Friday, July 31, 2015

Wandering Berlin with Theodor Fontane

I had the pleasure of spending a few days trooping around Berlin, getting to know the city a little bit.  A lot more than the glimpse of it I got fifteen years ago, which was hardly any help at all.  Berlin has changed so much, and so quickly; been destroyed and rebuilt in cycles.  It is still rebuilding and shifting, perhaps not as rapidly as in the 1990s, although there are still construction cranes all over.

Many years ago I was in a book club that read Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895).  Several readers noted that they had difficulties with the place names and settings (in Berlin and a Baltic coast town).  They had few referents for Berlin, almost none compared to Paris or London, cities we visit in literature so often that their landmarks take on meaning regardless of whether we have been there ourselves.  We create our own geography out of books, films, and news, much of it wrong but imaginatively functional.  For English-language readers, Berlin is more nebulous.

And then they keep changing it!  Literary Vienna may be unfamiliar, too, but the Vienna of Schnitzler still exists in some way.  Fontane’s Berlin is harder to find.

Commercial Councillor van der Straaten, of 4 Grosse Petristrasse, was incontestably one of the most substantial financiers in the capital, a fact scarcely affected by the circumstance that his solid reputation rested more on his business than on his personality.

L’Adultera / The Woman Taken in Adultery (1882), one of Fontane’s earliest novellas.  Title first (and for English readers that title needs a footnote), then surname, then address, as if I might send him a postcard.  The street has changed its name along with its character.  Their apartment has been replaced with either a parking lot or a Novotel. But he is right in the center of the city, on the Museum Island, in the middle of things, where a man of his stature ought to be.  Or so I understand now that I have looked into it.

The Penguin Classics edition, translated by Gabrielle Annan, that includes L’Adultera pairs it with the later, more exquisite, nearly plotless The Poggenpuhl Family (1896), about an aristocratic family in decline.  The address is delayed to the second sentence this time – “Since they had moved to Berlin from Pommersch-Stargard seven years ago they had lived in a corner house in the Grossgröschenstrasse, a new building only just completed and still damp in the walls when they arrived.”  I was not quite in the vicinity, but close enough to suspect that their apartment, if it survived the war, is now the home of a Turkish or Bosnian family.  Grossgröschenstrasse is definitely not in the center of things.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that Pommersch-Stargard is now in Poland.

All of this would have been easy shorthand for Fontane’s readers.  Some of it is easy for current German readers.  But I have to, or at least should, look up every street and park.  Eh, once upon a time I did not know where Kew Gardens or the Bois de Boulogne were, either, or what it might mean if a character set foot in them, but that’s old stuff now.

20 comments:

  1. You touch upon a frustration I often have with books; I very much want to know about and understand locations and contexts but lack the essential knowledge for a full appreciation of what the author might be suggesting.

    And, BTW, I am squeezing this comment into my schedule prior to my departure in another hour and a half for a weekend religious retreat (which you read about at my blog, Beyond Eastrod -- http://beyondeastrod.blogspot.com/2015/07/updated-announcement-and-question.html -- and I look forward to browsing your postings again during my idle moments this weekend. Be well.

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  2. It can take a little work. Google Maps has been a helpful tool. The tiniest parks, the most obscure streets just pop up for me.

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  3. Robert Benchley once wrote a charming piece claiming that he always visualized the scenes in books taking place in his hometown, Worcester, Mass. Caesar, if I recall, was assassinated in the vacant lot across from the grocery store. That may be common...

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    1. love benchley. what's the name of the book?

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    2. I just checked: the piece is called "Mind's Eye Trouble," and is included in "No Poems" and in the later "Benchley Roundup."

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  4. I've never been to Berlin, but I tried using Google Maps Street View when I read Effi Briest earlier this year, finding the experience rather frustrating. If I'm not thinking of another such experience, there's a kind of ugly apartment building now where the house should be. I'm sure this is all much more rewarding on foot, though how marvelous to have now, with digital technology, all these possibilities for mapping out and viewing literary locations where they still exist - and where they don't says something interesting too.

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  5. I often try to find maps of the city contemporaneous with the book I'm reading. Plenty of times that adds confusion, though.

    When I was in Prague, the city didn't seem to align itself properly with the early 20th-century novels set in Prague that I've read, even if none of the streets have moved. The metaphorical layer was missing.

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  6. Benchley cannot possibly be alone.

    I will say that using Google Maps to help with Fontane is much more meaningful and easier now that I have been there and have some things straight. Still, there are limits. In Paris, it is not all gone, gone, gone. In Berlin, well, the parks are still there. I suspect the reader of Berlin Alexanderplatz is not going to get much juice from actually visiting Alexanderplatz, given is condition today.

    I visited Prague on this trip, too, for the first time. I had never considered how beautiful Kafka's city was - and how it was beautifying around him. His childhood home was beautiful, his dang insurance office was beautiful. Externally at least. He grew up next to a giant 15th century clock. How strange.

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    1. Yes, Prague is breath-taking, a storybook city. All the colors and statuary. Did you go through the Mala Strana? What a park, with that monastery at the top of the hill. Kafka and Meyrink never pause to mention that their city is gorgeous, one wonder next to another, swans on the river, copper weathercocks everywhere.

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    2. Mala Strana, no. Meyrink's Prague is pure fantasy. Which I guess I knew. Kafka's Prague - maybe he was careful to keep it out of his fiction, or to hide it.

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    3. On my pile of books to read here is Meyrink's "Walpurgis Night," which I suspect may take place in a realer Prague. Maybe not; I guess I'll find out. Did you get out of Prague any? To the ossuary in Kutna Hora, or the painted castle of Cesky Krumlov, with its bear moat?

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    4. No ossuary's unfortunately. I wonder what the crowd was like there. We got out of the center of Prague, which was victory enough.

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    5. There's an extraordinary film of Kutna Hora by Jan Svankmajer http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065947/

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    6. Hang on, the bone sculptures are from the 19th century? We went to not one but two exhibitions of art brut on this trip - Kutna Hora would have fit right in.

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  7. 'L'Adultera' is an entertaining little book, but then most of Fontane's work is. Once again, as in 'Effi Briest', we're shown that infidelity doesn't have to end up with Anna Karenina splattered across the train tracks...

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  8. That is funny. Tony, I stole what you said in the next post, but before you said it. It is true.

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  9. Interesting post and interesting discussion. I had read most of Berlin Alexanderplatz before my first trip to Berlin. My German friend was very impressed that I was reading such a difficult classic even in English. (I had the book with me.) While I didn't look for specific match-ups between places in the book and locations in and around Alexanderplatz, I do recall thinking the overall run-down feel to the area matched my general impression of the novel's setting.

    I should say that I was there the year after the wall came down. It's probably all changed since then.

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  10. Alexanderplatz is still run-down compared to a lot of Berlin. That can't last. Too valuable.

    But I do mean the specifics. The entire area was destroyed during the war and rebuilt in classic East German style. Compare to Dublin and its Ulysses plaques. Although some of those show, like, where Bloom crosses the street. Maybe Alexanderplatz could still have plaques like that. But otherwise, they would all have to label what used to be on the spot.

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    1. Lot of 'used to be' in Dublin too. I lived in Berlin for a while in 1988 and it was strange to realise that so many of the apartments were built post WW2, especially as they were falling apart due to the bad quality of the cement used, due to the difficulty of getting building materials into Berlin.

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    2. Those East German buildings are increasingly rare. You certainly know them when you see them. Doomed buildings.

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