At an elementary level, this means that he took great pains to ensure factual accuracy in details, especially of milieu. In Unwiederbringlich, for example, Fredericksborg was a Renaissance castle actually destroyed by fire in 1859, the Hermitage park existed and so did Vincent’s Restaurant in Kongens Nytor in Copenhagen; Wortsaae and Thomsen were real antiquarians and Melby and Marstrand well-known Danish painters; Tersling, Bülow, du Plat, General Schleppegrell, and others were real soldiers; there was a famous Dutch doctor called Boerhave (p. 183); Fritz Reuter and Klaus Groth were contemporary poets and Lucile Grahn a well-known ballerina; the communities and schools of Gnadenfrel, Gnadenberg, and Bunzlau existed; and so on.

All this lends a great air of verisimilitude, but as Fontane himself wrote: “It is not the purpose of the novel to describe things which happen or at least can happen every day; the modern novel’s purpose seems to me to depict a life, a society, a milieu which is the undistorted image of the life we lead.” Thus the novelist’s work overflows into life and we must have the feeling, when reading, that we are continuing our real life; at the same time, the life imagined by the novel must have “the intensity, clarity, lucid arrangement, roundness and resulting heightened intensity of feeling achieved by the transfiguration which is the task of art.” Realism is not mere accumulation of naturalistic details but the careful composition of a story by which the heightening of effect can give a more general validity to normality.

Thus, one of Fontane’s most striking devices to achieve apparent objectivity—the lack of intrusion of an omniscient author—conceals deeper purposes. Again in Fontane’s own words: “the author’s intrusion is almost always wrong and at least superfluous. But it is difficult to ascertain where such intrusion begins, for the author must, as such, do and say a lot … ;but he must only refrain from judging, preaching, being clever and wise.” Hence, in Unwiederbringlich, the wide use of dialogue, conversation, and letters; we learn about Holk and Christine and Ebba largely through their speech and actions or through the speech and actions of others, and although motives are sometimes not untransparent, there remains an uncertainty, an ambiguity, a mystery about the core of their being—if core there be; for this, too, is left undetermined—which gives them the living and fascinating quality of real human beings. It is hardly necessary to point out the great opportunities of delicate irony offered by this method of allowing characters to reveal and indeed betray, if not to condemn, themselves out of their own mouth. If any analysis occurs, it is often sincere and splendidly muddled self-analysis that, even in moments of tension, is not without its humorous side. Fontane himself writes of the need to show things in a humorous light or at least to give them an interesting grotesque shape; again, examples are not lacking in Unwiederbringlich.

Fontane is well aware how little people frequently know about themselves and about others; and by letting his characters thus think and act for themselves, he is able to unfold his story in such a way that it takes place before our eyes. Thus he ensures that, as in life, the fate that overtakes his characters is never inexorable, at least not until it has taken place. At the end we may look back and see how everything, including chance, has had its role to play in any character’s lot, but while reading, we are left guessing, from one event to the next, how the apparently casual adventure will develop. Ars est celare artem, and the great art of Fontane is always to leave scope for interpretation and imagination.

Similarly, when a fate is finally decided, there is no question of its being a last judgement. Fontane is too wise, tolerant, and, above all, too skilful an artist to condemn. His purpose is not to embody a message but to tell a story. If he has any message, it is that all messages are contradictory and thus it is false to think that anything or anybody can be wholly right or wholly wrong. Indeed, in Unwiederbringlich, it might well seem that the only thing that is plainly and whole-heartedly disgraceful is just the lack of a sense of humour which prevents self-awareness, an ironical view of oneself, although even here one or two of the minor characters, e.g. Schwarzkopf, pompous though he is, seem exceptions to such a rule. Ultimately, we can only feel that Fontane has achieved his object of creating a work of art that retains the exasperating yet fascinating ambiguities of life.

Since Unwiederbringlich, as well as a psychological novel and a novel of mœurs, is something of an historical novel, a few historical notes may be appropriate to help the English reader, particularly on the Schleswig-Holstein question. As Palmerston once remarked, only three people had ever understood it, of whom one went mad, the second had died and the third, Palmerston himself, had forgotten! Briefly, the nineteenth-century history of the duchies concerns their attempts to remain united and, in spite of certain personal links with the Danish monarchy, relatively autonomous, in accordance with the declaration of 1460 (referred to by the Princess on p. 87) that they should remain undivided in perpetuity—uf ewig ungedeelt. A second obvious factor was the desire of some Danes to incorporate parts of Schleswig-Holstein into Denmark; in particular the so-called Eiderdanes (of whom the politician Hall, also mentioned in the novel, was one of the leaders) wished the whole of the area north of the Eider to become Danish. The German Bund or Confederation, with Prussia in the forefront, was equally determined to maintain rights, at least in Holstein which, since 1815, was a member of the Bund.

In 1848, Frederick VII, of whom we hear a good deal in the novel, proclaimed Schleswig a Danish province. The Schleswig-Holsteiners appealed to the Bund and their forces under a Prussian general achieved considerable success until, in 1849, they were at last decisively defeated at Fredericia, in north Schleswig. The Prussians then concluded an armistice and when the Schleswig-Holsteiners tried to fight on they were defeated at Idstedt by the Danes under the command of de Meza, a Dane of Portuguese extraction who also appears in Fontane’s novel. Finally in 1853, by the so-called London protocol, Schleswig remained in loose union with Denmark while Holstein, although largely administered from Copenhagen, remained a member of the German Bund—an explosive situation which forms the historical background throughout Unwiederbringlich.

Fontane, who was the author of a book on the Danish war of 1863, took great care to ensure accuracy, both in the general background and in political events as well as in personal details, for example concerning Frederick VII. Frederick who lived from 1808 to 1862, first married in 1836, married a second time in 1841 and divorced five years later. His mistress Luise Rasmussen, later Countess Danner, of whom so much is heard in the novel, had been successively a governess and a ballerina before being set up as a milliner with the help of the King’s private secretary Berling, who then withdrew in favour of the King. One of the undoubted charms of Unwiederbringlich is the way in which Fontane’s imagination has been stimulated and entranced by the setting of the novel on the Baltic coast as well as at the Copenhagen court and in the Danish country-side, which he visited to obtain local colour. Fontane has thus been able to give a wider resonance and a freer rein to his imagination in his treatment of the fait divers (actually occurring in Mecklenburg-Strelitz) which provided him with the starting-point of his novel; and it is relevant both to his obvious depth of understanding and to his powers of moral and emotional detachment that the relationship between his own father and mother and his own wife and himself seem to have provided material for the relationship between Christine and Helmut in the novel. Be that as it may, the combination of so many factors—the accuracy and vividness of the background and setting (not forgetting some very comical secondary characters), the skilful narrative technique, the sureness of purpose, the brilliantly aphoristic style, the pervasive irony, the importance and modernity of the theme, make Unwiederbringlich one of the outstanding novels of the nineteenth century.

This translation is dedicated to my wife.

Douglas Parmée
Queen’s College, Cambridge
1963

IRRETRIEVABLE

1

Holkenäs Castle, the family seat of Count Holk, was built on a dune sloping down to the sea, a mile south of Glücksburg: an impressive sight for the occasional visitor to a district at that time quite off the beaten track. It was an edifice in the Italian style, reminiscent in so many ways of classical Greek architecture that the Count’s brother-in-law, Baron Arne of Arnewieck, could well speak of a latter-day temple of Paestum.