Wilhelm Raabe
1831–1910 · German novelist and painter
Wilhelm Raabe (Eschershausen, 8 September 1831 – Braunschweig, 15 November 1910) was a German novelist who also practised painting, a side of his work that is less known and less documented. He is remembered mainly as a writer, and his first book appeared under the pseudonym Jakob Corvinus, but the available sources note that he had a real talent for painting and that some 600 of his paintings survive, almost all of them in the Braunschweig Museum. His output as a painter is substantial, though its study is limited by the scarcity of published information.
He was born in Eschershausen, then in the Duchy of Brunswick. After attending schools in Holzminden and Wolfenbüttel, he worked as an apprentice in a bookshop in Magdeburg from 1849 to 1854, a period in which he read widely in the stories and folklore of his own country and others. He studied philosophy in Berlin from 1855 to 1857. After the success of his first novel, Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse (1857), he gave up his studies to devote himself to writing. He lived in Wolfenbüttel, in Stuttgart from 1862 to 1870, and then in Braunschweig.
His fiction is usually divided into three phases. In the first he wrote cheerful novels drawn from his imagination and experience, such as Die Kinder von Finkenrode (1859) or Unser Herrgotts Kanzlei (1862). The second, shaped by Schopenhauer's pessimism, includes Der Hungerpastor (1864), Abu Telfan (1867) and Der Schüdderump (1870), sometimes regarded as a trilogy because they belong to the same period, although they are independent in content. In the third, the pessimism disappears and a humour recalling Dickens appears, with more serious plots. Horacker (1876) best represents this phase, and some readers consider it his masterpiece.
His influences shifted from Jean Paul at the start to Dickens and Thackeray at the end. German readers showed their esteem for him on his 70th birthday. From 1965 his collected works began to appear as Sämtliche Werke (Braunschweiger Ausgabe), edited by Karl Hoppe. His literary legacy is now better known than his painting, and research on his paintings remains less accessible.