Each of the guests was moved by the beauty of the scene - the art of Fontane

So now I will ignore everything I wrote yesterday and assume that we all actively enjoy fiction set in times and places when and where we not understand every detail; that we even prefer fiction full of things we – I – did not know, by itself one reason to read Theodor Fontane.

The title character of Schach von Wuthenow (1883) is a cavalry officer, a perfect gentleman, a Prussian ideal.  He is courting a woman older than himself, a great beauty, or perhaps her daughter, who lost her beauty to smallpox, although people still remember the effect she made at her debut.  The confusion of the situation causes trouble.  Prussia is small enough at this point, 1806 – this is real historical fiction – that the romantic problems of a cavalry officer are of interest to the King, who is a minor character.

Schach is one of those stories where everyone gets what they want, but in a horribly ironic way, like a perverse genie has given them a wish.  As Fontane novels go, it gets quite exciting near the end.  A nasty shocker.

Here the cavalry officers watch a sunset:

Each of the guests was moved by the beauty of the scene.  But the most beautiful sight was the numerous swans which, as everybody was looking up to the evening sky, were approaching in a long single file from the direction of Charlottenburg Park.  Other swans had already taken up a forward position.  It was obvious that the entire flotilla must have been attracted by something to have come so close to the villa, for as soon as they were level with it, they wheeled around military fashion to form an extension of the front line of those which, still and motionless with bills buried in their feathers, were riding at anchor, as it were.  Only the reeds were gently swaying behind their backs.  A long time went by in this way.  (p. 57)

Jenny Treibel (1892) is a dissection of Berlin class differences.  Tiny class differences.  The title character is a grocer’s daughter who almost married a professor but instead jumped to a merchant of higher distinction.  Can she possibly allow her weak-spined son to marry that professor’s daughter?  “’One might be able to get into a ducal family, but not into a bourgeois family,’” the professor says (289).

Terms as crude as upper or middle class are wholly inadequate.  Even geography matters – the Berlin merchant outranks the Hamburg merchant, who are such snobs because their business is international, so that the Hamburger “really believes seriously that we can’t distinguish between sole and turbot here, and is always using the English for lobster, and treats curry powder and soy sauce as the utmost secrets…” (241).  That is the title character, who can be awfully funny, not always intentionally.

The first half of the novel covers one day – a dinner party and another social gathering.  The next quarter is occupied with another party, a picnic, a good place for the marriage proposal that spurs such plot as the novel has.  The last chapter is a party scene, too, at a wedding.  Fontane is like Proust, here.  Most human activity worth documenting takes place at parties, or just before, or just after.

More Jenny Treibel – she is a married woman with adult children, and has just told the professor that although her life is wonderful of course she should have married him:

Schmidt nodded in agreement and then uttered a simple “Oh, Jenny…” with a tone in which he sought to express all the pain of a misspent life.  Which he did succeed in doing.  He listened to the sound of it and quietly congratulated himself that he had played his little part so well.  Jenny, despite all her cleverness, was still vain enough to believe in the “oh” of her former admirer.  (239)

Little insights, little ironies, little beauties.  And some bigger ones, too, but much of the art of Fontane is in moments like this one.

"He can pick it up like a macaroni" - some novels of Theodor Fontane that are harder sells

Theodor Fontane was a Prussian of French descent who could see his world – it classes and follies – from just a little bit outside of it.  He pulled advanced French fictional techniques (in shorthand, Flaubert) into German, almost alone as far as I can tell.  He was a journalist who did not turn to fiction until he was almost sixty.  He nevertheless had a twenty-year career as a fiction writer, long enough to have identifiable stages.

The esthetically unappealing but useful German Library series includes two novels in Short Novels and Other Writings (1981), one early, one late, so to speak, Schach von Wuthenow (1883, tr. E. M. Valk) and Jenny Treibel (1892, tr. Krishna Winston).  Both novels are full fine insights into the characters, beautiful little touches, descriptive and psychological, and a great sense of how the people live and act within the constraints – tight constraints – of their world.

Boy, are they dense with information.  A tough sell, I fear.  I have seen plenty of good readers have trouble with Effi Briest (1895), and these are both denser.  Fontane does much of his work with small talk, pages of it, so they are both denser yet often in a given moment quite trivial, especially when I have only a light acquaintance with foreign policy problems of Napoleonic Berlin, which is how Schach begins.  “’We may be equal to dealing with the Poles perhaps, but the Hanoverians are a fastidious breed’” (p. 4), etc. etc. etc.  The stories of real interest in both novels are marriage stories, love affairs.

Or look at the long, very German passage in Jenny Treibel in which a young woman and her beloved housekeeper discuss the astringent properties of pears.  Papa prefers the peel, core, stem, and all – this is with cooked pears:

“He can pick it up like a macaroni and hold it up and eat it all up from the bottom…  He really is a peculiar man…”

“Yes, that he is!”  (282, ellipses in original)

A full page on pears, before the conversation turns to the woman’s impending – or now maybe not – marriage, all of this while she is grating stale rolls for a bread pudding.

Or look at the title of Schach von Wuthenow.  The translator changes it to A Man of Honor, which is fits the story, at least.  Cavalry Captain von Schach’s ancestral estate is in Wuthenow.  The chapter where, in emotional turmoil, he revisits his old home and messes about in a boat is a lovely thing.  But for the reader without German, that title is too much of a mouthful.

I’m trying to get the negatives out of the way in this post.  In Jenny Treibel, so little happens – a series of parties – that the idea of plot moves towards abstraction.  A Man of Honor is, for Fontane, almost a thriller, so much happens, even a sex scene.  See if you can spot it:

Oh, these were the words her heart had been yearning for, whereas it had sought to don the armor of defiance.

And now she was listening to them in a daze of silent and blissful abandon.



The clock in the room struck nine and was answered by the church clock outside.  Victoire, who had been keeping count of the strikes, smoother back her hair and stepped up to the window and looked out into the street.  (64)

It is deliberately missable, even given the constraints on what can be described in a novel of the time, given later events in the story meant to have readers paging backwards – “Wait, when did that happen – oh.”

The terrible prose of the first line should be assigned to Victoire, not the narrator; unused to sexual attention, she has to resort to clichés she has picked up from a book.  That kind of subtlety is artful, but a hard sell.

So everything is to go on as before - living with Fontane's Poggenpuhl family

Fontane, at the end of his life, moved towards plotlessness.  He knew how to employ the melodrama of life, so to speak.  The events of Schach von Wuthenow / The Man of Honor (1882, the same year as L’Adultera) are effectively shocking.  Irretrievable (1892) has the main characters escape a fire across a rooftop, although I see that last year I wrote a post about Fontane’s slow pace in which I noted that the fire is practically the first event depicted in the novel, on page 201 of 256.  The first actual even, the beginning of an adulterous affair, took place in the blank space on page 200.

Not much happens in Fontane, is what I am saying, and my impression is that less happened as he wrote more fiction, culminating in a practically plotless but beloved and much quoted final novel, Der Stechlin (1898 – much quoted by Germans, I mean – I haven’t read it), and the novella Die Poggenpuhls / The Poggenpuhl Family (1896), which is intelligently paired with L’Adultera in a Penguin Classics volume.  A family with an old name has entered genteel poverty.  Three daughters live with their mother, “Major von Poggenpuhl’s widow” who “suffered from a perpetual cough and lived almost entirely on barley sugar and cough pastilles” (Ch. 1, 133).  I believe there may be some symbolism in that line.  Two sons are in the military, poor officers hoping to score promotions.  Every few days, the devoted maid has to dust and then, inevitably, rehang their prize possession, an oil painting “artistically of the third or even fourth degree of merit” showing the death in battle of one of their ancestors.

Whose story is told in the 96 pages of this book?  That of the mother; one or another of the daughters; the maid?  Soon the younger son drops in, so maybe – no, now he is gone.  An uncle visits, too, and treats his nephew and nieces to the theater and a restaurant.   One of the sisters goes to keep an aunt company.  There is a sledding accident.  The uncle dies and everyone goes to the funeral.  The Poggenpuhls have a bit more money at the end of the book than at the beginning.

“So everything is to go on as before?”

“Yes.”  (Ch. 15, 228, a few lines form the end of the book)

The book is not static but it is hardly eventful.  And it never does become the story of a particular character or two.  I sometimes felt Die Poggenpuhls was written twenty years too early.

So she took the coffee mill down from the shelf and went briskly to work.  When she had ground the coffee beans, she tipped them into the filter bag so that they would be ready later for her to pour on the water; finally she put the kettle back on the fire, picked up the basket of firewood… (etc., Ch. 2, 141)

Not that the entire book is written like this – hardly any of it – as if you do not know how coffee is made or fires are lit, just as not all of the dialogue is meaningless or atmospheric social chatter, although some of it definitely is.  How do you know who these people are?  In Fontane’s fiction, I do not eavesdrop on their thoughts.  I just live with them for a little while.

Well meaning but clumsy - a quote from but not a description of Fontane's L'Adultera

My shorthand for Theodor Fontane is that he brought the techniques of Flaubert into German literature, which spent most of the 19th century in its own aesthetic world.  I do not actually know that Fontane even read Flaubert.  He certainly could have reached the same point on his own path, his decades as a journalist and travel writer leading him, when he decided to turn to fiction at a fairly late age (59 when he published his first novel), to a Flaubert-like style: lots of incidental minutiae, limited third person point of views with lots of shifts among characters, scenes of dialogue that are more like chatter (another kind of minutiae).  Attention to detail but at a distance.  His novels are in the genre I call, after Trollope, “The Way We Live Now,” but with a style radically different than the voluble Trollope’s.

He was if anything more radical than Flaubert, spending more time on the surface of his story, allowing less time in the thoughts of his character.  Flaubert was more of a telepath.  Fontane just sees his characters, and hears what they say, thus the details and the chatter, Fontane’s artful, or trivial, means to reveal who his characters really are.

I keep nattering to excess about Flaubert not just because of style, but because Fontane’s best known novel, in English, at least, is an adultery novel, although one that has little resemblance to Madame Bovary.  Much closer is Fontane’s 1882 novella L’Adultera, the title translated, perhaps unnecessarily, by Gabrielle Annan as The Woman Taken in Adultery.  The Italian title is the name of a Tintoretto painting, the acquisition of which by the good-hearted but insecure Commercial Councillor van der Straaten prefigures the events of the novel.  Poor van der Straaten – his great fault is that at this worst, he is annoying, not solely but especially to his young, elegant wife.  His anxiety about being annoying is especially annoying.  For example, giving his wife the gift of a painting about an adulteress as an expression of his fear of adultery.  I believe we now use the term “passive aggressive.”

A big difference from Flaubert and Madame Bovary: despite his authorial distance – because of it, he might insist – he creates great sympathy for all of his major characters.  L’Adultera is a novel of surprising warmth and forgiveness. How can I not be sympathetic to a man who fears his family excursion to the countryside will be ruined:

“… out in front all the time with a harmonica.”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried van der Straaten, “A squeezebox?”

“No sir.  More like a mouth organ.”

“Thank God…”  (Ch. 8, p. 47)

Maybe this ploy for the sympathy of the reader is too blatant, since we all loather the squeezebox, but Fontane does create other, perhaps more substantial reasons to sympathize with van der Straaten and to not laugh but wince when he plays the fool too much.

The wife receives a similarly gentle, clear-eyed treatment.  The reconciliation at the novel’s end is a lovely moment, even if it still a bit passive-aggressive (“’Always the same.  Well meaning but clumsy.” Ch. 22, 129), and involves a specific kind of Prussian Christmas gift that requires a footnote.  I sometimes come across dismay that 19th century novels about adultery always end in a certain way.  No, not always.

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.

What earthly joy remains free from bitterness? - Theodor Fontane's Irretrievable

The marriage of Count and Countess Holk has turned sour.  The children are old enough to go to boarding school; building the new beachfront mansion was a useful distraction, but it is now complete; the Countess has grown increasing judgmental, rigid, and a bit morbid, while the Count is too shallow to repair the damage himself.

That’s how Fontane’s Irretrievable (aka Beyond Recall, 1891) begins.  Early in the book, when the point of view hops around among several characters, I guessed that the Countess would be the focus, since she is the more interesting person.  When the Count is summoned to his official duties in Copenhagen, as gentleman-in-waiting to a Princess, I thought this was a device to get him out of the way, but no, the point of view now stays with Count Holk, moving to the big city where temptations await.

As Madame Bovary made clear, this kind of limited perspective technique is adept at finding the depth in shallow people.

The novel at this point becomes a detailed, even methodical, account of the steps by which the Count is led, or allows himself to be led, or leads himself, into a sexual affair with one of his colleagues.  Because of some bad luck, and because Holk is a fool, the consequences of the affair are sadder than he had expected.

It occurs to me that Irretrievable is something of a workplace comedy, where the “employment” is assisting and entertaining the elderly aunt of the Danish king.

They all met daily, alternating between the left- and the right-hand towers, and just as the company was always the same, so the entertainment, too, always took the same form, being limited to play-readings, poetry recitals, and charades.  (188)

Easy but dull.

Only near the end of the novel did I understand that the wife’s story had also been present through the book, like a soft cello playing behind the brighter instruments.  I use a musical analogy because the key moment of the novel is her strong response to a song early in the book, back in Chapter 4.

The music was already open on the piano, the lights were on, and they both began.  But what they had feared happened: voice and accompaniment failed to keep pace and they both burst out laughing, half embarrassed.  However, they started again at once and Elizabeth’s high, clear voice, still almost that of a child, rang through the two rooms.  Everyone listened in silence.  The countess seemed particularly moved and at the end of the last verse, she rose from her chair and went over to the piano.  Then, picking up the song still lying open on the music-rest, without saying a word to anyone, she left the room.  (28)

That last action is the secret chord that does not resolve for over 200 pages.  Much of the subtle art of the novel is in this story, the wife’s, the story that is not told.  The lyrics of the song are included, of course, just like in a Theodor Storm novella, even repeated several times.  Delicate things, Douglas Parmée shoves the English into footnotes.  “Peace is surely the best of all earthly happiness, what earthly joy remains free from bitterness?” (46).

No one writes like that nowadays. Nowadays one writes much worse. - Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Samuel Beckett read Theodor Fontane

Three examples of Fontane’s influence or perhaps just presence, one predictable, another unusual, and the third hard to believe.

Thomas Mann must have grown up almost immersed in Fontane’s fiction.  Fontane is a rare case – he worked as a journalist, but did not turn to fiction until late, not publishing his first novel until he was almost sixty, and writing a string of masterpieces in his seventies.  Mann, who was a wonder kid whose publications began when he was, I believe, 18, would have been a teen in northern Germany when all of these radical new northern German novels were appearing.

Mann was always appreciative of Fontane.  “If I may be permitted the personal confession: no writer of past or present stirs in me that kind of sympathy and gratitude, that immediate, instinctive delight, that reflex gaiety, warmth, and satisfaction, which I feel reading any of his verse, any line of his letters, any scrap of dialogue.”

I found that in Phillip Lopate’s Irretrievable Afterword, p. 260; it is from the 1910 essay “The Old Fontane.”  Mann is a writer of many modes, most of them not especially evocative of Fontane, but it is hard to imagine Buddenbrooks (1901) without Fontane’s example.  The first part of the first scene is pure Fontane.  Little Tony Buddenbrooks is on her grandfather’s lap reciting her newly-memorized catechism; the grandfather gently mocks not her but the innovations recently introduced into it.  The grandfather is brought to life by this one little gesture based on a social change that a modern reader may not even be able to detect any more.

I have not read Günter Grass’s 1995 novel Too Far Afield.  I am not sure I could read it well.  It is about history and German unification, but it is also about Theodor Fontane, and not only about him but to some large degree composed of Fontane quotations.  Like a novelistic collage.  Good luck finding an English-language reviewer who was able to detect any of this.  The title, Ein weites Feld, is from a phrase Old Briest says repeatedly – in fact they are the last words of Effi Briest – a hugely famous quotation that not only means nothing to English-language readers but is not even recognizable to someone who has read Fontane in translation, since the two translations I know do not translate Briest’s words as “too far afield.”  Impossible.

The unlikely Fontane fan is Samuel Beckett.  I will quote extensively from Beckett’s Polish translator and collaborator, Antoni Libera:

Beckett arrived with his typical punctuality, at twelve on the dot, not a second later.  To a meeting that wasn't connected with any creative plans or projects he usually came "empty-handed", as he liked to put it.  This time he was holding a small book, which turned out to be an old, very well-thumbed copy of Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane.

Beckett's close friends and those who are experts on his work will know that it was one of his favourite novels, which he often went back to and which he also referred to in his writing.  "Let us hasten home", says Mr Rooney to his old wife in the radio-play All That Fall, "and sit before the fire. We shall draw the blinds. You will read to me. I think Effi is going to commit adultery with the Major."  And in Krapp's Last Tape, as he's making his recording, old Krapp muses: "Effi... Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes" - because the action of the novel takes place near Stettin - a city which now, as Szczecin, belongs to Poland.

All of that is accurate, except for some reason in Krapp’s Last Tape the name is spelled “Effie”: “Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again, a page a day, with tears again”  (p. 25 of the Grove Weidenfeld edition).  Back to Libera and Beckett:

I plucked up the courage to ask the vital question:

"Why do you like that novel so much?"

There was a long pause before I got an answer.

"I used to dream of writing something like it.  And I still have a bit of that dream left.  But I never did.  I never did write it..."  He broke off.

"You never did write it?" I brazenly tried to drag the words out of him.

Another wan smile, and then, unfolding his hands, he said:

"For... I was born too late.  No one writes like that nowadays.  Nowadays one writes much worse."  He glanced at me and added jokingly:  "But don't worry.  The world is changing.  Perhaps you'll manage it."

Beckett seems to have actually lived in a Beckett play.  A page a day would be a strange way to read Effi Briest.  Still, what good company for reading Fontane.

Why Fontane can be slow going - more ramblin'

When my old book club read Effi Briest – this was ages ago – several readers found the late 19th century Prussian setting and the German names and titles to be an obstacle.  Or perhaps more of a kind of friction, a thickening of the prose that was no longer present for these experienced readers of novels about Paris or London or St. Petersburg, which they had visited so often in fiction.

The friction was rough enough in Irretrievable that it slowed me down, though I had assumed I would be comfortable enough.  The setting is not even in Prussia, but mostly behind the scenes of the Danish court – the monarchical court, not the legal one – in Copenhagen, and occasionally in rural Schleswig, which at the time of the novel was Danish, but would be Prussian soon enough.  Note how I have snuck in another Scandinavian novel in German disguise.

There were times when I had to slow down quite a bit, either to puzzle out some mysterious reference or to file it away for later.  I mean, the functionings of the Danish court!  How helpful to have such easy access to good internet maps.

Fontane’s method contributes to the difficulty.  Characters are created from minute accumulations of detail, including pages of subdued scenes and trivial dialogue  – “social chatter” is what the editor of the NYRB Classics edition calls it (259).  Within every scene, there will be something in the chatter that is either deeply revealing about one or more characters, or will when mixed with something later becomes meaningful.  The effect is artful and subtle, but a cost of the method is that some of the chatter is merely that, deliberately shallow and sometimes even close to meaningless.

On top of this, as is common with novels of manners, there is little action of the melodramatic, plot-moving sort, but rather a great deal of ordinary motion, characters assembling for meals or taking walks.  Irretrievable is particularly slow, or daring, in this regard, with the first moment of action, the first point in which a reader can be clear what the novel is about, occurring on page 201 of 256.  In fact, two dramatic events occur at that same point, one genuinely melodramatic, a “damsel in distress” moment, as if Fontane wants to awaken the reader who has been lulled into a nap, or who did not notice that the first, character-driven dramatic event occurred in the white space between chapters.

As French as Fontane’s novels feel in some ways, and as concerned as they are with sex and adultery, Prussian standards of what could be directly expressed in print were much more Victorian than Parisian.  Given Fontane’s style, though, I doubt more permissive publishing would have changed much.

We are not so far, in Fontane, from basing an entire novel on a woman planning a party.  I do not think of Mrs. Dalloway as a novel where nothing happens; nor is that the case in Fontane novels, as the duel in Effi Briest or the climax of Schach von Wuthenow (1882) make clear enough.

Look at that title – English readers without a semester of German will have no idea how to pronounce it or what it is even supposed to mean.  It’s just a person's name.  The novella has been translated with the fake but less intimidating title of A Man of Honor.  Its story goes like this: romance, indiscretion, domestic stuff, domestic stuff, domestic stuff, OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED HOW HORRIBLE, ironic ending.  That was from memory, so perhaps I did not count the instances of “domestic stuff” properly, and my whole point is that whatever delaying devices Fontane uses, I vividly remember where the story ends up.

I think Fontane is a terrific writer, but for some kinds of good readers he will be a real test of patience.  That’s what I took 600 words to say.

I really did think I was going to get to Samuel Beckett today.  How that was going to work – anyway, tomorrow, Mann, Grass, Beckett; more social chatter.

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.