'Die besten Bissen vom Kuchen': Wilhelm Raabes Erzählwerk. Kontexte, Subtexte, Anschlüsse by Søren R. Fauth, Rolf Parr, Eberhard Rohse, Andreas Hjort Møller

Abstract

1182 Reviews serve the greater social good. The author has traced some forty letters and draws productively on Buchner's lifelong correspondence with Gutzkow for insights into her personal and professional life.Although frequently obliged to record gaps in information, or reportwhat her subject might' have experienced, Scharpf assembles enough evidence to give the reader a clear idea of the educational and social context, particularly in Darmstadt, where Buchner worked tirelessly with Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, to improve women's educational and employment opportunities. Chapters 2-4 and part of Chapter 8 are devoted to presenting and elucidating four editions ofDie Frauen und ihrBeruf (1855, 1856, i860, 1872; English trans., i999)> a treatise that Buchner latterly expanded into a 272-page monograph. This accessible, systematic study signally influenced debate on educational reform. Buchner's stance was moderate and practice-oriented. She argued for equal status forwomen and men, while maintaining the separation of their spheres of activity. At the heart of the project lies the primacy ofwork, whether unpaid in the home or paid beyond it, and?in order to be able towork effectively?of training and education. Unusually, she addresses the needs of unmarried women and ignores religion. Buchner also delivered courses of history lectures,whose 1875 publication Scharpf notes as a unique intervention in 'the male domain of academic specialization' (p. 191). Tracing the development of Buchner's ideas, Scharpf gives an account of her fiction and other non-fictional writings (which include an article on labour-saving household appliances), linking them to her feminist concerns. She examines Buchner's role as educational expert and delegate to the twomajor German middle-class women's organizations (Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein and Verband der Deutschen Frauenbildungs- und -Erwerbsvereine), latterlyas a keymediator between their radical and moderate wings. Scharpf aims to give Luise Buchner a Voice'. She achieves this more successfully in her accounts of her subject's actions than in the translations of her words, where idiom and accuracy would have benefited from further attention. Original quotations, however, are often supplied in endnotes, while 117 pages of supplementary material (a chronological list of Buchner's writings between 1838 and 1878, notes, bibliographies, and indexes) furnish sources for further research. It is impossible not to warm to this progressive humanist voice with itsoutspoken common sense and intellectual open-mindedness. University of St Andrews Helen Chambers 'Die besten Bissen vom Kuchen: Wilhelm Raabes Erzahlwerk. Kontexte, Subtexte, Anschliisse. Ed. by Soren R. Fauth, Rolf Parr, and Eberhard Rohse, with the assistance of Andreas Hjort Moller. Gottingen: Wallstein. 2009. 368 pp. 34. ISBN 978-3-835300544-1. There is clearly renewed academic interest in Wilhelm Raabe's extensive narrative oeuvre and his seminal contribution to the development of German Realism from the 1850s to the 1890s. Postcolonial and cultural studies, media and MLR, 105.4, 2010 1183 discourse history, and reassessments of German Realism in itsEuropean context are shedding new light on Raabe's works while also drawing on a widening range of texts and themultiple frames of reference inhis increasingly self-reflexive style of writing. Based on an international conference at the University of Arhus (Denmark) in April 2008, the volume under review is further evidence of growing international engagement with Raabe's novels and novellas and a welcome addition to the body of research that the forthcoming centenary of his death (15 November 2010) is currently generating. These conference proceedings combine chapters by established specialists with studies by younger academics and scholars who approach Raabe's works from a range of wider research contexts. The diversity of readings is balanced to some extent by a focus on the authors laterworks, in particular Stopfkuchen (1891), and by thematic emphasis on underlying frames of reference in his writing, liter ary contexts, and retrospective contextualizations. The volume's highlights include Hans-Jiirgen Schrader's analysis of Raabe's shifting use of titles for his works, as he moves from conventional patterns to enigmatic, deceptive, and deliberately misleading titles (such as Stopfkuchen, Zum wilden Mann, Eulenpfingsten), which alert the reader to the highly ironic and artistic style of his narratives and often imply critical comment on thepublishing and reading conventions of the...