Raabe moved to Berlin in 1852. He was unable to register at the University of Berlin after he failed the entrance exam, but he audited classes in literature, law, and philosophy.
Raabe moved to Berlin in 1852. He was unable to register at the University of Berlin after he failed the entrance exam, but he audited classes in literature, law, and philosophy.
Wilhelm Karl Raabe was a German writer and narrator. He was a representative of poetic realism, known for his socio-critical narratives, short stories and novels.
Background
Wilhelm Raabe was born at Eschershausen, then in the duchy of Brunswick, Germany on September 8, 1831, into the family of Gustav and Auguste (Jeep) Raabe. Soon after his birth, the family moved to the larger town of Holzminder, where Raabe spent most of his childhood. His father, a mid-ranking judicial officer, died when Raabe was fourteen, leaving Raabe’s mother to care for the family with only a limited income.
Education
In 1845 Wilhelm's family moved to Wolfenbuettel, where Raabe attended the local high school but never officially graduated. After spending four years as an apprentice to a bookseller in Magdeburg, reading voraciously and teaching himself English, Raabe moved to Berlin in 1852. He was unable to register at the University of Berlin after he failed the entrance exam, but he audited classes in literature, law, and philosophy. He also began reading the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic philosophy exerted a lasting influence on Raabe’s novels.
While at the university, Wilhelm Raabe wrote his first novel, Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse. Raabe returned home in 1855 after completing this novel, which he had privately printed the following year. Despite the obscurity of its author, Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse received wide critical acclaim and later achieved popular success. Determined to make his living as a writer, Raabe produced four novels in the next five years.
In 1862 Raabe moved to Stuttgart. There he completed what some critics refer to as his “Stuttgart Trilogy”, which comprises the novels Der Hungerpastor (The Hunger Pastor), Abu Telfan, and Der Schuedderump. In 1870 he moved to the smaller town of Braunschweig amid the Franco-Prussian War. Biographical information from Raabe's Stuttgart and Braunschweig periods is scant and has been gathered primarily from his terse but frequent journal entries and letters. Raabe's 1888 work, Das Odfeld, one of his many historical novels, focused on the Seven Years’ War.
Averse to personal testimony, as evidenced by his numerous refusals to write his autobiography, Raabe generally referred critics to his novels if they sought information regarding his life. Although Raabe continued to publish prodigiously during his Braunschweig period, it was not until late in his life that he achieved the public recognition he had sought throughout his career. Raabe published his last complete novel, Hastenbeck, in 1899. That same year he began Alterhausen but abandoned the unfinished novel in 1901, declaring that he had retired. He died a nationally recognized author in 1910.
A Bookman contributor declared that Raabe’s ripe maturity of thought, his exquisite humour, his tender keenness of observation and his easy, unhurried style, which does not feel the need of hastening on the action, but lingers to pluck a flower here, a leaf there, to enjoy a vista, or an outlook wherever they may offer — these are all mingled in an infinite charm, an impression of lasting sweetness and pleasure. Raabe’s talent has stood apart from the high-road, and has created gardens of beauty in half-hidden corners, where it is a pleasure to linger.
Considered by many as the foremost representative of realism in nineteenth-century Germany, Raabe approached the problem of verisimilitude in a manner that differed from such novelists as Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. Like Dickens, Raabe openly criticized the materialism and selfishness that he understood as characteristics of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. However, his allegorical novels forego the documentary reportage often associated with realism and represent reality through various literary devices and techniques.
Raabe’s narrative techniques are as relevant as plot or theme in many of his novels. In his 1891 novel Stopfkuchen, which Raabe once called an allegory of his art, the unreliable and evasive narrator Eduard confronts the reader with the possibility that his description of scenes and characters is incomplete, biased, and self-serving. The multiple perspectives offered by the three narrators of his 1896 novel Die Akten des Vogelsangs is another example of Raabe’s experimentalism, as is the fluid temporal scheme in Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse.
Quotations:
"Humor is the swimming belt on the stream of life."
Interests
painting
Philosophers & Thinkers
Arthur Schopenhauer
Writers
Jean Paul
Connections
Wilhelm Raabe married Berthe Leiste in 1862ю They had four daughters - Margarethe, Elisabeth, Clara, and Gertrud.