Tubby Schaumann by Wilhelm Raabe

First published:Stopfkuchen: Eine See-und Mordgeschichte, 1891 (English translation, 1983)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: Probably the 1880’s

Locale: A town in Germany and a farm overlooking the town, on the site of an old fortress

Principal Characters:

• Edward, the narrator, who made his fortune and settled in South Africa
• Heinrich (Tubby) Schaumann, the main character of the story, one of Edward’s boyhood friends
• Andreas Quakatz, owner of Red Bank Farm
• Valentina, his daughter
• Storzer, a country postman

The Novel

Wilhelm Raabe’s novel Tubby Schaumann: A Tale of Murder and the High Seas focuses on the life story of Heinrich (Tubby) Schaumann, called “Stopfkuchen” in German. The translator used the nickname “Tubby” to capture the feeling of the German nickname, which can be rendered as “cake eater,” although stopfen (to stuff) conveys more vividly than “to eat” the grotesque image of the young Heinrich stuffing himself with desserts to the point of obesity. The subtitle includes the word “murder” because a murder influences the lives of all the major characters, and it includes “the high seas” to refer to the narrator’s location on board ship as he tells his story.

As the novel opens, Edward, the narrator, is writing about his encounter with Tubby Schaumann during a short visit to his hometown in Germany. While there, he had intended to visit his old mentor, Storzer, a country postman who told him stories as a young boy about exotic places based on Francois Le Vaillant’s Voyage de M. Le Vaillant dans l’Interieur de l’Afrique (two volumes, 1790; Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa, 1790). Storzer’s excitement about these places fired Edward’s imagination and inspired him to seek his fortune in South Africa, where he now has property and a family. Learning of Storzer’s death, Edward decided to visit his boyhood friend Tubby Schaumann, who had dreamed of owning Red Bank Farm, situated on the site of some fortress ruins overlooking the city, just as Edward had dreamed of travel to more exciting places.

During his visit with Schaumann and his wife, Edward is told the whole story of how Schaumann’s dream was realized. When the two were boys, the farm was owned by a man named Andreas Quakatz, who lived as an outcast because the villagers suspected him of having murdered the livestock dealer Kienbaum. There was no proof of Quakatz’s guilt, but that did not convince the community, who self-righteously isolated the man and his daughter. Schaumann, an outcast himself because, as Edward remembers, “in those days [he was] the fattest, laziest, and greediest of us all,” had immediate sympathy for the two outsiders. He struck up an acquaintance with the daughter, Valentina, and finally one day won her friendship when he came to her defense during an attack by some village boys who used to mock her and throw stones. Being allowed to visit, he soon won the father’s friendship as well. Red Bank Farm became his sanctuary, and with the passing of time, he married Valentina and settled there permanently.

In his long, slowly rambling narration, Schaumann reveals that he knows who killed Kienbaum and then does not give the final account until he and Edward go into town that evening. At an inn where there is a waitress who overhears and later spreads the information, he tells the story of Storzer’s confession that he killed Kienbaum by accident. Kienbaum provoked the incident by hitting him with a whip, and poor Storzer, trying to defend himself, threw the stone which resulted in Kienbaum’s death. When Storzer discovered that he had actually killed Kienbaum, he delayed reporting it, even after Quakatz was unjustly accused. Until the end of his life, he was unable to make the admission that would have cleared Quakatz’s name. When Schaumann discovered the truth, Quakatz had already died, and he saw no purpose in revealing the facts as long as Storzer was alive.

Storzer’s recent death and Edward’s visit give Schaumann the perfect opportunity to end that chapter of his story. In the end, Edward realizes that he has no advantage over those who remained at home in Germany: “Yes, at bottom it all amounts to the same thing, whether you stay lying under the hedge and let adventure find you out or whether you let your good friend Fritz Storzer and his old Le Vaillant and Johann Reinhold Forster [a German naturalist] send you abroad to find it on the high seas or in the desert.”

The Characters

The life stories of all five of the principal characters are interrelated in this carefully constructed narrative. Edward interprets this construction explicitly for the reader when he quotes the German philosopher Christian Wolff’s principle of sufficient reason: “Nothing is without a reason for its being so.” Storzer has influenced Edward’s life through his tales of faraway places, just as his accidental killing of Kienbaum made outcasts of Quakatz and his daughter and attracted Schaumann to them, eventually making Schaumann the new master of Red Bank Farm.

The two principal characters, Schaumann and Edward, provide a double perspective to the story. On one level, there is the contrast between the traveler and the one who stays at home, and on another level, there is the conflict between the conventional man (Edward) and the individual(Schaumann), who stands outside and against society. The double perspective allows the reader to understand the feeling of the outcast through Schaumann’s personal telling of his story and at the same time to see events from a certain distance through the eyes of Edward, the visitor who has since made a life for himself outside this community.

The reader gets to know the narrator mostly as a representative of society. Edward, although called an old friend of Schaumann, is actually involved in society’s guilt as well. He was perhaps not an active tormentor, but he went along with the group rather than defending young Schaumann. He, too, thought (and still thinks) of Schaumann as “Tubby.”

Schaumann lives up to his nickname. His corpulent, slow-moving body caused a cruel schoolmaster to use him as a scientific example of the sloth: “Look at him, all of you, Schaumann, the sloth. There he sits again on the dullard’s bench, like the bradypus, the sloth.” The other boys at school did their best to make him miserable, and Schaumann himself admits that he would have rather been “a jellyfish in the bitter salt sea” than “that fat, stupid Heinrich Schaumann.” Unfortunately, he had no control over his physical endowments or his inability to do well in school. Eventually, he managed to come to terms with his life, a slow process which is reflected in the slow-moving narrative style that he uses to tell his story. Just as he always wanted to consume large quantities of food, he also wants to absorb the whole of life. He literally digs beneath the surface in his fossil hunting and tries to look at history in all of its depth, from prehistoric times to the present. The depth of his knowledge and his position as an outsider allow him a perspective on his own experiences and life in general, which makes him a humane person who is not quick to judge.

In the opinion of the world, Schaumann was a fat, lazy, stupid child, and it was easy enough to sneer at him. Schaumann himself affirms the description—he insists that Edward call him by his nickname, Tubby—and recognizes in it his destiny. As he says, “I’ve always been a little weak in the head and weak on my feet.... This was my weakness or, if you like, my strength. This was where destiny took hold of me. I resisted, but I had to surrender, reluctantly.” Because of his weaknesses, he remained where he was and found a haven at Quakatz’s farm from which to battle the world’s inhumanity. Schaumann does not integrate himself into society. Instead, he separates himself from it, fleeing into his private fortress. The view from his retreat allows him a wider perspective, as do his studies of the Seven Years’ War and his digging for fossils. The result is an individual perspective, not a solution to be followed by society. Unlike Green Henry, a character in Gottfried Keller’s novel Der grune Heinrich (1854-1855, 1879-1880; Green Henry, 1960), Schaumann does not experience a reintegration with the common values of society.

Critical Context

Tubby Schaumann has been called Raabe’s masterpiece and is placed among the important German novels of the nineteenth century. Raabe himself referred to it as his best work. Given the lack of translations, however, Raabe is not well-known in English-speaking countries.

The use of narration in the first person is a technique anticipated by his early work, Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse (1856; the chronicle of Sperling Street), in which the narrator also reminisces about past experiences. This technique was further developed in Raabe’s mature work Braunschweig (1870-1902; Brunswick), which is the basis of his reputation as a nineteenth century German novelist. This is Raabe’s so-called Brunswick trilogy of which Tubby Schaumann is a part, along with Alte Nester (1879; old nests) and Die Akten des Vogelsangs (1896; the Vogelsang documents). The same first-person narrative technique connects all three novels, although Tubby Schaumann is considered the best of them, with its complexity of narrative form through interrelated perspectives.

Raabe’s work was written during the period of German Realism (1850-1890), and Tubby Schaumann clearly focuses on the everyday reality experienced by the individual. His realism includes criticism of the society in which he lives. When Schaumann reveals the truth about the murder, the community judgment is revealed as false, and the persecution of Quakatz is shown as a baseless cruelty which cannot be undone. As in Horacker (1876; English translation, 1983), Raabe is concerned with the meanness in human beings who attack by gossip and rumor. The outward appearance of good, upstanding citizens is shown to cover a selfish and cruel core. In addition, Tubby Schaumann is an attack on the idealization of the past, shown in part through Edward’s facing of reality after Storzer’s death. Although a realist, Raabe’s work is regional only in the sense that a specific region can be recognized; the novel does not contain long and detailed descriptions. His concern is human reaction to the forces of society and how those forces influence the individual.

Tubby Schaumann is a masterpiece which exposes the modern theme of isolation. Each character sees his hopes limited by society and is forced to seek some meaning in human existence. The central story is Schaumann’s search for a way to live in harmony with his own character and physical being, but others, too, are forced into that search: Quakatz seeks to understand justice (both divine and human) as he sees himself unjustly accused, and Storzer needs to understand the purpose of life as his own life is spent in fear, first of Kienbaum, then of his conscience.

Raabe’s trademark is an ironic, humorous attitude. He keeps his distance by remaining skeptical about a person’s ability to control or understand the forces which determine human destiny. His protagonist tries to see the world in its full perspective but cannot change it. All Raabe’s mature works reflect the suffering of individuals in a society in transition, where greed and selfishness outweigh humane values. In this context, Tubby Schaumann clearly shows Raabe’s attitude of resignation in that the only solution is the individual’s creation of a humane circle outside the cruelty of the community.

Bibliography

Daemmrich, Horst S. Wilhelm Raabe, 1981.

Fairley, Barker. Wilhelm Raabe: An Introduction to His Novels, 1961.

Field, G. Wallis. “Poetic Realists in Prose: Raabe,” in A Literary History of Germany: The Nineteenth Century, 1830-1890, 1975.

Pascal, Roy. “Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910),” in The German Novel: Studies, 1956.

Stern, J.P. “Wilhelm Raabe: Home and Abroad,” in Idylls and Realities: Studies in Nineteenth-century Literature, 1971.