It has often been noted that, in contrast to the situation in Great Britain and France, the national literature of Germany was not in the nineteenth century rich in works of social realism or authors who combined high aesthetic standards with gifts of political and social analysis. There were no Thackerays and Stendhals, nor Flauberts and Dickenses among the prose writers of the decades before unification and, indeed, the German writers who made any pretense of dealing with contemporary and social subjects before 1870—Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Karl Immermann, Gustav Freytag—rarely ventured beyond the realm of the idyllic or the fantastic or the parochial. Their works seldom awaken any shock of recognition among non-German readers and in general have an antiquarian flavor that may be charming but is usually remote from the realities of the modern world.1
The explanation often given for this is that Germany was, in two senses, a retarded nation. Long after the Western countries had become powerful nation-states, it had continued to be fragmented into dozens of separate political entities, and the resultant lack of a cultural capital like London or Paris, where artists might gather and exchange ideas, had necessarily led to a narrowness of focus, a provincial perspective, and a lack of the urbanity that characterized the literature of the West.2 Moreover, the effects of political disunity upon economic development, the relative slowness of industrial growth and of the rise of a strong middle class, and the late arrival of such concomitant features of industrial society as urbanization, the proletarianization of the lower classes, and the disintegration of inherited social categories and values deprived German writers of the kinds of themes that challenged their colleagues in countries that were more advanced economically.
There is much to be said for this explanation, but it is not entirely satisfactory, else how would we account for the fact that, even after 1871, when the creation of the empire put an end to Germany’s political divisions and the country experienced a surge of economic development that transformed it within a generation into one of Europe’s leading industrial producers, German writers still, on the whole, avoided social and political themes? It was not until the 1880s, with the coming of the naturalist movement, that writers and dramatists showed any appreciable interest in such subjects as social justice, sexual discrimination, and the plight of the poor; and, even when they did so, their attention lacked persistence and was often disingenuous, for they tended to concentrate on prostitution, the more lurid aspects of urban crime, and other subjects that were likely to titillate the palate of the middle-class reading public.3 In the underlying values of society the naturalists had little interest, and in its politics none; and by the end of the 1890s, when the vogue of naturalism was past, German writers were little more concerned with serious problems of contemporary life than before 1871. There was a good deal of talk in artistic circles in the 1880s about the need to imitate Emile Zola and write sociological novels—this was the stock-in-trade of Michael Georg Conrad and the group in Munich that founded the journal Die Gesellschaft in 18854—but, in fact, few German imitators appeared.
The causes of this lack of social engagement must be sought, therefore, not in the slowness of the country’s political and economic development but in German views of the proper function of literature. It had long been a strongly rooted prejudice that writers worthy of respect, true Dichter, should concern themselves with transcendental themes and spiritual values, that the problems and politics of contemporary society were no business of theirs, and that anyone who persisted in dealing with such questions was automatically deprived of his artistic status and relegated to the company of mere scribblers or Literaten.5
Erich Auerbach has suggested that this odd differentiation owes much to the towering figure of Goethe, whose interest in the actualities of social development was minimal, who found such things as the growth of industry and the increasing evidence of social mobility distasteful, and whose own novels were set in static social contexts, the actual conditions of life serving merely as immobile backgrounds against which the drama of Goethe’s own ideological growth unfolded. To the emerging structure of life Goethe paid little attention, and such was his authority, Auerbach suggests, that his exclusive concentration on individuality and ideas came to be regarded as the criterion of art as opposed to mere literature.6
Whether or not Goethe was responsible for it is less important than the fact that the double standard prevailed. It is notable that Heinrich Heine, a writer of whom one would think any nation in the world would be proud, has never received his due recognition in the land of his birth, in part because political and social criticism was never far below the surface of anything he wrote.7 This confirmed bias against present-mindedness has doubtless served as a warning to countless writers with aspirations to lasting fame. In our own century, Thomas Mann, who certainly had the talent to write social novels, seemed uncomfortable with the genre and once confessed, “Social problems are my weak point [although] this puts me to some extent at odds with my art form itself, the novel, which is propitious to the examination of social problems. But the lure of . . . individuality and metaphysics simply happens to be ever so much stronger in me. . . . I am German. . . . The Zolaesque streak in me is feeble.”8
The inhibition imposed by literary tradition was reinforced by a concern for what the reading public would tolerate. Authors like to be read, and German writers after 1871 could not but be aware that a reading public that had made Heinrich von Treitschke’s Deutsche Geschichte im XIX. Jahrhundert a best-seller was hardly likely to welcome books that criticized the social foundations or political practice of the new Reich of which they were so proud. The educated middle class of the Bismarck and Wilhelmine years was excessively preoccupied with its own social status and prestige, which were its substitutes for the political power that it did not possess. Its jealous regard for its position, which it felt was threatened by the rising class of technicians and functionaries, made it vulnerable to a process of ideological feudalization and robbed it of its intellectual independence.9 Increasingly more conservative as the period advanced, this Bildungsbürgerhtum expected from the authors of its novels and dramas entertainment or moral elevation. It did not want to be told by them that there were things in the world that ought to be put right and that its duty was to correct them, and it had the power to make its disapproval felt. It took a determined writer to disregard this.
Of those who did disregard it,10 the most successful and the most lasting in his influence was Theodor Fontane.
In turning to the novel of society, Fontane was not motivated by any desire to indoctrinate his readers. It was rather his historical instinct that inspired him to begin his series of Berlin novels. He was fascinated by the changes that had taken place in Berlin during his lifetime, particularly by the accelerated mutations of social relations and mood that occurred after the war in France had united Germany and made Berlin the capital city, the shifts in values that took place as considerations of power and money began to bulk larger in German thinking and social justice and civility less. He was interested in writing about these things not in the abstract sense but in the particular, and certainly without any ideological presuppositions or intentions. Discussing the origins of L’Adultera, the first of the novels, with Paul Lindau, he said that he had been “principally interested in giving a picture of Berlin life and society; the circumstantial and the scenery was the main thing.”11
For this purpose he was, of course, superbly equipped, for, in addition to his long experience as a writer, he was a Berliner by choice and inclination. In his old age, to be sure, he sometimes denied this. On Fontane’s seventieth birthday, when Maximilian Harden wrote a commemorative essay about him in his journal Die Zukunft, he expressed his gratitude to Harden for having described him as an old Fritz grenadier. This, he wrote, was “sublime,” adding, “Also what you say about my descent. I am a Märker but still more a Gascon.”12 But this sort of thing was greatly exaggerated. The fact that Fontane’s family came from France hardly made him a Gascon; his command of the French language was merely competent, and his Frenchness found expression largely in the commemorative odes that he composed (in German) for annual gatherings of the French colony in Berlin.13
His self-identification with Mark Brandenburg was somewhat more substantial—he was born, after all, in Neuruppin—but almost equally sentimental, the product of the extensive research, archival and ambulatory, that was the basis of his travel books. In any real sense, leaving the question of origins aside, Fontane was a Berliner. Except for his long absence in England in the 1850s, he lived in Berlin for almost all his life, from the time when it was a sleepy residential capital enclosed within a wall whose circumference could be traversed by foot in four hours14 until the days when it had become a Weltstadt that, with its suburban villages and towns, covered an area thirty miles across. It was in the Berlin of the 1840s that Fontane had his beginnings as a writer, and the tumultuous growth of the city (its population had grown to 862,341 by 1871 and to 1,315,287 within the next fifteen years) contributed to the development and maturation of his literary skills, changing his perspective, honing his critical capacities, and supplying him with ever new themes and problems. It was with this dependence on the city in mind that he wrote to Paul Heyse in June 1860:
In the course of the years, and particularly since my stay in London, it has become a necessity for me to live in a great middle point, in a center where decisive things happen. However one may mock at Berlin, and however willing I am to admit that now and then it deserves this mockery, at bottom the fact is undeniable that what happens or does not happen here has a direct effect upon the great events of the world. It has become a necessity for me to hear such a balance wheel whirring close to me, even at the risk of its becoming now and then the well-known mill wheel.15
This feeling did not change with the years, despite his frequent complaints about the city and its inhabitants. To be sure, he conceived the idea that Berliner Luft, which the novelist Conrad Alberti once described as “nervous, endlessly quivering, [working] upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly: the air of the world city,”16 was injurious to his health and that the smell of the Landwehr Canal affected him with a kind of malarial fever, but he was always nervous about his health, and such worries were also a rationalization for his long working holidays in resorts like Thale in the Harz and Krümmhubel in the Silesian mountains.17 He was also a constant critic of the volubility, the lack of urbanity, and the dowdiness of the Berlin middle class, particularly when away from home, and portrayed them as figures of fun (as in the case of the two Berlin tourists in the novel Cecile)18 or, less kindly, as a “society of cockiness, larking-around, gossip and belittling” (Schnoddergesellschaft von Ulk, Klatsch und Kleinmacherei).19 In his more pessimistic moods, he was apt to drift into reflections about the corrupting effect of the city upon creative ability (“As a rule I am firmly convinced that the big city makes people nimble, quick and agile, but it makes them shallow, and from anyone who does not live in seclusion it drains away his higher powers of production”), although his own life disproved the generalization, or into moralizing complaints about the pervasive materialism of the metropolis: “The big city hasn’t time to think, and—what is even worse—it hasn’t time for happiness. What it creates, hundred and thousandfold, is merely ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ which is the same as unhappiness.”20
Perhaps such passages merely underline Fontane’s Berlinness, for self-criticism was always a Berlin trait, as he once admitted to his friend Friedla nder:
The more berlinisch one is, the more one rails or jeers at Berlin. That this is so is due not only to the critics and jeerers. It lies also in their object, in our good Berlin itself. Just as our Junkers remain ineradicably the same, small, very small people who take themselves for historical figures, so the Berliner remains an egotistical, narrow-small-town person. The city grows and grows, the millionaires increase tenfold, but a certain shoemaker’s mentality remains, which expresses itself above all in the belief that “mother’s dumplings are the best.” But at the same time nothing here—for one cannot cite Bismarck and Molke all the time, who were not even Berliners—nothing is the best; in Berlin there is only imitation, good average, respectable mediocrity, and all clever Berliners feel that as soon as they are outside Berlin.21
All the same, he never left Berlin and, even at his gloomiest, never wavered from the sentiments that he expressed in an eloquent letter to Theodor Storm in 1853, in which he praised the egalitarian instincts, the sound morality, and the readiness to sacrifice of the ordinary Berliner, reminding him that in 1813, during the war of liberation, the city had raised not only several regiments of troops of the line but ten thousand volunteers, out of a population of only 180,000. He told Storm: “The people here have a genuine and true joy in sacrifice—even the educated. Yes, even the ‘Berliner Kinder’ (who are in large part a disagreeable sort) provided that it amounts to something.”22
There was an implication here that the Berliner was a model for the rest of the German nation that, indeed, to use a phrase that Fontane used in another connection,23 before God everyone was really a Berliner. However that may be, for the common people of Berlin, their ability to rise to any occasion, their unflappability and their devastating capacity for repartee, and their use of the inexhaustible resources of their wit to give order to their often difficult lives, Fontane had a deep affection, as he had for their songs, their jokes, and their preferred amusements. In March 1886, as a member of a committee giving awards for new poetry, he insisted that a special prize be given to the author of a song that had taken Berlin by storm:
Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks is da!
Mädel, sei stille, ick seh et ja.
Ick hab keen Jeld, du hast keen Jeld.
Wer hat den Mann mit dem Koks bestellt?24
Gassenhauer, he said, sometimes deserved more respect than more formal expressions of the muse. “It is always something to have put a particular word or song into the mouth of a city of millions for four weeks.”25
Fontane loved Berlin speech and acquired a perfect ear for its cadences and rhythms, as for the love of exaggeration and the subtle antithetical constructions that characterized it. This is manifest in his letters, but most of all in his novels, where—to cite only one example—the scene in Der Stechlin, where the dying insurance secretary Schikaneder talks with his wife about their years together and tells her how to order her future is so natural that it goes beyond literature.26 Combined with his talent for penetrating the psychology of situations and the persons caught up in them, Fontane’s command of the local idiom repeatedly produces small miracles of verisimilitude, as in the penultimate scene in Stine, when Pauline Pittelkow, trying to rally the heroine after the death of her lover, says:
Go on and cry, Stinechen, go on and really cry. When it really pours again, it’s already half over, just like the weather. And now drink another cuppa. . . . Olga, where are you? I bet the girl is in the kip again. . . . And next Sunday is Sedan Day and we’ll all go off to the Finkenkrug and ride on the carousel and throw the dice. And then you’ll throw the double six again.27
He was no less skillful in reproducing the vocal mannerisms of the upwardly mobile middle class, which combined the wit and volubility of Berlin speech with floods of quotations, gleaned perhaps from Büchmann’s Geflügelte Worte, that remarkable work that first appeared in 1863 and afforded an easy way of adding embellishment, if not distinction, to spoken style.28 Not that the use of citation as a conversational gambit or badge of culture was an exclusively middle-class trait. If Van der Straaten in L’Adultera and Kommerzienrat Treibel in Frau Jenny Treibel are accomplished, if excessive, in its use, this is no less true of Professor Schmidt in the latter novel. No century before or since was ever so obsessed with education as the nineteenth, and in Germany, where Bildung became the expression of universal culture, it was perhaps only natural that the citation should become a means of communication and identification in daily life as in scientific and literary circles. Among German novelists Wilhelm Raabe was known for his extensive use of the quotation, not for vanity’s sake or to display his learning but to emphasize recollections, experiences, epiphanies, and intimations of meaning or truth.29
As Fontane refined his style, he relied less and less on narrative and description and more and more on conversation. Speech, he believed, was the key to a man’s character and capacities, and in speaking with others individuals revealed their differences, as well as their integrity or unreliability, their moral convictions and social prejudices, and the way they reacted to their times.30 Conversation was the sovereign instrument of self-disclosure as it was the best defense against it. In Unwiederbringlich Count Holk, worried lest his privacy be betrayed, is advised by a friend that the best defense is a “free manner, unaffectedness and lots of talk. Talking a lot is a pleasure anyway and at times the true diplomatic wisdom, for it prevents things from being ascertained precisely and, even better, one thing nullifies another.”31 Finally, conversation is rarely disciplined and restricted to discrete subjects but tends to drift here and there, revealing as it does a lot of miscellaneous information about the participants and their society. Writing about the seventh chapter of Irrungen, Wirrungen, Walter Killy has observed that, if we had nothing of the novel except this chapter, we should still have some interesting historical information, as well as a fascinating cultural-historical document.
One could deduce from it that lobster and chablis would be on the menu at such a gathering, that parsons who started as house tutors and ended in the position of pastor loci, were apt to have property disputes with landlords, that a respectable estate like that of Botho’s father could be ruined by gambling and unwise economy, that it was still common in the landed nobility to make early arrangements for the marriage of their children, and—an apparent bagatelle—that charming ladies of rank went to Norderney for the baths.32
While most readers are charmed by the wit and charm of Fontane’s conversation, opinions have been divided on its effectiveness as a tool of social realism. Russell Berman talks of Fontane’s “dissolution of reality in conversation” and argues that it is his way of arguing that there is no objective reality beyond what people say of it and that order and privilege in society can only be upheld as linguistic fabrications of arbitrary meanings.33 Fontane, who always believed in the primacy of the word in human intercourse, while admitting the gap between the word and the truth, would probably not have wished to push things quite so far. Certainly, he made neither political nor philosophical claims for his experiments with the social novel. Of Der Stechlin he wrote:
At the end an old man dies and two young people get married,—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages. Of complications and solutions, of conflicts of the heart and conflicts in general, of excitement and surprises there is virtually nothing. In an old-fashioned märkische estate; on the one hand, and a new-fashioned ducal residence (Berlin) on the other, various people meet and talk about God and the world. All talk, dialogue, in which the characters tell the story. Naturally I don’t claim that this is the best way of writing a contemporary novel but it is the one that is called for.34
If we apply this kind of radical reductionism to them, not much more happens in Fontane’s other novels than in Der Stechlin. In Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888), a young aristocrat who is deeply in love with a daughter of the people is informed by his uncle that his family will lose its estate unless he marries a wealthy young woman of his own station. He does what he considers to be his duty and leaves his sweetheart. In Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), a gymnasium professor’s daughter sets her cap for the son of Frau and Kommerzienrat Treibel but is balked by the young man’s mother, who, driven by social ambition, arranges for his marriage to the daughter of a Hamburg commercial firm. The professor’s daughter marries a young scholar and goes off to excavate Troy. In Die Poggenpuhls (1896), a Prussian aristocratic family lives in genteel poverty in Berlin, trying desperately to preserve their social position and that of two officer sons. In the end, the death of an uncle in Silesia brings a legacy that modestly increases their income. In Mathilde Möhring (1906), a young woman is responsible for the successful political career of her husband but, when he suddenly dies, is forced to return to her former position and to begin all over again.. There is, of course, more to these stories than these bare scenarios, which would hardly attract readers to them. The real stories lie in the talk.
That having been said, it should be noted that the stories are often affected by critical happenings that take place off stage. In Quitt (1890), an awkward book whose story occurs partly in the Silesian mountains and partly in an America that no American will recognize, there is a murder. Stine (1890), Cecile (1887), and Unwiederbringlich (1891) end with suicides; and in Cecile and Effi Briest (1895), there are duels with fatal consequences. Indeed, there is also a duel in Irrungen, Wirrungen, although one that took place before the story began. When the lieutenant Botho von Rienacker is confronted with the necessity of terminating his love affair with Lene Nimpsch and marrying a woman of his own social class, he goes on a lonely ride in the Tiergarten to the place where Frederick William IV’s all-powerful police president Carl Ludwig von Hinckeldey had been killed in a duel in 1856, because of an affair in which honor seemed to require that he act as he did. Botho seems to be seeking reassurance from Hinckeldey’s example for the hard choice that he will have to make.35
The importance that he attributes to the duel is one of several indications of how clearly Fontane realized the extent to which violence, and the mental constructs (Hilfskonstructionen) that human beings used to justify it, like the concept of honor, regulated society and, pace Berman, was the real force maintaining order and privilege within it.36
In June 1862 Fontane wrote to his wife:
Your little reprimand about Counts and Excellences is really pretty undeserved. I should have thought that I had explained myself enough in my letter. It is, to be sure, true that I come more into contact with the nobility than with the Bürgertum, but that is partly the result of my métier (poet and writer of the Wanderungen), and partly a consequence of my political direction. Poets and artists in all ages traffic almost exclusively with princes, nobles and the patriciate; it is really quite natural. Today, indeed, when the Bürger-stand (in the widest sense) has an outstanding significance and in part is precisely the recipient of the advantages that otherwise were unique to the nobility and the clergy, that doesn’t have to be so any longer, but someone who fights in the camp of the “feudals” must make do with them.37
When Fontane wrote this letter he was working for the Kreuzzeitung, which is what he means by his “political direction.” But the opinions of that paper did not represent his political or social philosophy. He was an old forty-eighter, and the liberal-democratic views he had held at that time had been strengthened by his long years of residence in England. There is a strong intimation in his letter that he believed that the time was coming when the Prussian-German middle class would become as dominant in the country as its counterpart in England, and that when that happened it would inherit the nobility’s political, social, and cultural role in society. In which case, he might not have to offend his wife’s social predilections so often.
In 1862 there was every reason to be confident in that result. The middle-class liberals had apparently recovered from their defeat in the year of revolution and were beginning a new assault upon the privileges of the crown, this time striking at its control over the military. But their efforts were defeated by the political resolve and tactical skill of Otto von Bismarck, and their political will dissolved in the wave of nationalism that swept over the country in the wake of the victories over Austria and France. During the 1870s the so-called National Liberals tried to convince themselves that their support was essential to the government; by the end of the decade it was clear that this was not true, and that the German bourgeoisie was dead as an independent political power. Henceforth, it gave itself over to moneymaking, to attempts to effect a social symbiosis with the ruling aristocratic class, and to cultural activities
Fontane watched this process with growing alienation. In the days when, as he said in 1873, to be a Bürger meant to possess three things, “property, respect for the law, and the feeling that flows from the first two,”38 he had had high hopes for the bourgeoisie. As the years passed he became a harsh critic of the materialistic traits and the parvenuism of parts of the new German middle class, hating “the Bourgeoishaft with an emotion,” as he once wrote, as if he were a “sworn Social Democrat.”39 Still, he did not abandon his own bourgeois credentials. Even in his last year of life, he could write:
I am always happy when I read names like Lisco, Luca , Gropius, Persius, Hänsel, Thaer, Körte, Dieterici, Virchow, Siemens, because as I do so I am aware that in these blooming families, now in their second and third generations, a new nobility, even if without the “von,” is growing up, in which the world really has something, models for the new age (for that is nobility’s real function), who can challenge the world and not see their life task in the egotistical pickling of dead things.40
He was well aware, however, that such names now represented only a tiny minority of the Bürgertum and that the old bourgeois spirit had died in the wake of the victory over France and the easy prosperity of the Gründerzeit.
But this was not all that had changed. The nobility, for which he had always had a tendresse—he wrote his wife late in life that “märkische Junker and country pastors remain my ideals, my secret loves”41—was no longer as easy to admire. He had always been aware that the Prussian legacy to a united Germany would be ambiguous; and, in the very year of unification, in a curiously veiled passage in one of his war books, he had written of the spirit of Potsdam as consisting of “an unholy amalgamation . . . of absolutism, militarism, and philistinism.” and said that “a breath of unfreedom, of artificiality, of the contrived . . . blows through it all and oppresses any soul that has a greater need to breathe freely than to get in line.”42 In the years that followed, he became increasingly convinced that it was this kind of Prussianism that had captured the country, which was now being ruled by and for a nobility that no longer had the qualities that justified such a monopoly of power. Increasingly he felt that
the Junker, our most characteristic type of nobility, has become unappetizing. A frightful mixture of dim-wittedness, vanity, and prejudice.43
Prussia—and indirectly all Germany—suffers from its East Elbians. We must recover from our nobility; we can visit them, like the Egyptian Museum, and bow before Ramses and Amenophis, but to rule the country for their sake, in the delusion: this nobility is the country, that is our misfortune, and as long as this condition persists any development of German power and German reputation abroad is unthinkable. Where the Emperor sees columns are only feet of clay.44
As an artist, Fontane was aware that the aristocratic always had an aesthetic charm that appealed to readers. His own work had profited from the contacts with the landed nobility that he had forged during the period of the Wanderings, and his long friendship with Mathilde von Rohr of Dobbertin, whom he called “a Prachtnummer, . . . a masterpiece of an old märkisch noble lady,” and who had supplied him with much information and served as his confidante in difficult times.45 He retained a sneaking admiration for the Junkers, unappetizing as their behavior had been in recent years, and wrote that they “remained interesting as figures of art, and historians and Dichter could take pleasure in the fact that such people had existed and still did; they had a fascination like everything that is sharply etched.” 46 Fontane preferred to give his novels aristocratic settings, and to introduce into them figures like Botho von Rienacker’s’s uncle from the country with his hatred of Berlin (“Damned nest! One can’t breathe!”) and Effi’s father, old Briest, and the general who came to Berlin to visit his relatives the Poggenpuhls and to attend a performance of “The Quitzows,” and, in his last novel, Count Barby and the domina aunt Adelaide, and old Dubslav. These were all relics of a former age rather than representatives of the new Germany, and Dubslav was so idealized that it is difficult to think of him as ever really existing. But the late novels would be the weaker for their absence, and Fontane did not greatly offend against realism by their inclusion. For, after all, it cannot be argued that he neglected the darker side.
Indeed, through all of his Berlin novels there runs a steady stream of careerists and adventurers and restless and ambitious men, beginning with Rittmeister von Schach in Schach von Wuthenow (1883), including the retired colonel St. Arnaud in Cecile (1887) and Landrat von Instettin in what is perhaps Fontane’s most successful novel of society, Effi Briest (1895), and ending with Ministerialassessor Rex in Der Stechlin. Intent upon their own ends and insensitive to the feelings of others, these representatives of the new Prussia were quick to resort to violence when they supposed that this was required by their sense of honor, that old military concept which had, in civilian life, been translated into a cruel and unnatural code of etiquette that imprisoned the upper classes in a moral straitjacket.
Fontane wrote of the tyranny of honor in two of his novels. In Cecile he told the story of a young civil engineer named Leslie-Gordon, attached to the Prussian army, who becomes acquainted, during a stay in a fashionable hotel in Thale in the Harz, with a retired colonel of a Guards regiment, St. Arnaud, and his lovely but mysteriously melancholy wife, Cecile. Gordon is powerfully attracted but scrupulously proper in his behavior toward her. Their acquaintance is continued when they meet again in Berlin, and here Gordon discovers Cecile’s secret, that with the connivance of her mother, she was for some years mistress to an old prince. After her protector’s death, she returned to her family home in a small regimental town, where St. Arnaud met and became engaged to marry her. On the eve of the wedding, he received from the officers of his regiment a letter saying that the projected marriage would be unsuitable, and promptly called out the officer who had acted as spokesman for the others and killed him in a duel, for which he was forced to retire.
This information, while arousing Gordon’s sympathy for Cecile, also inflames his desire, and in his attempts to see her he becomes importunate. This comes to the attention of St. Arnaud, who immediately challenges Gordon to a duel, less because of the affront to his wife than because of the insult to him. He tells himself:
It wasn’t the love affair as such that aroused his anger at Gordon, but the thought that the fear of himself, the man of fixed purposes, had not been enough to frighten him off. To be feared, to frighten, to make felt at every moment the superiority that courage gives you, that was really his passion. And this merely average Gordon, this blurred Prussian first lieutenant, this man of cables and international wire-pulling, he had believed he could play his game with him. This presumption!47
He kills Gordon and travels to the Riviera, expecting Cecile to follow him, but she commits suicide.
In Effi Briest, the theme is handled with greater penetration and sophistication. The Prussian bureaucrat von Instettin marries Effi, a young woman of aristocratic family, still scarcely more than a girl, and takes her away to live in a small seaside town where she has no friends. Intent on pursuing his own career—he has attracted the favorable attention of Bismarck and spends long periods of time at the chancellor’s estate at Varzin—he neglects his young wife, while at the same time exploiting her nighttime fears in order to discipline her. Her loneliness makes Effi amenable to the attentions of a Major von Crampas, who lives nearby, and they have a brief affair. Six and a half years later, Instettin learns of this from some old letters. Although it is clear that Effi has had no relations with Crampas during that time, and although he dearly loves her, Instettin challenges the major to a duel and kills him, and then drives Effi from his home and takes her child from her. As an intelligent man, he is well aware that his conduct is not rational, but in order to render his doubts ineffectual he tells a close friend, Baron von Wüllersdorf, of the affair, thus making it, as he sees it, impossible for him not to go forward with his drastic course of action. In what has been called “the greatest conversation scene in the German novel,”48 and certainly Fontane’s most searching analysis of the moral hollowness of German society in his time, Instettin says:
We’re not isolated individuals, we belong to society, and we must continually take society into account; we are dependent upon it. If one could live in isolation, I could let this go. I would then be bearing a burden that I had agreed to accept. . . . But with people living all together, something has evolved that exists here and now, and we’ve become accustomed to judging everything in accordance with its rules, other people and ourselves as well. And to violate that doesn’t work. Society would scorn us and, in the end, we would scorn ourselves and not be able to stand it, and would shoot a bullet through our heads.
In any case, he adds, there’s no keeping the secret now. He has to go ahead. If he does not, then one day, when someone has suffered an affront, and he suggests that allowances should be made because no real harm has been done, he will see a smile pass, or start to pass, over Wüllersdorf’s face and will imagine him thinking, “Good old Instettin! He’s never been able to discover anything that smells too strong for him!” Wüllersdorf, who has been trying to dissuade him, now strikes his guns. “I think it’s dreadful that you’re right,” he says, “but you are right. . . . The world is simply the way it is, and things go, not the way we, but the way others, want them to. All that high-flown stuff about a judgment of God is, of course, rubbish, and we don’t want any of it. On the other hand, our cult of honor is a form of idolatry, and yet we must submit to it, as long as the idol is allowed to stand.”49
Fontane’s view that the nobility had submitted to a kind of totem-ism convinced him that it was fast losing its originality, spontaneity, and moral energy and was ceasing to be a vital force in German life, a conviction that he expressed in Die Poggenpuhls (1896), the story of a noble family that lives on the memories of what they once were. But it had meanwhile corrupted other sections of society, the educational establishment and the clergy, which repeated and sanctified its prejudices, and the once self-reliant middle class. The portraits of the Besitzbürgertum (propertied middle class) that Fontane gives us in his novels are increasingly unflattering, reprobating both their money-grubbing and their parvenuism.
Fontane had less success with his middle-class figures than with his aristocratic ones, partly because, as Peter Demetz has suggested, he did not really believe that people from the world of business or specialists in any field were capable of arousing the interest and sympathy of his readers.50 He tried to compensate for this in various ways. His scholars, for instance—like Eginhard aus dem Grunde in Cecile and Professor Cujacius in Der Stechlin—are treated as comic figures, dressed in bizarre ways and shown as advocating theories that can only be described as fantastical. Even Professor Schmidt in Frau Jenny Treibel does not entirely escape this fate. In The Prelude, Wordsworth differentiated between the kinds of professors he met at Cambridge: on the one hand,
. . . old men,
Old humourists . . .
. . . men unscoured, grotesque
In character, tricked out like ancient trees
Which through the lapse of their infirmity
Give ready place to any random seed
That chooses to be reared upon their trunks,
and, on the other,
. . . those with whom
By frame of academic discipline
We were perforce connected, men whose sway
And known authority of office served
To set our minds on edge51
The self-educated Fontane knew nothing of academic discipline, and we cannot imagine his gymnasium professor Schmidt—who is certainly not unscoured but almost tediously an old humourist—in any academic setting. In general, artists come off better in Fontane’s novels. The singer Marietta Trippelli in Effi Briest is a credible figure, with all of her eccentricities,52 and the same must be said Pauline Pittelkow’s actress friend Wanda in Stine, who entertains her guests with a miniature Judith and Holofernes drama played with potatoes.53 Fontane understood the world of the theater and always believed, with Pauline Pittelkow, that “everybody from the theater has something and gets a chic, and can speak.”54 With his portraits of businessmen, however, he had greater difficulty.
Fontane’s first attempt to portray the life of the Besitzbürgertum was L’Adultera (1882), set in the Gründerjahre, the boom period that followed the war against France. Kommerzienrat van der Straaten is a financier and highly successful speculator, married to Melanie de Caparoux, a woman less than half his age. He is a self-confident, ebullient Berliner, with some pretensions to culture, but with a streak of vulgarity that he does not attempt to hide. This increasingly grates upon his wife’s nerves and helps attract her to a young businessman named Ebenezer Rubehn, whom van der Straaten has brought into their home, perhaps to test his wife. She falls in love with Rubehn and runs away with him, eventually returning to Berlin with her new husband and learning to live happily outside of society, which has now repudiated her. As this drama unfolds, van der Straaten remains magnanimous and forgiving, ready apparently to take Melanie back, a fact that only confirms her original conviction that she could no longer remain with him.
This story, awkward at best, was made even more so by Fontane’s decision to make both van der Straaten and Rubehn converted Jews. Fontane always had a problem with the Jewish question, and, although he had many close Jewish friends and correspondents (Georg Fried- la nder, the intimate of his old age, for one) and although he often said that the Jewish middle class was infinitely more cultivated and intellectually stimulating than the non-Jewish, he fretted over the longterm cultural effects of a growing Jewish population and became increasingly pessimistic in his letters about the success of assimilation.55 Why he should have introduced the theme here is puzzling, unless it was, as Peter Demetz has suggested, because he lacked the confidence to describe the working out of his love triangle in autochthonous society and was trying to ease his problem by marginalizing his characters. But this, of course, weakened the novel as a critique of German society, and Fontane all but acknowledged this by fleeing into sentimentality in the book’s last chapters.56
Ten years later, Fontane wrote another story of life among the propertied middle class, Frau Jenny Treibel. Its point, he wrote in a letter to his son Theodor, was to show “the hollow, wordy, deceitful, arrogant, hard-hearted nature of the bourgeois point of view, which talks about Schiller and means Gerson [Bleichröder].”57 In the novel, Counselor of Commerce Treibel, who has made a fortune from manufacturing Prussian blue, the dye used for army uniforms, has been assiduously copying the politics of the aristocratic classes and has now decided to become a candidate for a conservative seat in a rural district, while cultivating decayed gentlewomen in the hope that they will help his candidacy. One of them is bewildered by his ambition and lectures him on the politics of social stratification. She says to him: “Aristocratic estate-owners are agrarian conservatives; professors belong to the National Liberal party; and industrialists are Progressives. Become a Progressive! What do you want with a royal order? If I were in your place I would go in for municipal politics and seek bourgeois distinction!” That is not the kind of advice Treibel wants to hear, and he answers that conservatism suits him better, especially since he is a Kommerzienrat, “a title of fragmentary character” that cries out for augmentation.
Factories in general incline toward bourgeois distinction; factories in particular, however—and my own inclines most decidedly in that direction—constitute the exception. Your expression tells me you want proof of this. Well then, I’ll try to give it to you. I ask you, can you think of a market gardener who—let’s say on the Lichtenberger or Rummelsburger boundary—grows cornflowers en gros,—cornflowers, that symbol of royal Prussian sentiment—and is at the same time a pétroleur or dynamiter? You are shaking your head and that confirms my denial. And now I ask you further, what are all the cornflowers in the world compared with a Berlin Blue factory? In Berlin Blue you have the symbolical Prussia, so to say, in its highest potency, and the more certain and indisputable that is the more imperative is my remaining on the side of conservatism. The augmentation of the Commercial Counsellor’s title signifies in my special case a natural assumption . . . in any case more than a bourgeois distinction.58
All this is said with great joviality, but Treibel is deadly serious, and believes in what he says. So does his wife Jenny, as ruthless a social climber as Proust’s Madame Verdurin. As a friend says, Jenny “really imagines that she has a sensitive heart and a feeling for higher things, but she has a heart only for the ponderable, for everything that can be weighed and pays interest.”59
Treibel’s electoral plans come to nothing because he chooses as his agent a reserve lieutenant named Vogelsang, whose reactionary pronouncements alienate the press, the newspapers, and the central committee of the Conservative party. Fontane was here hitting out at a major feature of the militarization of the German middle class after 1871. The expanding army found it impossible to maintain the traditional monopoly of the officer corps by the nobility and had to admit young men of the middle class as reserve officers. It guarded against any significant ideological change within the army by submitting the new officers to what might be called a process of feudalization, in which they were indoctrinated in the manners, ideas, and vices of the existing establishment. This was not difficult. In imperial Germany the possession of a commission was an important sign of social acceptability, and it was eagerly sought after. In Zuckmayer’s Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, a new reserve officer dilates upon the importance of the uniform and listens approvingly as his tailor says: “Na, so you have managed to become a reserve lieutenant—that is the chief thing—that is the thing you must be these days—socially, professionally, in every connexion! The doctorate is the visiting card, but the reserve commission is the open door—that’s the essential thing these days.”60 Middle-class social gatherings were awash with uniforms, and Melanie van der Straaten, reading the visiting card of a caller, sighs, “Lieutenant in the Reserve of the Fifth Dragoon Regiment. . . . I detest these everlasting lieutenants! Are there no human beings any more?”61 Vogelsang’s uniform doubtless impressed old Treibel but in the end cost him the election.
Finally, in his gallery of bourgeois types, Fontane shows us, in the figure of the mill owner Gundermann in Der Stechlin, the kind of person who has squandered so much of himself to acquire an aristocratic title that he has forfeited all respect and is generally regarded as a mean-spirited intriguer and sycophant. “Gundermann is a bourgois and a parvenu,” someone says, “therefore, just about the worst thing anyone can be.”62
It was the effect of a society increasingly dominated by Instettins and Gundermanns on class relationships that most concerned Fontane. As early as January 1878, in a letter to Mathilde von Rohr, he wrote:
When I look around me in society, I encounter in the upper strata of our people, among the aristocracy, the officials, the dignitaries, the artists and the scholars, a merely moderate decency. They are narrow, covetous, dogmatic, without a sense of form and propriety; they want to take and not to give; they respect the appearance of honor rather than honor itself, and, to an unbelievable extent, they lack nobility of mind, generosity, and the gift of forgiveness and sacrifice. They are self-seeking, hard and unloving.63
A society whose upper classes were like this was unlikely to have much understanding of, or sympathy for, its most vulnerable members.
It has often been pointed out that Fontane’s range of social vision was limited and that he did not write, for example, about the problems of the poor. This is true enough, but he did pay more attention than most of his contemporaries to another and larger group of victims of society—namely, women, who are the main characters of all but the first and last of his novels.64 This was not because he held theoretical or doctrinaire views on the subject of women’s rights, although he knew, of course, that this was becoming a subject of lively debate, and he was acquainted with August Bebel’s widely read Woman and Socialism (Die Frau und der Sozialismus), which was published in 1883. For his time, Fontane had a singularly emancipated attitude toward women, for he liked them and credited them with qualities—intelligence, courage, independence of spirit—that other men did not see. His closest advisers and friends were women, above all his wife, with whom he had many difficulties but never failed to take into his confidence, as some of his most interesting and revealing letters show, his daughter Martha (the model for Corinna Schmidt in Frau Jenny Treibel, and Mathilde von Rohr. He was also fascinated by their moods and inconsistencies, and once wrote, “If there is a person who has a passion for women and loves them almost twice as much when he encounters their weaknesses and confusions, the whole enchantment of their womanhood [Evatum] in full flight, that person is I.”65 This accounts both for the care he lavished on the women who appeared in his stories and for their rich diversity—one thinks of Frau Captain Hansen in Unwiederbringlich (“a remarkable mixture of froufrou and Lady Macbeth”)66 or Melusine’s charming blend of grace and advanced political views in Der Stechlin. His observations of German life convinced him that the current condition of women was a distressing commentary on the moral state of the country.
His approach to the problem is illustrated by his reaction to the protests against the serialization of Irrungen, Wirrungen in the Vossische Zeitung, which took the form of letters demanding the termination of “this dreadful whore’s story.” He wrote to his son:
We are sticking up to our ears in all sorts of conventional lies and should be ashamed of ourselves for the hypocrisy that we practise and the crooked game we play. Are there, aside from a few afternoon preachers, into whose souls I should not like to peep—are there aside from a few of these questionable existences—still any educated and generous people, who become really morally outraged over a Schneidermamsell who has a free love relationship? I don’t know any and can add that if I did I would avoid them as a dangerous people. . . . What is outrageous is the behavior of several newspapers whose number of illegitimate children goes far over a dozen (the chief editor always with the lion’s share) who now take pleasure in teaching me good manners. Poor wretches! But one can always find privy counsellors, and not only subaltern ones, who will agree with such hypocrisy.67
It was this disingenuousness that he sought to attack in his novels, exposing the double standard of morality that tolerated infidelity and sexual license on the part of males (in Stine) but outlawed women who acted similarly (in L’Adultera, for example, and Effi Briest). In two of his most interesting but least read stories, Quitt and Cecile, and again in Effi Briest, he dealt with the tendency in upper-class society to educate women only in such things as would make them attractive to men and secure them good marriages, a practice he found shameful and degrading, since it deprived them of the opportunity for full development of their talents and depersonalized or reified them by turning them into commodities in the male market or, as in the case of Cecile, into odalisques.
Typical of male attitudes toward women in the nineteenth century was Adelbert von Chamisso’s “Frauen-Liebe und Leben,” a cycle of nine poems published in 1830. Recounting a woman’s life from her first love through marriage and childbearing to widowhood, these graceful verses were often set to music, most notably by Robert Schumann, a circumstance that has led Henry and Mary Garland to write tartly, “The tenderness of Schumann’s music disguises the masculine egotism underlying the cycle.”68 Not many people today would be inclined to disagree, for Chamisso’s heroine expresses an adoration of her husband and a willing subordination to him that offends modern sensibilities:
Du Ring an meinem Finger,
Da hast du mich erst belehrt,
Hast meinem Blick erschlossen
Des Lebens unendlichen Wert.
Ich werd ihm dienen, ihm leben,
Ihm angehören ganz,
Hin selber mich geben und finden
Verklärt mich in seinem Glanz.
Du Ring an meinem Finger,
Mein goldnes Ringelein,
Ich drucke dich fromm an die Lippen,
Dich fromm an das Herze mein.
[Oh Ring upon my finger,
You have taught me for the first time,
And revealed to my eyes
The endless value of life.
I will serve him and live for him.
And belong to him utterly,
Give myself to him and find
Myself transfigured in his brightness.
Oh Ring upon my finger,
My little golden ring,
I press you devoutly to my lips
And devoutly to my heart.]69
In the nineteenth century the sentiments voiced here would have been considered commendable. Society was intent upon keeping women in a state of dependence, partly in their own interest (the philosopher Schopenhauer had argued, after all, that they were inferior beings and without the intellectual gifts necessary to support themselves) and partly because public morality depended upon it. Once married, they no longer had any control over their own financial resources, which were now controlled by their husbands, and, in case of incompatibility, divorce was difficult, if not impossible. The possibility of escaping from the home into other activities was severely limited. Charitable activities of a religious nature were always possible, but nothing more ambitious, for women were denied basic civic rights (the right to vote and to belong to political organizations and trade unions) and were excluded from any share in the government, on either the state or community level. Their part in the nation’s cultural life was limited, in comparison with France, for example, by antiquated social codes and taboos. And, until the very eve of the First World War, they were denied the educational opportunities that would have opened new careers to them.
Since so much was made in the nineteenth century about the female’s natural dependence on the male, it is interesting to note how sharply Fontane’s fictional heroines contradicted that. In the relationship between Melanie and Rubehn in L’Adultera, Stine and Woldemar in Stine, Lene and Botho in Irrungen, Wirrungen, and Matilde and Hugo in Mathilde Möhring, it is the woman who is the stronger, the more resilient in time of trouble, and in every sense the educator of the man. Even so, her strength is nothing against the accumulated weight of social custom and moral hypocrisy. Stine and Lene both lose their lovers because society forbids their union; Melanie forfeits her position in society when she leaves her husband, and Mathilde hers when her husband dies. The cruelest case of this kind of deprivation is that suffered by the heroine of Effi Briest, a novel that, in the incisiveness of its social analysis and its psychological insight into the predicament of women in the nineteenth century, bears comparison with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.70 After she has been put aside by her husband because of an ancient infidelity, Effi receives a letter from her mother, who is no less a prisoner of social convention than he. It reads:
And now about your future, my dear Effi. You’ll have to fend for yourself, and you may be sure of our support as far as material circumstances are concerned. You will do best to live in Berlin (these things are best got over in a big city) and so you’ll be one of many who are deprived of fresh air and clear sunlight. Your life will be lonely and, if you can’t put up with that, you’ll probably have to move out of your social class. The world in which you’ve been living will be closed to you. And the saddest thing for us, and for you (if we are correct in thinking that we know you), is that your parents’ house will be closed to you too. We can’t offer you a quiet place in Hohen-Cremmen, a refuge in our home, for that would mean closing this house to all the world, and we are certainly not prepared to do that. Not because we are all that dependent on the world or that we would find it absolutely intolerable to bid farewell to what is called society. No, not for that reason, but simply because we have to show our colors and to make clear to everybody our—I cannot spare you the word—our condemnation of your behavior, the behavior of our only child, whom we loved so.71
The society that can punish poor Effi for a mistake made when she was hardly out of her childhood was capable of turning a blind eye to forms of sexual exploitation committed against the vulnerable classes of society. One of Fontane’s most brilliant creations is Pauline Pittelkow in Stine. A handsome woman with a ready wit, she has decided that, in order to bring up her daughter decently, she will become the mistress of an upper-class protector rather than go to work in the factory. She tells Stine that she is not proud of this but sees no other way out:
It’s this way, they’re all worthless, and yet it’s good this way, at least for people like us (with you it’s different) and for everyone who is stuck so deep in it and doesn’t know how to get in or out. For how in the end is one to live?
From work.
Ach Jott, work! You’re young, Stine. Sure, work is good, and when I roll up my sleeves I always feel at my best. But, you know, then one gets sick and miserable, and Olga must go to school. And where are you going to get it then? Ach, that is a long chapter.72
And so Widow Pittelkow does what she thinks she has to do, but not at the cost of her self-respect, and when her protector offends her dignity by toasting her at a party as “my queen of the night,” she is quick to respond, “Na, Graf, not like that, not so boisterous! I don’t like that. And before all the others! . . . Queen of the night. Is nich zu glauben.”73
In a letter to his daughter in 1883, Fontane wrote that he might have become a Zola or a Turgenev had he not been less interested in portraying society as a whole than he was in individuals and the way they reacted to the pressures society placed upon them. His own writing, he said, was in any case “completely free from two things: from exaggerations especially and, above all, from excesses in the direction of ugliness. I am not a pessimist and don’t pursue melancholy; and busy myself much more with leaving everything in the same relationships and averages that life gives to its appearances.”74
The typical Fontane novel was not a broad-gauged analysis of social life in a particular age but the story of how a particular group of individuals in society reacted to the circumstances in which they had to live. Trollope’s title How We Live Now could have suited them all admirably, whether they told the sad story of Botho and Lene or recounted the tragic end of the love affair between Stine and Waldemar. Nor did Fontane waste time arguing that things should be different or calling for basic reforms that would alleviate injustice and inequality. His critical mode was one of detachment and irony.
The result of this personal reticence was, of course, that the message that came through was sometimes ambiguous. What, for instance, are we to make of the novel Mathilde Möhring? Are we to sympathize with its heroine because her ambitions are balked by a male-dominated society or regard her as a somewhat obsessed representative of the age’s passion for social climbing? Are we to regard her husband as a weakling or see in him a lover of culture to which his wife is impervious?75 These questions Fontane leaves for the reader to decide.
This explains why the cultural and educational establishment of Fontane’s own time was almost completely deaf to his strictures, apparently finding it impossible to regard the man who had written the Wanderings as anything but a loyal subject, true to king, nobility, and the existing social order. It was only after the publication of his correspondence that it was realized that this was far from being the case, causing a small revolution in German studies.76 That this was so, and that the reading public of his own time read his stories with no deeper discomfort than an occasional twinge of moral outrage over his frankness in dealing with the relations between the sexes, gives some substance to the charges of critics like Georg Lukács who have written that, with all of his social sensitivity, Fontane never sought to explain the basic causes of the ills that he revealed or to suggest any solutions for them. In novels like Effi Briest, Lukács has written, Fontane was really predicting that the Bismarckian-Wilhelmine Reich was headed for another Jena. But “it was really a passive, a skeptical-pessimisticprophecy. The forces of German renewal lay outside his literary horizon.”77
This last sentence is perhaps not wholly fair. Fontane’s weakness, if that is what it was, was not so much a lack of analytical depth as it was one of choice. He believed that it was the function of the novelist not to tell his readers what to think but, rather, to explain to them the way things were. “The task of the modern novel,” he once said, “seems to me to be that of portraying a life, a society, a circle of people who are an undistorted reflection of the life we lead.” If one can do that, with the clarity, perspicuity, comprehension, and feeling that are demanded of the artist, then readers should be able to understand their society and their lives better. Whether they will want to change them is really up to them.
We know now that the people for whom Fontane was writing didn’t want to change them and that, partly because of that, the Bismarckian-Wilhelmine Reich went to its doom. But Fontane’s novels remain, and today he has more readers, both in his own country and abroad, than he ever had before. The writer who dreamed as a boy of becoming a historian has in the years since his death become precisely that, for his novels are a basic source both for professional students of nineteenth-century Germany and for Germans who read him out of nostalgia and a desire to know what their country was like before the long time of the troubles began in 1914. But that is surely not the only reason for his continuing popularity. The bulk of his new readers, one likes to think, is composed of those who have discovered on their own that Fontane is clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann, a master of construction, an incomparable stylist, and the creator of unforgettable portraits, especially of women who combine personal integrity and moral courage with beauty, wit, and discernment.