Robert Walser’s Forests

The favourite landscapes of the great wanderer Robert Walser definitely include forests. He found them in both his native Switzerland as well as in books, Romantic ones at that: Tieck’s Waldeinsamkeit (literally: »forest loneliness«) and Eichendorff’s Selbstvergessenheit (self-forgetfulness) pulsate through mountain or common forests.

Walser’s forest texts stage places of gentle disappearance, of pleasant quiet and the standstill of time. In them you meet erotic forest women, travellers and robbers, the eerie, no one – or yourself. On detours they lead to colourful forest celebrations or blazing forest fires but also to clearings on which inns invite the forest rambler to make a stop.

This anthology collects prose sketches and poems from the early texts created around 1900 up until the late time of the Microscripts in chronological order.

»Time and again the mysterious Rober Walser has to be discovered anew.« Roman Bucheli, Neue Zürcher Zeitung