Theodor Fontane. Romankunst als Gespräch (review)

Gerhard Neumann's monograph on Fontane collects articles of his published since the mid-nineties and includes two new essays. One of the most prominent international scholars of Kafka, European modernism, Kleist, Goethe, and more, Neumann presents readers with yet another impressive body of work. The main argumentative thread running through the book is that Fontane novels early and late test out an overarching cultural theory that earns the author a central place at the heart of European modernity. Of course, it is fi rmly recognized—among Germanists at least—that Fontane can hold his own with the likes of Flaubert, Eliot, and Tolstoy, but Neumann's rearticulation of Fontane's essential modernity is suggestive and welcome.

Neumann combines a strong theoretical bent with rich close readings. His main theoretical interlocutors are Foucault and Luhmann, bringing central aspects of their theories of modernity in dialogue with Fontane. On the one hand, Neumann uses the Foucauldian idea of the dispositif—i.e., a collection of discourses, institutions, media, and social practices out of which knowledge is generated— to describe classic scenarios that recur in so many Fontane novels, including conversation, duels, and mealtime discussion. These are all sites where Fontane tests out how cultural meaning making occurs. On the other hand, Neumann also draws on Luhmann's concept of modernity as an age of ever increasing differentiation: culture and knowledge are generated through acts of differentiation and distinction. The Gespräch—a key concept for so many interpreters of Fontane—is for Neumann fi rst and foremost a site of Differenzierung, a place where distinctions of class, gender, taste, and politics are negotiated.

For Neumann, Fontane is an unparalleled expert on the confl icts, tensions, and paradoxes (another key concept for Luhmann) at the heart of modernity; Fontane's portrait of nineteenth-century Prussia is so quintessentially modern because he puts his fi nger on the paradox that inheres between modernity as a process of "decadence" and "progress." Quoting Nietzsche's Ecco Homo, Neumann shows how Fontane casts a penetrating eye on European modernity as "décadent zugleich und Anfang." Fontane does this both as "ethnographer" of Prussian society and as "semiologician," putting a fi nger on the problem of language and the sign that Hofmannsthal and Saussure would elaborate in subsequent decades. Here Neumann heuristically positions Fontane between Zola and Mallarmé; ethnography and semiology stand as redescriptions of literary periods of realism and modernism, redescriptions that reveal both where these aesthetic trends converge and how they are related to broader social trends. Positioning Fontane in this way allows Neumann to fuse social-historical and post-structuralist, "semiological" readings.

Along with readings of frequently discussed works such as Effi Briest and Der Stechlin, Neumann engages with lesser-read early works such as Vor dem Sturm and Schach von Wuthenow, a welcome feature of this volume. His chapter on Schach von Wuthenow, co-written with Gabriele Brandstetter, is a masterful study of issues at stake throughout the entirety of Fontane's novels: the love affair as mésalliance, male and female outsider fi gures, and the tension between decadence and progress in Prussia. Neumann does a nice service by showing how even these early, ostensibly historical novels about the Napoleonic era contain the core of Fontane's mature diagnosis of the predicament of modern Prussian culture. The chapter on Vor dem Sturm combines a social-historical reading of the novel's engagement with Romantic theories of warfare with a study of the novel's refl ections on mediated communication at a time of transition to modern medial economies. In this and other chapters, Neumann convincingly shows how Fontane's novels are at heart about "das Spiel der Zeichen in der Gesellschaft; über ihre Wahrheits-wie über ihre Täuschungsstrategien" (8): this "Spiel" is characteristic both of modern social practices and of a thoroughly modern understanding of language.

A related argument across several chapters deals with Fontane's use of citation, literary and otherwise. Fontane's characters are constantly citing...