Die Landstraße

by Regina Ullmann, Peter Hamm (Afterword)

The stories in this volume are largely set in the Swiss countryside, and though resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of authors such as Adalbert Stifter, Ullmann’s distinctive, otherworldly voice has inspired comparisons to her contemporary Robert Walser. In her stories, the archaic and the modern collide. In one tale, a young woman on an exhausting country walk recoils at a passing bicyclist, but accepts a ride from a wagon, taking her seat on a trunk with a snake coiled inside. As Ullmann writes, “sometimes the whole world appears to be painted on porcelain, right down to the dangerous cracks.” This delicate but brittle beauty, with its ominous undertones, gives Regina Ullmann her unique voice.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

180 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

Regina "Rega" Ullmann was a Swiss poet and writer.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Swiss writer Regina Ullmann was out of money and suffering from severe depression when she finally managed to get Die Landstraße published in 1921, mainly thanks to the support and encouragement of Rainer Maria Rilke, who remained one of her biggest fans. She had already had an interesting life – unmarried, with two daughters in foster care from two separate liaisons (one of them with the priapic psychoanalyst superstar Otto Gross), and she tried to make a home in Germany until the Nazis kicked her out for having a Jewish father. She returned to Switzerland and kept writing, with limited success, until she died in 1961.

And the Swiss landscape makes itself felt in these stories in all kinds of subtle ways. Hillsides spotted with woodruff and gentian. Cream that's called Niedl, even in the English translation. All of it somehow diffuse, though, seen through a dreamy summery Instagram filter. A style fit for childhood memories. There is something intense but also purposeless about the action, or rather lack thereof. Details are vague – ‘You could think of it as any time of year you pleased,’ she says, setting up one story; and elsewhere, ‘If I told someone about this,’ she admits, ‘he would probably have trouble saying at this point what it was about, since nothing had been thought yet, nothing had been done. It had only been felt….’

And indeed the writing is powerfully felt, despite the simple settings and plots. ‘Plots’ might even be too strong a word for most of them – mere descriptions of particular scenes or events, Alpine, quiet, villagey. One is about picking strawberries. Another about buying a cake when friends come to visit. Ullmann's fierce hypersensitivity to these vignettes is striking – you feel almost that she is on the point of tears over the simplest description of a room or a garden. This leads her to find some beautiful similes (‘The fog was moving in the fields like a herd of distant sheep’), as well as some others that are more baffling (‘There was a feeling in the air as if the whole world were one great marigold’).

Ullmann was a Catholic convert, and there is something religious to her intensity, though not doctrinal. It's more like a hint of the mystic Christianity of John of Norwich, or Catherine of Siena. Difficulties and disappointments are seen as ways to approach near-ecstatic visions of life's truth, so that ‘even if life is hard, still, in some invisible, unknown way, it is rapturous’. The Country Road is a quiet and interesting collection, very welcome in its first English translation – a strange, soft-focus meditation on those moments when the simplest detail of everyday life can suddenly take on huge emotional importance, and ‘imprint itself on our lives like a fine, archaic script’.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most heartbreaking, mournful and beautiful writing I have ever encountered. For my full review, please see: https://roughghosts.com/2016/11/17/so...

[Lotte Van Der Paelt · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
I liked the stories, but I still felt like I didn't fully get them. I don't know if it's something I missed (maybe because I listened to it as an audiobook) or if it's just the way Ullmann writes. I think I might get more out of it on a second read, we'll see I guess.

[Akanksha · Rating 4 out of 5]

It isn't plenty what she told through her stories, but since her words are exceedingly soft and gentle, you love to have her speaking to you. She understood the beauty of life and she was overwhelmed by it. Her observations were movingly deep and her words are beautifully picturesque. There is poetry in her prose and she had heavy sorrows hung upon her heart, seemingly. Her stories travel from one world to another.

[Matthew Martens · Rating 5 out of 5]

As lonely and lost, and as found in lostness, and as lit up by aloneness, as Walser, and now and then at least as funny, at least as bleakly.

[Sven Deroose · Rating 4 out of 5]

De landweg : ****
Over een oud uithangbord : ****
De muis : **** 'De dood stond klaar in de vorm van een val.'
De oude man : ***1/2
Aardbeien : ****
De luchtballon : ***1/2
Kerstvisite : ***1/2
Naverteld : ***1/2
De gebochelde : ***1/2
Het meisje : ****
Susanna : ****

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned about this book from a review in either the New York Review of Books or the London Review, I can’t remember, but the article made the author sound intriguing and I purchased a copy.

Usually, when I review a short-story collection, I run down the stories in it, giving the plots and the good and bad points about them. That’s really not possible in this case. As another reviewer astutely pointed out, there’s precious little plot to any of them and they’re better described as intensely realized moments in the narrators’ lives. But those moments are vivid and stick in your mind, even if you’re not sure what Ullmann is trying to say.

It may be best to give several examples of Ullmann’s style (in translation). The first is the opening paragraph of “The Country Road”:

Summer, but a younger summer than this one; the summer back then was no more than my equal in years. True, I still wasn’t happy, not happy to my core, but I had to be in the way that everyone is. The sun set me ablaze. It grazed on the green knoll where I sat, a knoll with an almost sacred form, where I had taken refuge from the dust of the country road. Because I was weary. I was weary because I was alone. This long country road before and behind me … The bends that it made around this knoll, the poplars – even heaven itself could not relieve it of its bleakness. I was ill at ease, because just a short way into my walk, this road had already dragged me into its misery and squalor. It was an uncanny country road. An all-knowing road. A road reserved for those who had been, in some way, left alone. (p. 3)

Or the beginning of “The Old Man”:

The value of our existence is by no means always a function of its weight. On the contrary, because our fate alone is frequently too light, there are stones, as it were, that we take on as counterweights. And the way that people use them … Some heap these stones upon what is dearest to them on this earth. And others have claimed that they had to swallow them. Ah yes, I know people who look as if they had swallowed stones. (p. 63)

Or the ending of “The Christmas Visit”:

How well joy has equipped us, endowing us with hearing, sight, and taste, indeed, with basic things, simple, pure life, traveling a path that it must travel anyhow. And yet joy is like a flowering tree, or like winter twigs covered in snow, or like the bare contours of late autumn. It does with us what it will, indeed, many things… (p. 97)

And in even the happiest stories (like “The Hot Air Balloon”) there’s a profound sense of melancholia.

The Country Road is not to everyone’s taste but if you like Chekhov, you may like Ullmann.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the strawberries ripen in the woods and gardens and spread their many-colored fragrance along the currents of the air, when we feel childhood and the morning of a mother, of the many working people all around us in the world, the city with its greening gardens surging like waves around its walls, when we feel how even all the voiceless things are owners and bearers of life when the time is right, then we grow more confident, more comforting, and not for nothing. We are young ourselves, and we share in the beauty of a June day, we are deep within it like a blackbird's song. But because we can have all this without sharing in the effort of existence, because we are not prepared to fall from the air like birds, because we need a shelter all the same, and cannot merely view the earth from above like a relief, there is danger even in such beauty. Suddenly we are no longer there as people for the people around us, the path of our fate has vanished like a dead man's... We live outside of our being, and one day we are found like a plant, slowly rotting into the earth.

[Conny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sie schrieb über Figuren am Rand der Gesellschaft: Ein frisch aufgelegter Erzählband gibt Einblick in das Werk einer fast vergessenen Autorin.

Dass sie sich einst der Schriftstellerei zuwenden würde, hätten ihre ersten Lebensjahre nicht vermuten lassen: 1884 in St. Gallen geboren, wurde Regina Ullmann aufgrund einer Sprach- und Schreibschwäche zunächst nicht einmal in die Grundschule aufgenommen. Später – nun nach Deutschland gezogen – führte sie einen Briefwechsel mit Rainer Maria Rilke, der schliesslich zu ihrem Mentor wurde.

Trotz aller Bemühungen blieb Ullmann eine literarische Aussenseiterin. Sicherlich ist diese Tatsache nicht zuletzt ihrer jüdischen Herkunft geschuldet: 1936 musste sie, aus dem Deutschen Schriftsteller-Verband ausgeschlossen, Deutschland verlassen und kehrte über mehrere Stationen nach St. Gallen zurück. Sie kannte bitterste Armut, musste ihre unehelich geborenen Kinder weggeben und erfuhr Ausgrenzung am eigenen Leib.

Wer in ihre Texte eintaucht, erahnt die Schwermut und Depression, unter der die Autorin litt. Ihre Figuren stehen meist am Rande der Gesellschaft, sind vereinsamte Alte, Kinder aus ärmlichen Verhältnissen und selbst Tiere, denen eine menschgemachte Grausamkeit droht. Doch auch von der Schönheit einer vertrauten Umgebung wird gesprochen, von der einfachen Freude darüber, eine Ballonfahrt zu beobachten oder zu einem Weihnachtsfest eingeladen zu sein. Es sind weniger die Handlungen, die ihre Texte ausmachen, als vielmehr die Stimmung, die vermittelt wird.

So still und schlicht das Erzählte auch sein mag: Verpackt wird es in eine dichte, oftmals sperrige Sprache. Satz für Satz muss man freikratzen, was sich unter dem Text verbirgt, sich durch sprachliche Windungen und Wiederholungen kämpfen. Es ist kein zugängliches Werk, sondern eines, das langsam und genau gelesen werden will. Das ist anstrengend – macht aber die schmalen 192 Seiten umso ergiebiger.

Review erschienen bei Phosphor Kultur

[Luna Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

En este libro hay un cuento perfecto entre muchos otros cuentos ásperos, irregulares y aun así tan inquietantes como ‘El ratón’, tal vez porque a su autora no le importó nunca la gozosa imperfección de ese estilo que la caracteriza, de esa poesía difícil, de ese fluir de conciencia atragantado, o de ese exceso de sentimentalidad. Será porque lo bello si breve, dos veces bello, justo como el cadáver de un roedor...

Más en Babelia:
https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-07-02...#

[Biblibio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty much hated this one. Each story felt like a slog, nothing really clicked for me in terms of the writing, and I never got into the rhythm of the collection as an overall book. Just didn't work for me.

(tr. Kurt Beals)

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is one of those books I'll have to reread to get the author's meaning. Beautiful language, no doubt equal parts author and translator.

[Maren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skylight Books, The Coyotes

[Kyle]

Happened to be reading this alongside Simone Weil's Gravity & Grace. Some interesting links, most specifically: "The value of our existence is by no means a value of its weight."

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Joyful strange and sad

[James Ayres · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a series of short stories that all take place in same sort of setting, some unnamed early 20th century countryside. Some of the stories are incredibly beautiful and insightful (the first and the last ones specifically), while others are more "slice of life" - which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes short stories with a poetic flair.

[Frank Hoppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly amazing! Each story in this collection caused me to pause and savor what Ullmann had conveyed. I think the book cover blurbs say a lot. I'll be rereading it again soon.

Robert Musil - "Genius."

Rainer Maria Rilke - "To read your book is such a multiplicity of joys that I can only gradually cope with it."

Hermann Hesse - "A pure and noble poetic talent: everything is full of mystery."

Thomas Mann - "Her voice is something holy."