New Books from "The Old Fontane"

The late critic Gordon A. Craig wrote that Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) was "clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann."  Yet Fontane is barely known in the United States, in part because until the 1960s there were no English translations available.  But that has slowly changed, and now better translations are coming to market.  So few translations of German literary works are published in the US that the appearance of one is a cause for celebration.  Now we have an embarassment of riches as TWO Fontane translations have recently been published: Irretrievable (Unwiederbringlich) trans. by Douglas Parmee amd On Tangled Paths (Irrungen Wirrungen) transl. by Peter James Bowman.  With these new eitions, Fontane's repuation in the US can only grow.

For Fontane admirers and novices alike I recommend Daniel Mendelsohn's terrific essay in this week's New Yorker Magazine - Heroine Addict - which rightly focuses on the central role women play in Fontane's novels. Fontane's works are filled with women - unhappy wives, striving bourgeois, toiling seamstresses - whose ambitions are thwarted by Germany's anachronistic social conventions. But they are never caricatures: Fontane draws them with compassion and a gentle irony:

Women in Fontane’s work often represent energies and emotions for which there is no room in the world created by men: the world of Realpolitik and bombastic officialdom, of matrimonial hypocrisy and erotic double standards. This is why, as with those other authors, Fontane’s women are often both impressively self-aware and memorably broken. “If there is a person who has a passion for women,” Fontane confided in some friends in 1894, “and loves them almost twice as much when he encounters their weaknesses and confusions, the whole enchantment of their womanhood in full flight, that person is I.”

 Fontane's masterpiece, Effi Briest, deals with the tragic/absurd consequences of the female protagonist's adultery.

Still, my all-time favorite Fontane character is a the aging male central figure in Fontane's very last novel: the old Junker Dubslav von Stechlin, watching his world vanish from his dilapidated castle as the tumultuous events in Berlin and the wider world ripple across Lake Stechlin  (Der Stechlin, 1898).  Dubslav von Stechlin best embodies the sunny melancholy which is the essence of Fontane's style.  I was about to say "Fontane's late style", all of the great novelist's astonishing production (17 novels) relect Fontane's "late style": he published his first novel at age 60.  It was precisely this "late style" of Fontane which Thomas Mann's praised in his essay The Old Fontane:

Does in not seem that he had to grow old, very old, in order to fulfill himself completely? Just as thoug there are youths who are born to be youths only, fulfilling themselves early in life, certainly not growing old; so it would seem that there are other temperaments whose only appropriate temperament is old; who are, so to speak, classic old men, ordained to show humanity the ideal qualities of the last stage of life; benignity, kindness, justice, humor and shrewd wisdom - in short a recrudescence on a higher plane of childhood's artless unrestraint.  Fontane's was such a temperament.

Bonus: The late actor and director Kurt Westphal reads the first chapter of Der Stechlin:  Listen

Comments

[Hattie]

Fontane is one of my favorites, too. Perhaps I should revise a piece I did on *Effi,* because it gets a lot of hits on my blog but needs revision, since I wrote it for a graduate seminar, not as a critique. It needs quotes, above all, and some hint of what Fontane's style was like.
His Romane & Novellen in German are now available for less than $9.00 on Kindle, including several I haven't read!!!