Walks With Walser by Carl Seelig & Anne Posten

Author:Carl Seelig & Anne Posten [Seelig, Carl & Posten, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780811221405
Google: 33WbDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 34746207
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1977-03-14T08:00:00+00:00

April 9, 1945

A fine blue early spring day, as imagined by Mörike:

I see the clouds changing and the river

The sun’s golden kiss pierces

Deep into my veins;

My eyes, wonderfully drunk,

Sink as if falling asleep;

Only my ear keeps listening to sound of the bees.

Robert is waiting for me in a new Marengo suit that his sister Fanny gave him for Christmas. His hair is cut short. I say how young he looks today. He smiles, pleased, but speaks little on the way to St. Fiden. We turn right onto the street to Speicherschwendi. It is comfortingly lonesome. A farmer, herding a few goats into the city; a schoolboy shoveling horse manure for his two-wheeled cart; a peddler woman with stringy gray hair lugging a little notions shop on her round back. The reflection of light on a bubbling silver woodland brook, the scattered homesteads in the curved landscape, and the view of Lake Constance in the dull gray distance make Robert almost reverent: “This is the strangest time, early spring, when everything is full of promise and full of tender hope! How easy it is to hike now! It’s no longer cold, but not yet warm, the birds awaken and sing, clouds roam with us, and people’s faces finally look a little brighter.”

We have a morning snack in Rehetobel. I ask a man in the pub about Egon Z. . . . He says he’s been locked up in the Thurgau insane asylum for several years now. His father was far too strict with him. Egon was sent to first grade at five years old; later the long walk to Trogen for school every day — it took an enormous toll on his nerves. Robert listens with interest. Afterward we climb down into the wooded gorge, on whose far side Trogen lies. Far above us, a dogfight. The farmers stop their work and stare at the sky. Robert, on the other hand, turns to the fir trees and flowers, the clean little Appenzell houses and the steep rocky slopes. For him the whole morning walk is one great delight.

Lunch at Schäfli in Trogen. We both have a huge appetite and clean every plate: the oatmeal soup, the bratwursts, the mashed potatoes, the beans, and the pear compote. At the neighboring table a few soldiers are talking of the collapse of Nazi power. Robert remarks to me: “At some point this silly Hitler-worship had to come home to roost. Anyone exalted to the skies the way he was must eventually fall into the abyss. Hitler hypnotized himself into a cynical complacency, which left no room whatsoever for the well-being of the people.” Then he thinks of Raimund’s The Spendthrift, which he once saw in Berlin with sets by his brother Karl. Girardi played the master carpenter Valentin, who takes in the poverty-stricken count whose servant he once was: “I can still hear his ‘Song of the Plane.’ ” Later, in Bern, he had seen Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene, which strongly reminded him of Schiller’s Intrigue and Love.

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