Restless Guests

First English translation of an 1885 novel by one of the foremost writers of nineteenth-century Germany, examining fragmented communities in the "modern times" of the early Second Empire and resonating with our twenty-first century.


Restless Guests: A Novel from Modern Times belongs to a formidable suite of novels published by the prolific German author Wilhelm Raabe during the second half of his career (1874-1896). These works, Raabe's strongest and most complex, secure his stature among the foremost German novelists of the nineteenth century, including, according to the eminent scholar Jeffrey L. Sammons, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Theodor Fontane. Sammons particularly recommends Restless Guests, translated here for the first time, as among the best suited to introduce "serious, curious, and competent" readers to the rewards of engaging with Raabe's fiction.

First published in 1885 yet resonant today, Restless Guests explores tensions in fragmented communities under pressure in the modern times of the Second German Empire: a poor mining and farming village high in the Harz mountains and a newly booming spa in the valley below. Socially and spiritually disparate groups come into contact via tourism, a typhus epidemic, government regulation, and an awkward reunion of two university friends. The persistence of mean-spirited exclusion in the hidebound village and the frivolity and boredom of well-heeled spa guests reflect the ubiquitous unease and disorientation of the era. Raabe tells this story of "restless guests" with irony, melancholy wisdom, and the realist's deep appreciation of the montane natural setting and its mercurial climate.