“Walser ist in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung bis heute der Schriftsteller als Spaziergänger als Schriftsteller geblieben” (Gisi 202). Lucas Marco Gisi’s observation could well be placed at the opening of “Spazieren muss ich unbedingt” as a kind of epigraph, summing up the point of departure for the volume, the guiding thread that runs through the eighteen essays gathered here. Originally presented at an international conference that gave the volume its name, the essays all touch upon walking as physical activity or trope, taking up the topic—most often in relation to Walser’s Der Spaziergang— from a variety of approaches. Walser’s story of course occupies a central place in his work and figures as one of the touchstones for the growing body of criticism, in German and in English, on him, making the collection indispensable for Walser scholars as well as those of twentieth-century literature written in German more broadly. (It is worth noting that thirteen of the essays are written in German, five in English.) Those interested in the literature of walking, flânerie, and topics around the “culture of walking” broadly speaking will also find much of interest here. Taken together, the essays gathered in “Spazieren muss ich unbedingt” offer a valuable, if sometimes uneven, contribution to Walser, the writer as walker as writer, and to walking as cultural and especially literary phenomenon.
The tremendous variety of contributions to the volume is one of its strengths. Along with essays that aim to understand how the past in Walser’s texts, rather than being “etwas Abgeschlossenes, Vergangenes […] wird zur ‘Jetztzeit’” (Sorg 7), there are explorations of Lucius Burckhardt and the development of “Spaziergangswissenschaft” (Markus Ritter). Along with considerations of the confluence of physical and narrative Fortschreiten in Lessing (Nicholas Rennie), there is a careful, innovative reading that dislocates—rather than joins—walking and writing (Rochelle Tobias). And along with a detailing of Walser’s surprisingly numerous architectural musings and encounters (Hans-Georg von Arburg), there is a rethinking of his status as a Modern writer in terms of “speed politics” (Anne Fuchs). In short, the contributions offer an array of approaches that give a sense of the richness of Walser’s master story, and also of how profoundly his walking—and writing and thinking about walking— shape scholarship.
Yet this variety, this diversity of topics and approaches, is not without its drawbacks. The volume lacks any clear through line, whether argumentative, historical or other. This is not a problem in itself, though there are missed opportunities for particular essays to be placed in conversation with one another. Most notably, perhaps, two essays deal—each capably in its own manner—with the different versions of Der Spaziergang. Yet, Dorette Fasoletti’s methodical analysis of these versions is separated by two essays from Susan Bernofsky’s fascinating account of her translation of the second version of the story, which is to say, her revision of Christopher Middleton’s masterly translation of the first version. Similarly, Damion Searls’s account of visual ornament, the arabesque in particular, might have played off Marie Kakinuma’s quite fascinating account of the relationship—sometimes direct, sometimes more metaphorical—between Walser and Paul Klee. The two articles, after all, take up the visual: how lines—of drawing or writing—go for a walk and how the walk traces a line, however unprogrammable.
Rather than having these essays side-by-side to read together, then, the reader is left to make these kinds of connections. And rather than the editors grouping the essays into sections around topics or approaches, for example, we are left to make those groupings ourselves. This too has its advantages, leaving the reader free to walk among the essays at will, dipping in here, taking a stroll there, rather than being led straight through, directed how to read the collection. This makes possible, too, one of the most fascinating aspects of the collection: the re-emergence, unannounced and unexpected, of key passages, tropes, or scenes from Der Spaziergang in different essays and so from different approaches. Thus, for instance, the “Höhepunkt” of the story, the crossing of the railway bridge, emerges as part of Bernhard Malkmus’s analysis of the “Weg zu den Dingen zurück” (84) of Walserian perception and also in Peter Utz’s essay (59), among others, and the giant Tomzack appears in numerous contributions, each time in a different light.
Ultimately, the strength of the collection is that of the individual essays. To my mind, the strongest contributions are those that manage the delicate balance of close, careful, and patient readings of the text under discussion, on the one hand, and, on the other, opening it up to questions that lead both further into it and also beyond it, reverberating elsewhere in Walser, in the history of literature, or in more theoretical terms. Among these, I would count Tobias’s and Bernofsky’s essays, as well as Luisa Banki’s intriguing reading of “asemantischen Signifikanz und der semantischen Bedeutung” (101) and Andreas Langenbacher’s brilliant exposition of the letter O, the graphic sign of Walser’s figure of the fish-mouth and of the at once expressive and empty capacity of language and the self, which finds itself with surprising regularity walking alongside walking. Samuel Frederick’s thorough and thoughtful account of collecting as a paradoxical act of redemption that functions by destroying the thing saved is another high point, as is Pfeifer’s insightful intervention into the limitation placed upon walking and the experience of self when the walker is a woman. Marcus Steinweg’s closing meditations on Walser are brilliantly concise and incisive, close to epigrammatic, with a punch that almost matches that of Walter Benjamin, often Steinweg’s point of departure. And Utz’s essay could well take its place alongside his seminal Tanz auf den Rändern. Robert Walsers “Jetztzeitstil” (Frankfurt, 1998) and his no less indispensable essay on Jakob von Gunten (“Robert Walsers Jakob von Gunten,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 2000) as among the very best pieces on their particular corner of Walser studies.
The impression one is left with from the volume is most of all that of Walser himself—as a writer who seems increasingly to elicit varied scholarly work, because his work is itself varied, but perhaps most of all as an enigmatic writer. Just over 100 years after its first publication, Der Spaziergang provides the occasion, the impetus, for thinking that is often of the very first order, for meanderings and wanderings, for perambulations and strolls that take us through nature and through the city, but most of all through writing that increasingly is receiving the kind of broad, insightful reception it is due.
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