27 Facts About Robert Walser

Robert Walser was a German language Swiss writer.

Robert Walser additionally worked as a copyist, an inventor's assistant, a butler, and in various other low-paying trades.

Robert Walser eventually had a nervous breakdown and spent the remainder of his life in sanatoriums.

Robert Walser attended primary school and progymnasium, which he had to leave before the final exam when his family could no longer bear the cost.

From 1892 to 1895, Robert Walser served an apprenticeship at the Bernischer Kantonalbank in Biel.

In 1895, Robert Walser went to Stuttgart where his brother Karl lived.

Robert Walser was an office worker at the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt and at the Cotta'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung; he tried, without success, to become an actor.

Until 1905, Robert Walser lived mainly in Zurich, though he often changed lodgings and lived for a time in Thun, Solothurn, Winterthur and Munich.

In 1905, he went to live in Berlin, where his brother Karl Robert Walser, who was working as a theater painter, introduced him to other figures in literature, publishing, and the theater.

Occasionally, Robert Walser worked as secretary for the artists' corporation Berliner Secession.

In Berlin, Robert Walser wrote the novels Geschwister Tanner, Der Gehulfe and Jakob von Gunten.

Robert Walser published numerous short stories in newspapers and magazines, many for instance in the Schaubuhne.

Robert Walser lived for a short time with his sister Lisa in the mental home in Bellelay, where she worked as a teacher.

In Biel, Robert Walser wrote a number of shorter stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines in Germany and Switzerland and selections of which were published in Der Spaziergang, Prosastucke, Poetenleben, Seeland and Die Rose.

Robert Walser, who had always been an enthusiastic wanderer, began to take extended walks, often by night.

Robert Walser himself became isolated in that time, when there was almost no communication with Germany because of the war.

Robert Walser often changed lodgings and lived a very solitary life.

Robert Walser wrote poems, prose, dramolettes and novels, including The Robber.

Robert Walser absorbed influences from serious literature as well as from formula fiction and retold, for example, the plot of a pulp novel in a way that the original was unrecognizable.

Robert Walser later wrote a book, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser, about their talks.

Robert Walser has been regarded as the missing link between Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka.

Robert Walser was admired early on by Kafka and writers such as Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, and Walter Benjamin, and was in fact better known during his lifetime than Kafka or Benjamin were known in theirs.

Robert Walser never belonged to a literary school or group, perhaps with the exception of the circle around the magazine Die Insel in his youth, but was a notable and often published writer before World War I and into the 1920s.

Robert Walser was rediscovered only in the 1970s, even though famous German writers such as Christian Morgenstern, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Bernhard and Hermann Hesse were among his great admirers.

Robert Walser has exerted a considerable influence on various contemporary German writers, including Ror Wolf, Peter Handke, W G Sebald, and Max Goldt.

In 2004, Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas published a novel entitled Doctor Pasavento about Robert Walser, his stay on Herisau and the wish to disappear.

In 2007, Serbian writer Vojislav V Jovanovic published a book of prose named Story for Robert Walser inspired by the life and work of Robert Walser.