Berlin Stories

by Robert Walser

  On Cornflower Day, when everyone struts around in blue, it became evident how much the writer of the present scientific treatise feels himself to be a good, innocent child of his times. Indeed, I have participated in each and every nice and nasty cornflower folly with joy, love, and delight, and I must have behaved, I believe, very funnily. Several proud and earnest nonparticipants cast severe looks in my direction, but me, happy me, I was as if intoxicated, and I made a pilgrimage, I must confess, while blushing, from one distillery to the next, while buying, all along the way from Münzstrasse to Motzstrasse, patriotic flowers. Clad in blue from head to foot, I seemed to myself most graceful, but what is more, I felt myself most vividly to be a respectable member of the upper classes. Oh, this sweet feeling, how it befogged me and how happy it makes me, the beautiful, yes perhaps even, depending on circumstances, noble thought that I might fling to left and right, with very graceful gestures, pennies, healthy, true, honest, honorable, well-behaved, good pennies, thereby accomplishing a goodly work. Now come what may, let it happen to me, poor devil that I am: I am pleased with myself, thoroughly so, and a feeling of peace has overcome me, I cannot express it in carefully chosen or unchosen words. In my hand, or fist, I held a thick, huge, and evidently imposing bouquet of freshly picked paper flowers, the fragrance of which captivated me. I discovered, by the way, that such flowers are sold at seven pennies a dozen. A waiter, as honest as he is stupid, who always says “Very well” when he takes an order, told me this in a series of mysterious whispers. I am always on an intimate footing with waiters and suchlike people. That’s just by the way.

  As for flower days in general, I would have to be a heartless rascal not to grasp at once the noble purport on which they rest, and therefore I leap forward as rapidly as possible and exclaim aloud: Yes, it is true, flower days are heavenly. They are not comical in the least, but have, to my feeling, a thoroughly noble and earnest character. Among us blokes or fellow beings, of course, there are still a few isolated and, it would seem, obstinate people who would scorn to wear, on a flower day, a day of peace and joy, a pleasure flower in their soul-buttonhole. We might hope that such people may soon learn better and nobler ways. As for me, as I may fortunately declare, I am radiant on flower days, with sheer flowery and flowerish satisfaction, and I am one of the most flower-encrusted persons among all those who are beautified, adorned, and beflowered. In a word, on such a Day of Plants I am like a swaying, tender plant, and on the charming Violet Day that soon is coming I shall, this I know for certain, appear in the world myself as a modest and secluded violet. For some magnanimous purpose I might even be able to transform myself into a daisy. In future, let anyone, I would here heartily plead, stick and wedge his buttercup between his lips, whether they be opened or grimly tight shut. Ears, too, are excellent props for flowers. On Cornflower Day I had stuck a cornflower behind each of my three ears, and it was most becoming. Ravishing, too, are roses, and the Rose Days soon to come. Let them descend upon me, those distinctive days, and I shall embellish my home with roses, and, sure as I’m a modern man and understand my epoch, I shall stick a rose in my nose. I can warm to Daisy Days most animatedly too, since any random fashion, absolutely any, makes of me a servant, a slave, or subject. Yet I am happy so.

  Well, even then, such odd people, who lack character, have also to exist. The main thing is: I mean to enjoy my morsel of life as well and as long as I can, and if a person finds it amusing he’ll heartily go along with any kind of nonsense; but now I turn to the most beautiful subject of all—to women. For them, for them alone, the gracious flower days were invented, composed, poeticized. If a man wallows in flowers, it’s a bit unnatural; but in every way it befits a woman to put flowers in her hair and bring flowers to a man. Such a lady or virgin flower has only to make a sign, a gesture, and at once I hurl myself at her feet, ask her, my whole body trembling with joy, how much the flower costs, and I buy it from her. Then all pale in the face I breathe a glowing kiss upon her roguish little hand, and am prepared to surrender my life for her. Yes, indeed, in this manner, and others to match, I do behave on flower days. From time to time, to refresh myself, I plunge, it is true, into a snack hall and gulp down, there and then, a potted-meat sandwich. I adore potted meat, but I adore flowers too. There are now many things that I adore. All the same, one has to do one’s duty as a citizen, nobody should make a face, nobody think he has a right to pass the flower days off with a quiet smile. They are a fact of life; but one should respect facts. Should one really?

  1911

  Translated by Christopher Middleton

  Fire

  Even in a large city, the streets after a certain advanced hour of night are relatively still. What one hears and sees are apparitions and sounds to which both our eyes and our ears have long since grown accustomed. There are none of the usual sounds. People are at home, sitting around the cozy family table, or else in bars hunkered over their beers and political discussions, or in the concert hall, reverently listening to the pieces of music being performed, or at the theater, following the suspenseful goings-on upon the brightly lit stage, or else they are standing in pairs, or in groups of three or seven on some melancholy street corner, delving into profundities, or else perhaps aimlessly walking in some direction or other. “Hey there, car!” another cries out, and somewhere there might be a poet buried in his isolated room, drunkards wandering in wretched bliss from one still to another, bawling and harassing the passersby; perhaps a horse pulling a hackney cab is collapsing somewhere, a woman fainting, a scoundrel being apprehended by the always vigilant and safety-restoring police force—and suddenly someone shouts: “Fire!” Quite close by, it seems, a fire has broken out. People were just standing around, indecisive and bored, about to accuse the hour of lacking all interest and in any case starting to feel chilled, and suddenly here’s this great novelty being presented, something unexpected to kindle our enthusiasm. Everyone lurches forward and without realizing it has already begun a conversation with whoever happens to be standing alongside, cheeks are glowing, and now people are even starting to leap and run. They’re suddenly doing something they haven’t tried in a good two years. All at once the world appears changed, expanded, thicker, and more tangible.

  A metropolis is a giant spiderweb of squares, streets, bridges, buildings, gardens, and wide, long avenues. When a fire breaks out, only the neighbors closest to the scene of the fire know of the conflagration. Indeed, in a huge city like this there can be three, four, or even five large fires in the course of a single night, far apart from one another, each one representing a disaster in its own right, an “event,” without one having even the slightest impact on the others: five suspenseful chapters of a novel, each of them self-contained, without links to the other. A metropolis is a wave-filled ocean that for the most part is still largely unknown to its own inhabitants, an impenetrable forest, an opulent, overgrown, huge, forgotten, or half-forgotten park, a thing that has been built up too extensively for it to ever again be oriented within itself. But now dozens of people are hurriedly racing to the scene of the fire. They now know approximately where the blaze is.

  And now you turn a corner and the fire is right in front of you, it looks as if it wants to leap forward to greet you; an entire street is brightly, garishly lit up by it, it resembles a sunset in the distant south, ten evenings ablaze, a host of suns setting in unison. You see the façades of buildings looking like pale-yellow paper, and the bright red glow of the fire approaches, a thick, glowing, wounded red, and beside it the street lanterns look like feebly burning damp matches. And cries ring out. It seems as if trumpets are sounding everywhere, but this is a false impression, everything is relatively quiet, it’s just that you are running, and beside you, before you and behind, others are now loping as well, and hackney cabs are trotting past, and the electric tram passes by. There is something ordinary about all of this, yet at the same time something incomprehensible. Suddenly everyone stops short as if standing before a fairy tale. What now
appears resembles a bomb effect dreamed up by an enterprising theater director.

  A thick, seemingly incessant rain of small, light sparks and embers flies out of the dark air and down into the crowded street, sowing a crop of glowing snow. At just this moment a commuter train rolls past, and it too is soon entirely covered with this peculiar snow. People are standing there incautiously gazing up into the red-dotted sky without considering that a glowing, scalding hot snowflake might strike them in the eye. The coat of a gentleman who is just riding past on the tram catches fire. This tiny conflagration, however, causes no serious harm. Still it goes on raining in this unfamiliar, unprecedented way. Involuntarily you sense how very fortunate you are to still be capable of believing in a miracle out of the Thousand and One Nights. And indeed: we feel we have suddenly been transported to the Orient and the Arabian nights when we glimpse, right in front of us, a rosily shimmering fairy palace. It is perhaps a building whose architecture has been repeatedly criticized. But at this moment it isn’t clear which is more deserving of admiration: the charm of the Venetian illumination or the unsurpassedly beautiful architecture. This fiery glow is the consummate architect.

  You find yourself being shoved this way and that, half lifted up, carried along and rocked. An immense crowd has assembled all around this roaring, hissing, flickering fire catastrophe. Will lives be lost? people wonder. Soon all are finding the throng as familiar as an intimate friendship with a dear, admirable person. Now and again hot fiery winds blow across people’s faces, new flurries of sparks rise in the air, a splendid sight. And still it burns, and so and so many people are taking in the spectacle of the flames. One or the other is about to leave, but once again his eye is drawn back to the fire, irresistibly. If you now stand up high on your toes, you can see constables on horseback. “We were just expecting you,” some young fellow remarks. Others laugh. Everyone is standing head to head, breath beside breath, feeling beside feeling, curiosity beside curiosity, body to body, and each of them still finds himself compelled to go on reading this suspenseful nature story. Automobiles in the midst of the pressing crowd. “Let’s go stand somewhere else. This corner gives me the creeps.” Words of this sort are heard. Suddenly a majestic flaming figure bursts forth from a glowing gap in the conflagration, a veritable fiery giant, and thrusts itself far out into the night air, taking the form of gently falling rain, as though something beautiful and huge was just there and now is dying out.

  More and more people keep arriving as others leave. Those departing throw themselves amusingly into the wake of the puffing, tootling cars, which helpfully bore a path through the malleable throng, making their departure possible. The electric trams are stuffed to bursting because of all the many people taking refuge in the cars. Other inquisitive faces peer out the windows of nearby buildings. And now even the elegant nocturnal party set is sending out its envoys, both female and male, bedded in hackney cabs and furs, and still the fire continues to rage. The fire’s wrath is not so easily placated, not even with streams of water, even the most sustained. You see the team of firefighters, admiring the daredevil positions they assume, yet cannot help expecting at every moment to see them succumb to smoke and flames. Now a general jostling ensues: policemen up front are pushing back the crowd! It’s difficult to keep your footing, and in the first uncertainty of your new position you grasp, as if to steady yourself, the nearest available hand, which happens to be the delightful hand of a girl, but then, like it or not, this property must be let go of.

  Is this a great calamity? Thanks to the vigilance and valor of the fire department, the extent of the loss has been reduced, but an old, memorable, venerable building has been lost, and this is loss enough. Enough charming sites from ancient times have been snatched from us by everyday life and its raucous demands, and now the fire too is helping to thin out Berlin’s statues and historical monuments. But the populace is not terribly concerned with all that “old rubbish.” A postman standing there among the crowd remarks that it’s good to have room for new things. In Berlin, he adds, things are getting too cramped anyhow—it’s terrible how it blocks the flow of traffic. A person has to head for Charlottenburg—now there’s a proper region where you can find wide, lovely, bright streets, etc.

  My companion is now urging me on, he’s cold, and both of us are meanwhile convinced that we are hungry for a nice supper. We leave, but keep turning around to look back again. The yellow, red, glowing entity behind us is still alive, displaying frightful vitality, still speaking this same fierce, furious language, still feeling the same indestructible incendiary sentiments. But my companion declares it’s getting tedious to watch the flames for so long. I concede the point. It is one of my possibly bad habits that I am constantly conceding points to my fellow man.

  1908

  Something About the Railway

  How nice it is to stand about in train stations and in a leisurely fashion observe the travelers who are arriving and going off again. Many a poor, destitute devil enjoys this pastime, for it is an amusement that costs nothing at all. Nor does it require any formalities or rules; you merely stand there, your hands possibly in your trouser pockets, a cigarette or cigar stump in your mouth, almost indecorously, and yet without attracting any particular notice, and in this way you may enjoy the liveliest and loveliest spectacle in the world, for this is a train station. Train stations in the countryside can be downright ravishing with their gardens and the little stands of trees that tend to be situated beside such buildings, but in the train stations of royal seats and capitals there’s more going on, and all this mobility is sometimes far more beautiful than all beautiful, peaceful landscapes. For the unemployed and all the various sorts of idlers that today’s industrial, artistic, and commercial life and activity at times sets out on the street, train stations and the sight of the departing and arriving trains are ideal. The ne’er-do-well has plenty of time at his disposal, and as a result he observes practically everything, he walks slowly up and down the smooth platforms, measuring out steps of noble elegance, and lets his eyes wander everywhere. What a great massing and intermingling! At the ticket windows there are often veritable public assemblies and imperiously demanding mobs, as though we found ourselves in a year of passionate revolution. Everyone wants to receive his ticket as quickly as possible, but usually he has failed to sort out the exact change in advance as admonished by the station’s solicitous management. The idler is better off: he need not run and need not fear that the express train will pull out right under his nose. “I was just about to get on when, so help me God, that black devil of a train took off right past my hat.” This is the sort of thing uttered by travelers with boarding intentions, but not by the person whose aim it is to blithely, quietly observe. What a pushing, pressing, shoving, racing mayhem! Ah, here’s an important train pulling in, and you stand there watching how they throw their arms about each other’s necks, how kisses are distributed left and right, how hats are waved about, how the charming heads of women blush, how hands and arms are held out to receive, how eyes light up, how servants awaiting their masters stand to attention as they catch sight of them and then swiftly relieve them of their little suitcases, packages, and all sorts of silly items.

  After two or three minutes the hubbub generally dies down, and the idler takes up position somewhere else. There is always something happening everywhere in a train station, he’s quite aware of this, and so he is not at all concerned he might have cause to suffer tedium. Not a bit of it. He goes into the third-, fourth-, sixth-, or, as far as he cares, fourteenth-class restaurant, where there are always people sitting about on the benches or chairs or at tables. He’s already accustomed to the unsavory odors to be found in such establishments, and so nothing could possibly shrink or incinerate his pleasure. The twine he’s used to bind his enjoyment to this spectacle holds firm, and now perhaps he drinks a glass of beer and converses with an honest traveling journeyman who’s sitting on his suitcase as though he were afraid someone might come along a
nd rob him of all he owns. From time to time the loiterer might venture into the first- and second-class waiting rooms so as to pay a visit, if only a brief and rather conspicuous one, to the elegance and luxury that has settled itself here in lordly comfort. Sometimes he’s chased off by a stern official wearing a railway uniform, but this does him no harm, after all, he has once again beheld something beautiful with his eyes! If he is well-dressed, he might secretly sit down here among the aristocracy and the bankers’ guild and order a cognac which he will drink intelligently and with pensive dignity while striking up a conversation with a pretty waitress clad in a folksy Oberland costume. “Express train departing for Milan in four minutes,” a by all appearances courteous employee announces; our man rises to his feet, pays his tab, and strolls casually out to have a look at this Milan departure. What excellent grooming, what ensembles! Many of the ladies boarding the train wear white veils on their hats, and their cavaliers assist them with greater or lesser degrees of skill as they get in. The train chugs off, a few handkerchiefs are waved about like little flags, the ne’er-do-well is himself departing in his thoughts, in other words he imagines sitting in an empty compartment, reading a newspaper.

  But for the moment begone with this loitering observer, whose experiences in the end are after all rather one-sided. All at once we really are sitting in one of the many trains as an actual and not just imaginary traveler, experiencing journeys that last entire days and nights. Landscapes fly past the window like movable stage sets at the theater being spun around on the revolving stage. If agreeable company is present, conversation ensues, and if not, one feels a bit vexed and proceeds to light a cigar—to the annoyance of an all too sensitive fellow traveler—and produces great quantities of smoke. Or else one has a book and would like to read a bit of it, but one cannot quite, until in the end one can. The rectangle of window keeps displaying fresh new images. You watch vineyard-covered hillsides slowly falling away, houses sinking down, trees suddenly shooting up out of the earth. Clouds and meadows alternate amicably, meaningfully. “Might you give me a light from your fire there?” someone accosts you, but given your good breeding you willingly tolerate this interruption and reply “Why, of course!,” and with pleasure distribute some of the superfluous embers. What a flying, rattling, rustling. Entire towns and villages are left behind on both sides as though they were lifeless images, and yet in these places human beings respire, horses whinny, a metalworker hammers away, a factory spins its wheel, a steer bellows, a child is crying, a person is consumed by bitter despair, two lovers secretly rejoice, boys are heading off to school, a midday meal is cooked in someone’s kitchen, a pair of unfortunate invalids lie in bed, or two men exchange blows in some wretched altercation. But the railway keeps on flying down its precisely predetermined, prearranged path and lets all the rest of human life and activity be human life and activity. At each tidy station, people get out and in, those getting out are generally received by a mother, father, brother, son, or daughter, or else by acquaintances, and those who get in nicely say “Good day” or “Good evening,” depending on where, for example, the hour hand has gotten to. And then the journey continues, crossing plains, passing by thick fir forests and splendid little garden-encircled huts for the level-crossing attendants, then passing a woodcutter on the shore of a brightly glittering lake. What lake is that, people are asking in the car. Onward. Many sit silently in their seats, surrendering to a melancholy thought or memory, a few laugh and jest, most are now eating something they have extracted from paper wrappers and boxes, and one or the other takes railway-car friendliness to the point of offering his neighbor something to eat with the calmest demeanor in the world. Thank you! But no one is even expecting to be thanked. Traveling inspires camaraderie. And how marvelous it is to ride the train in winter! Snow everywhere, snow-covered rooftops, villages, people, fields, and forests; on rainy days: dampness everywhere, fog and darkly veiled views; in the sunny springtime: blue, green, and yellow everywhere, and white blossoms. The meadows are yellow and green, sweet sunlight shimmers through the beech forest, high up in the blue sky float the gayest, whitest clouds, and in the gardens and fields there is such a blossoming, humming, and splendor that one is tempted at every station to get out and lose oneself in all this warmth, color, and beauty. And in the fall, and in the middle of summery, languid, humid high season, and again in the frosty clear winter—no, one shouldn’t be so cocky as to try to cram all of this into the brief space of a newspaper article.