Carl Seelig
Carl Seelig (1894—1962) was a Swiss editor and writer and Robert Walser’s friend, guardian, and literary executor. He was a selfless supporter of countless other writers, and was also Albert Einstein’s first biographer.
A fascinating document that is both insightful and humane.
Carl Seelig (1894—1962) was a Swiss editor and writer and Robert Walser’s friend, guardian, and literary executor. He was a selfless supporter of countless other writers, and was also Albert Einstein’s first biographer.
A fascinating document that is both insightful and humane.
In this deft, clearly written translation, each walk is engagingly recounted–clouds, umbrella, kilometres covered, stops for beer, talk of literature and asylum life.
[Carl Seelig’s] personal, firsthand account is the closest we will ever have to a Walser memoir. The questions he poses to Walser, regarding his personal and professional history and his literary and political opinions, seem like those of an oral historian, and Walser, trusting his companion, answers with presence of mind, inflecting the conversation with his characteristic humor and unusual observations.
Walks with Walser is filled with Walser’s philosophy about leading a modest life, finding beauty in mundane things, and getting by with less.
Seelig kindly visited Walser and started keeping a record of his opinions, creating over the course of time an indispensable document for all those who love Walser’s surprising prose, which, silent as snowfall, cries out from the nothingness. Walser—as can be observed in Seelig’s book—lectured on beer and twilight.
That Walser is not today among the forgotten writers we owe primarily to the fact that Carl Seelig took up his cause. Without Seelig’s accounts of the walks he took with Walser, without his preliminary work on the biography, without the selections from the work he published and the lengths he went to in securing the Nachlass—the writer’s millions of illegible ciphers—Walser’s rehabilitation could never have taken place, and his memory would in all probability have faded into oblivion.