“What is it, Christine? What’s the matter?”
Julie knelt down in front of Christine and taking her hand covered it with kisses and tears. But Christine pulled her hand away and said softly to herself:
“Und die mir die liebsten gewesen sind,
Ich wünsche sie nicht zurück.”
[1]“Do you think of vanished days, Marie, as you stare in the fire at night? Do you wish for those hours and days to return when you laughed full of joy and happiness?”
“I do think of those vanished days, John, and always they fill me with happiness, but those which were dearest to me, I do not wish them back again.”
34
A week had gone by.
The air was mild and but for the Virginia creeper that was already taking on its autumn red as it twined luxuriantly round the columns of the castle terrace, one might almost have believed that midsummer had returned and that the splendid celebration of three months ago, in which the whole of Angeln had joined, was about to take place once again. Not only was the sun, almost summer-like, shining brightly over the castle and park, as on the day that the Count and Countess had renewed their marriage vows; but, as before, long lines of carriages gave a festive air as they brought the many guests to the castle. Bells were tolling far and wide and the village girls stood casting flowers as for the wedding procession. But today they were strewing white asters and the person who was passing on her way from the castle was dead. Solemn music accompanied the coffin behind which were walking Holk and the children and then the long cortège of relatives and friends. Petersen was standing at the entrance to the church and led the procession to the open grave beside the tumbledown old family vault. The choir was silent and every head was bared as the coffin descended and the earth closed over Christine Holk. A heart that had yearned for peace had found it now at last.
Julie von Dobschütz to Superintendent-General Schwarzkoppen
Holkenäs, October 14th, 1861
Your Reverence wished to know about our friend whose death was the first news that you received after taking up your office. I am glad to be able to satisfy your wish because, in spite of my grief, it is a consolation and an inspiration to be able to speak of our dear dead friend.
On the day that you last saw her, a thought must have been ripening in her mind which she may well have conceived long before. You may perhaps recall the elegiac, almost melancholy, folk-song that Elizabeth Petersen sang that evening—Christine left the room almost immediately afterwards and I believe from that moment onwards, her resolution was made. I found her deeply affected and I admit that I was immediately seized with anxious forebodings, forebodings which I could only succeed in calming by recalling the Christian sentiments and religious convictions of our dear deceased—those Christian sentiments which bear us through life, for so long as it is God’s will.
The next day seemed to justify my belief. Christine told me that she had gone very late to bed but she showed no signs of tiredness, on the contrary, she had a freshness which I had not seen since her reconciliation with her husband. When she came down to breakfast, she was more affable and friendly than usual, indeed almost jovial, and she persuaded her husband to join a shooting party in two days’ time to which he had just received an invitation from Count Baudissin. Then, strangely enough, she talked about clothes in great detail, though only in connexion with Asta who, she said, now that she was over seventeen, must begin to think of “coming out” and as she said this I saw her eyes fill with tears.
The day went by and the sun was already quite low when she invited me to go for a walk with her along the beach. “But we must hurry,” she added, “or else it will be too dark.”
We went off straightaway down the terrace and when we were at the bottom, she said that she did not want to walk along the beach as the sand was so wet and her shoes so thin, so we went out on the jetty. She deliberately avoided mentioning any serious topic. When we finally reached the end-platform and the steps where the steamers tie up, we sat down on a wooden bench that the Count had recently had placed there and looked at the sun reflected in the sea, which was completely still, and at the magnificent colours of the clouds. “How beautiful it is,” said Christine. “Let’s wait here to see the sunset. But as it’s already getting cold, would you go and fetch our coats? But to save yourself the climb up to the terrace, just call up for them, Asta will certainly hear you.”
She said this with a touch of embarrassment, because it was not in her nature to tell a lie; but it would have struck me as strange had she not shown this embarrassment, because in her almost excessive kindness and goodness towards me, she was always most scrupulous about asking me to do favours for her. She saw, too, what was in my mind, but I still could hardly show her too plainly how anxious and worried I was and so I went back along the jetty and up to the terrace, because her suggestion about calling until Asta heard had obviously been an after-thought.
When I came back to the end of the jetty, I could see nothing of the Countess and I knew at once what had happened. I hurried back to fetch help, although I felt sure that it would be of no avail. The Count was stunned and did not know what to do. Finally, the alarm was given in the village and they searched the jetty and the beach until far into the night. Boats went out to search a shallow sandbank which lay some distance off the jetty but for hours there was no result and it was not until the following morning that some fishermen from Holkebye came up to the castle to announce that they had found the Countess. We all went down. Her face that for so long had borne the marks of silent suffering had been transfigured and she looked almost gay: so eagerly had her heart been longing for peace. A bier was brought from the church and to avoid the steepness of the terrace, she was carried over the dune and up the slope of the drive. The whole village accompanied her body in mourning, particularly the poor people to whom she had always shown such kindness and generosity, and some of them said bitter words against the Count that I hope he did not hear.
As for the burial and Petersen’s funeral address which, as I can testify, would have satisfied the most orthodox, you will have read about that in the Arnewieck Messenger which Baron Arne sent you and perhaps in the Flensburg Gazette as well.
I want only to add what you may consider proper concerning the state of mind of the Countess and what made her take the fatal step. As soon as we had brought her up from the beach, we went to her room to see whether she had left any farewell message. We did, in fact, find a number of sheets of paper on which a few words had been written showing that she had tried to say good-bye to her nearest and dearest—her husband and Baron Arne, as well as to me. On those addressed to the Baron and myself she had scribbled a few words such as “Thank you …” and “When you read these lines …” but they had been crossed out, and on the sheet addressed to Holk there was not even that. Instead, inside the sheet intended for him there was a piece of crumpled paper that had been carefully smoothed out again, on which was written the song that Elizabeth Petersen had sung immediately before Holk’s departure for Copenhagen and which had made such an impression on her on that occasion, just as recently the folk-song translated from the English which I mentioned earlier. This latter song your Reverence will surely still recall but the earlier one may have slipped your memory, in which case, if you will allow me, I should like to copy the first verse. This is how it goes:
Die Ruh’ ist wohl das Beste
Von allem Glück der Welt,
Was bleibt vom Erdenfeste,
Was bleibt uns unvergällt?
Die Rose welkt in Schauern,
Die uns der Frühling gibt,
Wer haßt, ist zu bedauern,
Und mehr noch fast, wer liebt.[1]
The last line had been almost invisibly underlined, and that gentle, almost timid underlining contains the story of a whole life.
Your position and your faith will give you strength to accept the death of our friend but I have lost all that was dearest to me in life and what now remains w
ill be poor and empty. Asta asks to be remembered to you as does Elizabeth Petersen and
Your most respectful,
Julie von Dobschütz
[1]See note on p. 46.
AFTERWORD
Adultery and Social Chatter
The novels of Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) are so sparkling, polished, tender, sympathetic, delicately ironic, and psychologically astute that it is a wonder they are not better known by American readers. Considered the most important German novelist between Goethe and Mann, or even, as Gordon A. Craig, who wrote a fine book about him, claimed, “clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann,”[1] Fontane can be made to fit snugly into the school of nineteenth-century European realism that includes Stendhal, Balzac, Turgenev, Austen, Flaubert, Zola. But he came after most of them, in part because he was such a late bloomer (his first novel was published as he turned sixty) and in part because of Germany’s own delay in becoming a nation-state. Having been unified by Bismarck only in 1871, Germany may have needed more time for its social scene to thicken and acquire sufficient texture to generate a novelist of Fontane’s sensibility. Fontane has been called the first European German novelist: he did turn German fiction away from its folkloric, mythological, timeless elements and toward the novel of society, with its manners, traditions, hierarchies, and historic tensions. None of this would matter except to German literature scholars, were it not that he is an uncommonly interesting writer, whose novels continue to be so pleasurable to read.
What makes them delightful, for one, is their worldly, tolerant understanding of human frailty: the author’s refusal to condemn, preach morality, or be shocked by his characters’ errors, side by side with his rigorous honesty about their self-deceptions and his ability to see both sides of every question. Thomas Mann’s penetrating essay “The Old Fontane” seizes on precisely this mature perspective, liberated by advanced age, to explain his predecessor’s appeal:
Does it not seem as though he had to grow old, very old, in order to fulfil himself completely? Just as there are youths born to be youths only, fulfilling themselves in early life and not maturing, certainly not growing old; so it would seem that there are other temperaments whose only appropriate age is old; who are, so to speak, classic old men, ordained to show humanity the ideal qualities of that last stage of life: benignity, kindness, justice, humour, and shrewd wisdom—in short a recrudescence on a higher plane of childhood’s artless unrestraint. Fontane’s was such a temperament.[2]
The author of Buddenbrooks, himself an oldish young man when he wrote this essay in 1910, would seem to be identifying with Fontane, and defending his own aesthetic, when he goes on to say:
There is something positively enchanting in his style, especially in his old age, as we observe in his letters of the eighties and nineties. If I may be permitted the personal confession: no writer of past or present stirs in me that kind of sympathy and gratitude, that immediate, instinctive delight, that reflex gaiety, warmth, and satisfaction, which I feel reading any of his verse, any line of his letters, any scrap of dialogue.[3]
That Fontane’s work is so little known in this country may partly be explained by the American public’s incuriosity about much world literature beyond the biggest names. In a sense, he belongs more with those wonderful, lesser-known ironists of the late nineteenth century, such as Eça de Queiroz, Pérez Galdós, Machado de Assis, Bolesław Prus, who championed the provincial novel of manners, with a skeptical perspective that came from knowing one is not in the center of the universe. There is also in Fontane a Montaigne-like equipoise, a sunny melancholy, an investment in domestic family life that steadfastly avoids the demonic and apocalyptic—in a word, he may seem too bourgeois, too sanguine, to readers brought up on modernist discordances. The wisdom of experience he embodies in every sentence is perhaps not so highly valued anymore; and the very fact that he speaks to us from an elderly perch may turn off some younger readers. One is reminded of Lionel Trilling’s essay on William Dean Howells, whose intelligent books Trilling thought no longer spoke as much to our times because they lacked a radical sense of evil. Fontane may not have anticipated the destructive forces unleashed in the twentieth century or our own, but he was certainly conversant with war, tragedy, and erotic discontent. Violent and sexual acts do occur in his books, though usually offstage. He is the kind of artist who rejoices in working small, away from melodrama, and whose full worth you grasp much better the more you steep yourself in his works. Searching for a comparable artistry, I think of Eric Rohmer, who kept creating exquisitely wry filmic investigations of vanity, folly, temptation, and moral quandary.
Theodor Fontane was born in 1819 in Neuruppin, near Berlin. His easygoing pharmacist father liked to gamble and failed at business (perhaps the two were related), and his sterner mother, losing patience, divorced her husband. The family barely scraped by; Fontane, unable to afford university, followed his father into the apothecary trade. He also joined a literary circle, called the Tunnel over the Spree, where he gained a reputation as a skillful writer of poetic ballads. At thirty he made the decision to give up pharmacy and commit himself to living by his pen, one way or another. At the same time he married his fiancée, Emilie Rouanet-Kummer, after a prolonged engagement. For the next few decades Fontane supported himself and his growing family, sometimes just barely, with a succession of journalistic and government press-officer jobs.
Fontane had had the good fortune to be asked by a friend to accompany him on a trip to England, and the two-week trip sparked in him a lifelong enthusiasm for the English. He was to live and work in England for a number of years (1855–1859) and to travel in Scotland, experiences which led to his writing several travel books. There is no doubt that his experiences abroad gave him a more expansive and cosmopolitan viewpoint. He also traveled in the less frequented parts of Germany and wrote the multivolume Journeys Through the Mark of Brandenburg, which is still highly regarded. Despite his affection for Germany, he was well aware of the typical Prussian’s smug provinciality. In one of his novels, he has a character say acerbically: “I was abroad for a long time, and one learns about oneself when abroad. Anyone who comes back is surprised by nothing as much as by the naive belief, which he finds here on every side, that in the land of Prussia everything is the best. The big, the small, the whole and the single. The best, I say, and, above all, the most honorable.”[4] Fontane became increasingly attached to Berlin (where many of his novels take place), but saw it for what it was, a garrison town at the time, not yet a world metropolis.
The German characters in his novels are always a bit insecure and defensive about their cultural level—always looking to foreigners to provide excitement and sophistication. The Poles, the French, the Jews, the English, the Danes are each pressed into service to administer the necessary savoir vivre to these uptight Teutons. (Fontane himself would sometimes play up his Gascon roots, saying “The older I get, the more the Frenchman in me comes out.”[5] Several generations back, his Huguenot ancestors had fled persecution in France and emigrated to Prussia, though he spoke French poorly and was not nearly as conversant with French literature as he was with English.)
If travel gave him one enlarging corrective, history provided another. Before embarking on fiction, Fontane wrote a series of military histories: The War Against France, The Schleswig-Holstein War, The German War of 1866. He had a passion for history, and according to Craig, his scholarship and historiographic approaches stand up well. In both the nonfiction books and the novels, Fontane can be seen as writing, unofficially and accumulatively, the history of Germany as an emerging state. It is still possible to find more “things,” more sheer detail about German nineteenth-century life in his books than anywhere else.
Having participated marginally in the uprising of 1848 on the side of the progressives, he drifted into a moderate liberalism. Essentially apolitical, he was doubtful of reformism, saying, “Among my small virtues I count the fact that I do not wish to change the human ra
ce.” It is odd that, given his own humble beginnings and precarious financial struggles to support his family, he would come to write so often about aristocrats. When his own wife called him on that, he lamely justified the practice by saying that poets naturally hung around aristocratic milieus. The truth is that he found much to admire in the old Junker virtues of honor and rectitude, and he was repelled by the bourgeoisie’s sanctimonious greed. But he could also be highly critical, documenting in his novels the decline of the aristocratic values. Like Chekhov in The Cherry Orchard, he portrayed the aristocracy on its last legs from the sympathetic but detached viewpoint of a new-minted bourgeois.
In 1871, he was appointed drama critic of the newspaper Vossische Zeitung, which gave him a secure living and ample writing time for the first time in his life. It is no coincidence that his career as a novelist took off at about the same time he settled into his drama-critic berth. In his reviews, Fontane championed the innovative realism of Ibsen and Hauptmann. The post must have also refined his feeling for dialogue, which would play such a major role in all of his fiction. Fontane has been characterized as a novelist of causerie, or social chatter: he believed character and conflict could best be demonstrated by the way people spoke. Talk can be a means of both self-concealment and self-exposure. In Fontane, conversation establishes the distance between the social being and the inner being. Sometimes it also has the function of revealing the way mediocre people waste their lives in petty blather. It is extraordinary how flowing, various, witty, literate (or the opposite, satirically inane) the talk in Fontane’s books can be. The trick is that people appear to be speaking insignificant small talk, and suddenly out of this twaddle comes a startling insight, shrewd analysis, or confrontation. In Irretrievable, an old courtier tells the protagonist that his main responsibility as a gentleman-in-waiting is “to talk as much as possible. Talking a great deal is an excellent thing and in some cases it is by far the best diplomacy, because if you talk a great deal, then the details can never be properly ascertained, or better still, one detail cancels out another.” There usually comes a point, however, when talk can no longer obfuscate and the gloves come off, revealing the feelings underneath.
Irretrievable Page 27