Berlin Stories

by Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky (Introduction), Jochen Greven (Editor)

A New York Review Books Original

In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Germany, German Literature, 20th Century, Classics, Literature

153 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Robert Walser, a German-Swiss prose writer and novelist, enjoyed high repute among a select group of authors and critics in Berlin early in his career, only to become nearly forgotten by the time he committed himself to the Waldau mental clinic in Bern in January 1929. Since his death in 1956, however, Walser has been recognized as German Switzerland’s leading author of the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps Switzerland’s single significant modernist. In his homeland he has served as an emboldening exemplar and a national classic during the unparalleled expansion of German-Swiss literature of the last two generations.

Walser’s writing is characterized by its linguistic sophistication and animation. His work exhibits several sets of tensions or contrasts: between a classic modernist devotion to art and a ceaseless questioning of the moral legitimacy and practical utility of art; between a spirited exuberance in style and texture and recurrent reflective melancholy; between the disparate claims of nature and culture; and between democratic respect for divergence in individuals and elitist reaction to the values of the mass culture and standardization of the industrial age.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berlin Stories are like variegated impressionistic croquis drawings made on the fly…
The collection consists of four lacy cycles:
The City Streets is a set of very dynamic sketches…

Statues beckon you from gardens and parks; still you keep on walking, giving everything a passing glance: things in motion and things fixed in place, hackney cabs indolently lumbering along, the electric tram just now starting its run, from whose windows human eyes regard you, a constable’s idiotic helmet, a person with tattered shoes and trousers, a person of no doubt erstwhile high standing who is sweeping the street in a top hat and fur coat; you glance at everything, just as you yourself are a fleeting target for all these other eyes. That is what is so miraculous about a city: that each person’s bearing and conduct vanishes among all these thousand types, that everything is observed in passing, judgments made in an instant, and forgetting a matter of course.

The Theater is almost dreamlike artful meditations…

In this dream, everything is reduced in scale but also becomes more fearsome; faces generally bear unsettlingly fixed expressions: terribly sweet when the face is sweet and benevolent, and terribly repulsive when it’s a horror- and fear-inspiring one. In dreams we experience the ideal dramatic foreshortening. A dream’s voices possess a bewitching pliancy, its language is eloquent and at the same time well-considered; its images show us the magic of the enchanting and unforgettable because they are hyperreal, simultaneously genuine and unnatural. The hues of these images are at once sharp and soft, they cut into the eye with their sharpness like whetted knives slicing into an apple, and then are gone the next moment, so that you often – even while still in the midst of your dream – feel sorry to see certain things vanish so swiftly.

Berlin Life comprises brief scenes of the everyday existence…

Whatever is useless yet mysteriously beautiful – that is romantic. I love to dream about such things, and, as I see it, dreaming about them is enough. Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.

Looking Back is a short promenade down memory lane where even the most sad recollections sound nostalgic.
And even in the shortest of his stories Robert Walser is original, subtly observing and full of effervescent irony.
Youth is always in the agreeable harmony with the noise and tumult of big cities.

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author grew up German in Switzerland and moved to Berlin in his youth. His older brother, a famous stage designer for theaters, introduced him to high society and artists. None of these stories touch on those living on the other side of the tracks.



The main theme is the vibrancy of Berlin roughly from 1910-1920. The author loved his city and he considered it the cultural capital of the world. The tone of his upbeat essays show that love of the city as do quite a few other works I’ve read paying homage to other cities: many of Patrick Modiano’s stories set in Paris; E. M. Forster’s Howards End on London; Buenos Aires in Tomas Martinez’s The Tango Singer, and Barcelona in Eduardo Mendoza’s City of Marvels.

The stories are more essays than short stories. Of the 40 or so stories, really only a half dozen might be thought of as short stories with any kind of plot. They read as if they were to be published in newspapers; and many were “feuilletons” I gather – literary essays offered as supplements to news in big city papers.



So what are the stories about? Most are about the simple pleasures of the city: the market, the delightful chaos of the train station, the thrill of riding the electric tram, Sunday in the park, having a sandwich and beer at stand-up café, watching a building on fire. Several are about the theater and ballet and the performance of particular actors, actresses and dancers of the time.

Here’s a sample of his writing style from “The Park”:

“I go in, dry, fallen leaves fly and swirl and sweep and tumble toward me. This is exceptionally amusing and at the same time contemplative; the lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad. Park air welcomes me; the many thousand green leaves of the lofty trees are lips that wish me good morning: So you’re up already too? Indeed, yes, I’m surprised myself. A park like this resembles a large, silent, Isolated room. In fact it’s always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it’s always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child. Sundays have something parental and childish about them.”

A few essays qualify almost as short stories. And several of these have the same theme: an elderly wealthy woman (apparently one of his real-life landladies) who is stingy, friendless, childless, despised by her relatives, and goes around dressed in rags. Another, “The Little Berliner,” is written in the first person about a young girl who lives in Berlin with her father and occasionally goes to Venice to visit her mother.



A couple of stories touch on the author’s personal life (1878-1956). He became a well-known writer in his time (Wiki says his work was admired by, and an influence on, Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig and others. His personal outlook on life, like his stories, is amazingly upbeat and full of wonderment at life. Yet, despite his fame, he lived his entire life on the edge of poverty, relying at times on support from his brother. And despite his upbeat outlook on life he ended up in a mental asylum.

I enjoyed the stories and all the local color of Berlin at the start of the twentieth century.

Top painting: "Nach Natur," a watercolor of Robert Walser as Karl Moor, a character in Walser’s favorite play, The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller. The watercolor is by Robert's brother Karl Walser. From 50watts.com
Berlin in 1900 from rijksmuseum.nl
The author from dw.com

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Logarithms and "friend" suggestions will never totally replace the anxious and arbitrary means by which I travel from book to book. Yesterday I was sort of between books. A friend of mine called and asked if I could take him to doctor's residence. Sure, I quipped and ignoring my haggard state of toilette - I'd been tooling around in the yard -- I grabbed Berlin Stories from atop a stack and headed out the door. There are many stacks in our house. My wife would add there are TOO many stacks. I hadn't thought of this particular tome at all lately.

Before then I was prepared to dislike Berlin Stories. Despite many efforts I still don't "like" Bruno Schulz. I was ready for a similar encounter here. My, was I ever mistaken. Berlin Stories is a series of sketches of the metropolis, many reflect a gaping wide-eyed perspective. This appears apt as the most modern city in the world engulfs the reader. The trams and the stand-up restaurants are viewed as marvels. The regal nature of the posh neighborhoods doesn't alienate the visiting stroller, it encourages. The anxiety of penury is quickly muffled by these dazzling displays. It is interesting to contrast these views of Berlin with Alfred Doblin's.

I will likely pursue the other Walser works now.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

At this point Robert Walser and I are like an old married couple, or, to be more accurate, I am his widow, as of course he is dead, though I remain faithful because in a sense he is still alive in his writing, and anyway his writing is really all I know of him, so perhaps we are still married, but over the years over-familiarity has set in, and though it’s not the type that breeds contempt it is the type that breeds a kind of blindness to the other’s virtues and even faults as we potter about independently but in close proximity. I wouldn’t know a bad Walser story if I read it, just as I’d be hard pressed to recognize a superior one, because, you see, I have no desire to remain a detached objective reader when it comes to him, or to engage in what G. B. Edwards deemed “helicopter thinking”, i.e. viewing/judging from a lofty height free from emotional involvement, because, you see, I cannot abandon my emotional history with Robert Walser when I read Robert Walser, and I have no desire to, for his works are not works of literature to me but rather are the living body of my dead husband. But even so there are certain works of his that stand out in my memory – particularly the later mind-turning-on-a-dime-every-sentence stories and especially the novel The Robber - just as there are certain works that are so deeply embedded in my memory that I can no longer even recall them but that do add breadth and substance to our relationship as it were anonymously. And Walser loved his anonymity. He even wanted to disappear from himself! which in my mind is a factor that played into his being institutionalized… But let’s not dwell on that sad event, for this collection is culled almost entirely from his early effervescent days of intoxication as a young writer mingling with the arts set and enjoying his first successes, when he greeted all and sundry with wide eyed excitement and cut a (probably) threadbare but dashing feuilletonistic flaneur figure through the streets and parks and theaters of Berlin. Sprightly youthful days! but as his widow I can see the storm clouds between the sunbeamy lines, and I like, even need, dark and sinister storm clouds! so much so that I probably see them when they’re not even there! Did I add storm clouds to Walser’s urban pastorals to increase my enjoyment? Probably, but after twenty years of imbibing Walser’s sparkly soda notes, and with the weight of middle-age weighing on me more and more, I need to add demonic spirits to my soft drinks; which is not to say that as my middle age wanes into my twilight years, and youthfulness once again invigorates my newly virgined senescent mind with its simple excitements that these early works will work their latent magic on me. But until then… this collection will remain anonymously embedded in the infrastructure of my Robert Walser widowhood, giving it substance but not attracting my attention overmuch.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several months ago I read Fairy Tales: Three Dramolettes, because I couldn’t find a library copy of Jakob von Gunten. I still haven’t read the latter, but I think Berlin Stories might be a better entry point for a Walser novice anyway.

The introduction states: While we tend to call these texts “stories,” Walser himself described them as “prose pieces”; this hybrid of story and essay remained his genre of choice for most of his writing career. I didn’t think of them as stories but as lively sketches. Only one seems incomplete and I wonder at its inclusion, especially coming after the piece before, both being about the lonely, miserly woman who owns the building Walser lives in. All the others are slices-of-life, rendered with immediacy and vibrancy.

Starting with the first piece “Good Morning, Giantess!,” I imagined Walser walking through Berlin as a giant himself, describing all he sees from above, below, and beyond. The pieces start with buoyant optimism and end with more sober reflections, including moments that, if read between the lines, point to how difficult some of the earlier times had to have been for the writer. Early on we read, about a crowd viewing a fire, All at once the world appears changed, expanded, thicker, and more tangible and we can apply that sentence to the way he sees everything. Near the end there’s a turn in his outlook: It seemed to me advisable to bite into insight, which is well known to have a bitter taste.

Another good entry point for Walser is this wonderful conversation between Eileen Myles and Walser's translator/biographer Susan Bernofsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-aR... . I listened to it live before I read this book, but I think it’ll be insightful either before or after you read Walser.

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The feuilletons are interesting. Most were written during Walser's late twenties and early thirties in Berlin. If they pale they do so because of a relentless Berlin boosterism. In fairness, one must say that this is what Berlin's newspapers editors buying and the always impecunious Walser found himself able to supply. Even "The Little Berliner" suffers from this obsession, but that story, written in the voice of a twelve-year-old girl, is more assured and tonally solid and seems to transcend the feuilleton formula. The story is so good in fact that it put me in mind of Walser's four fine novels, and his wonderful Selected Stories, the volume introduced by Susan Sontag. Otherwise the book is a bit of historical and biographical piece work. Essential for the Walser completist, but not the place to start reading him.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Berlin never rests, and this is glorious.” p62

I just love exploring the psyche of a city in a book. Berlin Stories is like looking into a portal that transports me back more than 100 years to a pre WW1 Berlin, through the eyes of a seemingly happy go lucky man who absolutely is enraptured by this bourgeoning city. It’s a kaleidoscope of colour and impression and I am taken on a journey through parks, streets, beer halls, markets, the theatre, railway, boarding houses amongst others, privy to the most minute of detail, the most exquisite of facets that due to their ordinariness might otherwise be overlooked.

The reader feels the sense of excitement and wonder as Walser walks down Friedrichstraße to the point that I might as well be walking beside him. A simple park space is transformed into a vivid memory of childhood and a beer hall is a place to observe with pleasure how people in Berlin eat. The railway is depicted as the most amazing amusement that costs nothing at all to watch people arriving and leaving. Such beautiful and eclectic detail and I found myself savouring every morsel. Walser clearly has a gift for the descriptive and his powers of observation are evident in the beautiful meandering way he captures each moment….. such as…

“Up above is a narrow strip of sky, and the smooth, dark ground below looks as if it’s been polished by human destinies. The buildings, to either side rise, boldly, daintily, and fantastically into architectural heights. The air quivers, and startles with worldly life. All the way up to the rooftops, and even above, advertisements, float and hang. The large lettering is quite conspicuous. And always people are walking here.” Friedrichstraße

I’ve not read anything by Robert Walser before so this was an enlightening first experience. These stories are not really stories, they are, as Walser called them, prose pieces, or essays, or articles. Whatever they are they are beautiful pieces to pause over and devour each precious detail.

5 big Berlin stars from me.

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are pleasant stories that took place a hundred years ago when Robert Walser wrote about life in Berlin (1905-13), an invigorating and heady city compared to provincial Switzerland. Yet it is to the latter that he eagerly returns--to its sounds and sights. When Walser first comes to the big city he is 25 or 27 years old, and his brother Karl is a successful stage set designer there. The author's enthusiasm is fun to read like a re-experiencing of one's own naïveté. Before World War 1 he returns to his familiar, neutral Swiss homeland but continues to write more stories from that period of discovery. The Introduction by Susan Bernofsky calls the set a "four-part symphony" and points out Berlin at this time as a "melting pot" in which pass by in the urban outdoors people of every kind. This universality is evident in part one "The City Streets" in which Walser depicts a park, market, street, public garden, and tram. Part two introduces the colorful, terrifying, dream-like "The Theater" before 1910 in which artists from ballerinas to actors, directors, and other performers have viable occupations. In the part "Berlin Life", Walser depicts the "striving" for success and "greatness", the social classes, and some urban incidents such as a blazing fire. Finally, the part "Looking Back" are stories written after he'd left Germany for his Swiss homeland. In those, he looks into human nature and relationships. Throughout "Berlin Stories", Walser may critique Berlin society but may nonetheless consider his time there as one of the best experiences of his lifetime.

[Julian Worker · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 38 stories in this 137-page book were chosen by the author's German editor Jochen Greven, mostly from the 120 pieces Walser wrote during his Berlin years. These stories take Berlin as their subject matter and are divided into four sections: The City Streets, The Theatre, Berlin Life, and Looking Back.

Walser writes about the humbler side of the city of Berlin, about his own experiences in the well known areas of the city rather than the sights of those areas, and he alludes to the difficulties he experienced during the end of his time in Berlin. The final stories describe some of the people he met during his later years in the city when he was financially insecure.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even if you don't know Berlin (yet), you will certainly love this book.

4* Berlin Stories
4* A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories
TR Jakob von Gunten

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read these pre-GR.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, Walser. I'm woefully behind in reviews, and yet more people need to read you; at the same time, I'm not sure that any words can adequately convey the experience of reading your prose.

This collection of stories and critical essays compiles the work that Walser produced during his time in Berlin. One can feel the allure of the city, the possibilities and dreams that Walser felt in every fiber of the city—from the parks and gardens, to the people congregating on the streets, from the theatre to the literary life—and yet one can also sense an underlying melancholy, a growing sense of malaise as the pieces progress chronologically, not seeing Walser fulfill his goals, forced to return to Switzerland just on the brink of a world war.

In her introduction to Microscripts, Susan Bernofsky notes that we can't know for sure when Walser began writing in microscript form. Many of these pieces here in Berlin Stories read like some of his microscript stories, but these are more like vignettes than stories: they run together to create a full portrait of Walser's Berlin, its inhabitants, its pace of life, and his own precarious position in the city as both an outsider and an artist.

The simplicity of Walser's writing is balanced equally by his deft approach to a humanistic view of society and our individual responsibilities to others: his moral approach to life—even something as simple as traipsing through a park and chancing upon a woman reading or a lone bird—suggest that art is as much an every day sentimentality as it is setting thoughts to paper.

This collection ends with Walser examining his own critical output, looking back to his previous work and criticism with a sense of self-exile but also a sense of having accomplished what he set out to do. Hermann Hesse said of Walser: "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place." And so it would.

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will leave the reviewing to readers better suited to deconstruct Walser than I am. I simply like the fellow. I believe he was extremely clever and interesting. I enjoy reading all of his work, but especially the four novels that have survived. There is something so childlike and simple about his work, but still sophisticated and never boring though he revisits his subjects constantly. That is pure talent.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Walser's Berlin Stories surprised me: I never thought I would like these mostly short pieces that, somehow, seem to me to be so slight. And yet, as the book went on, the pieces became more profound -- especially as he looked back on his Berlin experiences.

Walser was actually Swiss. He went to Berlin with his brother to make his fortune. His brother Karl succeeded, working as a set designer for Max Reinhardt, but Robert had a tougher time of it. Who knows, though, in the end it was Robert who set his mark on the literature of the 20th century. Franz Kafka was one of his fans, and one can see the world of Walser curiously metamorphosed in Kafka's own stories.

The end of Walser's life was not happy: He spent many years in mental hospitals. Even as early as 1917, in "A Homecoming in the Snow," he criticizes his own career for fecklessness:

Instead of contenting myself with the lucrative, I ran after unattainable goals, which wasted a great deal of time as well as good courage. Exertions carried out in vain rendered me effectively ill. I destroyed much that I had created with great effort. The more earnestly I longed and strived to put myself on a firm footing, the more I saw myself teetering on the brink.

Walser lasted until 1956 when, on a solo walk in the snow near his asylum, he had a heart attack.

In the end, he succeeded more than he ever realized.

[Shankar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big one for Germany - and it’s wonderful history. I have yet visit though I have spent a day at Düsseldorf airport on account of an international flight being re routed.

So anything that has to do with Germany is a soft corner for me. With this bias came my purchase of this rather expensive NYRB classic in a Bangalore bookstore.

This book is a compilation of various “experiences” by the author with inclusions of minute details of them. It’s redeeming features are that each story is short and the book itself is under 150 pages. It has four sections and each touching on various parts of Berlin life. Almost like a tourist wandering through the city randomly gathering his thoughts words and experiences cobbled together in a journal.

It is an effort to finish it though the book is short. I did get to understand some things about Germans.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to say that I found Walser a delight to read. In fact, I would say he reminded me of Pessoa. I will definitely be reading more of Walser's oeuvre in the future!

[Rick Slane · Rating 1 out of 5]

These are not short-stories. Walser called them prose pieces. They are like essays or newspaper articles.

[Declan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays begins in beguiling and exuberant fashion with wonderfully enthusiastic, wide-eyed descriptions of rambles around Berlin; time spent in idle observation of the inhabitants of the city as they drink in a bar, or travel on a tram, or walk around a park. He notices the rich and poor, the elegant and the delicate, the raucous and the roguish. Walser's spirit of wonder and delight continues through his writings on the theatre and ballet (there's a "ravishing" piece about Anna Pavlova), but in the final third of the book the sun begins to go down, and the shadows begin to lengthen. His writing becomes a little caustic, more knowing and he admits to his own feelings of melancholia.

In a fictional story, "The Little Berliner", he skewers the kind of self-satisfied arrogance that seems, almost always, to accompany great wealth. The narrator is the daughter of such a man, who can see no wrong in her father's behavior and by describing his many virtues, informs us of just what an odious person he is: "Father boxed my ears today, in a most fond and fatherly manner, of course", the story begins. Of particular interest are two pieces about the women he meets when he rents an apartment, "Frau Wilke" and "Frau Scheer". The former is the owner of the house when first he lives in the decrepit room where, sometimes, overcome by depression, he stays in bed all day. Not long after he takes up residence there, Frau Wilke's health deteriorates and she dies. The new owner is Frau Scheer, an immensely rich woman who has devoted her life to amassing more money, and avoiding both society and pleasure. Despite his own state of poverty, he in no way resents this woman or her pointless wealth - indeed he finds her circumstances both pitiful and fascinating - befriends her and becomes her secretary (an experience that must have been useful for writing his excellent novel "The Assistant").

The collection ends with his return, in the snow, to Switzerland, leaving me curious about one thing in particular: in all his time in Berlin, did he never realise that the country was positioning itself to enter war? Not once is this alluded to.

[reem · Rating 5 out of 5]

"At three or four in the morning he would come home, and I would still be sitting there, enchanted by all the thoughts, all the lovely images wafting through my head; it was as if I no longer required sleep, as if thinking, writing, and waking were my lovely, restorative sleep, as if writing for hours and hours at my desk comprised my world, my pleasure, relaxation and peace."

This is the best thing I've read in the last 5 years, excluding one obsessive Virginia Woolf phase. Robert Walser has grown on me, like unwatered, uncared for, callous and defiant Prosopis cineraria. I don’t have to suffer a head injury to understand his humour, his brilliant manner in a world I would never have imagined alone, and it is liberating. He’s not for the weak, for he does write about the theatre, but for making me lick my lips and lose my breath with his unwilting style, I am willing to forgo all that. It’s no wonder that he was the inspiration for two prominent writers that even the most amateurish snob has heard of - Kafka and Hesse, who thanks to Walser now sit comfortably on many a shelf, in hammer-and-sickle-decorated, neon-illuminated rooms. But who knows of Robert, dear Robert, with his humorous essays and panic attacks, his Berlin before Berlin was taken by others? You owe it to yourself and the literary world you are too eager to boast about in your pathetic social media timeline, truly, to find him and make him a home in your home. Otherwise I would feel like I’ve failed you in this upbeat yet seriously lacking book review. If you’ve ever yearned for a place other than your current dwelling and if you’ve ever felt the call of the metropolis and somehow failed to muster up the courage to experience either then this book is for you. I’m certain it’ll prove a fulfilling companion.

[Gabe Steller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wry guide to city life meant for aliens who’ve never ever been to a city before?

Or I guess regular ppl cuz it’s 1907 and many of the features of cities we take for granted ARE new. Enjoyed his breathless description of how fun it is to ride a tram.
Surprisingly light and conversational in tone that frequently made me forget I was reading something from the 1900’s until he would say some obvious shit like “boy are ppl in the city in a hurry!”

[Jay Sandover · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short but diverse. Full of generosity.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading these short sketches of people and places in Berlin in the first decade of the 20th century makes the reader realize what a vibrant city it was. Nothing is too small or insignificant to escape Walser’s attention. He writes, “An artist here has no choice but to pay attention. Elsewhere he is permitted to sink into willful ignorance. Here this is not allowed. Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each day brings with it a new attack on complacency. There is an incessant blurring together of various things and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding.”

W. G. Sebald called Walser a “clairvoyant of the small.” Small things are what he notices and being an outsider from Switzerland he has a sharp eye for all kinds of random details that flit by and would be instantly forgotten had he not noticed and recorded them. He is a walker, through city parks, through commercial areas with interesting architecture, through open air markets, taverns with their sausages and beer, the Sunday Tiergarten, the electric trams, anything and everything that his eye and imagination happen to light on.

He adds commentary to his descriptions. For example in writing about the trams, he observes that they are places where anyone can mingle together, from the innocent schoolboy returning home, to the whore or the criminal who is hatching plans. None notice the presence of others, but everyone “wishes to be seemly and correct, everything can and will preserve itself. The streets resemble one another just as human destinies do, and yet every street has it own character, and you can never compare one destiny to another.” It’s this sense of human life in all of its varieties that comes across in these stories.

Walser is aware of the darker side of the city. Not so much the poor, especially if they are in good health, as they can work hard and often succeed, but the ones who should be pitied are the sick, people in poor health. They are the disenfranchised citizens of Berlin. Of them he writes, “At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, the suffering, their weakness, and their death.” Walser admits here that he is the outsider who can only bear witness to what he sees and is powerless to change any of it.

The last two selections of the book are longest and come closest to being fictional. Both involve the narrator’s friendship with old women who show him great kindness. “Old decrepitude, how enchanting you are!” he exclaims, unable even in witnessing misery, to be anything other than a writer, an artist. In the first story, he takes a room in a boardinghouse, telling the landlady that he is a poet. But if that’s what he is, he’s a frustrated and depressed one, spending entire days without getting out of bed, his thoughts “jumbled and chaotic.” A neighbor is kind to him, but he comes to realize that she is worse off than he is, starving to death, and one day she is taken to the hospital where she dies. He goes into her miserable room, looks at her pitiable clothes and meager possessions, realizing that “all things past, all things vanishing away, were closer to me than ever. I stood there motionless, not understanding anything anymore.”

But then he becomes calm and sees once again that there is beauty in this abject scene as much as anywhere. He leaves the room and goes out into the world. Sympathy with another human being, unlikely as it seems, has redeemed him. It’s this same “sympathy” that is found throughout all the “stories” but is here exhibited in a compressed form.

The final story is a counterpoint to this one and to the entire book for that matter. The narrator again befriends an old woman but she is a miser, intent only on her hoarded weath. “She had no interest in all the pleasures, splendors, and beauties of the world.” She is very unhappy and out of pity he helps her, even though when she dies he gains nothing of her wealth which goes to her greedy heirs. Again, there is empathy and compassion for a wretched fellow human being, possessing wealth, yes, but that contributes nothing to alleviating misery.

There is a progression throughout the book, and I think Walser succeeds in getting the reader to emotionally enter into Berlin in the first decade of the 20th century. The lives and habits of its inhabitants are long gone, but any of us would be fortunate, a hundred years later at the beginning of the 21st century, to have such a chronicler observing and commenting on our culture.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating very short stories of walser's time in berlin 1905 to um not sure, 1920 maybe? at only one-three pages most are very short, some more vignettes, some fully formed stories, but almost of have the bite of mark twain disdain, the beauty of chekov, the horror of will self. love him love these.
i think these are some of the stories that were found in his affects and were thought to just be indecipherable gibberish of a madman, but one dude stuck with it and discovered that the miniscule little tiny scribblings were actually hundreds and hundreds of stories. yeah dude!

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first heard about this book on the "Better Than Food" YouTube channel, and the host made it sound like something right up my alley so I decided to give it a try. While not every story works, the ones that do make this something worth seeking out if you're into Kafka or German literature, especially pre-First World War.

"Berlin Stories" is an original publication by the New York Review of Books, collecting some of Robert Walser's short, essay-like stories about his time in Imperial Germany's capital city from the period 1905 to roughly 1912, with some latter pieces making up the final section. Walser, a Swiss national, came to the capital in the early part of the twentieth century seeking to make his name as a literary titan, and his stories (many of them interconnected, with others seemingly narrated by the same unnamed protagonist and perhaps autobiographical) are short, to the point, and focused on the mundane yet beautiful everyday lives of city dwellers. The fact that Germany was only just beginning to start on its path as the epicenter for so much pain, suffering, and evil is hard to ignore when reading these pieces, but Walser (who did live long enough to see Europe reckon with the horrors of the Holocaust) can't possibly write about such events because his stories are set during the much more peaceful time of pre-1914 Europe, when Germany was a leading economic power.

Captured here in amber are reflections on the common people who figured in Berlin's everyday life, the poor and wealthy alike (even the Kaiser's family makes an appearance, albeit from a distance). Walser does write longer stories, but the real bread and butter are the shorter pieces, and one gets so used to the short tales that those which take up more than a page or two feel like rude interruptions of the flowing narrative. But two of the longer pieces, dealing with "Frau Wilke" and "Frau Scheer" respectively, are very good.

I really enjoyed this book, once I got into it. I think anyone who loves to read German literature from the period around the First World War (and this includes Germanic writers like Kafka, Hasak, and others) will enjoy this book. But even if you're not into German literature, this is a nice, short collection of tales focused on a German city but which could be about any city in the world circa 1905. Walser sees the beauty in the everyday and commonplace, an almost Zen-like appreciation of the small moments in life. You don't need to speak German to understand that.

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 5 out of 5]

More Walser is always welcome and more is coming but NYRB has the distinction of publishing some of his greatest short pieces so far. Alongside "Selected Stories" this reaches the same heights of brilliance. There's been much written about Walser by some great critics and that's not always to the benefit of the reader. Benjamin's claim that Walser has no style has been openly debated with good reason. Sebald's claim that Walser is the clairvoyant of the small is only half true to me. Sure Walser spends much time observing the minutia of life - extracting meaning from the simplest experiences but his focus is often on the larger concerns of a life well-led. I think sometimes there is a tendency to think of Walser as an unscholarly outsider but this group of stories should undo some of those notions. There is an illuminated sense of compassion and sensitivity in Walser that seems almost Buddhist at times. Like Hamsun's Pan - Walser chooses his own path and is rarely comfortable when his social interactions are more complex than that of the observant flaneur or the familial intimate. Walser is a great thinker who produced some of the most compelling writing I know - and while his observational skill might be somewhat secondary to his introspective awareness his writing really takes flight when he combines these elements into an almost religious reverence. Death, love and identification are frequent themes that in Walser's hands turn into fascinating reflections that are unique and very important. Readers that know his biography should be astounded at the closing "story" beautiful executed and intelligently edited as the last words of this edition of Walser - I don't want to spoil it - but the clairvoyant claims are more than justified by these closing words.

Walser writes of food, nature and the stages of life with the detail of a watchmaker, the love of a father and the frustration of creator struggling to better understand his progeny.

There is much to be learned from Walser: walk a lot, judgmental bitterness and pride are horrible afflictions, and you're probably going to feel the best when you can tune your senses to a heightened awareness that reveals the beautiful details of life.

Walser, while not simple, is one of the easiest and most rewarding writers I know. His wisdom is amazing, his prose is simple yet elegant and his insight illuminates some of the most endearing vistas I know.

[Ellie Midwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Berlin Stories” is a wonderfully vivid, poetic collection of short stories dedicated to a truly fascinating city, in which the author tried his luck as a writer and artist. It’s a pre-Great-War Berlin, not quite the decadent Weimar version of it, but the spirit of freedom and cosmopolitanism is evident on every page. Through his descriptive prose, the author allows the reader into a world of starving artists and influent industrialists, the grandest theaters and the seediest dives; ordinary streets and extraordinary people roaming them. Mr. Walser is hardly ever a participant; mostly, he’s an observer only, but his observations are so remarkable, you’ll actually feel as if you’re truly there, seeing it all through your own eyes. My only trouble with this book was that it ended much too soon. Perhaps, I felt this way because I couldn’t get enough of it, but I guess that’s how all the best books make one feel.

[Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loving how Walser loved life and loved Berlin, "The main thing is: I mean to enjoy my morsel of life as well and as long as I can." A collection of his "prose pieces" published in newspapers and magazines in the early 1900/10s, which read like vignettes, observations, rarely more than two or three pages each, capturing a time period and place in a wonderful way

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Berlin in the early 1900's. This time period is one of my favorites and it was enjoyable visiting a new city thru the eyes of an entertaining and thoughtful narrator

[B. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hit and miss—mostly miss—and exacerbated by an unrelenting obsession with women. Nonetheless, still well written and a few exemplary moments of Walser’s biophilic joie de vivre, but too inconsequential, bourgeois and square for the most part.

[Nicholas During · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first Walser book I've read and I really enjoyed it. Really a collection of feuilletons rather than short stories, what makes them so great is Walser's wonderful voice. Naive, young, optimistic, excited, adventurous, and tolerant, we see the lively Berlin of 1905 - 1912 or so in the eyes of a youthful flaneur who seems beauty in the small details of the electric trams, to the populations of the famed cabarets and theaters. And the writing is just as lively as the content. There is satire here as well, pretentious artists get their just desserts, snobs are exposed and ridiculed, but really the best part of the book are the descriptions of daily life by one who loves them so much, and whose observations are unique while at the same time universal to all. There is more to it than that, with some pretty serious metaphors about what it is to be artists, how art is important to life, and why the theater can tell us so much about people, but I do really like the flaneurness of the Walser protagonist, and his exuberant voice. Sometimes the sectioning off of the books I struggled with, I thought the theater pieces would have been more palatable mixed in with the rest of the book, and because I enjoyed the first section on city life so much it is disappointing to know that you've finished with them but still have more of the book to go. But it was a great introduction to me of a truly wonderful voice, and a new set of eyes on what it is to live in the city.