The walk (Walser)

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Robert Walser (late 1890s)

The walk is a story by Robert Walser . It was published in 1917 by Huber Verlag Frauenfeld and Leipzig.

background

The three novels Geschwister Tanner (1907), Der Gehülfe (1908) and Jakob von Gunten (1909) were written during the Berlin years , but Robert Walser did not succeed in establishing himself in the literary circles of Berlin. He wasn't a novelist. The format of the novel, an action-oriented concluding work, always hated him. Walser returned to Switzerland as a failed writer and devoted himself to shorter prose pieces.

In August 1916, Walser agreed to provide a previously unpublished prose text for the anthology Schweizerische Erz Teller; at the request of the Huber & Co. publishing house in Frauenfeld, it should be 80 pages long. Robert Walser wrote the text in an attic room in the Hotel Blaues Kreuz in his native Biel. At the beginning of September he submitted the text; In 1917 the story “The Walk” was published in an edition of 3000 copies.

Already at the end of 1917 / beginning of 1918 Walser subjected the text to sentence by sentence revision in order to include it in the anthology Seeland , which was then published by Rascher in 1920. "This second version is a bit shorter, as a result of only linguistic and stylistic tightening," wrote Walser expert Jochen Greven .

shape

Walser shows himself in The Walk as "an associative narrator who apparently arbitrarily describes his immediate world." Like his other stories, it is not organized through the action of the protagonist, but through the writing and narrative process itself. The narrator moves "that Incidental to the center of his writing ”; and he expresses the important issues “in a kind of casual manner”.

content

"" I inform you that one fine morning, I don't remember exactly what time, because I wanted to go for a walk, I put my hat on, left the writing room or the ghost room, the stairs ran downstairs to hurry into the street. ""

The hero in Robert Walser's story “The Walk” sets out like a descendant of Eichendorff's good- for-nothing; a writer in financially unsound circumstances, as one soon learns, for the walk of the walk leads into the forest, but also to the bank and the municipal treasury. In the forest he meets the eerie “giant” Tomzack, and in the silence of the tall fir trees an “unspeakable sense of the world” soon floods him, and his thoughts wander to ultimate things.

The writer is known as a walker, and is considered to be a well-heeled privateer or day thief who does not have to do bread and butter like other people, but is constantly allowed to indulge in idleness. So he is considered a person who does not seem to have any obligations and therefore has to be wealthy. In fact, this Homme des lettres only has a "very questionable fortune"; On the contrary, he is “covered with all kinds of poverty”, he has nothing to pay taxes and is dependent on alms. Now there are some kind and friendly patrons around him who invite him to dinner here and there. "Frau Aebi received me most graciously," says the text, "but the friendly lady has the quality of frightening the writer by starting to stuff him like a Christmas goose," wrote Viktor Schlawenz. “Similar to the witch in a fairy tale, she forces him to eat more and more. She makes the poor poet believe that she wants to fatten him up and bring about his death. No wonder that your invitation turns into a real nightmare. "

reception

Eduard Korrodi wrote in a collective review: “Robert Walser gave this collection a cheerful little masterpiece. The apology of the busy idler that common people call poets. The glory of a free stroll on a bright, bright workday is praised here in a provocatively beautiful way. "

"In these books, Walser deals with the form and content of his narrative in a new way." ( Critical Robert Walser edition )

“The walk is a vivid reminder of the theme of the path of life and invites you to examine walking with all its aspects for spiritual traces. But what is spirituality? Because Robert Walser lacks explicit references to religious or even Christian motifs, the searcher for traces is forced to define spirituality in terms of Robert Walser's work: In summary, it can be said that spiritual traces appear where a person is thinking about himself Being inserted into immanent, cosmic or transcendent contexts asks: Who am I? What is the meaning of my existence? The search for clues leads to the realization that both are much closer together than is often perceived. "(Markus Walser)

literature

expenditure

Audio book

Secondary literature

  • Walter Oberer: Robert Walser. The walk. In: Schweizer Rundschau . Monthly for intellectual life and culture. Editor: Siegfried Streicher. Benzinger, Einsiedeln 1944
  • Nagi Naguib: Studies on the novels of Robert Walser. Inaugural dissertation. Fink Verlag, Munich 1969.
  • Guido Stefani: The walker. Research on Robert Walser. Artemis, Zurich 1985.
  • Kordula Marisa Hildebrandt: The narrative model of the walk in Robert Walser's “The Walk”. 2008.
  • Markus Walser: Walking connects heaven and earth: A search for traces in Robert Walser's “The Walk”. AV Akademikerverlag, 2013. ISBN 978-3-639-46620-1
  • Claudia Albes: The walk as a narrative model. Studies on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adalbert Stifter, Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard. Francke Verlag, 1999. ISBN 978-3-7720-2742-0
  • Annie Pfeifer and Reto Sorg (eds.): "I have to go for a walk" - Robert Walser and the culture of walking. Wilhelm Fink, 2019, ISBN 978-3-7705-6377-7
  • Peter Utz: Dance on the Edges: Robert Walser's “Jetztzeitstil”. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018. ISBN 978-3-518-24139-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Afterword by the editor Jochen Greven . In: All works in twenty volumes: Fifth volume: The walk, prose pieces and small prose . Suhrkamp, ​​Zurich / Frankfurt am Main 1985.
  2. ↑ a b Aimlessness as a principle in Cicero
  3. ↑ Holger Noltze: Untold feeling for the world - 50 years ago the writer Robert Walser died. Deutschlandfunk Kultur, December 25, 2006, accessed on October 12, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Viktor Schlawenz: I would be dead without a walk Fritz Lichtenhahn reads Robert Walser. Literaturkritik.de, December 1, 2000, accessed October 13, 2019 .
  5. ^ Critical Robert Walser Edition (KWA): Prose Pieces / New Prose / The Walk . Stroemfeld Verlag, 2016. ISBN 978-3-86600-249-4
  6. ↑ Markus Walser: Walking connects heaven and earth: A search for traces in Robert Walser's “The Walk” . AV Akademikerverlag, 2013
  7. ^ "The Walk" by Robert Walser on SRF