Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 “BEFORE THE STORM” (“VOR DEM STURM”) by Theodor Fontane (first published in 1878; R.J.Hollingdale’s English translation first published in Oxford World Classics 1985)

Some time ago on this blog, I wrote of Theodore Fontane’s German masterpiece of conciseness and elliptical construction Effi Briest (look it up on the index at right). I noted that reading that masterpiece had led me to read the one other novel by Fontane (1819-1898) that is readily available in English, Before the Storm. Given that Before the Storm is an historical novel, set among the Prussian gentry over a few months in the winter of 1812-1813, and given that it concerns the German national uprising against Napoleon, I half-expected something like a German equivalent of War and Peace: an epic of the Napoleonic Wars as seen from a German perspective. Alas, I found Before the Storm to be no such thing. Instead, I found it to be a rambling, descriptive work, which took a long time to get nowhere, and I dismissed it as one of the most boring books I had ever read.

One day, I said, I would explain why I came to that conclusion.

So here I am doing so.

Let it be noted that for most of its length, Before the Storm has no “plot” as such. It is a series of sketches, vignettes, anecdotes and descriptions in which, presumably, Fontane is attempting to build up a panoramic portrait of Prussian society on the eve of its national revolt. For what it’s worth, the wisp of “plot” concerns the two young adult children of the widowed Prussian squire Berndt von Vitzewitz – Lewin and Renate. They seem, by love and mutual affection, destined to marry the two children of Privy Councillor von Ladalinski, a Pole who had become a Protestant and embraced Prussia as his homeland. But Kathinka Ladalinski, whom Lewin loves, eventually runs away with the Polish Count Jarosh Brinski, and re-embraces the Catholic faith. Lewin von Vitzewitz is heartbroken, but consoles himself by marrying Marie, a village girl, orphan daughter of a travelling showman. The novel seems to intend this to represent the rejuvenation of aristocratic blood by the blood of the people. Meanwhile Renate von Vitzewitz remains in love with Tubal Ladalinski, but Tubal dies heroically after being wounded in the national uprising, and Renate lives out the rest of her life as a sort of Protestant nun.

As I say, this “plot” is no more than the thread on which to hang various observations. For most of the novel, “nothing happens” in the sense of a story moving forward. Instead, we have a series of self-contained scenes and descriptions, often more in the form of separable essays than of narrative. Such scenes are mainly set either on the von Vitzewitzes’ East Prussian estate Hohen-Vietz, near the River Oder, or in Berlin. Thus, to illuminate various sides of Prussian life we are introduced to:

* A “Hernhutter” Protestant “Aunt” Schorlemmer, who rages against the slackness of the official Lutheran church.

* A grotesque dwarf-woman Hoppenmarieken, receiver of stolen goods and spy, who redeems herself in the last few pages by helping to rescue Lewin from a French prison. I assume she is intended to illustrate the nationalist worth of even the lowliest Prussian.

* The estate’s antiquarian clergyman Seidentopf, who is more interested in archaeology and various racial theories about the origins of Prussians than he is in preaching.

* There is also the complete Francophile Countess Amalie, Berndt von Vitzewitz’s sister, who adores French culture at the expense of German culture. That she dies in the last pages, around the time of the nationalist revolt, may be intended as some sort of symbol of the end of that sort of French-dominated “Enlightenment” ethos, and the birth of a new unified German spirit.

There are a host of other minor characters, but the only one who lodges in my mind is the rough-and-ready old “General” Bamme who takes over a local command in the final section. Fontane does, however, in “long shot” as it were, introduce some real historical personages. For example, in Berlin, Lewin attends a lecture by the German nationalist philosopher Fichte, and poets of the period are quoted at length.

Prussia in 1812 was still officially allied with Napoleon. Many soldiers and patriots were unhappy with this. Many Prussians fought for the French in the Grande Armee, but some had taken service with the Russians against the French. As the novel trundles along, there is much discussion and much agonizing about whether people should join a revolt against the French (who are at this stage straggling back from their catastrophic defeat in Russia). But, being good Prussians, nobody does anything until the King of Prussia issues a proclamation saying they can. In a 680-page novel (in the Oxford World Classics edition I read), the revolt itself takes up at most 60 pages near the end, and for some reason Fontane decides to focus on an entirely fictitious event – the attack by Prussian militia and volunteers upon a French garrison in the East Prussian town of Frankfurt. (Germany has more than one Frankfurt, remember.) It has been claimed that Fontane’s real theme is not the patriotic Prussian uprising against the French, but the repercussions of Prussia’s initial defeat by the French in 1806. It has further been claimed that his central idea is the tension between patriotism and duty to authority.

Even if this is so, however, it does not compensate for the novel’s lack of real dramatisation.

It is hard to believe that this novel, Fontane’s first, was written by the same man who, 16 years later, was to write Effi Briest (his 14^th novel). If he was later to become a master of compression and understated irony, he is here still the journalist and regional historian, striving to cram all his research into his novel. I detect a distant echo of the type of thing Sir Walter Scott was attempting to do, especially in his earlier Waverley novels, half a century before Fontane – an attempt to give a portrait of a whole society at an historical moment, introducing some factual characters and some historical events. Unfortunately, Before the Storm is almost as stylistically stiff and theatrical as Sir Walter Scott is. This is not the German War and Peace (history dramatised). It is the German The Antiquary (history annotated).

There are long and verbose discussions, not only of the proposed military action, but also of German poetry and Prussian law and the archaeological origins of Prussia. Numerous folk-tales are introduced, which seem to be the fruit of Fontane’s having recently written travel books about Brandenburg. Too often, rather than dramatising events, Fontane has people reporting them in conversation, telling rather than showing. The upheavals of the Napoleonic wars are conveyed by what characters say about them. Thus we hear older soldiers (some of whom fought for the French and some for the allies) discussing the Peninsular War in Spain. The Battle of Borodino and later the French retreat from Russia are talked about only. But so (in a letter) is a fire on the Hohen-Veitz estate and much of the skirmishing as Cossacks chase the French across parts of Brandenburg – events that would have impinged directly on the novel’s main characters. I was strongly reminded of a very boring old Hollywood film (Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of The Buccaneer), which chitter-chatters at length about conflict, but then after the long build-up disposes of its (supposedly) climactic battle in a handful of long shots. Fontane’s deliberate ellipses and evasion of some key action in Effi Briest are the work of a master ironist. In Before the Storm they seem the work of an incompetent and lead to bathetic anti-climax.

Such few pleasures as this novel affords, then, are the pleasures of the history textbook or antiquarian document, not of the novel.

Be it noted that with 200 years of hindsight, there is something disturbing about the novel’s Prussian-Germanic patriotism. Fontane himself (a Prussian with French Protestant forebears) is an urbane and civilised European gentleman. He shows – honestly enough, I suppose – that Prussian opinion in 1812-13 ran the whole gamut from loyal servants and admirers of the French to ardent Teutonists. He sometimes says admiring words about French soldiership and paints an amiable portrait of Lewin’s Gascon gaoler late in the novel. There is a tender scene (at Countess Amalie’s) in which it is admitted that Corneille is as stirring as German romantic poetry.

Even so, implicit in the whole structure of the novel is the idea of all levels of society (from king to dwarfish receiver of stolen goods) joining in a “holy” national crusade. Much of it sounds perilously like later Blut-und-Boden fantasies – the mystical union of Germans to German soil, and the type of racial “national community” that Adolf craved. As a research scientist, one of my sons once ran a Max Planck laboratory in Leipzig, not too far from the great German national monument commemorating the “Battle of the Nations” victory over Napoleon. Occasionally, he said, small groups of extreme right-wing German nationalists, rightly regarded with contempt by most modern Germans, would still demonstrate there – neo-Nazis, skinheads etc. Of course it is not Fontane’s fault, and his novel has to be read in its historical context, but the ideology of Before the Storm does lead directly to such scenes.

Some interesting sidelights of the novel:

As “allies”, the Russians are treated in a friendly enough fashion by Fontane, although there is much muttering about how “unreliable” they are when joint operations are planned.

The official Lutheran church is not satirised by Fontane, but is presented as the Anglican Church often was in contemporaneous English novels – that is, as a comfy institution, which few people take too seriously, its pastors being mainly careerists. Therefore, in Before the Storm, strong Protestant opinion is represented by “Herrnhutters”, Calvinists and various evangelicals, most of whom really do satirise official Lutheranism.

Particularly disturbing and distasteful is the novel’s attitude towards the Poles. We are quite a few miles away from later “biological” German racism, which saw Poles and other Slavs as inherently “inferior”. The Ladalinskis are clearly worthy enough to marry Prussian gentry and serve the Prussian government; but Kathinka’s return to the Catholic Church and to Polish patriotism is treated with scorn late in the novel. I detect here something akin to the English Establishment’s attitude towards the Irish – they are acceptable so long as they are a subject people and adopt our ways. Paddy is a fine fellow when he is willing to serve in the British Army; but he is a nuisance who deserves to be ridiculed when he starts talking about independence.  Likewise, according to this novel, Poles are fine people who are civilised only so long as they adopt Prussian ways and serve Prussia.

One final thought: how aware was Fontane himself of how pusillanimous the Prussian patriotic uprising at last seems in this novel? No matter how much it is dollied up in chatter, in the end all we see is the kicking of a demoralised French army that had already been defeated in Russia anyway.

I have just spent far too long trashing a novel, which you were probably never going to read in the first place. Apart from detecting future sinister trends in German nationalism – for which Fontane was not responsible – why have I raged on at such length? Because I know that, later, the author was capable of much, much better.

The key to my appreciation of Before the Storm is therefore intense disappointment.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

 

“EFFI BRIEST” by Theodor Fontane (first published 1894; Douglas Parmee’s English language Penguin Classics translation first published 1967)

            I sometimes toy with the game of reducing classic plots to a few curt sentences. Greek wanderer accidentally kills father, marries mother and blinds himself. Danish prince winds up dead after taking too long avenging his father’s murder. Jewish ad-man and Irish student wander around Dublin, get pissed and meet in a whorehouse. Tory MP’s wife plans a party on the same day a shell-shocked soldier kills himself – that sort of thing.

To reduce plots to a few words is literally reductionist and always misleading. A novel or play isn’t just its plot anyway, and anything can be made to look ridiculous or trivial in such a brief summary. Ask the idiot 17^th century critic who, after summarising Shakespeare’s plot, claimed that the whole point of Othello was that wives shouldn’t lose their handkerchiefs.

Anyway, with all this in mind, I venture to prove the point by giving you a brief plot summary of one of my favourite novels. Young woman makes arranged marriage with older aristocratic civil servant, is profoundly bored by married life in a provincial small town, and is caught out and destroyed when she has an adulterous affair.

Doesn’t sound too exciting, does it? And as many commentators have noted, if you substituted “doctor” for “civil servant”, this summary of Effi Briest could almost be a summary of Madame Bovary.

Let me make it more coherent by giving a more detailed plot summary.

Living not too far from Berlin, Effi Briest is a vivacious, impulsive 17-year-old girl at the beginning of the novel. Her friendships with other girls are frankly giggly and silly. Although middle class, her parents pride themselves on being of minor aristocratic descent. Therefore they are happy to arrange for her to marry Baron Geert von Innstetten who, at 40, is over twice her age (and is indeed a former admirer of her mother). And Effi is happy to be so married, because she has beaten her giggly friends to the altar.

Effi and Innstetten go to live in the small town of Kessin in Pomerania, near the sea, where Innstetten has some prestige as a local governor, a role he sees as part of his career path in the civil service. The newly married couple live in a large house, about which there circulate odd rumours and stories of the ghost of a Chinaman; and in which there hang a stuffed crocodile and a stuffed shark. When she lies in bed at night, Effi hears strange movement upstairs.

At first the novelty of Kessin interests Effi, but rapidly life in the small town palls and of course Innstetten is frequently away on official business. It is the process of Effi’s disillusion that occupies the central section of the novel  – an almost plotless series of encounters with local people, such as the courteous, hunchbacked shopkeeper Alonzo Gieshubler or the visiting opera singer “Marietta Trippelli” (really a Prussian lady, Fraulein Trippel) with her florid and loud theatrical manners. Sometimes we have vignettes of Effi and her husband visiting simple locals, who are overawed by his office. In her loneliness, Effie finds near the churchyard the simple servant Roswitha, who becomes her closest confidante.

A child, Annie, is born.

For a time Effi becomes obsessed with the story of the Chinaman’s ghost. She socializes with Sidonie von Grosenabb. She socializes with Major Crampas. On one outing, she and Major Crampas share a carriage, which becomes stuck in the mire.

Some years go by.

Innstetten is transferred to Berlin and Effi goes with him, without many regrets. Six and a half years after the transfer, little Annie is injured in a fall and the servants force open a desk to get a bandage…. and a bundle of letters fall out.

Innstetten reads them and is horrified to discover they are love letters between Effi and Major Crampas. Effi is away on holiday when this discovery is made. Innstetten summons his friend Wullersdorf and discusses whether he should defend his honour with a duel, despite the time that has elapsed since the affair happened. Wullersdorf agrees that he should. So with his friend as his second, Innstetten travels back to Kessin, arranges the duel and efficiently dispatches Major Crampas. He then writes to Effi, formally separating himself from her, and takes complete custody of the child Annie. When she receives the letter, Effi faints. Her disgraced parents refuse to take her back.

Three years go by.

Living with the servant Roswitha in a cramped flat in Berlin, Effi longs to have access to Annie after glimpsing her on a city tram. But when they do meet, their reunion is not a success. Annie has completely absorbed her father’s cold, formal manners and treats her mother with disdain. Effi’s parents reluctantly take Effi back. The local pastor Niemayer shows Effi some sympathy, as he recognizes her girlishness and emotional immaturity despite the fact that she is now a woman in her thirties.

Despite this partial acceptance, Effi still dies of grief. But before she dies, she requests that her tombstone bear her original name, as she believes she has brought no “honour” to her husband’s name. She accepts those very values that have been partly responsible for destroying her.

There now. I have totally outraged you by filling this summary with “spoilers” and ruining your own discovery of what is rightly regarded as a German masterpiece (“the most famous German novel of the nineteenth century” according to the back cover of my Penguin Classics paperback edition).

Or have I? For this is a novel where style and structure count for as much as plot.

I read this novel for the second time twenty years after I had first read it. Between readings, I had recalled accurately its sense of coldness, formality and the monotony of small-town existence in a flat landscape. But the single point I best remembered was how Fontane underplayed the duel. After the build-up, Fontane simply tells us in a sentence or two that Major Crampas was killed. The actual duel simply isn’t dramatised. What I did not recall is that this elliptical technique is true of the whole novel. Those events we would expect to be colourful or climactic (Effi’s wedding; the birth of Annie; the duel) are either shuffled over in a few lines or take place “off stage”. And this is especially true of Effi’s adultery. We are not even aware that it has happened until it is over and (three-quarters of the way through the novel) reduced to a bundle of yellowing letters.

What is the emotional impact of this deliberate avoidance of dramatic climax and its attendant catharsis? It is to emphasise anticipation and regret rather than action, achievement or the lived moment. Effi Briest becomes a novel of foreboding, of brooding, of monotony, of time passing slowly and time hanging heavy on Effi’s hands. It dramatises the truth that for most people, a lingering condition is more potent than a resolved event.

The ghost of the Chinaman and the stuffed crocodile and shark are curiously allusive symbols – but of what? Of Effi’s fears and guilts? Of the alien situation she finds herself in and cannot control? Innstetten uses the ghost as a means of taming and controlling his good little wife; but Effi’s belief in the ghost is also akin to her romantic and imaginative side, which cannot be harnessed to a rational Prussian code. The scene where Major Crampas’s’ carriage is stuck in the mire screams out with foreboding. The flat Pomeranian landscape has its own oppressive emotional power.

Male novelists in the nineteenth century wrote many sympathetic novels about women in loveless marriages – Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Dombey and Son or William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance to give just some obvious examples. They do not always meet with the approval of modern feminist critics, who can interpret them as male projections of how a woman’s mind works. Like Emma Bovary, Effi Briest is naïve and suggestible with a limited understanding of society. Yet I think Fontane’s account of her is as acute psychologically as it can be, and Fontane’s style is at least as chiselled as Flaubert’s. In Chapter 24, Effi’s mother describes Effi’s moral outlook thus:

“She has a tendency to look on God as a good, kind man and console herself with the hope that he won’t be too strict with her.”

This comes up against the Prussian-ness of Innstetten who, in Chapter 35, defines happiness in these cold terms:

“If I’m right, happiness consists of two things: first, in being where you belong… and secondly, and best of all, that one’s ordinary, everyday life should follow a smooth and easy course, that is, that you’ve slept soundly and your new boots don’t pinch you. If the seven hundred and twenty minutes of your twelve-hour day have gone by without particular annoyance, then you can talk of a ‘happy day.’ ”

I should also note that this novel is as much a comment on national character as it is an account of a failed marriage. A Prussian of French Protestant descent, Theodor Fontane (1819-98) was in his seventies when he wrote Effi Briest. His views on his nation could be conventionally patriotic or severely critical. Between my first two readings of the novel, I had somehow got it into my head that it was set in the early or mid-19^th century. Perhaps this was because of the less advanced country town where most of it takes place. In fact, with mention of the telegraph and the telegram and the telephone, it is quite specifically set in the decade when it was written, the 1890s. And Fontane more than once notes the boastful and vainglorious way Prussians still talked about their victory over the French in 1870.

This well-wrought, carefully-constructed, genuinely tragic novel is as great a work as it is claimed to be.

Some personal comments to conclude with.

First, I know only a few words of German, so I am reliant on Douglas Parmee’s translation for my assessment of Fontane’s style. It is excellent, but I did feel an awful crunch in Chapter 18 when Parmee uses the term “flappers” to describe giggly young women. Maybe the translator was getting old. The word belongs to the 1920s, and not the 1960s when the translation was made.

Second, I was so impressed with this novel that I hastened to read the other novel by Fontane that is readily available in English in the Oxford World Classics series, Before the Storm (Vor den Sturm), written in 1878. It is an historical novel set in Prussia at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Oh dear. I might some day make it a “Something Old”, but I found it as rambling and unengaging as I found Effi Briest focused and arresting.

Third, many years ago I saw a Film Society screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film version of Effi Briest (as a German classic, the novel has been filmed four or five times by the Germans, and is taught regularly in German schools). It was shot in black and white and starred Hanna Schygulla as Effi. Usually I found Fassbinder’s films verbose and sexually explicit bores, but I make an exception for this one. Fassbinder really got the point of Fontane’s elliptical style, and shot the duel scene in one brief, objective long shot. The film’s severe, controlled style, so atypical of its director, reflects accurately the novel’s sense of repression and limitation.