Wilhelm Raabe

Born on September 8, 1831, in Eschershausen in the Duchy of Brunswick, Wilhelm Raabe became one of the best-known German novelists of the realist tradition. After leaving school, he spent several years apprenticed to a bookseller in Magdeburg, read widely, and later attended lectures in Berlin before turning seriously to writing.

His early books appeared under the pseudonym Jakob Corvinus. Raabe gained attention with Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse and went on to write novels and stories that closely observed middle-class and small-town life. Readers and critics have especially valued the way his fiction mixes wit and warmth with irony, social criticism, and a strong sense of how modern life was changing 19th-century Germany.

Raabe lived for periods in Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig, and he died in Braunschweig on November 15, 1910. Today he is remembered as an important German storyteller whose work stands alongside other key realist writers of his century.