ABSTRACT
When Walter Benjamin's essay on the Swiss author Robert Walser is read alongside his early text on the German poet Friedrich Holderlin, what comes to the surface is a shared interest in the experience that our world cannot be reconnected to an ultimate ground or trans-historical essence. Benjamin's interpretation of the stories and novels of Robert Walser indicates a sensibility for the unsuspected significance of seemingly worthless elements. In Benjamin's view, Myshkin, for instance, is "utterly modest, even humble," "completely unapproachable," and "resembles nothing so much as an ailing incompetent" but he also considers him "unforgettable" and "immortal". Like Holderlin's earlier quoted line "Nachdenkliches, das immer muß/Zur Seite gehn zu Zeiten," Benjamin's own concept of thought always refers to what is an after- thought to life. Benjamin likens thought to "a gift that is added to" life, overwriting its very contingencies with an unsuspected layer of necessity.
