"Was bedeutet der Stein?”:
Fetishism, Profanation, and Parody in Fontane’s Grete Minde

Erica Weitzman
Northwestern University

Abstract
This article explores the function of the precarious (non-)significance of the thing in Theodor Fontane’s 1879 novella Grete Minde. On the surface a simple tale of exclusion and revenge in seventeenth-century Brandenburg and a seeming anomaly in Fontane’s oeuvre, the novella also contains a barely visible leitmotif of the agency of things on the cusp of their disempowerment, not to say fall into vulgar parody and obscene joke. This article reads the status of the thing in Grete Minde not only as a key to some of the text’s more curious narrative choices, but also as a mark of the persistence of the ontological and aesthetic questions of the Reformation and as Fontane’s ambivalent self-reflection on the task of the novelist in the modern era.

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Biography
Erica Weitzman is Assistant Professor of German at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from NYU, and has held positions at the Universität Konstanz and the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent publications include the monograph Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth and the German Comic Tradition (Northwestern UP, 2015) and the co-edited volume Suspensionen. Über das Untote (Fink, forthcoming 2015). She is currently working on a project on the concept of obscenity as a question of representation in German and European realism.

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I

Though it retains a dubious canonicity as a text of the right size and sentimentality to be foisted on high school students, Theodore Fontane’s 1879 novella Grete Minde, while a bestseller in its day, is no longer one of his better-known works. Based—so the subtitle tells us—“on an old chronicle of the Mark [Nach einer altmärkischen Chronik],”[1] the novella tells the story of Valtin and Grete, only children and half-orphans who live in neighboring houses in the town of Tangermünde in the early seventeenth century, just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Grete, the daughter of a Spanish Catholic by way of Bruges and a Tangermünder patrician, is treated with neglect and scorn by her sanctimonious sister-in-law, Trud. After her father’s death, Grete—described, like her late mother before her, as a great beauty—finally reaches the limits of her endurance and runs away from Tangermünde together with Valtin. When the narrative rejoins the pair after an ellipsis of several years, Grete and Valtin have become members of the same travelling acting troupe that had fascinated Grete years before and are the parents of a young child—and Valtin, wounded in a duel to defend Grete’s honor, lies dying in the attic of the inn where the actors are lodging. As his final wish, Valtin makes Grete promise to return to Tangermünde and throw herself on the mercy of her half-brother, Gerdt. When Grete attempts to make good on her promise to Valtin, however, her brother refuses her both sanctuary and the rightful inheritance that she demands in its stead. When the town councilmen, to whom Grete subsequently takes her claim, rule against her and in favor of her brother, Grete sets fire to Tangermünde, holding Gerdt and Trud’s young son aloft as she tumbles with him from the town’s bell tower into the flames below.

In the scant critical literature devoted to it, Fontane’s novella is usually read as a fable of injustice and revenge in the vein of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas,[2] a minor tragedy of familial ties and small-town relations,[3] a melodrama of the failed search for individual emancipation and personal happiness in a repressive society,[4] or a parable of bourgeois self-interest and criminality in the manner of Fontane’s own Unterm Birnbaum. In what follows here, however, Fontane’s novella will be approached less in terms of its plot and psychological or social content, and more in terms of its form: or rather, in terms of the ontological and cultural assumptions upon which form is premised. Specifically, the present article will be concerned with the precarious status of the thing in Grete Minde. For running through Fontane’s moralizing (yet also highly morally ambiguous) tale of family conflict and societal values is also a subtle but insistent leitmotif of the ambivalent agency of things on the cusp of their disempowerment, their troubling presence between imposition, availability, and withdrawal. As this article will claim, it is the thing—better: the idea of the thing—that acts as both hidden operator of the novella’s plot and the vehicle for Fontane’s negotiation of the task of the writer in the mid-nineteenth century. Far more than the mere “genre and character picture [Sitten- und Charakterbild]” that Fontane himself claimed it to be,[5] Grete Minde is Fontane’s tentative reflection on the possibility and potential risks of an art that would undertake to portray the world in its empirical, material “reality”: through the mirror of the past, an early and ambivalent testing ground for the literature of the present.

II

Constituting what is in fact a partial departure from the realist program towards the arguably more established genre of the historical novel, the plot of Grete Minde is loosely based on actual events—albeit ones even more scurrilous than the tale Fontane himself will eventually make out of them.[6] Almost all critics have noted the peculiar anachronistic quality that this background gives to Fontane’s novella, whose characters’ motivations and actions, not to speak of its narrative style and language, more often than not have a distinctly modern cast.[7] Birgit Jensen has shown how such anachronicity also functions as a fundamental element of plot, as the novella’s characters act out a conflict between an early modern ethos of sin and mercy and a proto-capitalist ethos of rational action.[8] Similarly, Bernhard Losch has stressed the element of historical transition and contrast in regard to the novella’s portrayal of systems of law, whereby Grete’s act of extrajudicial revenge in feudal Tangermünde would serve as Fontane’s warning to modern, post-revolutionary democracies about the necessity of providing for channels of legal dissent.[9] However, such temporal stereoscopy may also be examined not just in terms of its cultural repercussions, but also for what it reveals about the novella’s formal problems and their resonance for its literary-historical context. That is, beyond its implicit message of socio-historical change, another effect of the novella’s anachronicity—both linguistically, in the fluctuation between conscious archaism and modern colloquialism, and generically, in the uneasy mixing of historical chronicle, fairy tale, idyll, melodrama, and social novel—is to denaturalize, and thus to emphasize, its own techniques and narrative strategies: those that belong to earlier eras which Fontane consciously mimics, of course,[10] but also, even more significantly, the newer techniques and strategies of literary realism itself.

Such an effect of denaturalization can be perceived, for example, in the passage describing the appearance of Trud and her cousin (and Valtin’s stepmother) Emrentz at a town feast for the visit of the local prince-elector. In this passage, the narration pauses to note that both women “were dressed with a peculiar richness and splendor, in necklaces and high ruffs, and Emrentz, in spite of the July heat, had not been able to bring herself to forgo her little ermine-trimmed jacket [beide waren absonderlich reich und prächtig gekleidet, in Ketten und hohen Krausen, und Emrentz, aller Julihitze zum Trotz, hatte sich ihr mit Hermelinpelz besetztes Mäntelchen nicht versagen können]” (GM 51). The descriptive precision of this passage—not “Mantel” but “Mäntelchen,” for example; not “Hitze” but “Julihitze”—and, still more, the muted irony of the narration both firmly date this passage (one among many other similar passages in the novella) quite far from the sensibilities and literary style of the era in which it is in fact set. In adapting a modern literary style to seventeenth-century events, Fontane makes the nineteenth century loudly heard.[11] Indeed, the authorial irony or “humor”[12] that characterizes so much of nineteenth-century realist prose (and not just Fontane) may be claimed as a product of anachronism in a general sense: that is, of the historicism and regionalism that is similarly defining for the intellectual production of the nineteenth century, insofar as it is precisely the consciousness of the discrepancy between past and present, or one community and the other, that furnishes the conditions for cultural self-awareness and hence a certain wry detachment in regard to tempora et mores generally. In this sense, the overt historicism of Grete Minde has a potentially recursive effect, allowing the world view that is a late product of such historicism to appear almost more strange than the portrayed historical era itself, and the literary style associated with this world view—whose very name seems to imply the lack of both aesthetic and epistemological doubt—to be destabilized, its “realness” subject to the same questioning as the representational conventions of previous centuries.

And yet the formal denaturalization of Grete Minde is also more than just an incidental byproduct of its being set in a historical past as such; in addition, its specific historical setting necessarily foregrounds the same problems and tensions that the novella’s anachronicity already evokes on the level of style. For Fontane’s novella is not only incidentally set in the years leading up to the Thirty Years War; its plot also prefigures the war’s own confessional conflicts, which themselves, in turn, map onto some of the most pressing concerns regarding knowledge and artistic form in Fontane’s own era. In other words, it is neither chance nor local historical interest nor even writerly uncertainty alone that leads Fontane to adapt the story of Margarete von Minden—whose less than sympathetic protagonists and matter-of-fact cruelty make it indeed for him a rather unlikely choice of source material—for his second longer work of fiction. Beyond any of these possible motivations, Fontane’s sentimental tale exploits its historical background as a way to reflect, in the ontological/aesthetic questions of another era, the aesthetic/ontological questions of his own.

One of the most pressing among these, once again, is the question of the thing. More precisely, it is the question of the thing as something represented and—thereby—invested with meaning. The iconoclastic controversies that raged during the Reformation were not just controversies regarding the image, but also controversies of the thing insofar as the thing is made into an image: that is, into a sign for something more than or beyond itself or an entity invested with agency and spiritual life. As Andreas Karlstadt writes in his 1522 polemic “On the Removal of Images [Von Abtuhung der Bilder],” the text that would ignite the iconoclastic debate in the German-speaking world, “The maker of images makes an image / and bends down before it. […] Thus have they forgotten / that the eyes of images do not see and they have no understanding in their hearts [Der bildmacher mach eyn bilde / und krümet sich vor yme. (…) Also haben sie vergessen / das die augen der bilder nicht sehen und das sie in yrem hertze nicht verstehnd].”[13] These lines are particularly interesting in that they constitute a rewriting—or perhaps merely a misreading—of Isaiah 44:18, explicitly referenced by Karlstadt, where it is not, as in Karlstadt, the idols who are blind and uncomprehending, but, more conventionally, the idolaters in their idolatry. Karlstadt’s silent reinterpretation of the Old Testament passage thus inscribes, ex negativo, the fear of the livingness of the inanimate image into the efforts to abolish it. Whereas in Isaiah, the condemnation of the image is based on the image’s profane materiality—the same wood used to cook one’s food and heat one’s house is worshipped as a god when put into the form of a fetish—in Karlstadt, the condemnation of the image is based explicitly on the image’s failure to be the spirit that it promises (and latently, on the repudiated, but nevertheless threateningly present, case of the image’s non-failure).

What is in question in such iconoclastic controversies above all, then, is not the fact of the image itself, but the thing as image and the image as thing: or rather, the material image of the thing as an image of the un-imaginable and immaterial thing, the deceptively concrete (not to mention impiously miniaturizing) embodiment of the divine totality—or later, secularized, the “human heart”[14]—itself. Thus even in its most dogmatically iconoclastic formulations, the accusation of idolatry in the representations and rituals of Roman Catholicism had to do less with the image per se, and more to do with the dangerous tendency of the material and visual to accrue value in excess of itself, to have its mere material presence confused with the spiritual content that it may indeed indicate, but must not actually be.[15] On the other hand, the disenchantment of the thing demanded by the iconoclastic position results in the thing’s being in excess of itself in a different sense: as an abject and dead materiality, an alien presence all the more meaningless for the meaning once attributed to it, for the formerly supposedly seeing gaze that now stares out blind and uncanny.

Such controversies, which never truly disappear, reemerge in especially pointed and overdetermined form in the “return to thingliness/materiality [Rückkehr zur Dinglichkeit]”[16] of German literature and culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which was combined, among other things, a distaste for the perceived excesses of the previous decades’ romantic speculation, the consciousness of rapidly expanding capitalist economies,[17] a new emphasis on positivism in the natural sciences, and a general mood of political caution and reaction. Julian Schmidt’s and Gustav Freytag’s assertion (in their address to the readers of the literary-political journal Die Grenzboten on the occasion of their taking over of its editorship) that “literature only has justification to the extent that it immerses itself in life, devotes itself to it warmly and without reserve [Die Literatur hat nur noch insoweit Berechtigung, als sie sich in das Leben versenkt, sich warm und ohne Vorbehalt hingibt]” is paradigmatic for the rejection during this period of romanticism’s flights of fancy and the turn in literature and art to ostensibly objective representations of the current era’s “robust nature [robusten Natur].”[18] But despite all ambitions to break free from abstraction and fantasy and to narrate “the world as it is,” it is in fact rather the disavowal of empiricism and the rejection of the portrayal of individual phenomena that is constantly emphasized by the writers and theorists of realism. As Fontane himself stresses in his programmatic essay “Our Lyric and Epic Poetry since 1848 [Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848]”: “Realism does not want the merely material world and nothing but this [Der Realismus will nicht die bloße Sinnenwelt und nichts als diese].”[19] Yet such a purely negative definition of literary or “poetic” realism—which Fontane, despite his own protests, does not get much beyond in his essay—makes the dual problem it faces only all the more apparent: that of describing the sensual world and its objects in a way that is not merely “mere,” “the naked reproduction of everyday life [das nackte Wiedergeben alltäglichen Lebens],”[20] and at the same time, of handling the added value of the empirical world in such a way that one does not attribute this value to “mere” things as such.

Of the many dangers threatening the realist program, then, two are: the danger of abandoning the “poetry” of poetic realism entirely in favor of a vulgar mechanized materialism—a debate that would later achieve its full expression in the polemics around Naturalism—and the not unrelated danger of regressing to a pre-Kantian (if not indeed fully pre-modern) veneration of the empirical and the sensual, in which the particular is no longer a part subsumed into a larger whole, but is instead in its very particularity falsely invested with all the force of the absolute.[21] In this light, Fontane’s work in general—and Grete Minde in particular—may be read as an attempt to stake out what is effectively a modern version of a moderate Lutheran position between a presumed Catholic idolatry and a radical Protestant iconoclasm.[22] The moderate position is here indeed the most dangerous one: for it admits the necessity of both material reality and its “objective” representation insofar as human life is only knowable as lived, embodied experience, but, for this same reason, is unable to foreclose the possibility that precisely this embodiment of experience will draw attention away from that for which it is supposed to be the ephemeral instance or mere sign.[23] In such a context, the thing—or perhaps, “the thing”—thus takes on a strange doubly synechdochic function, simultaneously standing in for the false evaluation of part to whole and being the false part of every whole to which it fails to be adequate. Without proper vigilance, the thing in realism risks at every moment turning into (a fetish image of) the “thing in itself.”

III

Nowhere are these problems more apparent in Grete Minde than in the scene in the novella’s fifth chapter between the young Grete and the town pastor, Gigas. In response to Gigas’s question about the nature of her prayers, Grete guilelessly recites a pious little song that she has learned from her nursemaid Regine, a Catholic just as Grete’s late mother had been. Gigas immediately reproaches Grete, gently but firmly, for the song’s espousal of the anathematized Catholic doctrine of good works. However, the real heresy is yet to come:

“For you see, all our good works are nothing and mean nothing, for all our actions are sinful from the very beginning. We have nothing but faith, and there is only one thing that can atone for us and that has value: the Crucified One.”

      “Yes, sir…I know…and I have a sliver from his cross.” And in happy agitation she pulled a golden capsule from her bodice.

     Gigas recoiled for a moment, and his red eyes seemed to have become even redder. But he gathered himself again quickly […] and said calmly, “That is idolatry, Grete.”

     “Denn sieh, unsre guten Werke sind nichts und bedeuten nichts, weil all unser Tun sündig ist von Anfang an. Wir haben nichts als den Glauben, und nur eines ist, das sühnet und Wert hat: der Gekreuzigte.”

      “Ja Herr … ich weiß … Und ich hab einen Splitter von seinem Kreuz.” Und sie zog in freudiger Erregung eine Goldkapsel aus ihrem Mieder.

      Gigas war einen Augenblick zurückgetreten, und seine roten Augen schienen röter geworden. Aber er sammelt sich auch diesmal rasch wieder […] und sagte dann ruhig: “Es ist Götzendienst, Grete.” (GM 28)

The significance of this dialogue, of course, lies in its character-establishing function, allowing Fontane to set up the simultaneous innocence and otherness of Grete that will eventually prove to be the source of so many of her troubles.[24] But this dialogue’s significance also lies in what it indicates about the aesthetic controversies and challenges of the novella itself: for what Gigas accuses Grete of in her childish naïveté is also precisely what was perceived as the main threat to the development of a realist literature by its theorists and practitioners in Europe and, especially, in the German states. “Idol worship doesn’t become better just because you put a freshly cleaned-up fetish on the altar [Der Götzendienst wird darum nicht besser, wenn man einen neu aufgeputzten Fetisch auf den Altar stellt],” remarks Julian Schmidt in a representative polemic against the so-called “Märzpoeten.”[25]If in this essay, the issue is that the engaged writers of the early nineteenth century are just the new romantics, replacing the previous decades’ metaphysical idols with political ones, this valuation can easily tip over (as it will later do a fortiori with naturalism) and lead to an excessive and inaesthetic concentration on the material world as such: an art of things indeed, but without form or redemptive guiding idea behind them.

In other words: the doctrinal problem of how to worship the true incarnate God without deifying the body as such, such as Fontane dramatizes in its historical literality in the scene between Grete and Gigas, maps directly onto the epistemological-aesthetic problem of how to deal with the phenomenal world in such a way that one neither falls into a vulgar materialism or a seductive fixation on the sensual and the physical, nor floats away in the referenceless abstraction of an enervated romanticism. The “programmatic Realists”—among whom Fontane may, with qualifications, be included[26]—understood their task as that of maintaining the delicate balance between these twin excesses of idealization and materialism, establishing the “broadening and deepening of moral ideas in the detail of real life [Ausbreitung und Vertiefung der sittlichen Ideen in das Detail des wirklichen Lebens” as “the necessary, the only basis of a true and great literature [die nothwendige, die einzige Grundlage einer echten und großen Poesie].”[27] In this context, it is anything but incidental that Fontane rewrites Grete Minde’s source story partly as a religious conflict, for such a balance was conceived not only as a modern, but also—in a clear line of derivation from the Bildersturm controversies—as an explicitly Protestant accomplishment. Julian Schmidt, once again, formulates this view succinctly at the end of the first volume of his 1853 History of German Literature in the Nineteenth Century [Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert]:

Protestantism gathered together the contraries of the divine and the earthly within the human heart, where they developed in their concrete fullness; whereas in both the old Church and the new Jesuitism, Heaven and Earth were two worlds that battled with one another in a completely external way. For the true Protestant writer, life, character is a continuity, the soul an organic whole.

Der Protestantismus nahm die Gegensätze des Göttlichen und des Irdischen in das menschliche Herz auf, wo sie sich in concreter Fülle entfalteten; während sowohl in der alten Kirche, wie in dem neuen Jesuitismus der Himmel und die Erde zwei Welten waren, die sich ganz äußerlich bekämpften. Bei dem wahrhaft protestantischen Dichter ist das Leben, der Charakter eine Continuität, die Seele ein organisches Ganze.[28]

The fatal error of radical materialism and Roman Catholicism alike is that of separating the material and the spiritual worlds, and worshiping mere bodies in spirit’s stead (in materialism deliberately, in Catholicism so to speak merely as by-product).[29] When it is realized that the meaning with which these bodies have been invested is not inherent but arbitrary—as will always take place—what remains is mere matter, the fetish as corpse.[30] And yet, once again, this same act of investing bodies and things with meaning is also one of the main tasks of the realist writer, insofar as the human experience that realist literature explicitly privileges must spring from the very same material world that it is at the same time to transcend. Without this transcendence, however, the things of the realist novel threaten to become mere sensual appearances or sheer allegories, all the more dangerous because set up on the stage of the novel as objects of contemplation significant in themselves.[31] The thing that shapes the realist novel also constantly threatens to elude its networks of value.

Even if Fontane’s own version of realism is clearly far more character- and dialogue-driven than descriptive or scenic,[32] his work is nevertheless suffused by the ambivalent relation to the thing and its modes of portrayal. From his early career as an art critic—in particular, as a critic of historical painting, that most narrative of pictorial genres—Fontane was acutely aware of the vexed relationship between material objects and the stories told around them (and conversely, between stories and their material/pictorial illustration).[33] Indeed, the very dialogical, quasi-dramaturgical nature of Fontane’s prose makes the rare passages of description in his novels stand out all the more in their disruptive clarity. This can be seen, for example, in the ekphrastic description of Grete’s gold reliquary that forms the midpoint of the aforementioned dialogue with Gigas (elided in the previous quotation of the scene):

Gigas recoiled for a moment, and his red eyes seemed to have become even redder. But he gathered himself again quickly and looked at [the capsule]. It hung on a little chain. In the top section of the capsule was a Mother of God, etched in fine lines, but underneath that was a little piece of red silk, and inside this, the sliver of wood. The old man snapped the lid shut […].

Gigas war einen Augenblick zurückgetreten, und seine roten Augen schienen röter geworden. Aber er sammelte sich auch diesmal rasch wieder und nahm die Kapsel und betrachtete sie. Sie hing an einem Kettchen. In das obere Kapselstück war eine Mutter Gottes in feinen Linien eingegraben, innerhalb aber lag ein rotes Seidenläppchen und in diesem der Splitter. Der Alte knipste das Deckelchen wieder zu […]. (GM 28)

The ekphrasis embedded within this passage—just as Grete’s Virgin is embedded in her capsule—momentarily brings the action to a standstill, turning the reader’s attention to the same static presence of the thing that, at least traditionally, stands in an antagonistic position to the dynamism of mythos that is literature’s privilege alone. Such anti-dramatic stasis is only further emphasized by the description of Grete’s Virgin as being “etched in fine lines [in feinen Linien eingegraben]” (GM 28). The not merely homophonic relationship between engraving and the grave that these words evoke— “eingraben” meaning both “to bury” and “to carve, to inscribe”—is made all but literal through the fact that Grete’s sacrilegious capsule is also a heirloom from her dead and never known mother: “the only thing I have from her [alles, was ich von ihr hab’]” (GM 28).[34] And underneath this dead iconic image, problematic enough, lies the truth of the picture itself: the fetish object, the same bit of wood that Andreas Karlstadt, evoking Isaiah, reminds his readers is also used to cook meat and warm bodies.[35] Without the fetishistic faith that had once lent the reliquary an efficacious (if also, in Gigas’s view, false) spiritual content, the previous meanings of divine and motherly love, are as it were, separated out, leaving only a mere scandalous bit of debris; it becomes, at best, the memento mori of itself, a sign for nothing but the potential mortification of an art no longer animated by living spirit. Grete’s relic—in both senses of the word—figures the process by which things come to reveal the suspect nature of their own meaningfulness.

IV

This theme of the process of the disappearance of the meaningfulness of things, their slide into obsolescence and illegibility, forms no less than the hidden leitmotif of Fontane’s novella as a whole. In the novella’s pivotal chapter, “By the Wendish Stone [Am Wendenstein]”—which narrates the moment of Grete’s fateful resolution to run away from home—Grete and Valtin have climbed up on a hill outside of town, ostensibly to get a look at the aforementioned festivities surrounding the local prince-elector’s visit (in which, incidentally, the theme of religious conflict and cultural change appears yet again, in the recent conversion of the prince-elector—clearly modeled after the historical Johann Sigismund, Markgraf von Brandenburg—from Lutheranism to Calvinism). Before they are able to reach a proper vantage point, the children get tired and turn into the deep grass, coming suddenly upon an old wall:

On the top of the wall there was a boulder of peculiar form and so thickly covered with lichens that only a few half weathered-away characters could be made out with difficulty. And they sat on this boulder.

     “What does the stone mean?” asked Grete.

     “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a Wendish grave.”

     “How’s that?”

     “Don’t you know? This is the field where the great battle of Tanger was. Heathens and Christians. And the heathens won. And on either side of this dirt wall where we’re sitting […] they lie in the thousands.”

Auf der Höhe des Walles lag ein Feldstein von absonderlicher Form und so dicht mit Flechten überwachsen, dass sich ein paar halb verwitterte Schriftzeichen daran nur mühsam erkennen ließen. Und auf diesen Feldstein setzten sie sich.

     “Was bedeutet der Stein?” fragte Grete.

     “Ich weiß es nicht. Vielleicht ein Wendengrab.”

     “Wie denn?”

     “Weißt du denn nicht? Dies ist ja das Feld, wo die große Tangerschlacht war. Heiden und Christen. Und die Heiden siegten. Und zu beiden Seiten des Erdwalls, auf dem wir hier sitzen, vor uns bis dicht an den Wald und hinter uns bis dicht an den Fluß, liegen sie zu vielen Tausenden.” (GM 54)

Fontane’s Wendepunkt am Wendenstein thus turns, not just on a thing, but on a thing that has been overgrown, worn away, eroded to the point where it cannot be decided if it ever had significance at all: a merely potential pagan fetish, it rises up doubly dead above the thousands of corpses to which it fails even to bear proper witness. Grete’s question of what the stone “means” not only repeats Gigas’s words about the doctrine of works years earlier, but also evokes their message: letters, stone, and good works alike “mean nothing,” but only refer in their lack of signification to the signification they cannot in fact promise.[36]

That the repercussions of this loss of signification of the thing for realist representation is a concern of Fontane’s novella is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the subplot of the “traveling folk [fahrende Leute],” the itinerant actors whose performances of “The Last Judgment” and “The Fall”—in that order—almost bookend the novella.[37] This subplot is clearly meant to be read with the various Reformation bans on the theater in mind, where Trud’s Cromwellian comment that “It repulses me to see God and the Devil as mere puppets [Es wiedersteht mir, Gott und Teufel als bloße Puppen zu sehen]” (GM 16) is only the most explicit of the novella’s multiple indications of the problematic nature of the puppeteers’ performances. Although the novella’s sympathies clearly lie with neither the character Trud nor her iconophobic convictions, her words are nevertheless allowed to resonate uneasily in the novella, which equivocates on the question of both the artfulness and the propriety of the puppeteers’ art. “They’re only puppets [Es sind ja Puppen],” comments Valtin to the young Grete just before the first curtain rises, whereupon Grete responds, in a comment that could stand as motto for the novella as a whole, “But they still mean something, and I don’t really know if it’s right [Aber sie bedeuten was, und ich weiß doch nicht, ob es recht ist]” (GM 17). Indeed, to all intents and purposes the novella does not contradict, but actually corroborates Trud’s critique—“That’s something that Trud drummed into your conscience [Das hat dir Trud ins Gewissen gered’t]” (GM 17), responds the frivolous Emrentz blithely to Grete’s aesthetic anxiety—, portraying the puppeteers’ work not merely as an act of carefree blasphemy in the sensual presentation of the divine word per se, but as an outright travestying of the divine word as gaudy popular spectacle, in which not only the sublimity of religion but also art’s own spiritual task have been all but annihilated.[38] Similarly, the aforementioned spooling back of holy history within the order of the actors’ repertoire indicates less the reversal of original sin than its standstill or repetition, as one of the troupe’s members relates to the tavern owner, in the novella’s sole comic interlude: “Played twice every day, first the puppets and then us. And always a full house and no apples [tossed] to the ground [Zweimal gespielt jeden Tag, erst die Puppen und dann wir selber. Und immer voll und kein Apfel zur Erde]” (GM 72). Or as the “Türkenweib” (GM 20) Zenobia tells Grete, in what are her only spoken lines: “‘Member, Gret’, ‘ere’s still ‘nother play today. They want the ‘Rig’nal Sin.’ Them folks don’t give us no peace [Denk, Gret’, ‘s gibt noch a Spiel heut’. Den ›Sündfall‹ wollen’s. Das Leutvolk last uns ka Ruh nit]” (GM 78). Such repetition makes a mockery of the “origin” of original sin, turning representation (as a copy of an ur-image) into perpetually self-generating performance. Grete’s own personal iteration of the Fall, meanwhile, is not only concretely manifested in the form of her nameless infant child, but also linked to the theater fire early in the novella—a burlesque of hell gone awry—as well as to her final act of revenge, through Gerdt’s vulgar double entendre to the Tagermünder aldermen: “I’ve got nothing in common with females who light their fires between hedge and ditch [ich habe nichts gemein mit Weibern, die zwischen Heck’ und Graben ihr Feuer zünden]” (GM 96).

It is moreover instructive that Fontane—in a detail otherwise essentially irrelevant—specifically remarks on the theatrical transition in the novella from puppets to live actors. Contrary to what one might expect, the replacement of marionette figures with real live human beings does not lead to a greater humanization or true-to-lifeness of the medieval folk theater, but, to the contrary, results in a kind of marionettization of its human actors, in which they are mere fungible bodies fitted into stock figures, themselves the parody of the sacred scripture from which they are taken. As the novella’s penultimate sentence relates with heavy irony: “No one noticed the change that had taken place in the lineup [Niemand achtete des Wechsels, der in Besetzung der Rollen stattgefunden hatte]” (GM 102).[39] Indeed, a strange inhuman thingliness even surrounds the novella’s central character herself, and from her very first entry in the novella:

Now her shape became visible for the first time. It was a half-grown girl, very delicately built, and her fine lines, but even more the oval and the color of her face, indicated a foreigner.

Jetzt erst sah man ihre Gestalt. Es war ein halbwachsendes Mädchen, sehr zart gebaut, und ihre feinen Linien, noch mehr das Oval und die Farbe ihres Gesichts, deuteten auf eine Fremde. (GM 8)

As in the above cited scene between Grete and the pastor Gigas, a short descriptive passage brings a temporary halt to the flow of dialogue with which the novella begins, forcing the reader to linger on static appearance rather than being carried along by dramatic action. But it is not only this fact that binds these two moments in the novella: the “feinen Linien” of Grete’s physical appearance in the above passage are the very same words that will be used by Fontane in the later scene to describe the Virgin of Grete’s idolatrous reliquary. Thus Grete appears proleptically and from the very beginning as an image, a portrait, in the vignette-like oval of her face already en-capsulated, marking her out from the start as an object of adoration, of fear, and, indeed, of death.[40] In defiance of the realist emphasis on the reconciling power of the human “heart,” Grete’s exotically beautiful face already shows up as something as “foreign” and unreadable as the heathen stone about which she will later inquire. Even if Fontane’s description of Grete is not ekphrastic in the strict sense, her symbolic connection to the portrait in the pendant she carries with her and by which she is, throughout the novella, metonymically defined registers the fear that is, so to speak, the other side of Achilles’ shield: that is, that ekphrasis could also work the other way around. If the still image and the inanimate object can be spurred to life through narration—through anthropomorphization—the spirit that narrative grants may be exposed as illusion, believed in only by children and heathens, and the supposedly living and breathing lives of realist fiction revealed as so many fetishes and “half weathered-away characters [halb verwitterte Schriftzeichen]” (GM 54), not only unconvincing, but actively sacrilegious (including and especially the secular religion of humanism) in their claims to agency and meaning.

V

It comes perhaps as no surprise, given the widespread convention of using artist figures as authorial stand-ins, that the plainest of such commentary on the socio-historical conditions of the novella’s form is provided by the leader of the puppeteer troupe in the aforementioned tavern interlude, directly after the narrative ellipsis and before the recounting of Valtin’s untimely death. Remarking on the reference to a local convent in the lyrics of an improvised song, the actor exclaims,

But why nuns? There aren’t any nuns any more. I mean, here in this country. Down below, in the Empire, they’ve still got plenty of them. […] But here! Everything revoked, what they call “secularizing.”

Aber woher denn Nonnen? Es gibt ja keine Nonnen mehr. Ich meine hierzuland. Unten im Reich, da hat’s ihrer noch genug. Nicht wahr, Zenobia? Aber hier! Alles aufgehoben, was sie „säkularisieren“ nennen. (GM 73)

On the most literal level, of course, the actor’s words refer to the seizure of church lands and property by lay regimes as practiced in Europe from the Reformation to the nineteenth century: a historical situation set out graphically by Fontane in the very next chapter, wherein Grete petitions the old abbess—now living almost alone in her cloister slowly being overtaken by the surrounding nature—to provide Valtin with the Christian burial denied him by the local preacher. On a second level—which Fontane also no doubt intends—the words may be read as a kind of social and political critique, with Fontane’s actor bemoaning the reinvestment of the spiritual force of religion in earthly goods and gods, the most obvious candidate for which in the novella would in fact be money: not only the commodity fetishism that Fontane gently mocks in Emrenz’s unseasonable fur collar[41] but also the inheritance whose painful loss inspires Grete to transform her childhood fear of hellfire into a tool of personal revenge. In this interpretation, the “aufgehoben” of the above passage can be read with all its Hegelian connotations intact, as the decaying old order—Catholic, pre-modern, agrarian—gives way to the Protestant private enterprise systems of Fontane’s Prussia. It is on the basis of such a reading that Georg Lukács describes Fontane as a “wavering figure [schwankenden Gestalt],”[42] critical of the worldly avarice of bourgeois capitalism but ignorant of the fact that the values he opposes to such avarice—romantic love and individual freedom—are themselves inseparable from the advent of the bourgeois capitalist culture that he condemns.

However, the passage just cited may also suggest yet a third reading, one that touches on a transformation perhaps even more radical than—if every bit as conflicted as—that to which Lukács applies his ideological critique. For the lines of Fontane’s in the actor’s mouth also anticipate Walter Benjamin’s insight into the melancholy immanence of the baroque Trauerspiel vis-à-vis the eschatological transcendence of the medieval mystery play,[43] whose commercialization and loss of socio-cultural relevance, or at least its repurposing as popular entertainment, Fontane’s novella, again, indeed describes in some detail. But the disenchanted theater of Grete Minde—once again befitting the strange anachronicity of Fontane’s text—also indicates something decidedly contemporary: for the worldliness that to the mystery play is unknown and for the Trauerspiel is a source of affliction is for the realist novel not only desired, but formally necessary. If the transition from mystery play to Trauerspiel results, for Benjamin, in that allegory whose function “is not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked,”[44] the subsequent transformation into the total worldliness of the realist work—which is only highlighted by the resistance to this worldliness and its corresponding strategies of compensation—is a presentation of the material object as already naked: already, so to speak, no longer the object, despite everything still turned towards the human being, but now only the mere, illegible and inhuman thing. Thus, and with all due respect to Fontane’s actor, what takes place in Grete Minde is in fact less a successful secularization than a profanation, in the sense that Giorgio Agamben has given the term, that is to say, a removal from the sphere of the sacred entirely. As Agamben points out, secularization involves a change of position, but not a change of quality. Profanation, in contrast, “neutralizes what it profanes”[45]: it strips away the charmed field that surrounds the phenomenon; in other words, it returns the fetish to the thing.

Such profanation, however, is not simply a fall from grace; nor, clearly—at least not in Fontane’s presentation—is it an ecstatic freedom from the pressures of religion and an escape into untroubled materialism and carefree play. For profanation, too, contains its residue.[46] Just as in the puppeteers’ performances, the fall and salvation history of biblical chronology is presented as a sporadic and iterative loop, in the profane theater of Fontane’s novella—both that which is thematically represented in the subplot of the travelling actors, and that which the novella itself constitutes—is presented the unresolved repetition of the drama of the thing and its ever-contentious, ever-imperfect spiritualization: in which, moreover, the repressed juridical theater of the historical Margarete von Minden’s tortured and dismembered body[47] returns as all too empirical evidence for the severability of the thing from that same whole that the aesthetics of realism paradoxically calls upon the severable thing to comprise.[48] And though Fontane’s Grete’s fiery end has little of the gruesome physicality of that of her namesake (effectively abridging the latter’s execution to its very last scenes), it makes the same point of the final self-assertion of the thing, anagrammatically transforming the wooden splinter of Christ’s cross with which Grete had thought herself to be saved into the burning roof beams that crumble away under her own feet to make her arsonist, infanticide, and suicide all at once. In Grete’s final act—a pure parody of martyrdom—the transformation of the fetish object back into the materiality from whence it sprang is accomplished to dire effect.

It is thus no exaggeration to claim the anachronistic anomaly that is Grete Minde as the exemplary work of Fontane’s realism, the novella in which not only Grete, but thingly representation—indeed, realism itself—is placed on trial. Trud’s dismissive comment about the traveling actors towards the beginning of the novella—“Heathens and Turks, they are [Heiden und Türken sind’s]” (GM 16)— bears witness not just to a puritanical xeno- and theatrophobia, but also to the anxiety about the always potentially idolatrous investment of spiritual meaning in inanimate things that finds itself ambivalently reflected in Fontane’s novella. The compromise formations of realism, which were to have laid such controversies to rest, in fact constitute their return: “And the heathens won [Und die Heiden siegten]” (GM 54). Such a victory, however, is itself highly ambiguous, crossed from the beginning by violence and death, by forgetting, by travesty, by the profanation of the very thing the heathens should have so erroneously venerated. In this way, Fontane’s reinterpretation of the terrible fate of Grete Minde presents realism’s anxious negotiation between the spiritual elevation of the thing and the thing’s repudiation as a kind of tragedy in its own right, the impossibility of sustaining the delicate equilibrium that is the condition of its existence.

 

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