Two Novellas: The Woman Taken in Adultery; The Poggenpuhl Family

by Theodor Fontane, Erich Heller (Introduction), Gabriele Annan (Translation)

Fontane's novella The Woman Taken in Adultery (1882) is remarkable not least for its portrayal, in wealthy, stultifying Berlin society in the 1880s, of an adultery with a happy ending. The story was inspired by a celebrated contemporary scandal and tells of Melanie van der Straaten and her affair with Rubehn, the young protege of Melanie's eccentric and good-humoured husband Ezel. By contrast The Poggenpuhl Family (1896), a late masterpiece, centres on a birthday party given for Frau von Poggenpuhl and brilliantly evokes the lives of an aristocratic Berlin family struggling in genteel poverty. Theodor Fontane is one of nineteenth-century Germany's foremost stylists, and in these two short fictions his vivid portraiture and unforced dialogue, his mastery of understatement and emotional nuance are found to perfection.

Genres: German Literature, Germany

231 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1996

About the author

Theodor Fontane, novelist, critic, poet, and travel writer, was one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century German men of letters. He was born into a French Huguenot family in the Prussian town of Neuruppin, where his father owned a small pharmacy. His father’s gambling debts forced the family to move repeatedly, and eventually his temperamentally mismatched parents separated.

Though Fontane showed early interest in history and literature - jotting down stories in his school notebooks - he could not afford to attend university; instead he apprenticed as a pharmacist and eventually settled in Berlin. There he joined the influential literary society Tunnel über der Spree, which included among its members Theodor Storm and Gottfried Keller, and turned to writing. In 1850 Fontane’s first published books, two volumes of ballads, appeared; they would prove to be his most successful books during his lifetime. He spent the next four decades working as a critic, journalist, and war correspondent while producing some fifty works of history, travel narrative, and fiction. His early novels, the first of which was published in 1878, when Fontane was nearly sixty, concerned recent historical events.

It was not until the late 1880s that he turned to his great novels of modern society, remarkable for their psychological insight: Trials and Tribulations (1888), Irretrievable (1891), Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), and Effi Briest (1895). During his last years, Fontane returned to writing poetry, and, while recovering from a severe illness, wrote an autobiographical novel that would prove to be a late commercial success. He is buried in the French section of the Friedhof II cemetery in Berlin.

Reviews

[BJ Lillis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a rewarding book, though not quite as transporting as Effi Briest or No Way Back (although those books set an extraordinarily high bar). The Woman Taken in Adultery is fascinating primarily as a counterpoint to those novels, and to Fontane's Delusions, Confusions, with which it shares a certain spiritual kinship. Fontane looked at adultery from many angles, and if, of his novels I've read, only Effi Briest stands as a true masterpiece of that sub-genre of 19th century realism concerned with charting adulterous relationships and the stultifying marriages from whose rich soil they grew, nonetheless, Fontane's real achievement lies in the combined effect of his novels on the theme. Taken together, each story seems to illuminate the others, and although they do not connect directly, I do feel like reading Fontane is a little like reading Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, except instead of a mythical land beyond the world, there is 19th century Germany, and instead of talking lions and ancient elves, there are wives and lovers and a great many handsome officers of the Prussian military. And just as the battles and ghosts of fantasy fiction give a reader an unmistakably cozy feeling, throwing the comfort of a warmly lit room and comfortable chair into sharp relief, so to do the chilly dinner parties and marital spats of the Fontane novel. Or in other words, the magic comes not from magic, but rather from a certain profound sense of unreality emanating from a world so perfectly described, so true in all of its details, and yet so unaccountably strange at the same time. As for The Poggenpuhl Family, it was more fun than The Woman Taken in Adultery, and frankly, more fun than it had any right to be, although its characters' casual, and revealing, antisemitism is truly chilling, giving where it all would go in the century to come, and the result, at least for me, was that it was a rather uneasy read.

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard not to fall in love with Fontane's gentle wit and tolerance towards the wretched specimens we all are. "Adultery" is the sunny version of "Anna Karenina". A woman leaves behind her husband and children for her lover, and everything turns out all right. Melanie is reasonably happy with her much older husband, Commercial Councillor van der Straaten. They have 2 daughters, two residences, and a busy social life. Van der Straaten's rough manners and stubbornness only start to grate on Melanie when she has to entertain one of his younger business partners, Ebenezer Rubehn. When she falls pregnant by him, she decides to elope and let van der Straaten divorce her. Although he begs her not to and promises to look after the child as if it was his own, she rejects his generous offer and sticks to her plan. Eventually she gives birth to a third daughter in Venice. After a suitable interval, the newlyweds dare to come back to Berlin, and attempt to reenter society. Melanie's brother-in-law won't have any of it, but various friends see them in secret, and even broker a meeting between Melanie and her elder daughters, with full support from van der Straaten. The collapse of Rubehn's firm, instead of being the death knell for the couple, finally turns public opinion in their favor as they bear their relative poverty with dignity and become an appealing image of "true love in the face of adversity". First seen as a blameless victim, Van der Straaten is now ridiculed by society, but very much his own man as always, he doesn't care one way or the other and reconciles with Melanie, whom he truly loved and never wanted to punish.
Similarly, "The Poggenpuhls" presents a slice in the life of a set of mostly benign people who muddle through as best they can. The family consists of Major von Poggenpuhl's widow Albertine and their 5 children: Wendell and Leo, both in the army; and 3 unmarried daughters, Therese, Sophie and Manon. Their illustrious name means different things to the various characters, whose prospects are severely limited by the genteel poverty into which they have fallen. Kind and bumbling Leo resents having to penny-pinch and seriously considers marrying wealthy Jewish heiress Esther Blumenthal. A virulent anti-semite, Therese is horrified at the prospect. Manon also objects, but pushes for Leo to court her bosom friend Flora Bartenstein. Uncle Eberhard, a kind retired general, comes to their rescue by inviting Sophie to live with him and his wife Josephine at their country estate, Schloss Adamsdorf. Albertine and Josephine are both from the middle-class and have no illusions or delusions about their status with regard to the Prussian aristocracy into which they married. When Eberhard dies, Josephine makes generous provision for Albertine's children, who are immediately treated with greater respect by their neighbors. Therese's priority is to get Manon to drop her Jewish friends, a suggestion Manon emphatically rejects. Fontane's depiction of racial and class prejudice is subtle and I was very impressed with his non-judgmental but firm and clear-eyed take on his characters.

[Baby Axolotl · Rating 3 out of 5]

'The woman taken in Adultery' feels like a fanfiction of 'Anna Karenina' with a happy ending. I'm not saying this to be shady, I actually really enjoyed it. The pacing was slow in the beginning, the relationship between Melanie and Rubehn isn't explored as much as I would like it to be, BUT the ending is incredibly satisfying. The great humour and perfect understanding of human psychology are the author's greatest tools.
I can't talk for 'The Poggenpuhl Family' since my edition only has 'The woman taken in adultery', but I couldn't find it on its own in GoodReads, so I had to post my reviw here.

[Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating Fontane!

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of like a German/Prussian/Silesian/Austrian - somewhere thereabouts! - Thackeray or Trollope, only much more concise. Well-observed characters with all the detailed trappings of their particular time, place, culture. Fun to look at human universals through new/old prisms.