Geschichte 1914

GESCHICHTE 1914
Robert Walser
Translated from the German by Joseph Randolph

CONTINENTAL EDITIONS
Fiction
Paperback
114 pgs.

Releases June 2026

First published in 1914, GESCHICHTE occupies a singular place in Robert Walser’s work. Neither story collection nor historical account, the volume unfolds through a series of quiet prose pieces whose narrators hesitate, defer, and diminish their own authority even as they speak. Events refuse to announce themselves; significance arrives obliquely, if at all. What emerges instead is a literature of posture—attentive, provisional, exacting in its modesty.

This English edition restores GESCHICHTE as a book rather than a mere assemblage of texts. Walser’s prose appears here in its original sequence and in conjunction with the drawings by his brother Karl Walser, which precede each piece and frame the reading as a series of entrances, encounters, and brief visitations. Together, text and image establish a rhythm of approach that gives the volume its distinctive coherence.

Written during Walser’s Berlin years on the eve of the First World War, GESCHICHTE stands apart from the public language of its time. It offers no overt political argument and no narrative climax. Instead, it attends closely to how authority speaks, how records are formed, and how a “story” can quietly become an “account.” In doing so, Walser anticipates later modernist experiments while remaining unmistakably his own: lucid, evasive, and formally disciplined.