"The Robber" (1925) by Robert Walser is a labyrinth of weightless love affairs, idle walks, coffee spoons, kisses on the knee, and the main character himself casually talks with politicians, then turns into a boy's maid in short pants, and a robber's outfit with a pistol in his belt suits him just as well as a pretty white apron. Behind the cloudy lightness of the novel, not black, but pink melancholy shines through. However, Walser wrote down this trivial story almost in secret writing: in microscopic handwriting on scraps of cardboard and wrapping paper. A few years later he became a patient in a psychiatric hospital, where he spent the rest of his life. It took fifteen years of work by four philologists to decipher the micrograms, and the novel was published only in 1972.