Robert Walser (15 April 1878 – 25 December 1956), was a German-speaking Swiss writer. Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. Walser was admired early on by artists such as Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig,Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka.

On Christmas Day, 1956, the police of the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland were called out: children had stumbled upon the body of a man, frozen to death, in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police took photographs and had the body removed.

The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer. Some of his books were still in print; there had even been a biography of him published. During a quarter of a century in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks—like the one on which he had died—had been his main recreation.