Berlin Stories by Robert Walser Read Free Book Online Page A

hosting Christmas festivities, why are we happy to sit in a warm room and watch as it snows, gusts, blusters, or rains outdoors? We so like to spend time in dark, introspective holes. This penchant is not itself a weakness; our weakness is that we feel ashamed of it.
    Are not works of literature also dreams, and is the open stage anything other than their wide-open mouth speaking as if in sleep? During the taxing day, we drive our business interests and useful intentions before us through the streets and various establishments, and then we assemble in these narrow rows of seats, like narrow beds, to gaze and hear; the curtain—the lip of this mouth—springs open, and we find ourselves being disconcertingly yet also intimately addressed, roaringly, hissingly, with flickering tongues and smiles, which fills us with a frenzy we wouldn’t wish to subdue, nor would we be able to; it makes us writhe with laughter or else tremble with heartfelt tears. The images blaze and burn before our eyes, the figures in the play move before us like unnaturally large, unfamiliar apparitions. The bedroom is dark, only the open dream is resplendent in the bright lights—dazzling, speaking—and we are compelled to sit there with open mouths.
    How melodious are the colors in a dream! They seem to be turning into faces, and suddenly a color threatens, sobs, sings, or smiles; a river becomes a horse, and the horse is about to climb a narrow staircase with its hoofed feet; the knight is forcing it, he is being pursued, they intend to tear his heart from his body, they are getting closer, in the distance you can see the murderers racing toward him, a nameless fear seizes you—the curtain falls. An earthquake strikes a municipal square, the buildings sink and tilt, the air appears to be splattered with blood, fiery-red wounds are hanging everywhere; people are firing their rifles, meaning to compete with nature in murderousness; all the while the sky is a sweet pale blue, but it lies so childishly above the buildings, like a painted sky. This bleeding is like small roses being thrown about; the buildings keep falling and yet they stand, and constantly there is a horrific screaming and the crack of rifle fire and yet there is none. Oh, how divinely this dream is playacting! It presents incontestably pure images of the horrific, but also of sweetness, oppression, melancholy, and anxious remembrance. It instantly paints settings to match sentiments, persons, and sounds, supplementing the sweet prattling of a virtuous woman with her face, giving snakes the strange weeds from which they horrifically slither forth; the cries of the drowning the dreary evening landscape of river and shore; and a smile the mouth that expresses it.
    Amid dark-green bushes, white faces lean out, each with a request, a plaint or with hatred in its horrifically clear eyes. Sometimes we see only features, lines, sometimes only eyes; then the pale features come and frame these eyes, then come the wild black waves of hair and bury the face; then once more there is only a voice, then a door opens; two figures charge in, you try to wake up, but the inexorable charging-in continues. There are moments in a dream whose memory stays with us as long as we live.
    This is the effect of the theater too with its figures, words, notes, sounds, and colors. Who would wish to see a delightful love scene minus the opulently overgrown garden in which it occurs, a murder without the dark wall of the alleyway, a scream without the window through which it rings out, the window without the delicate and feminine white curtain that makes it a window, lending it magic and yet also naturalism? Snowy landscapes, nocturnal ones, lie upon the stage in such a way as to make one believe they extend and stretch for miles; a train with red-shimmering windows passes by, quite slowly, as though it were wending and winding its way far off into the distance, where the swift does not insist on