Jakob von Gunten

„We learn very little and the boys trained at the Institute Benjamenta will get nowhere, since we are being made to look small and inferior in later life“, this is how Robert Walser's fictional diary of the boarding-school pupil Jakob von Gunten begins. The setting: a school for servants, which does not promote the development of its students but actually prevents it. The teaching staff seem fast asleep, dead or petrified, except for the horrifying headmaster Herr Benjamenta and his unhappy sister Fräulein Benjamenta. Jakob, a smart and resourceful anti-hero, leads a peculiar double life: at once arrogant and submissive, he's playing the game seriously, shifting between dream and reality. Walser's avant-garde novel presents us with an unsettling counterproject challenging today's delusion of efficiency. In the end only Jakob and the headmaster – a king dethroned – are left. Side by side they ride off into the desert, the great void.