Place, Motion, and Guilt in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen

Wilhelm Raabe’s novel, Stopfkuchen (1890) highlights inescapable guilt, guilt that is both bound to specific places and that can travel great distances. The themes of guilt, place, and motion are interconnected in this novel, and the novel marks a modern shift in the understanding of these themes. It traces an emerging awareness of both the narrator’s individual guilt in a more traditional sense and the collective guilt of his town and of German culture in a more modern sense. This guilt is both connected to place and dissociated from it, suggesting both a pre-modern connection to place and a sense of displacement typical of modernity. By the end of the novel we find a sense of inescapable guilt that both resides in specific places and compels the guilty toward motion. It makes specific places unheimlich even as it extends across the globe.