"Die besten Bissen vom Kuchen". Wilhelm Raabes Erzählwerk: Kontexte, Subtexte, Anschlüsse, and: Wilhelm Raabe: Global Themes—International Perspectives, and: Erkundungen im Überseeischen. Wilhelm Raabe und die Füllung der Welt (review)

"Die besten Bissen vom Kuchen" contains an introduction, 13 essays, and a complete index of names. It is based on papers presented in 2008 at a Raabe conference in Århus, Denmark and, as the subtitle indicates, is divided into three groups: "Texte/Subtexte," "Subtexte/Kontexte," and "Kontexte/Anschlüsse."

Hans-Jürgen Schrader's "Raabes täuschende Titel" is the first of four essays in the first section. Schrader argues that because of the "Überschrift-Verheißung, assoziativer Fehllenkung und Nichterfüllung" of Raabe's titles as well as the artificial structures and broken references in the narration Raabe should be regarded as a literary precursor of modernity (42). In "'Die Welt fleußt gleich dem Strome her'—Modelle von Massendynamik bei Wilhelm Raabe," Rolf Parr examines the depiction of wars, rebellions, revolutions, pogroms, and natural disasters in Raabe's works and traces Raabe's initial technique of depicting mass events by showing their effects on "great individuals"—a technique he learned from Schiller—to his modification and transformation of these techniques in the 1860s and 1870s in such a way that mass dynamic scenes came to inversely mirror Schiller's method (43). Eberhard Rohse's "Paläontologisches Behagen am Sintflutort—Naturhistorie und Bibel in und um Raabes Stopfkuchen" contains 15 illustrations and makes for fascinating reading. Rohse asks himself how theological and biblical content, paleontology, and philistine Behaglichkeit can be reconciled in Stopfkuchen and other works and answers that it is Raabe's view of symbolic synchronicity that permits the co-existence of antithetical phenomena. In "'… beim letzten Droppen Dinte angekommen?'—Raabes Stopfkuchen as Projekt einer poetologischen Selbstvergewisserung," Georg Mein concentrates on Eduard and his diary as an act of emancipation from Schaumann's oral narration. According to Mein, Eduard reconstitutes his identity by digesting and purging himself of Schaumann's overpowering and all-consuming oratory (131).

Almost half of the length of the volume is devoted to the six essays in its second section ("Subtexte/Kontexte") which examine various influences on Raabe and/or his sources or as the editors write in the introduction, "Ausschnittsvergrößerungen [ … ] in der Form von Kontextualisierungen, die von anderen Autoren und ihren Texten aus in Raabes Schreiben hineinführen" (8). The limitation of space permits no more than a listing of the the titles here: Søren R. Fauth, "Die gegenseitige Mörderei und die geniale Anschauung—Raabes Odfeld, Stopfkuchen und die Philosophie Schopenhauers"; Heiko Ullrich, "Die 'herzoglich braunschweigische Ilias'—Wilhelm Raabes Erzählung Das Odfeld als Hypertext des homerischen Epos"; Gabriele Henkel, "Eine 'Stimmung für den hundertjährigen Geburtstag Friedrich Schillers'—Zur Schiller-Rezeption in Wilhelm Raabes Dräumling (1872) "; Jeffrey L. Sammons, "Thackeray als erzählperspektivischer Kontext Wilhelm Raabes—Ein neuer Anlauf"; Herbert Blume, "Literarisch transformierte Realität—Wolfenbüttel in Wilhelm Raabes Stopfkuchen"; and Kathrin Maurer, "Das Ausgraben der Vergangenheit—Heinrich Schaumanns und Heinrich Schliemanns historischer Sinn."

The last section of the book ("Kontexte/Anschlüsse") contains three essays "die von Raabes Texten aus nach außen führen" (8). In "Unruhige Gäste in der Gartenlaube—Zum Parasitären von Raabes 'Roman aus der Gesellschaft'" Christof Hamann argues that Raabe subverted the family magazine character of the Gartenlaube, which saw itself as situated in the mainstream (Mitte) of German life and values. The Parasitäre of the title refers, in a positive sense, to the parasitic method by which Raabe realizes his critique of that mainstream position in Unruhige Gäste, namely, by confusing and recomposing the familiar messages...