Robert Walser

Walser left school at fourteen for a series of menial jobs (bank clerk, copyist, butler, insurance clerk), following his brother Karl, a stage designer, into Berlin's turn-of-the-century art world without ever fully belonging to it. He wrote constantly around these jobs: novels, but far more often brief, glancing prose pieces sold to newspaper feuilletons, a form he treated as seriously as any novel.

Jakob von Gunten (1909), his strangest book, imagines a servant school that trains its students to want nothing and become no one: read by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin as a singular, prophetic achievement. Worsening mental health led him to enter a sanatorium voluntarily in 1929; he essentially stopped writing altogether for the rest of his life, filling his remaining decades instead with long solitary walks.

He died on Christmas Day 1956, found in the snow near the asylum at Herisau, on one of those walks.