«ein bitteres Ding»: il romanzo incompiuto di Wilhelm Raabe Altershausen

This contribution focuses on the unfinished novel Altershausen by the seventy-year-old Wilhelm Raabe, written between 1899 and 1902 and published posthumously in 1911. It is a crisis novel in fragment form that affects the narrative of late German Realism, which here goes to the threshold of the Moderne in relation to the problematisation of traditional narrative aspirations. Right from the title, the centrality of old age is signalled in a name in which time and the domestic space of life meet to define the perimeter of a fading subjectivity, that of Friedrich Feyerabend, whose surname (no less than the chronotope 237 I quaderni dell’AIG 5 | 2022 Abstracs of the title), alludes to the concept of end. The contribution aims to analyse the dimension of the third age in the novel and to suggest, for this work that entertains numerous intertextual relations with German and other literatures, a further source in Goethe.