In his remarkable series of essays The Spirit of the Age, William Hazlitt wrote:
A really great and original writer is like nobody but himself. In one sense, Sterne was not a wit, nor Shakespear a poet. It is easy to describe second-rate talents, because they fall into a class and enlist under a standard; but first-rate powers defy calculation or comparison and can be defined only by themselves. They are sui generis and make the class to which they belong. I have tried half-a-dozen times to describe [Edmund] Burke’s style without ever succeeding: its severe extravagance, its literal boldness, its matter-of-fact hyperbole, its running away with a subject and from it at the same time, but there is no making it out, and no example of the same thing anywhere else. We have no common measure to refer to, and his qualities contradict even themselves.1
These words are worth bearing in mind when we think of Theodor Fontane. There are nineteenth-century German writers whom we would rank higher: Goethe certainly, who had the ability to do everything anyone else did just a little bit better; and Heine, who had no equal as a prose writer and whose satirical gifts recall those of Juvenal; and any number of lyricists whose talents were truer and fuller than Fontane’s. Even so, the products of Fontane’s pen were so original and so diverse that their author’s stature is as undeniable as his defiance of classification. There is no one like him. No writer in his time had a range as great as his, including as it did political journalism of the highest quality, ballads, songs, historical poems and vers d’occasion, a unique kind of travel literature, military history and historical essays on Prussian, English and Scottish history, extensive writings on the theater, novels that have been described as the most completely achieved of any written between Goethe and Thomas Mann, and a volume of correspondence that marks him as one of the most entertaining letter writers in German literature.
Nor does such a listing of categories succeed in giving a true sense of the uniqueness of his work. Anyone who picks up a volume of The War against France or Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg with the expectation that it will conform to conventional nineteenth-century military or travel literature will be happily surprised, in the former case by the clarity and essentially literary quality of the style, which makes technical detail and complicated maneuvers comprehensible to the general reader, by the masterful description of the historical and political context and of the terrain in which the hostilities take place, by Fontane’s eye for the critical turning points in battle and his dramatic re-creation of individual passages of arms, by his freedom from narrow national partisanship, and—above all—by his insistence upon entering into the minds and attitudes of the soldiers on the other side of the hill. It is these qualities that have assured the survival of his military histories, while the professional studies of the time, written by people who refused to believe that a mere civilian was capable of writing about their métier, have long since sunk into oblivion. Similarly, one can say of the Wanderings that there is no example of the same thing anywhere else—a kind of travel literature that enchants the reader with its mixture of description, history, and anecdote, that is studded with brilliant set pieces, like the story of the execution of Katte, the friend of Frederick II’s youth, at Küstrin, and that is written in a style that varies between the circumstantial and the playful, Sachlichkeit consorting easily with Plauderei.
In his splendid biography, Hans-Heinrich Reuter has written that Fontane’s greatest gifts were his power of acute observation, his critical capacity, and his sense of history, and that it was these, gradually developed and mutually self-supporting, that comprised his originality and determined the character of his finest work.2 More will be said of all these qualities in the chapters that follow, but—since the author of these pages is himself a historian—the emphasis will fall upon the third, Fontane’s affinity for history, which he came to naturally and which was his strongest passion.
At this point, I should confess that the genesis of my own admiration of Fontane was very belated and that, to the best of my recollection, I had neither heard his name nor read a page of his work until 1938, when I was twenty-five years old. This still seems a bit odd to me, for during my training in history at the university I had a strong interest in German literature, and I can only attribute it to the fact that, in American universities in the 1930s, departments of German literature did not pay much attention to the nineteenth-century novel. Beyond the Laokoon and the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, and the writings of the Weimar dioscuri, and the Romantics, a great wasteland extended in which Schopenhauer and Wagner and Nietzsche were rumored to dwell but which was apparently forbidden territory for novelists, who had to go to Russia or France or Great Britain in order to ply their trade. It was not until I came back to Princeton from Oxford as a graduate student in history that I discovered that this view was exaggerated. At that time, my Doktorvater Raymond James Sontag gave me a book by Ernst Kohn-Bramstedt,3 and I heard for the first time the names of Gustav Freytag, Friedrich Spielhagen, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane.
Kohn-Bramstedt was a confirmed believer in the importance of the novel of society as a historical source, a belief that he emphasized at the outset:
To what extent can one rely on literature in depicting society? What likelihood is there that the social novel will help to a better understanding of society? By means of particular instances and sequences of events it can portray the specific character of social situations or of social types and illustrate even the smallest features of everyday life. Today a serious social novel implies just as exact an empirical knowledge of its subject as does a scientific sociological analysis. Although, in contrast with science, the novel does not verify its results with the aid of a statistical method, it works with a combination of observation and intuition, involving the risk of inaccuracy, but conferring the advantage of a greater approximation of life.4
Had I been further advanced in my historical studies, I might have considered that statement as exaggerated or even dogmatic. But I was at the time under the spell of the great French and English social novelists and inclined to believe that Kohn-Bramstedt was right. And in any case, I was curious about the work of these German writers of whom I had never heard. What Kohn-Bramstedt had to say about their novels and the light that they threw on the manners and morals of nineteenth-century German society was both interesting and illuminating, and I sat down to read Freytag’s Soll und Haben, Spielhagen’s Sturmflut, and Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle with enthusiasm and profit. Indeed, I learned more from them about early industrial development in Germany and the social consequences of the new capitalism and the financial collapse of 1873 than I had from any historical account that had yet come my way.
Of all these new discoveries, however, it was the novels of Theodor Fontane that seemed to me to focus most consistently upon the problems that had fascinated Dickens and Trollope and would later challenge the imagination of Proust—the decline of the aristocracy, the insidious effect of parvenuism on the middle class, and the general deterioration of values that flowed from all of this. As an apprentice historian, I was already working hard on the Bismarck and Wilhelmine periods, and from the beginning Fontane’s novels struck me as an indispensable source of material, and one that could be read with the keenest intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment. I was captivated by their economy, their artful construction, and their urbanity, humor, and felicity of phrase, but no less by their author’s skill in laying bare the essentials of social reality and class conflict by his delineation of his characters as social types responding to the problems of their time in typical ways.
In short, I admired the historian in Fontane more than the artist, of whom I was, of course, incapable of making any very sophisticated judgment. And yet, as I turned to his earlier works—the ballads, and the book on Scotland, and the wonderful Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg, and the war books, all works in which his historical gifts were more directly manifest than in the novels and which I read with enthusiasm and gratitude (rightly so, for what would my own book on Königgra tz have become had I not read Fontane’s German War of 1866?)—I began to understand that Fontane was a gifted historian because he was a great artist, often arbitrary in his handling of the material the professional historians brood over endlessly in their search for accuracy, but more searching and incisive for all of that, intent on looking into history rather than on photographing it, and sometimes succeeding, despite a proneness to small mistakes of fact, in giving a more truthful picture of the past than his academic colleagues.
Fontane was himself not unaware of this. At the end of a dreary Sunday in London in 1856—a time when he was serving as press attache to the Prussian envoy Graf von Bernstorff, doing work that did not challenge his talents, homesick and separated from his wife and son, and with only a handful of friends—he wrote in his diary:
Simpson’s on Drury Lane. Mutton as usual. I can’t stand it. I would give a Reichsthaler for a portion of green peas and beets or a bowl of sour milk. My stomach is done for, and it is an eternity till Christmas [when he would have home leave]—Café Divan. . . . Read Macaulay—the ever closer approach to the abyss, Tyrconnel in Ireland, the overthrow of the Hydes (Lord Clarendon, the viceroy of Ireland, and Lord Rochester, the First Lord of the Treasury)—all marvellous! Perhaps more of a work of art than a work of history in the common sense, but all the greater on that account.5
It is not unlikely that the lonely writer, putting his cares aside by burying himself in his oldest passion, history, recognized in Macaulay a kindred spirit and an example of that felicitous combination of history and literature that would characterize his own future work.