[In the following review, Ziolkowski summarizes the themes of Vormittag eines Schriftstellers, elucidating the volume's thesis and critical perspective.]

The latest volume [Vormittag eines Schriftstellers] by the impressively productive Martin Walser contains an assortment of eleven occasional pieces on political, cultural, and literary topics—mostly published in various newspapers since the German unification. We find here a paean to Boris Becker, an insightful appreciation of Horst Janssen's erotic drawings, a rhapsody to Goya's Maja, and a surreal vision of the year 2000 inspired by Dali. One piece portrays the figures of an economic scandal as drama while another meditates on the meaning of nation and nationalism in the era of unification with its skinheads and post—Cold War ideologies. (Walser, in contrast to many German intellectuals, is a firm supporter of Helmut Kohl's unification policies.)

The five remaining essays deal with essentially literary topics. A consideration of the professions of fictional heroes leads from Wilhelm Meister and Josef K. to the chauffeur-hero of Walser's own novel, Seelenarbeit (1979). Another records Walser's boyhood reading, which vacillated indiscriminately between Karl May and Schiller, between the Catholic children's books of Christian Schmidt and Dostoevsky, followed by wartime encounters with the works of Stefan George and Adalbert Stifter. An essay on opening sentences provides an intimate look into the writer's workshop. The literary pieces appeal with liturgical regularity, and with frequent apercus, to Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Kafka, Robert Walser—and to Walser's “household deity” Kierkegaard.

Particularly revealing are the two long framework pieces, both of which develop Walser's conviction that the modern intellectual's obsession with having opinions about everything interferes with any objective apprehension of reality. In the title essay Walser makes the point that he is most truly himself in the morning when he is alone and is not required by the presence of others to express any opinions. He even attributes the lack of authenticity in his writing to the unconscious desire to persuade the unseen reader of this opinion or that. The same theme reappears from the opposite standpoint in the final essay, “Des Lesers Selbsverständnis,” where Walser argues that the reader who approaches a text burdened with his own opinions, and feeling compelled constantly to pass judgments, cannot respond to the literary work on its own terms and is thus prevented from experiencing the originality of the work. (He illustrates the point brilliantly by sketching his own readings of Wilhelm Meister over many years.) Critics and scholars obsessed by their theories and ideologies might well take to heart the words of this scrupulously honest writer.