During Walser’s lifetime these publications received very little real public reaction. An exception is Walter Benjamin who, in his 1929 essay on Walser, called Snow White “one of the most profound creations of recent literature and one that is sufficient on its own to show why the most playful of all writers was a favorite of the merciless Franz Kafka.” Benjamin continues, “Walser starts where the fairy tales stop. ‘And if they are not dead, they live now.’ Walser shows how they live.”

Looking at literary history, Walser’s fairy-tale dramolettes are not unique. They belong to adaptations, re-creations, collections, and studies in the field of folk and literary fairy tales that have been treated by different minds such as Carlo Collodi, Oscar Wilde, L. Frank Baum, Engelbert Humperdinck, Johann Strauss, Selma Lagerlöf, Blaise Cendrars, Carl Einstein, Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Carl Jung.

The fairy-tale dramolettes are magical literary theater—“entirely poetry” in Walser’s words. The characters, while still fairy-tale beings, exemplify the modern individual who exists to understand the possible terms of his or her fate. For the characters, the fairy tale is the world and language out of which they are made, their nature. Walser depicts self-knowledge as an existential state of poetic exaggeration. When the characters speak of their existence, they stand as if beside themselves. Everything has already happened; time has stopped; life becomes reflectively stretched apart. It is transformed into this dream reality, which is fantastic, disillusioning, demonic, enchanting, enlightening, and uplifting. In addition to the subject matter and the metatheatrical dimension is Walser’s inimitable language that gives the dramolettes their special charm. For all its simplicity and elegance, his language is dazzling and full of surprising, ironic twists:

The language must be a weasel

falling headlong when it wishes

that it didn’t lack words for her,

but it can see her poverty.

These days we have learned to deal with the ambivalence of the tableau. Together with innovation, making the unreal means a threatening alienation as well. Walser, however, belongs to a generation that welcomes illusion. Fiction appears as a romantic power that allows one to transform a mundane reality:

Isn’t reality a dream too?

Aren’t we all, even when awake,

going about a bit like dreamers,

sleepwalkers in the light of day,

who play around with caprices

and act as if awake?

While they are jubilantly playful, the fairy-tale dramolettes are little teaching plays too. The characters behave as if in a poetic purgatory, twisting and turning until they confess, which in the end is precisely their purpose. They are messengers of a poetic existence who bear witness to the human longing for being without boundaries while rooted in a center. As an enlightened poet, Walser knew where the power of poetry exists. This is revealed by the Fairy Tale, as a character herself:

The people don’t believe in me,

but so what when just my nearness

makes them think a little again.