Raupach, Ernst

(1784-1852)

   Playwright. Raupach was a pastor's son born in Silesia, but he immigrated to Russia and began a teaching career in St. Petersburg. On the side, he wrote one-act entertainments for the local German theater company. He gave up teaching in his early 40s and in 1824 devoted himself full-time to writing for the Berlin stage. By 1826 he had his first verifiable hit, Die Leibeigenen (The Serfs). He went on to write more than 100 popular plays, and in the 1840s many of them were a regular feature at the Berlin Royal Theater. His most popular play there was Die Schleichhändler (The Smugglers), which ran for 35 seasons. His cycle of plays about the German dynastic family The Hohenstaufens consisted of 16 plays. Max Martersteig picturesquely described Raupach's stage works as "sugar cookies, gingerbread, cream pastries, and raisin streusel. After gorging themselves on that kind of fodder, audiences did not sleep well" (Martersteig, Das deutsche Theater im neunzehnten Jahrhundert [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1924], 444).