The German author Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) was once famous for his ballads and lively travel accounts but is now best known for his realistic novels, which are usually set in Berlin.

Theodor Fontane born on Dec. 30, 1819, in Neu-Ruppin (Brandenburg). The son of an apothecary, he planned to follow in his father's footsteps but found the work uncongenial. Thereafter, he determined to pursue a literary career.

Two trips to England, one (1852) to study ballad origins and a longer sojourn (1855-1859) as an attaché of the Prussian embassy, were followed by an editorial appointment on a conservative Berlin newspaper, Kreuzzeitung, a post that Fontane held until 1870. The post made possible considerable travel, notably described in the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (4 vols., 1862-1882). As a correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War, he was captured and narrowly escaped execution as a spy. In the postwar period he became, and remained for nearly 20 years, the theater critic of the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin.

Late in life Fontane discovered the literary form most congenial to his talents and produced the series of novels that reflect his long-continued, analytical, and objective scrutiny of late-19th-century society.

His novels Vor dem Sturm (1878) and Schach von Wuthenow (1883) are historically oriented; others concentrate on contemporary social problems. Three novels, L'Adultera (1880), Cécile (1886), and Effi Briest (1895), concern adultery. In the latter two works the situation is resolved tragically; in L'Adultera a divorce, followed by the marriage of the lovers, restores the necessary social equilibrium. "Marriage is order," Fontane believed, and without preaching he demonstrates the inevitably unhappy consequence when this "law" is flouted.

Irrungen, Wirrungen (1887) treats the "misalliance" between a member of the nobility and a simple, good-hearted girl of the people whose affair must end, for they make the hard decision that social dictates of "duty" and "order" must prevail. Stine (1890) recapitulates a similar theme with tragic overtones. Frau Jenny Treibel (1892) gently satirizes bourgeois pretensions, while the late novel Der Stechlin (1897) is a sharply observed study of the Brandenburg nobility. Fontane died in Berlin on Sept. 28, 1898.

Fontane is no reformer but a mildly amused, somewhat reserved, and keen-eyed observer to whom "society" represents a manifestation of a principle of order. Though neither divinely nor naturally ordained, society still transcends the power of the individual to alter it; those who make an attempt do so at their peril. What has been called Fontane's "psychological naturalism" links the preceding tradition of poetic realism and the analytical approach so prominent in the 20th-century German novel.

Further Reading

Kenneth Hayens, Theodor Fontane: A Critical Study (1920), is still useful. A perceptive analysis is in Roy Pascal, The German Novel: Studies (1956).

For more information on Theodor Fontane, visit Britannica.com.

Fontane, Theodor (Neuruppin, 1819-98, Berlin), came of a French family which had settled in Prussia in the 18th c. In 1827 the family moved to Swinemünde on the Baltic, but the boy spent 1833-6 in Berlin receiving a desultory schooling. In 1836 he was apprenticed to an apothecary (his father's profession), spent four years in Berlin, and was then an assistant successively in Burg, Dresden, and Leipzig. He did his military service in 1844 as a volunteer (Einjährig-Freiwilliger) in a guard regiment in Berlin, and during this time was able to make his first brief visit to England. He was also a member of the literary club Der Tunnel über der Spree, in which some of his early poems were read. In 1849 he abandoned the practice of pharmacy and lived partly from his pen and partly from minor civil service posts. He married in 1850, and in the same year his first books of poetry (Männer und Helden and Von der schönen Rosamunde) were published. In 1852 he spent the summer in London as correspondent for German newspapers. From 1852 to 1855 he lived in straitened circumstances in Berlin, giving private tuition and again working in a government office. His account of his London experiences appeared in 1854 (Ein Sommer in London). In 1855 he returned to London as an official correspondent, and remained there until 1859, touring Scotland in 1858. On his return to Berlin he conceived the idea of writing a travel book on the landscape and historical associations of his own country, the outcome of which was the four volumes of Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862-82), which were supplemented in 1889 by a fifth (Fünf Schlösser). In 1864, and again in 1866, he visited the scenes of war, and subsequently published Der Schleswig-Holsteinische Krieg im Jahre 1864 (1865) and Der Deutsche Krieg von 1866 (2 vols., 1869-70). After working for the Kreuz-Zeitung for some years, he removed in 1870 to the Vossische Zeitung and in the same year entered France as a war correspondent. In October he was taken prisoner in Domrémy, but was released in December. He incorporated his experiences in Kriegsgefangen (1871). In 1876 he was appointed secretary to the Berlin Academy of Arts, and almost immediately resigned, a step which imperilled his marriage. He then devoted himself to finishing a long historical novel ( Vor dem Sturm, 4 vols., 1878).

After this late beginning (he was 58) he wrote fourteen more works of fiction in twenty years. Grete Minde (1879), Ellernklipp (1881), and Schach von Wuthenow (1882, dated 1883) were all short works set in the past, as was the later Unterm Birnbaum (1885). The first novel dealing with contemporary Berlin was L'Adultera (1882). Graf Petöfy (1884) was an excursion into an Austro-Hungarian setting, but Cécile (1887), Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888), and Stine (1890) established the Berlin series. Quitt (1890, dated 1891) was a venture into a part-American environment. Fontane's Gesammelte Romane und Novellen appeared in twelve volumes 1890-1 and contained all the fiction to this point, plus Kriegsgefangen. In 1891 Unwiederbringlich, a novel of the Danish aristocracy, was published, followed by two outstanding novels of Berlin life, Frau Jenny Treibel (1892, dated 1893) and Effi Briest (1895). Die Poggenpuhls (1896) followed the same pattern in a lower key, as did the unfinished Mathilde Möhring (1906; correct version, 1969). The discursive conversational Berlin novel Der Stechlin (1898, dated 1899) provided a fitting epitaph. A number of the novels were first serialized in magazines; the dates given are those of appearance in book form.

In later years Fontane wrote two autobiographical works, Meine Kinderjahre (1894), which is one of his most attractive books, and Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig (1898). The poems (Gedichte), first published in 1851, were repeatedly expanded up to the fifth edition (1897). From 1870 to 1890 Fontane was dramatic critic for the Vossische Zeitung, and his notices include a favourable review of the first performance of G. Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889).

Long known only as the author of ballads, Fontane developed in old age into one of the most alert and subtle of German novelists. His numerous stories of Berlin life portray the social scene with delicate irony, and depict the characters with penetration and compassion. He is probably the most accomplished writer of dialogue among all the German novelists. His standing has risen steadily in the 20th c.

Sämtliche Werke (Nymphenburger Ausgabe), ed. E. Gross et al., appeared in 24 vols., 1959-75; Th. Fontane: Briefe (4 vols.), ed. K. Schreinert and C. Jolles, 1968-71; Werke, Schriften und Briefe (Hanser, 4 vols.), ed. W. Keitel and H. Nürnberger, 1970-4; correspondence with Th. Storm, ed. J. Steiner, in 1981; Werke, Schriften, Briefe und Tagebücher (Große Brandenburger Ausgabe) (c.50 vols.), a commentated Studienausgabe ed. under the auspices of the Fontane Archiv, Potsdam, by G. Erler, C. Jolles, et al., 1994 ff.

(tā'ōdôr fôntä'nə) , 1819–98, German writer. Although he is primarily important as a novelist, he did not begin to write fiction until he was almost 60 years old. Thereafter, during his last two decades, he produced almost a novel a year. Earlier he had written two volumes of poetry, Gedichte (1851) and Balladen (1861), as well as accounts of his travels and his experiences as a war correspondent and prisoner during the Franco-Prussian War. He was also a drama critic for many years. The first master of the realistic novel in Germany, he wrote perceptive novels revealing the state of contemporary Berlin society and delineating the characters of its inhabitants. They include L'Adultera (1882, tr. The Woman Taken in Adultery, 1979), Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888, tr. Trials and Tribulations, 1917), Frau Jenny Treibel (1893, tr. 1968, 1976), and his masterpiece, Effi Briest (1895, tr. 1976). He also wrote short novels and the autobiographical Meine Kinderjahre (1894, tr. of extracts, My Childhood Days, 1913–15).

Bibliography

See studies by H. Garland (1980); A. Bance (1982); and G. A. Craig (2000).

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