The Odin Field [antikvár]

Introduction Today, as in the eighteenth century, wars waged by the powerful devastate the lands in which they are fought and ravage the lives of ordinary people living there. When this happens, all that individuals can manage is to avoid the worst harm and to carry on with their appointed tasks. The novel Das Odfeld {The Odin Field, 1888-89) is a story that finds human dignity and valor in that effort rather than in military heroics; it speaks eloquently to any age in which human conflict accomplishes only misery and the waste of human life. Its author, Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910), stands now as a major figure in German literature between 1856 and 1900, although until recently he was seldom considered in the company of Gottfried Keller (1819-90), Adalbert Stifter (1805-68), or Theodor Fontane (1819-98) — the long-recognized masters of German prose literature in the nineteenth century. In fact, however, there is a case to be made for calling Raabe the preeminent German-language novelist of his time.' Like his great contemporaries, he has given us works of deep human sensitivity, and The Odin Field amply demonstrates this fact. But Keller and Stifter each completed only one major novel, while Raabe could claim at least twelve of significant rank. And his career as a fiction writer was established well before that of the older Fontane: Raabe had published fifteen novels and some thirty-five stories by 1878, the year of Fontane's debut in the genre with Vor dem Sturm {Before the Storm). Raabe's Life and Works Raabe was born in 1831 in Eschershausen, a town on the eastern slopes of the Weser River valley in northern Germany. At the time, it was part of the Duchy of Braunschweig. Here, primarily in the town of Holzminden, he spent his childhood and early adolescence. But when his father died suddenly in 1845 his mother moved with her three children to Wolfenbuttel, about fifty miles distant, where she had relatives. School at the Wolfenbuttel gymnasium became an unhappy enterprise for him, and he dropped out in 1849 without finishing. At