Effi Briest

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
Ś
winouj
ś
cie 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.