Effi Briest

by Theodor Fontane

  Notes

  1 In a review of Conrad Wandrey, Theodor Fontane, 1919, the first major study of Fontane’s novels, Mann observes: ‘A set of novels selected according to the most rigorous criteria, even if it were restricted to a dozen volumes, or ten, or six, could not possibly dispense with Effi Briest.’ Reprinted under the title ‘Anzeige eines Fontane-Buches’ in Thomas Mann, Das essayistische Werk, Frankfurt am Main 1968, pp. 106f.

  2 William L. Zwiebel, Theodor Fontane (Twayne’s World Authors Series), New York 1992,Chapter 4, has interesting commentary on the Prussian dimension in Fontane’s novels.

  3 Charlotte Jolles, ‘Fontanes Studien über England’ in Fontanes Realismus. Wissenschaftliche Konferenz zum 150. Geburtstag Theodor Fontanes in Potsdam, ed. Hans-Erich Teitge and Joachim Schobess, Berlin 1972, p. 104.

  4 Letter to Friedrich Spielhagen, February 21st, 1896, in Theodor Fontane, Briefe, ed. Gotthard Erler, vol. 2, Berlin and Weimar 1980, p. 395.

  5 See Helen Elizabeth Chambers, Supernatural and Irrational Elements in the Works of Theodor Fontane, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 185-214, on the role of the Chinaman’s ghost.

  6 Christian Grawe, Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest, 4th ed., Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 13 (my translation – H.C.).

  7 Charlotte Brontë, Preface to Jane Eyre.

  8 Gudrun Loster-Schneider, Der Erzähler Fontane. Seine politischen Positionen in den Jahren 1864–1898 und ihre ästhetische Vermittlung, Tübingen 1986.

  9 Letter to Julius Rodenberg, November 1st, 1893, in Theodor Fontane: Briefe an Julius Rodenberg. Eine Dokumentation, ed. Hans-Heinrich Reuter, Berlin and Weimar 1969.

  10 See also J.P. Stern, Re-interpretations, London 1964, pp. 315–47.

  11 Letter to Hans Hertz, March 2nd, 1895 in Briefe an Wilhelm und Hans Hertz 1859-1898, ed. Kurt Schreinert, Stuttgart 1972.

  12 Letter to Ernst Heilborn, November 24th, 1895, in Theodor Fontane, Briefe, ed. Gotthard Erler, vol.2, Berlin and Weimar 1980, p. 387.

  13 Karl S. Guthke, ‘Fontanes Finessen:“Kunst” oder “Künstelei?”’ in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 26, 1982, pp. 235–61, also as ‘Fontane’s craft of fiction: art or artifice?’ in Essays in Honor of James Edward Walsh, Cambridge, Mass. 1983, pp. 67–94.

  14 See for example Alan Bance, Theodor Fontane: the major novels, Cambridge 1982; Henry Garland, The Berlin novels of Theodor Fontane, Oxford 1980.

  15 Peter-Klaus Schuster, Effi Briest – Ein Leben nach christlichen Bildern, Tübingen 1978; Karla Bindokat, “Effi Briest”: Erzählstoff und Erzählinhalt, Frankfurt am Main 1984.

  16 Klaus Dieter Post, ‘“Das eigentümliche Parfum des Wortes”. Zum Doppelbild des Heliotrop in Theodor Fontanes Roman Effi Briest’ in Fontane-Blätter 49, 1990, pp. 32–39; Christian Grawe, ‘Effi Briest. Geducktes Vügelchen in Schneelandschaft: Effi von Innstetten, geboren von Briest’, in Fontanes Novellen und Romane, ed. Christian Grawe, Stuttgart 1991, p.229.

  17 Letter to Spielhagen, February 15th, 1896.

  18 Patricia Howe, ‘Realism and Moral Design’ in Perspectives on German Realism. Eight Essays, ed. Mark G. Ward, Lampeter 1995, p. 60.

  19 Walter Müller-Seidel, Theodor Fontane. Soziale Romankunst in Deutschland, Stuttgart 1975.

  20 For example inChapter 5: ‘Were you happy about Effi? Were you happy about the whole affair?’

  21 Norbert Frei, Theodor Fontane. Die Frau als Paradigma des Humanen, Königstein/Taunus 1980.

  Translators’ Note

  This new translation of Effi Briest was produced in response to a widespread feeling that existing translations, two abridged and out of print, the other failing to render vital aspects, denied the English-speaking reader adequate access to the greatest realist novel in German literature. Much has been written about the difficulties of translating a writer as subtle as Fontane, and there is no doubt that he presents particular problems. We have tried to get as close as possible to the effect of the original by rendering the natural feel of the conversation while still retaining the more poetic aspects of the text. Without, we hope, being anachronistic, we have avoided old-fashioned expressions, for the effect the novel had on Fontane’s contemporaries was anything but old-fashioned.

  Despite the novel’s simple, at times colloquial diction, its underlying artistic qualities, which reside partly in the rhythm of the sentences and the creation of verbal and symbolic echoes and patterns, require careful attention. Wherever we could we have retained these echoes and patterns. This was not always possible because of the divergence between German and English idiomatic usage. One has to be alive, for example, to gender-specific usage, with adjectives in German that may apply equally well to men and women, but don’t in English. Because of differences between normal German and English sentence structure it is impossible to replicate the rhythm of the German faithfully without doing violence to the idiom of English. We have done our best to produce a version that has a rhythmical flow and dynamic of its own.

  Titles and forms of address posed particular problems, especially the polite form gnädige or gnädigste Frau. Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, which was written at the same time as Effi Briest, suggested ‘my lady’ and ‘my dear lady’, with ‘your/her ladyship’ as the form used in place of ‘you’ and ‘she’. Titles such as Landrat generally remain untranslated, but are explained in the end-notes. The number of German words now current in English is increasing, and it seemed undesirable to impose a set of approximate equivalents deriving from the British Empire and civil service on the Prussian system. The German titles better preserve the geographical and historical context. Similarly street names have been left to speak with their own German voice, with annotation where appropriate.

  This translation is designed above all to be readable, but also to fulfil the more stringent requirements of the reader who seeks a reliable rendering of the original. We have kept faith with the text as closely as possible, both by preserving echoes and by avoiding repetition where there is none – this proved a significant problem as Fontane often places different expressions with similar meanings close to each other. Some deviation was inevitable and in particular the puns inChapters 17 and23 were untranslatable. Introducing the word ‘slug’ as the correct English expression for the red-hot metal put in a box-iron also caused us discomfort, as the term for ‘slug’ does not occur in Fontane’s fiction. The alternative English term would have been ‘weasel’. There are no weasels in Fontane either. German miles have been converted to British miles throughout, so that the distances are rendered accurately. We have paid attention to plant names, for Fontane, the pharmacist, had a detailed knowledge of the subject and chose his flowers carefully.

  In translating Effi Briest we have had the pleasure of gaining new insights into the fine detail of how the text works; and even compiling the end-notes has thrown fresh sidelights on its hidden subtleties, particularly on Innstetten’s allusions. Our translation is offered in the hope that it may help to find Fontane, belatedly, a wider English readership and facilitate a more informed assessment of his place in world literature.

  Effi Briest

  1

  To the front of Hohen-Cremmen, country seat of the von Briest family since the time of Elector Georg Wilhelm, bright sunshine fell on the midday silence in the village street, while on the side facing the park and gardens a wing built on at right angles cast its broad shadow first on a white and green flagstone path, then out over a large roundel of flowers with a sundial at its centre and a border of canna lilies and rhubarb round the edge. Some twenty paces further on, corresponding exactly in line and length to the new wing and broken only by a single white-painted iron gate, was a churchyard wall entirely covered in small-leaved ivy, behind which rose Hohen-Cremmen’s shingled tower, its weather-cock glittering from recent regilding. Main house, wing and churchyard wall formed a horseshoe, enclosing a small ornamental garden at whose open end a pond and a jetty with a moored boat could be seen, and close by a swing, its horizontal seat-board hanging at head and foot o
n two ropes from posts that were slightly out of true. Between the roundel and the pond, partially concealing the swing, stood some mighty plane trees.

  The front of the house too – a sloping terrace with aloes in tubs and some garden chairs – offered a place to linger and indulge in all manner of amusements if the sky was cloudy; but on days when the sun beat down there was a clear preference for the garden side, especially on the part of the lady of the house and her daughter, who on this particular day were sitting out in the full shade on the flagstone path, with windows wreathed in Virginia creeper at their backs, and beside them a short projecting flight of steps whose four stone treads led up from the garden to the upper ground floor of the wing. Both mother and daughter were busily at work on an altar-cloth that was to be made out of several squares; countless strands of wool and skeins of silk lay jumbled on a large round table, and between them, left over from lunch, were some dessert plates and a large majolica bowl filled with fine large gooseberries. The ladies’ wool-needles went back and forth, swift and sure, but while the mother never took her eye off her work, the daughter, Effi as everybody called her, laid down her needle from time to time and stood up to stretch and bend her way stylishly through a full sequence of health-promoting home gymnastics. It was obvious that these exercises were a labour of quite special love, even if she deliberately added a comic touch, and as she stood there slowly raising her arms and bringing her palms together high above her head, her mother too would raise her eyes from her work, but only for a surreptitious, fleeting glance, for she had no wish to show what delight she took in her own child, fully justified though such a stirring of maternal pride was. Effi was wearing a blue and white striped linen dress that would have been a straight tunic had it not been drawn in at the waist by a tight, bronze-coloured leather belt; the neck was open and a broad sailor’s collar went over her shoulders and down her back. Grace and careless abandon were combined in everything she did, while her laughing brown eyes revealed much good sense, a great zest for life and kindness of heart. They called her ‘the little one’, but she tolerated that only because her beautiful, slender mamma was a hand’s breadth taller.

  Effi had just stood up again to do a few gymnastic turns to right and left when her mother, looking up from her embroidery again, called to her, ‘Effi, maybe you should have been a bareback-rider after all. Always on the trapeze, a daughter of the air. You know I almost think that’s what you would like to be.’

  ‘Perhaps Mamma, but supposing I would, whose fault would that be? Who do I get it from? It can only be you. Or do you think from Papa? There, you can’t help laughing. And then, why have you got me in this shift – this boy’s overall? Sometimes I think I’m going to go back into short dresses. And once that happens I’ll curtsy like some sweet young thing, and when the officers come over from Rathenow I’ll get on Colonel Goetze’s lap and ride, gee-up, gee-up, and why not? He’s three quarters uncle and only one quarter admirer anyway. It’s your fault. Why haven’t I got any proper dresses? Why don’t you make a lady of me?’

  ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘No.’ Saying which, she ran up to her mother, threw her arms round her impetuously and kissed her.

  ‘Not so wild Effi, not so passionate. It always worries me when I see you like this…’ And her mother seemed seriously intent on giving further expression to her cares and anxieties. But she didn’t get so far, because just at that moment three young girls came in at the iron gate in the churchyard wall and walked up the gravel path towards the roundel and the sundial. All three waved to Effi with their parasols and hurried up to Frau von Briest to kiss her hand. She asked a few quick questions and then invited the girls to keep them, or at least Effi, company for half an hour, ‘I have things to see to, and young people are happiest left to themselves. So, I’ll take my leave.’ And so saying she climbed the stone steps leading from the garden to the wing.

  And with that the young people were on their own.

  Two of the young girls – plump little persons whose curly golden red hair admirably matched their freckles and equable temper – were the daughters of Jahnke, the assistant schoolmaster whose sole interests were the Hanseatic League, Scandinavia and Fritz Reuter, a fellow Mecklenburger and his favourite writer, in emulation of whom, with Mining and Lining in mind, he had given his twins the names Bertha and Hertha. The third young lady was Hulda Niemeyer, Pastor Niemeyer’s only child; while more ladylike than the other two, she was also boring and conceited, a lymphatic blonde with somewhat protuberant, stupid eyes that somehow always seemed to be searching for something, which was why Klitzing of the Hussars had said of her, ‘Doesn’t she look as if she were expecting the Archangel Gabriel at any moment?’ Effi felt that the somewhat critical Klitzing was only too accurate, but refrained nonetheless from making any distinction between her three friends. That was the last thing she had in mind at the moment. ‘This boring old embroidery. Thank goodness you’re here,’ and she put her elbows on the table.

  ‘But we’ve driven your mamma away,’ said Hulda.

  ‘Not really. You heard her, she was going anyhow, she’s expecting a visitor you see, some old friend from when she was a girl, I’m going to tell you about that later, a love-story complete with hero and heroine, and ending in renunciation. You’ll be amazed, you won’t believe your ears. I’ve seen him too, Mamma’s old friend, over in Schwantikow. He’s a Landrat, and very handsome and manly.’

  ‘That’s the main thing,’ said Hertha.

  ‘Of course it’s the main thing, “women should be womanly, men should be manly” – that’s one of Papa’s favourite sayings, as you know. Now help me tidy this table, otherwise I’ll be in trouble again.’

  In a trice all the skeins were packed into the basket, and when they were all seated again, Hulda said, ‘Well then Effi, it’s time now, let’s have this tale of love and renunciation. Or is it not really that bad?’

  ‘A tale of renunciation is never bad. But unless Hertha takes some of these gooseberries I can’t start, she can’t keep her eyes off them. Help yourself, as many as you like, we can pick more later, only don’t throw the skins away, or better still, put them on this newspaper supplement here, then we’ll make it into a paper bag and get rid of the whole lot. Mamma can’t stand it if she sees skins lying everywhere, she always says you could slip on them and break a leg.’

  ‘Don’t believe it,’ said Hertha, addressing herself to the gooseberries with a will.

  ‘Nor do I,’ Effi agreed. ‘Just think, I fall at least two or three times every day, and I’ve never broken anything. Proper legs don’t break so easily, mine certainly don’t, nor yours, Hertha. What do you think, Hulda?’

  ‘One shouldn’t tempt Providence. Pride comes before a fall.’

  ‘There’s the governess again, you’re a real old maid.’

  ‘Well, it won’t stop me getting married, perhaps sooner than you.’

  ‘Think I care. Do you imagine that’s what I’m waiting for? That’s all I need. Anyway, I’m going to have someone, maybe quite soon. I’m not worried. Only the other day little Ventivegni from across the way said, “What do you bet we’ll be getting together this year for somebody’s Wedding Eve!”’

  ‘And what did you say to that?’

  ‘“It’s possible of course,” I said, “quite possible; Hulda is the oldest and might get married any day.” But he wouldn’t have any of that and said, “No, it will be quite another young lady – who is as dark as Hulda is blond.” And he gave me a very serious look as he said it… But how did I get on to all this, I’m forgetting the story.’

  ‘Yes, you do keep going off at a tangent; maybe you don’t want to tell us after all.’

  ‘Oh I want to all right, but it’s true of course, I do keep getting off the subject, because it’s all rather strange, in fact, it’s almost romantic.’

  ‘But didn’t you say he was a Landrat?’

  ‘That’s right, a Landrat. And his name is Geert von Innstetten,
Baron von Innstetten.’

  All three burst out laughing.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ said Effi, put out, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Oh Effi, we didn’t mean any offence, not to you and not to the Baron. Did you say Innstetten? And Geert? Nobody around here is called anything like that. These old aristocratic names can be so funny.’

  ‘Yes indeed, my dear. But that’s the aristocracy. They don’t have to care, and the further back they go the less they have to care. You mustn’t mind if I say you don’t understand these things. We’ll still be friends. So it’s Geert von Innstetten, and a baron. He’s exactly the same age as Mamma, to the day.’

  ‘And how old is your Mamma then?’

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  ‘A nice age to be.’

  ‘Yes, it is, especially if you still have Mamma’s looks. She’s a beautiful woman, really, don’t you think? And the way she has everything just so, and is always so poised and refined, never puts her foot in it like Papa. If I were a young lieutenant, I would fall in love with Mamma.’

  ‘But Effi, how can you say such a thing?’ said Hulda, ‘That’s against the fourth commandment.’

  ‘Nonsense. How can that be against the fourth commandment? I think Mamma would be pleased if she knew I’d said something like that.’

  ‘That may well be,’ Hertha interjected, ‘but let’s get on with the story.’

  ‘All right, be patient, I’m just going to start… So, Baron Innstetten. He wasn’t quite twenty and he was stationed in Rathenow and was a regular guest on all the estates here, though his favourite was grandfather Belling’s place in Schwantikow. It wasn’t of course because of Grandfather that he called so often, and when Mamma talks about it, anybody can see who the real attraction was. And I think it was mutual.’