Abstract
From 1859 onwards, Theodor Fontane embarks on a series of walks and excursions to the Mark of Brandenburg around Berlin and reports on them in his travelogue Ramblings through Mark Brandenburg (4 volumes, 1862–1882). To date, researchers have assumed that nature is not a primary topic of this work but only a medium in Fontane’s method of linking places to facts and stories. A rereading from a new materialist and ecocritical approach and with a focus on the role of water can demonstrate that Fontane’s text accords agency and productivity to nonhuman nature in a manner similar to the nature writing of English and American traditions. The contribution shows the Ramblings to be an inventory of Mark of Brandenburg’s lakes, streams, canals, and wetlands, a record of their place names, and of the stories related to them. While water is revealed to be a formative force of the Mark Brandenburg’s topography and history, it also organizes the discourse of the Ramblings, and the material agency of water proves to be constitutive to the production of the text. Water is essential in the Ramblings’ construction of Mark Brandenburg as “Heimat,” but this water-based “Heimat” is fluid, ephemeral, and precarious.
Translation by Alexandra Schwind, including all citations marked “[transl. AS].”
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Notes
- 1.
Henry David Thoreau “both touches the genre’s roots and anticipates its flowering in this century.”
- 2.
In particular, numerous Wanderungen chapters feature the three interrelated levels of nature description, introspection, and reflection that, according to Simone Schröder (2018), characterize the nature essay.
- 3.
Diary entry from August 19, 1856 (Fontane (1970–1997). References from this edition are cited under the abbreviation HF with reference to the particular volume and page(s).
- 4.
- 5.
Cf. Erhart (1992), in particular 234ff.
- 6.
On Fontane’s strategy to relate “home and the world to each other and in this way to relate own and foreign to each other” cf. Ewert (2002, 169).
- 7.
For a comprehensive analysis of the concept of Heimat in modernity cf. Scharnowski (2019).
- 8.
Recent research shows that Fontane’s descriptions in the Wanderungen sometimes deviate strongly from the local conditions and that he sometimes even renounced the arduous journeys and only relied on written sources for individual places. Cf. especially the hybrid edition of his notebooks, ed. by Gabriele Radecke, https://fontane-nb.dariah.eu/index.html.
- 9.
- 10.
In his notebook, however, Fontane notes, “You can see the oaks clearly; drowned people are held [by them]; they don’t come back up. [Transl. AS] (Man sieht die Eichen deutlich; Ertrunkene werden festgehalten; sie kommen nicht wieder herauf.)” Fontane, Notebook A7: 59V.
- 11.
- 12.
Fontane’s text does not name any sources but is clearly parallel—in parts almost identical—to the description of sinkholes in Heinrich Berghaus’ Landbuch der Mark Brandenburg (1854) as well as to Karl Friedrich Klöden’s Beitrag über die Senkungen in der Mark, especially his listing of sinkhole lakes (Klöden 1828–1837, vol. I, 34–37). Klöden was Fontane’s former teacher at the Berlin Industrial School (cf. Engelmann 1968, 331–341).
- 13.
Berghaus assumes that the Schermützel, together with its surroundings, is the result of a “mighty subsidence of the ground” [transl. AS] (mächtigen Senkung des Bodens), a “mighty foreshortening” [transl. AS] (mächtigen Verstürzung), but this extensive subsidence is something different from a sinkhole, which he defines precisely in a digression (Berghaus 1854, 73–77 and 88). Perhaps Fontane was confusing this with the Scharmützel Lake near Storkow, which both Klöden and Berghaus give as an example of a lake formed by a sinkhole (cf. Berghaus 1854, 76, and Klöden 1828–1837, vol. I, 10).
- 14.
In Buckow Lake “a town is said to have sunk ages ago, but all traces of it have disappeared; only on St. John’s Day can the church tower still be seen deep on the bottom” [transl. AS] (soll vor Alters wohl eine Stadt versunken sein, doch sind alle Spuren davon verschwunden, nur am Johannistage kann man noch unten tief auf dem Grunde den Kirchthurm erblicken) (Kuhn 1843, 198). Fontane “knew the literature on legends of his time well, but he hardly considered it necessary to quote it” [transl. AS] ([hat] die Sagenliteratur seiner Zeit gut gekannt, nur hat er es kaum für notwendig erachtet, sie auch zu zitieren). (Schmidt 1979, 226).
- 15.
Fontane repeatedly uses the term “colonization” [transl. AS] (Kolonisation) for the Germanic settlement of the Mark (cf. z.B. HF II/2, 13, Pacholski 2010).
- 16.
Fontane’s Wanderungen almost completely omit to address the pollution of the waters in the course of industrialization, as it is clearly mentioned in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfister’s Mühle, for example; an exception is the chapter on the brickyard in Glindow, in which he mentions the turbid water of the ponds (HF II/1, 449).
- 17.
On the “diversity of genre elements and forms of discourse [transl. AS] (Vielfalt der Gattungselemente und Diskursformen) that lend the “long-standing project of the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg … an almost syncretic character” [transl. AS] (langjährige[n] Projekt der Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg … eine fast synkretistische Prägung), (Erhart 1992, 234).
- 18.
Letter to Wilhelm Hertz from October 31, 1861 (Fontane 1972, 52).
- 19.
- 20.
Cf. Fischer (2019, 48): “Local and regional lore, the diversity of linguistic terms, are equally part of the knowledge of nature that nature writers seek to tap” [transl. AS] (Lokale und regionale Überlieferungen, die Vielfalt sprachlicher Bezeichnungen, … gehören ebenso zu dem Wissen von der Natur, das sich Nature Writer zu erschließen suchen).
- 21.
Cf. Goldstein (2019).
- 22.
Thomas describes the Icknield Way as “a braid of stories and memories,” and Macfarlane draws inspiration from it (Macfarlane 2012, 44.)
- 23.
Macfarlane outlines the project of a “series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalize.” Cf. also Macfarlane’s beginning of such a collection of texts in Macfarlane (2005).
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Kramer, A. (2024). Fluid “Heimat”: Water and Nature Writing in Theodor Fontane’s Ramblings through Mark Brandenburg. In: Dürbeck, G., Kanz, C. (eds) German-Language Nature Writing from Eighteenth Century to the Present. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50910-0_6
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