Austro-Hungarian Camouflage: Theodor Fontane's Graf Petöfy

Little is certain about the sources of the sixth of Fontane's late novels, Graf Petöfy. Some long-standing information has been discredited, but not corrected. The 1880 Viennese wedding between the Hungarian count, General Török (68), and German comedienne Johanna Buska (33) is still considered to be the initial inspiration, but, as Helmuth Nürnberger has pointed out, a wedding is only a beginning. The ending in failed marriage and suicide has nothing to do with Török, who died a natural death four years later, since Count Petöfy dies by his own hand. Obvious, extensive similarities between Fontane's childhood memories and those of the comedienne/countess would appear to justify biographical interpretation, but none has been published.

This article is essentially biographical and based not on Fontane's childhood, but on his most recent experience, the reception given him by the Counts Philipp zu Eulenburg, father and son, at Schloss Liebenberg. This experiential element had to be camouflaged, since it was of a homoerotic nature — the terms "camouflage" and "homoerotic" borrowed here from Heinrich Detering's monograph. The Török-Buska wedding suggested Vienna and Hungary for the camouflage, and a French melodrama suggested an appropriate plot. The camouflaging forces us to differentiate between the literal novel, often criticized as superficial, and the subliminal, autobiographical one. The advantages from "outing" the novel include new sources and their interrelationship, clarification of puzzling issues, especially the title, a less naive concept of realism, insight into Fontane's biography, and backgrounding for the greatest scandal that rocked the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II a quarter century later. Two additional personalities prominent in this study are Adolf Wilbrandt and Karl Maria Kertbeny. Wilbrandt was a popular playwright and old acquaintance of Fontane's who provided a noncontroversial source recognizable when the novel was published. Kertbeny, a prolific translator and propagator of Hungarian literature provided emotional access to Hungary, where Fontane had never been, and to homoeroticism, which is probably why he is not mentioned by name.

The critics have not been kind to Graf Petöfy, the gist of their negative take long based on the belief that realists such as Fontane must know the territory in order to convince the reader, whereas Fontane spent only three days in Vienna and had never been to Hungary. Accordingly, the resulting Graf Petöfy, despite its brilliant dialogue and deep psychology, was a dilettantish mistake as a novel and at best a lesson learned. Some earlier scholarship has been refuted (Kerekes, "Gragger, Fontane und die Fakten" and "Ein Kuddelmuddel"), but no new insights into Fontane's sources or the title have been put forward (Grawe; Kabus; Osborne; Storch). Since about 1970, the novel has enjoyed a considerable improvement in its critical standing (Grawe; Mittenzwei; Voss), but rhetoric alone has failed to win interest in the novel — as evident in the Reclam Verlag's recent decision to remove Graf Petöfy from its catalogue.

From the outset, German scholarship has never questioned the title. György Konrád (17-18), however, had good fun with it in his opening talk at the Fontane "marathon" of 1998 in Potsdam: "Petöfi," Konrád pointed out, is not a real name, but the nom de plum of a butcher's son, one Sándor Petrovics who, had he lived until 1884, would have exercised his copyright to prevent a noble title being added to it. Alas, he had been missing since the Battle of Semesvár (German: Schässburg) on 31 July 1849, when he was only twenty-six: Fontane's Count Adam Petöfy is seventy in 1874. Konrád's judgment, "alles andere ist ein Werk der Phantasie" (16), is a challenge to find the elements of Fontane's fantasy and see how they fit together, whereby readers are advised to be ever aware of the spelling difference between the historical "Petöfi" and the fictional "Petöfy."

The title figure is a seventy-year-old bachelor who courts and marries the twenty-five-year-old comedienne Franziska Franz on a promise of...