ABSTRACT
In sharp contrast to Gottfried Keller's novel, both the theme and the form of Wilhelm Raabe's Hungerpastor reflect the idea of the incompatibility of aesthetic representation and social realism which the idealist tradition in German philosophical aesthetics suggests. The idea of a force of desire behind all experience and yet elusive of direct articulation is suggestive of Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, with which Raabe was certainly familiar. The ideological and racial subtext is clear, not least because the figure of Freudenstein is associated throughout the novel with a manipulative use of the categories of German idealism to justify Jewish egoism. Raabe's characters Hans and Moses both suffer from an unfulfilled subjectivity: the distance between their self-conscious mental life and the possible field of action which their society offers. This binary opposition is constantly manifest in the way Raabe's text represents objects.
