Effi Briest
EFFI BRIEST
THEODOR FONTANE, born in Neuruppin in 1819, was descended from French Huguenot settlers in Brandenburg, and was brought up on the Baltic Sea coast of Prussia before spending most of his life in Berlin. He trained as a pharmacist but in 1849 decided to earn his living as a writer. He spent several years as a foreign correspondent in London and his prolific non-fiction output includes journalism, poetry, theatre reviews, local travelogues of Berlin’s hinterland, unpartisan accounts of Bismarck’s wars and two autobiographical works. He published his first novel, Before the Storm (1878), at the age of 58 and this was followed by sixteen further novels which established his reputation in the twentieth century as Germany’s finest realist novelist. Fontane’s sensitive portrayals of women’s lives in late nineteenth-century society are unsurpassed in European literature. The Woman taken in Adultery (1882), Cécile (1886), Delusions, Confusions (1888), Jenny Treibel (1892) and Effi Briest (1895) focus on problems of love and marriage, while the late works The Poggenpuhl Family (1896) and The Stechlin (1898) provide humorous family portraits of Prussian society in decline. He died in 1898.
HUGH RORRISON was educated at Ayr Academy and the universities of Glasgow and Vienna. He has published extensively on modern German theatre. Among his translations are Wedekind’s Lulu Plays (performed at the Almeida Theatre), Pavel Kohout’s Maple Tree Game (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Heiner Müller’s Road to Volokolamsk (BBC Radio 3), Brecht’s Berlin Stories and Journals 1934–55 and Piscator’s The Political Theatre. He lives in Edinburgh and works freelance for radio.
HELEN CHAMBERS was educated at Hutchesons’ Grammar School, Glasgow, and the University of Glasgow. She has taught at the universities of Leeds and Melbourne. Her publications include Supernatural and Irrational Elements in the Works of Theodor Fontane and The Changing Image of Theodor Fontane, and, as editor, a study of Joseph Roth. She is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews.
THEODOR FONTANE
Effi Briest
Translated from the German by
HUGH RORRISON and HELEN CHAMBERS
Introduction and notes by Helen Chambers
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This translation first published by Angel Books 1995
Published in Penguin Books 2000
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Translation copyright © Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1995
Introduction and notes copyright © Helen Chambers, 1995
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EISBN: 9781101489222
Contents
Introduction
Translators’ Note
Effi Briest
Notes
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 ballad
s 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 reponsibility 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.