Effi Briest

Effi Briest  

Cover of the original edition
Author(s) Theodor Fontane
Translator Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers
Country Germany
Language German
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Philipp Reclam jun. Stuttgart & (Eng. trans. reissue Penguin Classics)
Publication date 1894-95; 1896 (book)
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 978-3-15-006961-5 & reissue ISBN 0-14-044766-0

Effi Briest is widely considered to be Theodor Fontane’s masterpiece and one of the most famous German realist novels of all time. Thomas Mann once said that if one had to reduce one’s library to six novels, Effi Briest would have to be one of them.[1] Published from 1894 to 1895 as a serial novel in the Deutsche Rundschau, a German magazine, it was first published in book form in 1896. The novel marks a watershed and climax at once in the poetic realism of literature and forms a thematic trilogy on marriage in the nineteenth century from the female point of view along with the more famous Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. All three are adultery tragedies.

Contents

Plot introduction

Effi Briest is the daughter of a nobleman in Germany. At the age of seventeen, she is married off to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a 38-year-old aristocrat who years ago had courted her mother Luise and been turned down because of his insufficient social position, which he has in the meantime ameliorated.

Plot summary

The young, immature and carefree Effi, still practically a child, but attracted by notions of social honour, consents to live in the small Baltic town of Kessin, where she ends up in the throes of an emotional crisis. Her husband is away for weeks at a time and leaves her to her own devices in their home. Alienated from the local aristocracy and therefore miserably unhappy, Effi finds but one companion in the whole town.

She suspects that their house may be haunted. Innstetten reassures her, but, perhaps on purpose, does not completely lay her fears to rest. When she voices her disquiet about the possible presence of a ghost, her husband angrily responds that her fears are insignificant when compared with the importance of his political career. His reply shows his worry that people may learn about Effi’s discomfort and subsequently censure them publicly.

The mercurial and debonair Major Crampas finally announces his arrival in Kessin, and although he is married and notorious for his overt womanising, Effi cannot help but rejoice in the attention he shows to her. As the reader is only delicately told, a full extramarital relationship is consummated. Despite this, later in the novel Effi is relieved to move to Berlin, away from Crampas, and expresses shame at her adultery, although she also expresses shame at not feeling guilty enough. Innstetten, however, inwardly scorns Crampas and perceives him as a lecherous womanizer with a cavalier attitude to the laws, whereas Crampas is persuaded that Innstetten has a habit of educating and "edifying" his fellows in a slightly patronising way.

Years later, Effi’s young daughter Annie is growing up and the family has relocated to Berlin as Innstetten has ascended the political hierarchy. All things appear to have turned out well for Effi. However, Instetten discovers her old correspondence with Crampas, and learns that his wife had become enamored of Crampas while they were living in Kessin. Innstetten challenges Crampas to a duel. Crampas agrees to the plan and is killed by Innstetten. Innstetten resolves to divorce Effi immediately. He is given custody of their daughter, in whom he successfully develops a feeling of disdain for her mother. Indeed, when Effi and Annie arrange a brief encounter a couple of years later, the tense atmosphere which dominates the reunion shows that they have grown further apart. In the aftermath of this meeting, Effi ceases to make any more endeavors to strike up an untroubled relationship with her daughter.

Forlorn and disowned by her fellows, Effi adjusts to a reclusive life and suffers from ostracism for years, during which she plumbs the depths of despair. Since public opprobrium has been heaped upon her, her parents refuse to take her back, believing that it is not right for them to accept her in the midst of their family. (According to the prevailing values of the late nineteenth century, one's reputation would be besmirched by the acquaintance of someone whose marriage was annulled because of their own adultery.)

In the meantime, Innstetten has second thoughts about his action. He finally has to acknowledge that the brighter days of his marriage are long past: he does not even delight in his gradual ascent within the country’s political hierarchy.

Effi is eventually taken in by her parents, and temporarily seems to recover from the nervous disorder she has come down with. Her recovery is nonetheless temporary, as feelings of sorrow and repentance are deeply embedded in her soul. Shortly before she passes away, she summons her mother and pleads with her to inform Innstetten about her regrets about her actions, with which she has been bedevilled over the course of her declining years. The novel closes with Effi dying serenely at the parental estate of Hohen-Cremmen, in a very symmetrical ending that matches the beginning of the novel. In the novel’s final scene, her parents vaguely realise their responsibility for her intractable hardships, but ultimately they do not dare question the social constructs which caused the tragedy.

Background

Elisabeth von Ardenne (1853-1952) is said to be the inspiration for Effi Briest.[2]

Elisabeth von Ardenne was born Elisabeth von Plotho on 26 October 1853, the youngest of five children. Her place of birth, Zerben, is nowadays known as Elbe-Parey. After her father’s untimely demise in 1864, she led a blissful and tranquil childhood until she made the acquaintance of her future husband, Armand Léon von Ardenne (1848-1919). The adolescent Elisabeth, who had by then received the sobriquet “Else”, is said to have displayed little interest in the young man who was five years her senior, and therefore declined his first proposal of marriage. Nonetheless she had a change of heart during the Franco-Prussian War, in which Ardenne had been injured. Elisabeth von Plotho and Léon von Ardenne announced their two-year engagement on 7 February 1871. The couple eventually wed on 1 January 1873.

They relocated to Düsseldorf in the summer of 1881 owing to Ardenne’s ascent within the country’s political hierarchy. In Düsseldorf they struck up a relationship with the judge Emil Hartwich (1843-1886). Hartwich, who also had an outstanding reputation as a painter, was suffering on account of his unhappy marriage. He and young Elisabeth von Ardenne, who was ten years his junior, turned out to have many things in common, such as their love for the theatre. The correspondence between them did not even cease when Ardenne returned to Berlin on 1 October 1884, with Elisabeth and the couple’s two young children following him.

Hartwich continued to pay sporadic visits to Elisabeth and her husband even after the couple’s departure. While he was sojourning in Berlin during the summer of 1886, he and Elisabeth both resolved to divorce their respective spouses and to marry each other. Ardenne, however, had been secretly harbouring suspicions which were confirmed when he found the letters which his wife and Hartwich had been exchanging over the course of several years. Thereupon he filed for divorce and challenged his rival to a duel, an event which attracted massive media coverage before it took place on 27 November 1886. Hartwich sustained severe injuries and died four days after the duel on 1 December 1886. Although Armand von Ardenne was initially sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, his prison term was reduced to merely eighteen days not long afterwards.

The von Ardennes’ divorce was finalised on 15 March 1887, with Armand von Ardenne being given full custody of their two children. Over the years following her separation from her husband, Elisabeth von Ardenne consecrated herself to the care of deprived or disabled people. Her name was, albeit temporarily, deleted from her family’s chronicles.

In 1904, Elisabeth’s daughter Margot was the first one to make an endeavour to track down her disowned mother. Her son Egmont encountered her only five years later. Thus Elisabeth von Ardenne reunited with her children after two decades of separation. Her former husband died in 1919 at the age of 71.

Elisabeth von Ardenne died on 4 February 1952 in Lindau at the age of 98, and was interred in an Ehrengrab in Berlin. Her grandson was the scientist Manfred von Ardenne.

Differences between fiction and reality

Fontane, however, changed myriad details lest the novel jeopardise the privacy of the people concerned. In addition, he intended to accentuate the story’s dramatic effects. For example, Elisabeth von Plotho did not marry her husband at the age of seventeen as does Effi Briest, but when she was nineteen years of age, with Armand von Ardenne being just five and not twenty years her senior. Moreover, she launched into her extramarital relationship twelve and not only one year into her marriage, and her husband did not despatch her paramour several years after the affair had ended, but when Elisabeth was still rendezvousing with Hartwich.

Fontane was cognisant of the fact that Elisabeth von Ardenne did not retreat into her privacy once her amour had come to light; in contrast to Effi Briest, she took up several jobs and devoted herself to the more disadvantaged. Elisabeth von Ardenne died in 1952 at the age of 98, whereas Effi expires when she is 29.

Additional differences between the fictitious story and the true incidents upon which it is based are the days on which several incidents in Fontane’s novel occur. Effi Briest weds her husband on 3 October, while Elisabeth von Plotho got married on 1 January. The former bears her child on 3 July, whereas neither of Elisabeth’s children was born on that day. Indeed, Margot and Egmont von Ardenne were given birth on 5 November and 4 January respectively.[3] Finally, Elisabeth von Ardenne’s day of birth is 26 October, while Effi Briest is said to celebrate her birthday sometime in August.

Legacy

Today the novel is widely discussed and taught at German high schools.

It is also taught as part of the German Prelim course at Oxford University.

The novel has exerted a major influence on later German writers, including Thomas Mann's early work Buddenbrooks.

Editions

Film and television adaptations

In 1974, a film version directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder was released, with Hanna Schygulla as Effi Briest. Three earlier German versions were made in 1939, 1955 and, for TV, in 1970. In 2009 German production company Constantin Film AG produced the book's fifth film and television incarnation, with European Film actress 2005 winner Julia Jentsch taking on the title character.

See also

References

External links