Introduction

Thomas Mann in 1919 said of Effi Briest that it belonged among the six most significant novels ever written.¹ By that time the Wilhelmine Empire evoked in Fontane’s major novels had already become history, and it is Fontane’s achievement to have captured that world on the eve of its dissolution. Its centre was Prussia, much maligned since, but dear to Fontane’s heart, and he has left us, in the voices and lives of a representative few, his diagnosis of the aspirations and ills of a society whose unspectacular decline he saw with the disabused clarity of old age.²

When Effi Briest was published as a book in 1895, after being serialized in the Deutsche Rundschau, its seventy-five-year-old author experienced his first real literary success. Recognition had been slow in coming to the man who was later to be seen as the greatest German novelist between Goethe and Thomas Mann. The reasons were both personal and political. He was born in 1819 in Neuruppin, thirty miles north-west of Berlin, son of the pharmacist Louis Henri and his wife Emilie Fontane, both descendants of the French Huguenot community in Berlin. His most vivid childhood memories are of the Baltic port Swinemünde (today Świnoujście in Poland) where his father took over a chemist’s shop when Fontane was seven. Swinemünde, a strange combination of stuffily provincial resort and cosmopolitan seaport, was the model for Kessin in Effi Briest. After haphazard schooling Fontane was apprenticed to his father’s trade and qualified as a pharmacist in 1847. There was no capital to set him up in his own business. He decided in 1849 to become a writer and years of struggle followed.

Fontane was steeped in English literature, in particular Shakespeare, Scottish and English ballads, Scott and Thackeray, and his literary experience was quickened in 1844, 1852 and 1855-59 by visits to England and Scotland, on the last occasion as London press agent for the Prussian government. His work as foreign correspondent involved close scrutiny of The Times which became a source for many of his own pieces. He admired especially the polished style of the leaders which were, surprisingly for a German, devoid of any whiff of dry officialese. Charlotte Jolles sees his own sovereign and stylish prose as in part the product of those years of reading The Times.³ The year of revolutions in Europe, 1848, saw him writing political polemics at home on the future of Prussia and Germany for the Dresdner Zeitung, some of them censored by the editor. He produced translations of Chartist poems, of Hamlet (c.1843), and of Catherine Gore’s novel The Moneylender (c.1850), as well as an essay on the worker poet John Prince (1842). Fontane’s experience of English life and literature was decisive. It focused his thoughts and feelings about his homeland. Victorian London was his first experience of a modern metropolis, and the seething centre of the Empire gave him a liberating sense of the wideness and diversity of the world, of infinite energy and possibilities, but at the same time he could see the power of history and tradition in Britain, which unlike politically fragmented Germany with its scores of sovereign states had no identity problems and could devote itself wholeheartedly to the serious business of making money.

Back in Berlin Fontane spent the next twenty years writing non-fiction for a living. Between 1862 and 1882 he published four volumes of local travelogues dealing with the towns and villages, the buildings and people, the history and anecdotes of Berlin’s hinterland, Rambles in Brandenburg (Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg). These were the years when Bismarck embarked on the wars that unified Germany and saw the King of Prussia proclaimed Kaiser of a new German Reich at Versailles in 1871, so at the same time Fontane found himself chronicling Bismarck’s military campaigns, in books on the war in Schleswig-Holstein against Denmark, then the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. In 1870 he was appointed theatre critic on the liberal Vossische Zeitung for which he wrote regular notices for the next twenty years. He published volumes of ballads and poems in 1851, 1861 and 1875. All this was excellent preparation and made him better informed than any other writer of his time, but it left little time for fiction, and though he started his first novel, Before the Storm (Vor dem Sturm) in 1862, he took until 1878 to finish it. So it was at the age of fifty-eight that Fontane launched his career as a novelist with a historical narrative that views a community from multiple perspectives while Napoleon retreats from Russia somewhere offstage. He wrote sixteen more works of fiction before his death in 1898. Before the Storm was followed by a series of social and psychological novels, often subterraneously political, which put Berlin on the literary map for the first time. Of these Delusions, Confusions (Irrungen, Wirrungen), Cécile and Frau Jenny Treibel stand out as close-ups of characteristic segments of Berlin life – not as genre-paintings in words but as portrayals of individual lives that point beyond themselves to wider truths about society and humanity.

In choosing plots for his novels Fontane preferred to start from fact. In this respect the genesis of Effi Briest is typical. Fontane described his novel as ‘a story of adultery no different from a hundred others’.⁴ He had heard of the scandal in 1888 or 1889 from a friend, and the lady involved, Elisabeth Baroness von Plotho, was still alive so he was understandably concerned that she might recognize herself when the novel appeared. Unlike Effi she survived to the age of ninety-nine, dying in 1952, having divorced her husband in 1887 and devoted herself to a career in nursing. Her husband Armand Léon von Ardenne was an officer and aristocrat from an estate near Rathenow. He was only five years older than her and frequented her parents’ house. The seventeen-year-old Else, as she was known, was often prevailed upon to come indoors and listen to him playing the piano, and the detail of her red-haired playmates calling ‘Else, come back’ in the open window was, according to Fontane, decisive in his conception of the novel. After marrying Ardenne Else led a not uninteresting life and presided over a lively salon in Benrath Castle on the Rhine, where she met and fell in love with Emil Hartwich, an unhappily married district judge and amateur painter. In 1886 they planned to marry, but Ardenne forced open Else’s box of letters from Hartwich, challenged his rival and killed him in a duel. The divorce went through the next year and in old age Else still wrote of Hartwich, the lost love of her youth, with vivid recollection and strong feeling. Ardenne was, in accordance with Prussian law, awarded custody of the children, spent a token period in prison for the illegal duel, but was soon pardoned by the Kaiser and pursued a distinguished military career, dying in 1919.

There are crucial differences, some of them surprising, between the facts of the case and Fontane’s fictional treatment of them. The age gap between Effi and her husband becomes twenty-one years. In the social context of the novel this allows Innstetten to have achieved an elevated position in society, albeit at a relatively early age. As Landrat in Kessin he is a senior civil servant with responsibility for a large rural district and so requires a wife as fitting social appendage. Effi with her blue blood suits the job description admirably, and it takes no effort of imagination on Innstetten’s part to find her. He simply returns to his home ground and seeks out the family of the sweetheart of his youth – Effi’s mother. For her part Effi at seventeen is already so conditioned by the expectations of her social sphere that it never crosses her mind to object to this marriage of convenience which mirrors her own parents’ union. In contrast to most English novels of the period money plays no part in the arrangement. The prerequisites are status and background.

There are psychological, sexual and political dimensions to the age difference too, and the mismatch between Effi and Innstetten is partly a function of the wide gap in their educational experience. Their relationship can be seen as symbolizing the conflict between nature and culture. Effi is associated from the outset with fresh air, plants and water, playing games in the garden. Her own associations with the classroom are of exotic tales of fallen women and other improper anecdotes from the geography lesson, and much later she tells her studious daughter that mythology was her favourite subject. This is all a world apart from her husband with his law degree, plodding pedantically through the churches and art galleries of Italy on their honeymoon and taking notes for conjugal culture sessions during the long winter evenings in Kessin. Major Crampas to whom, ironically, Effi turns in her anguished attempts to comprehend what she instinctively perceives as threatening in her marriage, deliberately undermines her loyalty to her husband by calling Innstetten a ‘born pedagogue’. This contrast between them is a modified reprise of a motif in the earlier Berlin novels Cécile and Delusions, Confusions: Cécile in constant danger of making gaffes in cultivated company and Lene’s spelling not passing muster. This is more than just a symptom of the couples’ incompatibility, it is part of the sexual politics of relationships where the inexperienced child-wife is manipulated by her knowledgeable husband. Education was, and still is, a cardinal aspect of German cultural identity. The subtext of Effi Briest – and even more strikingly so in Frau Jenny Treibel – is subversive with regard to education. The narrative stance favours nature and questions culture – not in any extreme polarizing way, but it does urge a critical adjustment of currently cherished values. In this as in so many areas Fontane is drawing attention less to the ‘what’ than the ‘how’. Education and culture are all very well, he is saying, if pursued with an appropriately human and flexible emphasis. They fail in their function if they become instruments of repression which eliminate freedom of thought and scope for imagination, instead of facilitating them.

The sexual dimensions to the age gap remain beneath the surface in this discreet and allusive novel. They are suggested, as is much that is vital in the inner action, by the symbolic texture of the narrative. Effi’s sexual inexperience at the beginning of the novel is beyond question, and the premature loss of her virginity is prefigured by the twins calling her back to the garden through a window framed by Virginia creeper. The allusion becomes less subtle in English for the plant in German has two names. Fontane chooses ‘wilder Wein’, literally ‘wild wine’ suggesting both freedom and Dionysian pleasures, but it is also known as ‘Jungfernrebe’, ‘virgin’s vine’ (after the botanical name parthenozissus) which adds a further layer of meaning to the scene. Effi’s apprehension at her introduction to sexual relations is reflected by her unease at the strange, exotic creatures in the Kessin house: the stuffed shark and crocodile, and the Chinaman’s ghost which is associated with problematic sexual experience.⁵ Innstetten, however, perhaps because of his early exclusion from sexual fulfilment with Effi’s mother, proves to be dysfunctional here. Through years of bachelorhood he has become accustomed to a variety of displacement activities. His career has first claim on his energies and his young wife is left with ‘one or two tired if well-intended caresses’ at the end of the day or, as she points out, on their way back from the dull round of duty visits to local gentry, he has constant recourse to his cigar and sits there beside her in the carriage ‘frosty as a snowman’. It seems that after years of self-discipline and mortification of the flesh Innstetten has regulated his natural urges into a state of atrophy. That Effi then seeks sexual experience with another, admittedly also older, but not previously celibate man, is presented less as the fulfilment of overwhelming unsatisfied sexual desire than as the need for natural human warmth and freedom from the constraints of artificially acquired self-denial and rigour.

The political dimension to the age difference, like the sexual one, is less close to the surface than its more obvious social and psychological aspects. Throughout his life, which spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century, Fontane closely followed the political developments of the age. In March 1848 joining the radicals he briefly manned the Berlin barricades with a theatrical-prop musket. In 1860 he joined the editorial staff of the conservative ‘Kreuzzeitung’. By the end of his life his attitude to Prussia and the Prussian establishment, always ambivalent, had become increasingly critical. The question of Fontane’s shifting political position is currently a matter of perhaps over-zealous scrutiny by Fontane specialists. Christian Grawe’s clear overview of his attitude to Prussia concludes, ‘Prussianness thus represented to Fontane’s contemporaries a mixture of militarism, Lutheranism, loyalty to state and king, order, ambition and obedience, the Kantian ethic of doing one’s duty and Hegelian apotheosis of the state – a combination of elements which Fontane regarded highly critically and to which he attributes the essential responsibility for Effi’s destruction’.⁶ By placing Effi and Innstetten in different generations Fontane is showing a society in the process of change, where the old, atrophying values have lost their ethical validity but are still in place to the extent that they can vitiate the life of the up-and-coming generation in a way that is fundamentally questioned by the narrative point of view. The age difference is at the heart of an undercurrent of political commentary which questions the hold of the old age over the new. Innstetten’s final, impotent recognition of the hollowness of his establishment principles coupled with the dying out of his family name prefigures the inevitable demise of an antiquated social and political construct. Fontane agrees with Charlotte Brontë: ‘conventionality is not morality’.⁷

The role of Bismarck on the periphery of the narrative – mentioned and visited but not seen – is a central aspect of Fontane’s critique. It has even been suggested that the Chinaman’s ghost, which in Fontane’s celebrated and in terms of subsequent critical enquiry uniquely stimulating words is ‘a pivot for the whole story’, represents Bismarck.⁸ Bismarck stands for much that threatens Effi and the literal dividing of the ways in Chapter 6: right to Kessin and domestic life, left to Varzin, Bismarck’s residence and official duty, like all the geographical details in the novel has more than literal significance. However, it would be misleading simply to equate Innstetten with Bismarck and see him as the representative of Prussian orthodoxy. As with so much in Fontane’s fictional world the opposite is also true. In his last, great novel Der Stechlin the aging Junker Dubslav von Stechlin says, ‘There are no such things as incontrovertible truths, and if there are, they’re boring.’ This paradoxically self-invalidating statement encapsulates the quintessential Fontane: humorous, self-reflexive, distrustful of absolutes. He functionalizes Bismarck in a characteristically shifting set of constellations of characters, on the one hand – parallel to Innstetten – as the correlative of duty, absolute obedience, career-conscious striving, and also as inimical to women and family life for Effi is excluded from the invitations to Varzin; but also as parallel to Crampas, for Fontane saw and despised in Bismarck the opportunist who disregarded principle in favour of expediency, that is the opposite of Innstetten the ‘stickler for principle’, incidentally a label Fontane also applied disparagingly to Gladstone.

Fontane chose his title and the name of his heroine with care. In early drafts he called her Betty von Ottersund, making pointed reference to her elemental, aquatic affinities, but in the end he chose Effi Briest for its sound, ‘because of all the “e’s” and “i’s”; those two are the fine vowels.’⁹ Effi is not a common name in German and it has been speculated that he may, as a keen reader of Scott, have taken it from Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian. The echo of ‘Eve’ with implications of the fall from grace is surely intended too. Many of Fontane’s characters’ names are invested with symbolic overtones. Innstetten’s first name ‘Geert’ not only means ‘a tall slender stem’ as old Briest remarks, but also a ‘switch’, an instrument of punishment and control. Innstetten is cast in the role of trainer and tamer of the spontaneous inclinations of his young wife. The titles of over a third of Fontane’s novels are women’s names, bearing out Ebba Rosenberg’s dictum in Beyond Recall (Unwiederbringlich): ‘Women’s stories are usually far more interesting.’ Of course Fontane is not alone among nineteenth-century novelists in choosing such titles, but the preponderance of women protagonists is striking, and a comparison with the often-invoked sister novels of adultery is instructive.¹⁰

Flaubert’s title Madame Bovary suggests that the problem, the central concern is the marriage, the turning of Emma into the wife of someone whose bovine name proclaims his character. The marriage fails to satisfy her, but equally she fails to assert a separate valid identity as Emma. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina articulates the conflict inherent in the simultaneous existence of the private individual Anna, who experiences true love and passion, and the social role as Karenin’s wife. Effi Briest is quite another matter. Effi’s problem is that she cannot complete the socially required metamorphosis from Fräulein von Briest to Frau von Innstetten, for this would entail a denial of her self, her natural, playful exuberance, the self-confident magnetic personality we see in the games in the garden on the one hand, and on the other her risk-loving nature, her propensity to let herself be carried away, her desire for the out of the ordinary, her unpredictability. As her mother says, she is ‘altogether a very odd mixture’. Ironically, although Innstetten is attracted by her natural, youthful charms it is precisely those sides of her that he then sets about stifling. That she remains Effi Briest at the end of the novel, a fact explicitly asserted by her instructions for the wording on her gravestone, is a sign that although she has succumbed physically in the draining conflict with the rigid forms of society she has managed to hold on to her own inner integrity, she has not lost her self. She has not been sacrificed like Anna to a grand passion. Her affair with Crampas was not a crucial emotional experience, it was merely a symptom of her need to preserve some area of freedom and spontaneity; nor has she been sacrificed like Emma to romantic notions and an egocentric personality. She has been sacrificed – and the motif of sacrifice runs through the narrative from the gooseberry skins’ watery grave at the beginning to the sacrificial stones by Lake Hertha and beyond (Chapter 24) – to a set of conventions which Wüllersdorf and Innstetten recognize as empty: ‘this cult of honour of ours is idolatry’, without being able to extricate themselves from the power of ‘that social something which tyrannizes us’ (Chapter 27), but she has not relinquished her irreducible sense of her own independent identity. That she finds her way back to being Effi Briest – a unique, beautiful name free of its aristocratic ‘von’, its social indicator, in her chosen, natural setting in the garden of her youth is an assertion of a triumph of a kind. It is an ambiguous one, for she has not survived to grow into mature adulthood, but the fact of her death constitutes an accusation levelled at a society whose warped logic it has exposed.

This reading requires qualification to the extent that the assertion of Effi as herself at the end, only in death, equally implies that the individual cannot survive independent of a particular social and historical context. Even if society’s values are wrong the only possible existence is social existence, and you either conform or go under. Going back to the garden – Hohen-Cremmen has frequently been seen as a paradise from which Effi is expelled – is not a viable option. On the other hand Innstetten’s option is only viable in very reduced terms. The career to which he sacrifices Effi, Crampas, home life and happiness brings him no joy in the end for he comes to see the price he has paid for shoddy goods.

The central question of a theory of time-limits raised by Fontane’s placing the discovery of the adultery at a remove of almost seven years from the act is a further aspect of the way in which he used an individual case as representative of wider social and political questions. That the loyal servant of the state should agonize over this matter of form and convention and decide in favour of a traditional code which demands the meaningless sacrifice of human beings and human values signals that the society portrayed is a society in decline. It is an age of transition and Fontane spotlights this transition and illuminates the unease, diagnoses the illness without being able to help the patient, except by the bracing and sympathetic clarity of his vision. The cult of honour, which derives from the military code, a male construct, is shown to lack moral foundation and be unequal to the dilemmas of real life in the social and domestic sphere, and indeed politically irrelevant too in the age of Bismarck’s Realpolitik, where pragmatism and opportunism have determined the very shape of the contemporary state. The inflexibility of the code is radically at odds with ‘the re-evaluation of all values’ – to use a phrase from Fontane’s contemporary Nietzsche – that was going on in Germany, above all in the young metropolis Berlin in the years of industrial expansion that followed unification.

The novel is set in the 1880s and Fontane was working on it during the first half of the ’90s. He claims to have written it ‘as in a dream and almost as if I were using a psychograph’.¹¹ In fact the birth of the novel was prolonged and difficult and this comment can only apply to the initial draft written in 1890. In 1892, the year in which he returned to it, Fontane suffered a severe physical and nervous breakdown from which he recovered by following his doctor’s advice and writing down memories of his childhood (Meine Kinderjahre, 1893). The main work of revising and correcting, always a laborious process for Fontane, took place in winter and spring 1893-94. Comparison of the final result with earlier versions reveals the extent to which the finished text is the product of constant refinement, reduction and paring away of redundant material.

Fontane’s particular brand of realism with its subterranean dynamic, not unlike Jane Austen’s, is based not on the naming or describing of an abundance of people and things. It works rather through glimpses and allusions. There is a strictly limited circle of characters whom we encounter in small groups. Large social occasions such as Effi’s wedding tend to be referred back to. The most striking example of this deliberately oblique, retrospective technique is Fontane’s treatment of Effi’s adultery. Only when we read the letters over Innstetten’s shoulder seven years after the event do we become sure that it actually took place, and we may then examine earlier chapters to find what we missed. Fontane was well aware of this aspect of his artistry. He wrote in a letter to Ernst Heilborn in 1895:

I’m glad to see that you’re in agreement with my leaving a lot to the reader’s imagination; I would find it quite impossible to do otherwise, and for me complete obscurity would always be preferable to the gas-light illumination of certain things whose depiction, even if it’s skilful (which is very seldom the case) still doesn’t really work.¹²

Such deliberate avoidance of dramatic scenes is rare in nineteenth-century literature. When Fontane does portray significant occasions directly in the present of the novel, as is the case with Ring’s New Year party and Annie’s christening, then we are given access to a series of dialogues which expose attitudes and interrelationships, not decisive turning points in the development of the plot. They are reflective rather than active and the reality of the characters is created in terms of their discourse, of what they say, rather than what they do or how they look. Dress and external appearance have little role to play in creating an authentic sense of location and period. Such details as there are point to the underlying concerns of the novel. Effi’s loose tunic at the beginning, authentic and realistic in the sense that in it Fontane replicated the dress and demeanour of a fifteen-year-old English girl he saw on a hotel balcony in the Harz, symbolizes her natural, childlike state, just as Johanna’s corseted ‘shapely bosom’ in Chapter 35 is a detail used to epitomize the opposite: correct but artificial restraint and denial of natural impulse.

Fontane’s narrative technique is very different from the leisurely, discursive style of many more familiar nineteenth-century English novelists. It is different in kind in its concentration and density of symbolic pattern and reference. In this respect it is closer in form and intention to the dominant genre of German realism, the Novelle, whose symbolism and taut structure Fontane reproduces in Effi Briest. The Novelle form has been defined as a circular line drawn around a central point, so that every detail refers back to that centre. This description fits Effi Briest, although readers cannot immediately see the connections, and it would spoil the cumulative effect if they could. They can nonetheless sense that the references are there to be unravelled in retrospect.

The connections take many forms. The light-hearted discussion of Crampas’s death by drowning at the end of Chapter 15 is characteristic of Fontane’s use of ironic patterning. The reader senses that in this conversation about death on a sunny day late in the year, with Crampas’s prediction that he will the a proper and, he hopes, an honourable soldier’s death, there is more going on than meets the ear. It is only later that we comprehend the full irony of this exchange; that it has been a central concern of the novel to show that what is ‘proper and honourable’ in this society, and perhaps in every society, is at best relative and at worst fatal. The opening paragraph of the novel too, typically for Fontane, is a classic example of the way in which his symbolic charging of the text is achieved unobtrusively before the reader’s eyes, while its full impact can only be appreciated in the light of the narrative as a whole. When we put the book down at the end with the sense that what has happened had to happen, it is worth going back, to find the signs that pointed the way from the beginning, before the characters themselves ever appeared on the scene. Looking again at the opening, we can more readily pick up what is so clearly signalled in the Prussian manor-house: its social and historical place, the deceptive idyll which is a combination of nature and civilization, park and garden, the enclosed space with the boat moored in the pond suggesting but denying the possibility of escape, while the only real ways out are either into the house, or through the gate into the churchyard. Looking again at the rickety swing which at intervals in the novel allows Effi to experience danger and exhilaration, to fly in the air, we recognize it as a highly ironic symbol of the inadequacy of the spirited heroine’s wings of desire. Above all, in the very first sentence of the novel our attention is drawn to the roundel, the circular flowerbed – in the beautiful and apparently salubrious environment which both nurtured and trapped her – whose ultimate function is seen in the final passage.

Writing of Confusions, Delusions Fontane referred to the ‘tausend Finesseri,’ the thousand subtleties in the novel. The apparently straightforward, restrained and undemanding realism of the surface conceals a web of cross-reference at a virtually inexhaustible variety of levels. Some critics, like Karl S. Guthke, have asked the question ‘art or artifice?’¹³ about Fontane’s style, finding his use of symbolic allusion and techniques of suggestion and anticipation overdone. The broad consensus however finds the finely woven texture an unfailing source of new discovery and delight in the novels.¹⁴ The range of possible points of entry into the interior of Effi Briest may be exemplified by Klaus-Peter Schuster’s study which approaches the text via references to paintings, especially those of the Pre-Raphaelites, developing an elaborate theory whereby Hohen-Cremmen is both the hortus conclusus of the Annunciation and the Garden of Eden, and Karla Bindokat’s analysis which approaches Effi Briest via the history of traditional literary motifs, examining Fontane’s borrowings from folk legend, myth and saga all of which feed into the social criticism in the novel.¹⁵ Numerous examinations of individual details in the novel, ranging from the heliotrope in the garden as a symbol of divine and earthly love and of Effi’s need for light and warmth to Cousin Dagobert’s Christmas card with its huddled bird in a snowy landscape with a telegraph pole as metaphor for her emotional deprivation and isolation, have progressively cast more light on the work’s intricacy.¹⁶

One effect of this all-pervasive allusiveness in a work of realism is the active involvement of the reader to an extent that is belied by the unassuming surface of the novel. In the space between the relatively few characters and their uncluttered milieu Fontane has left room for readers to interpret events and bring their own experience and observation to bear on what has been offered. This is quite deliberate on Fontane’s part; as we have seen, he was always in favour of too little rather than too much. He maintained that if there was anything superfluous at all, then it was a flaw.¹⁷ The realistic detail in Effi Briest all serves a wider scheme or structure, that of the historically and socially determined world in which the characters live.

The framework in which Fontane operates, as recent studies have shown, is one which points firmly forward to twentieth-century preoccupations. Patricia Howe sees this modern tendency in terms of the overriding of the conventional moral design of nineteenth-century realism. When Effi reads David Copperfield, a novel of wickedness punished and virtue rewarded, she has chosen a fiction that does not correspond to her own world. At the end of Effi Briest, Howe argues that neither Effi’s death nor that of her seducer restores order, but signals its disintegration, and that the final ‘injunction against further questioning’ must be seen as ironically undermining the apparent closure of the text.¹⁸ Walter Müller-Seidel in his authoritative study of Fontane’s novels sees the modernity of Effi Briest in terms of its ‘missing or reduced tragedy’.¹⁹ He attributes this to the almost ridiculous seriousness with which Innstetten reacts to an offence so far in the past, and to the fact that the fatal repercussions derive from an unintended sliding into a state of guilt. The serious consequences arise out of a combination of the everyday, the trivial, and the ridiculous. He sees in this disillusioned view of the novel which is no longer tragic but founded on half-comic absurdity, evidence of a tendency towards a modern consciousness. One of the problems in the earlier reception of Effi Briest by academic commentators accustomed to tragedy and passion in the novel was precisely this perceived lack, this shift in awareness that was then negatively judged against the high seriousness and emotional intensity of say Anna Karenina or Middlemarch. The scene that follows Innstetten’s fateful discovery of the letters is indeed remarkable for its comedy. It is a game of nicely observed one-upmanship between the servants, which may owe something to the Shakespearean tradition of comic relief, but which equally serves as an instant corrective to any more serious or indeed sentimental interpretation of events. The prosaic age of relativism and pragmatism has laid claim to the idealistic preserves of love, honour and loyalty.

Fontane’s realism has a characteristic flavour of its own which derives from a compound of refined irony, restraint and perspectivism. He created an ironic narrative tradition in German literature which was to be followed by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll and others. Like most great modern novels Effi Briest is a self-reflective narrative, a fact which can be seen more clearly in the original in the recurrence of the word Geschichte, ‘story’, which for reasons of idiom has sometimes been rendered by ‘affair’ in the translation.²⁰ In the first chapter, two of Effi’s comments both anticipate and call into question the entire narrative to come. She says, ‘A tale of renunciation is never bad’ and, ‘What happened was what was bound to happen, what always happens.’ The reader’s response in accepting these propositions at the end is proof of the aesthetic truth, coherence if you like, of the novel and in rejecting them of its moral force and coherence. That these responses can be harboured simultaneously demonstrates the sophistication of a work that evokes assent at one level and rebellion at another.

Effi Briest is the finest of Fontane’s portrayals of women living in a male-dominated society and, as the title of one Fontane study, The Woman as Paradigm of Humane Values,²¹ suggests, it is the female values that are vindicated against the male ones. In Effi Briest there is a warmth of human understanding and a non-judgmental attitude to human weakness which affords the reader a critical view of reality without destroying a sense of coherence and order. The intimate sphere of a broken marriage is a barometer of the health of the state and society as a whole, but in Effi Fontane has equally created a warm, attractive personality who, whatever she represents, is above all a vital, convincing character whose life and world we come to know and understand, and in knowing and understanding them we may know ourselves and our own world better too.

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 in Chapter 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.

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 on 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.