Tag: German Literature

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus and the German Novella

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus is a novella that shows the potentially dangerous consequences of going against society in the pursuit of love. But first and foremost, it is a story, and that’s what makes it fun to read. I’d like to make the case for that “fun” factor today, while still providing a summary of the plot and an analysis of what makes the story interesting from an “I’m going to have to write an essay on this for uni” perspective.

Theodor Storm and the Novella

The German word “Novelle” can be easily translated as “novella”, but you lose a lot of cultural associations that way. Theodor Storm, whose work is as cool as his name, was a master at the art of writing novellas and also one of the genre’s great theorists. He explained the power of the novella by connecting it to tragic drama when he said “the novella is the sister of drama”. Unlike a novel, which is typically (experimental works discounted) burdened by a large cast of characters and multiple subplots, the novella in 19th century Germany is lean and focused on a single plotline and a few characters, much like a traditional tragic drama. And unlike a short story, the novella has enough time to develop its characters and plots from fleeting impressions and moments into something with a complex plot that can grab and hold our attention.

A photo of Theodor Storm
Theodor Storm

Storm himself was born in 1817 and lived out most of his life in what is now northern Germany but during his lifetime changed from Danish to German hands. He wrote novellas and some beautiful poems, almost all of them taking his coastal homeland for their setting. This already puts him in stark contrast to the earlier German Romantics, who seemed to forget that Germany had sea as well as mountains and forests. His most famous works are Immensee and The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter), though Aquis Submersus is not far behind.

Storm’s tales are symbolic and often feature magic, which shows the influence of fairy tales. In their heavy symbolism Storm’s tales also conform to Paul Heyse’s Falcon Theory (Falkentheorie), which states that novellas ought to have a symbolic leitmotif that repeats throughout the work like a spine. We’ll see how this works out in Aquis Submersus.

Telling a Story – Framing the Narrative in Aquis Submersus

The thing that I like about Aquis Submersus, and Storm’s work in general, is that it has an unmistakable and yet undefinable quality of being a story to it. What does that word mean? Walter Benjamin did his best to explain what a story was in contrast to a novel. But for me, Storm’s stories feel like the sort of tales that are told by the fireside in some cold and dreary cottage. They are designed to bring mystery and wonder into a merciless world. They remind me of my own childhood, growing up in the far north of Scotland. The Rider on the White Horse even begins with that very idea – the narrator, a young boy, is told one layer of that story’s frame narrative by his grandmother, while he is playing around with an old newspaper in front of the fireplace in their cottage.

Aquis Submersus also uses a frame narrative. The unnamed outer layer narrator begins by describing his childhood visits to the house of the village priest, where he and the pastor’s son play outside in the grass by a pond. But they also sometimes investigate the church itself, which is an old building that the narrator says “excited my fantasies”. Inside that building there is a painting of a young, drowned boy, and underneath it there are the letters “C. P. A. S.”. Like any good 19th century lad, the narrator knows Latin and quickly determines that A. S. is “aquis submersus” – died from drowning. But he and his friend struggle to work out C. P. – giving the readers their first mystery. The narrator suggests it means “culpa patris” – “through the father’s guilt” – but the priest himself doesn’t know and can’t confirm the narrator’s suspicions.

Years go by, and the narrator finds himself attracted by an old house in his town. When he goes in he discovers another painting by the same artist, once more showing the drowned boy. When he asks about the painting the house’s inhabitants say it belonged to a member of the family from long ago, and offer to show him the belongings of the painter. These turn out to be, in the words of the owner, “just some old scribblings; there’s nothing of value in them”. But our narrator is overjoyed, and in his eagerness to learn what secrets lie within these books he doesn’t even leave the house but reads them right in that very room. And it is here that the main story begins.

The significance of the frame narrative device is here that it heightens the feeling that what we are reading is just a story. It mimics the format by which we ourselves here stories in the real world – organically and often through chance occurrences, so that we build ourselves a narrative out of the separate pieces. Just like the narrator we learn about a mystery, and then only gradually do we see it resolved. The fact that we have a resolution, the fact that the narrator stumbles upon the books – these are unrealistic, perhaps, but we accept them as we accept the corner-cutting and rearranging that takes place every time an old story is recounted. We know that not everything we hear is to be believed, but we want to hear anyway, and decide for ourselves what is real and what may well be fiction.

The Plot – “Just some old scribblings”

The story of Aquis Submersus concerns an orphan, Johannes, who finds financial support from a family of German nobles. The son of the family, the appropriately named Wulf, resents Johannes because he is receiving what Wulf considers his inheritance. It gets even worse when Johannes falls in love with Wulf’s sister, Katherina – a love that, in the middle of the 17th century when the novella takes place, cannot be legitimised through marriage due to the differences between their classes.

Time passes and Johannes leaves to become a well-known painter in Holland. When he returns, five years after his last meeting with the family, he finds that “the good times have passed”. As he approaches the family’s castle he is attacked by Wulf’s new bulldogs, and he also learns that the father has died, leaving the hostility of Wulf towards him without check. But there is another tragedy approaching – Katherina is preparing to be given away in marriage, likely to a neighbour, Kurt, who is noted for his brutality. As if to rub salt into the wound, Wulf demands Johannes paint his sister’s picture before she goes, so that her memory will always be in the house.

Johannes paints Katherina in a room filled with old paintings of her relatives, including one woman who reminds him of Katherina’s mother while also terrifying him. It turns out that the picture is of an ancient relative who cursed her own daughter, leading to the daughter’s death in a pond nearby. The reason was that the daughter didn’t want to marry the person chosen for her – and Katherina admits that she feels the curse is on her too. But there is a way out, and Katherina gives Johannes a letter to pass on to an aunt who might be able to spirit her away. Unfortunately, though, it seems that Kurt has put spies out, because when Johannes returns, the task complete, Wulf and Kurt together set the dogs on him, and Johannes is only able to escape by sneaking into Katherina’s window and spending the night with her.

The next day he must move on, expecting never to see her again. But a few years later he finds himself tasked with painting a priest in a local village, and he heads out there. The priest’s son is a small boy, also called Johannes, and at first his mother is unknown. But a series of events lead to Johannes the painter learning the identity of the mother, and thus begins the novella’s tragic conclusion.

Drama’s Sister – Tragedy in Aquis Submersus

The mother is none other than Katherina. Kurt has married someone else, leaving Wulf to dispose of his sister by leaving her with the priest – a good and kind man. Since Katherina was pregnant – with Johannes’ own child – the man’s decision to marry her saved her from ignominy and shame. But when Johannes sees her again, all thoughts of the public and their potential reactions go out of the window. She is outside with her child when Johannes catches her, and though she says she wants to keep the young boy – he’s only about four – in sight, Johannes refuses to let her go. He has waited too long. There is a moment of bliss between the two old lovers, and then it is shattered with a cry. The child has drowned, and the priest, now returned from work and knowing the full story, doesn’t let Johannes see the result.

These moments towards the end of the book demonstrate the way that Aquis Submersus is very much a tragic work extracted from the same vein as tragic theatre. A crescendo of happiness – what we might consider to be well-earned by the travails of both characters – is destroyed in a way that seems at first completely unfair. But when we ask ourselves why such suffering has taken place, explanations do appear. With each of the great tragic figures in literature, there are reasons for their fates.

But what makes Aquis Submersus exciting from an interpretive perspective – not just in essays, but when you listen to the story by the fireside – is that there is no one dominant explanation. Does Johannes’ child die because of his father’s impatience and selfishness? Or does he die because Johannes is going against society and God by trying to be with someone from a different social class? As one of the servants in the castle says early on in the story, “we ought to stay wherever the Lord God has chosen to set us down”. Is it a kind of hubris for him to want to be with Katherina? And why does Katherina have to suffer, when she tried to escape Johannes and watch over the boy? And why must the boy himself die? Unanswered questions like these form the tragic component of Aquis Submersus, where fate itself is inscrutable.

The Leitmotifs and Symbols of Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus is a highly symbolic work in addition to being a tragic one. Throughout the story objects and images repeat in the same way that a leitmotif repeats in certain types of music. Two prominent symbols are the castle and its grounds, and paintings. The castle and grounds are first introduced in the outer section of the frame narrative. There, they are completely in disrepair and the hedgerows are empty and “ghostly”. What we see in the inner narrative is the decline to this point play out. At first, while the father of the family is alive, things are well, but by the time he and the older servants are dead Wulf becomes isolated there. It is only by using the lush vegetation of the castle walls that Johannes is able to spend the night with Katerina. But with her banishment the place grows barren and infertile.

A picture of a German castle
A German castle, perhaps like the one of Aquis Submersus

Our first introduction to the central story of Aquis Submersus comes through a painting. The inscription is the source of the mystery – clearly there was a reason to commemorate the death of a child, but what? The idea that paintings are a source of memory continues when Johannes is tasked with painting Katherina prior to her departure from her family’s home. But the memories located in paintings, it soon becomes clear, aren’t always positive. The initial painting serves as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming love, while the portrait of the distant ancestor works to bring knowledge and memory of past misdeeds down through the generations as a curse. Johannes’ own career as a painter is marked by a desire to become famous because then the class barriers between him and Katerina will be no more. But in painting his dead son, Johannes finally performs an act of redemption.

There are other symbols too, such as birds and the water of the very title. But these two above should give an idea of how Storm weaves symbolism into the narrative and uses it to reinforce central themes. The castle comes right from traditional medieval works and their ideas of chastity, while paintings and their recorded images have always had occasional negative undertones, as if it is not an image but a soul that is trapped within them. Some things, of course, it is better not to remember. A painting keeps us from moving on.

Conclusion

I read Aquis Submersus both because I knew it was on my reading list for next year and because I’ve read and enjoyed Storm’s stories before. I was glad that this one didn’t disappoint. As with all of these German novellas, the formal aspects of Aquis Submersus are pretty interesting, letting you talk about various novella-theories and also how the story fits into Benjamin’s conception of storytelling too. But more importantly, the tale is fun because of the story itself, which is suspenseful and exciting. And at only eighty-or-so pages, it’s hard not to recommend it.

For more Storm, I have a summary of Immensee here. I’ve also translated some of Storm’s poetry, which you can read here.

Picture of a castle comes from KlausFoehl and is used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Poetry of Crisis

Introduction: Hofmannsthal, the enfant terrible of Vienna

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is perhaps the greatest claimant to the title of the German enfant terrible, placing him alongside Mikhail Lermontov in Russia and, most famously of all, Arthur Rimbaud in France in the German canon. Like those two poets Hofmannsthal displayed precocious talents at a young age – in his case he frequented a literary salon from the age of about fifteen with his father accompanying him since he was too young to go alone. And like Rimbaud, Hofmannsthal also ceased writing poetry suddenly to concentrate on other parts of his life. The reason usually identified by the critics is that he lost his belief in language as a tool to convey thought and the reality he saw around him. This crisis is memorably expressed in his fictional “Lord Chandos Letter” to Francis Bacon, in which the former man (a surrogate for Hofmannsthal) explains how language has failed him.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal shown in a photograph
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). Don’t let his dates fool you – he wrote almost all of his poetry before the turn of the century, before settling down into gloom and reactionary politics.

I am no Hofmannsthal expert, but I have read through his small poetic corpus a few times and want to share two aspects of his poetry that make him an interesting poet to me. Though the crisis that ultimately turns him away from poetry appears to be a linguistic one, I think there are more tensions lying under the surface of his perfectly tuned poesy than just ones of language. As ever, unmarked translations are mine.

Language Dies with a Whimper

By the time Hofmannsthal in 1902 actually penned his imaginary letter complaining of his inability to write it was long since he had written anything substantial. In my copy of his poems there are collected those poems he did not see worth publishing in his 1922 Gedichte. Some of these aren’t very good, but interestingly enough as 1895/6 – the apogee of his talents – passed he began to write several little couplets, which are scarcely poems at all. Instead, they seem a halfway point between the faith in language expressed poems like “A Dream of Great Magic” and the collapse of that faith expressed in the “Lord Chandos Letter”. At only two lines long, they seem positively Beckettian in attitude – the attempt to salvage some kind of meaning from the gigantic void that language’s failure has left. Some of them are, though bitter, thought-provoking and beautiful. Hopefully my translations are too!

Names

“Visp’s the name of a frothing brook; another name is Goethe. 
There came the name from the thing; but here the bearer created its clang.”

This poem is written by a poet who is very aware of words and their effects; but not only that these effects exist but how they have the capacity to be created and remade by a sufficiently talented person, like a Goethe.

Words

“There are some words that hit like hammers. But others
You swallow like hooks and swim on and do not yet know it.”

I love this one. It captures one of those inarticulable feelings you get when you read something truly superb. You know that the best works and their words will stay with you, but Hofmannsthal puts his finger on an image for how they do it. “Words”, here, is more specifically phrases, but I think that’s clear enough from the context and of little importance anyway. That title sounds better to my ear than “phrases” would.

The Art of the Storyteller

“Do you wish to depict the murder? Well show me the hound in the yard: /
Now show me at the same time in the eye of the dog the shadows of the killing.”

I think in this one the scepticism about language’s ability to reflect reality is clearly manifest. It was even clearer when I accidentally misread “murder” for “world” in the German because I wasn’t being careful. Nonetheless, Hofmannsthal is challenging our ability to depict the world in any meaningful way. Meaning here is removed by the successive impulse to get into smaller and smaller parts of reality – first the dog, then his eye, and then the shadows of the killing itself. It becomes too much, too detailed. We’re overloaded with information we cannot possibly manage to represent, and so representation itself becomes suspect. While the modernist fiction writers tried to go further and further into the subconscious, Hofmannsthal is expressing a feeling of futility in such an idea. It will never not fail at showing everything we are. This is the poem of one who will shortly give up on poetry.

Hofmannsthal’s Poetical (and Political) Guilt and Doubt

Late in life Hofmannsthal, the Austrian aristocrat, became a great reactionary. The loss the empire over which he and his fellow Viennese had ruled through military failure in the First World War was too much to bear for a soul like his, one already inclined by birth towards that which is conservative and noble in temperament. But we ought to give him his due – he was young once. And in his poems, there is more a tension between an artistic temperament that seeks to live creating art-for-art’s-sake, channelling a certain strand of Nietzsche, and an awareness of the responsibilities that he has for his people as a result of his position in society. A sense of his duty as a human being fighting against his sense of his duty as an artist. I think it is this tension that produces one of his most well-known poems, “Manche Freilich…”/”Some, of course…”:

Some, of course…

Some, of course, will have to die below,
Where the heavy rudders of the ship are striving;
Others live at the helm above,
And know the birds’ flights and the stars’ lands.

Some have to lie down with heavy limbs
Among the roots of tortured lives;
Others find they've seats arranged
Up by the Sibyls and the queens,
And there they sit as if at home,
With easy bodies and easy hands.

 But a shadow falls up from that life
 Into the other life above,
 And the easy are bound to the heavy
 Just as they’re bound to earth and air:
 
 I can’t remove forgotten tragedies
 That plagued past peoples from my eyes;
 Nor keep my frightened soul safe from
 The silent fall of far-off stars.
 
 Many fates are woven beside my own
 And through them all a presence plays;
 And my part is more than just this life’s 
 Slightest flame or slender lyre. 

A German version of the poem can be found here

Analysis: a political poem?

I’m not entirely sure what this poem means, but I’ve learned it and had it going around in my head for a few months, so I’ve at the very least been thinking about it. The sticking point, critically speaking, is in the first line: “Some, of course, will have to die below”/”Manche freilich müssen drunten sterben”. It’s hard to know what tone this is written in. It seems at first to indicate a resigned attitude towards equality and social progress and, if not an endorsement of existing hierarchies, then at the very least a suggestion that the hierarchies ought not to be tampered with. But it could be read as anything from complete support to a more insidious, ironic tone. I, at least, can’t read it without hearing irony. The description of the ship is designed to show inequality, without being so political as to start demanding solutions.

A picture of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born at almost the same time as Hofmannsthal, and into even more luxury. But unlike Hofmannsthal, whose “Some, of course” shows hesitation before action, Wittgenstein’s life contains many heroic attempts to connect with his fellow men and women.

Instead, the focus seems to be on the existence of inequality and the need, not for solutions so much as for understanding and a sense of personal responsibility. Hofmannsthal here is trying to feel what anybody in his position as an aristocrat, and indeed anybody in a position of relative wealth, can easily forget to feel – a sense of awareness of, and compassion and responsibility towards those who luck and other circumstances have not left as well-off as they have themselves. It is easy enough, I know from experience, to ignore the plight of others as being almost unreal, to dismiss the homeless as somehow deserving of their fate, and criminals as being exclusively bad people. Of course, there are bad people among the criminals, just as there are dangerous people among the homeless, but that cannot be justification to look away and hide from the obligation to pay attention.

Interconnectedness as solution

Hofmannsthal is keenly aware that he does not need to take any part in society whatsoever, except, if he wants, as an artist. A life of aesthetic and creative pleasure lies open to him in a way that it is for almost nobody else. He can, in the language of the poem, look at the birds and the stars, and sit and feast well into the early morning. But this life becomes, in contemplation of the reality facing him as a conscientious human being, inadequate – “my part is more than just this life’s slightest flame or slender lyre” – the lines reject making that life of luxuriant aestheticism the entirety of his world. Not only do the fruits of that life seem to be unworthy, Hofmannsthal also appears to feel a kind of guilt from it, suggested by “I can’t remove forgotten tragedies / That plagued past peoples from my eyes”.

He begins to see being fully aware of “the presence” / “Dasein” that runs through all things as the goal of his life. With that there comes a view of the world that sees all life as valuable for being a reflection of this central idea of its very existence. It’s not a religious idea per se, so much as the idea of our interconnectedness made clearer. Instead of seeing himself as isolated from other people because of his social status, Hofmannsthal here reworks his understanding of his position to allow himself the ability to feel keenly the value of other people, even as he doesn’t let it become a political statement. He disestablishes the hierarchies of his mind, instead of concerning himself with destroying the hierarchies of the world. In essence, he adds compassion to his conservatism. It is, I think, a somewhat heroic gesture.

Conclusion – Reasons to read Hofmannsthal

Hofmannsthal is a pretty cool poet. What I like the most about his poetry is how little there is of it, and how good what there is is. No matter how productively-minded you may be, there’s enough time to go back and reread things, and think about what they have to say. The German is attractive to the ear, and the topics that he deals with are usually interesting enough. That sounds like a lukewarm recommendation, and perhaps it is, but I think it’s difficult to capture a sense of beauty when you recommend something anyway. His poetry is beautiful and filled with pleasant turns and wondrous images. He is neither a great thinker nor a great soul in his poetry, but for a young man who stopped writing his poems only a year or two older than I am now, it’s amazing what he did achieve. Check him out.

For more German poetry, I’ve translated some pieces by Theodor Storm here.

The Largely-Forgotten Tragedy of Fontane’s Effi Briest

Introduction – Germany’s contribution to the European realist novel

There are no two ways about it – Effi Briest is a sad and depressing book, and a deeply tragic one too. It tells the story of the marriage of a young girl to a much older man, and that marriage’s inevitable break down. I heard about it, as I imagine a few others may have done, because Samuel Beckett really liked it, and though I don’t like Beckett’s writing much his praise was enough to put Fontane’s novel on my radar. Beckett said of it: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places”, and while I can’t imagine reading it four times I do think I’ll come back to it one day, and maybe even be moved once more. It is, all in all, an excellent book.

A painting of Theodor Fontane, author of Effi Briest
Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) is the most well-known representative of German bourgeois realism. He turned to novel writing late in his life, using works like Effi Briest and Frau Jenny Treibel with their female leads to criticise the social structure and ideals of the newly unified German Reich.

But that’s where its problems begin. Effi Briest is a good book: it is meticulously well put together, pleasantly short for a 19th century realist novel, and has interesting characters whose fates are easy enough to be interested in. But it was published 1895, a few scant years after Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a book which it has a lot in common with, and a book which is Great where Effi Briest is only good. I know the Germanists have tried to make Effi stand among Anna and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as one of the best realist novels of the 19th Century, but I can’t help but feel the comparison just leaves Effi looking silly, a little girl next to these older and more experienced women.

The Daughter of the Air – Effi Briest at home

“Poor Effi”, as the narrator on rare occasions breaks their neutral facade to call her, is seventeen at the story’s beginning, though there’s very little indicate that. The girl is introduced more as a cheeky child than as an almost-adult, with she and her mother doing some handiwork together. Effi soon leaves to be with her friends, though, where they make a mess eating berries and sitting on the swing at Effi’s house. The swing is one of the recurrent leitmotifs of the story, one of those objects connecting Effi and a certain vision of her world. She is given the epithet “Daughter of the air” at one point, and it well describes the carefree attitude that she has at the novel’s outset.

But there are storm clouds ahead, even if Effi can’t see them. While they eat their berries she tells her friends about the guest to the family’s house, Baron Geert von Innstettin, who once was madly in love with Effi’s mother but was unable to marry her due to lack of funds, and who perhaps – we assume – still has some passion left over. He proposes to Effi as soon as she has finished with her friends, in spite of only having had a glimpse of her up till then, and with no small amount of pressure from her parents Effi agrees to let herself be married off.

Very little of this is described, which I suppose is one of my main gripes with Fontane. The wedding is not described, the first real meeting between Effi and Innstetten isn’t described, and the honeymoon trip to Italy is equally sparsely illustrated. You might say that this is impressive stylistic economy – Fontane knows what he doesn’t need to show. Furthermore, it surely adds a sense of mystery to the novel, making us ask ourselves what might have happened and look for clues in the rest of the narrative. Up to a point I’d agree with both of these views. But only up to a point. For I suspect that Fontane’s economy is due to a lack of funds too – I can’t help but feel he just doesn’t have the talent or confidence to attempt certain scenes, such as going inside Effi’s head while she’s giving birth.

Kessin and its ghouls

After some shopping in Berlin, Effi is whisked away to the fictional town of Kessin, out on the Baltic Sea, where Innstettin has his home. It is a quiet, isolated town with an oppressive atmosphere that leaves Effi longing for her own home. One of the best scenes in this section of the novel is one where Effi sees the train heading West and cries – it is excellent precisely because the connection between home and trains is one we have to make for ourselves. Throughout the novel trains are constantly mentioned – they always point to another life that seems to be running away from us.

A picture of the Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea. In Effi Briest the town of Kessin becomes a hugely oppressive place for young Effi, who finds its populace close-minded and hostile, and the sea equally cold.

Even with Innstettin, who Effi does love, or thinks she does, there is difficulty. He goes away regularly for work, leaving her all alone. The townsfolk, bar one, are no company, and the house may have a ghost in the attic who prevents Effi from sleeping well. Another brilliant moment that reveals just how isolated Effi is is when she confesses to the maid about how she didn’t sleep well the first time the ghost appears. This information, given privately, is then immediately passed on to Innstettin by his servant – it shows where the real power in the house lies, and how Effi is completely without anyone to trust.

“An Affair” of sorts

Eventually an old friend of Innstettin’s comes to town to occupy one of the various beaurocratic posts created by the new German Reich. He is, like Effi’s husband, in his forties, but Major Crampas is also a far more youthful man than Innstettin is. Innstettin is a man who is absolutely blinded by various conceptions of duty, order, and what is proper – his career is everything to him, and even though he cares for Effi it’s hard to see much passion in his interaction with her.

Meanwhile, Crampas knows poetry, and dazzles Effi by introducing her to Heine’s works. Even though he has a wife, that doesn’t stop him from seducing her. The consummation of their affair takes place in a carriage, deep in the woods late one night on the way back from a dinner – a thoroughly Romantic location. It lies at the centre of the novel in terms both of structure, and in terms of pages.

But after it, there’s almost no hint that the affair took place. Effi meets him a few more times, and we forget about him. It may be that I didn’t understand the nuances of the German I read the novel in, but that really did seem to be all there was to it. There aren’t any more chapters devoted to him. He just fades out. Effi, for her part, doesn’t really seem to be all that into the affair. Like a leaf floating the air, she just seems content to be blown around by his passions.

Growing up and its Consequences

With the prospect of an imminent promotion Innstettin decides, much to Effi’s relief, to move to Berlin with her. She goes ahead to choose a flat, but deciding she doesn’t want to see Crampas again, she feigns illness until Innstettin himself comes out, a few weeks later, having finished up at home in Kessin. Her illness is a key incident because it shows how Effi has gone from being a carefree dreamer to having something akin to a cunning nature of her own. From being a child who it is easy to like, I found myself turning a little bit against her.

But time passes, and everybody gets on with life. Effi’s daughter, Annie, grows up a little, and Effi herself reaches about twenty-five years old before anything else happens. It is then, quite by chance, that Innstettin discovers Crampas’s old love letters to Effi. Even though the whole thing lies deep in the past he decides that his honour still demands he duel with Crampas, so he arrives in Kessin and kills him in single combat in another sparsely described scene – “The shots came; Crampas fell”. Crampas tries to say something, but dies before he can have any last words. Innstettin goes home, having already sent Effi away, and gets on with his life. Fontane’s realist style does well to take any kind of magic away from the conflict.

The Ending of the Story

Effi can’t go home – her parents forbid it – but she does get a little money from them and rents a small flat, also in Berlin. She has few visitors, except for one of Innstettin’s servants whom she had been responsible for hiring, and who now decides to carry on serving her. Only twice does she see her own child, but the second time, in a meeting organised with Innstettin’s blessing, Annie is completely monotonous and shows no signs of affection towards her mother. Effi sends her away after only a few minutes, and cries. But her inner turmoil is avoided by Fontane – another moment where he seems to have lacked the confidence to go inside her head.

Eventually though, Effi gets to go home after her parents take pity on her. She has some happy moments, then dies of a chill. It is a frustrating ending because there really is no reason for her to die. Both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary had relatively good reasons to justify their tragic fates. But with Effi, I can’t help but feel like Fontane was just shrugging his shoulders and saying “well, I have to finish the novel somehow”. I also am not sure I am a fan of the implications of the end, which seem to suggest that death is inevitable for adulterers. It’s strange to me because Fontane is generally a champion of progressive social changes in the novel. It’s like he can’t bring himself to have an ending that fully goes against convention.

A photo of a girl on a swing.
A little girl on a swing. If only Effi had chosen to stay on her swing instead of marrying at such a young age her life would not have ended in misery and tragedy. But as with both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary social pressures proved greater than Effi’s own resistance. We can only hope that in our own day the situation is no longer so.

The one thing I did like about the ending, though, was the glimpse we get of Innstettin. He now has served a short stint in prison for the duel and is back at work, having also had the promotion he wanted. But all his love for his job has vanished. He is tormented by the feeling that all of his career ambition is actually meaningless, that the duel was a mistake too. I didn’t want to see him have a gruesome comeuppance, but I was glad to see him face the consequences of his own actions. In much the same way Effi’s parents express the beginnings of doubts concerning the whole marriage, once she is back at home and dying. Even though Fontane isn’t willing to keep Effi alive, I suppose he does make the most of her death.

Conclusion

I suppose I can recommend Effi Briest, but only with reservations. If you are going to dip into Fontane, it seems to be an excellent place to start – but given how few of his works are translated, there’s not much choice to begin with. He called Effi his “first real success”, and it is a success. But as much as we often like to read good books, variety also seems to be pretty important in considering what to give our time to. And unfortunately there is another novel which involves trains, adultery, parents and children, and the battle of the individual against social pressures – another novel which is, I think, far better than Effi Briest. That’s the unavoidable problem here. If it weren’t for the book being useful for my German exams next year, I’d be feeling a little disappointed that I hadn’t just read Anna Karenina another time through.

Am I completely wrong here? Have you read Effi Briest and did you enjoy it? Comment below!

Picture of the Baltic Sea by Mantas Volungevicius [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] is used without changes.