The Babel Guide to German Fiction in English Translation

“I do not understand, and I shall never understand, how it can be a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of misery and despair. In fact I love repose and all that reposes.”

This is the Swiss writer Robert Walser, voicing his objections to the motor car in a piece of prose entitled The Walk, first published in 1917. According to this guide the author later suffered a “cataclysmic mental illness”, and spent a quarter‐century in an asylum. The...