Berlin Stories by Robert WalserTranslated by Susan Bernofsky and othersNew York Review of Books, 2012

In her introduction to Berlin Stories, Susan Bernofsky notes that “while we tend to call these texts “stories,” Walser himself described them as “prose pieces”; this hybrid of story and essay remained his genre of choice for most of his writing career” (xi). The pieces are short—many are just two or three pages—and they read, largely, as sketches or impressions or scenes. Most have a narrative voice that could be Walser’s own: male, young, a writer. (“The Little Berliner,” narrated by a twelve-year-old girl, is an exception.) And that narrative voice is a strong part of this book: it’s sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes sly or tongue-in-cheek, and often feels extremely precise, extremely considered. The book has four sections, arranged thematically by Walser’s German editor, Jochen Greven, and the first and third sections (“The City Streets” and “Berlin Life”) appealed to me more than the others (“The Theater” and “Looking Back”). What I liked most about this book were the city-moments, the sense of time/place/atmosphere, the briskness of Berlin streets on a cold morning or the conviviality of a restaurant or a crowded tram car or the scene of a building on fire, with onlookers multiplying by the moment. Walser is great at capturing the humanity and motion and interest of the city, as in the below two passages from “Good Morning, Giantess,” the first piece in the book:

Cold and white the streets lie there, like outstretched human arms; you trot along, rubbing your hands, and watch people coming out of the gates and doorways of their buildings, as though some impatient monster were spewing out warm, flaming saliva. You encounter eyes as you walk along like this: girls’ eyes and the eyes of men, mirthless and gay; legs are trotting behind and before you, and you too are legging along as best you can, gazing with your own eyes, glancing the same glances as everyone else. (3)

Now you are walking in the park; the motionless canals are still covered in gray ice, the meadows make you shiver, the slender, thin, bare trees chase you swiftly on with their icily quivering appearance; carts are being pushed, two stately carriages from the coach house of some person or other of official standing sweep past, each bearing two coachmen and a lackey; always there is something, and each time you wish to observe this something more closely, it’s already gone (5)

One of my favorite pieces in the book is “Something About the Railway,” in which Walser writes of the “pushing, pressing, shoving, racing mayhem” of the station, and how pleasing it is to idle there and watch everyone else rushing past (87). The piece also includes some great passages on traveling by train instead of just sitting at the station, like the two passages below:

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. (88).

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 sweet sunlight shimmers through the beech forest, high up in the blue sky float the gayest, whitest clouds, and in the garden 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 (89).

I love that – the exuberance of it. The other sections of the book sometimes felt more abstract, more concerned with talking about how people are/how society is—but there was enough glorious concrete detail in the pieces I liked to make me glad to have read this.