Waiting for the Barbarians (30 page)

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 in 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:

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:

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.