1

History

Theodor Fontane’s first published prose work was a story called “Sibling Love.”1 He tells us in his memoirs that on 19 December 1839, shortly after his twentieth birthday, he had gone to the local district physician, Dr. Natorp, for an oral examination in botany and related subjects and that Natorp had certified his promotion from apprentice to assistant apothecary. On the way back to Rose’s pharmacy where he was employed, Fontane stopped off at the Heureuse Konditorei in the Kölln Fish Market to look at the Berlin Figaro, his favorite journal, and discovered his story in its pages. He had already had some poems published in the paper, but their appearance had never had the same effect upon him, he wrote, “perhaps because they were so short; but here, these four columns with the ‘To be continued’ at the bottom, that was marvelous. By everything that this afternoon had brought me, I was as if stunned, and had every reason to be so. In little more than half an hour I had been promoted by Natorp to a ‘Herr’ and by Heureuse to a writer of stories.”2

It is perhaps significant that he says nothing about the story itself. Certainly anyone who reads it in the hope of discovering some sign of the great novelist to come will be disappointed. The theme is provocative enough, and has appealed to other writers, including Fontane’s admirer Thomas Mann, in his unpleasant little story “The Blood of the Volsungs,” but Fontane exploits none of its possibilities. His story is about Clärchen, a young woman who lives, in straitened circumstances, with a brother who has been blind from birth but has apparently reached man’s estate without developing any talents except an extraordinary self-pity and the ability to play melancholy songs on a lute. The preacher in the local cloister church becomes interested in the pair, visits them frequently and has long talks with the brother, and gradually falls in love with Clärchen, and she with him. When the brother discovers that they intend to marry, he submits the lovers to every kind of moral blackmail and, when they persist in their plans, says that he never wishes to see them again. The parting, for he is true to his word, proves too much for his sister, who after a year of marriage becomes persuaded that God may have intended that her love should be reserved for her brother and becomes fatally ill. The preacher prevails upon the brother to give up his obduracy and come to her deathbed, where the siblings are reconciled. In death, her love makes the two men close friends for the rest of their lives. Indeed, they die within hours of each other, “and there above they found their faithful and true loved one and stilled their hot longing and forgot all the pains of separation in their blessed reunion with their Clärchen.” Although the theme of incest, which was to occupy Fontane on later occasions, is touched upon here, the mawkishness of this tale, and of the interspersed verses that accompany it, is equaled by the lameness of its plot and the inertness of the style in which it is told, and Clärchen and her brother are both so colorless that no one could have predicted that their creator had a future as a writer.

Yet “Sibling Love” was certainly no worse than hundreds of other stories written and published in Germany in its time, and may indeed be described as a characteristic product of its age. Two years before its publication, the leader of the Young German movement, Karl Gutzkow, had written in his journal Das Telegraph für Deutsch-land that “the present generation of German writers seems destined only to open the way for a future one; great things will not develop out of it; it will have to fill the trenches over which another race advances to victory.” He attributed this circumstance to the fact that contemporary writers had to contend with the suspicion of literature that dominated established bureaucracies, the illogic and lack of principle of the press laws, the crude pretentiousness of popular criticism, the timidity of the publishing industry, the pervasive mysticism and materialism, and, above all, “the ice-coldness of our daily experience,”3 that is, the fact that nothing exciting ever happened. In the daily lives of young writers there were simply too few things that helped them grow, and too many that cabined, cribbed, and confined them. The atmosphere in which they lived stifled talent, and the models that were available to them were antiquated, tradition-bound, and uninspiring.

In Prussia this was true not only of the provinces but also of Berlin, which in the late 1930s, in contrast to the capitals of other great nations, was a mere residential city, dominated by its court, its bureaucracy, and its military establishment, with a population that was predominantly lower middle class, with neither a self-confident bourgeoisie nor a sizable proletariat to challenge conventional ways of thinking, and with a heterogeneous class of actors, scribblers, and pseudo-intellectuals who congregated in its many cafés and pastry shops to read the newspapers or formed literary clubs and read their latest works to each other. Even the young assistant in Rose’s pharmacy, dreaming of becoming an independent writer one day, was vaguely aware that this might not be the best place in which to achieve his dreams. In one of those miscellaneous pieces that he began to submit to newspapers, he wrote in 1842:

There was a time when Berlin seemed destined to be Germany, to rule the world; the presentiment of this great destiny penetrated the hearts of its best men. But that time has passed, and the mission has been thrown into the rubbish bin, and anyone who still believes in it is a child. . . . Formerly over-confident, the Germanic Gascon, now it is modest and discomfited. Formerly giving itself airs as the leader of the spiritual power of Germany, now it runs around naked and unashamed as the promoter of the most reckless and outrageous stock-jobbery. . . . A foreigner who has lived here for a short time can say, “Berlin is a great city, a Residenzstadt; and as such it provides a mass of amusing ways to pass the time.” That, however, is all that we can attribute to Berlin; of a genuine amusement and one that lasts, there can be no question. That is due to the complete lack of public life. Mere being together, talking together, sitting together, dancing together is far from being public life. A public life, a Volksleben, can only exist when the population is penetrated by a distinct character, as, for example, in Vienna or Paris. . . . Berlin is hardly more than a colony . . . in which all inclinations and opinions are contradictory, . . . and the inner unity, which in the case of a true Volksleben is mirrored in every face, is conspicuously absent. The heartless mania for making pitiless wounding witticisms about everything that people hold sacred comes in large part from this condition.4

For a time, the would-be writer felt that his talent might flourish elsewhere than in Berlin, and he seriously considered making his career in Leipzig or Dresden, where he worked as a pharmacist after leaving Rose’s. In both cities he made friends but in the end found the atmosphere no livelier than that in Berlin, to which he returned in 1844 for his military service. In Leipzig and Dresden he became for a time interested in politics and became a critic of King Frederick William IV of Prussia and his increasingly conservative course. But this was backed by no real energy. At no time in his life did Fontane become interested enough in politics to give it more than superficial attention, and his own political position was always marked by contradictions and great lability, given his distrust of parties. Above all, aside from some poems in the Herwegh manner and a few not very profound articles in newspapers, nothing much resulted from his intermittent political activity, nor did it bring him any closer to his goal of becoming a real writer, that is, one who produced works of art.5

Finding nothing to challenge him in the present, Fontane therefore turned increasingly to the past. Since politics provided no inspiration for his muse, he sought it in history.

I

Fontane came to history naturally and never lost his passion for it. In a letter written to Theodor Storm in 1854, he said that even when he was a child in Swinemünde, it was his favorite subject. His interest was stimulated by his father’s encyclopedic knowledge of the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte and the delight he took in telling tales about the emperor and his marshals Ney and Lannes and “le premier grenadier de la France,” Latour d’Auvergne.6 He told Storm that, when he was ten years old and was asked what he would like to become when he was grown up, he said stoutly, “Professor of history!” When he was twelve, he added, he was already

an ardent newspaper reader, fought with Bourmont and Duperre in Algeria, participated four weeks later in the July Revolution and wept when it was all up with Poland after the battle of Ostrolenka. . . . And then I went to the Gymnasium. As a thirteen-year-old third grader, and a mediocre student to boot, I had such a reputation in history that the first-graders took me on walks and allowed themselves to be—I can’t think of any other way of putting it—crammed by me for exams.

His stock-in-trade was mostly names and dates, he admitted, but there was one occasion when he astonished his auditors with a highly colored description of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers.7

Fontane continued to play with the idea of making history his career until the midforties, but nothing came of it. Instead, he went to Berlin in 1833, lived with an uncle, and attended the Klodensche Gewerbeschule. Six years earlier Bettina von Arnim had wanted to send one of her sons to this school, which, she told her husband, was attracting more and more children from families “of our class,” but Achim von Arnim was not persuaded, writing that the trade school, which had no classes in Greek or Latin, could not provide a first-class education.8 The young Fontane was by his later admission so given to truancy that his example is useless for testing Arnim’s opinion. About all we know about his record is that he continued to impress people by his historical knowledge. Seeking to escape his school chores, which included the writing of a “German essay on a self-chosen theme,” he spent a Sunday afternoon in 1833, trudging from Berlin to the village of Löwenbruch three miles south of the city, where he had family friends. On the way he was reminded that twenty years earlier, Bülow’s army, composed mostly of Landwehr, had marched under streaming rain in the same direction and, in the fields around the Großbeeren churchyard, had fought the great battle in which Oudinot’s forces were driven into retreat and Napoleon prevented from reentering Berlin. He remembered also that on 14 August 1813, his mother, still a girl, had gone out with other women to tend the wounded left on the stricken field and that the first unfortunate she came upon was “a very young Frenchman who—with hardly a breath left in his body—when he heard his own language being spoken raised himself up as if transformed. Then, with one hand holding the beaker of wine and the other my mother’s hand, he was dead before he could drink.” That would be a good theme for the essay, thought the student Fontane, and when he got back to Berlin he wrote it and for once received a “Very good” from his teacher, instead of the usual “Vidi [Seen].”9

Three years later, Fontane graduated from the trade school and, following his father’s footsteps, became an apprentice in Rose’s pharmacy in the Spandauerstraße next to the St. Nicholas Church. His passion for reading newspapers did not diminish, and he spent much of his free time in establishments that provided them for their patrons, mostly in the Konditerei Anthieny in the northeastern part of town but occasionally in the grander cafés like Stehely on the Gendarmen-markt and Sparnapagni on Unter den Linden. The literary and political discussions that he heard in these places were probably the real cause of his determination to become a writer, and he started to experiment in various forms. Gradually he concentrated on what he considered to be his greatest strength and began to write historical verse. Thus, in the wake of the doleful “Sibling Love,” he composed a poem on the battle of Hochkirch that was inspired by Chamisso’s “Salas y Gomez,” an epic called “The First Love of Henri IV,” and his first ballad, “Retaliation,” which dealt with the guilt, triumph, and end of Pizzaro.

Crucial in the development of his poetry was the fact that during his military service in 1844 he became fast friends with Bernhard von Lepel, an officer in the Kaiser-Franz-Regiment in Berlin who also had literary ambitions. Lepel was a member of a literary club called the Tunnel Over the Spree. Founded in 1827 by the Berlin wit M. G. Saphir, it was a kind of personal bodyguard to support him in his endless feuds and to supply material for his paper, the Berlin Express, Originally dominated by a rowdy group of law students, young businessmen, actors, journalists, and lieutenants with an interest in the arts, the club had with the years become both more respectable and more conservative. In Fontane’s time, it included such notables as the epic poet Christian Friedrich Scherenberg, the reader to the king Louis Schneider, the lawyer Wilhelm von Merckel, the painter Adolf Menzel, the art historian Franz Kugler, Rudolf Löwenstein, the editor of the new satirical journal Kladderadatsch, the military publicist Max Jähns, the artist and illustrator Theodor Hosemann, the Swiss philosopher Max Orelli, and the writers Felix Dahn, Paul Heyse, and Theodor Storm, who met periodically to read and discuss new verse and prose written by fellow members.10

There was a strong dilettantish cast to the Tunnel, and very few of its products—aside from Fontane’s ballads and the much anthologized “The Heart of Douglas” by Moritz Graf von Strachwitz, a Silesian poet who died in 1847—have survived the test of time. The members took themselves very seriously and exercised their critical function with an energy that bordered sometimes on the ferocious. Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg, a highly regarded author of novels and stories of social criticism, found their pretensions faintly comical and refused membership because he said he would not submit his work to “students and soldiers who with the proven German philistine attitude would assure me that my stories were worthless,” an opinion that might get out and lead booksellers to cut his royalties.11 But this was an exaggeration from a writer whose novels might have profited from criticism, and in general the Tunnel gave a fair and often helpful hearing to new works.

This was certainly true in the case of Fontane. He was proposed for membership by Lepel in 1844 and began to attend meetings regularly after the conclusion of his military service. Apparently, his first presentations did not impress the membership, and every now and then they were inclined to feel that his later ones were frivolous or in violation of the society’s prohibition of political themes. This would almost certainly have been true of his charming poem in 1848 urging his fiancée, Emilie Rouanet, to join him in exchanging the depressing political atmosphere of Berlin for that of the Cordilleras, where

Ohne Wühler dort und Agitator

Frißt uns höchstens mal ein Alligator. . . .

Und dem Kreischen nur des Kakadu

Hören wir am Titicaca zu.

But in 1846, when Fontane read his ballad “The Old Derffling” to the Tunnel, his reception must have been very much like that accorded to the poet Hansen-Grell in the Kastalia chapter of his novel Vor dem Sturm: his audience’s enthusiasm far outweighed their criticism;12 and, on 18 April 1847, the reading of “The Old Ziethen” and two other ballads about Seydlitz and Schwerin was an extraordinarily great success.13

He was encouraged, therefore, to stick to this vein and to develop it, a process that was facilitated in 1848 (when he had run out of Frederician marshals to write about) by his discovery of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection of ballads, sonnets, historical songs, and metrical romances published by Thomas Percy, later bishop of Drumore, in 1765, and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, three volumes of ballads compiled by Walter Scott and, after some heavy-handed editing by him, published in 1802–1803. Fontane fell upon these with delight, and they became his favorite reading and his greatest resource, determining, as he wrote later, his taste and direction, and providing him with a source of deep enjoyment for the rest of his life.14

His skill in exploiting these sources soon brought his work to the attention of a wider audience than the Tunnel. His poems were printed and in time established themselves in the popular consciousness, so that even today, when he is chiefly remembered as a novelist, Fontane is well represented in popular anthologies of poetry, like Ludwig Reiners’s Eternal Spring,15 which in its 1958 edition had forty of Fontane’s poems, including the ballads, “The Old Derffling,” “Archibald Douglas,” “John Maynard,” “Jan Bart,” “Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im Havelland,” and the marvelous “Gorm Grymme,” with its chilling conclusion, telling how, after the death of King Gorm’s only son, his queen

. . . gab ihm um ein Mantel dicht,

Der war nicht golden, nicht rot,

Gorm Grymme sprach: “Was niemand spricht,

Ich sprech es: Er ist tot.”

Er setzte sich nieder, wo er stand,

Ein Windstoß fuhr durchs Haus,

Die Königin hielt des Königs Hand,

Die Lichter loschen aus.16

[Gave him a thick mantle,

It was not golden or red.

Gorm Grymme said, “What none will say

I’ll say it: He is dead.”

He sat him down then, where he stood.

A gust of wind blew through the house.

The Queen took the King’s hand.

The lights went out.]

We should perhaps at this point ask why it was that Fontane had such great success with his ballads. This method of telling a dramatic story in short stanzas with a striking or dramatic conclusion had, of course, been popular in Germany ever since the eighteenth century, encouraged in the first instance by Herder’s interest in folk songs and attracting such poets as Goethe (“Der Erlkönig”) and Bürger (“Lenore”) in the Storm and Stress era and, in the Romantic period, Chamisso, Brentano, Eichendorff, and Uhland. In Fontane’s day, both before and particularly after the 1848 revolution, interest in the ballad revived because, in an apparently inert society with nothing in particular to look forward to, people took refuge in stories about their past triumphs or, failing that, about dramatic events in the remote history of Germanic peoples, the Danes and the Norwegians, the English and the Scots. In this climate, Fontane’s insatiable interest in history stood him in good stead, as did his sense of the popular temper. In a letter to a friend in April 1850, he wrote, “The far away has charm, and precisely from the vantage point of the mixer of pills, clinging to the Percies and Douglases is psychologically correct.”17

Fontane was, of course, not the only aspiring writer who sought to exploit popular interest in the past. His friend Christian Friedrich Scherenberg wrote large epics about the battles of Ligny and Waterloo and had the honor of having the latter read to the king by Louis Schneider at one of the periodic literary teas in the castle, and even in the Tunnel Fontane was not the only composer of ballads. His greater success in the genre came less from his superior poetic gift than from his deep reflection on its requirements. In the first place, he was well versed in the work of his German predecessors, and before them in the rich store of medieval Volk ballads, which he once said was the necessary basis for any understanding of what a ballad was and how it was constructed. In his view, ballads had to be composed—that is, written according to a logical scheme—but must, at the same time, appear to be natural and free of any literary artifice. Success depended also on the skillful use of suggestion, omission, and abrupt transitions, on mastery of the art of repetition, refrains, and leimotiv, on an ability to create effects with a minimal use of means, and, above all, on color.18 His own attention to such requirements is apparent even in his earliest ballads, which showed, in addition to great verbal and metrical facility, a remarkable ability to combine highly sophisticated symbolic techniques with the artless diction that the ballad required.

Thus, in what was almost his first ballad, “The Old Derffling,” which dealt with the life and death of the victor at Fehrbellin, he took as a leitmotiv the fact—if it is a fact, and not merely the invention of enthusiastic biographers—that Derfflinger had been a tailor in his youth, an occupation from which he had run away to serve with the Swedes in the Thirty Years War. Fontane scattered images taken from the tailor’s trade throughout the poem, as if to emphasize the consistency and coherence of the old hero’s life and the admirable simplicity of his character.19 Thus, as a soldier,

Er war der flinke Schneider

Zum Stechen wohl geschickt.

Oft hat er an die Kleider

Dem Feinde was geflickt.

[He was the nimble tailor,

Adept at making holes in things,

And he had often put patches

In his enemies’ clothes.]

and, when he died, well stricken in years,

Er sprach: “Als alter Schneider

Weiß ich seit langer Zeit,

Man wechselt seiner Kleider—

Auch hab’ ich des nicht Leid.

Es fehlt der alte Hülle

In Breite schon und Läng’,

Der Geist tritt in die Fülle,

Der Leib wird ihm zu eng.20

[He spoke, “As an old tailor,

I’ve known for a long time

That one changes one’s clothes—

And I’m not sorry about that.

The old clothes are lacking

Already in breadth and width.

The soul gains in fullness,

The body becomes too tight for it.]

Fontane used a similar technique in his ballad about Jacob Keith, the Stuart supporter who had to go into exile after the failure of the 1715 rising and who had then served in the Spanish and Russian armies and the Russian diplomatic service before becoming one of Frederick’s field marshals. Fontane had the happy idea of portraying Keith as a player forced by circumstance to wander from theater to theater.

Ein Kunst- und Wanderleben

Hob an; von Land zu Land:

Gastrollen tätst du geben;

Der Degen in dem Hand.

Du spieltest alle Rollen,

Den Höfling selbst, mit Glück,

Doch schöpfen aus dem vollen

Ließ sich das Ritterstück.

Das war dein Fach, das Kühne,

Der Mut bis an den Tod,

Und manche schlechte Bühne

Halfst du aus arger Not—

[And so began, from land to land,

A life of art and wandering,

And you gave guest appearances

With your sword in hand.

You played all roles excellently,

That of the courtier too,

But pieces about chivalry

Gave you the greatest scope.

Daring was your profession,

Courage in the face of death,

And many a poor theater

You helped in the worst of times.]

until he came in the end to the theater of the master director Frederick and played his greatest roles at Roßbach and at Hochkirch, where he fell.21

These strokes of creative imagination distinguished Fontane’s ballads from those of his competitors, and they also explain what he meant when he warned poets who took medieval ballads as their models that they must bring something of themselves to this process and not simply try to make a perfect copy of the older form. In a correspondence with Pol de Mont, a professor in Antwerp who was a specialist in ancient Nordic poetry, Fontane wrote in 1887 that the ballad had not yet completed its evolution and that one should not fasten upon any of its diverse forms as a model for imitation. In writing ballads, he added, we may make “borrowings” from the old Volk ballads, but the important thing is our own contribution. We must invest the tone of the old ballads with material from our own world and, alternatively, gave the material of the old ballads a new, or at least greatly altered, sound. It is best, he added, “if we refurbish both and hold the old ballad in our ear merely as the echo of memory.”22 Fontane’s fidelity to these principles accounted for his staying power as a writer of ballads and the extraordinary success that he had not only with ballads like “Archibald Douglas,” read at the anniversary meeting of the Tunnel in December 1854, but also with “John Maynard” and “Jan Bart,” and others written thirty years later when the interest and taste of the time were vastly different. In the Bismarck period, an age that loved dramatic declamation, it was not unusual for a new Fontane ballad to be read by professional actors as part of a theatrical performance. In January 1880 Fontane wrote to his old friend Mathilde von Rohr:

Last week, in No. 2 of the Gegenwart, I published a poem, “The Bridge on the Tay,” in which I handle in the ballad manner the frightful railway accident near Dundee. Perhaps it has come to your attention; if not, I’ll send it to you. . . . It has made a kind of sensation here, perhaps more than anything I have written. Sunday fortnight [Richard] Kahle will recite it at a Singakademie concert.23

Fontane’s colleagues in the Tunnel in the 1840s might have had some difficulty in identifying “The Bridge on the Tay” as a ballad, but, although the form was greatly changed, the echo of memory, of which Fontane had spoken, was there.

Fontane’s longtime reputation as a poet, therefore, justified the decision he had made in the 1840s to seek to establish himself as a writer by means of historical verse. At the time, however, there was one serious drawback: it was difficult to make money at it. Later on, there would be collected editions of his poems and the royalties that went with them. In the late 1840s that was not true. He calculated once that he could not count on selling even one of his best ballads for more than 2 reichstaler, 71⁄2 silver groschen.24 And when his six patriotic ballads about Derfflinger and the Frederician marshals appeared in Louis Schneider’s Der Soldatenfreund, he received an honorarium of half a groschen per line, for a grand total of 4 taler, 20 groschen.25 Indeed, publishers and booksellers like A. W. Hayn seemed to operate on the principle that the art of poetry depended on the poet’s lack of adequate nourishment.26

This was all very daunting for Fontane, who wanted to give up pharmacy and to get married. There was always the possibility that he might secure a salaried job as a writer with a government department, but his chances in that direction were compromised to some extent by the extreme conservatism of the government after the suppression of the revolution of 1848 and Fontane’s reputation for liberal ideas. It is true that he had done nothing very alarming during the revolution. His sympathies were undoubtedly with the people of Berlin, but, true to his propensity for seeing everything through historical spectacles, he seems to have believed that the best contribution he could make to their cause was the writing of a historical drama to be called “Charles Stuart,” which would deal with the English Revolution by focusing on the weakness of the king and Cromwell’s consciousness of guilt.27 In the end, the materials proved to be too rich and the problems of causation and responsibility too complicated for him, and he abandoned the project and turned to the writing of political articles for the Dresdener Zeitung, in which he was critical of royal policy and the signs of growing reaction.28 These were for the most part temperate and well reasoned, but they were enough to attract unfavorable attention in high places, and Fontane became so discouraged that he considered leaving Berlin and offering his services to the beleaguered troops of Schleswig-Holstein, hard-pressed by the Danes and abandoned by their German allies.29

How he thought this adventure could relieve his situation is not clear. In any event, thanks to the intervention of friends in the Tunnel, he was able to find employment as a writer of feuilleton pieces for two government papers of moderate views, Werner Hahn’s Deutsche Reform and Wilhelm von Merckel’s Literarische Cabinet, and this enabled him in August 1850 to marry his fiancée. But in the following January, when Otto von Manteuffel became minister president, Prussian policy became more rigidly conservative, and Fontane once more found himself with no regular income. He searched desperately for a new occupation without success, and finally, in October 1851, decided that his family took precedence over his liberal principles and wrote a letter to the Adler-Zeitung, a quasi-government publication, promising to send them a commemorative poem for the king’s birthday and using the occasion to request employment as a writer on English affairs.30 When this had positive results, he wrote ruefully to his friend Lepel:

Today I sold myself to the reaction for thirty pieces of silver a month and am once more a salaried Scriblifax (in verse and prose) in the Adler-Zeitung, resurrected from the late lamented Deutsche Reform. These days one cannot survive as an honest man. I am making my debut with octaves in honor of Manteuffel. Content: Minister President crushes the (inevitable) dragon of revolution. Very nice!31

II

However bruising to the ego, this small gesture to conformity gave Fontane the security he needed in order to pursue his own writing while being paid for what he considered to be hackwork comparable to an apothecary’s filling of prescriptions.32 But, Brotarbeit or not, journalism brought him the opportunity to travel. In the summer of 1852, with a subvention from the king, Fontane went to London as a correspondent for the Adler-Zeitung but with a free hand to choose the subjects of his reportage. Three years later, in the middle of the Crimean War, relations between the British and Prussian governments were strained because of Prussia’s neutrality in the conflict, and Fontane was sent back to London as a reporter on English politics and press opinion. It was not the happiest of assignments, for he was too objective and too sympathetic to his English hosts to write the kind of reports that the Manteuffel government desired, and there were continuous difficulties between him and the bureaucrats in the press section in Berlin.33 He was happy, therefore, when his official reporting duties came to an end in March 1856 and he was made an attache for literary and cultural questions and a semiofficial correspondent to the Prussian press. The significance of his residence in England, which lasted until 1858, was that, aside from deepening Fontane’s knowledge of a country other than his own, it weaned him away from the belief that poetry was the highest form of literature, a product in part of his membership in the Tunnel, and made him a prose writer, a turning point in his career that was signaled in 1858 by the appearance of his book A Summer in London.

The English experience also deepened Fontane’s historical sense and broadened his historical interests, but, to the extent that it did so, it militated against the success of his political reporting. Charlotte Jolles has written of the great opportunity that his sojourn in the home of modern politics gave to Fontane to develop his knowledge of the arts of political journalism, an opportunity that was enhanced by the presence in England of a master of the art, in the figure of Lothar Bucher, who was later to be the most brilliant figure in Bismarck’s press bureau. At the time, Bucher, in exile because of his political activities in 1848, was writing articles for the liberal National-Zeitung.If the two writers were in a sense competitors, however, Fontane never came close to developing Bucher’s skill in tailoring his style and his argument to the needs and interests of his readers and making the values that his political masters wished to implement comprehensible and desirable to them. The fact of the matter was that Fontane wrote for himself rather than for his readers and was always thinking of what he could learn about the subject he was writing on. Nor was he interested in conjecture or in possibilities or in contingencies that had not yet arisen; he preferred things that were true and had demonstrable origins and effects. His were the gifts of analysis rather than those of advocacy. He thought, in short, like a historian rather than like a politician. This explains why his masters in Berlin were always complaining about the irrelevance or abstraction of his political articles and the prolixity of his feuilleton pieces and his failure to make concessions to popular interest.34

In his heart Fontane probably admitted the justice of these criticisms. The fact was that he was happier when working on historical subjects, like his studies of the English press,35 than when describing the daily events of British life or the crises of party politics. In this sense, his last years in England were years of frustration. He was increasingly critical of English life and culture. He had always hated the food, which he found unimaginative, rarely “cooked with love,” to use the German phrase, and potentially ruinous of his health. Although he had made many friends, having enjoyed evenings in their homes and been admitted to their social clubs, including one that had some similarity to the Tunnel, he increasingly felt that English culture was superficial, providing only rare opportunities for deep and extensive discussion of important subjects, like history, philosophy, and art. Above all, his life in England, and the incessant demands that his position imposed upon him, gave him no opportunity to express himself as an artist. His diary during the London years reflects all of these feelings. For the most part a matter-of-fact and even laconic account of his daily life and doings, its most interesting pages are those in which he lets himself go on subjects that really interest him—the history of the English stage, for example, and the differences between popular theater in Germany and in England36—or when he writes about historical projects that he intends to complete when he gets home. Thus, on 19 August 1856, he wrote: “Made a plan. ‘The Marches. Their Men and their History. Collected and edited for the sake of the Fatherland and future literature by Th. Fontane.’ The contents themselves I would present alphabetically. If I could get to the point of writing that book I would not have lived in vain and could lay my bones to rest.”37 Again, on 4 June 1857, he wrote: “Planned a book: ‘Stories of Brandenburg,’ for example: the false Waldemar, the Hussites before Bernau, the beautiful Gießerin, the White Lady, the old noble families and their sagas, Derffling, Agnes von Borck, . . . the electoral castles, Rheinsberg, Kohlhaas, the Prince von Hessen-Homburg, etc.”38 Charlotte Jolles has written that in Fontane’s last London years the yearning after artistic expression was constantly on his mind and that he suffered from his inability to satisfy it. “Only his trip to Scotland gave the writer a certain satisfaction.”39 It did so, of course, not only because it allowed him for a brief period to immerse himself in history without any distraction, but also because it strengthened his resolve, as he returned to Germany, to focus and actualize the projects that had gnawed at the fringes of his mind during his journalistic career.

Indeed, the English years can be seen as a useful and necessary prelude to the longer period during which his principal work was historical. When he returned to Berlin in January 1859, his first problem was to find an occupation that would support him and his family, and for a short time he was captivated by the idea, which originated with his friend Paul Heyse, that he might, if he played his cards right, secure a position at the court of Ludwig II of Bavaria, which would enable him to live as an independent writer.40 It is amusing to speculate about what his life would have been like if anything had come of this. He might even have become a colleague of Richard Wagner, who came to Munich at Ludwig’s invitation in the early 1860s: and, given Fontane’s low opinion of Wagner’s music, that might have had explosive results. But, although Fontane went to Munich in March 1859 and had two audiences with Ludwig, during which he read his poems to the king and was quizzed about them and about Scotland and his work in England, nothing positive emerged, perhaps because of the distraction caused in Munich by the onset of the Italian War.41 Fontane himself had by then developed strong misgivings about a move to Bavaria, whose pronounced Catholic atmosphere would hardly have been congenial to his tastes and temperament.42

Instead, he took a position at the Kreuzzeitung, the paper of the most rigidly conservative Prussian nobility although, in its editorial practices and in the freedom it allowed its staff, remarkably open-minded. This job, like the one he took as theater critic for the Vossische Zeitung in 1870, gave him the time to do the things he wanted to do. In the first instance, these were the extensive researches by foot that led in the end to the four volumes of the Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg, the first fruits of which appeared as articles under the general title “Scenes and Stories from Mark Brandenburg” in Cotta’s Morgenblatt in 1860.43 Then, as Bismarck’s policy unfolded in the years after 1864, came the three remarkable war books, and, after them, the great essays, like those on the cavalry commanders in national history44 and the relationship between the Mark and Berlin and the development of Berlin character.45 And then, starting in 1878, came the historical novels and stories, Vor dem Sturm, Schach von Wuthenow, Grete Minde, and Ellernklipp. It was only when he turned to the social novels of his last period that the emphasis on history was relaxed, although none of the novels is entirely free from historical pastiches and references. This was so because Fontane was part of all his characters, and history came naturally to them as it did to him.

Thus in the charming scene in the last of the novels, when Dubslav goes to Rheinsberg to cast his vote in the Reichstag election in which he himself is the conservative candidate for the district seat, he refuses to sit around and wait for the results. Instead, he proposes to a few friends of his age and political conviction that they take a boat and cross to the other side of the lake, where they can see the statue of Prince August Wilhelm, the second son of King Friedrich Wilhelm I, and study the French inscriptions on the tablets on its base, with their references to Prussian heroes in the Seven Years War. “Such a recapitulation,” says Dubslav, “always strengthens one historically and patriotically, and our rear-area French also regains strength.”46 Like his creator, Dubslav believed that, whatever the circumstances, history was always edifying.

III

Fontane lived in an age in which the art of history became at once more scientific and more professional. Under the leadership of German scholars like Niebuhr, Gregorovius, and Ranke, historians learned to pay more attention to the nature of the sources of historical knowledge and were less willing to accept the authority of legend, tradition, and conventional wisdom. Theories of causality and generalization, once employed so loosely by writers, now became the object of anxious scrutiny; a new historical method was devised to promote a more faithful interpretation and understanding of the past; and the written document, scientifically interpreted, became the primary instrument of truth. The free and easy methods of historians like Schlosser and Gervinus, more future-oriented than bound to the past, now fell into disrepute.

The new scientific methodology was propagated by the universities, which trained their students in the new methods and in time placed them in university chairs of history. This soon became the accepted and normal method of becoming a historian, and it amounted to a professionalization of the discipline. Anyone who went to the university and took the required number of courses and examinations and wrote the required doctoral and habilitation dissertations and served the usual number of years as an assistant to a professor and then became a professor himself, was considered and considered himself to be a professional historian. Writers of history who did not have the benefit of academic training were regarded as amateurs.

This system has perpetuated itself, both in Germany and in the Anglo-Saxon countries, until the present day. It should be noted that it has little to do with talent. It would not be difficult to name half a dozen so-called amateur historians at any one time who have talents and records of achievement equal to those of the most distinguished holders of academic chairs, and there is not the slightest doubt that by far the greatest number of academic positions in history are filled with earnest dullards. There is a rough justice in the fact that the latter enjoy the prestige that still clings to the title professor; the amateurs have to make do with the royalties that come from the greater sales of their books. In the nineteenth century, it was the rare academic historian who had the courage to break with the heavy and footnote-laden style favored by his colleagues and vie with the amateurs for popular favor, although Mommsen did so in his great Roman History and Droysen in his Alexander the Great, and although Burckhardt once wrote, when he was working with Kugler in Berlin in 1847–1848, “At the risk of being considered unscientific by the population of pedants, I am firmly resolved from now on to write in a readable fashion. . . . Against the sneers of the contemporary scholarly generation, one must arm oneself with a certain scholarly indifference, so that one will perhaps be bought and read, and not merely be the subject of bored note-taking in libraries.”47

In this scheme of things, Theodor Fontane was clearly an amateur, and it is plain enough that he was made to feel it on occasion. Hence his exasperated remark that two anecdotes about Frederick the Great were worth all the state papers of his reign, which was surely not meant to be taken literally, and his frequent sallies against academic historians. In February 1862, a Professor J. A. E. Preuß wrote to the Vossische Zeitung to correct Fontane’s assumption in an essay in that paper that Johann Christoph Schadow had been born in Saalow. Fontane wrote to thank him, and, as he informed the publisher Wilhelm Hertz:

Preuß answered my letter at once and wrote almost four full pages. One couldn’t ask for more than that. The letter included lots of things that were true—some of them with a bitter aftertaste—and held to a line half way between friendliness and goodwill on the one hand and a consciousness of superiority on the other. Personally, I feel not in the least offended; but in general and in principle I deplore the fact that for these “men of research” no compromise, no recognition of mutual rights seems possible. While we on our side are ready at any moment to be just and to show all possible respect to “research” (even if from time to time it is dry and leathery enough and likewise, in its results, subject to correction at any time), the old professor with his hair in a braid [Zopf-Professor] cannot conceive of the idea that the free artistic handling of material, for the sake of the artistic, has a right to existence, even if the strict historical truth is violated in the process.48

One might ask here how much violation of the truth is to be permitted the artist. Fontane, who was recognized for his poetry sooner than for his other writings, was sometimes accused of writing history as if it were a ballad, and there is some truth in this. As in the case of the ballad, he believed that the historian should not merely attempt to reproduce the past but bring something of himself to it. That, it might be noted, he will do in any case, but when he does it consciously he runs the risk of seeking to improve and embellish the truth for the sake of the story. The art of writing ballads, as Fontane had written to Pol de Mont, also involved the skillful use of leitmotivs and omission. In the writing of history, this was also questionable. It might be argued that in Fontane’s brilliant essay “The Mürker and the Berliner and How Berlinertum Developed,” he was a bit heavy-handed in his argument that Berlin temperament and speech were the result of the style of Frederick William I’s Tabakskollegium, refined at the court of Frederick the Great and transmitted to Berlin by the veterans of his wars who settled there. The omission here, the failure to do justice to the importance of French, Slavic, and Jewish influences, weakens the article as a whole.

But these faults—if that is what they were—were occasional and never fatal, and they were offset by the great virtues of Fontane’s historical writing. He was an inveterate reader of history. He knew the classical historians well enough to cite them comfortably; during his English years he whiled away lonely evenings at the Café Divan reading Macaulay and Lecky;49 he was on friendly terms with Ranke and corresponded with Droysen. He respected their work while occasionally criticizing their style, and he sought in all his major works to emulate their energy and scrupulous attention to the laws of evidence. In his own work, he showed imagination, persistence, and thoroughness in his search for and exploitation of sources. Pierre-Paul Sagave has described how conscientiously he labored, during the composition of his novel Schach von Wuthenow, to reproduce the geographical reality and the social relationships of Berlin in 1806, the reciprocal influences that passed between the court and the upper class, the condition and intellectual atmosphere of the officer corps, and the character and personal foibles of the historical figures who appeared in his story, and how solidly the novel was based upon his research in contemporary historical literature and in the pamphlets, fly sheets, legal briefs, and eyewitness reports inspired by l’affaire Schach.50

In time, Fontane learned to tolerate, and even to profit from, the criticisms of the Zopf-Professoren, just as he later, when he turned to military studies, learned to put up with the condescension of the General Staff historians. He came to see that in both cases he was confronted with Ressortpatriotismus, the attempt of insiders to protect their turf against interlopers. He didn’t mind being considered an interloper because he knew that he was doing something that no one else, least of all his critics, was doing. Instead of becoming involved in scholarly controversy, so dear to the German heart, he therefore went about his business, which was the writing of The Wanderings and the impressive war books, which will require our attention in due course.