Effi Briest

EFFI BRIEST

THEODOR FONTANE, born in Neuruppin in 1819, was descended from French Huguenot settlers in Brandenburg, and was brought up on the Baltic Sea coast of Prussia before spending most of his life in Berlin. He trained as a pharmacist but in 1849 decided to earn his living as a writer. He spent several years as a foreign correspondent in London and his prolific non-fiction output includes journalism, poetry, theatre reviews, local travelogues of Berlin’s hinterland, unpartisan accounts of Bismarck’s wars and two autobiographical works. He published his first novel, Before the Storm (1878), at the age of 58 and this was followed by sixteen further novels which established his reputation in the twentieth century as Germany’s finest realist novelist. Fontane’s sensitive portrayals of women’s lives in late nineteenth-century society are unsurpassed in European literature. The Woman taken in Adultery (1882), Cécile (1886), Delusions, Confusions (1888), Jenny Treibel (1892) and Effi Briest (1895) focus on problems of love and marriage, while the late works The Poggenpuhl Family (1896) and The Stechlin (1898) provide humorous family portraits of Prussian society in decline. He died in 1898.

HUGH RORRISON was educated at Ayr Academy and the universities of Glasgow and Vienna. He has published extensively on modern German theatre. Among his translations are Wedekind’s Lulu Plays (performed at the Almeida Theatre), Pavel Kohout’s Maple Tree Game (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Heiner Müller’s Road to Volokolamsk (BBC Radio 3), Brecht’s Berlin Stories and Journals 1934–55 and Piscator’s The Political Theatre. He lives in Edinburgh and works freelance for radio.

HELEN CHAMBERS was educated at Hutchesons’ Grammar School, Glasgow, and the University of Glasgow. She has taught at the universities of Leeds and Melbourne. Her publications include Supernatural and Irrational Elements in the Works of Theodor Fontane and The Changing Image of Theodor Fontane, and, as editor, a study of Joseph Roth. She is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews.

THEODOR FONTANE

Effi Briest

Translated from the German by
HUGH RORRISON and HELEN CHAMBERS

Introduction and notes by Helen Chambers

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This translation first published by Angel Books 1995
Published in Penguin Books 2000
11

Translation copyright © Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1995
Introduction and notes copyright © Helen Chambers, 1995
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EISBN: 9781101489222

Contents

Introduction

Translators’ Note

Effi Briest

Notes

Introduction

Thomas Mann in 1919 said of Effi Briest that it belonged among the six most significant novels ever written.1 By that time the Wilhelmine Empire evoked in Fontane’s major novels had already become history, and it is Fontane’s achievement to have captured that world on the eve of its dissolution. Its centre was Prussia, much maligned since, but dear to Fontane’s heart, and he has left us, in the voices and lives of a representative few, his diagnosis of the aspirations and ills of a society whose unspectacular decline he saw with the disabused clarity of old age.2

When Effi Briest was published as a book in 1895, after being serialized in the Deutsche Rundschau, its seventy-five-year-old author experienced his first real literary success. Recognition had been slow in coming to the man who was later to be seen as the greatest German novelist between Goethe and Thomas Mann. The reasons were both personal and political. He was born in 1819 in Neuruppin, thirty miles north-west of Berlin, son of the pharmacist Louis Henri and his wife Emilie Fontane, both descendants of the French Huguenot community in Berlin. His most vivid childhood memories are of the Baltic port Swinemünde (today Świnoujście in Poland) where his father took over a chemist’s shop when Fontane was seven. Swinemünde, a strange combination of stuffily provincial resort and cosmopolitan seaport, was the model for Kessin in Effi Briest. After haphazard schooling Fontane was apprenticed to his father’s trade and qualified as a pharmacist in 1847. There was no capital to set him up in his own business. He decided in 1849 to become a writer and years of struggle followed.

Fontane was steeped in English literature, in particular Shakespeare, Scottish and English ballads, Scott and Thackeray, and his literary experience was quickened in 1844, 1852 and 1855-59 by visits to England and Scotland, on the last occasion as London press agent for the Prussian government. His work as foreign correspondent involved close scrutiny of The Times which became a source for many of his own pieces. He admired especially the polished style of the leaders which were, surprisingly for a German, devoid of any whiff of dry officialese. Charlotte Jolles sees his own sovereign and stylish prose as in part the product of those years of reading The Times.3 The year of revolutions in Europe, 1848, saw him writing political polemics at home on the future of Prussia and Germany for the Dresdner Zeitung, some of them censored by the editor. He produced translations of Chartist poems, of Hamlet (c.1843), and of Catherine Gore’s novel The Moneylender (c.1850), as well as an essay on the worker poet John Prince (1842). Fontane’s experience of English life and literature was decisive. It focused his thoughts and feelings about his homeland. Victorian London was his first experience of a modern metropolis, and the seething centre of the Empire gave him a liberating sense of the wideness and diversity of the world, of infinite energy and possibilities, but at the same time he could see the power of history and tradition in Britain, which unlike politically fragmented Germany with its scores of sovereign states had no identity problems and could devote itself wholeheartedly to the serious business of making money.

Back in Berlin Fontane spent the next twenty years writing non-fiction for a living. Between 1862 and 1882 he published four volumes of local travelogues dealing with the towns and villages, the buildings and people, the history and anecdotes of Berlin’s hinterland, Rambles in Brandenburg (Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg).