SOURCE: Bullivant, Keith. “Working Heroes in the Novels of Martin Walser.” In New Critical Perspectives on Martin Walser, edited by Frank Pilipp, pp. 16-28. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994.

[In the following essay, Bullivant compares and contrasts the protagonists in several of Walser's novels in terms of the relationship between their occupations and Walser's thematic concern with individual failure in modern competitive society.]

The novels of Martin Walser are usually understood as breaking down into three, or even four groups: Marriage in Philippsburg (1957, trans. 1961) was a relatively conventional social novel set at a time of social mobility that had more in common with, e.g., John Braine's British novel Room at the Top (1957) than with the then contemporary West German novel. Halbzeit (1960; Half Time) and The Unicorn (1966; 1971), the first two parts of the Anselm Kristlein trilogy, were strikingly more modern in the somewhat rambling form, in the innovative use of language, and in the central thematic concern with identity and role-playing in modern society. As such they were seen as belonging to the same sort of category as Grass's Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum, 1962) and Uwe Johnson's Mutmaßungen über Jakob (1959; Speculations about Jakob, 1963), with these novels in turn being understood to constitute a breakthrough of the West German novel into the company of international modernity. The final part of the trilogy, Der Sturz (1973; The Fall), was in many ways closer to the style of the earlier part than to Walser's writing of the early seventies and can justifiably be seen as the summation of Walser's novels of the sixties. However, as early as 1964 it was clear that Walser was becoming highly critical of the major tendencies of “bourgeois literature,” which for him had lost its initial emancipatory impetus and had by now become merely affirmative, its main characteristics being

the leeway granted, the precisely delimited fool's license, the boldly undertaken linguistic expeditions into elegant or attractively wicked dead ends … into the modern supernatural. Into nothing but language games.¹

This disquiet, closely linked to Walser's growing political awareness in the turbulent sixties, reached its zenith towards the end of the decade when, taking a break from writing himself, he championed the publication of the life stories of people outside the middle class² and became involved in the work of the cooperative of worker-writers, the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt. To this phase also belonged Walser's Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit (1972; Gallistl's Disease), his attempt “to write a socialist novel from the point of view of a petty-bourgeois intellectual”;³ the experimental prose piece Fiction (1970); and the completion of the Kristlein trilogy. The next—and, it would appear, final—phase of Walser's fictional prose-writing was ushered in by the highly criticized novel Beyond All Love (1976; 1981) and in 1993 consists of eight novels and two novellas. The works are linked back to the trilogy, in that, like Der Sturz, they are all concerned with individual failure in modern competitive society. They are seen, however, as forming a discrete unit insofar as they are all far more conventional and readable and, above all, are marked by an extensive use of free indirect speech that produces an intensively subjective form of realist writing having much in common with the “New Subjectivity” of the seventies.⁴

There is much to this reading of the progress of Walser's career as a novelist; it certainly addresses the major stylistic changes in his craft over the last twenty-six years. Walser, however, has argued that while “the finer spirits really don't want to see occupations of any sort in today's novel,” every one of his own novels and novellas features a central character with a clearly defined job: Hans Beumann (Marriage in Philippsburg) is a journalist, Anselm Kristlein is a sales representative, a writer, and the administrator of a rest home; Josef Gallistl has various jobs and ends up as a writer; Franz Horn (Beyond All Love and Letter to Lord Liszt, 1982; 1985) is a sales executive; Helmut Halm (Runaway Horse, 1978; 1980 and Breakers, 1985; 1987) a schoolteacher; Klaus Buch, his alter ego in Runaway Horse, a journalist; Xaver Zürn (The Inner Man, 1979; 1984) a chauffeur; Gottlieb Zürn (The Swan Villa, 1980; 1982 and Jagd, 1988; On the Prowl) a realtor; Wolf Zieger (No Man's Land, 1987; 1988) is a local government official and GDR spy; and Alfred Dorn (Die Verteidigung der Kindheit, 1991; In Defense of Childhood) is a lawyer employed as a civil servant.⁵

Walser's career as a novelist began in the late fifties, at a time when a number of writers and critics, notably Alfred Andersch, Walter Jens, and Wolfgang Rothe, were complaining that, despite the urging of Julian Schmidt and Karl Gutzkow a hundred years earlier, the German novel continued to focus on the world of leisure rather than the workplace as the determinant of modern existence. While it can be argued that such a view ignored certain of Böll's shorter prose works of the time, Walser's first novel, Marriage in Philippsburg, was a truly isolated work in the context of the German novel of the fifties. In his case—although the possible influence of Andersch, a colleague at the Südwestfunk, cannot be excluded—the strong evidence is that Walser's concern with the pressures on the individual working within modern competitive society can be traced back to his doctoral work on Kafka and to his interest in the work of Robert Walser (no relation), especially his novel Der Gehülfe (1907; The Servant), which thematically anticipates The Inner Man. Only as a result of his politicization in the sixties does the sympathy for, and support of, working-class efforts for self-expression in writing emerge, a concern that continues into the eighties.

The apparent emphasis in Walser's first three novels was on the price paid by the individual for success (or merely survival) in modern society. Hans Beumann, much like Joe Lampton in Room at the Top, succeeds in his new social milieu by squashing the noble ideals of his student days. His finer feelings are suppressed in favor of a dog-eat-dog attitude that enables the quick-witted protagonist to succeed in the marketplace of Philippsburg. The price of success is, though, betrayal of people like himself (climaxing in the scene when he forcibly evicts a proletarian gate-crasher from the exclusive Sebastian Club), suppression of true feelings (he really prefers the humbler Marge to Anne Volkmann, marriage with whom is, though, his entrance card to the higher society of Philippsburg); and, ultimately, deformation of character.

Although marking a radical stylistic breakaway from the relatively traditional first novel to an aggressive avantgardism, Halbzeit continues the concern with modern pressures on the individual. Walser's protagonist this time is a sales representative, a figure of particular significance for Walser:

It has struck me how awful it is if someone constantly has to sell things when those around him don't really need anything. Or, at least, they can just as easily buy or order what they've bought or ordered from this sales representative from any of his competitors. There is, therefore, no other job that could so forcefully make a person aware of his or her own superfluity as that of the commercial traveler.⁶

We are confronted with the impact of such problems on the individual at the very beginning of the novel, when we learn that Anselm Kristlein has recently returned home from hospital, a stay brought on by job pressures. But, trapped in the system though he is, Anselm is clearly a survivor, able to achieve some degree of independence through his chameleon-like mastery of role-playing and, at the same time, indulging himself in his weakness for the opposite sex. In The Unicorn, the second part of the trilogy, Anselm has become a freelance writer, but the social game remains the same—indeed, he has now become even more expert as a player of social roles. This talent enables him not only to survive in the competitive world but also (unlike Hans Beumann) to maintain his identity:

His identity is never seriously endangered. He is chained to it as to nothing else. That is to say, he is in no sense a pathological case, he is absolutely not schizophrenic; his roles are simply his attempt—through masterly conformism towards those stronger than himself—to make himself appear a strong person.⁷

The final volume of the trilogy marked a decisive turning point in Walser's portrayal of Anselm Kristlein. By the time he came to write this novel, Walser had moved farther to the Left politically, strongly supporting efforts by groups within the DKP (the German Communist Party) and by the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt to articulate in literature the price paid by those working in capitalist society. His Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit focuses—in a way that takes us back to Hans Beumann—on the deformation of character as an integral part of the work process; Gallistl works

in order to earn the money that I need to be Josef Georg Gallistl. But by having to work so much, I never get to being Josef Georg Gallistl. Up to now I have never been anything more than the person who works for the Josef Georg Gallistl who doesn't yet exist.

(GK [Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit] 22-23)

Gallistl is weary of the hard and lonely struggle, dreams of escape into the world of manual labor and considers joining “the Party” (Presumably the DKP) in order to end his isolation. The Anselm Kristlein we meet in Der Sturz is a not dissimilar figure. The (now) fifty-year-old is exhausted by the “pressure to earn money” (S [Der Sturz] 25), longs to experience life without that pressure, but—having known no other life—is afraid “that my life would at once cease to have any meaning at all if the pressure to earn money were removed. Up to now it has had no other meaning than earning money” (S 26). In a desperate attempt to make money he has risked and lost all of his wife's inheritance, 72,000 marks, walked and worked his way south from Munich in his quest to rejoin his family, and been arrested and tried on suspicion of murder (being freed only after the intervention and detective work of his wife, Alissa). Traumatized by these experiences, which culminate in his being attacked by persons unknown after his release, and as a result more or less incapable of communication with the members of his family, Kristlein now runs a rest home for the entrepreneur Blomich and finds himself surrounded by fellow victims: the worker Berthold Traub, unable to face the thought of returning to work in the Blomich works, commits suicide, as does the ex-gardener Michel Enziger, while Kristlein's wife has a nervous breakdown. The final disaster comes when Blomich sells out to the American competition and all of the employees are dismissed. Kristlein's sovereign “counter-type” has now made himself completely independent of the world of commercial competition, while the isolated Anselm, turning too late to Alissa for support and comfort and lacking the political support enjoyed by those who are politically organized, can envisage only further catastrophe. The final section of the novel, “With the sailing boat across the Alps,” Anselm's dream (narrated in the future tense) of what might now happen, is a bizarre act of individual rebellion, in that he fantasizes about running off with Blomich's treasured possession, an episode which ends, significantly enough, with boat and trailer causing an accident in the Alps and the line: “It's downhill all the way for us” (S 352).

The central thematic concerns of Der Sturz—the increasing inability of the middle-aged male to cope with the pressures of the rat race, with those problems exacerbated by the inability of Walser's protagonist to break out of neurotic individualism and take advantage of the support offered by a loving wife or political organization—are at the heart of most of Walser's subsequent prose fiction. These works differ stylistically from their predecessors in their intense focus on the inner life of the antihero, achieved by the extensive use of free indirect speech. The prototype of the protagonist in this sequence of works is Franz Horn, a sales executive with a firm of denture manufacturers. He has obviously enjoyed a good measure of success in former years but now finds himself increasingly incapable of coping with the intense competition coming from younger colleagues. He has been making a series of more or less unconscious protest gestures against the diminution of his standing within the firm, through heavy drinking, weight gain, and involvement in trade-union activities directed against the management. However, it is only during the course of a business trip to England that he becomes truly aware of the depth of his dissatisfaction when confronted with his alter ego Keith Heath. He crowns the failure of his business trip by taking a (nonfatal) overdose of sleeping pills, having found a sort of contentment in having exited the rat race by embracing failure: “All he wanted was to be left alone with his own worthlessness, which he no longer disputed” BAL [Beyond All Love] 66; JL [Jenseits der Liebe] 112).

This survival tactic is continued by Horn in the epistolary Letter to Lord Liszt and is adopted too by the failed realtor Gottlieb Zürn and Helmut Halm, during his visiting semester in the U.S.A. in Breakers, as a means of coping with the pressures brought out so forcefully (and economically) in Runaway Horse. In the figure of the seemingly Peter Pan-like Klaus Buch we appear to have the successful embodiment of the ethos of competitive society. He regards every sphere of his life—work, sex, sport—in an incredibly competitive light and appears to enjoy success in all these areas. Only when he is swept overboard while sailing with Helmut Halm on Lake Constance does his young wife reveal the implosive effect of his lifestyle on her and, too, the true misery of Klaus's life:

“He didn't have much of a life,” Hella said. “It was just one long grind. Every day ten, twelve hours at the typewriter. Even when he couldn't write, he still sat at the typewriter. ‘I must be at the ready,’ he would say then. Everything he did was a terrible effort. … He often used to cry out, at night. And more and more often he would break out into a sweat, in the middle of the night. …”

(RH [Runaway Horse] 98; FP [Ein fliehendes Pferd] 136-37)

While Klaus embodies the attempt to cope with societal pressures through total conformism to the norms of competitive society, Helmut Halm adopts a radically different strategy. In a form of controlled schizophrenia (living doppelt), he safeguards his true self by superficial conformism at school and withdrawal into an internalized existence in his private life.

This is the “inward path,” the “subordination of the external world to that of the soul,” as Walser calls it, that in his view has made an artistic virtue out of historical necessity within the history of the German novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁸ The irritant source of this “petty-bourgeois tendency” (Kleinbürgertendenz) is the “violation of human dignity brought about by dependency,” i.e., wage labor of all kinds,⁹ the means of coping with it in literature the depiction of the withdrawal into an inner life in which the true self can be just that. In Walser's work this is seen with particular force in the figure of Helmut Halm in Runaway Horse. While, however, this latter work would seem to fit beautifully into the scheme of Walser's ideas and be supported by, e.g., Der Sturz, a number of other works in the last phase of Walser's career raise problems. The figure of Gottlieb Zürn embodies all the features of the Walser antihero that characterize the novels since 1976. He dreams of finding peace by making his fortune—“Money would mean living without stop-watch and whip” (SV [The Swan Villa] 86; SH [Das Schwanenhaus] 87)—but, like Franz Horn, lacks the dynamism and courage of his competitors and comes to enjoy the various defeats that he suffers as realtor, husband, and father. His final defeat, the demolition of the Swan Villa for which he has failed to get the listing rights, induces a rapprochement with his wife, Anna, that gives him the strength to fall asleep (a recurrent motif of survival in these works). However, even though all the constituent parts are there, it is difficult to consider Zürn in any way as victim; indeed, the self-indulgence that characterizes his behavior throughout is based on the fact that, whatever financial insecurity he may claim to suffer from, he is exceedingly comfortably off. By the time we get to Jagd, the sequel to The Swan Villa, Zürn has been able to take early retirement, thanks to his competent wife's taking over the running of the business. As a result he can, he says, indulge himself in idling and writing (although the bulk of the novel is concerned with his efforts to achieve sexual fulfillment). The self-indulgence of the protagonist and the ultimate slightness of these works makes it difficult to read them as substantial workings out of Walser's theme, but rather they come over as—in the German marketplace—commercially successful novels for a middle-class readership that could recognize its own foibles and problems presented in ironic form.

The same playing with Walserian leitmotifs, by now lacking real provenance in the structure of modern capitalist society, marks Breakers, which sees Helmut Halm on sabbatical in California. While the central thrust of the novel is to push the theme of midlife crisis from Runaway Horse into the realms of the absurd, much of its bulk is made up of sometimes elegant, often funny sketches that have little or nothing to do with the theme Walser claims to be addressing. And Halm, the German schoolteacher with all the rights, privileges, and complete security afforded by the civil service status of such a position, can—despite the way in which he otherwise exemplifies the Walser protagonist since 1976—no more be considered a “petty bourgeois,” in any societally significant sense of the term, than Dr. Gottlieb Zürn, the failed but comfortably-off realtor.

Many of the experiences of Helmut Halm at the “University of Oakland” are, as is widely known, based on Walser's stay in the German Department of the University of California at Berkeley; perhaps less well known is how much of Beyond All Love, which seems to be set in the world of commerce, is based on Walser's experiences during his time as Writer in Residence at the University of Warwick.¹⁰ This knowledge, together with input from what others know or have learned from conversation with the ever candid Walser, suggests that there is a close link between the fiction and the life and times of Walser himself. And indeed, if we look back over the range of his novels, it is clear that there are close parallels between the author and his protagonists over and beyond those written since 1976—in the figures of the women, some of whom bear the names of members of the Walser family; in the sense of financial insecurity (Walser has often stressed that it was not until the success of Runaway Horse, published when he was fifty, that he attained financial security and was freed from the burden of an enormous mortgage); in the age of Helmut Halm as well as of other protagonists and the experience of midlife crisis. Above all, it is the social background of the protagonists, successful though they now are in real terms, that is strikingly similar: Hans Beumann and Franz Horn are the illegitimate sons of waitresses, while Helmut Halm is the son of a waiter; Anselm Kristlein and Gottlieb Zürn grew up in impoverished circumstances after the business failures and subsequent suicides of their fathers. Walser's father ran a small Gasthaus and a small coal business on the side, but was a poor businessman and, when he died of diabetes at the age of forty-nine, Walser's mother was left to bring up her family burdened with debt; the father like a number of Walser's antiheroes, sought solace in attempting to write.¹¹ It could, thus, be argued that the Walser novels dealt with here constitute to some considerable extent a constant working over in fictional terms of problems and neuroses that are those of an author who claims to be, like his protagonists, “deformed by my petty-bourgeois background,” but who has, in real terms, long since left this behind him.¹² Those main characters, like the author himself, are parvenus (Aufsteiger), typical products of a West German society marked, at least in its first few decades, by a remarkable social mobility that soon produced a “leveled-in middle-class society” (nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft), in Helmut Schelsky's term, full of arrivistes like Walser and his antiheroes coping, with varying degrees of success, with the psychological baggage of their petty-bourgeois past. There is another, final way in which the likes of Kristlein, Franz Horn, Klaus Buch, and Gottlieb Zürn—all those, in fact, involved in selling in one form or another—embody to some extent Walser's own preoccupation with his position and activity as a writer in modern society (as influenced by his social origins): in an interview with Horst Bienek, quoted in part earlier, he stressed the impact on the consciousness of the sales representative Anselm Kristlein of his quintessential superfluity. This, Walser went on, “is what has made me sympathetic towards this profession: it reminds me of that of the writer.”¹³

There is one of the post-1973 works, however, which cannot be read as yet another variant on Walser's highly individualistic and to some extent autobiographical working out of the Kleinbürgertendenz. It admittedly contains a number of the key motifs of the other works; its protagonist is, moreover, a member of the Swabian clan that we know from them, and his grandfather had committed suicide in the face of bankruptcy; but Xaver Zürn (The Inner Man) is the only true petty bourgeois amongst them.

Whereas the other members of the extended family that we know have all gone through higher education and subsequently “made something of themselves,” as the phrase goes (whatever mixed blessings they may feel that process has brought), Xaver has been able only to move up from forklift-truck driver to the position of chauffeur. Unlike his relatives, he has been frustrated in his hopes of social advancement: the Mercedes he drives, normally a potent symbol of “having made it” in West German society, is for him the badge of his servitude. Even in the case of this remarkably precise analysis of the consequences of “functional specificity,”¹⁴ Peter Hamm claimed “of course this driver isn't really a driver” but, as with the other novels discussed here, “the author.”¹⁵ We would, however, argue that the personal problems inherent in the extreme form of master-servant relationship embodied in that between chauffeur and employer-as-passenger in no way correspond to the anxieties that characterize the rather privileged existence of both Walser as freelance writer and of his troop of antiheroes. What he is doing here is drawing on a long-term preoccupation with the implications of such a position through literature, on the one hand (that tradition embracing Robert Walser's Der Gehülfe and Brecht's Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti [1948; Puntila and Matti, His Hired Hand, 1972]),¹⁶ and through personal observation, on the other. Walser's second prose manuscript (of 1951, unpublished), entitled Memoirs of a Chauffeur, was based on his early experiences as a radio journalist traveling around for months with a sound engineer and a chauffeur.¹⁷ Chauffeurs also crop up in both Halbzeit and The Unicorn and are thus further testimony to the author's long pre-occupation with what he sees as the social significance of the figure.

The Inner Man has the same sort of dramatic structure as the post-1973 novels, beginning just before a major crisis in Xaver Zürn's life. A long drive undertaken in the first part of the novel (“May”), from Lake Constance to Düsseldorf, Cologne, Giessen, Heidelberg, and Munich, confronts us with the total exclusion zone between Xaver and his employer, Dr. Gleitze, and, through reflective flashbacks, informs the reader about those unsatisfactory aspects of Xaver's employment that have induced his present physical problem of acute and painful constipation. During his thirteen years of work as Gleitze's driver he has had to conform to his employer's—quite incorrect—image of him as the ideal chauffeur: a careful driver with the skill of a champion marksman (which Xaver never was), a composed nondrinker, whose only indulgence is ice cream (but who, in reality, prefers to indulge in a bottle or two of wine in his off-duty hours). He has constantly to endure the separation between front and rear in an automobile, rendered particularly intense by Gleitze's being constantly wrapped in his obsession with the world of opera on the back seat; the indignity of removal to cheap hotels with uncomfortable beds at night; the exclusion from the sybaritic pleasures of his thoughtless employer, who then, to make matters worse, rams home the false persona he has inflicted on his driver by insisting on Xaver's being treated to the sickly-sweet “treat” that he so hates, under the impression that he (Gleitze) is being generous. Their peripatetic pas de deux embodies with an intensity not found in Walser's other works the personal degradation inherent in the (at least European) class structure.

Xaver has in some way compensated for the fear of losing his somewhat privileged position with fantasies of aggression. This antagonism towards Gleitze is, in turn, further stimulated by the casual purchase of his “colleague” John Frey's memoirs of his life as a chauffeur to a German Nazi manufacturer, in which he recognizes his own experiences—above all, his real dependency on the whim of a man who, although to Xaver and all others seemingly decent in his treatment of his driver, has ultimate power over him: even Xaver's nominally free weekends are spent running errands for Gleitze and/or his wife, or for their friends. This power relationship, as with John Frey, in turn produces hatred for Gleitze, hatred which is, however, immediately suppressed, manifesting itself in Xaver's physical discomfort. His detailed physical examination in a Tübingen clinic turns out to be the climactic moment of the novel, exposing his apparent illness as ultimately psychosomatic and, at the same time, confronting him with the truth about his relationship to his employer. On learning that Gleitze has arranged for a close friend to examine him, Xaver at first feels that this is yet another example of the man's inherent kindness, but the series of painful tests convinces him that he has, in fact, been exposed to “those machines, because he [the boss] needs a man whose reliability has been scrutinized by every technological process.” Moreover, Gleitze “was entitled to be informed about every square centimeter of his insides” (IM [The Inner Man] 156; SA [Seelenarbeit] 170). Just how true this is is revealed somewhat later. After his week in the clinic Xaver returns to his job and, on the surface, nothing seems to have changed apart from the fact that Xaver's aggressive feelings towards his employer are more intense: when the latter gets out of the car to urinate on a night journey home Xaver fantasizes about stabbing him with one of the six knives he by now has stashed away in the glove compartment. The next day—there is no suggestion of a casual link, except perhaps that the knife in Xaver's hand aroused Gleitze's suspicions—he is summoned into the office to see the secretary, who informs him that he has been relieved of his chauffeur's duties and is to return to the warehouse. She hints, with some empathy, at advancing age and mentions an apparent suggestion by Gleitze that Xaver was having increasing difficulty in getting through the day without a beer (he has had but one in public!), but the crucial thing is the totally impersonal way in which he is demoted by the man to whom he has been physically close for some thirteen years and who is widely held to be a considerate person. The nature of his demotion brings out with an intensity found nowhere else in Walser the full nature of Xaver's dependency on Gleitze.

On the same day the Zürns learn that their daughter Julia has failed the examinations necessary for her to proceed towards the high-school diploma (Abitur), the prerequisite for social advancement in Germany. This convinces Xaver of the inevitability and correctness of Gleitze's judgment of him, a failure from a family of failures (IM 247; SA 264)—a judgment confirmed by further personal calamities. In the acceptance of the inherent justice behind his degradation, with only sexual intercourse with his wife Agnes offering any sort of solace, is captured the extremely low self-esteem so quintessentially typical of the lower orders in European class society. Whereas in the other post-1973 prose works examined here the social origins of this malaise are frequently only alluded to somewhat cryptically, The Inner Man confronts us in graphic form with the social origins and psychological consequences of the “petty-bourgeois deformation” that marks all of Walser's later anti-heroes and, in turn, enhances the understanding—particularly that of the non-European reader—of the other works.

Notes

1. Walser, “Freiübungen,” Erfahrungen und Leseerfahrungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp) 97.

2. Cf. here Erika Runge, Bottroper Protokolle (1968), Ursula Trauberg, Vorleben (1968), and Wolfgang Werner, Vom Waisenhaus ins Zuchthaus (1969).

3. Anthony Waine, Martin Walser (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1980) 102.

4. Cf. here Frank Pilipp, The Novels of Martin Walser: A Critical Introduction, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture 64 (Columbia SC: Camden House, 1991) 32-35, and Keith Bullivant, Realism Today (Leamington Spa, Hamburg, New York: Berg, 1977) 213-20.

5. Walser, “Brauchen Romanhelden Berufe?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Literary Supplement) 11 Jan. 1992: 1-2. It should be stated here that, notwithstanding the point Walser makes, the emphases in No Man's Land and Die Verteidigung der Kindheit are different from those of the other later novels and will not be examined here.

6. In an interview with Horst Bienek in the latter's Werkstattgespräche mit Schriftstellern (Munich: Hanser, 1962) 195.

7. Walser in a letter of 27 July 1967 to Melvyn Dorman, a graduate student at the University of Birmingham (UK). Quoted in R. Hinton Thomas and W. van der Will, Der deutsche Roman und die Wohlstandsgesellschaft (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969) 124 (my translation).

8. Walser, “Goethe hat ein Programm, Jean Paul eine Existenz,” Literaturmagazin 2 (1974): 108-09.

9. Walser, “Die Literatur der gewöhnlichen Verletzungen,” Die Würde am Werktag: Literatur der Arbeiter und Angestellten, ed. Martin Walser (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1980) 7.

10. Cf. Keith Bullivant (ed.), Englische Lektionen (Munich: iudicium, 1990) 80.

11. On Walser's childhood cf. Waine, pp. 7-11.

12. In an interview with Donna L. Hoffmeister, Vertrauter Alltag, gemischte Gefühle. Gespräche mit Schriftstellern über Arbeit in der Literatur (Bonn: Bouvier, 1989) 170.

13. Cf. Bienek, p. 195.

14. Cf. here Donna Hoffmeister's excellent analysis of this work, “Fantasies of Individualism: Work Reality in Seelenarbeit,” Martin Walser: International Perspectives, eds. Jürgen E. Schlunk and Armand E. Singer, American University Studies: Series 1, Germanic Languages and Literature 64 (New York: Lang, 1987) 59-69.

15. Hoffmeister, Vertrauter Alltag, gemischte Gefühle, p. 169.

16. This aspect is examined in part by Siegfried Mews in the following essay.

17. Hoffmeister, Vertrauter Alltag, gemischte Gefühle, p. 169.

Works Cited

Bienek, Horst. Werkstattgespräche mit Schriftstellern. Munich: Hanser, 1962.

Bullivant, Keith. Realism Today: Aspects of the Contemporary German Novel. Leamington Spa, Hamburg, New York: Berg, 1987.

———, (ed.). Englische Lektionen. Munich: iudicium, 1990.

Hoffmeister, Donna L. “Fantasies of Individualism: Work Reality in Seelenarbeit.” Martin Walser: International Perspectives. Eds. Jürgen E. Schlunk, and Armand E. Singer. American University Studies: Series 1, Germanic Language and Literature 64. New York: Lang, 1987. 59-70.

———. Vertrauter Alltag, gemischte Gefühle. Gespräche mit Schriftstellern über Arbeit in der Literatur. Bonn: Bouvier, 1989.

Pilipp, Frank. The Novels of Martin Walser: A Critical Introduction. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Columbia SC: Camden House, 1991.

Thomas, R. Hinton, and Wilfried van der Will. Der deutsche Roman und die Wohlstandsgesellschaft. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969.

Waine, Anthony. Martin Walser. Munich: Text + Kritik, 1980.

Walser, Martin. “Brauchen Romanhelden Berufe?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Literary Supplement) 11 Jan. 1992: 1-2.

———. “Freiübungen.” Erfahrungen und Leseerfahrungen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1965. 94-110.

———. “Goethe hat ein Programm, Jean Paul eine Existenz.” Literaturmagazin 2 (1974): 108-09.

———. “Die Literatur der gewöhnlichen Verletzungen.” Die Würde am Werktag: Literatur der Arbeiter und Angestellten. Ed. Martin Walser. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1980. 7-11.