Im Bureau

The law of the office shapes our lives from A to Z. When the young Robert Walser began writing around 1900, things were quite different. As an apprentice in a bank, he experienced the office as something irritably new. It appears as the epitome of a life dictated by others and devoid of meaning, while also serving as the place where fantasies and dreams emerge, through which the poet appropriates reality. Like the bureaucratic satires of Melville, Gogol, or Kafka, Robert Walser's stories about employees, gathered here for the first time, shed both enlightening and amusing light on what binds us at our core: the rationalization of the working world.