German Life and Letters 38:4 July 1985 0016-8777 $2.00

REALITY AND IMAGINATION IN FONTANE’S IRR UNGEN, WIRR UNGEN

PATRICIA HOWE

With his sub-title ‘Eine Berliner Alltagsgeschichte’ and his opening phrase, Fontane lodges Irrungen, Wirrungen in the contemporary world of Bismarck‘s Germany and takes leave of his literary beginnings in the ballad and the historical novel. In Irrungen, Wirrungen neither the historical reality of great events nor the fantasy of fairy tale endings prevails, But Fontane’s ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ is not Zola’s ‘tranche de vie’. As he suggests in a letter listing some of the work‘s factual inaccuracies, an author can achieve and a novel sustain only so much reality:

Es bleibt . . . bei den Andeutungen der Dinge, bei der bekannten Kinderunterschrift: ‘Dies sol1 ein Baum sein.’ Mit gewii3 nur zu gutem Rechte sagen Sie: ‘Das ist kein Wienerisch’, aber mit gleichem Rechte wurde ein Ortskundiger sagen (und ist gesagt): ‘Wenn man vom Anhal- tischen Bahnhof nach dem Zoologischen fhrt, kommt man bei der und der Tabagie nicht vorbei.’ Es ist mir selber fraglich, ob man von einem Balkon der Landgrafenstrai3e aus den Wilmersdorfer Turm oder die Charlotten- burger Kuppel sehen kann oder nicht. Der Zirkus Renz, so sagt mir meine Frau, ist um die Sommerszeit immer geschlossen. Schlangenbad ist nicht das richtige Bad fur Kathes Zustande; ich habe deshalb auch Schwalbach noch eingeschoben. Kalendermacher wurden gewii3 leicht herausrechnen, dai3 in der und der Woche in dem und dem Jahre Neumond gewesen sei, mithin kein Halbmond uber dem Elefantenhause gestanden haben konne. Gartner wurden sich vielleicht wundern, was ich alles im Dorrschen Garten a tempo bluhen und reifen lasse; Fischzuchter, dai3 ich - vielleicht - Muranen und Maranen verwechselt habe; Militars, da8 ich ein Gardebataillon mit voller Musik vom Exerzierplatz komrnen lasse; Jacobikirchenbeamte, dai3 ich den alten Jacobikirchhof fur ‘tot’ erklare, wahrend noch immer auf ihm begraben wird. Dies ist eine kleine Blumen- lese, eine ganz kleine; denn ich bin uberzeugt, dai3 aufjeder Seite etwas Irrtumliches zu finden ist. Und doch bin ich ehrlich bestrebt gewesen, das wirkiiche Leben zu schildern. Es geht halt nit. Man mu& schon zufrieden sein, wenn wenigstens der Totaleindruck der ist: ‘Ja, das ist Leben.’’

As with the child’s painting, which may say more about how the child sees a tree than about the nature of trees, so it is with the novel: if we are persuaded, ‘Ja, das ist Leben’, it is probably because we are persuaded by the vision of life, that is, by the imaginative view of reality. Indeed the question may eventually arise, whether this imaginative view is sufficiently persuasive and pervasive to challenge ordinary reality and offer an alternative.

At first sight this seems unlikely, for Irrungen, Wirrungen contains more negative than positive references to the power of the imagination. The characters

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generally fear the imagination’s power to transform reality and give it new value. This fear is heard in Frau Dorr’s anxiety for Lene and in the distinction she draws between her own and Lene’s reactions:

Immer wenn das Einbilden anfangt, fang auch das Schlimme an. Das ist wie Amen in der Kirche. Sehen Sie, liebe Nimptsch, mit mir war es ja eigentlich ebenso, man blod nichts von Einbildung. Und blod darum

Perhaps ironically it is not Lene but Frau Dorr with her absurd suggestion that Lene might really be ‘eine Prinzessin oder so wad (2,322) who both invokes and trivialises the imagination’s capacity to transform. The same fear is heard again in Kathe’s comments:

‘Vorstellungen sind iiberhaupt so machtig. Meinst du nicht auch?’ Und sie seufzte, wie wenn sich ihr plotzlich etwas Shreckliches und tief in ihr Leben Eingreifendes vor die Seele gestellt hatte. (2,465)

In the single approving comment Botho’s colleague, Serge, links imagination and pleasure:

Alle Genusse sind schliedlich Einbildung, wer die beste Phantasie hat, hat den grodten Genud. Nur das Unwirkliche macht den Wert und ist

As the editors of the Hanser edition suggest, this may be a bowdlerised quotation from Schopenhauer, whose attitudes Fontane generally eschews; but as a principle of narrative composition he seems to uphold it. In his novel the ‘unreal‘elements of the narrative become the means of evaluating the ‘real’, historically plausible ones.

As we know, Fontane thought the opening chapters of a novel were crucial, for these establish the parameters of the novel, the values and conventions of its fic- tional world. The opening paragraphs of Irrungen, Wirrungen show Fontane juxta- posing elements from different kinds of narrative, moving swiftly and without comment from the verisimilitude of realistic description to phrases that might be found in more romantic narratives like the ‘Marchen’. The references to ‘Kurfiir- stendamm’, ‘Kurfiirstenstrai3e7, ‘Zoologischen’ and ‘Mitte der siebziger Jahre’ (2,319) stand beside such picturesque diminutives as ‘rot und griin gestrichenes Holzturmchen’ and ‘dreifenstriges Hauschen’; the robust and worldly Frau Dorr appears beside the frail Frau Nimptsch, huddled over her boiling kettle; the Dorrs’ ‘SchloB’ contrasts with the prosaic departure of its owner for his regular ‘Kegel- abend. But these contrasting elements belong together. The many references to concealment indicate that the real world hides another, not immediately visible, and containing, as Schmidt-Brummer points out, the hidden love of Lene and Botho, for which there is no place in the real world.2 As its first words say, the novel exists ‘An dem Schnittpunkt’ (2,319), opening on a real street but where much is hidden; and in the ‘Mitte der siebziger Jahre’ (2,319), but where the reference to ‘einem halb weggebrochenen Zifferblatt unter der Turmspitze (von Uhr selbst keine Rede)’ (2,319) modifies the precise sense of time, evoking without fully entering the timeless world of the ‘Marchen’. Moreover the scene is set in the half light of evening and in ‘halb marchenhafte Stille’(2,320), so

war es auch wieder ganz anders. (2,321)

eigentlich das einzig Reale. (2,360)

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that time, place and the relationship between the lovers seem poised in this beginning between historical reality and the world of the imagination.

Further references to time maintain this ambivalence. It is true, as Margaret McHaffie says, that ‘Precise details about time are given at the beginning of the novel and the precision is maintained throughout’. But these details impress not only by their precision, but also by their associations and by the relationship between real time and the relative experience of time as it affects our lives; that is, time modified by imagination and by its cousin, memory. The most important date in the novel exists only as memory. This is the ‘zweiter Ostertag‘, mentioned three times (2,329; 349;376), whkn Botho and Lene first met. It initiates what Botho in his last letter calls ‘eine kurze schone Zeit’ (2,406), the weeks between Easter and the end of June, 1875, but which assumes a much larger space in their lives and memories than its actual span would suggest. Memory may indeed supersede historical time as the structural principle behind the novel. Frances Subiotto suggests that the first half is dominated by anticipation of the end of the affair, the second by recollection of it, and that this determines the novel’s structure. Together anticipation and memory thus distort the sense of real time by the value they set on small parts of it. The key episode, the trip to Hankels Ablage, is magnified through the text itself, through the peculiar ability of the text to represent time as space: thus the episode occupies three days in the novel’s three-and-a-half years but three of its twenty-six chapters - that is, about 0.25% of historical time becomes 11.5% of textual space.

Fontane also uses precise dates for their associative powers. Unusually in Irrungen, Wirrungen these dates are religious and traditional festivals. Botho and Lene meet at Easter and the novel opens at Whitsuntide, both times of miracle and celebration. Thereafter the feast days become more problematic. June 29th, the date of Botho’s mother’s fateful letter, is the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, chosen probably not for its real function as a celebration of the Church’s founders, but because St. Peter, keeper of the keys of heaven, and St. Paul, patron of prisoners, escapologists and those in similar predicaments, have also given their names to a number of prison^.^ This day and its associations are the key to Botho’s feelings about his future in marriage to Kathe and separation from Lene. Likewise June 24th, the day of Kathe’s departure for Schlangenbad, is both Midsummer Day, a time of fairy magic and superstition, and, as Fontane points out, ‘Johannistag’, the day when children are king. Traditionally the day was celebrated with bonfires, and young engaged or married couples jumped through the flames to purify themselves, throwing flowers and herbs into the fire to banish unhappiness.‘j When Botho burns Lene’s letters and flowers during Kathe’s absence at Schlangenbad he mimics the superstitious practices of this day, but we cannot be sure whether this or Kathe’s trip has in fact banished all unhappiness. In these examples we see how ‘das Unwirkliche’, the associative and transforming power of the imagination gives us a commentary on the events of the narrative. They fall not on random days, but on the days that give a shape to life, the festivals and holidays. The signposts of the calendar become the signposts of the narrative. But these are unusual

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signposts, for Fontane more often links personal experiences to historical, especially political, events, as in E f i Briest. By linking them with religious and folk festivals he places them in a stream of life that is not tied to a specific time or place but seen sub specie aeternitatis.

Fontane’s reticence about the actual events and conditions of the time underlines this point. In 1875, the year in which the novel opens, civil marriage became obligatory in Prussia, emphasising the public and social aspects of marriage; it was also the year of a census that reveals social conditions quite unlike the idyllic picture offered by Lene’s surroundings; moreover, the events of the novel coincide with the formation of the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands in May 1875 and the proscription of socialism in 1878.8 Fontane could not have been unaware of these events, nor of their possible implications for characters like those of his novel. Yet he chooses to represent the absolute force of time not through historical reality, but through its paradoxically most enduring characteristic, namely that it passes. The knowledge that it must pass colours the relationship between Botho and Lene in the first half and their relationships with others in the second half of the novel.

The reality of place in the novel is perhaps more ambiguous. Frau Nimptschs imagination makes the Dorrs’ ‘jammerlicher Holzkasten’ (2,322) into a cast1e;g Botho’s equates his own kitchen garden with the Dorrs’ market garden; Serge’s wilder imaginings allow him to imagine he is listening to Etna or Vesuvius when he hears the skittles fall in the club. The idyllic places chosen by Botho and Lene for their walks and excursion prove to be ‘Abladestellen’: the evening stroll to Wilmersdorf confronts them with a cupid’s head in the rubble of a stonemason’s yard, a comment on the relationship between the lovers and the wider world; it shows that their love may be seen as a thing of beauty for which the world has no use. Hankels Ablage, scene of the most significant episode in the novel, is variously perceived as an ‘Aus- und Einladestelle’ (2,381), a pleasure resort for trippers, an idyllic refuge from society for the lovers, and finally, with the arrival of Botho’s friends and their mistresses, almost literally the ‘demi-monde’, a half-world in which two social classes can consort with each other under strictly observed conditions. In this demi-monde the imagination’s uses are perverted in the mischievous borrowing of names and roles from Schiller’s DieJungfirau uon Orleans. The arrival of this group brings the ‘Vertrei- bung aus dem Paradies’ (2,388) that Botho fears earlier. Later in the novel, Kathe’s trip to Schlangenbad in search of a cure for her childlessness also has the connotations of banishment from paradise. Kathe is immediately aware of the sinister connotations of the name and feels the viper at her breast. The connotations of temptation and sin are found in Serge’s insinuations, ‘Und was sie nur in Schwalbach oder Schlangenbad will. . . Es hilft doch nichts. Und wenn es hilft, ist es meist eine sonderbare Hilfe’ (2,431). Whether or not Kathe is tempted by the attentions of Mr Armstrong and thus learns some self-knowledge is a matter for speculation. lo So is the question of why Fontane evokes images of banishment from paradise: on the one hand it may be that Botho and Lene must be shown to be living in a fool’s paradise during the early part of the novel; the image of banishment and the reduction of idyllic places to dumping

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grounds would then suggest that Fontane is undermining the power of the imagination to maintain the love of Botho and Lene; on the other hand the need to recreate ordinary places, endowing them with the qualities of paradise, may be a rejection of the real world, from which the imagination, like the lovers, has fled.”

Into his ambiguous world Fontane puts an ambiguous tale. On the surface it is the story of Lene Nimptsch, who lives with her mother opposite the zoo, earning her own living, and between Easter and June 1875 has an affair with Botho von Rienacker, an aristocratic officer, that ends when he marries his cousin, and she, some three years later, marries Gideon Franke, a worker and lay preacher. But even this is not quite what it seems. Lene Nimptsch is not, whoever else she may be, Lene Nimptsch, for her mother is not her mother and she, more romantically, is ‘bloi3 angenommen’ (2,322); moreover, Rienacker is not an aristocratic but a bourgeois name. Although Fontane raises and dismisses the suggestion that Lene might really be a princess by attributing it to Frau Dorr, nevertheless a gap opens up between what is and what might be. Through the mismatching of names and whom and what they designate, Fontane invites his readers to speculate on the possibility of another kind of reality, one in which, for example, Botho and Lene might be closer to each other. The social differences on which the relationship between them founders are relativised, questioned, perhaps exposed as artificial.

Although in one sense Lene’s name is a fiction, it becomes her fate. At first it contains a number of ambiguities: only after Botho’s marriage do we learn that Lene is short for Magdalene, with its biblical associations of the woman taken in adultery, whereas it might equally well stand for Helene, with its classical asociations of the unique power of love to conquer all. Nimptsch is also ambiguous, since it is probably a Slavonic name meaning ‘German’. The Slavonic elements in Irrungen, Wirrungen are said to represent unruliness, sensuality, a threat to German orderliness; hence Lene’s maiden name suggests a fine balance between order and chaos.’* When she marries Gideon Franke, whose surname is kine alte Bezeichnung der Deutschen’, the preference for order that Botho and Frau Dorr attribute to her is confirmed.13 Thus names, occupations, status etc. are not merely illusory. They belong to the social reality that enables Frau Dorr to liken herself to Lene and makes Lene and Botho see themselves in the three couples at Hankels Ablage. Ultimately this is the obdurate reality on which their love founders and the reality we are left with when Kathe reads out the announcement of Lene’s marriage. But because it is presented ambivalently, leaving room for speculation, it also trails the shadow of an alternative, possibly happier reality.

When we consider the question of characterisation in Irrungen, Wirrungen, we find that pragmatism and imagination are distributed so variously that we cannot say for sure whether those with the most imagination have the most pleasure. If Lene, so to speak, embodies both the real and the imaginary, so that she becomes the focus of speculation, she is by nature relatively free of illusions. She is ‘fur Ordnung und furs Reelle’ (2,322); her affinity with nature is pragmatic rather than fanciful: when she and Botho pick flowers she knows

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their names and habits, whereas Botho knowsonly their sentimental associations. Only once is she deceived and made the victim of her imagination, namely when she sees Botho and Kathe laughing together in the street and for a moment the memory of her own happiness with Botho will not allow her to adjust to the sight of his apparent happiness with Kathe; ironically, of course, what she sees is partly illusory, indeed Rotho remarks to Kathe that people will think they are quarrelling. Lene’s reaction is like that of a Kleistian heroine, who loses consciousness when her sense of self is contradicted by a shock; but the momentary escape from an unbearable reality restores her strength, so that she emerges more practical than ever, to remove herself and Frau Nimptsch to a part of the city where she will ndt see Botho again. The move is a commitment to a future without Botho, although, since memory is a merciless trickster, it is also a monument to their love. It is also a commitment to practicality and to modernity and away from romance and fairy tale, for the ‘dreifenstriges Hauschen’ (2,319) and the bubbling kettle are exchanged for ‘eine kleine Prachtwohnung‘ (2,422) with some new furniture, and ‘einen an den groi3en Vorderzimmerofen angebauten Kamin’ (2,422) as the only concession to the old life.

By contrast, Botho is constantly threatened by his imagination, in small things and in larger ones. His taste for the less fashionable paintings of Oswald Achenbach would, if he expressed it, undermine the value of the painting by the more fashionable Andreas Achenbach that he owns; his love for Lene, although he cannot acknowledge it publicly, really does undermine his esteem for women of his own class and for the pleasures of the salon. But his imagination is, at least initially, wholly retrospective - he cannot solve his problems because, like Schach von Wuthenow, he can imagine the future only in terms of the past. In his meditative wanderings in chapter 14, we see that, unlike Lene, he had seriously thought of a future in which they would be together, but he describes it as a dream:

Alles, was ich wollte, war ein verschwiegenes Gluck, ein Gluck, fur das ich friiher oder spater, um des ihr ersparten Affronts willen, die stille Gutheii3ung der Gesellschaft erwartete. So war mein Traum, so gingen meine Gedanken. Und nun soll ich heraus aus diesem Gliick und soll ein andres eintauschen, das mir keins ist. (2,404)

It is significant that throughout Botho’s musings in this chapter the horse, ‘seine prachtige Fuchsstute. . .ein Geschenk des Onkels, zugleich der Neid der Kameraden’ (2,403) and thus a link with duty and family responsibilities, repeatedly brings Botho back to reality. When Botho admits to himself that he hesitates to marry Kathe because of his love for Lene, the sound of cannon is heard and he returns from the world of his imagination to calm ‘das momentan unruhig gewordene Pferd‘ (2,403); when he speaks of the ‘Zauber, aus dem mich zu losen mir jetzt so schwer fallt’ (2,404) the horse pulls up short and brings him back to the real world; when he expresses his revulsion for the world of the salon and for ‘alles Unwahre, Geschraubte, Zurechtgemachte’ (2,404), the horse leads him to the monument for Hinckeldey where he finally accepts

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that, ‘das Herkommen unser Tun bestimmt’ (2,405). Only when he has accepted this link with his own past, of which the horse, as his uncle’s gift, is a symbol, does he gain control, ‘Wahrend er so sann, warf er sein Pferd herum’ (2,405). Imagination and practicality, inclination and duty struggle for supremacy in Botho in this passage, and although imagination is generally Botho’s stronger trait, his real, historical past, as symbolised by the horse, makes the outcome inevitable, and, if the reader pays careful attention to the horse’s behaviour, predictable.

Because of his vulnerability to the claims of the imagination and of the past, Botho is closest to the world of the ‘Marchen’. Most references to ‘Marchen’ occur in Botho’s presence. When he brings sweets from a grand occasion, he hastens to say that he does not bring ‘ein goldener Pantoffel oder sonst was aus dem Marchen’ (2,336); Lene, like Cinderella, cannot go to the ball, for she cannot appear in Botho’s world; so, in imitation of such grandeur, she and Botho dance to music heard through Frau Nimptsch‘s window, while Dorr and Frau Nimptsch beat time. At Hankels Ablage Botho speaks of awakening Lene with a kiss, but she is, in every sense, awake. Indeed, the fairy-tale beginning of their affair, in which the handsome nobleman rescues the poor girl, has awakened both of them to unknown possibilities. Botho also tells Lene the story of Undine, who drowned herself because her lover danced with another girl, but she dismisses it laughing. Later in the novel we learn that she had an earlier aristocratic lover, and with this revelation disappears the sense of uniqueness that attends the love of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Undine. It is instead Kathe who has danced at her first secret ball and later dances with Botho; and finally Botho who sits by the ashes, although by this time he might be said to be involved in another ‘Marchen’, that of the doll-wife who is transformed into a thinking, feeling human being by the birth of a child, the tale that inspired Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. Kathe is a woman without a shadow, associated throughout the novel with sunshine, as Lene is with the moon.14 Botho’s references to ‘Marchen’ create the sense of a world in which barriers and differences disappear. But they do so because such barriers are ignored rather than overcome. They seem therefore to offer not a viable alternative to the real world, but only a source of ironic and fragile reference, a comment on its inadequacies.

This seems to be confirmed by the use of fairy tale as a principle of structure. It is easy to see that E& Briest, for example; is underpinned by an anti- ‘Marchen’, a reversal of the Cinderella story, in which the heroine goes from riches and security to poverty and disgrace. It is less easy to see that any such structure may underpin Irrungen, Wirrungen. Yet if, as Jean-Louis Bandet suggests, Irrungen, Wirrungen is really about the moral education and growth of Botho von Rienacker, and the relationship with Lene in the first half and with Kathe in the second, together with the shift from idealised places to real ones, are the means of effecting this education, then the novel begins to resemble Kleist’s Das Kathchen von Heilbronn: it does so not insofar as both concern social status, but as both concern the moral education of a young man through his choice of a bride and his commitment to marriage; and Kleist’s play is itself

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underpinned by the fairy tale known as ‘Echte Braut, falsche Braut’. But if Fontane’s Kathe is the true bride, like Kleist’s Kathchen, and Lene, as Bandet suggests, only an idealised figment of Botho’s imagination, as Kunigunde in Kleist’s play is a creature of artifice, then the relationship between fairy tale and real world has become perverted. It can no longer offer a guarantee, as it does in Kleist’s play, that truth and goodness will prevail, if only because it is impossible to say what is good. What is desirable in the world of the imagination might be a union of Lene and Botho, but in the real world it is a union of Kathe and Botho. l5 And when Botho makes his final pronouncement that ‘Gideon ist besser als Botho’ (2,475), there can, for a number of reasons, be no corresponding comparison of Lene and Kathe.

The other characters show different degrees of pragmatism and imagination. Frau Dorr seems to have the best of both worlds, combining sentimental nostalgia for her youth, vicarious pleasure in Lene’s love for Botho, and the ruthless practicality of marriage to Dorr. Dorr’s imagination is indiscriminate. It attracts him to his wife because of her colourful past, not, like Gideon Franke, in spite of it. It also causes him to vacillate between extravagance and parsi- mony. The second chapter, largely devoted to Dorr, who then almost disappears from the novel, echoes with the idea of betrayal, for Dorr betrays the real world for the sake of his imagination - in his disorderly garden, where, as Fontane says, everything blossoms and ripens unseasonably, and in his dishonest business, where he enjoys imagining the chaos and anger caused by cheating his customers. Perhaps Dorr’s betrayal of reality is a warning to the young lovers; certainly Lene sees him, as her contemplation of the picture entitled ‘Si jeunesse savait’ indicates, as an example to be eschewed. Kathe’s volatile mind and extravagance initially suggest the same kind of betrayal, but she may not be totally incorrigible. Gideon Franke, by contrast, betrays the wider claims of the imagination. He accommodates himself to unpalatable realities, such as Lene’s past, and, more trivially, Frau Nimptsch’s passion for cards, but the clichCs and formulae of his speech and his homespun wisdom, as well as his dull appearance, show that his broader experience of life is not matched by his imagination. Although he is, in several ways, a representative of a new world, Fontane does not treat him or his world with much sympathy. It is still not a world in which Lene and Botho would have been free to choose each other.

Since reality and imagination are ambiguously combined in the depiction of time and place, and somewhat polarised in the portrayal of people, I think we must ask, finally, whether there is any general critical heading under which they may be united. Two possibilities, not of course mutually exclusive, suggest themselves, namely comedy and social criticism. Comedy deals in relatively harmless misunderstandings, that is, the collision of two views of reality, or of reality and imagination. This is what happens when Frau Dorr sees herself in Lene and Lene inwardly resists the comparison. Frau Dorr’s projection is comic insofar as she is harmless, kind-hearted and unthreatening; as a projection of Lene’s future she is more discomfiting. Onkel Anton fulfils the same role in Botho’s life; he is benevolent towards the nephew whom he does not understand; yet here the comedy gives way again to social criticism, for Onkel Anton has

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the power to affect the decisions Botho makes about his life and those of others. Similarly, although a comparison between Lene and Frau Dorr may be comic, a comparison between Lene and the mistresses of Botho’s colleagues is not; and the verbal echoes of Frau Dorr’s speech in that of Konigin Isabeau, intensified by Isabeau’s more graphic account of the hazards of her way of life, make the parallels with Frau Dorr and with Lene disturbingly clear. In the discrepancy between Lene’s and Botho’s love and more conventional, more acceptable, albeit illicit liaisons, Fontane implicitly criticises his society. The encounter at Hankels Ablage brings out the mercenary and degrading hypocrisy of the demi-monde in which the social circles of Botho and Lene meet in a parody of intimacy. It is all this that Botho rejects when he ends his affair with Lene.

If, as it seems, this means that harsh reality prevails, should we see the imaginative elements in the novel as the construction of a fool’s paradise, built up only to be destroyed? O r do they represent a reconstruction of reality, however tentative and fragile, a reality that is slowly being transformed? The events and especially the conclusion of the novel admit different interpretations that support each of these possibilities. It may be argued that the novel ends in acceptance and resignation; or that Botho, having betrayed his love for Lene, finds he has made a meaningless sacrifice. On the one hand his and Kathe’s childlessness may be interpreted as punishment for this betrayal, or, on the other, simply as immaturity, a temporary unreadiness to commit themselves to this marriage. The fairy-tale rescue of the poor girl by the aristocratic hero may be seen as an ironic or negative reference not matched by the novel’s conclusion, or instead, as the beginning of Botho’s real-life rescue from the blind prejudices of his class and of a moral education that ultimately parts him from Lene, but leaves him a better man for having known her. These different views are possible because in comedy and social criticism, and as a narrative principle, the brighter world of what can be imagined and remembered modifies, even subverts, the verifiable, sometimes dispiriting historical realities of the novel. The factual inaccuracies for which Fontane apologises unnecessarily and perhaps even disingenuously in his letter, prove to be part of that modifica- tion. Although both the real and the imaginary worlds are equally authentic, the one verified by historical fact, the other by spiritual and popular tradition, neither, by itself, carries Fontane’s authority or approval. For ultimately reality and imagination inform and reform each other in a succession of transformations. Botho himself testifies to this process when he tells Rexin:

Es kann nichts ungeschehen gemacht werden und ein Bild, das uns in die Seele gegraben wird, verblafit nie ganz wieder, schwindet nie ganz

The real event becomes a picture and the picture lives on in the mind to inform attitudes and actions. And the effect of this process on the narrative itself is to produce another subtler, more complex and finely discriminating, if also more elusive, reality that offers not only a persuasive vision of the world but also a commentary on its ways.

wieder dahin. Erinnerungen bleiben . . . (2,463)

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NOTES

References to Irrungen, Wirrungen are from: Theodor Fontane, Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Walter Keitel & Helmuth Niirnherger, Ahteilung, I , Samtliche Romne, Errahlungen, Gedichte, Nachgelassenes, vol. 2 , Munich 1971* ( = Hanser-Ausgahe). Volume and page numbers appear in the text after quotations

1 To Emil Schiff, 15 February 1888, in Bride TheodorFontanes, Zweite Sammlung, ed. Otto Pinower & Paul Schlenther, 19102, pp. 147f.; also in Hanser-Ausgahe, 2,919-920.

2 Horst Schmidt-Brummer, F o m des perspektivischm Erzihlens: Fontanes 7nungm, Wimngen’, Munich

3 M. A. McHaffie, ‘Fontane’s Irrungen, Wirrungen and the novel of realism’, in J. M. Ritchie (ed.),

F. M . Suhiotto, ‘The Use of Memory in Fontane’s Irrungen, Wirrunpn’, in Fonnen realisticher

5 See Eugene Faucher, ‘Le langage chiffre dans Imngen, Wirrungen de Fontane’, Etudes G m n i q u e s ,

6 See Christine Grawe, ‘Kathe von Sellenthins Irrungen, Wirrungen’, Fontane-Bliitter, 5 (1982), 90.

7 Fontane sees the association of public festivities with historical events as more typical of North Germany: ‘Man wirft unserem norddeutschen Lehen vor, dai3 es niichtern sei und des poetischen Schwunges enthehre. Das ist in gewissem Sinne wahr. Es fehlt uns das Bunte der Costume und das Coulissenwerk einer Wald- und Bergnatur, und weil wir dieser Requisiten entbehren, mag his zu einem gewissen Grade die Lust und die Fahigkeit in uns verkummert sein, ein Schauspiel im gronen Stile aufzufuhren. Es fehlt uns aunerdem die katholische Kirche, die groi3e Lehrmeisterin der Festzuge und Processionen. Zugegehen das. Aher ein neues Volk, wie wir sind, dessen Traditionen iiher den Tag von Fehrbellin kaum hinausreichen, hat sich hierzulande eben alles ahweichend von dem sonst Uehlichen gestaltet, und mit einem ganz neuen Lehensinhalt ist eine neue Art von Volkspoesie, mit dieser Poesie aher eine neue Art von Volksfesten geschaffen worden. Das Soldatische hat sich z u m poetischen Inhalt unseres Volkslebens ausgebildet.’ Werke, Schriften und B r i e f , Ahteilung 11, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, vol. 3, p. 41 1.

Faucher, ‘Le langage chiffr&’, p. 216., makes this comment: ‘Botho lit les journaux de faGon trop futile pour discerner si tat les signes des temps. Mais Fontane l u i - m h e est plus attentif il sait que les deux partis socialistes allemands ant decides leur fusion en une Sozialdemokratische Arheiterpartei Deutschlands ?I la fin de mai 1875, donc au moment oh commence I’action du roman, et il n’est pas indiffErent non plus que celui-ci s’achkve au moment oh Bismarck fait voter les lois contre les socialistes’.

Jean-Louis Bandet, ‘Le secret et la caricature. Remarques sur Fontane’, in Mdlanges offerts d Claude Davidpour son 70e anniversaire, ed. Jean-Louis Bandet, BerneIFrankfurt a.M./New York 1983, p. 41, makes the point that the transformation of the ‘SchloR’ into a ‘jammerlicher Holzkasten’ in the second chapter of the novel resembles the similar transformation near the beginning of Kafka’s DQS SchloJ3, ‘ce qui . . . semble annoncer la dCsillusion de K .

1971, pp. 35-36.

Periods in German Literature, 11, London 1969, pp. 173-4.

Erzahlkunst. Festschriftfor Charlotte Jolles, ed. Jorg Thunecke, Nottingham 1979, p. 479.

24 (1969), 217.

l o See Grawe, op. L i t . , pp. 91-93 and passim. I 1 Grawe, op. cit., p. 85, suggests: ‘Die Idylle van Bothos und Lenes Liehe wird also van Anfang

an auf Ahstellplatzen angesiedelt. Die moglichen Illusionen des Paares werden durch Fontanes Darstellung selhst untergrahen.’

I 2 Faucher, op. cit. , p. 219. This view of the Slavonic people scems to he common in Fontane’s works and perhaps elsewhere in German literature; for example, Crampas is ‘ein halher Pole’, Graf F. in Kleist’s Die Marquise van 0 is Russian.

l 3 Grawe, op. cit., p. 87.

l 4 Vincent J. Gunther, Das Symbol im erzahlerischen Werk Fontanes, Bonn 1967, pp. 51 & 56, discusses the symbolism of sun and moon; further interesting points are made on the subject by Kenneth J. Northcott, ‘Some Topoi in Fontane’, in the present volume.

356 REALITY AND IMAGINATION IN FONTANE

‘ 5 Jean-Louis Bandet, op. cit . , p. 49, sees the novel as the account of Botho’s moral education: ‘Le personnage principal de Irrungen, Wimngen n’est pas, ne peut pas &tre Lene, qui est bien trop schtmatique, psychologiquement invraisemblable, et qui d’ailleurs disparait presque complttement dans la deuxitme partie; Irrungen, Wirrungen n’est pas d’avantage le roman des amours entre les deux jeunes gens, mais bien exclusivement le roman de Botho, du personnage qui est prtsent d’un bout i l’autre de l’ceuvre, et le r6cit est entitrement organis6 autour du cheminement, de la reflexion qui le conduit i sortir de son narcissisme putril; Lene n’est alors qu’un personnage de rtftrence, qui permet de mesurer l’tvolution de Botho.’ Pierre Bange, Ironic et dinlogisme duns b romans de Fonfane, Grenoble 1974, p. 140, suggests that Frau Dorr’s illusions about Lene’s origins raise ‘le r&ve banal de l’amour plus fort que les barritres sociales (qu’on pourrait appeler ici le fantasme de Kathchen von Heilbronn).’ My reading of Das Kathchen von Heilbronn depends on the interpreta- tion of Hermann J. Weigand, ‘Zu Kleists Kathchen von Heilbronn’, in W. Miiller-Seidel (ed.), Heinrich von Kleikt. Aufsatze und Essap, Darmstadt 1973, p. 327.