ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Raabe’s literary career is a prolonged and somewhat unhappy tussle with the public and critics of Wilhelminian Germany. His first novel, Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse, 1857, achieved a popular success he never quite equalled in the half-century of novel-writing which followed it; and the masterpieces of his last decade were only written when he at last reconciled himself to the insecure position of a literary outsider. Yet throughout his long career the concerns of the German middle-class public remained intimately the concerns of his fiction. Raabe’s novels, like those of Theodor Fontane, his senior by twelve years but his exact contemporary as a practising novelist, are created from a fruitful compromise between European realism and the German literary tradition. But whereas in Fontane the compromise is achieved on the European side, as a local variant of European realism, the work of Raabe’s maturity lies well to the German side of the continuum of nineteenth-century literary conventions. Is Raabe’s then another case of self-impalement through otherworldliness and provincialism? The suspicion is unjustified wherever he takes issue with it, by turning the conflict between the worldly world and German inwardness into a major theme of his fiction. Nor is there anything provincial about the fairly complex narrative techniques of those of his novels where a characteristic self-indulgence and prolixity of style is turned to parodistic and critical account. But the narrative manner is far from consistently critical, and to impose an overall pattern of conscious social criticism would be as misleading as in the case of Dickens. The fact is that neither early popular success nor later academic (and popular) neglect appears to have helped Raabe to cultivate a consistent understanding of his finest literary gifts. His lasting achievement springs neither from conformity nor open conflict with the society of his day and its professed ideals; nor could he create in such radical and occasionally indignant isolation as did Adalbert Stifter. His achievement is to be found where he writes as his society’s sympathetic domestic chronicler and critic. This is Raabe’s characteristic way of fulfilling one of the conditions, perhaps the most paradoxical, of nineteenth-century realistic prose, whose universal and permanent appeal springs from its creators’ utmost immersion in the palpable circumstances of a very specific and particular time and place. The specificity of vision: the immersion in the domestic particular: the rendering of the familiar detail – these are the objects of the realist’s Eros, and one of the main sources of his relevance beyond his time and place.
