Fabio Condemi - Jakob Von Gunten

In 1905 Robert Walser followed his brother to Berlin and enrolled in a school to become a servant. Later, the servant of a Count had him hired for a castle in Upper Silesia, at the top of a hill. Below was the town. Walser had to sweep the rooms, polish the silver spoons, beat the rugs and serve in tails under the name of Monsieur Robert. Walser drew inspiration from this experience to write Jakob Von Gunten.
The action of this novel-diary written in 1909 takes place in a school where young boys are learning to serve: the Benjamenta Institute. A symbolic place of torture and happiness, it is both ambiguous and fantastic: the students, including Jakob Von Gunten, learn their education backwards, blind obedience to the point of disassociating the personality, to the pleasure of self-annulment. All the activities inside the school take place in a state close to sleep and dreaming.
Even the teachers (if they truly exist), in the pages of Jakob’s diary, are described as “sleeping or dead or petrified” and so the subjects they teach: History, Mathematics, Science, Literature doze off inside the Benjamenta Institute. Including Religion, because “sleep is more religious than all religion and it is when we sleep that we are closest to God”.