There are many labels used in dealing with Martin Walser, who was once among the angry young men and is now approaching his early sixties. Critics speak about the radical, if occasionally loquacious, intellectual of the independent Left, the regional writer loyally attentive to the lives of simple people on the shores of his native Lake Constance, or the sharp-eyed analyst of the way in which industrial society deforms and paralyzes those drawn into competition for money and power. Other issues are perhaps less frequently considered, as for instance whether or not it was the early loss of his Catholic beliefs that turned Walser into a restless seeker of general truth. Also worth noting are his quick and curious shifts from one genre to the other, and the disturbing sequence, or rather coexistence, of successful and unsuccessful books, revealing a rather insecure judgment of his own literary possibilities.

Walser was born in 1927, the son of a rustic innkeeper (and coal merchant on the side) in the small town of Wasserburg on Lake Constance. His father died early and his mother, unaffected by the Nazis because of her strong Catholic upbringing, kept the family together. Martin was sent to the Lindau Gymnasium, and later in the war served in the student antiaircraft artillery (as did Günter Grass), the Reich Labor Service, and the army. After the Allies occupied southern Germany, he found himself in a POW camp in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he spent his time working and reading in the library of Radio Munich, which had been moved to this Bavarian resort at the time of the air raids.

Walser's story is that of the highly gifted student who, after many years in the editorial offices of state-supported radio stations, resolved that the time had come to concentrate on his own plays and novels. Immediately after the war, Walser first studied German literature and history at the University of Regensburg, and later at Tübingen, where he wrote a first-rate dissertation on Kafka's narrative habits. By 1949 he had settled in Stuttgart, again working for the regional broadcasting corporation, together with his colleagues Helmut Heissenbüttel and Alfred Andersch. His first reading for Group 47 was not exactly a success, but in 1955 he received the group's literary award for one of his short stories, which, taken as a whole, demonstrate his difficulties in emancipating himself from Kafka's example. German critics, I suspect, somewhat underrate the importance of his first stay in the United States, in 1958. He was invited by Henry Kissinger to attend the Harvard International Seminar, lingered many hours on the steps of Widener Library, studied the structure of the American advertising industry, and, upon returning home, immediately wrote the first two volumes of his trilogy about corporate life. In the early 1960s Walser shifted to writing a spate of plays exploring the recent German past; their success made it possible for him to leave his small city apartment and move with his family to his own house at Nussdorf on Lake Constance, where he lives today. The political restlessness of the late sixties affected him deeply in a kind of ideological midlife crisis. For a brief time he nourished illusions about the German Communist Party as a viable alternative to the Social Democracy he had supported earlier. He turned against the traditional theater by insisting on abortive theatrical experiments and published cryptic texts about the function of the intellectual in contemporary society. Only in the mid-1970s did he complete his corporate trilogy and write a series of more relaxed narratives and novels confronting the pains and middling hopes of his fellow citizens caught in crippling jobs and subjected to demanding social hierarchies. Walser recently said that he was enjoying a new kind of success as a novelist, and it may be fair to say that he has become the favorite of the younger and not-so-young West German urban professionals, who all share his nostalgia for the late sixties and early seventies.

In his compact first novel, Ehen in Philippsburg (1957; Marriage in Philippsburg, 1961), which was little praised by American reviewers, Walser explored the attitudes of the new German professional classes. His trilogy, Halbzeit (1960; Halftime), Das Einhorn (1966; The Unicorn, 1971), and Der Sturz (1973; The Fall), consists, at least at first sight, of the rambling confessions, revelations, and disordered thoughts of one Anselm Kristlein, who pursues a picaresque career as a traveling salesman, an advertising expert in the rapidly expanding West German mass media, and a moderately successful second-rate writer who frequents fashionable parties and ends up as a corporation employee. The volumes of the trilogy are different in tone and yet intimately linked by a recurrent pattern of events. The earlier volume shows Kristlein (who as a philosophy student had married the daughter of his professor) trying to find a place in the sales and advertising jungle, drawing on the spiel of his business colleagues and his secondhand knowledge of Madison Avenue jargon. In the second volume Kristlein, who has moved from Stuttgart to Munich, operates on the higher level of sales campaigns and publishers’ advance contracts, and now offers his confessions in a more literary language, sustained by Joycean allusions and intricate pastiche.

Der Sturz (1973; The Fall), the long-delayed final volume of the trilogy, published nearly ten years after the second, marks Walser's turn to social and Marxist thought. The adventurous Kristlein, more tired, shabby, and vulnerable than ever, lacks much of his earlier verve; even in his ingenious ploy of separating his usual ramblings into three distinct sections (retrospective, concurrent, and anticipatory), he again reveals his compulsion for repeating his experiences. Once more, after losing the family savings in a dubious investment, he has left the family in order to escape, an inspired vagrant, to Bavarian and Allgäu landscapes; and once more—after going through assorted picaresque experiences in a factory, a nature commune, and the embraces of fat or anorexic damsels—he finds himself back home, confessing all his sins to his understanding wife Alissa. Again there is hope: husband and wife are employed as house parents in a vacation home for the employees of a small corporation, but Kristlein of course has trouble adjusting to the job, nor is it particularly helpful to his career that he invites a literary friend who drinks a good deal and plans to fabricate a Soviet samizdat manuscript, to be sold either to Helen Wolff of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich or to Mondadori Publishers. Unfortunately, the German corporation is bought by Nabisco and the house parents are immediately fired. In the final section, Kristlein plans to cross the Alps via the dangerous Splügen Pass with his old sailboat in tow, and clearly envisions how car and boat will go crashing down the mountainside, burying him and Alissa in the burning wreckage. But Kristlein speaks about his “happiness and his end” in the future tense and Walser, in an ironic coda published separately, assures us that Kristlein has visited him to say good-bye and to look, after so many loquacious volumes, for bliss in utter silence. While the author expresses doubts that Kristlein was ever a critic of society as some commentators assumed (he rather saw him as a tragicomic figure of total conformity), he consoles us with the news that Kristlein, when last seen, was sitting on a stone bench in a little village not far from the Grande Chartreuse, that old monastic refuge of those who have chosen silence as the ultimate good.

Throughout the trilogy, Walser depends exclusively on the expanding consciousness of the one character whom he knows as well as himself, yet he insists that he avoids narrative solipsism. He does not present the traditional lonely hero “held together by a skin,” but maintains that Anselm Kristlein has many existences and is right in considering himself a “parliament of personal pronouns” in which the first person represents the married, professional, eager salesman, while the second fondly and slavishly submits to the unicorn's sexual desires, and the third meanwhile is checking up on both and possibly on other selves emerging from Anselm's ego. Present experience and the language of the moment (in whose power Walser fervently believes) are closely related, but an immense abyss opens up between past life and present language; Anselm's recurrent elegy on the “pastness” of things reveals that all the exuberant richness of his language is but a desperate attempt to do the impossible and make the past a now. In the final conjuration of love, Kristlein combines his ultimate passion with the archetypical force of amorous words of all ages, yielding a finesse of verbal intelligence unparalleled among Walser's contemporaries.

As if wanting to convince himself of the range of his literary potentialities, Walser in the early and mid-1960s wrote a number of plays that were usually welcomed by warm applause and demonstrative whistling (the German way of protesting in the theater), while reviewers insisted with a certain regularity that the playwright showed considerable promise and that the best was yet to come. His first play, Der Abstecher [1961] (The Detour, 1963), in which two men band together against a woman, should be rediscovered by the feminists because it tells, in spite of its “absurd arabesques,” the story of a woman who learns how husband and lover resemble each other in their thoughtless brutality. Die Zimmerschlacht [1967] (Home Front) takes a long look at a middle-aged couple and articulates what the marriage partners have hidden from each other for so long. The only trouble with the living-room battle is that we look at a Hausfrau and a pedant who, in the long run, exhaust our interest; since the German professional classes abound in such people, it is not quite clear why the playwright insists on duplicating their problems on the stage.

In his more political plays of the sixties, Walser had a difficult time extricating himself from what the critic Clara Merck called his “exact eclecticism.” His use of Brecht, absurdist theater, and traditional farce did not necessarily strengthen his historical examination of moral failures past and present and his attempts to teach us something about ossifying capitalism. In Eiche und Angora [1962] (The Rabbit Race, 1963) theatrical method and polemical questions work at cross-purposes. Wanting to show us a panorama of German history since May 1945, Walser assembles a motley crew of average Nazis, a castrated and brainwashed concentration camp survivor who from time to time relapses into his radical ideas, schoolteachers still imbued with nationalist ideas, and numerous frustrated women; yet he fails to fuse the separate conventions of the literary and nonliterary theater. (It is symptomatic of the play that, in a printed version, the abstract figure of a Jew in search of his lost children had to be cut.) Walser's Der schwarze Schwan [1964] (The Black Swan) was the most ambitious and thoughtful of all his plays of the 1960s, but its opaque language and complex structure left some audiences and critics confused. For once, Walser moves away from inappropriate farce and thin allegory toward a renewed realism and sets against each other a Nazi father involved in the mass killings, and his son who discovers documentary evidence about his father's crimes and asks himself how he would have acted, had he been born earlier. Memory itself is being explored in all its recent German varieties, but the son who, like Hamlet, puts on a play to force the guilty to make a public confession, fails in his efforts and kills himself. Walser succeeds in holding up a scenic mirror to the fictions of remorse rampant in German contemporary life.

By inclination sympathetic to the aims of Social Democracy, in 1961 Walser was the spokesman of a group of younger writers eager to persuade their fellow citizens to vote Socialist. Later, appalled by what he considered the soft attitude of the SPD toward U.S. intervention in Vietnam, he moved closer to the Extraparliamentary Opposition and, after it had withered away, for two years (1972-74) expressed his active sympathy with the German Communist Party (DKP), which he hoped would offer an alternative home to restive Socialists. (He had sufficient common sense, however, to notice that the DKP was directed from the GDR, and that it did not protest against the persecution of writers and artists there.) Only in the mid-1970s did Walser feel new respect for the grand old SPD for upholding “democracy in practice” in an age of terrorists and blatant irrationalism to left and right. Many of his irritations, with both his fellow citizens and himself, show in his hostile plays of the time and in forbiddingly cryptic prose pieces exploring the chances of intellectuals in a post-1968 society. In Wir werden schon noch handeln [1968] (We are Going to Act, Just Wait) he tested the fictions of the theater in left-wing Pirandello imitations, and in Ein Kinderspiel [1971] (Children's Play), an arid work about young radicals and conformists, sorely strained the patience of his critics, even the friendly ones. Three years later he returned to German history in Sauspiel [1975] (Sow Game), though not necessarily to discuss the past. He suggested that he was concerned with present issues in the image of past events and, stubbornly undeterred by the dangers of historical analogies, presented, in a sequence of loosely related scenes, a view of the proud city of Nuremberg immediately after the defeat of the peasant (i.e., student) revolt of 1525 (i.e., 1968). Concentrating on a group of illustrious magistrates, artists, and intellectuals, he demonstrates that all they do is provide arguments to strengthen ossifying power, while murdered peasants rot in the fields and radical Anabaptists rot in prison; but the play is too diffuse to be of service to its own ideological intent.

The prose pieces of Walser's wintry discontent are no less questionable. In Fiction (1970) a somewhat disembodied voice offers an internal monologue in five parts, being paradoxically attracted and repulsed by experiences in the city streets and by any attempt to speak about them. In Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit (1972; Gallistl's Disease) Walser exorcises his devastating uncertainties in a hapless narrative in which, by way of self-therapy, a middle-aged citizen speaks of leaving his old circle of friends, in hopes that he might find more sympathy and perhaps a glimpse of the historical future among a group of friendly Communists. Gallistl's sincerity is not entirely balanced by acumen; he would be a perfect character in one of R. W. Fassbinder's minor movies about the dull Bavarian provinces.

Though Walser's final demise as writer and playwright has time and again been announced by his critics, he has his own way of recouping his losses. He passed through his ideological late-sixties crisis with undiminished courage to continue what he had begun twenty years before. If, in the beginning, the traditionalists usually disliked and the progressives adored whatever he did, there has been a recent shift in his critics’ responses, which now range from the complaints of aging experimentalists deploring what they call his flat language and new traditionalism, to unexpected praise from traditionalists who like his recent novellas and novels, which are closer to an acceptable diction and characterization. With renewed energy Walser confronts the question of narrative proportion, explores possibilities of disciplining his linguistic exuberance (which tempted some observers to quote Heidegger and say that language speaks Walser rather than the other way around), and alternates between a Balzacian solution of separate narratives sustained by recurring sets of characters, and the sharply delineated novella of classical tradition. In Jenseits der Liebe (1976; Beyond All Love) and Brief an Lord Liszt (1982; Letter to Lord Liszt) he again uses a middle-management character to show how competition and the power of corporate hierarchies deform and paralyze people born to realize their full potential of spontaneity. Taking on the burdens “of most people,” as he defined his intentions in an open letter to the Soviet writer Uri Trifonov, he also has to solve his recurrent problem of how not to bore us, the average readers, with stories about ourselves. In Beyond All Love he closely watches the growing frustrations of Franz Horn, a sales manager who has long marketed dentures produced by Chemnitzer Zähne, Inc., a firm originally located in the Soviet zone. He tells us about Horn's ambivalent relationship with his boss; his resolution to leave his wife and children; his inability to outsmart his colleague Horst Liszt, once his subordinate and more recently his superior; a sales trip to England that utterly fails; and Horn's unsuccessful attempt at suicide. The second part of the story, published six years later, turns into an epistolary novel consisting of a very long letter and nineteen postscripts in which Horn regurgitates his boss hate (which may be but love unreciprocated), his disappointments, and the entire history of his departmental degradations and office sufferings. The cathartic letter is not mailed, of course, and Horn returns from a holiday to his office, still loyal to the marketing department (now selling a line of surfboards) and with all his repressions intact. Walser often complains that his bourgeois critics do not sufficiently consider his political point of view. He prefers Brecht-trained readers—those who do not want to follow Horn's example and now, warned by his fate, more clearly recognize their own role in offices and factories and actively wish to help change social hierarchies.

Walser's novella Ein fliehendes Pferd (1978; Runaway Horse, 1980) was immediately welcomed by nearly everybody on the (moderate) left and the right as a witty, wise, and well-constructed story of deeper significance. It is a subdued comedy of seventies manners sustained by gentle melancholy rather than aggressive bitterness and, unusual for Walser, successfully explores the social attitudes of the professional classes without ranting about the vices of dying capitalism. Helmut Halm, a somewhat morose teacher in advancing middle age, and his rather passive wife Sabine spend their summer vacations, as they have for years, in a small town on the shores of Lake Constance, where by chance they encounter Klaus Buch, Helmut's high school buddy of twenty years before, with his much younger second wife Helga. Klaus immediately insists that they all go dining, walking, swimming, and sailing together. But the two couples have different ideas about how to spend their time. Helmut, an introvert, likes to take it easy, drink red wine, and read Kierkegaard's diaries (though he never proceeds beyond one sentence), whereas the trendy Klaus and Helga jog, talk of their successes on TV, demonstratively stick to their health diet of steaks and mineral water, and constantly irritate their more sedate friends by being beautifully sportif. On a walk through the countryside, Klaus shows his energy when he skillfully stops a runaway horse (knowing, to everybody's surprise, that you have to do it sideways), but when the two men go sailing and Klaus exhibits his virile daring in a sudden storm, Helmut unexpectedly pushes the tiller out of his hand and Klaus is immediately washed overboard. Believing him drowned, his wife reveals that his stories about his successes are untrue. Yet Klaus comes back, the couples part quietly, and we never hear how they are going to live in the future.

Working meticulously with details of gesture, funny idiomatic conversations, and minute irritations at the dinner table and during nature walks, the narrator avoids melodrama. The episode of the runaway horse cannot easily hide its symbolic function, but Helmut's sudden and murderous revolt against Klaus is perfectly plausible. Helmut, an introspective man who has come to terms with being a failure, refuses to indulge, as does Klaus, in memories of past hopes, adventures, and expectations. It is Klaus (reminding us of the loquacious Anselm Kristlein) who is in real trouble; in spite of all his talk about his TV appearances and the high print orders for his popular ecology books, he cannot afford the vacation. Walser certainly tells an interesting story for middle-aged professionals of a certain standard of living, and it sold nearly two hundred thousand copies within a few months in Germany.

Once Walser develops a character successfully, he does not let go easily. In Brandung (1985; Breakers, due 1987) he sends Helmut Halm (with his wife and one of their daughters) to California, where Halm teaches for a term at a large university easily recognized as Berkeley, the scene of many academic novels showing a European intellectual confronting an alien civilization. Walser compassionately watches how Halm, under the strong sun of San Francisco Bay, himself comes close to changing into a kind of Klaus Buch, or rather (to the enjoyment of the reader) an Anselm Kristlein. He buys a flashy new suit, begins to jog, and falls in love with a blonde student who regularly wants his advice about her literary essays for another course. The ritual of departmental parties, emotional confusions at the student cafeteria, and the plight of frustrated faculty wives may be more surprising to German than to American readers, yet Walser prefers his comedy of academic manners distinctly on the melancholy side. The middle-aged teacher, in spite of Anselm Kristlein's blessed self-irony, has a difficult time resisting his rising emotions, even if only expressed in office-hour conversations about Shakespeare, Rilke, and Faulkner. After he has returned to Stuttgart he receives a newspaper clipping saying that the young woman died in a landslide, trapped in a car parked on the edge of a cliff above the surging waves of the sea. For the rest of his life he will have to cope with his burden of guilt, because he knows that she was still on crutches after hurting her ankle at his farewell party, where he and she danced with abandon and crashed to the floor. Walser's Breakers differs from the American academic novel by virtue of its quiet sympathy for fallible people (including a departmental chairman) on the ironic scene of bittersweet romance. Perhaps without wanting to do so, Walser delivered to his readers a successful campus novel (or rather an example of its subgenre about the German visitor on an American campus)—a genre first attempted by the critic Hans Egon Holthusen in his novel Das Schiff (1965; The Ship), little appreciated in its time, which firmly established the essential characters of the charmed European intellectual and the financially independent femme fatale in the guise of an American undergraduate who drives an expensive car barefoot.

In Seelenarbeit (1979; The Inner Man, 1984) and Das Schwanenhaus (1980; The Swan Villa, 1982), Walser once more turns to his Lake Constance schlemiels, trapped by oppressive jobs, family pressures, and the burdens of industrial society. The protagonists of the two novels are both members of the Zürn clan (zürnen means “to be angry”), and while Xaver Zürn in the first novel works as a chauffeur for a local industrialist, his cousin Gottlieb in the other narrative earns his income as an independent real estate agent meeting cutthroat competition. In Walser's world the boss and the driver have always been contemporary versions of Hegel's Herr and Knecht; now, in The Inner Man, we witness the psychosomatic and other difficulties of the honest Xaver, who suffers silently whenever he chauffeurs his boss around. Walser always had his populist sympathies for truck drivers (Xaver reads books about the German peasant revolt, Christian mystics, and whodunits in English and French), but The Swan Villa, the novel about Gottfried Zürn, is far more interesting, since it involves the reader in the complexities of community politics and the real estate business. Far from being content with a diagnosis of psychosomatic gastritis, the narrative looks in moving, funny, and grotesque detail at the daily experience of a lawyer and real estate agent of romantic inclinations. Gottlieb finds himself imprisoned by the incessant necessity of making more money to fulfill the demands of his family (four daughters, like Walser), to keep up with the Joneses of provincial Stuttgart and Lake Constance, and to impress his inventive competitors, who have few if any scruples, with his energy and the number of wretched condos sold. He dreams of acquiring the exclusive listing for the Swan Villa, a neo-Gothic monster with stained-glass windows and Lohengrin frescoes, which he admired when he was a poor boy, but his competitors, allying themselves with local political interests, are far more successful. When he arrives at the villa to pursue negotiations, he comes just in time to see it blown up and the park trees cut down by a consortium of real estate operators who plan to build luxury apartments on the site. Again, as in many other Walser novels, it is the faithful wife, seemingly colorless and introverted, who has the quiet strength to save the protagonist from utter despair.

Walser likes to speak about a kind of contemporary life that sociologists, statisticians, and demographers would find interesting; in his own way, he continues the work of Siegfried Kracauer, who in the Weimar Republic was the first to describe how white-collar employees actually lived. Friedrich Schiller, in the age of the French Revolution, clearly anticipated the emergence of “people who are but copies of their business,” and Walser translates Schiller's idealist concepts into the idiom of market research, public relations, and corporate structures (via Marx and, recently, Kierkegaard). For a long time Walser has consistently avoided speaking in a language of his own making. In the early Kristlein trilogy, the archaic exuberance of the German language, in many dialects and historical idioms, asserted itself against events and individual characters. In the later narratives the author attaches himself, like a leech, to one of the central figures (usually professional, and frustrated or a failure), impersonally reporting his thoughts, sensations, and sayings without ever claiming the privilege of looking at him from a distance in order to judge whether he is right or wrong. Perhaps it is easier to hear Walser's own voice in the radio features and essays that he has gathered in many collections, including Erfahrungen und Leseerfahrungen (1965; Experiences and Reading Experiences), Heimatkunde (1968; Local History), Wie und wovon handelt Literatur (1973; Manners and Themes of Literature), and Liebeserklärungen (1983; Confessions of Love). Writing, he says, comes from the experience of dearth: the writer responds in his fictions to inimical realities, and the reader then responds to the writer's response by activating his own energies of protest, criticism, and desire. Walser freely confesses that he feels closest to Hölderlin, Kafka, and the Swiss author Robert Walser; writes with perception and particular insight about Proust, Swift, and Heine; and conducts a protracted argument for and against Goethe, the “department store” of literature, crammed full of dubious goods. He is at his best when he writes about German history and the German language, which, as he suggests, may have been affected by the Nazis on its periphery but must never be “disqualified” in its totality for that reason. Walser is a more engaging writer when he does not strain to be a dutiful intellectual. The second volume of the Kristlein trilogy, The Unicorn (with its marvelous language associations), his probing play The Black Swan, and the later narratives, including Runaway Horse and The Swan Villa, are first-rate achievements that reveal a fragile sensitivity and an ironic intelligence in a continuing search for self-realization, as elusive as ever.