The Best German Novelist of His Time
Ulli Lommel as Major Crampas and Hanna Schygulla
as Effi Briest in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Effi Briest
by Phillip Lopate, nyrb
"The novels of Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) are so sparkling, tender, sympathetic, delicately ironic, and psychologically astute that it is a wonder they are not better known by American readers. Considered the most important German novelist between Goethe and Mann, or even, as Gordon A. Craig, who wrote a fine book about him, claimed, “clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann,”1 Fontane can be made to fit snugly into the school of nineteenth-century European realism that includes Austen, Stendhal, Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola. But he came after most of them, in part because he was such a late bloomer (his first novel was published as he turned sixty), and in part because of Germany’s own delay in becoming a nation-state. Having been unified by Bismarck only in 1871, Germany may have needed more time for its social scene to acquire sufficient texture to attract a novelist of Fontane’s sensibility. nyrb