Fontane’s fiction career began with a couple of history novels. His first, Before the Storm (1878), showed the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the gentry and ordinary folk. It is a long, patient, slow-moving work in which Fontane was still feeling his way, some characters treated sentimentally while others already display psychological complexity. What is clear from the first is that Fontane was following his quirky instincts and writing to suit himself, rather than genre formulas. Already one could detect a shying away from heavy plotting and a preference for story to crystallize from conversation and details of everyday life. He once defined his stylistic ambition: “It was my proud intention to describe the seemingly most insignificant things with the most detailed precision and thus to raise them to a certain artistic level, indeed to make them interesting by means of the kind of simplicity and transparency that appears to be easy but is most difficult to achieve.”[6] His final novel, published in 1898, the year he died, the exquisitely nuanced if becalmed The Stechlin, a tender portrait of an old aristocrat who embodied the admirable, live-and-let-live nobility, the last of a dying breed, had so pared-down a plot that, by his own admission, “At the end an old man dies and two young people get married—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages.”[7]
Curiously, only his first and last novels were lengthy; the others had a bracing brevity. Fontane was a master constructor of novellas and short novels. Given his inclination to work with as little plot as possible, and his avoidance of what he called the “Jack the Ripper” sensationalism of some naturalist novelists, the shorter fiction forms allowed him scope to develop one situation at leisure, and to bring it to a point of crisis. Focusing on the domestic and familial, he will introduce matters that seem at first casually digressive; only in a second reading does one grasp how economically each new topic anticipates a major theme while moving the story along.
Nowhere is this foreshadowing construction tighter than in Unwiederbringlich, alternatively called Irretrievable or Beyond Recall in English. (The latter title was used by Douglas Parmée, whose superbly fluent translation, first made in 1963, is being reprinted in this edition.) “Among the novellas his artistically most accomplished work is Irretrievable,” wrote Erich Heller.[8] It is certainly as good a place as any to start reading Fontane. Published initially between January and June of 1891 in the Deutsche Rundschau and in book form that same year, when Fontane was seventy-eight, it fell in the midst of his string of marvelous social novels that included The Woman Taken in Adultery, Delusions, Confusions, Frau Jenny Treibel, The Poggenpuhl Family, and the exquisite Effi Briest, usually regarded as his masterpiece. Though Effi Briest is perfectly composed, I admit a slight personal preference for Irretrievable because it is so sprightly and replete with amusing cameos and side streets. Fontane made good use of all his previous occupations—the balladeer, the travel writer, the historian, the drama critic—in this novel.
Irretrievable is the story of a marriage that has worn thin. The partners have been together for some twenty-three years, are raising two teenage children, and for the most part have enjoyed a happy marriage. Still, they have reached a point where they no longer are charmed but are irritated by the limitations each sees in the other. A familiar enough situation in everyday life: less a question of anyone’s fault than of the erosion of romantic idealization in a long-term union. The wife, Countess Christine, regards her easygoing husband, Count Helmut Holk, as a weak, indecisive man without much character, who has no interest in deeper spiritual or existential challenges; he, in turn, finds her a moralistic, dour, self-righteous scold. Various secondary characters discuss the merits of the case, weighing in on the couple’s flaws. Fontane preferred to advance the character analyses by putting insights into the mouths of bystanders. Since he was always open to various sides of each question, he would distribute points along the spectrum to different speakers. Though he liked to think his style was “objective” and didn’t impose his own judgments, at key moments he let his narrator swiftly adjudicate the conflicting claims. For instance: “Holk, though a kind and excellent husband, was none the less a man of rather ordinary gifts and in any case markedly inferior to his wife, who was a far more talented woman.”
Christine is a highly responsible mother, driven by her sense of duty, constantly considering the best educational course for her two children. When the novel begins, she has just about decided to send them off to boarding school, where the teaching is on a higher level than the tutors she hires. She also broods about the family burial vault. A woman whose mind gravitates toward mortality, she cannot shake her feelings of sadness at the death of their third, youngest, child. This ghost hovers over the narrative, as a preoccupation of Christine’s and a rebuke to Holk, who has seemed to put it too easily behind him. He has relocated them from her family’s traditional estate to fulfill his dream of building a new castle by the sea, Holkenas, a move which she initially resisted because it would mean leaving the burial ground of their child. In time she has come to appreciate their new home, but she worries that Holk will not care about the things that are bothering her: where to send their children to school, and what to do about the family vault. He is happy to play at being a gentleman farmer, and since she has always made the child-rearing decisions, he sees no reason to keep up the charade that his opinion matters. “I am clever enough to know who is master here and who gives the orders.” Beyond that, he is immensely resistant to her moral and religious preoccupations. In fact, Christine can be something of a pill. She has no sense of humor, according to her husband (and the narrator concurs). But she sees clearly. “You’ve been unlucky in your choice, you need a wife who is better able to laugh.”
Humor is not only a favored technique in the novel but a subtheme: each character is defined by his relationship to it, like the courtier Baron Pentz, who “saw everything from its funny side,” or the princess, who thinks that “to be able to laugh at your dear fellow beings was really the greatest enjoyment in your old age.” Despite Fontane’s own identification with a comic way of seeing, his scrupulous fairness and ability to grasp each character’s viewpoint allows us to sympathize with both marital partners. Yes, Christine says grimly, Holk has plenty of likable qualities, “almost too many, if you can ever have too many likeable qualities,” but “he thinks only of the present and never of the future.” Not much of a reader or a letter-writer, vain about his personal appearance, he is, being a Schleswig count, expected to serve occasionally as gentleman-in-waiting to the Danish princess. (Schleswig-Holstein, a long story: the Germans and Danes had contested both provinces for centuries, and Schleswig was still a Danish protectorate in the period the novel is set, 1859.) The nobleman who was expected to perform that service has contracted measles, so Holk has been summoned to the court. Christine is afraid that her husband will be tempted by the looser morals of the Copenhageners, “the Parisians of the north.” Justifiably so: no sooner does Holk arrive than he becomes enthralled by the beautiful, calculating daughter of his landlady, Brigitte Hansen, who dresses in “a remarkable mélange of frou-frou and Lady Macbeth.” But Brigitte is just a warm-up for his real infatuation with the princess’s lady-in-waiting, Ebba von Rosenberg. Ebba is an attractive, sharp, self-assured young woman who believes a girl must look out for herself and is casting about for a rich match. A delicious scene occurs when Holk tries to impress her with his antiquarian’s genealogical knowledge of the noble families bearing her name. She cuts him off with the real facts of ancestry, that her grandfather Meyer-Rosenberg was “well known … as King Gustav III’s personal pet Jew.”
This explanation, instead of putting off Holk (who had previously sounded mildly anti-Semitic), makes her all the more fascinating: she is witty, mocking, independent, open to sexual adventure, and can “never remain serious for long”—everything his wife is not. Ebba, on the other hand, performs a merciless dissection of his character once he has left the room. “He stands there as solemn as a high priest and has no idea when to laugh …
. Germans don’t make good courtiers.” It is telling that she keeps seeing in him the very trait, Germanic earnestness, he cannot abide in his wife. Later she will be even more scathing: “Because he looks like a man, he considers himself one. But he’s only a good-looking man, which usually means not a man at all … He’s confused and half-hearted and it is this half-heartedness that will cause his downfall.” (Not only is poor Holk overmatched by the women in the novel, but behind his back or to his face they deliver the most withering judgments about him,[9] which has the boomerang effect of making the reader feel sorry for the guy. The novel is indisputably a study of male weakness, but a sympathetic one.) Fontane subtly refrains from explaining how the same woman who can judge Holk so harshly could also be interested in taking him as a lover, or be irritated whenever his attentions toward her flag in the slightest.
The atmosphere surrounding the Danish court in Copenhagen and the rural Frederiksborg castle revives echoes of medieval chivalry and feudal fealty. Fontane himself was, as we know, fascinated with history, but he was quick to make fun of the genealogical pretensions and archaeological pedantry of the princess’s entourage. She herself is all too aware how obsolete her role is: “We poor princesses have very little left in any case and we have almost been pushed out of the world of reality already, so that if we lose our place in ballads and fairy-tales as well, I hardly know where we shall be able to go.” Holk, who regards the aristocratic order as sacred (“he would, indeed, have been glad to reintroduce the most medieval practices”), would like to play the gallant knight who rescues damsels in distress. The irony is that he does save Ebba’s life during a fire, but his recompense is not what he imagined.
In the midst of Holk’s fantasizing, we are explicitly told, in one of those occasional Olympian asides Fontane allowed himself: “Had he been able to see himself from outside he would have been able to realize all this, but this gift had been denied him; and so he continued to float along on the stream of his specious arguments, following his dreams, lulling his conscience to sleep, writing himself one certificate of good conduct after another.” Thinking he can find a little more happiness with another woman, Holk needs to exaggerate the case against his wife. Fontane shrewdly exhibits this mechanism of self-justification via his protagonist’s internal monologues. But Holk is allowed at least some awareness through intermittent twinges of conscience. He senses he is being unfair to Christine. Where he truly hasn’t a clue is in his overvaluation of Ebba’s feelings for him: he mistakes a one-night stand for undying love on her part. And does Ebba ever set him straight: “You try to be a courtier and a man of the world and you are neither the one or the other … I’m young and you’re no longer young and so it wasn’t for me to preach morality to you and, since I was bored, keep you anxiously on the path of virtue ….” Cruel as her statement may be that he isn’t a man, there is rough justice operating here, since it exactly mirrors Holk’s insult to Christine: “You lack anything feminine, you’re bitter and morose.”
In one of the many aperçus that comment in a metafictional way on the unfolding story, Ebba maintains: “Love-stories must never be left unfinished and when harsh reality has cut the thread before its time, then it must be spun out artificially. Every novel-reader expects that ….” Ebba also remarks on the disappearance or weakening of true passion on the part of men in her day; in a similar fashion, Holk accuses her of seducing him just to pass the time. We are in the first stages of that development Vivian Gornick would identify as “the end of the novel of love,” when it becomes harder to believe in the all-consuming, all-shattering power of romantic passion. But if love has begun to lose ground as a narrative trope, pride and humiliation still retain their full vigor. So it is up to the humiliated Christine, the odd one out in the affair, to bring this love story to a finish. The brilliant confrontation scene between Holk and his wife, when he is leaving her, demonstrates Fontane’s mastery of dramatic dialogue. The novelist adeptly shows how a quarreling couple almost reconciles, but goes past the point of mutual sympathy out of excess of wounded pride. Christine rises to magnificent heights in her calling of the question and acceptance of the rupture, but had she been a little less noble, she might have coaxed her weak, halfhearted husband into salvaging the marriage.
The title, Irretrievable (or Beyond Recall, take your pick), says it all. Fontane was at pains to orchestrate a narrative chain of events which would appear neither overdetermined nor random, but would achieve naturally an impression of inevitability. When it came to devising novel plots, he once confessed, he would rather rely on the trivial than the forced. Here, happenstance—measles, an out-of-town skating party, bad weather, a malfunctioning oven flue—all converge to produce the book’s climax. Mishima once said that he could only relax when he had brought his novels to the point of catastrophe. Fontane, for his part, was interested in reaching that turning point from which there is no going back, no possibility of making amends. For all his equanimity, he was enough of a pessimist/truth-teller to insist on the obduracy of the heart’s injuries and the irreversibility of some losses. What is “irretrievable” here is not only the Holks’ happy marriage but a whole way of life: the once-functioning system of aristocratic values and ethical certainties, in a secular age entering modernity.
Fontane reverted often to the theme of adultery and extramarital sex in his novels. We have no way of knowing whether this preoccupation had an autobiographical basis in his long, at times difficult marriage with Emilie. But we can assume that he was drawing on both his parents’ and his own union to explore the shifting power relations provoked by infidelity. In his first treatment of this theme, the surprising L’Adultera (The Woman Taken in Adultery), Fontane depicts a woman who seems contentedly and securely married, going off with a dashing officer, abandoning her children, and in the end living happily ever after. In Effi Briest, a pretty, youthful heroine married to an older government official has an affair with a major, though she instantly regrets it and settles contentedly into marriage; her husband discovers the affair years later, and while in other respects a kind, reasonable man, he challenges the major to a duel, kills him, and severs ties with his wife, whom he still loves, out of social propriety. In Irretrievable, Fontane reverses the situation, making the handsome, weak husband the straying party. Fontane has been justly celebrated for his sympathetic portraits of strong, courageous, sensual women. When the woman commits adultery, we can pity her more easily because she is confined in a male-dominated society. If it is the man, however, readers are less likely to extend compassion, especially when we know his wife is beautiful and good. But Holk has been “unmanned” by his feelings of inferiority toward Christine. He acknowledges that she wears the pants in the family. Both Holk and Ebba, in fact, share the role of consort or person-in-waiting; and it is this subservient position, more than anything, perhaps, that awakens an erotic sympathy between them, however temporary.
Fontane’s investment in the adultery narrative planted his work ever more firmly within the camp of European fiction, where adultery was such a common plot element. Why this particular transgression should have been so central to nineteenth-century Continental and American fiction (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Elective Affinities, The Red and the Black, The Scarlet Letter, etc., etc.) is a question Tony Tanner takes up in his stimulating study, Adultery in the Novel:
[M]arriage is the central subject for the bourgeois novel: not marriage as a paradigm for the resolution of problems of bringing unity out of difference, harmony out of opposition, identity out of separation, concord out of discord—as it is, for instance, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where marriage is not only social but magical, mythical, metaphysical—but just marriage in all its social and domestic ramifications in a demythologized society. Or rather a society in which marriage is the mythology (at least the socially avowed one; it would be possible to say that money and profits made up a more secret mythology). Marriage, to put it at its simplest for the moment, is a means by which soci
ety attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property; in bourgeois society it is not only a matter of putting your Gods where your treasure is (as Ruskin accused his age of doing) but also of putting your libido, loyalty, and all other possessions and products, including children, there as well. For bourgeois society marriage is the all-subsuming, all-organizing, all-containing contract. It is the structure that maintains the Structure, or System (if we may use that word, for the moment, to cover all models, conscious and unconscious, by which society structures all its operations and transactions). The bourgeois novelist has no choice but to engage this subject in one way or another, at no matter what extreme of celebration or contestation. He may concentrate on what makes for marriage and leads up to it, or on what threatens marriage and portends its disintegration, but his subject will still be marriage.[10]
As in all these tragedies of adultery, the first question that comes to the modern reader’s mind is: Why couldn’t they simply get a divorce? And the second is: Why couldn’t the wronged party forgive the unfaithful one? The answer to the first question is that they apparently do go through a formal legal separation, but by this time Holk has come to his senses and realizes that Christine is the only woman for him. He also wants to be able to come back home, to Schleswig and his castle by the sea. He presses his suit and in the end Christine agrees to remarry him, more out of a sense of duty to the institution and her children. Being a religious Christian, she sees marriage not merely as a social institution but as protected by a higher law. We are told she still loves Holk, but she cannot forgive him his infidelity. Why not? The reason she gives in her letter to her brother is that she has been wounded in her feminine pride and knows that Holk is available and eager to remarry her only because Ebba threw him out. That doesn’t sufficiently explain her inability to forgive him, which, after all, contradicts her Christian ideals of mercy. That she goes so far in the end to break the peaceful truce by drowning herself suggests a certain vindictive desire for vengeance just this side of spite.
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