Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky

Author:Susan Bernofsky [Bernofsky, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Biography, History
ISBN: 9780300220643
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-05-24T23:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

The Aftermath of War

1917–1920

DURING THE WAR, Robert lost a brother. The deceased was not a war casualty, unless you count the inner war he’d been fighting for years. Ernst Walser, who’d entered Waldau Asylum in 1898, died there on November 17, 1916, at the age of forty-three. The news of his death arrived in the middle of Robert’s work frenzy that fall, and while he left his desk long enough to gather with his siblings to remember their departed brother, he soon returned to his “writing room, or room of phantoms.”1 Much as Ernst’s life and death were on his mind, he didn’t use them as material. Somehow Karl’s early indiscretions and Lisa’s heartbreak seemed fairer game than the fate of this unhappy brother whose mind had come apart at the seams. Robert’s siblings had been horrified when he described Ernst’s institutionalization in The Tanners nearly a decade before. Now he left the story alone.

For Robert, Ernst’s death marked the beginning of a protracted season of loss that would persist throughout the war years and beyond. This would prove to be a decisive period in his life, his last best chance to resurrect his career even as Europe was descending ever deeper into chaos. He understood all too well that merely continuing to publish stories and essays in magazines and newspapers was no longer enough to keep him financially afloat nor to raise his profile as a writer. More than ever, he needed book publications—which might mean a collection of his shorter writings but should, as he saw it, mean a novel, his first since Jakob von Gunten. If in Berlin he had felt himself crumbling under the expectation that he produce another novel, now he was discovering it was just as hard to write a book when no one was pressuring him at all.

For all his recent industry, Robert’s income remained low while his expenses, especially for food, were rapidly mounting. Even in neutral Switzerland, inflation was now at 16 percent and rising, and the war was causing significant supply-chain interruptions. Before the war, 85 percent of the grain baked into Switzerland’s bread had been imported, along with most of the fodder for the cows producing the country’s all-important milk supply. Now bread prices soared, nearly doubling over the course of the war, and meat was rising even higher. Milk grew scarce in 1916 following a weak hay harvest and frigid spring, making cheese scarce as well. Rationing began in 1917 for key food items, with shortages developing in cities especially. Robert was less and less reticent about sending Frieda Mermet explicit requests for tea, sugar, cheese, and other items. Wood and coal were running low by winter 1917, with the Hotel Blaues Kreuz in danger of running out.2

On July 16, 1917, Robert was deployed again, this time to the mountainous Italian border in Switzerland’s Ticino region, whose climate was mild enough for palm trees and magnolias to grow amid an Alpine landscape of enormous scale and grandeur. From

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