The Tanners Read Online Free PDF

all
     events, it was not an auspicious start, and one could say that in 1909, looking
     through the eyes of Haroun al Rashid, Walser saw far into the future; and he will
     hardly have been less far-sighted as the 1920s drew to a close. The Robber, whose
     whole disposition was that of a liberal free-thinker and republican,
also
became soulsick on account of the looming clouds darkening the political horizon.
     The exact diagnosis of his illness is of little relevance. It is enough for us to
     understand that, in the end, Walser simply could not go on, and, like Hölderlin, had
     to resort to keeping people at arm's length with a sort of anarchic politeness,
     becoming refractory and abusive, making scenes in public and believing that the
     bourgeois city of Berne, of all places, was a city of ghostly gesticulators,
     executing rapid hand movements directly in front of his face expressly in order to
     discombobulate him and to dismiss him out of hand as one who simply does not count.
     During his years in Berne Walser was almost completely isolated. The contempt was,
     as he feared, universal. Among the few who still concerned themselves with him was
     the schoolteacher (and poet) Emil Schibli, with whom he stayed for a few days in
     1927. In a description of his meeting with Walser published in the
Seeländer
     Volksstimme
. Schibli claims to have recognised, in this lonely poet in the
     guise of a tramp and suffering from profound isolation, a king in hiding "whom
     posterity will call, if not one of the great, then one of rare purity." While Walser
     was no stranger to the evangelical desire to possess nothing and to give away
     everything one owns––as in
The Robber
––he made no claim to any kind of
     messianic calling. It was enough for him to call himself––with bitterly resigned
     irony––at least the ninth-best writer in the Helvetic Federation. We, though, can
     grant Walser the honorific title with which he endows the Robber and to which in
     fact he himself is entitled, namely the son of a first secretary to the canton.
    The first prose work I read by Robert Walser was his piece on Kleist in
     Thun, where he talks of the torment of someone despairing himself and his craft, and
     of the intoxicating beauty of the surrounding landscape. "Kleist sits on a
     churchyard wall. Everything is damp, yet also sultry. He opens his shirt, to breathe
     freely. Below him lies the lake, as if it had been hurled down by the great hand of
     a god, incandescent with shades of yellow and red […] The Alps have come to life and
     dip with fabulous gestures their foreheads into the water." Time and again I have
     immersed myself in the few pages of this story and, taking it as a starting point,
     have undertaken now shorter, now longer excursions into the rest of Walser's work.
     Among my early encounters with Walser I count the discovery I made, in an antiquarian
     bookshop in Machest in the second half of the 1960s––inserted in a copy of
     Bächtold's three-volume biography of Gottfried Keller which had almost certainly
     belonged to a German-Jewish refugee––of an attractive sepia photograph depicting the
     house on the island in the Aare, completely surround by shrubs and trees, in which
     Kleist worked on his drama of madness
Die Familie Ghonorez
before he,
     himself sick, had to commit himself to the care of Dr. Wyttenbach in Berne.

    Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected
     across space and time, the life of Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss
     author who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a
     pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum,
     Walser's long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death,
     happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that
     of
Heimat
with that of exile. On all these paths Walser has been my
     constant companion. I only need to