Die schönsten Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg: Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Günter de Bruyn

by Theodor Fontane

Günter de Bruyns hochgelobte Auswahl der »Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg« in einer überarbeiteten auf der Grundlage der Erstdrucke und ausführlich kommentiert.Wer sich im Kulturraum der Mark Brandenburg bewegt, kommt an Theodor Fontane ebensowenig vorbei wie an Günter de Bruyn. Kein anderer Autor der Gegenwart kennt sich besser aus in Preußens vielgestaltiger Kulturgeschichte, keiner liebt die Landschaft der Mark Brandenburg so wie Günter de Bruyn. Für diese Zusammenstellung hat er die fünf Bände von Fontanes »Wanderungen« nach den schönsten Stellen durchsucht. Die ausgewählten Texte folgen dabei den Erstdrucken, die Fontanes Reiseeindrücke oft farbiger und unmittelbarer festgehalten haben als die überarbeiteten späteren Fassungen. Die Auswahl erschien erstmals im Rahmen der gemeinsam mit Gerhard Wolf herausgegebenen Reihe »Märkischer Dichtergarten«. Für die Neuausgabe hat Günter de Bruyn den Band noch einmal durchgesehen und den umfangreichen Anhang aktualisiert.

Paperback

Published August 24, 2017

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.