Drama:
Der Abstecher, pr., pb. 1961 (The Detour, 1963)
Eiche und Angora, pr., pb. 1962 (The Rabbit Race, 1963)
Überlebensgross Herr Krott: Requiem für einen Unsterblichen, pr. 1963
Der schwarze Schwan, pr., pb. 1964
Die Zimmerschlacht, pr., pb. 1967 (Home Front, 1971)
Wir werden schon noch handeln, pr. 1968 as Der schwarze Flügel, pb. 1968
Ein Kinderspiel, pb. 1970, pr. 1972
Aus dem Wortschatz unserer Kämpfe, pb. 1971
Ein reizender Abend, pr. 1971
Das Sauspiel: Szenen aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, pr., pb. 1975
In Goethes Hand: Szenen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, pr., pb. 1982
Die Ohrfeige, pr. 1984
Ein fliehendes Pferd, pr., pb. 1985 (adaptation of his novel)
Das Sofa, pb. 1992
Kaschmir in Parching, pb. 1995
Long Fiction:
Ehen in Philippsburg, 1957 (The Gadarene Club, 1960; also known as Marriage in Philippsburg)
Halbzeit, 1960
Das Einhorn, 1966 (The Unicorn, 1971)
Die Gallistl’sche Krankheit, 1972
Der Sturz, 1973
Jenseits der Liebe, 1976 (Beyond All Love, 1982)
Ein fliehendes Pferd, 1978 (Runaway Horse, 1980)
Seelenarbeit, 1979 (The Inner Man, 1984)
Das Schwanenhaus, 1980 (The Swan Villa, 1982)
Brief an Lord Liszt, 1982 (Letter to Lord Liszt, 1985)
Brandung, 1985 (Breakers, 1987)
Dorle und Wolf, 1987 (No Man’s Land, 1989)
Jagd, 1988
Die Verteidigung der Kindheit, 1991
Ohne Einander, 1993
Finks Kreig, 1996
Ein springender Brunnen, 1998
Der Lebenslauf der Liebe, 2001
Tod eines Kritikers, 2002
Short Fiction:
Ein Flugzeug über dem Haus und andere Geschichten, 1955
Liebegeschichten, 1964
Selected Stories, 1982
Gesammelte Geschichten, 1983
Messmers Gedanken, 1985
Fingerübungen eines Mörders: 12 Geschichten, 1994
Nonfiction:
Beschreibung einer Form: Versuch über Franz Kafka, 1961
Erfahrungen und Leseerfahrungen, 1965
Heimatkunde, 1968
Wie und wovon handelt Literatur, 1973
Wer ist ein Schriftsteller?, 1979
Selbstbewusstsein und Ironie, 1981
Liebeserklärungen, 1983
Variationen eines Würgegriffs: Bericht über Trinidad und Tobago, 1985 (travel)
Heilige Brocken, 1986
Über Deutschland reden, 1988
Vormittag eines Schriftstellers, 1994
Ansichten, Einsichten: Aufsätze zur Zeitgeschichte, 1997
Deutsche Sorgen, 1997
Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede: Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels 1998, 1998
Ich vertraue– Querfeldein, 2000
Miscellaneous:
Werke in zw ölf B änden, 1997 (12 volumes)
Martin Walser (VAHL-sur) is certainly to be ranked among the most prominent West German writers since 1945. Born in the picturesque Bodensee area of southern Germany, Walser was the child of innkeepers. He attended a local school during the Nazi era and graduated from secondary school in 1946. He went to several German universities and completed his studies in 1951 with a dissertation on Franz Kafka. While still a student, he worked for a number of years with a southern German radio and television station, and he married in 1950. Walser won the prestigious prize of the “Gruppe 47” organization of German writers in 1955 and has since been an independent and prolific author. He has taught as a guest professor at a number of universities in the United States and in England, and he has been the recipient of numerous prizes for literature.
Walser’s initial efforts at writing were deeply influenced by his early reading of Kafka’s works, in which he identified with the profound and pervasive sense of isolation, and much of his writing during the 1950’s represents an attempt to come to terms with the literary and psychological influence of the Prague writer. Gradually Walser began to realize the crucial role played by social and economic factors in determining the individual’s sense of self and the quality of interaction with others. Although Walser’s works still touch upon existential themes such as aging, love and sexuality, and death, these “socialist” themes came to predominate in his writings as of the 1960’s.
Walser’s first novel, The Gadarene Club, suggests his efforts at emancipation from the influence of Kafka and his adoption of a critical stance toward German society. Written in a complex series of internal monologues, the novel focuses on several characters and their lives in the upper-middle-class social circles of a fictitious southern German city of Philippsburg. Walser levels a sharp and ironic critique of the shallow and egocentric social, sexual, and political machinations of his characters in a societal system that promotes the psychological estrangement of its members. The novels Halbzeit (halftime), The Unicorn, and Der Sturz (the fall) form a loose trilogy of texts that examine the character Anselm Kristlein and continue Walser’s critical probing of the falsity and self-deception of middle-class German society from the economic boom period after the war until the beginning of the 1970’s. Texts such as Die Gallistl’sche Krankheit (the Gallistl illness), the story of Josef Gallistl’s rejection of his upper-middle-class life and his adoption of socialist values, continue these themes. Other works, among them Runaway Horse and Breakers, examine love and marriage, sexuality and aging, and issues of male identity in modern industrial society.
In his plays, too, Walser provides an often ironic portrait of character types–from capitalists in Überlebensgross Herr Krott (larger-than-life Mr. Krott) and former Nazi doctors in Der schwarze Schwan (the black swan) to authoritarian bourgeois families in Ein Kinderspiel (a child’s game)–of modern German society and they evidence, to a degree, the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s satiric-didactic dramatic techniques and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s grotesque parodies. The play Die Ohrfeige (the slap) depicts the situation of the unemployed, their anger and helplessness as well as their fundamental lack of comprehension of the industrial system that determines their lives.
Walser’s writings, much like those of Heinrich Böll, present a critical vision of German society in the postwar period and as such they spring from a deeply humanistic and utopian sense of a kind of social organization that could be. His critique of modern capitalist societies and the kinds of personality distortion such societal structures produce in the individual suggest a romantic longing for a feeling of authentic community in which mutual cooperation (and not ruthless competition), self-respect, and love of others (and not neurotic self-doubt and veiled aggression) regulate human interaction. As a critic of modern social consciousness, Walser gives the reader a sadly accurate but nevertheless optimistic view of his contemporary situation.