Runaway Horse by Martin Walser

First published:Ein fliehendes Pferd, 1978 (English translation, 1980)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: c.1978

Locale: A resort town on Lake Constance, Germany

Principal Characters:

• Helmut Halm, a middle-aged German schoolteacher
• Sabina Halm, his wife
• Klaus Buch, a middle-aged German journalist and author
• Helene (Hella) Buch, his much younger wife

The Novel

Schoolteacher Helmut Halm is vacationing with his wife, Sabina, as they have for the past eleven summers, in a little town by the water on the German side of Lake Constance. Sunburn, a fondness for food and alcohol, and a lack of exercise do not flatter his forty-six-year-old body or hers. The reader first meets them in a sidewalk cafe watching the passersby, whose appearance puts him to shame: He has not even managed a decent tan, and sunburn has brought out every wrinkle and blemish in his wife’s puffed-up skin. Just as he decides to return to their lonely rented room, a trim, muscular, handsome, bronzed young fellow comes up beside them, accompanied by an equally stunning woman, both stylishly casual in blue jeans. Helmut, with distaste, imagines the man to be one of his former students, but the latter introduces himself, however improbably, as Klaus Buch, Helmut’s long-forgotten boyhood companion. Klaus, though Helmut’s age, appears a generation younger, thanks to a regimen of jogging, sailboating, health foods, mineral water, and abstinence from drink and tobacco. He and his strikingly lovely younger wife, Helene, obviously revel in their appearance, even as they excite Helmut’s envy. Klaus professes great joy at this chance encounter and insists on renewing their friendship, despite reluctance on Helmut’s part. In front of both wives, Klaus spins endless tales about their often embarrassingly sexual boyhood adventures. Helmut professes, not very convincingly, to remember virtually none of the details, and he even denies the basic truth of some of the incidents.

Klaus asks that Helmut and Sabina lead a hike into the nearby mountains, but he sneers at the height that they finally attain: a mere hill. He laughs uproariously and mocks Helmut’s inability to keep to the route, a failure scarcely diminished by a sudden downpour. At the summit, they dine at a restaurant, but Klaus objects to the poor quality of the food. During their descent, passing through a village, they come upon a runaway horse, with two men chasing it helplessly. Klaus, approaching it in a wide arc, daringly grabs its mane and mounts it. It races off anew but soon is seen returning, Klaus still astride. He claims to identify with runaway horses and maintains that the owner erred in approaching it head-on: “You must never stand in the path of a runaway horse. It must have the feeling that its path remains unobstructed. Besides: You can’t reason with a runaway horse.”

Klaus is the hero of the excursion. He even appears to be no longer pathologically afraid of the cold, wet nose of Helmut’s gentle old spaniel, Otto, which formerly made him scream at its friendly touch—odd behavior in so virile a man.

More meetings ensue, during the course of which not only does Sabina flirt mildly with Klaus, but also Helmut, who has for some months forsworn sexual contact with his wife, begins secretly to covet Helene. They go sailing on the lake, which, for the Halms, is an unexpected delight. This experience sets the stage for the book’s melodramatic climax. The two men, this time alone, set out for a second sail. The weather deteriorates; a vicious storm arises. Klaus, becoming somewhat crazed, refuses to turn back, almost determined to head for the storm’s eye. The canvas tilts so close to the water as would seem inevitably to capsize the vessel. Only by leaning far out in the opposite direction do they avoid disaster. The logical Helmut demands that they head for shore. Klaus at least agrees to face the wind, thus momentarily righting the boat. He calls Helmut a coward but screams at him to seize the tiller and hold it tight between his legs. Helmut obeys clumsily, causing the boat to change direction. Klaus retakes control and recklessly allows the craft to heel over again. Waves break over the sides. Then, Helmut kicks the tiller out of his friend’s hand; the boat, again heading into the wind, rights itself, but Klaus is knocked into the water and disappears. Eventually, Helmut manages to beach the craft, but Klaus is lost.

The next day, there is still no sign of Klaus. Three people are reported drowned during the storm. Helmut, curiously, proposes to Sabina that they go jogging in the forest. They will walk into town, purchase some running shoes, shorts, shirts, and two bicycles. As they prepare to exercise after their return, they find Helene at the door. She enters, begins to drink, smoke, and eat some rich homemade cake. She is no longer stylishly garbed. This is not the Helene they have known. Her arrival initiates a confession. Tearfully, she claims that Klaus was not at all the successful environmental journalist that he seemed. Often he suffered from writer’s block, staring for hours at the blank page in his typewriter. He fought with his editors and publishers,and his career was about finished. He really worried that she (his second wife) no longer loved him. She could not communicate with him. Jealous of her early musical promise, he forced her to abandon a career as a pianist. Far from a success, he had sunk so far as to look upon Helmut as his only means of salvation.

They answer a knock at the door, and there stands Klaus, the survivor, come to take his wife home. Still drinking and smoking, Helene greets him, somewhat ambiguously says, “Let’s go, genius, onward and upward,” and leaves with him.

Helmut and Sabina now decide that they do not really want to go jogging. In fact, they will even leave the just-purchased bicycles with their landlord. If they ever return to the lakeshore another year, they can retrieve them. Instead, they will pack and head for some other town. The story ends aboard a train, where they find a compartment to themselves; Helmut looks upon his wife with rekindled desire.

The Characters

Since Runaway Horse is actually a novella, hardly more than a hundred pages, there is little space for character description and development. Only Helmut and Klaus receive full treatment. The introspective Helmut is given to hiding his real persona, uncertain of his calling as a teacher and troubled by memories, most of which he would willingly forget (and often does). He prefers the confines of his rented room to the world outside. (He actually enjoys its barred windows and misses them when he returns home.) Depicted as a man of reason, he is nevertheless patently neurotic and even irrational in his unease at Klaus’s probing into their boyhood past. His uncertainties extend to his own self-image. He is gradually, if unwillingly, growing apart from his wife, unable to communicate sexually and torn by a sense of inadequacy. Not until the story’s end does he succeed in achieving some satisfaction from his life and in reestablishing a sexual bond with his wife.

Klaus at first seems to be a successful and well-adjusted writer of health and environmental books, lean and tanned of body, admired by women, and in appearance twenty years younger than his boyhood friend. Yet he is far from this ideal. His wife accuses him of morbid jealousy, of being so insecure as to believe that the equally insecure Helmut can effect his salvation. If Helmut is the man of reason, then Klaus is the man of instinct, the runaway horse of the book’s title and, as the storm incident bears out, an irrational force with which no one can reason.

Sabina and Helene, characters merely sketched, are more normal, foils for their respective husbands. Helene, though younger than Klaus, actually shelters and mothers him. She is unhappy, repressed but resigned, another survivor like her husband. Sabina is scarcely more than a good German hausfrau.

Still, Martin Walser is too professional to create cardboard stereotypes. Helmut is no unblemished hero who, unaware of his own basic strengths, miraculously saves both vessel and madman from his folly, finally solving his physical and psychological problems. In truth, he is mainly to blame for Klaus’s being swept overboard and is experiencing well-deserved pangs of guilt over his friend’s apparent death. Nor does Klaus end as a mere shell of the man he once was; only the disaffected wife offers a litany of his supposed shortcomings. It takes quite a man to survive a plunge into a storm-tossed lake. He returns, doubtless demythologized, as one critic has put it, and doubtless chastened, but hardly conquered.

Critical Context

Runaway Horse afforded Walser his first commercial success; it was a runaway best-seller. It continued the critical acclaim of his earlier novels, plays, and essays. With the death of Heinrich Boll, Martin Walser has become one of the two most prominent German novelists; like Gunter Grass, Walser is eminent in several genres. No modern German writer is better at probing the inner recesses of characters beset by frustration and failure, and Walser accomplishes this without the exaggeration of Grass or the social preachments and frequent humorlessness of so many East German writers. Walser can be quite amusing. Not every critic has recognized the fine sense of humor that prevents tendentiousness and leavens almost all of his books, not least among them Runaway Horse. He can laugh at his protagonists, making the reader laugh with him and possibly at him. If his beliefs and biases inevitably color his fiction, whatever message he sends must be discovered. Rarely does he slip into applying obvious labels. Walser remains a thoroughly satisfying master artist.

Bibliography

Clark, Jonathan Philip. “A Subjective Confrontation with the German Past in Martin Walser’s Ein fliehendes Pferd,” in Martin Walser: International Perspectives, 1987. Edited by Jurgen E. Schlunk and Armand E. Singer.

Pickar, Gertrud B. “Narrative Perspective in the Novels of Martin Walser,” in The German Quarterly. XLIV (1971), pp. 48-57.

Sinka, Margit M. “The Flight Motif in Martin Walser’s Ein fliehandes Pferd,” in Monatshefte. LXXIV (Spring, 1982), pp. 47-58.

Thomas, Noel L. “Martin Walser Rides Again: Ein fliehendes Pferd,” in Modern Languages. LX (1979), pp. 168-171.

Waine, Anthony Edward. Martin Walser, 1980.