Environmental Depredation and Aesthetic Reflection in Wilhelm Raabe’s Late Fiction

Abstract

In the winter of 1890 to 1891 the city of Braunschweig experienced a precipitous decline in the quality of its drinking water. The cause: beet sugar factories in the surrounding duchy were releasing hydrogen sulfide—the major byproduct of beet sugar production—into the Oker River watershed in quantities that exceeded the capacity of local water purification facilities. Wilhelm Raabe described the town’s situation in a letter to his daughter on January 17, 1891: “Be glad that you are not in Braunschweig. An absolute pigsty! We no longer bathe, we no longer brush our teeth, even in our cooked food you can taste the water from the Oker, spoiled by twelve sugar factories: Pfister′s Mill in its most terrible completion!” (Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, H III 10 : 2).1 The letter describes the intrusion of a byproduct of modern industry into a city that Raabe had once praised for the “ancient magnificence and beauty of lower Saxon bourgeois splendor.”2 In the letter Raabe understands environmental crisis as an aesthetic crisis, one that then precipitates a civilizational crisis: quotidian habits of hygiene and consumption are suddenly disrupted as the ugly signs of modern industry move from the duchy’s peripheral industrial settlements into the beautiful, pre-industrial urban core. Pfister’s Mill (Pfisters Mühle) is Raabe’s 1884 novel about water pollution from a beet sugar factory driving a mill out of business. If Pfister’s Mill reaches its “most terrible completion” in the calamity of 1891, then it is because what appeared in the novel as an individual tragedy has grown into a disaster for an entire city.