OTRAS CLASES DE TURISMO

Irrungen Wirrungen tells the story of a lived experience, the affair, and how that experience, as memory and an imagined alternative, as a quantity of private knowledge then informs the way the world is perceived. Because of the affair, the characters look at the world in a different way: it has a new meaning for them. This is shown primarily through Botho‘s eyes. In a small, limited way, the reader is shown in this novel the construction of one level of subjectivity: the text leads the reader through the process by which the affair gives the world a new layer of significance. In the terminology introduced at the beginning of this study, Fontane recreates the process by which ‗lived-space‘ comes into being.

For Botho, Berlin becomes a series of locations which act as symbolic stimuli. Relating how the affair with Lene began to Gideon Franke from his Berlin home, Botho comments:

Ich begleitete sie nach Hause und war entzückt von allem was ich da sah [...] ich fragte, ob ich wiederkommen dürfte, welche Frage sie mit einem einfachen ‗Ja‘ beantwortete. (442)

Botho‘s initial attraction to Lene is transferred to her surroundings: the continuation of their relationship is expressed in terms of Botho being able to visit the garden again. The situation of their love has become a metaphor for their love itself. Botho‘s emotional experience informs his entire spatial experience. This then works in reverse: the remembrance of space is part of the path to reliving emotion:

Rienäcker, als das alles wieder vor seine Seele trat, stand in sichtlicher Erregung auf und öffnete beide Flügel der Balkontür, als ob es ihm in seinem Zimmer zu heiß wurde. (442f.)

Having just mentioned the garden, the memory of that place stimulates an emotional response.

A similar episode occurs earlier in chapter sixteen, after Botho and Käthe return from their honeymoon. Their house on the Landgrafenstraße overlooks the zoological garden and a church tower is a landmark on the horizon. Käthe asks Botho what the village to which the church belongs is called, and in his response, ‗―ich glaube, Wilmersdorf‖‘, his emotional attachment to the place is clear to Käthe:

‗Nun gut, Wilmersdorf. Aber was heißt das: ―ich glaube‖. Du wirst doch wissen, wie die Dörfer hier herum heißen. Sieh nur Mama, macht er nicht ein Gesicht, als ob er uns ein Staatsgeheimnis verraten hätte? Nichts komischer als diese Männer.‘ (413)

Not only places, but also objects related to the affair acquire symbolic significance. The presentation of Botho and Lene‘s emotional attachment, particularly during the period when Botho decides to end the affair and after it has ended, concentrates greatly on artefacts and their meaning to the two. Paramount among these are the love letters Botho received from Lene and the posy she gave

him in Hankels Ablage. These are physical evidence of Botho‘s enduring love for her even after his marriage, an outward sign of inner faithfulness. These ‗Träger der Erinnerung‘ ‗beleben und auffrischen, was tot ist und totbleiben muß‘ (454f.). It is Botho‘s awareness of their power as relics, which causes him to destroy them in an attempt to forget.

The way the characters respond to places and objects not directly linked to the affair is also influenced by their love and predicament. The reader frequently finds Botho and Lene interpreting signs by analogy, or ascribing a symbolic, almost metaphysical meaning to the world, often in a melancholically playful way. When Botho‘s canary bothers him for affection, he concludes: ‗Alle Lieblinge sind gleich, [...] und fordern Gehorsam und Unterwerfung‘ (347). Similarly, his inability to swat a fly, which he gives the generalised name ‗Unglücksbote‘, prompts a musing on the inevitability of failure:

‗Wieder fort. Es hilft nichts. Also Resignation. Ergebung ist überhaupt das beste. Die Türken sind die klügsten Leute.‘ (400)

For Botho this tendency to interpret the world has life determining repercussions: a turning point in the novel is his ride to the Hinckeldey monument and the sight of the factory workers at lunch (404-406). Botho interprets what he sees, and what his horse led him to by chance, as a sign with relevance to his own life: the senselessness of individual resistance and the need for social order. If the tendency towards generalisation is frequently an aspect of Botho‘s humour, then here it has serious consequences.

Lene too reacts to the world and interprets symbols, and whereas this is often the product of humour with Botho, with Lene it is often linked to her

tendency towards superstition. When Lene sees a maid washing dishes at Hankels Ablage, she says to Botho:

‗Weißt du, Botho, das ist kein Zufall, daß sie da kniet; sie kniet da für mich, und ich fühle deutlich, daß es mir ein Zeichen ist und eine Fügung.‘ (389)

In these episodes, Botho and Lene are seen to read the world with reference to their lives. We see Lene and Botho interpreting the world according to a shared experience of which we as readers have been allowed a glimpse – through the affair the world acquires a new level of meaning for them. An earlier example at Hankels Ablage suggests that rather than this personal, biased view of the world being inaccurate, unobjective and therefore less real, it can in fact be a way of seeing what normally lies hidden: as in the novel‘s opening paragraph, the imagination sees a more interesting reality. In a meadow, Botho complains that he would like to pick a posy for Lene, but there are no flowers (377). Lene, by contrast, says:

‗Du hast kein Auge für diese Dinge, weil du keine Liebe dafür hast, und Auge und Liebe gehören immer zusammen [...] Es sind aber Blumen und noch dazu sehr gute‘ (378)

Botho and Lene‘s behaviour, and in particular her comments cited above, need to be understood in a wider context. Fontane frequently alludes to the inevitable subjectivity of perception and judgement. In Vor dem Sturm Berndt von Vitzewitz remarks: ‗ein jeder sieht was er zu sehen wünscht; darin sind wir alle

gleich‘,23

and in Schach von Wuthenow, Victoire makes the following statement on literary evaluation: ‗das Allerpersönlichste bestimmt immer unser Urteil‘.24

There is significant textual evidence to suggest that, rather than assessing personal bias negatively, Fontane saw positive value in subjective interpretation. In the second foreword to the Wanderungen for example, Fontane writes that to appreciate the Mark, both ‗den guten Willen‘ and historical knowledge are necessary.25 The meaning and ultimately beauty of a place or object is not to be sought by considering the object in a distanced, unprejudiced way, but rather by emphasising its specific relationship with the individual, in this case the fact that it is his local area, and the knowledge he brings to it, in this case historical knowledge. As Lene promotes looking with love, Fontane suggests that the viewer predisposed to find value in an object will be best placed to do so, which will often involve drawing on information extraneous to the object itself.

Fontane also consistently stresses the need to look positively at the world as an artistic imperative. Writing to his wife in 1883, he comments: ‗die Schönheit ist da, man muß nur ein Auge dafür haben‘,26 and in ‗Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848‘ (1853) he argues:

Das Leben ist doch immer nur der Marmorsteinbruch, der den Stoff zu unendlichen Bildwerken in sich trägt; sie schlummern drin, aber nur dem Auge des Geweihten sichtbar und nur durch seine Hand zu erwecken.27 23 _{HA I, 3, 176.} 24 HA I, 1, 616. 25 _{HA II, 1, 12.}

26 _{Letter to Emilie 14}th _{June 1883, Erler, Briefe, II p. 103.} 27 _{My emphasis, M.W. HA III, 1, 241}

The concept of the observing artist is a topos of Realism, but in Fontane‘s case, it is a highly personal one.28 The ‗künstlerische Betrachtung des Lebens‘ he advocates and represents in his literary writings is also biographically determined.29 As a correspondent, war reporter, and Wandrer, Fontane himself was an imagining observer, and, as has been shown in the Wanderungen discussion, the interpreting narrator is a significant and recurrent feature of this magnum opus. Fontane‘s letters record his tendency to interpret and generalise about what he sees in a similar way to the examples in Irrungen Wirrungen.30 In this context, the imagining figure at the beginning of the text acquires a far more profound meaning: it is a poetical and biographical symbol, an image of a way of life, and of artistic behaviour which draws out the full truth of the world. That imagining figure is a prelude to the way in which the reader sees Botho and Lene engaging with their surroundings, an announcement of their symbolic understanding or their lives.