Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  At first glance, it’s hard to reconcile the sparseness of Fontane’s plots, the way he prefers to linger over what he calls “the circumstantial,” with the extravagant emotions his work has provoked in so many critics and writers over the years. (Thomas Mann: “No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue.”) The key lies in his understated narrative style, in his paradoxically powerful “discretion,” as some critics have called it: a gift for obliquity, for knowing what to leave out, and above all for letting the reader “overhear” the speech of his characters, rather than paraphrasing it for us—the last being a particularly effective alternative to the psychologizing observations of an omniscient narrator. It is this skill at delineating character through dialogue—one early scholar of Fontane’s work calls a scene in Effi Briest “the greatest conversation scene in the German novel”—that creates the sense of intimacy that his novels have, the sense that you’re in there with his characters: the attractive but somehow desperate wives, yearning for recognition in a society dominated by masculine and military codes; the minor nobles, hardworking seamstresses, and disdained intellectuals trying to keep their dignity in a world destabilized by the materialism and the militarism of Bismarck’s Second Reich.

  Fontane’s courteous technique is ideally suited to a rueful wisdom: he is the great novelist of what you might call dignified defeat. In his fiction, love doesn’t triumph over class distinctions (On Tangled Paths), individual suffering inevitably yields to hard social and political realities (The Poggenpuhls, Effi Briest, Cécile, The Stechlin), and climactic reconciliations don’t quite take (Irretrievable). It is through his characters’ failures, rather than their victories, that Fontane quietly critiques politics and society. This modesty, the preference for suggestive description over ambitious prescription, set Fontane apart from other late-nineteenth-century realists. In an 1883 letter to his daughter—part of the voluminous correspondence that established him as one of the century’s great letter writers—he remarked that he would have become a Turgenev or a Zola had he not been far more interested in individuals than in society as a whole.

  Long revered on the Continent, Fontane has had a hard time catching on in this country. Although he lived to old age and published extensively from his youth until the time of his death, no major work of his enjoyed a complete English translation until 1964. It may be that, caught between Goethe’s protean genius and Mann’s fin-de-siècle neuroticism, Fontane simply isn’t what we think of when we think of what a great German author ought to be. (If Mann has the temperament of a patient, Fontane has that of a physician. Ours is an age of patients.) The recent publication of two of his most delicate and beautiful novels will, with any luck, help turn the tide. One is the bittersweet romance On Tangled Paths, from 1888, newly translated by Peter James Bowman and published by Angel Books; the other is a curiously gentle tragedy called Irretrievable, first published in 1891, now reissued in the 1964 translation of Douglas Parmée by New York Review Books. Together, they convey the distinctive allure of an author who prided himself above all on his “finesses” and whose two salient traits—a severe reserve and a profound empathy—stemmed from an unusual ability, as Mann put it, to see “at least two sides to everything in life.”

  Fontane himself was a mass of contradictions—“the kind of man in whom both opinions, the conservative and the reactionary, could exist side by side,” as Mann would later observe. He was a product of the middle class and yet attracted to the aristocracy, a German patriot who admired England and came to detest Prussian militarism, a writer besotted with the “Romantic-Fantastic” who nonetheless had a natural aptitude for what he called the “factualness” of history, a liberal who spent much of his career working for an ultra-rightist newspaper, a well-known balladeer, a dogged journalist, an admired travel writer, and a prolific military historian whose extraordinary talent for writing fiction ripened only late in a life that had many more than two sides.

  He was born on the next-to-last day of 1819 in Neuruppin, a military garrison town northwest of Berlin, to parents descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Prussia in the seventeenth century. Both his mother and his father, a rather eccentric apothecary, had firsthand experience of the Napoleonic Wars, a national trauma that exercised a hold on the writer’s imagination all his life. (His first novel, Before the Storm, published in 1878, was a historical epic set during the wars, an attempt at a kind of Prussian War and Peace.) From Fontane senior, the future writer received a peculiar but effective education: the father enjoyed reenacting great moments from the wars with his young son. At least some of Fontane’s interesting bifurcations, political as well as temperamental, may be attributed to his mismatched parents: his father the Prinzipienverächter, the hater of rigid principle, his mother a Prinzipienreiter, a stickler for principles.

  At sixteen, Fontane finished with his formal education and apprenticed as an apothecary; he ended up working for his father. But his literary tastes and ambitions were already in evidence. He published his first story, about a quasi-incestuous brother–sister relationship, when he was not quite twenty, and in his mid-twenties he began publishing the ballads and verses for which he became well known, inspired by his extensive reading in English and Scottish ballads. (He learned English by reading, and translated Hamlet into German when he was in his twenties.) In 1844, he was invited to join a Berlin literary club called Tunnel Over the Spree, and made the first of what would be a number of enthusiastic trips to England. In 1848, that year of political upheaval throughout Europe, he had manned the antigovernment barricades in Berlin, but his relationship to liberal politics, like everything else about him, was far from straightforward. The grandson of a courtier of the Prussian Queen Luise, for whom he maintained a lifelong reverence, and an on-again, off-again admirer of Bismarck, whose speeches he loved to read over breakfast (and whose style he compared, favorably, to Shakespeare’s), Fontane had an abiding admiration for the values of the old Prussian nobility, the Junkertum: simplicity, honor, and directness. As the scholar Alan Bance has pointed out, these values surface in Fontane’s greatest female characters, who often struggle to uphold them against the crassness of men, society, the new Prussian state.

  By the time Fontane was thirty, he had decided to abandon the apothecary and embrace a life of writing. In 1850, he married Emilie Rouanet-Kummer, another descendant of French Huguenots, and soon afterward took a job in a government press office. A year later, when the first of the couple’s seven children was born—four lived to adulthood—Fontane, eager for some financial stability, queasily accepted a job writing about English affairs for Die Kreuzzeitung, a government-run newspaper. (“I sold myself to the reaction for thirty pieces of silver a month,” he wrote a friend.) He was in England for several months in 1852, and in 1855 he began a three-year stint there; his job was to plant stories favorable to the Prussian state in the British press. He spent a great deal of time going to the theater and—prompted by his impassioned reading of Walter Scott and Robert Burns, and of English and Scottish ballads, all faddishly popular among Germans in the mid-nineteenth century—taking long walks in the Scottish countryside. These walks partly inspired his splendidly discursive and erudite Rambles in the March of Brandenburg, whose combination of sentimental enthusiasm and the amateur’s besotted enthusiasm for historical anecdote and geographical and zoological minutiae suggests a kind of Patrick Leigh Fermor avant la lettre. (In an affectionate study of Fontane, the historian Gordon A. Craig retraced the author’s steps.)

  Fontane returned to Berlin in 1859 and, after briefly considering a post at the court of the mad Ludwig II of Bavaria—it’s hard to resist wondering what the result of that collaboration might have been—set to work on Rambles, which occupied him for the next two decades. But this was also the period i
n which Prussian political and military ambition exploded, culminating in three major wars—against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870—and the unification of Germany under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns. In the decade between 1866 and 1876 Fontane published three major, exhaustively researched studies, one for each war. Contemptuous of “making books out of books,” he conducted extensive interviews and visited various battlefields, sometimes before hostilities ceased; at one point, he was captured by French troops, and Bismarck had to intervene to get him released. (Fontane later wrote a book about the experience.) Despite his historian’s admiration for Prussian warcraft, Fontane came to speak out with increasing vigor against the chauvinism, jingoism, and triumphalism that characterized so much contemporary writing about the wars. “The mere glorification of the military,” he later wrote, “without moral content and elevated aim, is nauseating.” His distaste for the public mania that followed the victory against France eerily anticipates a later efflorescence of German militarism:

  The whole situation works upon me like a colossal vision … one stands and stares and is not sure what to make of it all … always masses, inside of which one whirls like an atom, not standing aside and in control but surrendered to the great movement without any will of one’s own.

  At the end of the 1860s, as he reached his fiftieth birthday, Fontane—inspired, perhaps, by his experience writing the first two war books and thinking about the cultural implications of Germany’s recent history—quit his post at the conservative, God-and-country Kreuzzeitung. (He waited to submit his resignation until the long-suffering Emilie—who, despite the fact that she wrote out the fair copies of each of his books, never quite believed that he would succeed as a writer—left for a vacation.) Soon afterward, he jumped at the opportunity to replace the recently deceased theater critic for the liberal Vossische Zeitung: certainly because of the promise of a regular income but also, undoubtedly, because it provided an outlet for his love of the theater. His criticism—conversational yet informed, often crustily amusing (he once wrote of a production of Macbeth that all the roles were played badly except that of the rain, which beat convincingly against the walls of the castle)—further increased his fame. He remained happily in this job for the next twenty years.

  Many critics have looked to various aspects of Fontane’s life—not least, his French ancestry—for clues to a style that was so fresh, so lifelike: so different, in a word, from that of many of his contemporaries. (The author’s relationship to his Frenchness was typically bifurcated: he liked to talk about his “essentially southern-French nature,” but also called knowing French “a great virtue, which I do not possess.”) But it seems clear that he owed much to his deep love of, and appreciation for, the theater—instilled, you suspect, during those playacting sessions with his father. His distinctive way of letting his characters reveal themselves through monologue and dialogue (or letters, or poems—anything that lets them speak for themselves) betrays an intuitive feel for the theatrical. Jenny Treibel opens with the title character, an arriviste with grand dynastic ambitions, bustling into the home of her childhood sweetheart, now a colorful old professor, whose daughter, Corinna, will soon threaten Frau Treibel’s plans:

  My dear Corinna, how nicely you know how to do all this and how pretty it is here, so cool and fresh—and the beautiful hyacinths! Of course they don’t go very well with these oranges, but that doesn’t matter, it looks so nice.… And now, thoughtful as you are, you’re even adjusting a pillow for me! But forgive me, I don’t like to sit on the sofa; it’s so soft and you always sink in so deeply. I’d rather sit over here in the armchair and look at those dear old faces there.

  Fontane’s novels are filled with characters who talk and talk and, in so doing, reveal themselves more damningly than an omniscient narrator could. Can you doubt that Frau Treibel and Corinna will clash? Do you doubt who will prevail?

  The years of theater criticism, of having to articulate his responses to others’ writing, were surely crucial to Fontane’s evolution as a novelist, strengthening his sense of his own aesthetic responses, his own powers as a writer and thinker. “I have an unconditional confidence in the rightness of my feeling,” he once wrote. “I am wholly free from veneration of names or the cult of literary heroes.” An arresting passage in a collection of his critical writings (with the characteristically informal title Chats on the Theater) suggests where Fontane’s veneration did, in fact, lie. He recalled how he would sometimes go into one of the city’s many Gothic churches to clear his head after a matinee. One day, following a particularly unsatisfactory performance of Iphigenia in Tauris—one of the neoclassical works that were a staple of bland local productions—he wrote of something that had affected him tremendously: “Hidden behind a pillar, I saw a man crying, which shook me more than three acts of tragedy.”

  It’s a fascinating moment, because the best of Fontane’s mature fiction is filled with eerie minor epiphanies that have a powerful effect on a given character—and on the reader. In Effi Briest, the apparition in a window of the teenage heroine’s twin playmates, at the moment she is to be betrothed to the much older nobleman her mother has chosen for her, seems to symbolize the poignant tension between the girlish “child of nature” and the social role she is still unprepared to play—a tension that ultimately destroys her. In On Tangled Paths, the lower-class heroine, a seamstress involved in an impossible love affair, sees a young girl washing pots in the river, a vision that somehow irrefutably conveys to her the fact that there will be no way to flout social conventions.

  Such moments represent a crucial facet of Fontane’s art. He liked to say that he had a well-developed sense of Tatsächlichkeit, “factuality”; for him, the trick of literature was to “transfigure” everyday facts into something elevated, imbued with Rätsel and Halbdunkel, “mystery” and “twilight.” (“A piece of bread … is poetry,” he once wrote.) He disdained Turgenev—interestingly, Bismarck’s favorite novelist—for failing to transcend Tatsächlichkeit, for having merely a “photographic apparatus in eye and soul.” In the novels of Fontane, apparitions like the one he beheld in the church that day, essentially theatrical in nature, are instances of “facts” elevated into memorable art.

  As he was nearing sixty, Fontane made the extraordinary announcement that he was ready to begin a new career—as a novelist. “I am only at the beginning,” he wrote his publisher, Wilhelm Hertz, in 1879, with a touching combination of bravado and trepidation. “There is nothing behind me, everything is ahead, which is both fortune and misfortune at the same time.” As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. For the next two decades, he and Emilie lived at 134c Potsdamer Strasse, where he produced the seventeen novels that marked him as a great writer.

  It’s not surprising that Fontane’s first novel was a work of historical fiction: partly the factuality of the past, partly the twilight mystery of literary art. Some readers at the time found Before the Storm a disconcertingly becalmed work: the author’s languid eavesdropping was, they found, ill suited to a subject that raised expectations of high color and excitement. (“Will they sit down at the table again? Will they go to sleep again?” one of Fontane’s many correspondents wrote of the characters in that “silly” book.) It took Fontane a while to find the proper vehicle for his talent for depicting everyday realities imbued with the poetic—ordinary people reaching for (and, as often as not, failing to attain) transcendence. That vehicle, as the literary world soon discovered, was women.

  As is the case with certain male writers famous for their female characters—Euripides, Tennessee Williams—women in Fontane’s work often represent energies and emotions for which there is no room in the world created by men: the world of realpolitik and bombastic officialdom, of matrimonial hypocrisy and erotic double standards. This is why, as with those other authors, Fontane’s women are often both impressively self-aware and memorably broken. “If there is a person who has a passion for women,” Fontane confided to some friends
in 1894, “and loves them almost twice as much when he encounters their weaknesses and confusions, the whole enchantment of their womanhood in full flight, that person is I.” It would be hard to think of a better way to describe the figures on whom the author’s reputation as a master of characterization and delicate plotting is based. Such weaknesses and confusions, the feminine enchantment in full flight—in both their comic and their tragic expressions—make On Tangled Paths and Irretrievable small masterworks.

  On Tangled Paths (Irrungen, Wirrungen in the original, a rhyme nicely finessed in an earlier translation, entitled Delusions, Confusions) has a typically unfussy plot. Lene Nimptsch is a pretty young seamstress (she comes complete with a much put-upon foster mother and chatty, eccentric, but loving neighbors, all painted in amusing Dickensian colors) who’s in love with Botho von Rienäcker, a dashing officer from an aristocratic family; he loves her. They spend time together; he teases her foster mother and the neighbors; the couple make an overnight excursion on the Spree. (Readers weren’t the only ones outraged by Fontane’s unsensationalistic depiction of the casual sexual relationship when the novel was first serialized in a newspaper. “Won’t this dreadful whore’s tale soon be over?” one of the paper’s owners protested.) Eventually—and it takes some time—Botho’s mother reminds him that he must marry a suitable girl. This he does, reluctantly at first: she’s an airhead and a chatterbox. (Fontane just lets her rattle on.) Lene, for her part, ends up marrying a nice enough man. At the novel’s close, both young people have accepted their fates, though not without complex emotions: “Our hearts have room for all sorts of contradictions.” That could be Fontane’s motto.