Robert Walser was found dead in the snow in 1956 after 23 years in an asylum, and his guardian Carl Seelig controlled the microscripts until 1962

Robert Walser entered the Herisau asylum in 1933 under a diagnosis of schizophrenia. On 25 December 1956 children found his body in the snow on one of his long walks. He was 78. Police photographed the body, and the photograph is widely reproduced. His friend and walking companion Carl Seelig had become his legal guardian in 1944 and also acted as literary executor. Seelig received manuscripts from Walser's sister Lisa in 1937 and a further bundle found at Herisau after the death. Walser had written on scraps in a script so small that Seelig first read it as a code linked to illness. Student Jochen Greven worked out that it could be read, and Seelig refused him access to more manuscripts. Seelig died in 1962. Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte then spent about a decade on the texts. The estate includes 526 pages of microscripts. Walser's sister Fanny Hegi-Walser transferred the rights to the Carl Seelig Foundation on condition they be kept in a single archive open to researchers, and the Robert Walser Archive was set up in 1973.