Introduction

Effi Briest (1895) is a novel of development that tells the story of a young woman’s emotional coming-of-age. The spirited daughter of Prussian landed gentry, Effi is seventeen when she is maneuvered into a marriage with the much older Baron von Innstetten, a high-ranking official under Bismarck and her mother’s former suitor. As Effi’s hopes for marital happiness are stifled by her distant and unsympathetic husband, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the figure of a Chinese ghost, who, Effi believes, haunts their home. Bored and disillusioned, she eventually engages in an illicit affair with the charming and persistent Major von Crampas, a dalliance that costs him his life and leads to her exile from society. Set in the 1880s, the narrative of Effi’s maturation and her Orientalized fantasies unfolds against the backdrop of Imperial Germany as it positioned itself to join the European race for colonies in Africa and China.

Theodor Fontane’s realist novel opens with an idyllic scene set at the Briest estate in Hohen-Cremmen, Prussia. Effi’s childhood home, bathed in sunlight, is, for the time being, a world of warmth, security, and stability for her. In the shade of two large plane trees an ebullient Effi sits with her mother and embroiders an altar cloth, pausing every now and then to do a few calisthenics. “Immer am Trapez, immer Tochter der Luft” (6; Always on the trapeze, a daughter of the air, 10), comments her mother, half-amused, half-concerned. The mother-daughter tête-à-tête is interrupted when three of Effi’s friends stop by to call on her. Effi tells the trio of the impending visit of Major Geert von Innstetten, her mother’s former suitor, whom Effi is less than excited to spend the afternoon with, given his age: “Er könnte ja beinah mein Vater sein” (16; he could almost be my father, 11). She tells the girls the story of her mother’s love affair with Innstetten, and the conversation turns to their notions of romance and marriage, thus foreshadowing the novel’s primary concern. Just before the guest is due to arrive, the girls, at Effi’s instigation, indulge in a play-ritual. They wrap the skins of the gooseberries they have been eating in a small paper bag and sink it, with a stone, into the pond while singing a solemn little dirge. Then Effi explains: “‘so vom Boot aus sollen früher auch arme unglückliche Frauen versenkt worden sein, natürlich wegen Untreue.