Halfway to Siberia

Ruth Franklin

• Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich by Gordon A. Craig
  Oxford, 232 pp, £26.00, November 2000, ISBN 0 19 512837 0

‘In the middle of the 1870s,’ Theodor Fontane’s novel Delusions, Confusions begins, ‘just at the crossing of the Kurfürstendamm and the Kurfürstenstrasse, diagonally across from the “Zoological”, could still be found a large vegetable garden, stretching a distance away from the street.’ By the early 1880s, when Fontane began to write his ‘Berlin novels’, the city was living through a period of change not unlike the decade since Reunification – the vegetable garden probably didn’t survive for long. When Fontane first came to Berlin in 1833, to go to school, the city was a small provincial capital: by the mid-1880s, a decade after Unification, its population had risen to more than 1.3 million and it was the focus of a newly powerful state. The way of life to which Fontane’s generation had become accustomed was disappearing, and the future was auspicious but uncertain.