Eleven reasons to read Fontane

Fontane's language seduced. , He writes a captivating English. It was in his letters or novels, be it as a ballad poet, travel writer, theatre, art, or literature critics. He is so accessible, formulated to easily and accurately and loves it, occasionally frivolous. A wonderful conversationalist, he, a, has raised the Chat to high art. Only the name, the fall of Napoleon, Bismarck, Menzel, captain –, we notice that he lived in a time other than our own, and wrote.
Fontane opens worlds. Certainly, he is a writer of the 19th century. Century, born on the 30. December 1819 in Neuruppin, died on 20. September 1898 in Berlin. But what that means! Anyone who reads it, who followed his biography, instant access to a very turbulent European era, experienced the rapid change in technology and culture, society and politics, a development that shapes us today.
Fontane writes of time history. of The young Fontane was inspired by the freedom of spirit in the Vormärz. The revolutionary outbreak on Saturday, 18. March 1848, at Berlin's Alexanderplatz entrainment and at the same time, panic-stricken, he told in his autobiography, "From Twenty to Thirty" is impressive.
Fontane shows, such as courage goes. Fontane was a graduate pharmacist. But a pharmacy? He was a talented Poet and writer! Courageously, he decided, with thirty years to live by his pen. The money he earned first as a Journalist for the conservative government, the press ("I sold today for thirty pieces of silver"), then as a government correspondent in London. Later, he has not spared all the begging, to finally be a freelance writer. Not quite to the delight of his wife, but with your full support.
Fontane know that behind the mountain living people. in the middle of the 1850s lived Fontane in London, temporarily, with his wife and child. Here he became acquainted with the modern world, city life and moved naturally among Englishmen. Fontane, the European and cosmopolitan: In London, the Preusse is of Huguenot background for the citizens of the world. An important prerequisite for his great late novels.
Not without Fontane durch die Mark Brandenburg cycle. The idea had seized him already, as he returned from London to Berlin, his "hikes"-project. In the four volumes of his travel articles available today. They describe the landscape, tell of the villages, castles and people of the Mark Brandenburg. There are texts, such as beads. You need to in the Luggage! Whether you bike through the canals with the train or car on the road: A stop with Fontane, on the Stechlinsee, for example, increases the desire to travel and broadens the view.
Fontane tells his prisoner-of-war. He had given up his job as an Editor at the conservative "Kreuz Zeitung" and the theatre had become a critic of the liberal "Vossischen newspaper", because of the war between Germany and France broke out in the summer of 1870. A well-paid job as a war journalist allowed him to travel to occupied France. At Domremy, he was a prisoner of war. The exact circumstances of his arrest and of his imprisonment on the Ile d'oléron described by Fontane in "prisoner-of-war" is accurate and reflects. It is his first car is a biographical work, very personally, very much worth reading, and has yet to be translated during his lifetime into French.
One of the best ballad poet of Germany. early on Fontane's ballads all the way to the school book found. With the "Archibald Douglas", in 1857, set to music by Carl Loewe, earned the Poet even beyond Germany's success. Today probably the most famous ballads – "The Brück' am Tay", "John Maynard", "Mr. von Ribbeck on Ribbeck in Havelland" – are, however, late throws, and emerged as the night. "That would be me again the privilege of the gods and Hämmeln return to my youth, it would have been' I'm not dreaming," wrote he cleaned up his son, and said self-ironically, his "Ballade of capital" was, unfortunately, the only fortune he leave his children behind. And really, the thickness of a business with Fontane we make today.
The old Fontane, a novelist of European rank. , And then, with sixty, he actually only really. It is the late novels "the trials, tribulations" (1888), "Frau Jenny Treibel" (1892), "Effi Briest" (1895), "The Stechlin" (1898), with which he is without a doubt one of the biggest in the German literature and in the same breath with Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy. The Plots Fontane found in historical materials, in newspaper reports or in his own life-world. It is a modern, realistic Berlin novels with living people, whose fate he sale so told, that they captivate us till today.
female figures, male figures. is Briest, for example, the young Effi. At seventeen, she is forced by her mother into marriage with an older man and careerist. You will not find this Geert von Innstetten initially not so bad. Only when she desperately to his cold, saves them in a secret affair. Fontane tells all of this with a lot of empathy for Effi, also condemned the duel that follows, as Innstetten has discovered the long stale history and the lovers totschiesst. He also knows how to arouse outrage against the fate of Effis, which shatters the last of the narrow social conventions. An "old creep" is this Innstetten, wrote to him a young reader after reading. What are you, the old Fontane confessed in his engaging way, that, "if this is to apply, all the men are actually "old disgust," which is perhaps correct, but a somewhat strict view".
The poetic child. of The old Fontane wrote, in addition to the novels, also in his autobiography. "My baby," is the book in which he finds all to himself. He had "written to this book back to health", he wrote in 1892 in his diary. Because of the months earlier it had plagued a deep Depression. The "child" notes. You are a heart gripping piece of a large denomination.

The space is too tight for what is to be said. That Fontane was very well-read, and the game with texts in mind, and that he – dominated, such as Gottfried Keller – the art of humour and ironic Self-deprecation. But the best: easy to read! The novels and autobiographical works, the ballads and poems of ball, the letters, and Travel reviews, the correspondence and theater reviews, it's not the end. And then it happens: you fall in love with the Fontane-Ton, you are the font'd.

(editing Tamedia)

Created: 13.01.2019, 18:15 PM