inappropriateness of the language to the expressed facts becomes noticeable.

In addition, references to the robber motif in literature and art history can be made, for example to a romanticization of the robber role. In short prose pieces, Walser sometimes explicitly refers to Schiller's “robbers”. Reference is also made to Christian August Vulpius ' novel Rinaldo Rinaldini, the robber chief .

The relationship between narrator and character

The robber sometimes appears as the narrator's alter ego: “I always have to be careful not to confuse myself with him” (87), “Where did I see that? Rather, where did the robber see it? ”(93), whereby literary evaluations of the manuscript have shown that Walser took up actual scribes and thus very consistently obeyed the demand that“ something impulsive must come into writing ”(77) . There are also important parallels to be drawn between the robber and the narrator - both are writers, both are confronted with social ostracism, both show a certain inappropriateness in their behavior: “It's a shame that, by the way, I'm never going to the second class again where I have made myself impossible by handing my straw hat to the head waiter to hang up, a sophistication that the whole hall took disapprovingly notice of ”(20 f), the narrator says, for example; About the robber, on the other hand: “Once, on the street, when a man of good looks yawned at him so nothing to you, he threw the remains of a cigarette into this open yawning hole. (...) One can call this behavior: the robber's vengeance. Fortunately she was of a cute nature. "(61 f)

In other places there is an explicit demarcation, which is partly parody: “I am me and he is him. I have money and he doesn't have any. That is the big difference. "(190) The robber is sometimes seen as a rival who steals the show from the narrator in the text:" Suddenly this stupid robber is there again and I disappear next to him. "(93)

Here, too, as in the form of the narrative process, a reflection of the relationship between author and narrative material can be seen, or a parody of it: While the author insists on the one hand not to be put in one with his characters, he wants on the other hand Let your own views and observations flow in and express your worldview in your work.

The mismatch in devotion

One motif that is often dealt with in Walser's work, most extensively in Jakob von Gunten , is that of subordination, which, however, since it happens voluntarily and is recognized as such by the subordinate and enjoyed with relish, has something socially subversive. The relationship between the robber and women is particularly characterized by such a conscious devotion: For example, “he licked off the widow's spoon, thinking he was her page” (21), and thus “has an impressive performance on the erotic Area brought about, he who was otherwise always weak or insufficient in this subject ”(22). And once "the robber imagined himself jumping and jumping in an order given by Edith and how he would collapse, and how she saw it and only smiled a little worriedly about it, and he found this to be the case Enchant ”(134 f). By consciously savoring devotion, the devote ultimately keeps the reins in his hand and can reverse the relationship at any time; this corresponds to a principle of cyclical movement in which every impulse to find balance leads to its opposite: “One must have been bad to feel a longing for the good. And you have to have lived a mess to wish to bring order to your life. So order leads to disorder, virtue leads to vice, monosyllabic speech, lies leads to sincerity, the latter leads to the former, and the world and the life of our qualities are round, not true, monsieur, and this little story forms a kind of interweaving. "(114 f)

Evidence

  1. ↑ (119)

expenditure

German :

  • Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 978-3-518-41868-0 .
  • Suhrkamp, ​​Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-518-37612-8 . (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch 1112)
  • Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1988, eds. Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang , ISBN 3-518-01972-4 . ( Library Suhrkamp Volume 972) (Corresponds to: Robert Walser: "From the Pencil Area". Volume 3, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1986)
  • Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1986, newly deciphered on behalf of the Robert Walser Archive of the Carl Seelig Foundation Zurich. Edited by Bernhard Echte u. a. 24 facsimile sheets + transcription of the facsimile, ISBN 3-518-03084-1 .

Translations :

  • Danish: Røveren. Translated by René Jean Jensen. Basilisk, København 2006, ISBN 87-91407-18-4 .
  • French: Le brigand. Translated by Jean Launay. Gallimard, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-07-040090-5 . ( Folio series )
  • Norwegian: Røveren. Translated by Sverre Dahl. Bokvennen, Oslo 2004, ISBN 82-7488-136-2 . (Series modern tider )
  • Portuguese: O salteador. Translated by Leopoldina Almeida. Relógio d'Agua, Lisboa 2003, ISBN 972-708-716-7 .
  • Russian: Razbojnik. Translated by Anna Glazova. Mitin Žurnal, Tverʹ 2005, ISBN 5-98144-037-6 .
  • Slovenian: Ropar. Translated by Slavo Šerc. Nova Revija, Ljubljana 2009, ISBN 978-961-6580-56-4 .

literature

  • Jochen Greven: Robert Walser. Figure on the edge, in the changing light. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1992, ISBN 3-596-11378-4 .
  • Thomas Bolli: Staged storytelling - reflections on Robert Walser's 'Robber' novel. Francke, Bern 1991, ISBN 3-317-01761-9 (dissertation University of Basel 1989).
  • Thomas Bürgi-Michaud: Robert Walser's "effort overloaded feat". A structural analysis of the "robber" novel. Lang, Bern 1996, ISBN 3-906756-43-2 (dissertation University of Basel 1996).
  • Melissa de Bruyker: The resonant silence: the rhetoric of the narrated world in Kafka's Der Verschollene, Schnitzler's Therese and Walser's robber novel, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8260-3689-7 (Dissertation University of Gent 2006, 377 Pages).
  • Jens Hobus: "Robber" novel (written 1925) . In: Lucas Marco Gisi (ed.): Robert Walser manual. Life - work - effect , JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02418-3 , pp. 180-189.