Ernst Raupach

Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach
Portrait by Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein (1840)

Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach (May 21, 1784 – March 18, 1852) was a German dramatist.

He was born at Straupitz (Polish: Strupice), near Liegnitz in Silesia, a son of the village pastor. He attended the gymnasium at Liegnitz, and studied theology at the university of Halle. In 1804 he obtained a tutorship in St Petersburg. He preached at times in the German Lutheran church, wrote his first tragedies, and in 1817 was appointed professor of German literature and history at a training college in connection with the university.

Owing to an outburst of jealousy against Germans in Russia, culminating in police supervision, Raupach left St Petersburg in 1822 and undertook a journey to Italy. The literary fruits of his travels were Hirsemeuzels Briefe aus und über Italien (Hirsemeuzel's Letters from and about Italy, 1823). He next visited Weimar, but, being coldly received by Goethe, abandoned his idea of living there and settled in 1824 in Berlin. Here he spent the remainder of his life, writing for the stage, which for twenty years he greatly influenced, if not wholly controlled, in the Prussian capital. He died at Berlin on March 18, 1852.

Raupach wrote both tragedies and comedies; of the former, Die Fürsten Chawansky (1818), Der Liebe Zauberkreis (1824), Die Leibeigenen, oder Isidor und Olga (1826), Rafaele (1828), Der Nibelungenhort (1834) and Die Schule des Lebens (1841), and of the latter Die Schleichhändler (1828) and Der Zeitgeist (1830) are pieces which enjoyed great popularity.

The historical dramas with which his name is chiefly associated are Die Hohenstaufen (1837–38), a cyclus of 15 dramatic pieces founded on Friedrich von Raumer's Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, and the trilogy Cromwell (1841–44).