UPON THE PUBLICATION of Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig (From Twenty to Thirty) on June 22, 1898, a raft of male pundits seized the opportunity to weigh in on their beloved Theodor Fontane. The seventyeight- year-old Fontane was “eternally young and eternally modern,” they effused, and had remained “lively, productive, and young”; he belonged to the “eternally young ones.” Yet he also possessed the “wisdom that comes with age.” They evoked, furthermore, his “proud and serene independence” and “the true nobility of his character and disposition.” Their fulsome praise on this occasion expressed the growing sense that, as Luise Berg-Ehlers observes of late Fontane-reception, the author had achieved indisputable greatness. In that vein Cosmopolis deemed the book important because Fontane was beloved and important: “But whoever loves the old Fontane—and who wouldn't?—Everyone who knows what he means for the literature of our times will have to read the book.” Fontane's demise three months later and the publication of the book edition of Der Stechlin in October prompted male contemporaries to praise their “dear master” yet again. Later, in 1905, likewise in an adulatory register, Fritz Mauthner recalled the master's embitterment over the social position of writers and his feeling that he had never quite received the reliable remuneration or the recognition due to him. Sympathizing here with Fontane's disgruntlement, Mauthner emphatically affirms his literary standing.

This effusive investment of the male literary world in Fontane the author and public figure prompts my examination of Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig, an autobiographical account organized around the writer's twenties, when he had yet to publish anything of note. As I will show, Fontane, the autobiographical narrator, here immerses Fontane, the historical figure, in a primarily male-populated social world, one in which he operates largely within male networks critical to his image and self-understanding as an emergent writer in the first full decade of his adult life and also to his self-presentation at the time he was writing Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig. Otherwise famous for his literary treatment of the Prussian nobility and the middling and upper classes at their leisure, fiction in which both genders matter, fiction that, as Manuela Günter maintains, he wrote for women, Fontane here presents a view of German letters, both amateur and professional, as self-absorbed, homosocial, and nearly devoid of women and female influence.