Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works Erika Kontulainen University of Pennsylvania Abstract: This paper explores how encounters with natural spaces as landscapes in Fontane’s works trigger within the narrator or characters a contemplation of the past which is being (re)constructed in the present through the mediation of memory. Such poetic interactions between past and present worlds, imagined and real, suggest that reality through the image of landscape appears as a dynamic construct, formed through subjective and cultural means of interpretation. My discussion focuses on three works by Fontane which are central for his landscape poetics, including his travel narratives Jenseit des Tweed: Bilder und Briefe aus Schottland (1860) and Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862—89), and his novel Cécile (1887). Keywords: Theodor Fontane, landscape, memory, Jenseit des Tweed, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, Cécile Fontane’s landscapes permeate his entire literary work, including his poetry, travel writings, essays, letters, and of course, his novels, and provide a compelling contribution to representations of space in the literature of German Realism. Fontane’s landscapes offer a nuanced reading of space in this literary period, moving beyond nineteenth-century historical and scientific paradigms which rely on a notion of reality as an empirically and visually verifiable truth, or as a product of a pre-determined social and cultural order. Consider for example Fontane novels such as Schach von Wuthenow (1883), Cécile (1887), or Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888). They depict characters who struggle to meet the societal conventions and expectations in Prussian Germany, and whose existence is often mirrored in the confined domestic, interior, and urban spaces of their quotidian lives. As a contrast, the encounter with natural spaces and topoi such as the country outing (Landpartie) enable Fontane’s characters to transgress their societal restrictions and the border between conventional everyday life 70 Erika Kontulainen and temporary relief. To this end, travel to natural environments in Fontane’s works manifests itself as a subjective encounter with landscape, in which nature becomes a reflection of personal and cultural identity and memory. I will examine in this paper how encounters with natural spaces in Fontane’s works initiate within the describing or observing subject (the author, narrator, or character of a text) an interaction with landscape, resulting in a contemplation of what is absent — namely, the past. In this interaction, landscape becomes a space of personal and cultural memory, in which the subject may retrieve an imagined past into the present through the mediation of memory. Such aesthetic encounters with landscape in Fontane are indicative of a quest for self-expression and personal and cultural identity. I will focus my discussion on three works by Fontane which all are essential for understanding his landscape poetics. The first two texts are representative of Fontane’s earlier writing prior to his career as a novelist, yet foundational for his engagement with landscape and memory: Jenseit des Tweed: Bilder und Briefe aus Schottland (1860) and Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862-89). I will finally illustrate based on Cécile (1887) how this engagement culminates in Fontane’s novels. The aesthetic mediation of geographical place as landscape reveals how the meaning of landscape is not inherent in the object itself but produced by means of its cultural interpretation. Particularly interesting is the suggestive power of the immaterial worlds of landscape and memory as products of human subjectivity. Just like memory is an imagined mediation of the past, landscape, too, originally a genre of painting derived from the seventeenth century (think of landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain and Jakob Ruysdael), is a mediated and artificial form of nature, situated within rather than outside the human imagination. The realization that an artistic genre forms the basis for how human beings, including Fontane, have imagined landscape shows that our perception of what landscapes are supposed to entail and look like is pre-shaped by a pictorial tradition (Gann 323). The term landscape is thus situated somewhere between geography and aesthetics. Fontane’s landscapes, too, demonstrate a unifying element in their common reference to the visual arts, mainly landscape painting, and to aesthetic categories such as the picturesque. 1 Typical attributes for describing landscape in Fontane’s works include adjectives such as malerisch, schön, or reizend, and nouns such as Bild, Landschaftsbild, or Szenerie. Hubert Ohl points to the distinct Bildcharakter of Fontane’s landscapes and argues that, although the various elements in the landscape may be viewed as objective in their existence within the scenery, Fontane’s landscapes are neither supposed to be realistic nor render Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 71 objective accounts of reality. Instead, they should be understood as representations of art (Ohl 202). 2 In its constructed nature, landscape does not designate an objective rendition of the external world; rather, landscape represents a productive locus for human self-expression. Joachim Ritter famously states in his landscape essay: “Landschaft ist Natur, die im Anblick für einen fühlenden und empfindenden Betrachter ästhetisch gegenwärtig ist” (150). The programmatic emphasis on local geography and landscape in Fontane’s works, as in German Realism overall, reflects Ritter’s remark insofar as the heightened awareness of the artificiality of natural environments comes to the forefront in this literary period. Landscape thus becomes a characteristic feature of German realist writing, and landscape painting a highly popular genre midcentury. Portraying a cultural memory, an imagination of the past, landscape may be interpreted as an aesthetic locus of absence, even loss. One explanation for this may be found in the increasing and rapid changes to natural environments in the German lands of the nineteenth century, caused by industrialization, demographic growth and an economization of agriculture. These developments led to changing perceptions of space and time, and a change in the relationship between human beings and place. John Lyon discusses in this context how German realist writing represents a shift in how place is perceived. No longer able to provide meaning and identity, place is observed as threatened, even lost to the dispersive forces of modernism and therefore belonging to the past (28). Already earlier realist authors started contemplating the rapidly increasing changes occurring to the natural world. Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter is known for his lengthy landscape descriptions that suggest an attempt to preserve place and counteract anticipated loss or change to the living environment. Also, culture-historical travel books started becoming more popular midcentury. These are books with detailed topographical, geographical and historical descriptions of places from all corners of Germany. Fontane’s Wanderungen may be viewed as part of this development. With a focused gaze on the local surroundings, literature began perceiving more carefully the spaces inhabited by human beings. Geographical places, authentic regions, and human culture increasingly received more attention. The perspective turned from romantic to realistic (Freund 102—3). Overall, the literary period of German Realism represents a programmatic shift toward local places and cultural history and memory. The literary construction of landscape becomes a geographically identifiable locality, a place which the individual may discover for himor herself, and name it geographically, culturally, and historically. Furthermore, the artificiality and permeability of landscape as an aesthetic space allow human subjectivity to transgress the perceived objectivity of place. 72 Erika Kontulainen The aesthetic and cultural mediation of (geographical) place as landscape offers a possibility to imagine and retrieve into the present meaning that has been perceived as lost. Writing landscape is thus different from simply describing it. It is “the very fixity of geography that allows for the mobility of imaginative locale-building” (Bode and Labbe 3). Simon Schama discusses the close connection between landscape and memory, geography and culture, and states that every perception of landscape entails imagined aspects: “Landscapes are culture before they are nature” (61). The imaginative practices associated with landscape in Fontane’s works are in fact representations of memory, and there is moreover often no clear distinction between memory and imagination in German realist texts — an observation already noted in the seminal studies on German Realism by Hubert Ohl (1968) and Eduard Beaucamp (1968). Beaucamp notes how imagination, emphasized in his study especially in the works of Wilhelm Raabe, is foremost directed backwards in time and is as such memory (94). In his 1872 essay on German author Willibald Alexis, Fontane discusses pure landscape description and the denomination of single elements such as the sun, water, and trees in literary texts as “die billigste literarische Beschäftigung, die gedacht werden kann” (NA 21.1: 206). The function of pure description is to Fontane simply a means to move narration forward. He continues: “Die Landschaftsschilderung hat nur noch Wert, wenn sie als künstlerische Folie für einen Stein auftritt, der dadurch doppelt leuchtend wird, wenn sie den Zweck verfolgt, Stimmungen vorzubereiten oder zu steigern” (NA 21.1: 207). The metaphor of the rock, a dead object, comes alive when the surrounding landscape creates and enhances atmosphere. The silent rock, symbolizing in this context the past and the no longer living, regains life in the present through poetic imagination and narration� Fontane’s praise of the ideal landscape is directed toward Willibald Alexis’s historical novels, particularly Isegrim (1854). The ideal landscape according to Fontane must create a certain atmosphere in order to evoke memories and associations of the past—the rock must come to life again. About Isegrim he writes, “Gleich das erste Kapitel ist eine landschaftliche Ouvertüre zu dem, was kommt. Wir sehen ein märkisches Luch, an dessen einem Rande unser Isegrimm auf Haus Ilitz wohnt. Auf Meilen hin ein Moorgrund, eine Torfniederung; die ganze Geschichte der Landschaft hier herum knüpft sich an dieses Stück Sumpf und Sand” (NA 21.1: 207). Fontane explains how Alexis’s novel oscillates between the past and the present, transitioning into a poetic imagination of the past and then returning to the present: “Hier, vor tausend Jahren, wurde die große Wendenschlacht geschlagen… . Über dieser Landschaft liegt jetzt ein grau Gewölk; … alles öde, leer; nur eine Krähe sitzt auf dem einen Stein. So das Bild, das die ersten Seiten vor uns entrollen. Und alles, was geschieht, es stimmt zu dem Ton, Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 73 den Willibald Alexis hier einleitend anschlägt. Das ist Landschaftsschilderung” (NA 21.1: 207). These observations on landscape depiction in Willibald Alexis’s novels illustrate a model for the kind of poetic interaction between landscape and memory that Fontane employs in his own literary work. Furthermore, the chronology of scholarship on Fontane indicates a strong continuity in reading Fontane’s landscapes not only as spatial but as temporal spaces, 3 or what Mikhail Bakhtin would define as a “chronotope” (84) in that the representation of space and time, landscape and memory, both provide and structure meaning in Fontane’s texts. Moreover, Fontane’s landscapes may be read as virtual spaces because they create a tension between the visual and the imagined; the concretely present (landscape) is always something other than what is being remembered (the past) (Zimmermann 138). Landscape in Fontane is thus more a function of Fontane’s portrayal of figures, rather than a conception of spatial qualities. Individual places and landscapes and at times simply their denomination in Fontane’s novels trigger personal memories or historical reminiscences within the novels’ characters. Think for example in Cécile when Gordon during a table conversation speaks about the trout in Loch Leven at his Scottish home of Kinross. In this context, Gordon makes sure to mention Mary Stuart and her imprisonment at the old Loch Leven Castle in the middle of the lake (GBA I/ 9: 72). The scenic and geographical components of this episode in Cécile form the pretext for narrating the historical anecdote, which in its turn serves to reflect latent tensions within the world of the novel. The significance of the landscapes and places in Fontane only becomes visible through the memory and associations of his characters. What these localities objectively look like or signify remains incidental (Ohl 205—6). Fontane’s engagement with landscape thereby transcends topographical description, which is an observation made among many scholars—already as early as by Max Tau in his seminal study Der assoziative Faktor in der Landschafts- und Ortsdarstellung Theodor Fontanes (1928), and more recently for example by James Bade in Fontane’s Landscapes (2009). Fontane’s landscapes, many of them geographically verifiable places, establish at least initially a sense of objective realism. However, Fontane is neither interested in the specificity of nature, nor is he like Stifter obsessed with lengthier landscape descriptions. Fontane is interested instead in the individual and productive encounters that his narrators and characters experience with landscape. These encounters are determined by a connection to memory and the past, in which personal and historical experiences are imagined. Any perceived loss in the present is in Fontane retrieved through a poeticization of the past, not inherent in the landscape itself, but imagined through human encounter. 74 Erika Kontulainen The imagination and cultural memory of the past as a poetic construct is of central importance in Fontane’s Scottish travel narrative Jenseit des Tweed: Bilder und Briefe aus Schottland (1860). As Fontane embarks upon his two-week journey to Scotland in 1858, he sets off on an imaginary journey back in time to the romantic setting of the Scottish Highlands. Fontane was excited to finally travel the lands and legends of Walter Scott, Mary Stuart and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and with his very own eyes see the landscapes which he had only read about in literature and history books. The Scottish literary and historical canon was by no means foreign to Fontane. In a letter dated April 15, 1891 to Hans Hertz, the son of his publisher, Fontane even admits having, in his childhood, “mit Maria Stuart zu Bett gegangen und mit Archibald Douglas aufgestanden” (HA IV/ 4: 113). The Scottish landscape was to Fontane, like most other Scotland tourists at that time, saturated with literary and historical subjects, and thus inscribed with a certain cultural memory. Jenseit des Tweed must therefore be read as a highly stylized journey into a poetically transfigured province, meaning that we should not read Fontane’s travel narrative as an accurate rendering of a contemporary, modernized Scotland. Fontane’s travels in Scotland were directed specifically at tracing the legacies of Ossian, Macbeth, Mary Stuart, and foremost the sites connected to Walter Scott. During the nineteenth century, Walter Scott was perhaps the most notable actor in Germany’s lasting interest in Scotland - something that also becomes evident in the German travel narratives of Scotland from the 1820s and onward. Scott was in fact the main catalyst for the massive literary tourism in Scotland during the nineteenth century. The popularity of his historical novels and his epic poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) resulted in mass tourism with a literary purpose, complete with visits to the sites and regions in Scotland depicted in Scott’s works (GBA IV/ 2: 274). No other author, including Robert Burns and J.M. Barrie, played a greater role in the promotion of Scotland, both in Britain and abroad, as a place of romance and history, than Walter Scott (Durie 46). 4 Upon visiting Loch Katrine, central to Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake, Fontane emphasizes the importance of the poem to fully understanding the site’s cultural significance: Unmittelbar hinter Callander beginnt, auf eine Strecke von etwa drei deutschen Meilen, jener schöne, berg- und seegeschmückte Landstrich, dem die Schotten in dankbarer Huldigung gegen den Dichter, der hier jeden Zoll breit Erde poetisch verherrlicht hat, den Beinamen »the country of the lady of the lake« gegeben haben. Um dieses Land zu verstehen und zu genießen, ist es nöthig, mit dem Inhalt der gleichnamigen Dichtung einigermaßen vertraut zu sein. (GBA IV/ 2: 127) Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 75 Following this quoted passage is a lengthier summary of Scott’s poem. The summary forms a substantial digression away from the main text, covering about half of the entire chapter. In fact, Fontane makes it a frequent practice in his text to provide his readers with literary and historical summaries. The memory of landscape is not inherent to the landscape itself, but it is the digression which becomes the inscribing agent of cultural memory upon the landscape. The landscape itself, as a geographical locality, establishes a realistic setting for Scott’s poem and Fontane’s text, but is overshadowed by its literary context. Moving away from the immediate description of landscape to the memory of literature, Fontane not only challenges the genre conventions of travel writing, but also condenses the landscape into a fixed image constructed through literature: “Die Lokalität scheint eine romantische Dichtung fast wie herauszufordern …” (GBA IV/ 2: 138). It is Fontane’s text (and Walter Scott) and not the landscape as such that carries further the legacy and cultural memory of a Scottish national author and a literary history: “Jeder müht sich die Stelle zu erkennen, wo das mit so viel dichterischem Aufwand geschilderte Haus des alten Douglas gestanden haben soll, aber nur Birken und junge Tannen überragen die unwirthbare Fläche” (GBA IV/ 2: 139). As suggested by this quotation, the absence of material traces in the historical present is recuperated through the presence of cultural memory in the form of Scott’s poem and Fontane’s text. The literary semanticization of space inscribes significance onto a landscape perceived as lost in the present. The Lady of the Lake marked a pivotal moment in the development of Scottish literary tourism and in the discovery of the Scottish Highlands, changing the behavior of Scott’s readers. Suddenly, readers wanted to visit, see, and imagine the landscape as described in the poem. In the year of its publication, The Lady of the Lake sold up to 20,000 copies and immediately triggered a rush of visitors to the locality, drawing from the local population, the English, Americans, and travelers from continental Europe (Durie 45—47; Watson 67—68). The masses of tourists who then started traveling to the site of Scott’s poem have never abated. Fontane’s model for narrating landscape and cultural memory is determined by an attempt to objectify memory in the landscape by recuperating meaning which is not immediately available in the sites he visits. Just like other tourists visiting Loch Katrine, Fontane visited the landscape enhanced primarily by his memory of something that never happened outside the textual reality of the poem. It is Fontane’s vivid imagination, fed by historical fact and detail, that contributes to the true (reading) experience of his travel narrative, and that makes Fontane’s text into a distinctive piece of writing. Nicola Watson points to the fictional associations of this landscape as an “extreme example of romantic loyalty,” not “layered with geology, not with autobiographical feeling, not with 76 Erika Kontulainen the material mementoes of history, but with a literary memory both personal and collective” (75). Such acts of appropriation, which tourists such as Fontane indulged in, illustrate the ways in which being a reader of Scott’s poem enabled the stranger (and foreigner Fontane) to be familiar with the landscape. Jenseit des Tweed forms the starting point for Fontane’s life-long literary preoccupation with landscape as a medium of cultural memory, culminating in his magnum opus Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862—89). Just as Walter Scott saturated Scotland’s landscape with a sense of the local, with poetry, tradition, and history, so too did Fontane invent a cultural memory of landscape for the Mark Brandenburg. In fact, the idea for the Wanderungen was born in Scotland: Mit diesem Havelland, dem es, wie jeder Potsdam-Besucher wissen wird, auch keineswegs an Schönheit und malerischem Reiz gebricht, möcht’ ich die Ufer des Forth vergleichen, die jetzt, während wir im Steamer den Fluß hinauffuhren, mit Dörfern und Villen, Städten und Burgen, vor allem aber mit dem Klang berühmter Namen zu uns herübergrüßten. (GBA IV/ 2: 109—10) Fontane’s Wanderungen illustrates a poetic program similar to the one in Jenseit des Tweed. It is a program that seeks to (re-)construct a cultural memory and an imagined past seemingly lost or forgotten, somewhere under the multitude of temporal layers, yet inherently rooted in the landscapes to which Fontane travels. Fontane again picks up on the parallels between Scotland and Brandenburg in the preface of the Wanderungen, in which he further celebrates his journey to Scotland as the initiating moment for his own project. Fontane, self-made author that he was, had decided to become the Walter Scott of the Mark: “Erst die Fremde lehrt uns, was wir an der Heimat besitzen.” Das habe ich an mir selber erfahren und die ersten Anregungen zu diesen “Wanderungen durch die Mark” sind mir auf Streifereien in der Fremde gekommen. Die Anregungen wurden Wunsch, der Wunsch wurde Entschluß. Es war in der schottischen Grafschaft Kinroß, deren schönster Punkt der Levensee ist… . Es waren Erinnerungen aus der Heimat, ein unvergessener Tag. (GBA V/ 1: 1—2) In Scotland, Fontane found a model for creating a similar cultural history of his native Brandenburg — a terra incognita waiting to be canonized, just like the Scottish landscape already had been canonized through its literature and history. For his project, Fontane positions himself as the cicerone of Brandenburg’s cultural memory, seeking to retrieve and collect its fragments of memories, stories, and histories that have disappeared or are about to disappear under the layers of space and time. He enables a narrative of the Mark to come to life and safeguards its existence through writing: Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 77 Ich bin die Mark durchzogen und habe sie reicher gefunden, als ich zu hoffen gewagt hatte. Jeder Fußbreit Erde belebte sich und gab Gestalten heraus, und wenn meine Schilderungen unbefriedigt lassen, so werd ich der Entschuldigung entbehren müssen, daß es eine Armut war, die ich aufzuputzen oder zu vergolden hatte. Umgekehrt, ein Reichtum ist mir entgegengetreten, dem gegenüber ich das bestimmte Gefühl habe, seiner niemals auch nur annähernd Herr werden zu können; denn das immerhin Umfangreiche, das ich in nachstehendem biete, ist auf im ganzen genommen wenig Meilen eingesammelt worden: am Ruppiner See hin und vor den Toren Berlins. Und sorglos hab ich es gesammelt, nicht wie einer, der mit der Sichel zur Ernte geht, sondern wie ein Spaziergänger, der einzelne Ähren aus dem reichen Felde zieht. (GBA V/ 1: 3) Fontane defines himself as a collector who can select carefully the finest ‘harvest’ by strolling through the landscape. This rhetoric is similar to that of the Brothers Grimm, who in their 1819 preface to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) refer to their collection of fairytales as “einzelne Ähren” which were able to survive “Sturm und andere[s] Unglück” (13) and which need to be harvested, collected, and secured for the future, as they are about to vanish: “So ist es uns vorgekommen, wenn wir gesehen haben, wie von so vielem, was in früherer Zeit geblüht hat, nichts mehr übrig geblieben, selbst die Erinnerung daran fast ganz verloren war, als unter dem Volke Lieder, ein paar Bücher, Sagen und diese unschuldigen Hausmärchen” (13). Fontane’s mission as a collector and stroller is like that of the Brothers Grimm in that they all seek to retrieve and preserve the (imagined) cultural memory of a certain (imagined) place, just before it is too late. In his second, 1864 foreword to the first volume of the Wanderungen, Fontane lists the types of visual and oral culture that the traveler to the Mark will encounter: Du wirst Klosterruinen begegnen, von deren Existenz höchstens die nächste Stadt eine leise Kenntnis hatte; du wirst inmitten alter Dorfkirchen, deren zerbröckelter Schindelturm nur auf Elend deutete, große Wandbilder oder in den treppenlosen Grüften reiche Kupfersärge mit Kruzifix und vergoldeten Wappenschildern finden; du wirst Schlachtfelder überschreiten, Wendenkirchhöfe, Heidengräber, von denen die Menschen nichts mehr wissen, und statt der Nachschlagebuchs- und Allerweltsgeschichten werden Sagen und Legenden und hier und da selbst die Bruchstücke verklungener Lieder zu dir sprechen. (GBA V/ 1: 7) Here, however, Fontane goes beyond the metaphor of the Ähre and contrary to the Grimms insists on a mutual co-existence between the physical (landscape) and spiritual (memory) world, and between visual and non-visual representa- 78 Erika Kontulainen tion� In the Wanderungen, Fontane moves from the fragmented material world of landscape to constructing through his collection of stories, myths, and legends an imagined cultural memory of an immaterial past. This memory hinges upon the materiality of the present landscape as a semantic space carrying meaning from the present back into the past. The landscape is, however, through its decaying and changing nature fragile, and it threatens to disappear altogether. Fontane’s role is to re-activate life into the traces present or nearly lost in the landscape by means of poetic imagination. The invention of cultural memory in the Mark becomes something of a hermeneutic endeavor. The very fragility and even loss of the material world demands poetic imagination, myth, and legend, to (re-)construct and uncover its unknown stories and histories which otherwise lack verification in the material world. The imagination of landscape and memory transforms the Mark Brandenburg into a living space. The material world functions as a mere backdrop against which the poetic engagement with memory can be practiced. Fontane’s cultural memory of the Mark presents itself as a mediation of history, myth, and legend. In one chapter of the Wanderungen, he especially draws on the medium of landscape as image by referring to a painting by the famous German Romantic painter Carl Blechen (1798-1840), who was, like Fontane, a native of Brandenburg. Fontane describes the landscape of the Müggelsberge in Brandenburg through Blechen’s painting. The landscape emerges in front of the viewer Fontane not as an immediate description of nature, but rather as an image of Blechen’s painting Das Semnonenlager (c. 1828): Karl Blechen, “der Vater unsrer märkischen Landschaftsmalerei,” wie er gelegentlich genannt worden ist, hat in einem seiner bedeutendsten Bilder die Müggelsberge zu malen versucht. Und sein Versuch ist glänzend geglückt. In feinem Sinn für das Charakteristische, ging er über das bloß Landschaftliche hinaus und schuf hier, in die Tradition und Sage der Müggelsberge zurückgreifend, eine historische Landschaft. Die höchste Kuppe zeigt ein Semnonenlager. Schilde und Speere sind zusammengestellt, ein Feuer flackert auf, und unter den hohen Fichtenstämmen, angeglüht von dem Dunkelrot der Flamme, lagern die germanischen Urbewohner des Landes mit einem wunderbar gelungenen Mischausdruck von Wildheit und Behagen. (GBA V/ 4: 110) Fontane’s reference here to the “historical landscape” demonstrates the close connection between landscape and history and forms the core of Fontane’s interest in landscape. Blechen’s painting, similar to Fontane’s remarks on Willibald Alexis, serves as a model for Fontane’s landscape poetics, which, as we may conclude from the Wanderungen, always moves “über das bloß Landschaftliche hinaus” in order to tell a story situated somewhere between truth and fiction, the past and the present. Fontane specifies in the quoted passage above how Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 79 Blechen arrives at his historical landscape, namely by drawing on tradition and myth, “Tradition und Sage.” The imagination of the past, expressed through poetry and narration, serves to enliven the landscape of Müggelsberge in Blechen’s painting, in Fontane’s text, and possibly in the external world. The poetic practice of landscape forms in Fontane’s travel narratives a starting point for Fontane’s landscape poetics and his engagement with landscape and memory, which he later transfers onto his novels. Fontane’s novel Cécile serves as an example of how landscape is depicted as a space of both cultural and personal memory, and a space that the novel’s characters perceive in differing ways with reference to personal experiences, perspectives and memories. I will focus my discussion here on the novel’s protagonist Cécile. In the novel’s opening, Cécile and her husband, former colonel Pierre von St. Arnaud, are traveling by train for a vacation at the health resort of Thale in the Harz region. Cécile is supposedly suffering from a disease affecting her nerves and needs to escape Berlin for some time to recover and enjoy “den wohltätigen Einfluß dieser Luft” (GBA I/ 9: 37). But more so, Cécile seems in need of escape from the unhappy life she is leading. Only at a later point in the novel does it become clear that, prior to marrying Arnaud, she had been the twofold mistress of a monarch and his successor. Cécile knows that her tainted past is incompatible with her present life as the wife of a former Prussian colonel. Throughout the novel, she utters nearly nothing about her past. In her dreamlike state of “dies apathische Träumen” (GBA I/ 9: 8) she does not participate in the present realities of the text. Cécile’s turn inward reflects her wish to escape the present and instead search for a place within herself, where she may find comfort and happiness. Cécile’s turn inward becomes in the novel a turn to landscape. The landscapes during Cécile’s stay in the Harz region become her temporary refuge, away from her current state of dislocation. At the same time, Cécile’s inability to reconcile imagination and reality, the past and the present, detaches her from the external world, finally culminating in her complete withdrawal from it through her suicide. The episode of Cécile’s and Arnaud’s breakfast on the veranda of Hôtel Zehnpfund in Thale, overlooking a seemingly beautiful landscape, illustrates clearly the differing interests and perceptions of landscape between the married couple: “Der Anblick mußte jeden entzücken, und so hing denn auch das Auge der schönen Frau, die wir am Tage vorher auf ihrer Reise begleiteten, an dem ihr zu Füßen liegenden Bilde, freilich, im Gegensatze zu dem Obersten, ihrem Gemahl, mit nur geteiltem Interesse” (GBA I/ 9: 11). The narrator insists on the beauty of the landscape, thereby underscoring Arnaud’s presence and Cécile’s absence in the visual presentation of the scene. Whereas Arnaud carefully inspects, remi- 80 Erika Kontulainen nisces, and describes the external attributes of the landscape, Cécile in contrast remains silent in her inward-looking, dreamy state of being. It is not clear at what she is looking, or if she is even looking at all: Cécile … sah dann abwechselnd auf Berg und Wiese, ganz einer träumerischen Stimmung hingegeben, in der sie sich augenscheinlich ungern gestört fühlte, wenn der Oberst, in wohlmeinendem Erklärungseifer, den Cicerone machte. “Vieles”, hob er an, “hat sich speziell an dieser Stelle geändert, seit ich in meinen Fähnrichstagen hier war. Aber ich finde mich doch noch zurecht. Das Plateau dort oben, mit dem großen würfelförmigen Gasthause, muß der Hexentanzplatz sein. Ich höre, man kann jetzt bequem hinauffahren.” (GBA I/ 9: 11) Cécile picks up on Arnaud’s reference to the Hexentanzplatz, where legend has it that the witches meet to dance around the fire before flying off on their broomsticks to the Brocken mountain range on Walpurgis night: “‘Hexentanzplatz,’ nahm sie nach einer Weile das Gespräch wieder auf. ‘Wahrscheinlich ein Felsen mit einer Sage, nicht wahr? Wir hatten auch in Schlesien so viele; sie sind alle so kindisch. Immer Prinzessinnen und Riesenspielzeug …’” (GBA I/ 9: 11—12). Cécile’s knowledge about the legend of this site is limited. Instead, she replaces it with her personal memories of her childhood in Silesia, but they are of a highly selective nature, fragments of an idealized past of childhood and innocent play. The landscape and cultural memory of the Harz (not to mention the lacking reference to Goethe’s Faust) is re-written by Cécile into a contemplation of subjective perception and personal memory. The excursion to the town of Altenbrak further illustrates the differing interactions between external and internal realities in the novel. The travel companions decide to split up into two convoys. Cécile’s husband and two other tourists decide to travel by foot, whereas the novel’s main characters, the engineer Gordon and Cécile, will follow thirty minutes later by horse. As Gordon is upset about the poor selection of horses for their excursion, Cécile with delight makes note of a few donkeys nearby: “Da sind Esel, Herr von Gordon. Das ist nun einmal meine Passion: Eselreiten und Ponyfahren” (GBA I/ 9: 86). Shortly thereafter, Cécile and Gordon are on their way to Altenbrak in a typical Harz tourist fashion, by donkey: “[W]enige Minuten später saßen beide bereits plaudernd im Sattel und trotteten, über einen Brückensteg hin, auf eine mit vorjährigem Eichenlaub gefüllte Schlucht zu, die, jenseits der Bode, zu der auf dem Bergrücken entlanglaufenden Blankenburger Chaussee hinaufführte” (GBA I/ 9: 86). Cécile’s excitement for donkeys and her gaze, “von dem schwer zu sagen war, ob mehr schmeichelhafte Huld oder naive Kinderfreude darin vorherrschte” (GBA I/ 9: 86), complicate her character further. Her expression leaves Gordon Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 81 wondering why she suddenly seems so happy: “Eselreiten und Ponyfahren! Sie sprachen so glückstrahlend davon, meine gnädigste Frau. Sind es Kindererinnerungen? Das Ponyfahren läßt es fast vermuten” (GBA I/ 9: 87). Then, Cécile speaks in one of the very few episodes in the novel, and shares more extensively a memory of ostensibly happy, innocent days in the Swiss Alps: Nein, leider nein. Meine Kindertage vergingen ohne das. Aber dann kamen andre Tage, freilich auch halbe Kindertage noch, in denen ich aus der kleinen oberschlesischen Stadt, darin ich geboren und großgezogen war, zum ersten Mal in die Welt sah. Und in welche Welt! Jeden Morgen, wenn ich ans Fenster trat, sah ich die ‘Jungfrau’ vor mir und daneben den ‘Mönch’ und den ‘Eiger.’ Und am Abend dann das Alpenglühn. Ich vergesse sonst Namen, aber diese nicht, diese sind mir in der Seele geblieben wie die Tage selbst. Schöne, himmlische, glückliche Tage, Tage voll ungetrübter Erinnerungen. Und unter diesen ungetrübten Erinnerungen auch Eselritt und Ponyfahren. (GBA I/ 9: 87) Interesting about Cécile’s personal story is her formulaic language, including phrases such as “schöne, himmlische, glückliche Tage” and her twofold emphasis on “ungetrübte Erinnerungen.” Cécile’s memories seem to be everything but “ungetrübt.” Her memory of a seemingly happy youth with donkey and pony rides is constructed through her selective perception and communicated through formulaic expression, ellipsis, and repression. Katharina Grätz refers to the correlation between Cécile’s personal memories and the story about her that the novel delivers as ‘ambivalent.’ Cécile’s trip to the Swiss Alps was in fact made when she was already a member and thereby mistress at the court of Prince von Welfen-Echingen (GBA I/ 9: 207). Yet Cécile omits detailed information about this life, nor does she utter any evaluative statement about it. Although her predominant silence, formulaic language, and selective perception of her past as “schöne, himmlische, glückliche Tage” may offer the reader clues about Cécile’s character, the novel nevertheless leaves the reader with very little information about her. Even if we are unable to draw any definite conclusions about Cécile, the notion of happiness, central to the novel’s protagonist, gets us closer to understanding her ambivalent character. Happiness in Cécile is dependent on spatial and temporal circumstances. Spatial in the sense that landscape becomes the locus in which Cécile negotiates and defines this concept on a personal level; temporal in that the idea and memory of happiness for Cécile seem to be relative to time. We are however not able to verify Cécile’s memories as true or false. They are constructed by Cécile as personal memories of happiness, as an opposing force to her present state of passivity and dislocation, but possibly just as the fairy tale of happiness to which she refers in the novel’s opening chapter (GBA I/ 9: 8). 82 Erika Kontulainen It is the incompatibility between Cécile’s past and present life that results in her turn inward. Landscape in Fontane’s novel in its permeability and openness to subjective memories and imaginations allows Cécile to construct a space in which she may temporally ‘think herself away’ to another place amidst the history, poetry, and cultural memory of this place. However, the very moment the story about Cécile’s past is revealed, she can no longer remain indifferent. If she is not able to live in the imagination of her past, she for the very first time in the novel must take control of her own life, indicated by her suicide. Once again Fontane constructs a heroine unable to free herself from the systematic and societal constraints of Bismarckian Germany, in which tragedy becomes the only means of escape. Finally, a fundamental premise about the literature of nineteenth-century German Realism is that it is an art literature depicting reality as a poetic construct. According to Fontane’s programmatic essay on realism, Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848 (1853), German realist writing should not simply attempt to mimic the empirical world as objective reality: “Vor allen Dingen verstehen wir nicht darunter das nackte Wiedergeben alltäglichen Lebens, am wenigsten seines Elends und seiner Schattenseiten” (NA 21.1: 12). It is precisely the question of what constitutes reality which presents an inherent tension in German realist writing. As this paper has shown, Fontane’s landscapes depict reality as an imagination of the past. Landscape in Fontane moves beyond the “bloß Landschaftliche,” beyond an objectively given or fixed reality, allowing for a dynamic space to emerge in the interaction between subject and world. The reality of Fontane’s Realism may be sought under the historical and mythological veil of landscape; and such cultural memory of landscape — be it in Scotland, in Brandenburg, or in the Harz region — may just as well turn into a personal encounter with the self, further complicating and even blurring the line between reality and fiction. Notes 1 For a recent study on references to visual media such as painting, panorama, and photography in Fontane’s works, see Hoffmann. 2 Another feature of Fontane’s landscapes indicative of their pictorial qualities is their clear arrangement into coordinated patterns of looking, such as left/ right, above/ below, and proximity/ distance. These guiding patterns help the reader to “view” Fontane’s landscapes in their constructed nature as images. At the same time, these patterns create an optical illusion of spatial depth (Tau 11—14; Ohl 202; Bade 14). Furthermore, the direct reference to landscape painters is particularly evident in Fontane’s Wanderungen durch Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 83 die Mark Brandenburg (1862—89), spanning multiple centuries and painters including Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Wilhelm Gentz, and Carl Blechen. Walter Erhart speaks in this context about Fontane’s Mark Brandenburg as a gallery of images that organizes and retains space and landscape as preshaped models of perception (244—45). Hubertus Fischer refers to Fontane’s landscapes in the Wanderungen as corresponding to an iconic apperception of landscape (133). 3 See e.g. Heinrich; Parr; Zimmermann. 4 Although there is no clear-cut view on the scope and intensity of Walter Scott’s influence on Fontane, it is certainly evident that since his childhood, Fontane was quite familiar with Scott’s literary oeuvre. Not only had Fontane read several of Scott’s novels, Scott was central to Fontane’s discovery of England and Scotland. Scott’s works became signposts, bridges, perspectives, take-offs, and destinations through which Fontane could depict his own surroundings, collect material for his writings, prepare his travels to Scotland, and use Scott as a point of comparison for his own storytelling (Aust 354—55). Fontane’s essay Walter Scott (1871), celebrating Scott’s one hundredth birthday, poignantly summarizes Scott’s importance to him. It includes references to biography, genre, aesthetic style, and politics. Scott’s global influence on Fontane’s aesthetic program seems however to lie in the practically demonstrated synthesis of romanticism and realism, poetry and prose, truth and transfiguration (Verklärung). On a political level, Fontane views Scott a pioneer of the idea of nationality (Aust 357). Works Cited Aust, Hugo. “Scott-Lektüre.” Fontane-Handbuch. Ed. Christian Grawe and Helmuth Nürnberger. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2000. 354—59. Bade, James N. Fontane’s Landscapes. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 84—258. Beaucamp, Eduard. Literatur als Selbstdarstellung: Wilhelm Raabe und die Möglichkeiten eines deutschen Realismus. Bonn: H. Bouvier u. Co., 1968. Bode, Christoph, and Jacqueline Labbe, ed. “Introduction: Writing Place.” Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010. 1—3. Brüder Grimm. Kinder- und Hausmärchen gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm. Ed. Heinz Rölleke. Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. Durie, Alastair J. Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scotland, 1780-1939� East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2003. 84 Erika Kontulainen Erhart, Walter. “Alles wie erzählt: Fontanes Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 36 (1992): 229—54. Fischer, Hubertus. “Märkische Bilder: Ein Versuch über Fontanes Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, ihre Bilder und ihre Bildlichkeit.” Fontane Blätter 60 (1995): 117—42. Fontane, Theodor. Große Brandenburger Ausgabe. (GBA) Ed. Gotthard Erler et al. Berlin: Aufbau, 1994 ff. —. Werke, Schriften und Briefe. (HA) Ed. Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger. 22 vols. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971—97. —. Sämtliche Werke. (NA) Ed. Edgar Gross, Kurt Schreinert et. al. 24 vols. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsanstalt, 1959—75. Freund, Winfried, ed. “Nachwort.” Annette von Droste-Hülshoff: Westfälische Schilderungen und ihr Echo in Westfalen. Paderborn et al.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1991. 102—11. Gann, Thomas. “Landschaft.” Stifter-Handbuch: Leben - Werk - Wirkung. Ed. Christian Begemann and Davide Giuriato. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2017. 322—25. Grätz, Katharina. “Tierjagd in Altenbrak: Poetische Topographie in Theodor Fontanes Cécile.” Metropole, Provinz und Welt: Raum und Mobilität in der Literatur des Realismus. Ed. Roland Berbig and Dirk Göttsche. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. 193—211. Heinrich, Gerd. “Ein nicht verächtlicher Schatz: Fontane und die Historische Landschaft.” Geschichte und Geschichten aus Mark Brandenburg: Fontanes Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg im Kontext der europäischen Reiseliteratur. Ed. Hanna Delf von Wolzogen: Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003. 15—38. Hoffmann, Nora. Photographie, Malerei und visuelle Wahrnehmung bei Theodor Fontane� Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2011. Lyon, John B. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement and Modernity. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Ohl, Hubert. Bild und Wirklichkeit: Studien zur Romankunst Raabes und Fontanes� Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1968. Parr, Rolf. “Die nahen und die fernen Räume: Überlagerungen von Raum und Zeit bei Theodor Fontane und Wilhelm Raabe.” Metropole, Provinz und Welt: Raum und Mobilität in der Literatur des Realismus. Ed. Roland Berbig and Dirk Göttsche. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 53—76. Ritter, Joachim. “Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft.” Subjektivität. Ed. Joachim Ritter. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. 141—66. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Tau, Max. Der assoziative Faktor in der Landschafts- und Ortsdarstellung Theodor Fontanes. Oldenburg: Schulzesche Hofbuchdruckerei und Verlagsbuchhandlung Rudolf Schwartz, 1928. Watson, Nicola J. “Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake.” Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place. Ed. Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010. 67—79. Landscape and Memory in Theodor Fontane’s Works 85 Zimmermann, Rainer E. “Fontanes konkrete Utopie eines Brandenburgisch Preußen.” Theodor Fontane: Berlin, Brandenburg, Preußen, Deutschland, Europa und die Welt� Ed. Hanna Delf von Wolzogen et al. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. 121—38.