2023-06-08 14:38:28
UUniversity of Tübingen, summer semester 1979. We, a small group from the Germanic Proseminar, dare to do something. After the session we go via the romantic artist novella to the great Jochen Schmidt. The “Schmidt genius” who, around 1980, worked feverishly on his great work works, a two-volume “history of genius thought”, to this day a standard work of research. We take heart and ask him to leave his literature on the crest of the mountain and offer a Fontane seminar in the coming semester!
Something that was unheard of back then. But the professor graciously accepts the fact that students make suggestions for his range of courses. He even seems amused and smiles. He remains firm on the matter: “You don’t organize a seminar on this author. You can also read it by yourself.”
Back then, Jochen Schmidt was by no means alone in his contempt for Fontane. A hundred years after his death in 1898, Fontane was still considered by many literary scholars to be basically an entertaining writer. As one of the better category, of course; educated, witty, funny, but intellectually not really up to par. Not an issue for prospective Germanists.
In the last quarter of a century, this has turned into the exact opposite: scholarly study of the most important German storyteller of the late 19th century has long since not only become intellectually satisfying. In a way, it may even be used as a fashionable are valid. For a German studies that is increasingly moving away from text analysis and turning to fields such as the literary market, the working and writing processes of authors or their publication strategies, Fontane can integrate well into current research trends.
Wonderfully cursed books
Fontane was no “genius”. And he did not pay homage to any “aesthetics of genius”. He was basically a columnist who also wrote novels in his later years. And, as is usual with feuilletonists, they were made up of a lot of things that had been seen and overheard. Systematics were not his thing. Fontane is also difficult to pin down to clear positions. In the course of his 78-year life, he has always hung his coat according to the winds of his various employers. But he developed this utterly unmistakable “sound”. Skeptical, ironic, striving to “surpass it cheerfully”, which Thomas Mann attested to. And his books were so wonderfully talked about. The author himself said of what is perhaps his best novel, “Stechlin”, here, where nothing else happens than this: “In the end, an old man dies and two boys get married”, so here, on 500 pages “everything is chatter”.
So if you now look at the two volumes of the Theodor Fontane handbook, in which the entire state of research on the author is spread out on no less than 1,500 pages, you can’t help but smile like Jochen Schmidt did for two reasons. Because it doesn’t get any more unfontanical than serving up “Fontane complete” in around 200 articles by around 100 authors. And the whole company also has something of the defiance of students who were once cheated of their Fontane seminar, who are now professors themselves and boast: “Of course you can hold Fontane seminars. And certainly no one should read it alone.”
So it’s all vain academic self-reflection, funded by the Thyssen Foundation, which apparently has too much money? Not at all. In addition to a lot of rolled-out banality, the present Fontane thesaurus also contains interesting information about how the perception of this author has changed in recent decades. It now looks surprisingly contemporary.
How come? What one of the editors, Peer Trilcke, who is also the director of the Potsdam Fontane Archive, calls what is perhaps the most far-reaching readjustment is what one of the editors, Peer Trilcke, calls the cancellation of any “homogenization” with which Fontane’s texts have been canonized in past decades sought. The best example are those anthologies that Fontane, who earned his living with newspaper work for a long time, wanted to stamp as a “classic of literary criticism”, whereby passages from his letters were then presented as reviews or even essays.
Fontane’s theater reviews, which fill four thick volumes in the large edition of the works by Aufbau-Verlag, must also be “dehomogenized”: They by no means depict all of Berlin’s theater events, as did the works of Alfred Kerr later, for example, but capriciously focus on the productions of the Royal Playhouse, which was already considered old-fashioned at the time because of its “patriotic” schedule policy. But Fontane’s employer, the “Vossische Zeitung”, only sent its employees here. Fontane skilfully made a virtue of necessity and used the text genre of reviews to settle accounts with the rampant “Borussism” that got on his nerves after the unification of the Reich – so much for the subject of writing strategies. But he wasn’t a classic theater critic either!
The handbook’s most insightful contribution to our current debates comes from Rolf Parr, who holds a professorship at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Under the lemma “colonialism” he explains how intensively Fontane dealt with Bismarck’s colonial policy, whereby the author differentiates between knowledge “from” and “from” the colonies. The former is mainly reflected in his novels, which are teeming with traces of life from the German-occupied areas of Africa and China.
Fontane and Colonialism
In his letters, however, Fontane then primarily exposed the representatives of German colonial policy (Adolf Lüderitz, Heinrich Leist, Ernst Wehlan) to ridicule and confessed: “They make me feel really bad”. Fontane had already criticized English colonialism in his early years with the poem “The Tragedy of Afghanistan”. In the last years of his life, looking at the German efforts, he came to the conclusion: “The whole colonization policy is nonsense. ‘Stay at home and eat well.’ Everyone has to prove themselves where God has placed them, not in a strange nest.”
Incidentally, this quote can already be found in the “Fontane Lexikon” published by Helmuth Nürnberger and Dietmar Storch in 2007. Names, Substances, Contemporary History” under the keyword “Colonialism”. This publication is still recommended for all Fontane fans as a private purchase. The new, unwieldy handbook will probably only be consulted in special libraries.
Gabriele Radecke, Peer Trilcke and others (Hg.): Theodor Fontane Handbuch. De Gruyter, 2 volumes, 1,500 pages, 294 euros.
#Colonialism #Theoder #Fontane #Early #Critic