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28 December 1944
A bitter cold, bright winter morning. In the passageway we discuss where to go. Robert, without an overcoat, blue hands and cheeks, white stubble round his chin, asked, half joking, half suspicious, if I'd brought an itinerary: "Have you anything planned?" "No, nothing." "How about Appenzell?" "No, that's too far for today. Do we want to climb or go to St. Gallen?" "How about the city?" "Yes!" "Let's go!"
After a few steps, Robert: "Let's slow down; we don't want to chase after the beautiful, but have it with us, like a mother her child." "Then you should have dressed warmer, Herr Walser!" "I'm well padded with warm underwear. My topcoat’s a horror. I had one like yours, incidentally, in Berlin, when I fell into a life of luxury. Later in Biel when I lived in the same little room in the Blauen Kreuz where I'd lived before, I never heated it, even during the bitterest cold. I wore my army jacket and worked in that, no better or no worse than people sitting by the stove. On my feet I wore a kind of slipper that I made from old scraps of clothing."
Robert: "People today have become too demanding. The war has at least had the good effect that people are compelled to live more simply. Could we chat so peacefully, without the stink of gasoline and cursing drivers, if fuel wasn't rationed? People travel too much. Packs of people break into new regions, as if they were the real owners."
We stride out in the direction of Abtwil. The frost-covered hedges hang in the air like fishermen's nets in the watercolor landscape. It looked as though any minute the trees could float away like balloons. Occasionally a farmer or farm wife, improbably small, almost gnome-like in the quiet. Sometimes we'd be shrouded by fog for minutes at a time. Then the sun would burst through like a ball hanging in the south. A lane of poplars. Cherry red berries are still hanging on a rowan tree. Windows of several farms flash from a hill when the fog clears a bit: silvery eyes that drew Robert magically. He asked a number of times: "Do we want to go up there?" "Why not?" I would say. "What makes you happy makes me happy." Robert: "We'd better stay in the valley; we can save this other adventure for later. Isn't it just as nice to look at the beautiful from below?"
Robert: "In your youth you're eager for the unusual, and you're almost hostile to the everyday. As you age you come to trust the everyday more than the unusual, which arouses suspicion. That's how people change, and it's good that they do."
We get past waterfalls that are frozen as if by the movement of a spirit hand. As we climb upwards through a forest Robert suddenly gets the urge to go bushwhacking through undergrowth and streams, across slopes of ocher-yellow scree and under fallen trees roaming past them down to the Sitter. He seems lively and merry as a boy; frequently he'll stop, murmuring: "How lovely, how magical."
Over the Wienerberg, down to St. Gallen, where we arrive for lunch at the Hotel Schiff. Over a Berneck red wine Robert told me about democratic politician Robert Blum, a gentle theater usher in Leipzig, who was shot by a court martial in 1848. Compared to him Bismarck had been the loyal sheepdog of Kaiser Wilhelm I.
Robert believes the Allies will have a terrible time beating the Germans on their own soil. "Defense stiffens the spine; fighting for your homeland gives you a mysterious strength. The defensive is so much more upright than the offensive, which always has to attack and destroy, confusing itself and forced to artificially spur itself on!"
He doesn't have a high opinion of people today: "Fools and rascals. Without a proper leader they can't do anything at all."
Since my last visit he's read two books from the library at the sanitarium, with great enjoyment. Der Huettenbesitzer by Georges Ohret; a bit sentimental and kitschy, but the plot moves along very well. It reminded him of the painter Courbet. Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the second book, which he described as "naively genius." It helped provoke the North American [sic] civil war.
Over café crème in the Konditorei Pfund he mocked our literary clubs and students for wanting to invite a notorious Nazi poet to read for them. Appropriately, the authorities kept him out of the country. "All things considered, what a bit of foolishness, allowing a foreign, derivative poet to strut about our country! And he isn't even representative of Germany. Our editors and good society have once again been convinced by a fake from the Third Reich. You find the same lack of imagination and curiosity in the literary foundations. It's always the same goats first in line at the trough."
On foot back to Herisau. The sun shines warm on the paths through the meadows that led us to Winkeln. As we walked, Robert told me that his brother Karl went to Japan with the publisher Cassirer and the novelist Bernhard Kellerman to illustrate the story of the trip. In Moscow in a public place Karl boxed the ear of Kellerman's colleague for being impudent. Some time after that the publisher Samuel Fisher asked Robert if he'd like to travel to Poland and write a book about it. "What for?" he claims to have said. "I like Berlin just as much!" Then he was asked if he wanted to go to Turkey: "No, merci! I can be Turkish anywhere, perhaps even more so than in Turkey. In any case I don't want to travel. Why do writers need to go anywhere if they have their imagination?"
I add casually: "In one of your books I've run into that same idea: Is the natural world leaving the country? I look at the trees and tell myself: they're not going anywhere, why shouldn't I stay where I am?" "Yes, what's really important is the journey to yourself."
Then for a long time he talked about a good woman, now very old, who had befriended his sister Lisa and had visited him occasionally at the sanitarium. Her son, with whom she lived in Basel, had become an honest, decent mechanic. "How often such quiet, inconspicuous folk are underestimated when they're young, and yet they are that which holds the world together; from them comes the strength that helps a nation survive."