This book — subject of a recent film by the Brothers Quay — is published in a series from Serpent’s Tail, a UK publisher with a strong international list, in a series called ‘Extraordinary Classics’. ‘Extraordinary’ is really the right description for a funny, original and downright eccentric book, written with an oddball perceptiveness, a fantastic sensitivity to the peculiarities of individuals and institutions. The cast of individuals here are the students and teachers of the Institute Benjamenta which is a school for servants; Walser, who had a taste for humility and simplicity, attended such a school in Berlin at the turn of the century and worked as a butler for a while. But the Institute Benjamenta of the book seems to exist not entirely on the normal plane of existence. It is run by an exceedingly odd couple; Herr Benjamenta the Principal, who spends his life ignoring the world hiding behind a sheath of newspapers, and his beautiful tragic daughter who seems to have some magical powers to transcend space, time and feeling...

The theme of servanthood itself is an extremely unusual and unlikely one which Walser celebrates, ‘to be of service... a glimpse into divine and misty paradises’, where the strain of constant decision making is subsumed into just following orders. A certain psychology of inner freedom through absence of personal will is suggested, or is Walser mocking German authoritarianism and leader-love? This is a book, a supposed diary, where nothing much is really definite except the often super-delicate and inspired writing itself; Walser is ‘someone who can sense tremblings of beauty in defiance’ and writes such magical sentences as ‘For my fellow-pupil Fuchs I have only one single expression: Fuchs is crosswise, Fuchs is askew. He speaks like a flopped somersault and behaves like a big improbability pummeled into human shape.’

The eventual, predictable, dissolution of the Institute — bullying and pompous as it is, despite the kind Fräulein Benjamenta — has, retrospectively for a book published in 1908, echoes of the dissolution of uptight Bismarkian Imperial Germany at the end of the First World War in 1918 — or are these echoes in reality the first vibrations of Walser’s cataclysmic mental illness which put him in an asylum for nearly twenty-five years? In any case, if you enjoy the truly quirky and unpredictable then check out Walser.

‘«Of course there’s progress on earth, so called, but that’s only one of the many lies which the business people put out, so that they can squeeze money out of the crowd more blatantly and mercilessly. The masses are the slaves of today, and the individual is the slave of the vast mass-ideas. There’s nothing beautiful and excellent left. You must dream up beauty and goodness and justice. Tell me, do you know how to dream?»’ p55