Why Theodor Fontane is good - no quotes, no examples, no nothin' - a ramble

Maybe ten years ago I read a number of the short novels of Theodor Fontane, the German novelist with confusingly French name,* and I reread his masterpiece Effi Briest (1894), still pre-blog.  In Germany he is, or at least used to be, much assigned to youngsters, which ought to make him hated, but my understanding is that a number of his characters are among the most beloved in German fiction, like Jo March or Jane Eyre in English.

Fontane’s greatest skill was creating lifelike or rounded or “real” characters, really wonderful characters.  He used techniques borrowed from French literature.  He brought Flaubert into German literature, much like Eça de Queirós was doing in Portuguese literature at the same time, with similarly vivid results, although he has none of Eça’s satirical savagery.

Great, lifelike characters had not been the strength of German literature in the 19th century.  Characters were flat or perhaps a better word is abstract, social and physical settings idealized, plots episodic.  German-language fiction was full of uncanny effects, whether as outright fantasy or the unsettling weirdness of Adalbert Stifter, who I would suggest as the extreme end of what I am describing.  I suppose it is not surprising that to the extent German literature seeped into English, the effect was mostly seen in fantasy literature.  A well-rounded character would be out of place in a Poe story, and might even destroy the effect.

Fontane is a realist in a Kantian sense.  Stifter, Hoffmann, Goethe – idealists.  As if this is any help.  Aside from the German setting, Fontane kept in touch with two distinctive aspects of German literature: first, he liked to include uncanny touches amidst the so-called realism; second, he made use of songs and poems within the novel, a device that is socially accurate but also connects his fiction to that of Theodor Storm and many others.

The novel I just read, Irretrievable (1891) makes especially poignant use of a couple of songs.  What more effective way to reach for a sense of beauty than to mesh the action with a poem?  Or what cheaper way?  But in this case, effective, so poignant, so sad.

Fontane firmly joins the European mainstream in his interest in stories about adultery and marriage.  He does not have a hint of the censoriousness that some readers find in, say, Tolstoy.  Well, even I find it in Tolstoy.  You pick a better example.  Fontane first, writes with some distance, and second, shows great sympathy for human weakness.  Any reader of, say, Effi Briest, who thinks that Fontane has picked a “position” on adultery will be surprised when he tries a different book.

Fontane ought to be read much more widely than he is.  A lot of readers would love him.  Tomorrow, though: the case against, or at least a sympathetic glance at those other readers.  Anything to avoid writing about the book itself (as with this very post).

*  No silent vowels in German.  The last “e” is a schwa.  Fon-TAH-nuh.  A French name made German.