Berlin Stories

by Robert Walser

  People do, after all, tend to get somewhat bored on such trips, which often require twenty or thirty minutes or even more, and what do you do to provide yourself with some modicum of entertainment? You look straight ahead. To show by one’s gaze and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with a quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn’t that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead.

  It is prohibited for the conductor to converse with the esteemed passengers. But what if prohibitions are sidestepped, laws violated, admonitions of so refined and humane a nature disregarded? This happens fairly often. Chatting with the conductor offers prospects of the most charming recreation, and I am particularly adept at seizing opportunities to engage in the most amusing and profitable conversations with this tramway employee. It pays to ignore certain regulations, and summoning one’s powers to render uniforms loquacious helps create a convivial mood.

  From time to time you do nonetheless look straight ahead again. After completing this straightforward exercise, you may permit your eyes a modest excursion. Your gaze sweeps through the interior of the car, crossing fat, drooping mustaches, the face of a weary, elderly woman, a pair of youthfully mischievous eyes belonging to a girl, until you’ve had your fill of these studies in the quotidian and gradually begin to observe your own footgear, which could use proper mending. And always new stations are arriving, new streets, and the journey takes you past squares and bridges, past the war ministry and the department store, and all this while it is continuing to rain, and you continue to behave as if you were a tad bored, and you continue to find this conduct the most suitable.

  But it might also be that while you were riding along like that, you heard or saw something beautiful, gay, or sad, something you will never forget.

  1908

  The Metropolitan Street

  Some of the streets in the historic city center appear strangely deserted; a cathedral in its venerable glory, monotonous barracks, and an old castle serve only to heighten the sense of stillness and isolation. In the dimly lit, stolidly middle-class beer halls, a few evening guests sit at the tables reading newspapers; the waiter stands idle, a napkin clamped beneath his arm. In another district a few streets away, people are hurrying along shoulder to shoulder and at each other’s heels; no one is chasing them, but, as it appears, no one is beckoning them either. These hundred hurriers have similar destinations and are coming from places that very much resemble one another, and all of them maintain a measured gravity admirable in its way. The trees are strangely green, not like in other cities. A silent cemetery from olden days borders one of the busiest streets upon whose bumpy pavement hackney cabs, horse-drawn carts, and omnibuses ceaselessly roll. In various Aschinger branches, beer is ceaselessly poured into glasses, and all these glasses being filled one after the other find takers and drinkers. The managers of these places of entertainment comport themselves like officers on the field of battle, and officers are seen going about their business, silent, staid, sedate, and modest, as though they’ve tired of putting on a show of valor, as is surely the case for some of them. When you cross from one sidewalk to the other, you must take care not to get run over, but this caretaking goes unnoticed, it has become a habit. How this great city both hinders and feeds on the movements of human beings. People who live in its northern districts have gone perhaps a full year now without setting eyes on the bright, elegant districts to the west, and it’s difficult to see what might prompt a lady residing in a western district to visit the neighborhood surrounding Schlesischer Bahnhof in the east unless she had some quite particular cause.

  You rarely see the frail and infirm hereabouts, and this is no doubt above all because invalids and the weary have every reason to avoid this constant stream of traffic and instead keep to the quiet of home. The people you find circulating on the street are more or less hardy and energetic, and display a gay-hearted vivacity, if only because they sense that propriety requires this, and because all who live and walk here rise to the occasion with a certain unobtrusive courtesy. Sulky or despondent persons are forced to dampen their sulkiness and despondency if only out of purely practical considerations; hotheads are compelled to cool their heads; an individual tempted to laugh aloud for sheer delight instantly comprehends that this is not allowed; and one whose eyes well up with tears quickly turns to gaze into a shop window as if oh so fascinated by what he sees there. The flirt avails himself of the simplest and at the same time subtlest measures. Although you might have the impression that strangers shy away from one another in the streets and squares and trams, assiduously avoiding every contact or emotion, a great many lovely, sweet exchanges do nonetheless occur, more than the observer might suspect or the nonlocal manage to observe, precisely because the one undertaking or planning something acts as though he were just aimlessly daydreaming or pondering. Should some minor unpleasantness occur—be it that a horse loses its footing on ground often smooth as glass and falls, be it that a brawl or something of the sort erupts—a generally attractive clutch of onlookers immediately gathers about the novelty, responding neither with indifference nor with any sort of vehemence to the interruption.

  Everything is clean. Shop windows gleam with the same meticulous cleanliness as the utterances of the people, the schooled and unschooled alike; the maidservant takes on the bearing of her employer, and the lady of the house leaves all dignity and aloofness behind when she exits the door of her home. The droll, innocent schoolboy brings his report card home on the very same “electric” that is also transporting the harlot or a person who is using this time to hatch criminal plans, and not one of them bristles at the others’ presence. Many eyes shine with secret longing, many lips are pressed tightly together, many souls are trembling, but everything wishes to be seemly and correct, to take its logical course; everything can and will preserve itself. The streets resemble one another just as human destinies do, and yet every street has its own character, and you can never compare one destiny to another. As for elegance, one generally seeks and understands it best by choosing not to cultivate it; the greatest charm of elegance lies in a certain negligence, approximately like the noblesse of thought and feeling that is lost the moment it begins to struggle for expression, or like style in language, which fails when it tries to come to the fore.

  In the greatness and pride of this city lies a certain unmistakable stillness; and all its sounds are crowned with a soundlessness so powerful that when a person has spent some time in rural silence and retirement, he longs to hear it once more to refresh his soul. And it is clear beyond all doubt that in the metropolis a pronounced need to avoid all superfluous rushing and haste predominates. Eating and drinking well count for a great deal here; the hungry feel anger toward their fellow men and therefore are always running up against others everywhere they go, be it with a sharp elbow or the scowls on their aggrieved, disgruntled faces. Disgruntlement is an enemy of mankind and also of the pointlessly languishing disgruntled person himself, and because it is impossible to avoid this feeling when many people find themselves pressed together in close proximity, one might say that every city, once it grows into a metropolis, gradually rids itself of this or that percentage of the annoyance that fruitlessly grieves and groans out its days there, as grudging grievers generally cannot stomach the company of others. Oh, certainly! Often we are filled with anger, fury, or hatred, but then we go and dilute ourselves, in other words seek out human company, and behold: the ills afflicting our souls quickly vanish. A sort of noble, far-seeing socialism is gaining ground here in a quite natural way, and class hatred appears no longer to exist outside the newspapers that paint its portrait. Every lowly worker or day laborer who excels in mental and physical health can calmly triumph, noting the appearance of wealthy folk who suffer physical complaints,
a circumstance they are often unable to conceal; and so it is the sickly, not the poor who must be pitied, and the disenfranchised are the ones in poor health, not those who happen to have lowly origins. The metropolitan street teaches us this lesson quite convincingly. Oh Lord, enough for now, I have to go out, have to leap down into the world, I can’t stand it any longer, I have got to go laugh in someone’s face, I must go for a walk. Ah, how lovely, how very lovely it is to be alive.

  1910

  The Theater

  The Theater, a Dream

  The theater is a like a dream. In the Greek theater, things might have been different; ours is mysteriously, exotically enclosed in a roof-covered, dark building. You go inside, and then a few hours later you emerge again as if from a peculiar slumber, returning to nature and to real life, and the dream is dispelled.

  In this dream, the images rising up before the eye—which might be the soul’s eye—have something sharp and firmly sketched about them. Natural spatial perspectives, actual ground beneath one’s feet, and fresh air do not exist here. You inhale bedroom air while striding across mountains like the man with Seven League Boots. 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.

  Our theater is like a dream, and it has every reason to become even more like one. In Germany everything wants to be enveloped and enclosed, everything wants to have a roof. Even the poor, pompous works of sculpture in our gardens are dreams—but for the most part these dreams are frozen. It’s a well-known fact how bad we are at public monuments. Amid the wafting breezes of freedom, we find ourselves devoid of talent. We’d rather step into a dear, dreamlike, strange building where we encounter our true breezes, our true nature. Why are we so skilled at hosting Christmas festivities, why are we happy to sit in a warm room and watch as it snows, gusts, blusters, or rains outdoors? We so like to spend time in dark, introspective holes. This penchant is not itself a weakness; our weakness is that we feel ashamed of it.

  Are not works of literature also dreams, and is the open stage anything other than their wide-open mouth speaking as if in sleep? During the taxing day, we drive our business interests and useful intentions before us through the streets and various establishments, and then we assemble in these narrow rows of seats, like narrow beds, to gaze and hear; the curtain—the lip of this mouth—springs open, and we find ourselves being disconcertingly yet also intimately addressed, roaringly, hissingly, with flickering tongues and smiles, which fills us with a frenzy we wouldn’t wish to subdue, nor would we be able to; it makes us writhe with laughter or else tremble with heartfelt tears. The images blaze and burn before our eyes, the figures in the play move before us like unnaturally large, unfamiliar apparitions. The bedroom is dark, only the open dream is resplendent in the bright lights—dazzling, speaking—and we are compelled to sit there with open mouths.

  How melodious are the colors in a dream! They seem to be turning into faces, and suddenly a color threatens, sobs, sings, or smiles; a river becomes a horse, and the horse is about to climb a narrow staircase with its hoofed feet; the knight is forcing it, he is being pursued, they intend to tear his heart from his body, they are getting closer, in the distance you can see the murderers racing toward him, a nameless fear seizes you—the curtain falls. An earthquake strikes a municipal square, the buildings sink and tilt, the air appears to be splattered with blood, fiery-red wounds are hanging everywhere; people are firing their rifles, meaning to compete with nature in murderousness; all the while the sky is a sweet pale blue, but it lies so childishly above the buildings, like a painted sky. This bleeding is like small roses being thrown about; the buildings keep falling and yet they stand, and constantly there is a horrific screaming and the crack of rifle fire and yet there is none. Oh, how divinely this dream is playacting! It presents incontestably pure images of the horrific, but also of sweetness, oppression, melancholy, and anxious remembrance. It instantly paints settings to match sentiments, persons, and sounds, supplementing the sweet prattling of a virtuous woman with her face, giving snakes the strange weeds from which they horrifically slither forth; the cries of the drowning the dreary evening landscape of river and shore; and a smile the mouth that expresses it.

  Amid dark-green bushes, white faces lean out, each with a request, a plaint or with hatred in its horrifically clear eyes. Sometimes we see only features, lines, sometimes only eyes; then the pale features come and frame these eyes, then come the wild black waves of hair and bury the face; then once more there is only a voice, then a door opens; two figures charge in, you try to wake up, but the inexorable charging-in continues. There are moments in a dream whose memory stays with us as long as we live.

  This is the effect of the theater too with its figures, words, notes, sounds, and colors. Who would wish to see a delightful love scene minus the opulently overgrown garden in which it occurs, a murder without the dark wall of the alleyway, a scream without the window through which it rings out, the window without the delicate and feminine white curtain that makes it a window, lending it magic and yet also naturalism? Snowy landscapes, nocturnal ones, lie upon the stage in such a way as to make one believe they extend and stretch for miles; a train with red-shimmering windows passes by, quite slowly, as though it were wending and winding its way far off into the distance, where the swift does not insist on receding swiftly from the eye. The distant and the near lie side by side in the theater. Two scoundrels are always whispering too loudly; the noble gentleman hears it all, and yet he pretends utter ignorance. This is what is so dreamlike, so truly untrue, so poignant, and in the end so beautiful. How beautiful it is when two men whisper to each other at the top of their lungs while the expression of the other one says to us: how quiet it is all around me!

  Such things are like the gruesome and beautiful stories in dreams. The stage does its utmost to terrify; it does well to have such aims, and we do well to foster that something within us that allows us to be receptive to the pleasure and frisson this terror brings.

  1907

  A Person Possessed of Curiosity

  What plays will be put on this winter, what protagonists will walk the stage, what manner of authors will be heard from, and with the help of what sorts of wires will performances be launched in all the theaters of the capital? That is the—once again, as it appears to me—not entirely uncrucial question. Probably there will be a play by Hauptmann, one by Sudermann, and one by Wedekind, and apropos one by Hofmannsthal, and I must confess that it didn’t cost me much mental exertion to be compelled to trumpet out all of this. But will there also be some new name emerging from the vast shadows of as-yet-unknownness, will novelties be served up? Let me venture to assume so and to believe that we shall have sparks rained down upon us by luminaries in the southeast. What will Reinhardt be putting on? Will he have some good trumps to play, and what are our best-known critics currently up to? Are they still sitting at the edge of the woods reading books or smoking pipes? Soon they will have to come flitting this way at a proper clip, for things here are about to heat up, and we shall have heartfelt need of this cooling fire brigade. What are the actors doing? Where are their not yet burnt-out Vesuviuses of creative verve to be found? Be careful there with your sunshiny high spirits and flames of enthusiasm! People are already standing here in formation with their pointy water hoses�
��i.e., pens—behind their ears, ready to give you a good squirting should you overestimate your own achievement. Where is youth, and where are the undiscovered talents, and where, if this query meets with approval, are the esteemed high- and lowborn dramaturges currently traveling? I believe I see one of them strolling up and down the lively streets of Copenhagen on the arm of a pretty wench. They should watch out or someone might take them down a notch. Soon this luxuriant summer world will, thank God, have come to an end, and what I meant to ask was: When is the first important premiere, on what day will it take place, and will it be thrilling? I do hope so, for I am of the sort who lick their lips at the prospect of premiere night, which they quite possibly expect to be a banquet. Not that I’d say I enjoy it when a playwright is hissed and decried, but I do enjoy it all the same, as there is always some enjoyment to be found in the lamentable.

  When will the curtain rise for the first time to allow us to gaze down upon uplifting scenes? Will there be much that uplifts? I’d like to hope there will also be, now and again, something degrading to be seen, something shameless, so to speak, since it must after all be reckoned among the secret pleasures of a theatergoer to be permitted to find sufficient grounds to blush. Things should prick and prickle a bit, otherwise it might get dull, and after all, there are always people who enjoy this, as well as some who are swiftly inclined to find everything tedious. Did the stage-set painters give their brushes a proper cleaning during the vacation? Is there oil in the lamps? Are there innovations with regard to the lighting? But this is perhaps significantly less important than the breathless question of how things stand with the actors’ gestures. It’s to be hoped that one or the other of the individuals in question has smoothed his rough edges a little, and as for the noble dexterity of tongue, we are expecting miracles this year: