Wilhelm Raabe
(1831-1910)
Bewildering Stories biography
Wilhelm Raabe was born on 8 September 1831 in Eschershausen, in Lower Saxony, and would make homes in later life in Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig, two towns in the same province. From 1849 to 1853 he worked as a bookseller, settling in Berlin in 1855, where he wrote Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse (“The Chronicle of Sparrow Street”), which was published to great popular acclaim in 1857.
He then embarked on a long and successful career as a freelance writer, much as his older contemporary, Dickens had done in England twenty years earlier with The Pickwick Papers. He moved to Wolfenbüttel and then Stuttgart (in Baden-Württemberg) and lived from 1870 onwards in Braunschweig (Brunswick) where he died, famous and well-loved in Germany, at least, on November 15, 1910.
Holunderblüte, which I have translated as “Elderflowers” although the word Holunder (= ‘elder’) often has the connotation of Flieder (= ‘lilac’) in northern Germany, is an 1863 novella of doomed love between a doctor and a poor Jewish girl in Prague, who dies young of a heart problem. The doctor, Hermann, will go on to devote himself to the medical study of heart disease as a result of the girl’s untimely death.
Copyright © 2023 by Michael E. Wooff
