Theodor Fontane
1819–1898
Biography
Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) was a German novelist and poet, born in Neuruppin, a town northwest of Berlin, into a family of Huguenot descent. He trained as an apothecary, like his father, and then turned to journalism and writing, working for years as a reporter and critic before he gained wide recognition. He was 58 when he published the first of the novels for which he is remembered today.
His novels, including Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888), Frau Jenny Treibel (1892) and Effi Briest (1894–95), look at German society from the middle classes up to the Prussian aristocracy. He wrote about marriage, class, infidelity and the place of women, subjects that polite society of his day preferred not to discuss openly. Many critics regard him as the leading German novelist of realism. His manner is ironic and restrained: he rarely tells the reader what a character thinks, and lets conversation and action carry the meaning.
Two of his books are here in German. Effi Briest is about a young woman married to a much older Prussian official. Years later her affair comes to light, and the society that had approved the marriage casts her out. Unterm Birnbaum (1885) is a shorter novella set in the Prussian countryside, told with the same sharp eye for village life and its quarrels.
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Books
Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
Effi Briest is a realist novel by Theodor Fontane, published in book form in 1895. It can be thematically compared to other novels on 19th-century marriage from a female perspective, such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, which are also adultery tragedies. This book uses the…
Summary from Wikipedia: Effi Briest (CC BY-SA 4.0)Unterm Birnbaum
by Theodor Fontane
In a village in the Oderbruch in the 1830s, the innkeeper Hradscheck is deep in debt and his wife longs for a better life. When a travelling agent who came to collect money vanishes one winter night, the village begins to talk. A short crime novel by Fontane, more interested in…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.