The Tanners

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.