Effi Briest Read Free

overwhelming unsatisfied sexual desire than as the need for natural human warmth and freedom from the constraints of artificially acquired self-denial and rigour.
    The political dimension to the age difference, like the sexual one, is less close to the surface than its more obvious social and psychological aspects. Throughout his life, which spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century, Fontane closely followed the political developments of the age. In March 1848 joining the radicals he briefly manned the Berlin barricades with a theatrical-prop musket. In 1860 he joined the editorial staff of the conservative ‘Kreuzzeitung’. By the end of his life his attitude to Prussia and the Prussian establishment, always ambivalent, had become increasingly critical. The question of Fontane’s shifting political position is currently a matter of perhaps over-zealous scrutiny by Fontane specialists. Christian Grawe’s clear overview of his attitude to Prussia concludes, ‘Prussianness thus represented to Fontane’s contemporaries a mixture of militarism, Lutheranism, loyalty to state and king, order, ambition and obedience, the Kantian ethic of doing one’s duty and Hegelian apotheosis of the state – a combination of elements which Fontane regarded highly critically and to which he attributes the essential reponsibility for Effi’s destruction’. 6 By placing Effi and Innstetten in different generations Fontane is showing a society in the process of change, where the old, atrophying values have lost their ethical validity but are still in place to the extent that they can vitiate the life of the up-and-coming generation in a way that is fundamentally questioned by the narrative point of view. The age difference is at the heart of an undercurrent of political commentary which questions the hold of the old age over the new. Innstetten’s final, impotent recognition of the hollowness of his establishment principles coupled with the dying out of his family name prefigures the inevitable demise of an antiquated social and political construct. Fontane agrees with Charlotte Brontë: ‘conventionality is not morality’. 7
    The role of Bismarck on the periphery of the narrative – mentioned andvisited but not seen – is a central aspect of Fontane’s critique. It has even been suggested that the Chinaman’s ghost, which in Fontane’s celebrated and in terms of subsequent critical enquiry uniquely stimulating words is ‘a pivot for the whole story’, represents Bismarck. 8 Bismarck stands for much that threatens Effi and the literal dividing of the ways in Chapter 6 :right to Kessin and domestic life, left to Varzin, Bismarck’s residence and official duty, like all the geographical details in the novel has more than literal significance. However, it would be misleading simply to equate Innstetten with Bismarck and see him as the representative of Prussian orthodoxy. As with so much in Fontane’s fictional world the opposite is also true. In his last, great novel
Der Stechlin
the aging Junker Dubslav von Stechlin says, ‘There are no such things as incontrovertible truths, and if there are, they’re boring.’ This paradoxically self-invalidating statement encapsulates the quintessential Fontane: humorous, self-reflexive, distrustful of absolutes. He functionalizes Bismarck in a characteristically shifting set of constellations of characters, on the one hand – parallel to Innstetten – as the correlative of duty, absolute obedience, career-conscious striving, and also as inimical to women and family life for Effi is excluded from the invitations to Varzin; but also as parallel to Crampas, for Fontane saw and despised in Bismarck the opportunist who disregarded principle in favour of expediency, that is the opposite of Innstetten the ‘stickler for principle’, incidentally a label Fontane also applied disparagingly to Gladstone.
    Fontane chose his title and the name of his heroine with care. In early drafts he