©Natalia Pais-Fornari
©Natalia Pais-Fornari
"In Berlin, in a shorter or longer time, I will learn to my true pleasure what the world wants from me and what I myself have to want from it," Robert Walser wrote in 1915, when he had already left Berlin behind and had learned that the world wanted nothing from him and that he, too, was not allowed to want anything from it.
Marti is new in Berlin and is looking for a job. He wants to get to know himself and his abilities and put them to use in fulfilling work. A placement agency accidentally assigns him two jobs at the same time. He doesn't correct the mistake, however, out of shyness, and so finds himself a daytime assistant to a mercurial engineer who lives in a villa on Alexanderplatz, and a nighttime assistant to an ambitious (megalomaniac?) director who is rehearsing an opera adaptation of the Days of the Commune in a basement. Hopefully, he ties his identity and self-confidence to his assistant's work, the actual execution of which, however, remains perplexingly unclear.
Marti is new in Berlin and is looking for a job. He wants to get to know himself and his abilities and put them to use in fulfilling work. A placement agency accidentally assigns him two jobs at the same time. He doesn't correct the mistake, however, out of shyness, and so finds himself a daytime assistant to a mercurial engineer who lives in a villa on Alexanderplatz, and a nighttime assistant to an ambitious (megalomaniac?) director who is rehearsing an opera adaptation of the Days of the Commune in a basement. Hopefully, he ties his identity and self-confidence to his assistant's work, the actual execution of which, however, remains perplexingly unclear.
