Microscripts »

Robert Walser (1878-1956) was born in Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence working as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant while producing essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium—where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad."

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

W. G. Sebald called Robert Walser “a clairvoyant of the small,” and nowhere is the phrase more apt than in his “microscripts.”

Secrets, Not Code: On Robert Walser's Microscripts Susan Bernofsky 9

Microscripts Susan Bernofsky

Radio 23

Swine 27

If I am properly informed 34

What a nice writer I ran into not long ago 35

The Songstress 36

The Demanding Fellow 38

Somewhere and somewhen 40

The Train Station (II) 42

Crisis 45

So here was a book again 49

Is it perhaps my immaturity 53

The Prodigal Son 54

Usually I first put on a prose piece jacket 59

My subject here is a victor 65

A will to shake that refined individual 69

He numbered, as might well have been true 71

Journey to a Small Town 75

The Marriage Proposal 83

Autumn (II) 87

A Sort of Cleopatra 91

The failure to prize the chance 95

As I was instructed by a book 99

Schnapps 101

New Year's Page 105

Robert Walser Walter Benjamin 109

About the Microscripts 115

About the German Texts 118

Original German texts transcribed Bernhard Echte Werner Morlang 119

Notes 155

Acknowledgments 159