We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.
Michel Foucault, “Des Espaces Autres,” 1967.
Historians are to nationalists what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
Eric Hobsbawm, Anthropology Today, 1992.
In 1979 Richard Löwenthal, Jewish German journalist, publicist, and influential post-war FRG scholar noted “a very special lack of chronological continuity, geographic unity and spiritual form and coherence” of Germany (Gesellschaftswandel 240 - 242). In 1981, James Sheehan, an American specialist in German history, similarly insisted on the need to acknowledge the fragmentation, discontinuity, divisiveness and regional diversity of German historical experience and criticized post-World War II German historians for their tendency to view Germany’s history through a Prussian lens and to conflate the German Empire with Prussia. Thus he observed: “It is remarkable that France, Europe’s most centralized nation, has been dissolved by its historians into regions, while Germany, Europe’s most fragmented polity, is treated as if it were a cohesive entity.” If Germany did not exist as a coherent entity either in terms of language, politics, or physical
boundaries in the eighteenth century, Sheehan points out, the notion of a single German culture is not sensible. It is an abstraction, whether it is supposed to apply to the whole of the German-speaking territories or to those later incorporated into the Bismarckian state.
Furthermore, while one can speak of German state-builders and their supporters, a
mention the millions with ties to German social, cultural, economic and political life who were excluded from the Bismarckian state, does violence to the facts. (21).
Such observations serve as an apt reminder of the impact German/ Prussian nineteenth century historiography has made on prevalent attitudes and common misconceptions of Germany as a whole with Prussian Germans as crucial factors in giving the area that was once Imperial Germany its meaning and coherence. Sheehan’s verdict, however, has to be revised in view of a burgeoning new interest in the area’s cultural history and a growing number of new historic approaches which stress diversity and heterogeneity and a common heritage of Germans and Poles in Prussia by connecting intertwined and overlapping territories and societies thereby increasingly undermining a unified and /or Germano/Prusso-centric view of German history (Aust/Fischer; Engel;
Blackbourn; Retalleck; Piskorski; Friedrich; Bartlett and Schönwälder).
Nevertheless, mainstream Fontane scholarship has barely taken notice of these innovative approaches and still continues to sustain a largely monolithic vision of Prussia/ Germany, which overlooks the fact that Germans and Poles share a common heritage in Prussia. These older largely Germano-centric historiographic traditions still seem to exert a strong influence on Fontane scholarship and they have in turn impacted the framework within which the content, context and time/space in Fontane’s Effi Briest is critically approached and analyzed in terms of identifying Prussia with Germany and hardly even mentioning Prussia’s close relations with Eastern Europe and especially Poland. Since Fontane scholarship creates not only the knowledge about Fontane’s texts but also about the very reality his texts deal with, our practice as literary and cultural critics needs to resist such pitfalls of homogenized constructions of Prussia/Germany.
The dynamics, complexities and multifariousness of the historic realities of East Central Europe (where Prussia also belongs) defy any easy categorization and the paradigms so far applied have failed to do credit to differences as regional diversity and to properly represent the spatial continuity, openness and fluidity of these transitional frontiers between East and West, where boundaries fluctuated widely according to time, political conjuncture and national and religious loyalties, challenging efforts to stabilize identities. A proper historic cross-cultural reading of Effi Briest requires a methodological shift: different tools, different strategies, different knowledge and most of all different sense of time and space.
In contradiction to a totalizing, homogenizing developmental discourse that
habitually pits a dynamic, creative Western civilization against a static, fast-frozen image of European East, I argue that spaces are heterogeneous, contradictory and unstable, subject to contingency between economic power and cultural power, both of which thoroughly imbricated in a system of time and space. My contention is that Fontane’s Effi Briest requires attention to the representation of a regionally diverse, culturally
contradictory and vocally polyphonic Prussia. This heterogeneity, however, cannot be reduced to a center-periphery dichotomy, as it is commonly done, because it occludes the ways in which German nation building was intertwined with and dependent on Poland (and a number of other minorities) within and without the boundaries of the nascent German imperial-nation state and how metropolitan Germany became the constitutive focus and center of political, economical, cultural domination over places outside of the German core. Etienne Balibar’s decentered notion of borderland Europe differs from the
conventional center-periphery paradigm in that there is no “center,” there are only
“peripheries”:
I suggested in the past that (particularly in Mitteleuropa but more generally in all Europe), without even considering the question of “minorities,” we are dealing with “triple points” or mobile “overlapping zones” of contradictory civilizations rather than with juxtapositions of monolithic entities. In all its points, Europe is multiple; it is always home to tensions between numerous religious, cultural, linguistic, and political affiliations, numerous readings of history, numerous modes of relations with the rest of the world, whether it is Americanism or Orientalism, the possessive individualism of “Nordic” legal systems or the
“tribalism” of Mediterranean familial traditions (Balibar 5)
In order to challenge the familiar one-way modernizing trajectory from the center to periphery and bearing in mind Balibar’s suggestion, in this chapter I propose to explore Fontane’s Effi Briest through the lens of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as one possible model of approaching the novelistic space which, by emphasizing instability, multiplicity and contradictions, simultaneously juxtaposed and dispersed, can be
productive in dismantling previously homogenizing methods of analyses and ideological effects of such traditional interpretational impositions that lie at the very heart of
European universalism and progress.
Michel Foucault’s text, entitled “Des Espaces Autres,” first published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture on heterotopia he had given in March 1967 to architecture students and it was later released into the public for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Foucault’s death.
Foucault starts his lecture by observing the defining difference between the nineteenth century’s obsession with history and the twentieth century as above all “the epoch of space” which he described as the epoch of simultaneity juxtaposed, “the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed in a network that connects points and
intersects with its own skein” (22). Foucault’s contestation of the traditional notion of linear time and his observation that “certain conflicts animating present-day polemics that oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space” is at the core of my reading of Fontane’s Effi Briest.
Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, I suggest, is a good starting point that can help us begin also to account for the entangled and changing relations of power and ethnic hierarchy, identity construction and reconstruction, and the workings of Eurocentric epistemologies. The conflation of space with nation as a recurrent point of reference in most analyses of Effi Briest has often effaced this heterotopic character by equating Prussia with Germany and “Germanness” and by contrasting German urban and modernizing activities with the static provincialism of the eastern periphery mapped in the image of the agrarian and backward Polishness. In what follows I will draw on Foucault’s notion of heterotopias as referring to varied spatial and temporal disruptions that imaginatively interrogate and undermine certain formulations of time and space by demonstrating that spaces are no less mental constructs than nations. The idea of heterotopia understands space(s) over a period of time and also opens up spaces like nations to multiplex uses, which help to uncouple the supposedly natural growth of space and Volk and also disrupt binary oppositions, which pit a modernizing center against a backward periphery.
On July 27, 1890 Fontane announced his intended novel to the Stuttgart publisher, Adolf Kröner, owner and editor of Die Gartenlaube, the publication which serialized many of Fontane's novels but which under Kröner’s tenure became an increasingly conservative influence in shaping reading habits of the public:
Zugleich frage ich an, ob ich Ihnen im Winter oder um nächsten Ostern einen
adligen Gut, im zweiten Drittel in einem kleinen pommerschen Badeort in der Nähe von Varzin und im letzten Drittel in Berlin. Titel: Effi Briest. Es handelt sich, ganz im Gegensatz zu „Quit“ und „Unterm Birnbaum“ nur um Liebe, also stofflich eine Art Ideal. Ob auch sonst? (Werke 4: 55)22
As usual when writing to famous, respected or important persons such as publishers, Fontane's tone is characteristically modest and deceptive. While Fontane’s proposal was not exactly exciting it complied with the mass market tried-and-tested formulae as well as the requirements demanded of writers by conservative editors such as Kröner, who would tolerate neither political nor religious topics, neither divorces nor suicides. Normally the writer had to meet expectations of depicting a protagonist that represents what society holds to be proper. The guarantee of success is part of the function of entertainment.
Surely there must be more to this claim that the novel is only about an everyday love story than initially meets the eye. For one, it is an obvious contradiction to Fontane’s preference for social themes over love stories, as he explained in another letter to
Friedrich Stephany on July 2, 1894, when:
Liebesgeschichten, in ihrer schauderösen Ähnlichkeit, haben was Langweiliges –, aber der Gesellschaftszustand, das Sittenbildliche, das versteckt und gefährlich Politische, das diese Dinge haben . . . das ist es, was mich so sehr daran
interessiert. Und dabei, bei naiven Leuten, immer noch die Vorstellung: so was kommt bei uns nicht vor! (Werke 4: 370).
Fontane achieves this goal of engaging with and questioning the practices of Imperial Germany of his time through his productive fictional strategies. By setting his intended novel in three different locations: the Old March of Brandenburg,
Hinterpommern (East Pomerania of the New March)23 and the imperial capital, Berlin,
22 In 1894 Effi Briest was serialized in the Deutsche Rundschau.
23
Fontane announced his intention to tell his story from the different perspectives these multiple locations (the local, the peripheral, and the central, respectively) entail. In other words, Fontane intended to give a cross section of contemporary Prussia, the largest and most powerful part of the new German Empire. By spreading his story over diverse geographic and national/ethnic landscapes and superimposed places, and by constantly questioning relations between these different locations, Fontane was engaging a strategy of composite map-making: rather than a unified textual space, he created a composite, heterogeneous spaces resistant to any homogenization. In so doing Fontane provided a counter-model to the monolithic mapping of Prussia. Fontane’s fictional strategies in Effi Briest thus come to resemble what Michel Foucault calls heterotopia(s) – which can help understand relations between power, knowledge and space as Fontane envisioned them in the novel.
In 1967 Michel Foucault introduced the idea of heterotopias as lived and socially produced spaces thus: “We do not live inside a void . . . we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites, which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not
superimposable on one another” (“Other Spaces” 22). Among all sites Foucault is interested in particular ones “that have a curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or invert” (“Other Spaces” 24). These two unique sites are utopias and heterotopias. While utopia is fundamentally unreal, heterotopia, by contrast, is a real space but simultaneously mythic and real (“Other Spaces” 24). Poland can be taken for such an example. At least since the Enlightenment Prussian discourse
had claimed that Polish culture was never able to separate reality from myth. Seen through the Prussian lens, Poland was different, extreme, and backward and it did not even exist. However the case of Germany is also interesting in view of its contradictions;
the processes of rapid modernization and homogenization competed with regional loyalties to separate principalities across an extremely heterogeneous and confusing geographic, ethnic and linguistic space with no clear boundaries in the east.
The lifestyle of a long-time journalist afforded Fontane the opportunity to witness the range of different communities within Prussia and the German Empire. Fontane’s novels are considered as a valuable source of historic information about late nineteenth century Prussia because they exemplify a supposedly realistic or “truthful” representation of Prussia’s reality at the time, even though Fontane himself had mocked his readers who enthusiastically praised the photographic and historic accuracy of his detailed
descriptions. In one letter Fontane commented that all the details in Schach von Wuthenow, “everything down to the last straw,” was his own invention. Elsewhere he listed with irony all the inaccurate details contained in his novels set in Berlin, but he also added that, nevertheless, they were essentially realistic (qtd. in Lukács, German Realists 302; Doebling ix-x).
Against this background, I suggest that the three broad locations, in which Fontane’s Effi Briest enfolds, namely, Hohen-Cremmen in Havelland, Kessin in Hinterpommern and Berlin, might also be taken for such imaginary and yet real places. Furthermore, they are socially constructed spaces, which do not stand alone but are simultaneously
coexistent and inextricably linked, even though they can be incompatible.
“Heterotopias” provide a useful tool for considering the relationships within and between these spaces in Effi Briest. Thus for instance in Foucauldian terms Havelland/
Hohen-Cremmen, Berlin and Hinterpommern (Eastern Pomerania)/Kessin in Effi Briest not only suspect, invert and mirror each other and bring together different incompatible sites, but they also bring together different times as well as sites. On the one hand, Berlin had undergone dramatic changes especially in the last fifty years of Fontane’s life, which he observed and reflected upon in his late novels. On the other, as a historically minded author, Fontane was aware that the capital of the new German empire, increasingly becoming one of the premier centers of power in the world, originally sprung from a little medieval Slavic village. By the late nineteenth century there remained few visible
remnants of this “prehistory” but its ghostly presence was still felt. As a historian of Mark Brandenburg, Fontane wrote about this Slavic “historical a priori” in Foucault’s sense by invoking a long history of struggle, colonization, cooperation, intermingling and
overlapping between Germans and Wends/Slavs. Everywhere in Prussia there were visible remnants of the Slavic past both in form of ruins as well as proverbs and names of many Prussian toponyms and family names which together indicate not only the
superimposition of the German over the submerged Slavic layers, but also patterns of a complex demographic mix, resistance and cultural hybridization. Finally, fictional Kessin is situated in the real province of Hinterpommern of the Baltic region, a transitional but also highly contested site since the Middle Ages where Teutonic Knights and Slavs, Germans and Poles, Prussia and Poland encountered and contested each other.
According to Foucault all cultures are heterotopias and he illustrates this through six principles to explain the concept’s application in reality. 1) The first principle involves
two main categories of heterotopias: the heterotopia of crisis and deviation, respectively.
The first refers to sacred and forbidden places, including the site of the bride’s
“deflowering” on the honeymoon trip. The second refers to places where people are confined when they do not conform to social norms, including rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons; 2) heterotopias can change function within a single society; 3) they may take the form of contradictory sites or combine several spaces which actually can never be together, such as the representation of a “sacred garden” as a microcosm of the world or theatrical performance bringing onto the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are alien or unfamiliar to one another; 4) they are linked with a break in traditional time, identifying spaces that represent either a quasi-eternity, like museums and libraries, or are temporal, like fairgrounds; 5) heterotopias are not freely accessible, they are entered either by compulsory means or their entry is based on ritual or
purification; 6) the final principle concerns singular spaces within some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others. To Foucault some seventeenth-century puritan societies in America are the most extreme example of other spaces, a realized utopia, a very strict planned settlement that combines strict Christianity and ordered communal life.
In what follows I will explore the relevance of Foucault’s principles for the reality Fontane constructed in Effi Briest. Foucault’s first principle involves two main categories of heterotopias: the heterotopia of crisis and deviation. According to Foucault the
heterotopia of crisis refers to sacred and forbidden places, reserved for individuals in crisis including the site like a hotel room where the bride’s “deflowering” on the
honeymoon trip takes place out of sight, as happens to be also the case of the eponymous
protagonist of Effi Briest. Furthermore, the crisis intensifies as she moves away from the heimlich/familiar parental home in the Heimat to the unfamiliar/ unheimlich and alien Kessin. It is a brutally drastic change of situation for the protagonist who suddenly finds herself isolated and frustrated by a sense of confinement and enforced passivity and fearful of her new surroundings. This leaves someone like Effi feeling confined yet vulnerable, not fully part of the real world yet subject to its demands and intrusions.
Effi’s feelings of being imprisoned: “Es brach wieder über sie herein, und sie fühlte, daß sie wie eine Gefangene sei und nicht mehr heraus könne” (169)24 invoke what Foucault’s
“crisis heterotopia,” that is, privileged, sacred or forbidden places, reserved for
individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, etc. (“Other Spaces” 24). Similarly, the parental house also serves as a crisis heterotopia (functioning something like a present-day hospice) to which terminally ill Effi is admitted and
confined at the end of her life.
Furthermore, Fontane makes the subtle intertextual link between Effi’s married life in Kessin circumscribed by conventions reminiscent of life imagined to be the condition of Oriental women, caged behind the bars of a harem. A Kessin gingerbread-baker Michelsen who objected to the stationing of Hussars in Kessin on moral grounds, pointed out that should they be coming anyone with a daughter would have to put bars on their
Furthermore, Fontane makes the subtle intertextual link between Effi’s married life in Kessin circumscribed by conventions reminiscent of life imagined to be the condition of Oriental women, caged behind the bars of a harem. A Kessin gingerbread-baker Michelsen who objected to the stationing of Hussars in Kessin on moral grounds, pointed out that should they be coming anyone with a daughter would have to put bars on their