"Ein handwerklicher Romancier": Masochist Antimodernism in the Works of Robert Walser

Abstract: This article investigates the gender dynamics in Robert Walser's short stories and novels, arguing for the close relationship of the author's masochistic male protagonists to the author's own preoccupation with archaic models of servitude and his understanding of his writing as "artisanal" ( handwerklich ). These aspects of Walser's prose situate him within a gendered antimodernist discourse in German-speaking Europe. By the start of the twentieth century, and especially after World War I, the search for viable economic and political alternatives to the historical fragmentation of German-speaking lands intensified. Rejecting the technocratic economic models of Western Europe and the United States as "soulless," völkisch nationalists advocated a return to archaic forms of community ( Gemeinschaft ) that could discipline, unify, and revitalize Germanic peoples. The troubled gender dynamics of novels like Walser's Die Geschwister Tanner (1907; The Tanners , 2009), Der Gehülfe (1908; The Assistant , 2007), and Der Räuber (1925; The Robber , 2000) anticipate the antimodern, masochistic male personae that later became key to manufacturing consent to Nazism.