Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten

© Silke Hesse 2013

Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten. Can Anyone Tell What Is Wrong?

Silke Hesse

The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) published his third and most memorable novel, Jakob von Gunten, in 1909. Like the earlier two, it is the story of a young man still finding his feet in life but filled with the desire to encounter and observe it in its many variations and to that end to tease and provoke it into revealing itself. In all three novels the hero is not unlike the author himself. The first of them, Geschwister Tanner, leaps from episode to episode, each rendered mainly in long, formal, well constructed and almost monologic speeches, indicative of young people taking control of their lives; the narration does not pause to explain transitions between episodes, thus repeatedly leaving the reader momentarily disorientated as in a fairy-tale. The realism of the second novel, Der Gehilfe, told in the self-effacing third person, is painstaking in its insistence on the causality and detail of everyday life, almost as pedantic as the observant servant who is its protagonist is expected to be in the service of his boss or master. In both these earlier novels we can already discern an unobtrusive but determinedly eccentric departure from what is considered proper practice in the realist novel. In Jakob von Gunten this strangeness comes into its own.  

The novel begins with the arrival of the protagonist Jakob at the Institute Benjamenta in Berlin. This is a school that trains adolescent boys to be servants. (As an adult in 1905, Robert Walser himself did a four week course at a school for servants; upon its completion he worked in that capacity at Schloß Dambrau for three months.) The Institute Benjamenta is a school in which, as the first sentence tells us, very little is taught and whose students will never amount to anything in life. But Jakob comes there, it seems, of his own volition, also in possession of the money to pay the school fees. Why has he come? Who gave him the money? Throughout the story our ears remain pricked for clues that could provide a satisfactory explanation of this at first sight peculiar decision; the boy too has anxious misgivings upon his arrival. Jakob does not seem to have fallen out with his parents, whom he loves and admires even though his determination to be independent means he never writes home. He is the scion of a well-to-do, respected family of aristocratic origins and he is proud of that. He grew up in a pleasant provincial town with a population of 28,000, though here too there were already pockets of the type of the proletarian unrest now common in industrialized cities. (When people ask Jakob where he comes from, he doesn’t like to reveal this, but Switzerland would be a good guess). He tells us that he wants to make his own way in life without falling back on the privileges of class or wealth or familial love and support; he is also attracted to the big city and its modernity and acclimatizes very quickly; and finally, he is keen to earn money which he sees as the crucial facilitator of modern life. (The school guarantees to find jobs for its graduates.) But though Jakob is prepared to embrace a lowly status, he is also attracted to the gracious and humanizing qualities of upper class life which he feels he would like to support. (Servants, he tells us, will always reflect the qualities of their masters). In this way he hopes to avoid the coarseness and aggressiveness of a proletarian existence. It later turns out that he has had very fanciful ideas of the elegant and aristocratic life-style of the Benjamentas; in reality they do not inhabit a hidden palace but two sparsely furnished rooms.

Jakob’s experiences in junior high school (the Progymnasium) have not been good. He grew thoroughly sick of the pandemonium of classes conducted by teachers in the thrall of the cane and with little of interest to communicate to rebellious modern boys, whose lives in the new mass society are not likely to require classical heroism or even original thought and discernment. The one teacher of genius whom the boys all admired was, significantly, the Maths teacher. The school masters about whom Jakob then fantasizes at the Institute Benjamenta are actually the very same ones who taught Robert Walser in Biel; Jakob seems quite glad they have not turned up in Berlin.

Halfway through the novel Jakob happens to meet his brother Johann, who is now a successful and well-respected painter in Berlin (just like Karl Walser, Robert’s painter-brother in real life). Johann confirms that existence in the upper echelons of society is “simply horrible” and it is better to spend your life at the very bottom (to come from ganz Unten = von Gunten) and not, one might say, as a “von Guten” (someone from a good family).

All these, of course, may be sufficient reasons to choose to go to a school for servants. But we are given another piece of information that should perhaps not be ignored. In the curriculum vitae Jakob is required to write, the only text in the novel he does not write as a diary for himself, he mentions an incident where he beat up his former history teacher, Dr. Merz. He was the one who was trying to instill classical ideas of heroism in today’s youth. Jakob says he regrets this atrocity. But he also tells us that he purposely wrote his CV in a tone of pride and insolence in order to provoke a reaction from the Director of the Institute, Herr Benjamenta; its veracity is therefore obviously in doubt. For readers looking for more substantial reasons for Jakob’s choices this could, however, provide one. Maybe Jakob was expelled from school and home because of such an act of violence and the Institute Benjamenta was the last resort for him. But the mysteriousness of Jakob’s arrival at the Institute is never completely resolved; it is the same sort of mysteriousness that later envelops the arrival of Kafka’s surveyor in The Castle, only that Kafka, a great admirer of Walser’s novel, gives us no useful clues whatsoever.      

The Institute Benjamenta is run by a brother and sister. Herr Benjamenta, the director, is of enormous size and his pupils, who frequently get to feel his brutal strength when he beats them for misdemeanors, his main educational activity, look like dwarves beside him. He never seems to leave his office where he reads newspapers all day, surveying the world at second hand and barely looking up when a pupil approaches him other than to enforce an obsequious greeting.  He doesn’t seem to put much effort into attracting new students or finding future employers for them either; on Jakob’s arrival he is quick to grab the boy’s money but refuses a receipt or to return his fees when Jakob then wants to leave. Intimidation is hardly an effective method of recruitment and it is not long before the boy senses that the school is in trouble. But Jakob becomes increasingly fascinated by this intelligent, always irate and potentially enormously powerful man who doesn’t seem to have even “begun to live” yet. He reminds us of the frustrated middle-class bureaucrats or business men of that era (Kafka’s gigantic father was one), whose desk-work hardly required them to use their abilities or initiative and who then went home to their families as brutal disciplinarians, the only role in which their strength and frustration could be directed to some end.

All the teaching at the school is done by the unmarried sister, Lisa Benjamenta, whom Jakob always speaks of as das Mädchen, the girl. Like the mothers and nursemaids of that era, she is above all concerned with the rules of polite and proper behavior: sitting up straight, rising when a teacher or woman enters the room, keeping your hands still and out of sight, waiting quietly for as long as required, eating up everything put on your plate, being content, quiet and undemanding, helpful at all times, neat and clean, keeping your mouth shut firmly and never laughing (laughter is seen as a sign of disrespect). The students also learn the phrases of polite conversation and how to play-act, how to entertain a lady, and the proper way to proceed in a variety of circumstances. Manners are to be so deeply ingrained that they have command of you rather than you of them, that it becomes impossible for you to behave improperly. All learning is done by rote; thinking is strongly discouraged. At the Institute Benjamenta the boys are moreover required to do the household chores and they wear women’s aprons. The greatest crime in this place is “Liederlichkeit”, slovenliness. (In Germany, where boys were not normally sent to boarding schools, the generation of the early twentieth century was raised by their nursemaids, mothers and grandmothers with enormous value placed upon good manners, neatness and cleanliness.) In the dream in which Lisa guides Jakob through his future life, much of which, she says, will consist of hardship and sadness, her advice is always to accept what life might throw up and to do so graciously and with patience. One can say that in the Institute Benjamenta the boys receive a feminine upbringing to help them live an unselfish, uncomplaining and unrebellious life of service.

But the education provided by the Institute is not simply a matter of good manners and proper behavior: of dressage. While the saber and helmet of a policeman, regularly polished up by the boys, hang over the entrance to the rooms of brother and sister as symbols of rule-abiding orderliness, Miss Benjamenta says good night in a flowing white robe and the boys revere her like an angel. In contrast to the way in which Jakob’s former male high school teachers were treated, the boys at the Institute idolize Lisa Benjamenta as a higher being to be approached with the deepest respect. Here they are not only taught to act like women; but woman also represents for them all that is good and pure in life. In this woman’s world Herr Benjamenta can have no function other than that of enforcing respect.

Apart from the meager formal education in manners that the boys are given, they are also encouraged to get to know their fellow students and value them for what they are. Additionally, they are given a reasonable amount of spare time to roam the city, make their own observations and occasionally indulge in boyish vices which are, of course, kept in bounds by their impecuniousness. They are certainly not held in seclusion but allowed to observe the society they will one day serve. While never well informed, they are encouraged to feel well integrated. Foremost among Jakob’s vices is smoking but just once he is also tempted to visit an elegant brothel.

What are the results of such an education? Most of the boys recruited to the school seem to come from lower class backgrounds and have physical, intellectual, psychological or moral deficiencies or peculiarities on which the school has little significant influence. They later don’t cope well in employment. Some of them, like Hans who is used to farm labor, will probably eventually become useful servants. But from the moment of his arrival, Jakob is made aware of the star pupil Kraus who is the pride of both educators. Kraus has special status and duties because he is so reliably conformist. He is still incessantly and senselessly learning the rules of the school even though they have long become second nature to him and he is now quite incapable of breaking them. Kraus never laughs. He never wastes time. His mission, as he sees it, is to admonish the other students to greater industriousness and conformity. He is like a perfectly functioning automaton; when Jakob meets him on arrival, the obsequiously bowing figure strikes him as no more than a trained monkey and this quite horrifies him. But later Jakob learns to value Kraus as his opposite, his sparring partner, and a well meaning if intellectually limited human being. What Lisa Benjamenta’s regime does achieve, is to focus attention on the positive in all things; thus the boys learn never to be dismissive of others.

The other star pupil, long not recognized as such, is the narrator himself, Jakob von Gunten, who not only chose to come here for, it seems, commendable reasons but also finds that his own passion for and interest in all things that are good and righteous is catered to here. Jakob genuinely loves people; he tells us he is more interested in their foibles, peculiarities and uncontrolled irritabilities than in any of the wonders of nature. He is a passionate psychologist who never tires of observing people. And strangely enough, the rule-bound milieu of the Institute Benjamenta is the ideal laboratory for a rule-breaking observer like Jakob because any challenge to the conformist’s unquestioned world arouses extreme and fascinatingly telling reactions in such conformists . Jakob is not out to trick or humiliate others and he is no moralist. He is simply in love with the variability of life played out in its human form. In the end, both sister and brother Benjamenta have to acknowledge that Jakob’s approach to life is superior to their attempts to enforce virtuous conformism. Lisa: You, Jakob, are quite slovenly compared with Kraus but you are the nicer person. And Herr Benjamenta says: If there were no vices and mistakes, the world would lose warmth and attractiveness and richness. Jakob himself puts it this way: Rules gild existence. If rules try to prevent me from laughing then I get to feel what true laughter is. One might sum up that submitting to discipline and then defying it when the pressure becomes too great heightens one’s enjoyment of life.

It is not only the constant challenge to rules that characterizes Jakob’s philosophy of life. He also believes that the genuine truths are to be found in the ordinary and everyday, in all things that are unadulterated by intellectual and social constructs. “I value only experiences. Humankind loses its courage to live with all that discussing and comprehending and knowing.” This is the Impressionist’s view of the world where the sudden flash of color, what seemed invisible or at best marginal and momentary is what gives a situation life and reality. Jakob’s experience of the world is acutely sensory. “One gains if one is in the middle of the swirl and the effervescence. One has a good sensation in one’s legs, in one’s arms and in one’s chest  if one endeavors to wind one’s way, properly and without hesitation, through all that living commotion.” One of Walser’s favorite words is Reiz, also in reizen, reizend meaning: stimulus, stimulate, attract, irritate, delight, delightful. It is the Impressionist’s word par excellence. The Impressionist loves what can be sensed rather than seen, what is fleeting rather than stable and permanent, what is unique rather than characteristic. Kraus is a character. He has firm principles; he never changes. But both Benjamentas are intelligent and honest enough to be vulnerable to the irritants Jakob provides.

And this is where the problems arise. Lisa Benjamenta is most truly herself in the world of the Symbolist vision she arouses in Jakob and shares with him: the vision of sorrow, deprivation and despair, just occasionally interrupted by moments of enjoyment or ecstatic freedom, visions that have shaken off the concrete details of everyday life and with them real life. She wants Jakob to accept his fate patiently and graciously, not fight against it. Lisa will soon die and in spite of his veneration for her, her announcement of her impending death does not arouse shock and sadness in Jakob. She is too spiritual and ethereal to belong to this earth. In Herr Benjamenta on the other hand, Jakob awakens a “starved and imprisoned tiger” who fascinates him but whom he cannot understand or control, who woos him one minute and tries to strangle him the next and who will soon run off to a completely strange and unreal world with him. “Sometimes,” Jakob tells us, “it seems to me as though I would never be able to separate myself again from this man, this giant, as though the two of us were melted into one.” In Jakob’s dream, dreamt at the wake of Lisa, Herr Benjamenta takes him off to trade in the desert; later the dreamer then follows him to India, where his former director has started a revolution and is soon elected as ruler. This is a dangerous and unreal world of violent dreams of power and conquest and for the boy it entails the experience of loss of self.

Of course, Johann the painter too had advised his brother to rely on dreams for all the things modern society would deny him. This dream world is the world which the new Expressionist movement was conjuring up, a man’s world to replace the gentle woman’s world of Lisa Benjamenta. It is also the world of WWI which would erupt five years later, the world of revolutions and ideologies and eventually of the terrible Second World War with its as yet unimaginable genocide. (The Jewish  problem is briefly touched on in a conversation between Jakob and Kraus; its equation with the capitalist problem here temporally, and as would emerge falsely, presents itself as a satisfactory and non-racist solution.) Impressionism, with its alert awareness of the beauty and interest of all that exists, in this case above all of the fascinatingly variegated human psyche, is too ephemeral a style to provide a bulwark against the long repressed strength, ability and violence of men like Herr Benjamenta.

Prior to his seduction by this man, Jakob had had the occasional boy’s day-dream of soldiering. In one dream he won a battle as the conquering hero; but he was then happy to show compassion, pardon a traitor and lightly relinquish the promise of power and glory his victory had held. In the second dream he had seen himself as a cog in the giant machine of Napoleon’s army as it invaded Russia, a marching automaton who would eventually collapse and die like his comrades. This required a dedication to service similar to that advocated by Lisa at the Institute. Earlier in the story Jakob had also told us that he had no wish to travel to foreign lands, that for him truth lay in the reality of the everyday that was close at hand. The dreams of power and conquest that come to him at the wake of Lisa Benjamenta are not originally his own but seem to be those of the man watching beside him whose ego has taken over his. Once the era of World Wars and Revolutions had been inaugurated, the egos of many ordinary men were to be consumed by the wild ambitions of the starved and imprisoned tigers in their society.

At this point we should remember that Walser’s novels generally also contain an autobiographical strand. It is perhaps of interest that in 1929, twenty years after the publication of Jakob von Gunten, the author succumbed to schizophrenia. He would spend the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in institutions. Towards the end of Jakob von Gunten the narrator eerily predicts: “A blow will strike me one day, a truly annihilating blow, and then everything, all these confusions, this longing, this ignorance, all this gratitude and ingratitude, these lies and self-deceptions, this thinking-that-you-know–something and this nevertheless-knowing-nothing will be over. But I want to live, no matter how.” It is difficult to know how to speak of prophecy when it is sequestered in a work of literature. Both Walser’s novel and his personal fate seem to predict the inevitability of the dark schizophrenic destiny that befell twentieth century Germany and the enthusiasm with which ordinary and sensitive men then turned out to join in the madness of war.

Why did it all happen? If we want our answer from Walser’s novel we will have to turn to the gender split in twentieth century central European society as epitomized  in the educational practices of the Institute Benjamenta. We have here a society which believed it had resolved the threat of latent male violence by making women predominantly responsible for the education of children, including boys. It encouraged women to put in place an ethereally gentle and kind yet at the same time repressive regime of strictly controlled behavior. Meanwhile, men like Herr Benjamenta had become fettered to their by now tediously desk-bound professions which gave them virtually no opportunity to use their physical strength and intellectual ability. Men do not become peaceful by being starved and imprisoned. And for all their reverence for gentle femininity, young boys cannot be turned into quasi women who are unsusceptible to the promise of adventure. In a trice, all the carefully drilled habits of  patient contentment and obedience to rules would be blown away when a more masculine lifestyle beckoned. The genetic predisposition of men that enabled them to be raiders, hunters and defenders of tribe and territory is, as Jakob understands when he chooses to become a student at the Institute, no longer suited to our modern world; it needs to be modified and redeployed. But it cannot be simply repressed.

Now we can perhaps try to answer the question posed at the start of this essay: Why did Jakob choose to submit himself to the Benjamenta training regime? Throughout the novel he is always aware that he comes from a family of knights and warriors and he is proud of them; but he also knows that their lifestyle and their concept of honor is no longer relevant to modern life. If Jakob did, in fact, beat up the teacher who was promoting an outworn image of masculine honor, he would have had to realize how close beneath the surface his own violent instincts lay and that he would need to bridle them. In contrast to Kraus, Jakob did not allow the Benjamenta regime, which he always approached with a critical mindset and where he had initially expected to find male teachers too, to suppress his masculinity. This remained active in his teasing, challenging, confrontational approach to rules. Where the frustrated giant Benjamenta was the target, such challenges also required considerable courage for they could easily end in brutal beatings and, as Jakob tells us, often did.

Jakob’s rebelliousness is good-natured and constructive; he loves people and he wants to understand how their minds work, something of great importance if society is to change. In contrast to Walser’s contemporary, the psychoanalyst Freud, who concentrated on dreams and built great mythologies of the mind often on the flimsiest of evidence in true Expressionist fashion, Jakob’s method is based on observation and experiment; his provocations and challenges are always experimental. But once Lisa dies and the feminine regime she was in charge of collapses, this approach can no longer work.

Lisa’s death, like all else in the novel, is not simply the author’s invention. The motif of the Ophelia-like death of the abandoned beautiful fin-de-siècle maiden who cannot find happiness because her lover has other things on his mind and will not make a commitment to her, is one of the most popular topics in early twentieth century German men’s poetry. Jakob’s final dream of seeing a beautiful maiden, it is not specifically Lisa, lying naked on a rug embroidered with flowers and stars “that are kisses”, follows the pattern of the times, and the ribbon tied to one of her legs like a mortuary identification tag and fluttering in the wind, picks up Goethe’s well-worn image of the poet painting his love on a ribbon intended for his lover. Such idealization of woman is dream and poetry, not reality.

Though Jakob still makes half-serious attempts to force Herr Benjamenta to procure him a job as a servant, a job that would allow him to resume his research into the masculine mind and modernity, the Director refuses; he has other plans. Now all that is left is for the boy to follow his master’s trail, though Jakob seems by no means reluctant to do so. The dream of trading with desert tribes and then rushing on to cause revolution in India and take over the governance of that country, closely parallels the historic path of the colonizer Britain. She had for the past two centuries found new masculine challenges for her men-folk in the conquest and control of non-western nations. This was a tactic she was hoping to deny the German nations and which she did succeed in denying them after WWI. In consequence it is not surprising that Britain was not the instigator of the European wars of the twentieth century; her men were busy elsewhere. But colonialism as a solution for the problem of unfulfilled masculinity would eventually also collapse as the colonized nations sought their independence. This had, of course, not yet happened when Walser published his novel in 1909.

More than Walser’s other novels, Jakob von Gunten has a disconcerting strangeness about it. It cannot be called surreal because there are no real breeches of probability, though it may take a suspicious reader a while to establish that. Since the story is told through the protagonist’s diary entries with their personal and gradually changing perspective and their legitimate and unavoidable selectiveness, it is hard to work out how much of this strangeness is due to the boy’s immaturity and how much to difficulties with orientation in unfamiliar surroundings: whether there is an element of madness in the boy or in the author or, what seems perhaps more likely, in the Institute Benjamenta itself and the society it represents. All we are aware of is an uncomfortable feeling of things not being right and since we are given minimal help in diagnosing the causes, our questions are likely to range in many directions. Something is wrong but in the years prior to World War I, and this novel was of course published five years before its outbreak, it is as yet almost impossible to diagnose the exact nature of the malaise.  

In my view, Robert Walser’s most lasting contribution to the world of culture and ideas lies in his psychological insights. By the time Jakob von Gunten was written, these had already been explored in his two previous novels, Geschwister Tanner and Der Gehülfe and as they can add a dimension to the later novel, I shall briefly discuss them here. All three novels are closely linked by the autobiographical dimension they share.

The first, Geschwister Tanner (1905), was written in Berlin in the course of  just a few weeks . Walser had recently moved there and was staying with his painter brother Karl. The publisher Bruno Cassirer, for whom Karl had done work, showed an interest in a longer text by the author who had till then published only short prose pieces. Walser was 27 at the time; he had been forced to leave school at the age of fourteen after his mother’s death and had done two of the three years of an apprenticeship in banking, with excellent results, before he became restless and had to leave. For the next ten years he then moved from place to place, mainly in Switzerland, doing whatever jobs were on offer, a worry to other family members who would have liked him to have a safe and honorable career. For the writer these years were, however, a storehouse of  people and places and situations he could later draw on.

Geschwister Tanner is about five siblings, all unusually gifted in different ways. They are based on the Walser siblings. Simon, the youngest and the central figure resembles the author; Kaspar, closest to Simon in age is inspired by Karl, the painter; Klaus has his model in Hermann the oldest, a geographer and academic; another brother who seemed to show particular promise, Emil in the novel, Ernst in real life, ends up in a psychiatric institution and has thus dropped out of the family; Hedwig is a primary school teacher like Robert’s sister Lisa, who gave her name to the teacher in Jakob von Gunten; both Hedwig and Lisa had had to take on the care of their mother in her final years of mental illness. In the novel, Simon and Kaspar live together for a while and Simon stays with Hedwig for three months when he is down and out; otherwise the siblings keep intermittent contact but live separate lives. This closeness in concern and love but separateness of lives, which allows individualities to develop fully, is central to the novel, for individuality as the source of  creativity is its theme. And the real life models are important because Walser’s psychology is based on the close observation of specific and unique individuals whose combination of qualities is unpredictable and therefore constantly astounding.

There is no story, no action, no climax as we might expect in a novel: just characters. There is even a teasing avoidance of drama, e.g. when the jilted husband of Klara, in whose house Simon and Kaspar share a room (she had fallen in love with Kaspar) fires random shots all night in the forest where the lovers are; then a little later Klara wakes up the house with her scream. It turns out that she has just had one of her fits; to our surprise, her husband is perfectly kind and reasonable, and their separation after he has apparently gambled away their house, is hardly considered worth a mention. Even Walser’s characters do not really develop as we have come to expect in a novel; this is no Bildungsroman. The Tanners go about their lives each doing their work, work that is ultimately of value to others but more importantly, also allows them to be themselves. Klaus is the exception. His dry academic career and sense of duty and propriety prevent him from fulfilling himself or ever really comprehending what his creative brothers with their intuitive approach to life, whom he would so love to help and advise, are about.

Simon learns a lot from Kaspar, who is primarily a plein air landscape painter, in love with the beauty of his native country, creative through joy at the fleeting wealth of nature around him which must be preserved before it is lost, a careful observer, a dedicated, tireless and skilled worker, a charismatic personality and yet someone whom even the love of women cannot divert from his course. Kaspar later goes to Paris (rather than Italy with its academic tradition which Klaus had suggested) where the Impressionists share his airy, intuitive, joyful, reality based approach to painting. (A comment by Hedwig that seems to allude to Degas’ Olympia painting, also points towards Impressionism.) Intuition, joy, close observation, individual experience of life is Simon’s formula too and even before he begins to write, he practices his perspicacity and flare for words in long speeches to those he encounters, speeches that people find quite strange but also, as one after the other has to admit, interesting; “but you interest me” rings like a refrain throughout the novel. Simon is, of course, also testing out his future audience. The novel briefly introduces us to two unsuccessful artists: Erwin, a painter who is too serious, heavy-handed, traditional and religious in his approach to paint like his friend Kaspar and Sebastian, a poet. Sebastian, we hear, was spoilt by early adulation and never completed his education; he now avoids people who are not his audiences and spends the days in an attic on his unmade bed or roaming in desolate forests and mountains. He occasionally gets some help from a few kind people, like Hedwig, who take pity on this tragic failure. But since he has no experience of life, he has nothing real to communicate to others and his poetry makes no impact. One day Simon finds him frozen to death in the forest.  Simon for his part, who of course also left school early, always tries hard to support himself. And he is making sure he has plenty of experience of life before he embarks on a career as a writer.  

The three months that Simon stays with Hedwig are also important for him. She supports him when he can’t find a job locally and in return he does the housework and gardening for her and thus lives almost like a woman. In his spare time he reads and experiences nature and village life. But what is more important, the siblings talk to each other during the many hours they have together each day; their childhood and family is one recurring topic and this helps Simon to understand his background. In talking with Hedwig, Simon also becomes intimately acquainted with the mind of a woman, hears among other things of her dissatisfaction with the type of teaching required of her and the barrenness of a life without love and family. These conversations are rarely reproduced but we realize later why Simon has such insight into family matters in the last chapter. If Kaspar was a good artist, Hedwig is an unusually perspicacious and honest psychologist; her conversation is invaluable training for a novelist.

Among other things, Hedwig gives Simon an analysis of his own personality, the personality, one might say, of an Impressionist writer.

           

You are a strangely unresistant and unscrupulous person. What is asked of you, you do. You want everything that one wants oneself. I think people could require you to do a good deal that is improper before you would rebel. One can’t help despising you a little. I do despise you just a bit, Simon! I know you won’t mind if you are told this. By the way, I consider you capable of a heroic deed, if that’s what’s important to you. See, I do have quite a good opinion of you. When you are around, one can permit oneself anything. Your behavior releases the behavior of others from any restrictions.[...] I have always been accustomed to treating you as inferior. Maybe other people react similarly. You don’t give the impression of cleverness, more of love, and you know how this feeling is generally assessed. I don’t think your doings and concerns will ever be crowned with success,  but that is unlikely to worry you [...] People always have to get to know you before they trust you, and that takes time. [...] Not many people will love you but there will be some who will have great hopes for you. It is simple and good people who will like you; for your stupidity can be quite considerable. [...] You will offend many, people will call you insolent, and you will have uncouth enemies who will be quick to pass judgment on you. They will make you sweat; but you’ll never be afraid of them. In a larger company, where it is important to present oneself in a good light by speaking well, you will always remain silent because you’re not interested in opening your mouth when so many others are talking. Consequently, you will be overlooked.[...] In contrast, some people who have met you will consider it a privilege to open their hearts to you in private; for you know how to listen and, in a conversation, that may well be more important than actually talking.    

An Impressionist writer, as here described, is more interested in listening than talking. He doesn’t want to influence reality, he wants to see it as it is; but he will provoke and challenge other people so as to gain reactions in order to better understand them. He loves every living thing for its uniqueness and can’t bring himself to pass judgment on others. He is curious about everything. You can’t depend on him to support any party or cause but he could be drawn into some undertaking before he knows what is happening to him. He has no plan for his life other than experiencing to the full what comes his way. He is vulnerable and may well end up being guilty by association. He has the mentality of a servant who will do what the master he is currently working under tells him to do. Hedwig, and in his way Klaus too, can see the dangers in such a personality for, as educators, they stand within society while Simon and Kaspar are both observers and outside it. There are those who blame the Germans’ servility to authority for their susceptibility to dictatorship.

To return to the topic of psychology. There were several approaches to this relatively new discipline current at the time. Walser alludes to them in his novel. The biological determinism of the Naturalist school (Gerhard Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenausgang may serve as an example) is suggested by the man whom Simon meets in a bar and who tells him the story of Emil, the Tanner brother who has ended up in an asylum. Presumably because their mother was also mentally ill, this man suggests that Emil’s insanity may run in the family. Simon protests violently.

The “scars of life” approach is also offered for consideration. We are, for example, given a detailed account of Simon’s mother’s childhood. She grew up in a harsh and isolated region of the mountains with parents so cruel to her that as a child she had contemplated suicide. Later when she moved to the city and married, it was in the middle of an industrial boom that brought prosperity to all classes so that even the workers could live an irresponsible, hedonistic life. But none of this explains the mother’s quick and irritable temper, her pride, the deep regard other women felt for her, or her ultimate madness in any conclusive or enlightening way.

Simon’s view, and he almost certainly speaks for Walser here, is that each person is uniquely constituted and must cope with his given personality in the way that best suits him. It is not Emil’s genetic predisposition nor is it his association with loose women that have led to the downfall of this gifted and unusually good-looking person.

No, it can’t run in the family. I’ll deny that as long as I live. It is simply bad luck. And it can’t be the women. You’re right when you say it isn’t the women. Does it always have to be the fault of the poor women when men get into trouble? Why don’t we think about this more simply? Can’t it just be someone’s character, a grain of dust in the soul?  (238)

Simon for his part, who was of course ultimately destined to share his mother’s fate, never ceases to work on himself even in times of poverty and misery. While he draws frequent attention to the effect the seasons, the weather, the landscape, and a person’s physical surroundings have on his wellbeing, his moods and his ability to cope, such things are there to be enjoyed when they are helpful and ignored when they are not.

Simon does, however, recognize a developmental psychology of adolescence, particularly in the case of boys whom he sees as almost universally destined to go through a phase of rebelliousness, irresponsibility and violent enmities, enmities such as that between himself and Kaspar before they grew up and became the closest of friends.

Walser’s second published novel, Der Gehülfe (1908), is based closely on his period as secretary and general servant to an inventor and unsuccessful entrepreneur who eventually goes bankrupt. What Walser in the guise of Joseph points to here are the extraordinary inconsistencies within the personalities of individual people. In the case of his boss, there is the man’s intelligence, competence and generosity on the one hand and his total inability to deal rationally and effectively with his financial problems on the other. In the case of his wife, it is her ladylike and dignified kindness as opposed to the irrational hatred she bears one of her little daughters. It is clear to Joseph that the child is already severely affected by the cruel treatment she constantly has to endure. Though Joseph draws the mother’s attention to all this, she seems to have no wish or ability to change her behavior, perhaps, he suggests, because the hated child resembles herself unflatteringly. To his horror, Joseph himself then notices that he too is favoring the favored child: an expectation of kindness, he realizes, attracts kindness. Joseph’s impulse here is not to be simply an observer and unscrupulous supporter of wrongdoing, but to intervene and enlighten. It seems he has taken to heart Hedwig’s criticisms from the earlier novel. Unfortunately, his subordinate and dependent position in this household makes effective intervention almost impossible. All the same, though he is very aware of their faults, Joseph finds that he is genuinely fond of both husband and wife and grateful for their generosity and companionship.

Even in Der Gehülfe, Walser is still promoting what I have called his psychological Impressionism, his belief in unique, complex, unpredictable and lovable characters who must, however, learn to take responsibility for themselves and their problems. This implies a belief in free will and human pride, along with a love of the infinitely fascinating and beautiful variability of the world. But the oncoming age, an age of one issue ideologies (in the case of Freud based on the preeminence of sexuality, in Lenin’s of class and in Hitler’s then of race ), the age of dictatorships (in the case of Freud we have the dictatorship of the psychoanalyst for whom a patient’s intuitions can only ever be deviously false), the age of myths (be they of Oedipus, or a classless society, or Germanic superiority), and the age of pseudo-science and declamatory posters was gaining ascendency in Europe. In literature, this was the Age of Expressionism, with its love of theories and abstractions and exaggerations and simplifications, its pathos and propaganda, so different from all that Walser had aspired to. In 1913 Robert Walser made the decision to return to provincial Switzerland.