To claim that Fontane’s first novel deserves to be placed in the very top rank of his fiction would be considered quixotic by most readers. By the critics Vor dem Sturm tends to be disregarded, and it is virtually unknown abroad. At the time of its publication, even so sympathetic a reader as Julius Rodenberg, an admirer of Fontane’s articles on the theater, confided to his diary that it was a “silly book”—“I ask myself continually, what’s coming next? Will they travel into the countryside again (with the ponies)? Will they sit down at the table again? Will they go to sleep again?” Most of those who noticed the book at all seemed to be confused by its relaxed style and slow pace, by the large number of characters who were described with a detail that bore no relation to their importance in the story, and by the fact that, in a novel set in Prussia’s heroic time, the years 1812–1813, all of the patriotic actions described failed miserably.
It was not until after the Second World War, when Germans were tired of heroism and, as Heinz Ohff has written, nostalgic for a piece of their own history that was not burdened by the crimes of Hitler, that the book was rediscovered.1 It began then to be perceived that what had formerly been considered its weaknesses were, in reality, its strengths, and that in its description of life in Berlin and the Oderbruch during the first phase of the rising against Napoleon, of the way in which the nobility on the land and the peasants in the villages lived, of the atmosphere of the court and the university, and of how the great events that were shaking the world influenced the private fortunes of ordinary people in all walks of life, whether they were carpet-makers in Berlin or village mayors in the Mark, Fontane had brought a part of Prussia’s history to life with a richness, completeness, and fidelity to reality that made it the only German novel that could be mentioned in the same breath as the undeniably greater achievement of Tolstoi in War and Peace. It is also a work that breathes liberality of spirit, and is a great pleasure to read.
Among Fontane’s other historical fictions the most distinguished is Schach von Wuthenow, a short novel that is set in Berlin on the eve of the collapse of Frederician Prussia in 1806. Notable principally for Fontane’s presentation of the mood of the capital on the eve of the defeat of Jena, which is based upon much research in original sources, Schach also demonstrates a further development of the critique of Prussia first voiced in Vor dem Sturm by the Polish patriot Count Bninski and, in this respect, is the first example of Fontane’s use of his fictional work to comment on contemporary politics. As such, it represents a significant step forward to his novels of society.
In 1866, writing to Wilhelm Hertz about his plans for the book that was to become Vor dem Sturm, Theodor Fontane showed a degree of vagueness that must have exasperated the publisher. He had never, Fontane admitted, asked himself whether the book should be a novel or not or, if so, what rules it should follow. On the contrary, he wanted to write a work according to his own inclination and individuality, without any particular model. Dispensing with murders and fires and stories of great passion, he had the idea of simply presenting a great number of figures from the Mark Brandenburg—that is, persons of mixed German and wendisch blood, which would give the book a special character—and to show how the events of 1812 and 1813 affected them. His intention would be to demonstrate the effect of a great idea upon quite simple people, without striving after sensation and éclat. “Amusing, gay, and, when possible, intellectual talk [Geplauder] . . . is the main thing in the book.”2
One recognizes here the author of the Wanderings, reminding himself that his gift of light conversation had in the past helped him avoid many an arid stretch of historical exegesis and that it might be useful again. Indeed, in the same letter to Hertz, he wrote, “One must not want to say everything, for that suspends the activity of the reader’s fantasy and gives birth to boredom.”3 That can hardly have reassured the bookseller, after Fontane’s blithe admission that he had not fully considered the question of whether his book would have a story to tell or a hero to give it unity and continuity of plot. Hertz’s forbearance when Fontane later decided that he would have to postpone the märkische project until he had written his war books may indicate that he had no great confidence in it.
Meanwhile, Fontane himself seems to have reached the conclusion that his first sketch of the book had fundamental weaknesses and that a pastiche of conversations about how different groups reacted to the imminent fall of Napoleon would be hardly enough to compensate readers for the sensational events and tales of passion of which he was so insistent on depriving them. He appears to have concluded that it might not be a bad idea to consult other writers whose books had dealt with social and political crisis and change in human history. Since he had no high regard for the historical novels of Felix Dahn or Julius Woff or for Gustav Freytag’s Die Ahnen, all of which he regarded as books for and by backward-turned natures, this inevitably meant going back to the inventor of the modern historical novel, Sir Walter Scott, and looking anew at the principles that had guided the construction of works that had, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, taken Europe by storm.
Scott’s general theory of the novel and the impression it made on Fontane have been described in an earlier chapter,4 and what was said there need not be repeated. One aspect of Scott’s technique worth emphasizing here, however, is the special function of his heroes, which was to show both sides of the social and ideological struggles that formed the real subject of his tales without betraying, at the outset, a preference for either. Edward Waverley in the novel of that name and Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy were nothing like the heroes of the sentimental romances of Scott’s time and later, who dominated the action, won all the battles single-handedly, and, in the end, carried off the princesses. On the contrary, they tended to be young men of good social class and average gifts, honorable, decent, courageous but not given to passionate commitments, whose political views were loosely held and never clearly articulated, welcome in every company without making much of an impression when they were present, helpful when help was required and always good listeners. By family connection, they were often related to both sides in the social or political struggle that was the novel’s subject; with unprejudiced ear, they listened to both sides of the ideological dispute; and on occasion their middle position enabled them to bring representatives of the contending sides into contact with each other, resulting in confrontations and debate over their differences. Thus, while their own fortunes created a plot that aroused the interest of readers (Edward’s unwitting treason and his pardon because of courageous action in the battle of Prestonpans; Francis’s persecution by his malevolent cousin Rashleigh and his love for the high-spirited Diana Vernon), they also provided a sense of the broader historical development that was Scott’s true theme.
If we compare the final form of Vor dem Sturm with the sketch in the 1866 letter to Hertz, Fontane’s debt to Scott is clear, for the end product has a unity and a true relationship with the historical process that were not originally foreseen. Its story has been given shape and energy by being identified with the fortunes of a Scott-like hero, Lewin von Vitzewitz, who is romantic in disposition, idealistic, and almost as naive when we meet him as Edward Waverley, and it has also acquired a greater ideological dimension by the insertion of several confrontations and debates of the kind that Scott used as a literary device. In the elaboration of the action, Fontane has also been faithful to other rules that Scott observed: namely, that real historical persons (kings, warlords, heads of state) are better talked about than seen and should not become principal characters in the action; that in describing military affairs an author is well advised to restrict himself to what is manageable for him and clear to his readers, opting for the description of small actions rather than whole battles or campaigns; that supernatural occurrences and persons endowed with magical powers can be counted on to titillate the fancies of some of the author’s readers but must in the interest of realism be treated with the most extreme skepticism by the author himself and those who speak for him in the story; that the common people in the story—whether Scottish clansmen or the inhabitants of märkisch villages—should on occasion be allowed, in the interest of verisimilitude, to speak their own languages, but that this should not be carried so far as to confuse the reader and that, as a general rule, when Lewin’s coachman addresses his master in märkisch, the latter should reply in German. Not all of the principles of Scott’s art were perhaps as fully absorbed by Fontane as these, but on the whole it is clear enough that he had studied Scott closely.
Equally important as an object of study, although the lessons learned were for the most part negative ones, was Willibald Alexis, the author in the middle years of the nineteenth century of a string of “patriotic novels” about the Prussian Mark, two of which, Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht and Isegrimm, were set in the period and the locality in which Fontane planned to place his own historical fictions. In the early 1870s, Fontane reread all of Alexis’s novels and wrote an article on him that appeared in Julius Rodenberg’s Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft in 1872.
Willibald Alexis is now almost completely forgotten, except perhaps for his ballad “Fridericus Rex, unser König und Held,” which includes the splendid lines delivered by the king as he leaves for the field,
Nun adieu, Lowise, wisch ab das Gesicht,
Eine jede Kugel, die trifft ja nicht.
Denn träf jede Kugel apart seinen Mann,
Woher nähmen die Kön’ge ihre Soldaten dann?
Die Musketenkugel macht ein kleines Loch.
Die Kanonenkugel macht ein weit größeres noch.
Die Kugeln sind alle von Eisen und Blei,
Und manche Kugel geht manchem vorbei.
[Well, adieu, Luise, wipe your face off,
Every single bullet doesn’t hit its target.
For if every bullet, contrary to reason, hit its man,
Where would the kings get their soldiers then?
The musketball makes a little hole,
The cannonball makes a much bigger one.
The bullets are all made of iron and lead,
And many bullets miss many people.]
The oblivion into which his prose works have fallen does not do justice to Alexis’s energy and imagination, the thoroughness of his historical research, his gift for drawing character, and his great skill in describing landscape. Born in Breslau in 1798, as Georg Wilhelm Häring, he moved to Berlin with his family after his father’s death, was educated in that city, and, while still a schoolboy, became a volunteer in the Colberg Grenadiers and participated in the battle of Waterloo. When peace was restored, he studied law at the universities of Berlin and Breslau and then passed the state examinations for the higher civil service. From the beginning, he was more drawn to a career in literature and began to experiment in various forms, finding the historical novel most congenial to him and in the mid-1820s he actually published two novels, Walladmor and Schloß Avalon, which purported to be “translated from the English of Walter Scott.” His considerable success with the public began with a series of vaterländische Romane composed between 1832 and 1856, when illness brought his active literary career to a halt, although he lived until 1871.
The first of his patriotic novels, and the first of his books to be published under the name Willibald Alexis, was Cabanis (1832), a story of the time of Frederick the Great that deals with the fortunes of an aristocratic family in the French colony of Berlin. This was followed by Der Roland von Berlin (1840), set in Berlin and Cölln and the surrounding Mark Brandenburg in the years between 1442 and 1448 and treating the conflict between the first Hohenzollern and the leaders of the Bürger of the twin cities; and Der falsche Waldemar (1842), dealing with the appearance in 1347 of someone claiming to be Waldemar, margrave of Brandenburg, who died in 1317. More successful, and still the most likely of Alexis’s works to be found in secondhand bookstores, was Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow (1846–1848), which is set in the time of the rebellion of the petty nobility in Prussia at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was followed by Der Wärwolf (1848), which treated the fortunes of some of its characters in the struggles of the early Reformation. Finally, Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht (1852) took as its theme the decline of public virtue and political integrity in the two years before the battle of Jena in 1806; and Isegrimm (1854) had as its background the regeneration of Prussia after Jena, the wars of liberation, and the country’s development in the period before 1848.
In his essay in Rodenberg’s Salon, Fontane wrote of Alexis’s life and career with great sympathy but also with some fundamental criticisms that are of interest in the light of his own later work. Of the novels he rejected only one—Der falsche Waldemar—as being completely unsatisfactory, largely because the motivation of the principal character was so romanticized, and basically so unpersuasive, as to be bereft of any credibility to a critical reader. But he pointed out that all of the novels set in medieval times showed a disproportion between the energy expended by the author and the material that was its object. When you come right down to it, he asked of Der Roland von Berlin, are the events described either so interesting or so important as to justify Alexis’s labors? Few writers have been able to make the Middle Ages come alive (Fontane was inclined to believe that Viktor Scheffel, the author of Ekkehard [1955]5 was a lonely exception), and Alexis’s limited knowledge of life in Berlin at the beginning of the fifteenth century makes him incapable of drawing his characters as individuals They are all typical figures and, as such, have no more power to seize upon our imagination that those portrayed in the Death Dance in St. Mary’s Church in Berlin. As for the importance of the historical story he tells, Alexis has a tendency to see fifteenth-century Berlin as a model of liberty and civic virtue, which it almost certainly was not. He probably knew that his picture was false but persisted in it with
the ethical purpose of giving the bourgeoisie of 1840 an impetus for the better by telling them a historical fairy tale about the freedom and magnificence of the Berlin councilors of 1440. What was at first a political slant finally became (as it always does) a conviction. The artificial picture stepped into the place of reality and carried the artist away. He made an enthusiast of himself.6
In the other novels dealing with the Middle Ages, the energy of Alexis’s style and his considerable powers of description were also wasted in constructing a picture of society that was basically untrue. Fontane made a partial exemption in the most durable of Alexis’s works, Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow, where he praised Alexis’s comic gift and the skill with which he related the political story to the fortunes of the elk-leather trousers of Herr von Bredow; but even here the failure to individualize the characters was a serious problem, and it was even worse in Der Wärwolf, its sequel, which suffered from the further fault that it was difficult to say why the book was called as it was, unless it was merely to arouse curiosity.
Fontane was even more critical of Cabanis, Alexis’s novel of the reign of Frederick II. He recognized the author’s careful research on the history of the French colony in Berlin and found the novel excellent as a picture of Berlin manners and morals in its time. But he pointed out that it was much too long, and that the characters kept repeating themselves and never seemed to develop. So also in Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht, where readers are confronted with too many characters too quickly, with no clues from the author to help them determine at the outset which of them are going to be key players in the story and which will have subsidiary roles.
As has been noted previously, Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht and its sequel, Isegrimm, dealt with themes that would stand in the foreground of Fontane’s own historical fiction—the decline and destruction of Frederician Prussia and its subsequent regeneration—and his judgments of them are particularly interesting. On various occasions, he was quoted as saying that one or the other of them was his favorite Alexis novel, and in his essay for Rodenberg’s Salon his praise of them is, if anything, excessive. He does, however, admit that, as in Der Roland von Berlin, Alexis’s liberal political opinions tended, in both these late novels, to romanticize the actuality described by seeing everything as lighter or darker than it actually was. This was particularly true of his description of the civic and moral decline of Prussia in the years before 1806. Fontane admits that his own picture of those years was not as dark as Alexis’s, which would not be especially important if it were not for “the excess of psychological attention that [Alexis] pays to the morally repulsive.” This showed a lack of proportion that distorted reality, and it also posed a question of taste. Alexis, Fontane wrote, “gives the ugly more space, and dwells upon it longer and more lovably, than is justified in a novel that has to be judged in the first instance according to aesthetic standards. . . . Literature has other standards of truth than history.”7
Leaving this aside, Alexis was never destined to enjoy the popularity of Scott, nor did he deserve it. His research was too detailed, his period pieces too complicated, and his dialogue too interminable to enable him to retain public attention and affection. Above all, Fontane pointed out, he lacked a sense of humor.
Wrapped in his tartan plaid, Scott rode over the Grampian hills of his homeland, and the castles and the huts, the kings and the crofters all lay before him, each in its place, and life held nothing that he could not treat, in his fictional forms, with gaiety and superiority. His prejudices merely heightened the effect. He was the great humorist because he was so great and free as a person. In those places where Willibald Alexis tries to assume a similar position, he remains as a child of his time and his country, stuck in irony. He mocks; he ridicules; but his soul never achieves Olympian laughter. He was just no Olympian.8
As he brought his first novel to conclusion, Theodor Fontane probably spent little time wondering about his own Olympian qualifications. But he had wanted to write a novel that he himself would be pleased with, and to achieve that he had sought to avoid the mistakes of the writer who had sometimes been called the märkische Scott while trying to emulate the virtues of the real one.
The novel was finished during a painful period in Fontane’s personal life. In 1876 he had accepted a position as first secretary of the Prussian Academy of Arts, largely, one supposes, to please his wife, who longed for the security that a bureaucratic position would bring and dreamed of her husband becoming a Geheimrat.9 Almost immediately, he discovered that he had made a grievous mistake, that his new colleagues had no respect for his literary achievements and, indeed, treated him de haut en bas and seemed to expect servility in return. He reacted by submitting his resignation, which posed awkward problems of protocol, since his appointment had been signed by the emperor, and took a lot of time before it was effected, and which also came close to destroying his marriage.10 The book, to which he turned with an almost defiant energy, helped him cope with these difficulties. He wrote to his friend Mathilde von Rohr:
Yes, the novel! In these times, so comfortless for me, it is my only happiness, my only means of recuperation. In busying myself with it, I forget what is troubling me. When it really appears, I shall, looking back on the time in which it emerged, have to say: a child of sorrow. But it bears no signs of that. In many passages it is gay, and nowhere is it sicklied over with misery. I believe that I ought to say that it will please you, and that the hopes that you have always had for it will not be wholly unfulfilled. As I work on it, I feel that I am only a writer and that only in this fine profession—however the jumped-up culture mob [aufgeblasene Bildungs-Po bel] may laugh at the thought—I can find my happiness.11
It would never have occurred to Fontane to refer to Vor dem Sturm as a “patriotic novel.” He had, as we have seen, distanced himself from the heightened nationalism that had overcome Germany in the seventies, and his war books, not only Der Krieg gegen Frankreich but also Kriegsgefangenen and Aus den Tagen der Okkupation, had shown such forbearance toward the former enemy that his son, an army captain, had remonstrated with him. At the time of publication in the winter of 1878, he wrote to his publisher, expressing the wish that reviewers would perceive the book’s true intentions. It was, he wrote,
the expression of a determined world and life philosophy; it takes a stand for religion, morality and the fatherland, but it is full of hatred of the “blue cornflower” and “With God for King and Fatherland,” that is to say, of caricaturing that trinity or smothering it in phrases. I dare say—and I feel this as strongly as I live—that I have put down something in this book that lifts it far above the usual novelistic rubbish, and not merely in Germany.12
The story opens in December 1812 with its hero, Lewin von Vitzewitz, going home for Christmas to the village of Hohen-Vietz in the Odenbruch between Frankfurt am Oder and Küstrin. The family estate, situated here since the reign of the Ascanians, is currently presided over by Lewin’s father, Berndt von Vitzewitz, a vigorous representative of the country nobility with good connections at court but a melancholy man, brooding over the death of his wife six years earlier, during the turbulent days that followed the defeat of Jena, when she was insulted by an officer of the French occupation force, whom Berndt subsequently killed in a duel. The mistress of Hohen-Vietz is now Lewin’s sister Renate, whose quiet existence is relieved by the endless gossip of her companion Aunt Schorlemer, who once lived in a Herrnhüter community in Greenland, her amused interest in the archaeological researches of the local pastor, Seidentopf, and her friendship with the orphan Marie, the daughter of a wandering player who died in the village, and who is now the ward of the village mayor Kniehase. Not far away, at Guse, lives Berndt’s eldest sister, Amelie, whose husband was an officer in the army of Frederick the Great who took retirement after the battle of Leuthen, because of what he considered to be an unjust reprimand by the king, and became a member of the court of Frederick’s brother Henry. Long widowed, Aunt Amalie maintains an island of French culture at Guse, attended by the older members of the local nobility who still venerate the spirit of Frederick.
Lewin is a student in Berlin and the member of a society of young army officers, civil servants, and fellow students called Kastalia, whose members cultivate the arts in the same way as Fontane’s own Tunnel did in the forties. One of the members of Kastalia is Tubal Ladalinski, member of a Polish noble family which, after the last Polish partition, shifted its allegiance to the Prussian crown. Lewin is a frequent visitor to the Ladalinski home in Berlin, as Tubal is to Hohen-Vietz, and, as the ties between the two houses grow stronger, Tubal and Renate are brought together, and Lewin falls in love with Tubal’s sister Kathinka.
This network of relationships, which was soon to be changed beyond recognition by events in the great world, Fontane describes at length and with an unhurried attention to detail and a willingness to sacrifice pace to anecdote and historical retrospection. It is easy to imagine that many of his contemporaries felt as Julius Rodenberg did and found it difficult to understand why Aunt Schorlemer is allowed to talk quite so much about Greenland as she does or why Fontane described with such gusto the debates between Pastor Seidentopf and his friend the Frankfurt legal counselor Turgany over the Germanic or Slavic origins of their archaeological findings. But such scenes—and even others more peripheral to the main story, like the description of the evening party of Frau Hulen, Lewin’s Berlin landlady, and the scene in the Berlin pub in which Corporal Klemm gives a wrongheaded lecture on military strategy to a quartet of Berlin Bürger—are justified by Fontane’s determination to give as complete a picture of Prussian society as he can, as they are also by the spirit and humor of the telling and the considerable skill in character delineation. Fontane’s later novels, while much more disciplined, profited from the experiments he made in Vor dem Sturm.
The moving force in Fontane’s novel is Napoleon Bonaparte, whose waning fortunes affect both the policies of the Prussian state, tied to him in alliance, and the private fortunes and ambitions of its citizens, high and low. On 26 December 1812, two days after Lewin goes home for the holidays, the Berlinische Zeitung prints reports of the emperor’s fateful battle on the Berezina, and this event, which is the occasion of Corporal Klemm’s lecture in the pub on the Windmühlenberg a week later, convinces Berndt that the time is ripe for a general rising of the eastern provinces against the French occupation forces. He tells his son on Christmas Day, “It is easy to bury people in the snow. Only no mercy! Few of them will get across the Nieman, but none must be allowed to cross the Oder!”13
Neither Lewin nor Prince Hardenberg, the king’s chief minister, whom Berndt sees in Berlin the next day, approves of this plan. Lewin tells his father that he is no lover of what is now called the Spanish way of war, and that taking a demoralized army in the rear is something that he, the son of a French mother, could not condone. Prince Hardenberg informs him that the king has no intention of breaking the French alliance and will authorize no anti-French action by provincial leaders.
Events are now, however, slipping out of government control. On 30 December the commander of the Prussian contingent in the Napoleonic army, General York von Wartenberg, concludes a convention at Tauroggen with the advancing Russians, pulls his forces out of the French line, and assumes a position of neutrality. Lewin hears about this at a ball in the Ladalinski home in Berlin, in circumstances that, although he does not realize it at the time, foreshadow the frustration of his romantic dreams of winning Kathinka’s heart. The announcement of York’s action so infuriates the Polish Count Bninski, a suitor of Kathinka and an admirer of Napoleon, that he inveighs against Prussian loyalty in a way that induces her to see him with different eyes and to begin to question the Prussian loyalties of her father.
Meanwhile, York’s action electrifies public opinion and encourages the thought of imminent liberation from French control. In the university, the philosopher Fichte presents a lecture, “The Concept of Real War,” to a crowded audience and thoughts of battle subvert the usual program of the Kastalia society, where talks on Borodino and the war in Spain became the order of the day and a new friend of Lewins, named Hansen-Grell, arouses enthusiasm by reading a ballad about Frederick’s marshal Seydlitz:
Sie reiten über die Brücken,
Der König scherzt: “Je nun,
Hie Feind in Front und Rücken,
Seydlitz, was würd Er tun?”
Der über die Brückenwandung
Setzt weg, halb links nach vorn,
Der Strom schäumt auf wie Brandung—
Ja, Calcar, das ist Sporn.14
[They ride over the bridges,
And Frederick jokes, “Well now,
If the enemy were in our front and rear,
Seydlitz, what would you do?”
Over the bridge’s wall
he spurs, half-left and forward,
The stream foams up like surf—
Ja, Calcar, das ist Sporn.]
Finally, as a culmination of all this martial enthusiasm, there is a grand expedition by sleigh to Kloster Lehnin, where the members and their guests dine while counterfeit monks produce a spectral Bonaparte amid cries of “Pereat!” It is during the homeward ride from this extravaganza that Lewin admits to Kathinka that he loves her and wishes to marry her, only to be told, “You are a child.” A few days later, Tubal sends word to him that she has fled with Bninski. Shattered by this news, Lewin returns to Hohen-Vietz in a state of collapse and, after he has been nursed back to health by his sister, commits himself almost despairingly to the rising against the French garrison in Frankfurt that his father has been planning since the beginning of the year.
It is notable that, in describing the evolution and execution of this project, Fontane nowhere subscribes to the temptation of taking the easy way and describing it as a grand patriotic enterprise. His emphasis is rather on the moral issues involved, the question of loyalty, and the questionability of Berndt’s motivation. In a passage that Scott might have written, these issues are debated by Berndt, the village mayor, Kniehase, and the assistant director of the Frankfurt school, Othegraven. Berndt begins by referring to a rash of recent break-ins and robberies, which he attributes to deserters from the Grande Armée, although Kniehase, rightly as it turns out, says they have been committed by local riffraff. Berndt insists that, before these grow out of control completely, a Landsturm must be organized, village by village, which, in dealing with the smaller problem, will be prepared to deal with the larger, when the bulk of the French army attempts to cross the Oder. When Kniehase answers that this will require a command of the king, to whom they all owe their loyalty, Berndt replies that he recognizes his loyalty to the king, but that there is another loyalty that binds both ruler and subject and that is to the soil: “The king is there for the sake of the land. If he separates himself from that, or lets himself be separated from it through weakness or false counsel, then he breaks his oath and absolves me from mine.”15
Kniehase answers that without the king’s command nothing can be done, since the king is everything to the peasants, who owe the draining of the Oderbruch and their churches and homes to the crown; and he remains unmoved when Berndt gives way to an impassioned speech about the sacredness of the soil, made all the more so to him because his wife, dead because of the crimes of the French, is buried in it: “I have learned what earth is. There must be blood in it. And everywhere hereabouts it is fertilized with blood. At Kunersdorf there is a place called the ‘red field.’ And should all that be given up because a king is not strong enough to resist weak counsellors? No, Kniehase, with the king as far as it goes; without him if that must be.”16
Berndt appeals to the Konrektor to support him, and Othegraven, a deeply religious man, shifts the focus of the argument to one of values. Prussia has always been a royal land, he says, and one deeply loyal to its rulers. But it would be an abomination to make blind obedience a people’s highest virtue. That place belongs to freedom and love. Trusting in these, and in the hope that no lasting break will come between the king and his people, his subjects must have the determination to act, while showing the king that they are for him even if their actions seem to say the opposite. It is a matter of the heart. “It is more difficult to decide than to obey—more difficult and often more loyal.”17 Schill and Hofer knew that their rulers were forced to opt for inactivity, but their hearts told them that they themselves must act for the country.
Fontane’s characters generally speak for themselves rather than for him, and he was certainly aware of the shortcomings of this argument. But it is enough to persuade Kniehase to give up his opposition, and the plans for the rising go forward. Yet none of Berndt’s expectations is fulfilled. The French deserters, against whom an elaborate operation is mounted, turn out to be a couple of thieves from a neighboring village. A plan to ambush regiments of Oudinot’s corps who are bivouacking at Schloß Guse and to seize the war chest they are reportedly carrying is foiled by the foresight of their commander, who senses the danger and leads his troops to safety before the trap is sprung. Finally, when the attack is launched upon the French troops in Frankfurt, they turn out to be not the demoralized rabble that Berndt expects but a well-trained reserve unit that reacts quickly and drastically. His peasant detachments are forced to retreat with significant losses. Hansen-Grell is killed in the fighting, Othegraven taken and executed by the French, and Lewin captured and placed in prison in Küstrin to await a similar fate.
It is at this point that Fontane, a stern critic of the exaggerated patriotism of his own time, has Berndt von Vitzewitz examine his own motives with a pitiless eye:
Berndt, don’t deceive yourself, don’t lie to yourself. What was it? Was it fatherland and sacred vengeance, or was it pride and vanity? Was the decision up to you, or did you want to shine? Did you want to be the first? Tell me the answer. I want to know it, I want to know the truth. . . . Poor, petty human nature! And I thought I was greater and better! Yes, fancying that I was better, that’s what it was. Pride goeth before a fall, and what a fall! But I am punished, and this hour prepares my reward.18
Major General von Bamme, the diminutive Ziethen hussar, who is a member of Aunt Amelie’s circle at Guse, and as a professional soldier was chosen to lead the assault on Frankfurt, also experiences a revelation as a result of the fighting there. He has always had a tendency to think of his own kind as a superior race, and he confesses to Berndt that that faith has been severely shaken.
There is nothing to this stuff about two kinds of people. One thing at least we thought we had taken a lease on, courage. Then along comes this albino rabbit Grell and dies like a hero with a saber in his hand. About the Konrektor I won’t speak at all: a death like his can make an old soldier ashamed. And where does it all come from? You know. West wind. I make nothing of these windbags of Frenchmen, but in all their stupid stuff there is a pinch of truth. Nothing much will come of their fraternity, nor of their freedom. But there is something in what they have stuck in between. Because what does it mean in the end but Mensch ist Mensch.19
Here, certainly, Fontane is speaking through Bamme, and this speech is the clearest validation of his claim that Vor dem Sturm is an expression of his “world and life philosophy.”
The novel comes to its end with a dispatch that is in sharp contrast to the meandering pace of its earlier chapters With the aid of Hoppenmariecke, a figure who might have appeared in a novel by Scott, a “kobold,” as Othegraven calls her, who is feared by some people as a witch and suspected by others as a thief but has always been protected by Levin, a way is found to get intelligence to him in his prison cell in Küstrin, which alerts him to the preparations being made to effect his escape. In the execution of this escape, however, Tubal is fatally wounded and dies after the return to Hohen-Vietz. The novel ends, then, with Berndt chastened by the results of the action he insisted upon; Renate deprived of her destined mate; and Lewin and Marie coming together in a union that will presumably renew the fortunes of the Vitzewitz house. In what is the weakest part of his book, Fontane deals with these events in an almost cursory fashion, telling his readers that Lewin loves Marie without allowing them to see this for themselves or giving them any way of imagining what their future life together will be like.20 So too Renate, an attractive and interesting woman in the earlier chapters of the book, is allowed to fade away with deplorable suddenness into an old lady in a cloister, keeping a diary.
Still, the novel itself is an impressive performance, and it is necessary to ask why. Writing of Vanity Fair, a work that Fontane greatly admired (and which, incidentally, also had a botched ending), the critic F. R. Leavis once noted caustically that it had “nothing to offer the reader whose demand goes beyond the ‘creation of characters’ and so on.”21 This charge has also been made against Fontane, but in his case, as in Thackeray’s, it is singularly unjust In reality, Fontane’s first novel was a model of what a historical novel should be. It created a credible world filled with credible characters. To nineteenth-century readers of Prussian stock, it said, “This is what we were once like.” To non-Germans it offered an interesting picture of another culture in all its variety in a time of crisis. To anyone interested in Napoleon, it gave a new appreciation of how his ambitions impinged upon the lives of ordinary people living not in the centers of power but in the byways of history, where nevertheless great decisions were made that had some effect upon his fall. To provide all that, and a good story as well, was no small achievement.
In Fontane’s own career, Vor dem Sturm marks the emergence of a new spirit of criticism of the Prussia that Fontane had idealized in his ballads and in the Wanderings. This was induced in part by his concern about the spirit of arrogant nationalism that had been one of the results of the victory over France, although it may have been influenced also by his unpleasant experience with Prussian bureaucracy during his brief career in the Prussian Academy and his lingering resentment over the lack of recognition shown him for his war books. In any event, during the last stages of the composition of Vor dem Sturm, his mind was never entirely free from reflection on the more unpleasant aspects of Prussianism.
This did not, to be sure, obtrude upon the text of the novel, but it was not entirely absent either. Count Bninski, Kathinka’s suitor, may be considered the voice of this side of his author, the Polish patriot and admirer of Napoleon who, after Tauroggen, rails against Prussia’s lack of loyalty,22 and later, in an emotional conversation with Kathinka, describes Prussia as a predatory and greedy land:
All that flourishes here is class and petty formality, number and routine, and along with it that hateful poverty that breeds, not simplicity, but only cunning and wretchedness. Scant and frugal, that’s the motto of this land. . . . A simulation of existence—appearance and cunning—and with them a deep-seated conception of being something special. And why? Because they have that joy in fighting and robbing that always goes with poverty. It is never satisfied, this people; without polish or form or anything that does good or pleases, it has only one desire: always more. . . . A people of pirates who make their raids on land. But always with Te Deums and for the sake of God and the highest values! For it has never been short of inscriptions for its banners.23
On the eve of the onslaught upon Frankfurt, these sentiments are echoed by the Prussian lieutenant Hirschfeldt, who is acting as Bamme’s chief of staff, in a talk with Tubal Ladalinski. He says:
I was abroad for a long time, and one learns about oneself when abroad. Anyone who comes back is surprised by nothing as much as by the naive belief, which he finds here on every side, that in the land of Prussia everything is the best. The big, the small, the whole and the single. The best, I say, and, above all, the most honorable. And yet precisely here lies our weakest point. What kind of politics have we made for the last twenty years! Nothing but deceit and betrayal, and we will have to go to ruin because of it. For it’s all the same, state or individual, whoever wavers and shifts, whoever is unreliable and unsteady, whoever breaks vows, whoever, in short, does not keep his word, is doomed.24
Such passages, which reflected Fontane’s increasingly pessimistic reflections about contemporary social and political tendencies in Germany, were to become more frequent in Fontane’s next major historical fiction, the short novel Schach von Wuthenow. Set in Berlin in the autumn of 1806, this is, for all of its careful historical construction, a parable for Fontane’s own time, an interesting forecast of L’Adultera, Unwiederbringlich, and the other novels of contemporary life that were to follow. In constructing a picture of aristocratic life in Berlin in the months before the disaster of Jena, Fontane was counting upon his readers’ memories of what happened in historical time after the end of his story to make the connection between the private tragedy described in the book and the national one that followed and might well be repeated.
In Schach von Wuthenau, the historical setting is described with great economy in the opening chapter, in which Frau von Carayon and her guests discuss the recent attempt of the Prussian foreign minister Count von Haugwitz to appease Emperor Napoleon of France, who, since his overwhelming victory over Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in December 1805, has been accusing Prussia of breaches of neutrality and has been encroaching upon Prussian territory. Haugwitz’s mission has apparently been successful, and has assured the future cession of Hannover to Prussia, but it has been highly unpopular with Prussian patriots and the Prussian military, who are agitating for war. In the discussion at the Carayon reception, however, Haugwitz is strongly supported by a former staff captain named von Bülow, recently returned to Prussia from abroad, where, like Lieutenant Hirschfeldt in Vor dem Sturm, he has learned a lot about his own country, particularly that everything of significance in the world does not have to happen between Nuthe and Notte, and that Mirabeau was not mistaken when he likened Prussia to a fruit that was already rotten before it was ripe.25 A provocative and incisive critic, whose role in the novel is to outrage others by means of drastic formulations whose truth they are unwilling to face, Fontane’s Bülow is based upon the historical figure Freiherr Dietrich von Bülow, a military publicist of great talent, an admirer of Napoleon, whose victory at Austerlitz he considered the new Actium, and a bitter critic of his own country for failing to appreciate this or to see that it required profound changes in the Frederician system. Overly assertive and paranoid, he was eventually declared to be insane and died in confinement in Riga in 1807.26
Bülow shows his colors at the Carayon reception when a new guest, Rittmeister Schach von Wuthenow, brings the news that a street mob has been besieging the Haugwitz residence, howling and throwing stones in protest against the treaty. His fellow officer Alvensleben complains that this will be blamed on the Regiment Gensdarmes, whose opposition to the Haugwitz policy is well known. This elicits from Bülow the retort:
And rightly so. . . . Why do these gentlemen, who every day become smarter than the king and his ministers, use this kind of language? Why do they make politics? Leaving aside the question whether an army may make politics in any case, when they do so they should at least make sense. At last we are on the right path, at last we are standing where we should have been from the beginning, at last His Majesty is listening to the precepts of reason, and what happens? Our officer class, whose every third word is of the king and their loyalty, . . . indulge themselves with an opportunism that is as dangerous as it is naive, and, through their insolent activity and more insolent language, invite the anger of the emperor, who has only just been appeased with difficulty.27
These words are hotly contested by Schach, and the eruption of a political debate between the two is avoided only by the adroitness of their hostess, who changes the subject of the conversation.
But it is not the antagonism between Bülow and Schach that is the center of Fontane’s novel, although there are other brushes between the two, which Fontane uses to throw light on the conventionality of Schach’s political views. Rather, it is the relationship between Schach and the two women of the story, Josephine von Carayon, a handsome widow of thirty-seven of established social position and great charm, and her attractive and idealistic daughter Victoire, whosebeauty would have matched her mother’s were it not for the fact that she suffered disfigurement by smallpox at the age of fifteen. Schach, a handsome and socially accomplished man, is a frequent visitor at the Carayon receptions, and it is widely believed that he hopes to marry Josephine, although he seems to be in no haste about this. Victoire herself favors this match, although she herself is drawn to Schach. But in a conversation with Bülow and other officers at the wine restaurant Sala Tarone, Alvensleben advances the theory that Schach is a person so obsessed with externals that such a wedding is out of the question, since he would consider Victoire to be unpresentable in society, and would be embarrassed to have to introduce her to persons of high position as his daughter. The thought that the match is impossible brings an expression of satisfaction from Bülow, who has come to admire Josephine for possessing the charm of truth and naturalness, but regards Schach as being pedantic and pompous as well as
the embodiment of that Prussian narrowness that has only three articles of faith: first, “the world rests no more securely on the shoulders of Atlas than the Prussian state on those of the Prussian army”; second, the Prussian infantry attack is irresistible; and, third and last, “a battle is never lost until the Regiment Garde du Corps has attacked.” Or naturally the Regiment Gensdarmes, for they are brothers, twin brothers. I detest such expressions, and the time is near when the world will recognize the hollowness of such boasting.28
Shortly thereafter Schach takes mother and daughter and their old aunt by carriage to Tempelhof—on one of those country excursions that now became a regular feature in Fontane’s novels—where they book a table in the restaurant and then walk through the fields to view the village church. Coming back, Schach accompanies Victoire, and they talk about the chivalric order of Knights Templar and its founder, Philippe le Bel, which leads her to say artlessly that all historical figures with this nickname are unsympathetic to her. “I hope not out of envy,” she adds. “But beauty, which must be true, makes one egoistic, anyone who is egoistic is thankless and untrue.”29 Schach tells himself that this remark was not intended to be directed at him but feels that it was spoken out of “a dark presentiment.” As they reach the village, he waits until the other couple joins them, and then changes his partner, reentering the restaurant with Josephine, as if corroborating both Alvensleben’s theory and Victoire’s remark.
Victoire guesses the reason for his behavior but is paradoxically attracted more strongly to him. Schach, too, finds that she is much on his mind. At a Herrenabend to which he has been invited by Prince Louis Ferdinand (who, as most of Fontane’s readers would have known, was to die at Saalfeld only a few months later after Napoleon opened hostilities against Prussia), the prince, who has had much experience with women, is intrigued by what he hears about the Carayons and remembers seeing Victoire when she was young and being impressed by her beauty. When Schach tells him that this has been much diminished, he refuses to believe it and gives a Schach a lecture on feminine beauty. He speaks of a beauté du diable, which conceals fire, energy, and passion beneath a superficial ugliness, a higher form of beauty because it has “gone through the fire.” He expresses the desire to resume his acquaintance with the Carayons and says that his friend Pauline will visit them and arrange a meeting.
A few days later, after a great review of the army on Tempelhof Field, which one observer with premonitory foresight called the “farewell review of the Frederician army,” Schach visits the Carayon residence and finds Victoire alone. He tells her of the pending invitation but warns her that Louis Ferdinand is “alternatively a heroic prince and a prince of debauchery” and is perhaps not an acquaintance to be cultivated. She answers that she is not in a position to judge the morals of society and that, in any case, her disfigurement gives her a freedom to make her own decisions. Schach suggests that she is taking her ideas from the book she is reading, which he supposes is a volume of Rousseau. She answers that it is rather her favorite author, Mirabeau, who was, like her, a victim of smallpox and that, if she could, she would make his name part of her own. She speaks these words with a passion and bitterness that transfigure her, and Schach, thinking of the prince’s description of beauté du diable, loses his composure and finds himself holding her hand and uttering endearments. Victoire gives herself to him.
In the days that follow, however, Schach reverts to his reserved and distant manner, and it is apparent to Victoire that he recognizes no change in their relationship. She then confesses to her mother, and Josephine, in one of the most brilliant passages in the book for what it reveals about Schach’s character and her own, accosts Schach and, after saying, in a friendly manner, that she has no intention of making a scene or delivering a moral sermon, says that Victoire has told her the truth but asked her to be silent, expressing the romantic desire to bear all of the blame, private and public, for what happened in order to spare the man she loves. Josephine continues:
Weak as my love for Victoire makes me, I am not so weak that I am ready to support her in this comedy of generosity. I belong to society and obey its rules. That’s the way I was brought up, and I have no desire to sacrifice my social position for a sacrificial whim of my beloved daughter. In other words, I have no desire to go into a cloister or to play the role of a saint withdrawn from the world, even for Victoire’s sake. And so I must insist on the legitimation of what has happened. That, Herr Rittmeister, is what I had to say to you.
Recovering his composure with difficulty, Schach answers that he realizes that everything in life has its natural consequences, and that he has no desire to avoid these.
He had had the wish to remain unmarried, and to say good-bye to an idea that he had held so long caused for the moment a certain confusion. But he felt no less certainly that he had to congratulate himself on the day that would shortly bring this change in his life. Victoire was her mother’s daughter, and that was the best assurance of his future, the promise of real happiness.
Josephine notes the coolness of this answer, and is wounded by the absence from it of either love or a sense of guilt. She answers pointedly that he himself must feel that his assent might have been more wholehearted and natural, but that it is nevertheless acceptable. What she wants now is a formal engagement in the cathedral and a gala wedding. After that events can take their course.30
After he has left her, however, all of Schach’s doubts about marriage, and especially about marriage to Victoire, return. He says to himself:
I am helplessly given over to the scorn and witticisms of my comrades, and the ridiculousness of a happy country marriage, which blooms like a violet in the shade, looms before me in model form. I see exactly how it will be: I’ll quit the service, take over the running of Wuthenau again, plow, improve the soil, raise rape or turnips, and devote myself to wedded bliss. What a life, what a future! On this Sunday, a sermon; on the next, the Gospel or Epistles; and in between whist en trois, always with the same pastor. And then, once in a while, a prince comes to the nearest town, perhaps Prince Louis in person, and changes his horses, while I appear either at the gate or the hotel. And he looks me over in my old-fashioned coat and asks how things are going with me. And as he does so, every muscle in his face is saying, “My God, what three years can do to a person!” Three years—and perhaps it will be thirty!31
Nevertheless, he makes the wedding arrangements with the Carayons, including plans for an extended honeymoon in Italy. But now his worst fears are realized. He receives in the mail a caricature called “Le choix de Schach,” showing him as a Persian shah between two female forms, recognizable as Josephine and Victoire von Carayon. Other caricatures follow and find their way into the public, and Schach, humiliated, takes leave and retires to his estate without informing his betrothed or her mother.
The story now moves quickly to its conclusion. Feeling that her daughter has been betrayed, Frau von Carayon goes to Paretz, where the royal couple are in residence, and appeals to the king for help. In a personal interview with Schach, he insists that he keep his promise. Schach obeys; the marriage takes place; but, immediately thereafter, he shoots himself. The last word is spoken by Bülow, in a letter to his publisher from Königsberg. He writes:
There you have the essence of false honor. It makes us dependent upon the most vacillating and arbitrary thing that exists, the judgment of society, even although it is based upon quicksand, and it sees to it that we sacrifice the most sacred commandments and our finest and most natural impulses to these social idols. And to this cult of false honor, which is nothing but vanity and eccentricity, Schach too has succumbed, and greater things than he will follow. Remember these words. We have stuck our heads in the sand like the ostrich, in order not to hear or see. But this ostrich-like precaution has never worked. When the Ming dynasty went into decline, and the victorious Manchu army had already penetrated into the palace garden in Peking, messengers and envoys continued to arrive with news of victory after victory for the emperor, because it was against the manners of high society and the court to speak of defeats. Oh this good form! An hour later an empire was in ruins, and a throne overturned. And why? Because everything artificial becomes a lie, and everything that is not true leads to death.32
Schach von Wuthenow is a more polished and disciplined production than its predecessor, but less impressive and less rewarding for its readers. It lacks the epic sweep, the attempt to see the whole of society, and the richness and variety of Vor dem Sturm. Fontane has limited his characters severely: two aristocratic women, a prince, a handful of army officers, a military publicist who talks too much and does too little, and some minor figures who make cameo appearances (King Frederick William III, for example, and Queen Luise). No members of the lower classes are seen except Schach’s groom and his family retainers at Wuthenow, and no bourgeois, except the musician Dussek, who seems to have been inserted in the story to give Fontane an opportunity, through Bülow, to make a remark about “your whole Bürgertum which doesn’t want to create a new class of freedom but only, with vanity and jealousy, to incorporate itself with the old privileged classes.”33
None of these, moreover, with the exception of Josephine von Carayon, is fully developed by the author. Consider the case of Aunt Marguerite, with her insistence on pronouncing “i’s” as “u ’s” (Kürche) and her zeal for imparting well-known information (“Sieh, Victoire, das sind Binsen.”).34 She is such a pale shadow compared with Aunt Schorlemer in Vor dem Sturm that we are almost persuaded that Fontane doesn’t have his heart in what he is doing. A more serious failure in this respect, and certainly one felt by many readers, is Fontane’s failure to make Schach himself a credible figure. His fellow officers, even when criticizing him, are apt to insist that he is not to be underestimated: “He is nevertheless one of our best.”35 But Fontane gives us no reason to believe this or, for that matter, to explain why it is that two attractive and intelligent women are fascinated by him. Schach is handsome and has good manners, but he is of mediocre intelligence, with an instinctive suspicion of new ideas. He appears also to be completely humorless. There is much speculation in the book about “le choix de Schach,” but it turns out in the end that he is not sexually drawn to either Josephine or Victoire; he just wants to go to their parties and to remain uncommitted. He is, in everything that he does, more Schein than Sein, and this being so is not of the stuff to be an effective tragic hero or to be attractive to the ordinary reader.
If the personal drama that is the center of the story is weakened by these deficiencies, the historical novel suffers from a lack of historical description. The tragedy of Schach von Wuthenow is presumably set in a society in moral decay and on the verge of destruction but, while we are told that this is so through the monologues of Bülow, which become a bit of a bore, we never see any actual signs of it, except perhaps in the public demonstration of officers of the Regiment Gensdarmes against Iffland’s production of the Reformation drama Weihe der Kraft. This spectacle, which comes in the wake of Victoire’s surrender to Schach and so disgusts her that it prompts her confession to her mother, consists of a sleigh ride on the salt-strewn streets of the city and represents
contempt for everyone and everything. First, debauched nuns with a witch of a mother superior at their head, howling, drinking, and playing cards, and then in the middle of the column the principal sled, rolling on cylinders and from the excess of its gilt decoration designed apparently as a triumphal chariot, in which Luther and his famulus sat and, on the barbette, Katharina von Bora.
In his comments on Ruhe ist die erst Bürgerpflicht in his essay on Willibald Alexis, Fontane criticized Alexis severely for the emphasis that he placed on the moral decay of Berlin in 1806 and for dwelling on the uglier aspects of this “longer and more lovingly” than was necessary.36 Yet for all its other faults, Alexis’s extensive descriptions in Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht of his heroine’s temptations in the salons of high society and of the seamy side of Berlin politics convey a more convincing picture of a society in dissolution than is to be found in Schach von Wuthenau. Partly out of prudery, perhaps, Fontane preferred to rely upon symbolism and analogy rather than description,37 but readers can be expected to read only so much into a couple of references to Mirabeau or the description of the prank of some bored army officers.
Still, Fontane was feeling his way, and the techniques with which he experimented in Schach von Wuthenow were to be used more effectively in his novels of society.