Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories

Today is the publication date for Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, a collection of his early stories, with some later ones as well, set in Berlin where he followed his elder brother in 1905, translated by Susan Bernofsky and others including Christopher Middleton. We thought we’d share the first story in the book, titled “Good Morning, Giantess!”:

It’s as if a giantess were shaking her curls and sticking one leg out
of bed when—early in the morning, before even the electric trams
are running, and driven by some duty or other—you venture out
into the metropolis. 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. And
each breast bears some somnolent secret, each head is haunted by
some melancholy or inspiring thought. Splendid, splendid. So it is a
cold morning—half sunny, half gray—and many, many people are
still snug in their beds: revelers who’ve lived and adventured their
way though the entire night and half the morning, refined persons
who make it a habit to arise late, lazy dogs that wake up, give a yawn,
and go back to snoring twenty times in a row, graybeards and invalids
who can no longer get up at all or only with difficulty, women
who have loved, artists who say to themselves: Get up early? What
rubbish!, the children of wealthy, beautiful parents—fabulously
coddled, sheltered creatures who go on sleeping in their own little
rooms behind snow-white curtains, their little mouths open, immersed
in fairy-tale dreams until nine, ten, or eleven o’clock. At such
an early hour of morning, the wild maze of streets is all a-skitter and
a-scurry with if not stage-set painters, then at least paperhangers,
clerks who copy addresses, paltry insignificant middlemen, as well as
persons intending to catch an early train to Vienna, Munich, Paris,
or Hamburg, for the most part people of no significance, girls from
all possible spheres of employment, working girls, in other words.
Anyone observing this hubbub will have no choice but to declare it
exceptional. He then walks along like this and is almost taken up by
a compulsion to join in this running, this gasping haste, swinging
his arms to and fro; the bustle and activity are just so contagious—
the way a beautiful smile can be contagious. Well no, not like that.
The early morning is something completely different. It flings, for
example, one last pair of grimily clad night owls with loathsomely
red-painted faces out of their barrooms and onto the blinding, dusty
white street where they loiter, stupefied, for quite some time with
their crooked sticks over their shoulders, annoying the passersby.
How the drunken night shines forth from their sullied eyes! Onward,
onward. That blue-eyed marvel, the early morning, has no
time to waste on drunkards. It has a thousand shimmering threads
with which it draws you on; it pushes you from behind and smiles
coaxingly from the front. You glance up to where a whitish, veiled
sky is letting a few scraps of blue peek out; behind you, to gaze after
a person who interests you; beside you, at an opulent portal behind
which a regal palace morosely, elegantly towers up. Statues beckon
you from gardens and parks; still you keep on walking, giving everything a passing glance: things in motion and things fixed in place,
hackney cabs indolently lumbering along, the electric tram just now
starting its run, from whose windows human eyes regard you, a constable’s idiotic helmet, a person with tattered shoes and trousers, a
person of no doubt erstwhile high standing who is sweeping the
street in a top hat and fur coat; you glance at everything, just as you
yourself are a fleeting target for all these other eyes. That is what is so
miraculous about a city: that each person’s bearing and conduct vanishes among all these thousand types, that everything is observed in
passing, judgments made in an instant, and forgetting a matter of
course. Past. What’s gone past? A façade from the Empire period?
Where? Back there? Could a person possibly decide to turn around
once more so as to give the old architecture a supplementary glance?
Good heavens, no. Onward, onward. The chest expands, the giantess
Metropolis has just, with the most voluptuous leisureliness,
pulled on her sun-shimmery chemise. A giantess like this doesn’t
dress so quickly; but each of her beautiful, huge motions is fragrant
and steams and pounds and peals. Hackney cabs with American
luggage on top clatter past mangling the language. 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. Naturally you
have a large number of thoughts during your one-hour march, you
are a poet and can practice your art without removing your hands
from the pockets of your—let us hope—respectable overcoat, you
are a painter and perhaps have already finished five pictures during
your morning stroll. You are an aristocrat, hero, lion tamer, Socialist,
African explorer, ballet dancer, gymnast, or bartender, and
you’ve fleetingly dreamed just now of having been introduced to the
Kaiser. He climbed down from his throne and drew you into a
friendly half-hour chat in which his lady the Empress may also have
taken part. In your thoughts you rode the metropolitan railway, tore
the laurel wreath from Dernburg’s brow, got married and settled
down in a village in Switzerland, wrote a stage-worthy drama—jolly,
jolly, onward, hey there, what? Could that be … ? Indeed, then you
ran into your colleague Kitsch, and the two of you went home together
for a cup of chocolate.