Theodor Fontane as Realist Novelist

Abstract

Theodor Fontane as realist novelist ... where to start? I’ll begin by considering the origins and nature of his Anglo-German interests before trying to give some sense of what, to my mind, are among the key aspects of his distinctive version of literary realism. Theodor Fontane, the son of a pharmacist of French Huguenot extraction, was born in Neuruppin, a small town North West of Berlin, but when he was seven his family moved to the Baltic port of Swinemünde (today Świnoujście) for five years. He loved the river and the sea and used to watch the English dredger for half hours at a time. The engineer, an old Scot called MacDonald, was a particular friend. He had a lifelong interest in British literature and history, fuelled from an early age by his father’s enthusiasm for Walter Scott, whose novels Fontane began reading as a boy of thirteen or fourteen. From a young age he lived with Shakespeare’s works too, seeing the plays on stage in Dresden in the 1840s, where, following his father’s trade, he was working as a pharmacist’s assistant. He translated Hamlet at this time and probably a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later, as press correspondent in the 1850s in London and as theatre critic in Berlin in the 1870s and ’80s, he saw and wrote about dozens of productions. He had a more intimate knowledge of English-language literature than any other German writer of his time and declared himself a Nordlandsmensch,1 a Northerner. Fontane was no stranger to the exigences of literary anniversaries, being called on in 1864 to front the celebrations for Shakespeare’s 300th anniversary at the Berlin Schauspielhaus, a task that caused him no little anxiety and last-minute head-scratching as he worked on the Prologue he had been commissioned to both compose and to deliver on stage.2 In 1871, for Scott’s centenary, despite