Well I suppose that Jakob von Gunten is a bildungsroman because it follows its young and eponymous first-person narrator through his later school years and ends with his departure from the Institut Benjamenta. On the other hand, its 144 pages raise some doubts about whether it qualifies as a Roman, although the Süddeutsche Zeitung published it in the newspaper’s second set of great novels of the 20th century. I’m also not sure how much Bildung goes on. While most of the novel takes place inside the Benjamenta, I think it shows even less of classes and lessons than The Confusions of Young Törless, and that was precious little. Jakob’s progress shows mainly in his interactions with the school’s namesake director. It is a peculiar book, which is fair, because Walser led a peculiar life.

The novel is set more or less at the time of writing, which is to say 1909. Walser turned 31 that year. He had led a peripatetic life as a young man, leaving Biel, Switzerland where he grew up for Stuttgart, where he had a brother, and then later moving on to Zurich, where he worked irregularly in various office jobs. Following Zurich, he lived in Thun, Solothurn and Winterthur (all Swiss) and Munich; he did his mandatory military service, and then in 1905 he moved to Berlin, to which his brother had in the meantime moved. Walser had been publishing stories in various magazines, and in 1904 he published his first book, a collection of essays. This was a time when it was possible to make a living — sometimes modest, sometimes precarious, for a fortunate few quite tidy — writing for the numerous newspapers and periodicals in the big German-speaking cities. At its more esoteric end, this milieu shaded into the settings described in Herr Dame’s Notebooks; at its more carefree, the kinds of light adventures described in Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky, who is counted as an admirer of Walser. In 1905 Walser attended a course to become a servant at an aristocratic castle. The years just after the turn of the 20th century were still a time when European nobility continued to openly wield power from castles large and small, and training such as Walser had could lead to an actual job. The school shared characteristics with the fictional Benjamenta, but Walser as a 27-year-old trainee would have been very different from teenaged Jakob von Gunten.

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