Elke Lehmann

I can see why this annoys so many people at school. Fontane provides a lot of excuses for the mistakes his characters make, but he doesn't really manage to make them likeable. Effi is bright, clever, pretty, but in essence a spoilt, vain teenager; Innstetten is stiff and official most of the time, and Crampas only really gets one scene in which he has something interesting to say. And it is difficult to sympathise with the trouble they make for themselves: Effi so effectively manages to conceal whatever she has done from the reader that we feel rather cheated when we find that she has kept some incriminating evidence for Innstetten to find, while Innstetten has plenty of good reasons to find some less baroque way of settling the matter than pistols in the dunes. There isn't much story, either: the whole thing could easily have been done in 25 pages by Kleist, for instance. If I'd read this at the over-literal age of 17, I'd probably have hated it too.

So why is it such an appealing novel after all? It is, definitely appealing, so there must be something more to it than the storyline. I think it comes down to Fontane's style and the clever way he mixes realism with symbolic motifs. We may not like Effi, but we understand her and the other characters as an integral part of the north German landscape. The story clearly has to take the shape it does, and we come to the final chapters waiting for the swing, the plane trees and the Rondell to come back. The strange, slightly spooky quality of Kessin seems odd in the abstract — what could be less spooky than a flat, windy Baltic beach resort? — but in context it makes perfect sense that everything there happens at a slightly higher level of intensity than elsewhere. The sunny innocence of Hohen-Cremmen and the official briskness of Berlin (where seven years can pass in the space between two sentences) make perfect sense too. It's basically just the translation of ballad form to prose...… (mehr)