20th Century Metaphysics in Wilhelm Raabe’s Stopfkuchen

Raabe’s Stopfkuchen marks a change in the way in which Raabe, in many of his prose works, uses prints, for example raven footprints, as a metaphor of writing. This new view brings Raabe close in some ways, though not in all ways, to deconstructionst models of the nature of writing and signification. In Raabe’s works, the author is figured as a raven, and his words are the incisions made by the raven’s claws. By the time Raabe writes Stopfkuchen, disillusionment has come to characterize Raabe’s political views and also his views regarding the aspirations to literary representation that constituted the German realist project. With writing that erases itself (sous rature), and an absent center at the heart of the Stopfkuchen novel, Raabe has intuited some of the ways in which literary representation will be understood in the next centuries.