This must be Europe. Novels in Russian, Spanish and French, English thrillers and a travel guide to neighboring Holland – plus lots of German dictionaries. These would have been bought by the flocking expats to make contact with the local culture a little easier (Appelwein!) and then left behind when they set sail for the next foreign country. On the other side of the Main, the towers of financial Frankfurt shine. Among all that violence in large volumes – safely behind glass, of course – there is a piece from one of the great beauties of the German book industry, the Universal-Bibliothek van Reclam. It is number 8971: Theodor Fontane’s novel published in 1888 Irrungen, Wirrungen.
Those books are little yellow miracles. Of a size that they actually fit in a back pocket, typographically impeccable. The novel takes you to that other German expat magnet: Berlin, the remote metropolis that a friend of mine lovingly describes as “a stone in the forest near Poland”. A century and a half ago that stone was much smaller. As Fontane writes: “The Schnittpunkte von Kurfürstendamm und Kurfürstenstraße, schräg gegenüber dem ‘Zoöologischen’ befand sich in the Middle of the siebziger Jahre nor a large, brightly colored gardens themselves.” (For those who need a boost to get into the rhythm of the German to come: the translation Wandering…failing by J. Clant van der Mijll – Piepers from 1918 integral online).
In that Berlin city fringe we find the heroes of the story: the young bourgeois girl Lene, her noble suitor Botho and the neighbors: the old stingy gardener Dörr and his second wife. Old Dörr has a lot to complain about his young wife. When she returns from the field with a sparsely filled basket of asparagus (“meist dünne Stangen und veld Bruch dazwischen”), he pronounces: “You have keine Spergelaugen.” Asparagus eyes or not, Frau Dörr doesn’t care much about her husband. Although he wants her to hide the broken stems in the middle of the woods when she ties them up, she simply gives them to Lene to cook a soup with. In this way, Fontane strings one elegant irony-laden scene after another, including the eternal truths that all misers occasionally give their wives a ridiculously expensive gift.
But the main point in this novel – one Pride and prejudice in pocket size – is the impossible love between Botho and Lene. Both know that the difference in class will be an insurmountable obstacle to a marriage, but still, but still. There are the secret kisses at the back of the garden, there is that one night… But the dark clouds are already gathering over all that longing when it becomes clear that there is also a wealthy niece, whom Botho has to marry because of old agreements and family capital.
Lene accepts her fate and ultimately chooses her own marriage of convenience, after which poor Botho’s grief overflows: he burns the letters he still kept from her. “Alles Asche. Und but gebunden.” Poor boy.
