ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Raabe’s writing career spanned almost the entire era of German Realism and extended into the period of Naturalism. However, he came to be quite detached from these movements, in time virtually ignoring his German contemporaries and their literary theories while allowing his own work to be influenced by English novels, especially those of Charles Dickens (for empathic representation of the trials and sorrows of ordinary people) and William Makepeace Thackeray (for sardonic social commentary and dubiously reliable first-person narrators). While his contemporaries demanded the suppression of the narrative voice and a transparency of style, Raabe did just the opposite, complicating the narrative perspective in a variety of ways and foregrounding fictionality. His German contemporaries decided that he just did not know how to tell stories, but they admired his spirit and came to revere him not as a literary artist but as an oracle of bourgeois wisdom, forming a cult around him that served as a kind of fame from the latter part of his life into the Nazi period but then became a burden for his reputation because of its nationalist and fascist complicities. This was not, in any case, what he wanted; he strove to reconcile his distinctive narrative imagination with his ambition to be acknowledged as a major writer of the German nation, and in his own eyes, he never succeeded.
