Introduction: Fontane and the Bilder seiner Zeit Brian Tucker and John B. Lyon Wabash College / University of Pittsburgh Theodor Fontane, perhaps the most renowned German-language novelist of the nineteenth century, was born at the end of 1819 in Neuruppin and would have celebrated his two-hundredth birthday in 2019. During that year, literary scholars around the world celebrated on his behalf. This included a panel series at the 2019 German Studies Association conference in Portland, Oregon that was the initial impetus for this volume. We have entitled this special issue “Fontane at 200” because it aims to consider what it means to read Fontane now, at 200 years and beyond. To produce new readings of Fontane today means to account for the issues and involutions that maintain a firm grip on our collective critical interest, to identify the modern elements in his works that continue to compel inquiry. But it also means to recover elements of his writing that may have been overlooked or misunderstood in past interpretations. It is thus an effort both to connect Fontane to our time and to ground him more squarely in his own. Interestingly, in an 1875 review of his contemporary Gustav Freytag’s Die Ahnen, Fontane locates the modern element of narrative fiction in its temporal rootedness, in the reflection of its particular era. He writes in well-known lines, “Der moderne Roman soll ein Zeitbild sein, ein Bild seiner Zeit” (NA 21.1: 242). 1 He establishes this requirement as a fundamental criterion: if the modern novel means to be serious and successful, it must portray the time period from which it emanates. Fontane continues, underscoring that this has been the novel’s task for the last 150 years, essentially since the genre’s inception: “Jean Paul, Goethe, ja Freytag selbst … haben aus ihrer Welt und ihrer Zeit heraus geschrieben” (NA 21.1: 242). In this way, the best novel delivers a temporal image, a “Bild seiner Zeit,” where the possessive is repeatedly, consciously emphasized. Unlike an historical novel, which would by definition portray a time other than (prior to) its own, the modern novel is born from its depiction of its own time. It is worth pausing to consider what it could mean, aus einer Welt und einer Zeit heraus zu schreiben. On one level, one could easily understand this directive as part and parcel of a Realist program of representation: the modern 4 Brian Tucker and John B. Lyon novel should provide a mimetically faithful depiction of its world and time. In Fontane’s case, readers have long recognized the abundance of local color and historically accurate details. James Bade, for instance, in Fontane’s Landscapes, foregrounds “that authenticity in background and detail which makes his novels unique” (11). Fontane’s characters stroll down streets and stop in restaurants and shops that would have been intimately familiar to his contemporary readership. As Peter Wruck puts it, “Und sein Berlin? Er hat es dem wirklichen topographisch so getreu nachgebildet, daß der Leser dieselben Wege abschreiten konnte wie die Figuren” (413). That topographical accuracy makes it possible, even today, to locate many of Fontane’s settings on the map and in person. In this sense, the requirement that novels provide a portrait of their world and time could be understood as a Realist narrative correlate to the historical positivism of the late-nineteenth century. One might say that Fontane, like Leopold von Ranke, seeks to mirror an historical reality and to reflect through mimetically precise details “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” 2 Anja Haberer takes the understanding of the Fontanean Zeitbild in a different direction, insisting that this criterion imposes methodological demands not only on the novelist who would produce modern narrative but also on those critics and theorists who seek to interpret modern narrative as an image of its time and place. It pushes us, she writes, to expand the traditionally “textbezogene Methodik” via “eine gesellschafts- und kulturgeschichtliche Perspektive” (21). In other words, if one agrees that a text aims to depict a temporally and geographically contingent social reality, then one can assess that aim only through a cultural historical perspective that looks to sources beyond the literary text itself. Haberer describes the Zeitbild’s methodological demands in more detail: Die bestimmenden Kräfte, von denen das gesellschaftliche Bewußtsein des späten neunzehnten Jahrhunderts geprägt wird, müssen mit historischer Genauigkeit aus den zeitgenössischen Quellen heraus dargestellt werden, wenn Fontanes Anspruch, ein Zeitbild zu geben, sinnvoll beurteilt werden soll. (21) Haberer’s passage responds to Fontane’s essay by duplicating the “aus … heraus” formulation that one finds there. Just as Fontane asserts that modern novels should be “aus ihrer Welt und ihrer Zeit heraus geschrieben” (NA 21.1: 242), Haberer adds that the social forces of the time should be depicted “aus den zeitgenössischen Quellen heraus.” The author’s and the literary critic’s tasks overlap in that both must take as their point of departure a sense of temporal and cultural rootedness. The critic can interpret the novel as a “Bild seiner Zeit” only by reconstituting the contours of that time through sources beyond the novelistic image itself. Introduction: Fontane and the Bilder seiner Zeit 5 Haberer offers a clear methodological approach, but there are further important elements that such an approach should also include, for in filtering everything through a socio-historical lens, one risks occluding the aesthetic, psychological, stylistic, and other qualities that are equally essential to the “Zeitbilder” that Fontane’s novels construct. A more holistic approach would recognize both the social-historical and other discourses of Fontane’s era, accounting for what Norbert Mecklenburg describes as the “Vielstimmigkeit” of Fontane’s novels. In addition, it would focus not exclusively on Fontane’s era, but also on the intersection with our own era. For, as Mecklenburg puts it at the outset of his extensive study of Fontane and the “Einzigartigkeit und Modernität seines Realismus,” “[s]ein literarisches Werk hat bei aller Geschichtlichkeit eine erstaunliche Gegenwärtigkeit bewahrt” (ix). The articles in this special issue take up the mantle of the methodological task posed by the novel as Zeitbild. One way to frame the determinative social forces that Haberer references within a larger analytical context is to think of them as discourses circulating in the late nineteenth century. From this perspective, a chief methodological development in recent decades is to read Fontane’s texts as being inscribed within the discursive formations of his time. Scholars have expanded the text-based approach of close reading and moved toward a cultural historical perspective by reading Fontane’s works not as a privileged, walledoff form of literary or poetic language but rather as participating in and being constituted by the prevalent discourses of late nineteenth-century Germany. Michel Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge that one can never clearly define the boundaries of a book because every book “is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (23). By reading Fontane as embedded in a system or as a node within a discursive network, we draw out links to other kinds of texts and sources, other kinds of speaking and writing. More and more often, scholars are discovering that these links are not external but rather internal, not referential but constitutive. The discourses of the late nineteenth century circulate both around and within Fontane’s works, because his writing participates in those discourses and indeed weaves in snippets from other contemporaneous sources. Foremost among these in recent scholarship has been work on media studies and Fontane’s writing practices. Petra McGillen, for example, shows how Fontane’s novels make use of “samples” or discursive “sound bites,” consisting “mainly of past media content” (240). Fontane spent his adult life immersed in the polyphonic media environment of the periodical press, and McGillen notes that Fontane cut and pasted from popular media to bring that multiplicity of voices into his novels. She writes, “With his discursive sound bites, Fontane put this polyphony into his novels - or rather, he built his 6 Brian Tucker and John B. Lyon novels on top of this polyphony” (231). In other words, the discursive networks of nineteenth-century Germany, particularly those of the periodical press, are internal to and essential to Fontane’s writing. As McGillen’s work demonstrates, however, such analyses are also products of contemporary discourses. Terms such as “sampling,” “sound bites,” and “cutting and pasting” point to a late-20thand early 21st-century media discourse, and the keen awareness of the importance of mediality would have been impossible without the media studies perspective embodied in Marshall MacLuhan’s dictum, “The medium is the message” (7). Analyses such as McGillen’s occupy an intersectional node between the media discourse in Fontane’s era and today’s discourse of media studies. This special issue of Colloquia Germanica includes articles that represent different nodes of intersection between discourses contemporary to Fontane and discourses contemporary to our day. These range from articles that situate Fontane’s texts within late nineteenth-century literary conventions to articles that link Fontane’s discourse of aesthetics and appearance to twenty-first-century practices of self-fashioning via social media. In this special issue, several articles explore the relationship between Fontane’s works and periodical print media, drawing on both the media discourses of Fontane’s era and current media studies. Petra McGillen contributes a piece that highlights how Fontane learned journalistic and literary practices from the Times while serving as a correspondent in London. Fontane’s journalistic failures in London helped him develop a more complex understanding of journalistic authority and opinion-forming processes than was possible in the German press. And Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile shows how newspapers represent a constitutive medium for Fontane’s concept of Realism. With references to major novels such as Unwiederbringlich, Irrungen, Wirrungen, and Der Stechlin, he explores how Fontane uses advertisements, current events, and newspaper reportage to construct fictional worlds that remain tethered to contemporary media and to present-day discourses, thus appearing more familiar - more “real” - to his contemporary readership. Willi Barthold’s article takes a related approach by focusing exclusively on Unterm Birnbaum and its media and publishing context. Fontane’s murder mystery novella first appeared in 1885 in Die Gartenlaube, Germany’s most influential illustrated magazine at the time. Barthold’s reading analyzes how Unterm Birnbaum reflexively comments on the very media environment in which it was published, thereby calling into question the construction of reality in both the illustrated periodical press and in its own narrative. The discourse of media and mediality contravenes traditional aesthetic discourses of the nineteenth century, where romantic notions of aesthetic autonomy lingered from earlier in the century. Several analyses in this special vol- Introduction: Fontane and the Bilder seiner Zeit 7 ume indicate that Fontane’s works, although deeply engaged with aesthetic concerns, undermine such romantic notions and re-frame the role of the visual arts. For example, Erika Kontulainen finds in Fontane’s representations of landscapes less a spatial and visual phenomenon and more of a temporal one, where landscapes render space as a dynamic complex that draws on subjective and cultural memory. Fontane’s representations of landscapes refuse to perceive the world as an objectively given totality, but instead suggest the co-existence of multiple realities, real and imagined. Stefan Bronner’s article traces the shift from text-based to visual-based culture in Die Poggenpuhls and finds in it an analogy to contemporary Instagram influencers, where the act of fictionalizing and aesthetically elevating one’s life privileges appearance over substance and also offers a democratizing opportunity to refashion one’s existence. And Edith Krause’s treatment of Schach von Wuthenow focuses on Victoire’s abject face and how, when confronted with this disfigurement, Schach finds himself at a precarious border where acceptable standards of beauty and disaffecting ugliness collide and challenge the core of his socialized identity. The novel’s focus on the visually and aesthetically abject embraces the ambiguities and variable forces that constantly cloud intentions, appearance, and reality, and instead challenge the idea of the body as something whole and of subjectivity as something always orderly and coherent. Media and aesthetics are major discourses in this volume, but Fontane’s varied backgrounds and interests entail multiple other contemporary discourses of his era and an array of them are represented here. Peter Pfeiffer, for example, addresses gender and the reception of the adultery novel by contrasting Fontane’s Effi Briest with Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Unsühnbar. He demonstrates how a shared literary form gives rise to divergent aesthetic evaluations. Fontane and Ebner-Eschenbach use the same genre, but to decidedly different ends and with notably different outcomes. Whereas the clichéd form of the novel of wifely adultery serves as a scaffold for Fontane’s modernist experimentation, Ebner-Eschenbach struggles against the genre’s socially ingrained implications for the place of women in both personal relationships and society, as well as the ethical issues of being an authentic female individual that the genre presents. While also treating an adultery novel, Brian Tucker draws on emotion studies, specifically the study of empathetic judgments, to analyze the reception of Effi Briest by Fontane’s contemporaries, asking why Effi elicited empathy but Innstetten was rejected as repulsive. He argues that readers want to see Innstetten punished for the malicious and excessive punishment that he inflicts on others. Yet to Fontane, their judgment, even if empathetic and compassionate, feels far too adamant for the murkiness and moral ambivalence of human be- 8 Brian Tucker and John B. Lyon havior. Fontane pleads instead for a perspective that tempers a desire for justice with leniency and indulgence. Other discourses also figure importantly in Fontane. Before his career as a writer, he was an apothecary, and medical discourse plays an important role in his texts, as Vera Bachmann highlights. Bachmann’s essay demonstrates that homeopathic principles are evident not only as subject matter within Fontane’s novel, Unwiederbringlich, but that they are closely bound to poetological principles in Fontane. Principles of quantity and similarity shape his aesthetics of literary reception, so that he prioritizes the effects of the miniscule over grand causes. And working as an international correspondent, Fontane was also keenly attuned to Germany’s rising power on the international scene and its role in colonial and nation-building endeavors. John B. Lyon approaches Unwiederbringlich from a transnationalist, Europeanist perspective and highlights orientalist-like thinking in the novel, where false “Vorstellungen” lead to the downfall of both a marriage and a nation. The failure of an individual relationship is bound to national affairs and links Denmark’s loss to Prussia in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 to false Prussian ideas about Danish lands and false Danish ideas about themselves. This brief overview of discourses in which Fontane participated is admittedly far from exhaustive; each of the examples given above could be read as an overlap between multiple discursive spheres: Pfeiffer’s article, for example, negotiates both literary conventions and gender roles; Krause’s engages aesthetic, psychological, and social discourse; McGillen’s paper draws on both media studies and national discourse; Bronner links aesthetic concerns to both mediality and power, and so on. From these various intersections and analyses, we hope that a richer and more nuanced appreciation and understanding of Fontane will emerge for today’s readers, now more than 200 years later. We aim to show not only how he wrote “aus seiner Welt und seiner Zeit heraus,” but also why his writing still finds resonance today. Notes 1 Collected editions of Fontane’s works are cited in this issue using the following abbreviations: NA = Nymphenburger Ausgabe (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsanstalt, 1959—75); HA = Hanser edition (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971—97); GBA = Große Brandenburger Ausgabe (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994 ff.). Complete bibliographic information is found in the Works Cited page of each contribution. Introduction: Fontane and the Bilder seiner Zeit 9 2 Cited in Davies, 93. Hugo Aust employs a similar formulation, writing that Fontane’s Realism presents itself “als befreiter, entautomatisierter Blick, der registriert, wie etwas tatsächlich ist” (416). Works Cited Aust, Hugo. “Fontanes Poetik: Realismus.” Fontane-Handbuch. Ed. Christian Grawe and Helmuth Nürnberger. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000. 412—27. Bade, James. Fontane’s Landscapes. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. Davies, Steffan. “Geschichte Wallensteins: Ranke’s Problem of Narrative - and Schiller’s Solution? ” Textual Intersections: Literature, History, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Ed. Rachel Langford. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 89—105 Fontane, Theodor. Sämtliche Werke. (NA) Ed. Edgar Gross, Kurt Schreinert et. al. 24 vols. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsanstalt, 1959—75. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Haberer, Anja. Zeitbilder. Krankheit und Gesellschaft in Theodor Fontanes Romanen Cecile (1886) und Effi Briest (1894). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man� 2 nd ed. New York: Signet, 1964. McGillen, Petra. The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Mecklenburg, Norbert. Theodor Fontane. Realismus, Redevielfalt, Ressentiment. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2018. Wruck, Peter. “Fontanes Berlin: Urbanisierung und Urbanität.” Fontane Blätter 6 (1986): 398—415.