ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Theodor Fontane — incomparably the greatest novelist of late nineteenth-century Germany — exemplifies a realism of interpretation and social critique which depends crucially upon the immediacy of narrative form. It suggests that Fontane's realism embodies a kind of interpretative immediacy: one which discloses the real consequences, in human speech and interaction, of the ideologies by which human beings in society are both consciously and unconsciously determined. The power of Fontane's social realism consists in its ability to show how the 'unreality' of this human situation has, for his character Innstetten, become 'reality'. Fontane's realism has aptly been described as embodying a kind of liberal ethic, one which has authority precisely because it never compels the reader's assent. Fontane's character Geert von Innstetten and his wife Effi Briest are both, in their different ways, the victims of a mechanism of social control which operates in and through their own subjectivity.
