Luke Dale Collection – German Literature IV –

Saturday AM (23/04/22)
‘A detached narrative perspective prevents sentimentality.’ Discuss with reference to
ONE OR MORE of the prescribed prose texts.

Both the realism of Theodor Fontane’s adultery novel and the naturalism of Thomas Mann’s
tragic novella are served well by a detached narrative voice. In Effi Briest, the narrator lurks behind an
overabundance of dialogue, characters being developed not by any artificial process of description,
but rather in the more subtle manner of their conversations. Thomas Mann has no such freedom in his
short story Der kleine Herr Friedemann, whose limited length necessitates rapid introduction and
action of characters. Thus, while Fontane’s absent narrator merely provides space for his personalities
to fill, sentimental or not, Mann’s distant voice remains in full view, and anathematises sympathy
with its tone of disgust.
The Hohen-Cremmen chapters of Effi Briest serve as a glimpse of paradisical childhood,
whose languor will be replaced with boredom and whose spontaneity will be replaced will social
ritual. Fontane gives a rich description of the garden, but in terms of character prefers to allow the
interactions of mother and daughter, husband and wife, and between young friends, speak for
themselves. Often the most innocuous pieces of dialogue can bear the greatest weight of meaning—
for example, Hertha’s childish call through the “von wildem Wein halb überwachsenen Fenster”:
“Effi, komm.” Fontane spoke of this utterance as the seed from which the whole tragic tale
germinated: far from simply the call of a friend, it seems to represent the call from Effi’s youth,
distant and unanswerable, as she is prematurely snatched into adult life. The window might be
conceived as a kind of frontier between these two spheres, with the proliferation of the vine a
Dionysiac symbol of fertility. Furthermore, the vine adumbrates Briest’s ham-fisted attempt at
metaphor during the marriage feast, in which Effi is likened to her near homophone ‘Efeu’, which
climbs around Innstetten’s “schlank aufgeschossenen Stamm”. From the innocence of the prelapsarian
garden, then, Effi is catapulted into sexuality; indeed, her innocence is itself objectified as an object of
desire by her own mother, who observes her daughter’s “jugendlich reizende Geschöpf… noch erhitzt
von der Aufregung des Spiels.” It is this imposition of adulthood upon the reader’s brief experience of
an idealised prepubescence that rouses sympathy. For childhood to mature into adulthood is itself a
tragedy; for the latter to appropriate the former for its own sexualised ends is a horror, and one which,
through dialogue, Fontane steers our emotions without requiring further authorial comment.
Mann seems to have no interest in rousing sympathy. The opening passage of his short story
establishes a narratorial voice of observational impassivity, an atmosphere in which sentimentality
cannot thrive. The description of “die Glieder des gekrümmten und zuckenden kleinen Wesens,” has
an analytical rather than concerned tone, with the latter noun especially notable in that it reduces
Friedemann’s humanity. Indeed, the fronting of the judgement that “Die Amme hatte die Schuld”
renders the child’s suffering as secondary, the assignation of guilt being a priority. Mann’s obsession
with guilt reflects a Naturalistic worldview of innate depravity, an almost Calvinistic conviction at the
base nature of men. Guilt, then, may be assigned here, but for Mann it is a universal: his narrative
voice is detached because sympathy is impossible in a world where nobody deserves it. This opening
passage warrants comparison to Fontane’s; after all, an identical theme of children robbed of youth by
adults is at play. But where Fontane creates a tension, and as such a sentimentality, about Effi’s
departure from innocence, Mann has this departure happen before the narrative, with the reader’s in
media res experience exclusively of the fallout. As such, only does Mannian irony anathematise
Mitgefühl, but the narrated time emphasises not the protagonists suffering, but merely his
instrumentalization by those around him.
That Mann numbered Effi Briest amongst his favourite novels should be of no surprise; he
takes many elements of Fontane’s style and narrative, only stripping out sentimentality. For example,
it is worth considering the disabled character in the novel, Alonzo Gieshübler, who confides in Effi
that “Personen meines Schlages sind nie jung.” Fontane, then, does not ignore the trials of disabled
characters, but nor does he wax lyrical about them: he simply gives the character in question a voice.
Mann, by contrast, has his narrative voice focus on the non-verbal tics of Friedemann to render him
more animal than human. The zittern of desire, which recurs as a Leitmotif throughout the short story,
typifies Mann’s approach of reducing identity to uncontrollable physical phenomena. It is not his
detachment that prevents sentimentality, but what he does with this detachment.
The titular assertion is therefore false. In detaching himself, a narrator creates a void which
may be filled with sentimentality or not. In Effi Briest, Fontane uses detachment to create a more
compelling set of characters with whom we sympathise more by virtue of his method. In Der kleine
Herr Friedemann, Mann uses detachment to create characters who are almost fake by their lack of
identity—they are rather types in his melodrama to demonstrate human depravity.

Discuss the presentation of ONE of the following in ONE OR MORE of the prescribed
texts: revolution; the supernatural; settings; honour.

In 1895, the year in which Arthur Schniztler’s play Liebelei was released and Theodor
Fontane’s Effi Briest was published in book form, honour was in apparent decay across Europe. The
decadent movement of the fin-de-siècle epitomised this cultural breakdown, with its depictions of
aristocratic sexual wantonness and indulgence of all kinds. Schnitzler’s play lays bare the hypocrisy
of the Viennese bourgeoisie at the turn of the century, demonstrating how their superficial honour had
rotted to the core. It is not the well-spoken gentlemen—the supposed pillars of society—who maintain
traditional morality, but rather the working-class. By contrast, Fontane’s Innstetten represents a
landowner for whom the Prussian honour code still holds fast, but to his detriment.
In Act One, the meeting of Fritz, Christine, Theodor and Mizi reveals a younger generation of
wealthy Viennese driven by hedonism and immediate gratification over long-term relationships. But
despite their evident good acquaintance, it is insisted upon that the men and women maintain the
formal ‘Sie’ until the ritual of the ‘Bruderschaft’ is completed. This jarring contrast between
traditional rules of social engagement on a linguistic level, and unorthodox and potentially
dishonourable actual behaviour, indicates the hypocrisy upon which the façade of aristocratic life is
clad. During the ceremony, Theodore utters “Aber nicht mit dem Wein, das ist kein
Bruderschaftswein. (Erhebt sich, nimmt eine andere Flasche – gleiches Spiel wie früher.)”; Schitzler
appears to be ironising the complexity of these social rituals. More importantly, however, is the noun
‘Spiel’ in the stage directions—a mere ‘game’ is exactly what such rituals are without the honour code
which traditionally upheld them. It is clear by the men’s actions that this has disappeared. Martin
Swales, writing about another of Schnizter’s plays, aptly comments of the writer’s milieu that “It is a
disintergrating world, a world that, in part at least, knows of its own disintegration. It answers this
sense of its own collapse with a kind of cynical hedonism, and yet continues to pay lip-service to
traditional moral and social virtues. Honour, then, is dead; but Honour’s shadow, like that of God in
Nietzsche, will be shown in caves for thousands of years to come, a simulacrum of honour whose
original copy is lost. Swales’ comment as to the self-consciousness of the disintegration can be seen
in the dense irony of Fritz and Theodor’s dialogue—explaining the anxiety of jenes Weib, Fritz tells
Theodor: “(ironisch) schlechtes Gewissen, wenn du willst.” In their circles, then, the idea of conjugal
honour is absurd, with the crucial ‘irony’ transforming serious moral transgressions into laughable
irrelevancies. The power of the play’s volta, when the apparently laughable honour rears its fatal head
in the duel, works so effectively because honour had been theretofore considered only as a historical
artefact.
It is the “Frau eines Strumpfwirkers” Katharina Binder to whom honour is an actual, felt
social force. “Die Männer sind ja so ordinär” she tells Christine, disgusted at her consorting with the
rich men of Vienna. Unlike Theodor, Katharina makes no attempt to justify her views as
‘vernünftig’—if so she might consider the financial potential of a wealthy suitor—her keen sense of
propriety is instead essentially an inherited prejudice from a working-class background. That she feels
‘bound’ (as her speaking name ‘Binder’ indicates) to a social honour code is also made evident in her
condemnation of Weiring for stealing flowers: “Wenn sich das aber alle dächten –”. By this reasoning
her Weltanschauung is identical to that of Fontane’s Innstetten. In a disarmingly honest monologue to
his friend Wüllersdorf, Innstetten reveals that he would prefer to ignore Effi’s transgression, “Aber im
Zusammenleben mit den Menschen hat sich ein Etwas gebildet, das nun mal da ist und nach dessen
Paragraphen wir uns gewöhnt haben, alles zu beurteilen, die andern und uns selbst. Und dagegen zu
verstoßen geht nicht.” The Prussian honour code, then, by which Innstetten’s life operates, is so
ingrained into his thinking as to have become unassailable. Fontane presents a society not where
Honour has degraded, but where its very entrenchment causes crisis. However, this crisis is of course
precipitated by Effi’s transgression—Innstetten can be criticised on many fronts, but he is honest, and
holds to his convictions. By comparison, Fritz and Theodor’s society is, as the husband of Fritz’s
mysterious Weib condemns it, a “Maskenscherz”: he then tells Fritz “Meine Frau hat nämlich ihren
Schleier bei Ihnen vergessen.” The ‘Schleier’ evokes the marriage veil, but also the veil of deceit
which is the reason for the shawl’s being in Fritz’s house.
For contemporaneous publications, the play and the novel present radically different ideas of
Honour. Schnitzler’s corrupted honour code contends with Fontane’s almost unhelpfully uncorrupted
one. Innstetten’s firm foundation of honour has its Viennese analogue not in a man of his rank, but
rather a woman of lowly status. Schnitzler’s play is perhaps a warning against the decadence of an
amoral bourgeoisie lacking honour, whilst Fontane’s novel is a warning against the dangers of
adhering to a totalising honour code without self-interrogation.

Discuss protagonists’ struggle to comprehend the world around them with reference to
ANY TWO of the prescribed prose texts.

In both Irmgard Keun’s Nach Mitternacht and Thomas Mann’s Der kleine Herr Friedemann,
the world appears incompressible to the protagonists. For Susanne Moder, an emotionally mature girl
living through the perverted social world of Nazism, we might identify this incomprehension as the
fault of society. For Friedemann, incomprehension instead comes from his own physical and mental
Verwachsenheit—though notably this in turn was the fault of the social malady of alcoholism. Both
characters struggle to reconcile their own experiences and beliefs with the reality around them; but
whereas Sanna’s observant cynicism allows her to see through the Nazi political theatre, Friedemann
instead takes flight from that which is incomprehensible to him, and hides behind the vicarious
experiences of art.
The performativity of Nazi society is evident in Sanna’s language as she describes the arrival
of Hitler in Frankfurt. The women with whom she shares a balcony are said to “benahmen sich still
und mit vornehmer Aufmerksamkeit wie in der Loge von einem Theater.” In this way, the theatrical
nature of the whole event is foregrounded, and, like Brecht’s verfremdete Zuschauer, Sanna can
dissect analytically what her fellow citizens are experiencing more immediately. This she does, noting
that Göring “immer gern aparte Kostüme trägt,”, again invoking the theatrical metaphor. This
comment, moreover, reflects something of the narrator’s naivete—namely in the assumption that
Göring’s actions are based on what he likes, rather than what is politically effective; and in the noun
‘Kostüme’, whose childish connotations make the Nazi military uniforms appear harmless. However,
Sanna’s observations are powerful by virtue of their apparent innocence; she sees the faint absurdity
precisely because she approaches politics from the perspective of a young girl, focused on friendship
and beauty more than on the Nazi regime. By positioning her protagonist as part of a conceptual
audience, Keun frames her as an outsider, a threatening role in a society which stressed the unity of
the deutsches Volk. But this also allows her struggle at comprehension to mirror that of the reader,
discarding any preconceived assumptions in what amounts to a kind of prosaic defamiliarization.
Later, considering Jewish cafés, Sanna remarks “Es sind die schönsten Cafés, und es ist traurig für die
Arier, daß sie Angst haben müssen, auch dort zu sitzen.” Such comments are striking by their
sympathy for all parties—rather than concerning herself particularly with the plight of persecuted
Jews, Sanna fears for the Aryans’ café experience. While obviously misguided, this instinct of
universal care is ultimately endearing, and crystallizes into a disgust at the regime as Sanna matures.
Thus, Keun shows how the Nazi façade is threatened merely by the simple kindness of an utterly
disenfranchised girl.
Friedemann’s struggle to understand his world is markedly different, arguably because it is a
struggle he gives up almost before it has begun. His experience “vor der Stadt auf dem Walle” of
seeing a girl he was interested in with another boy utterly stunts both his maturation, and any attempt
to comprehend the ‘Erlebnisse’ of which his Klassenkameraden talk. The geography of this volta is
significant – the protective bourgeois sphere of the ‘Stadt’ is a metaphor for the apparent propriety
which Friedemann’s refusal to acknowledge his sexuality endorses. Outside of this ‘Stadt’ lurks the
dangers of adult sexuality, of unchecked desire. Therefore “er verzichtete, verzichtete auf immer. Er
ging nach Hause und nahm ein Buch zur Hand oder spielte Violine, was er trotz seiner verwachsenen
Brust erlernt hatte.” Which is to say—Friedemann sublimates the intensity of first-hand desire to the
watered-down Dionysiac outlet of the arts. The arts become a mediator between Friedemann and
reality, which henceforth he only experiences vicariously, and therefore exists in a kind of stasis. For
Michael Minden this is a ‘precarious epicureanism’, whose superficial knowledge of opera and
literature is in fact a fig leaf covering the terrible nakedness of actual experience. This is distinct from
Sanna’s detachment from society, which she uses to analyse the world around her, while still allowing
herself to experience that which she considers good and pure—such as her relationship with Franz.
These parallel struggles to understand incomprehensible societies thus have different
conclusions. Sanna’s revelation of the corruption in Germany does not occasion a mental breakdown,
because she has never identified with the ‘world around [her]’. Von Rinnlingen’s shattering effect
upon Friedemann’s aesthete façade is, on the other hand, fatal. Perhaps we sympathise less with
Friedemann because his society is one which is akin to our own, not obviously corrupt, and therefore
less easy to accept as flawed.