Wilhelm Raabe: 'German Moonlight', 'h Xter and Corvey', 'at the Sign of the Wild Man' (Modern Humanities Research Association New Translations)

This volume assembles English translations of three of Wilhelm Raabe's most intriguing narratives. Raabe (1831-1910) was one of the most complex and multi-layered German writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. The three pieces published here for the first time in English are: 'German Moonlight', a tongue-in-cheek study of lunacy and split personality as a quintessentially German condition; 'Höxter and Corvey', an unsettling reconstruction of civil unrest and anti-Jewish violence in the seventeenth century which advocates tolerance and sobriety in troubled times; and At the Sign of The Wild Man, an inverted genre piece in which a rural idyll is devastated by an agent of global capitalism. All three narratives, written during the first half of the 1870s, contain stinging criticism of the mentality of complacency so prevalent in the newly-founded German Empire; but they also offer moving stories of personal crisis, quiet heroism and noble resignation.