Unwiederbringlich; No Way Back

[This page by Barbara Lester] Wir öffnen willig unsre Hände, daß

Unwiederbringlich uns ein Gut entschlüpfe.

Goethe, Torquato Tasso (lines 1584-85)

We willingly open our hands, so

A good thing slips away from us irretrievably.

Unwiederbringlich; Beyond Recall; No Way Back; Irretrievable (1891)

Variously translated as Beyond Recall, No Way Back and Irretrievable, this novel was written between 1887 and 1890. The title prefigures later developments by pointing to the futility of trying to recapture the past in the hope of regaining lost happiness. The story is based on real events in an old German aristocratic family as these had come to Fontane’s attention.

The main protagonists, united in marriage for seventeen years, living in apparent harmony and anchored in family life with their children, are Count Holk and his wife, Christine. The setting for their lives is the castle of Holkenäs, a building reminiscent of the classical Greek style with all its inherent formality, but, at the same time, also indicating a more relaxed southern lifestyle. This castle replaces the Holks’ former ancestral home, which had witnessed their early happiness. In the crypt of the family chapel, however, the Holks’ youngest child lies buried, and this was one of the reasons why the Countess had originally been reluctant to move away from this meaningful location. The reader senses that the architecture may replicate the diverging mentalities of the couple: the new modern castle overlooks the Baltic Sea, suggesting a more open, fresh and outward-looking attitude, that reflects the nature of Count Holk, while Christine’s mind tends to dwell rather more on the past than one might regard as healthy.

The reader soon becomes aware of underlying tensions in the marriage, which arise not so much from emotional staleness as from difference in the temperament of the protagonists. Christine’s character is marked by pronounced piety and slight otherworldliness, by the fact that she at all times walks the moral high ground, and is constantly looking backwards to the past, which she perceives as the ideal spiritual home for her vision of happiness, her preoccupation with death and tombs, her apparent frostiness and obvious condescension towards her more easy-going husband. Holk is portrayed by Fontane as a figure in his own right and not merely as a foil to the two important female characters in the story; he is seen in a positive light despite certain shortcomings, but lacks recognition by his more educated and culturally superior wife and is thus sapped of the greater vitality with which nature has endowed him. In a memorable inner monologue he fervently wishes for ‘a less excellent wife’; the narrator states with great irony that Holk is virtually made to ‘suffer because of Christine’s virtues’. Holk perceives her increasingly as a woman who is driving him away by her cool conduct and moral rigidity. He even allows himself to compare her to an iceberg which he fears may ultimately leave him frozen.

It becomes clear that the marriage of these two temperamentally ill-suited partners is disintegrating, thereby preparing the way for Holk to accept with alacrity a renewed invitation to fulfil his role as a courtier at the Danish court, a function which arises out of the politically troubled years of Danish rule in Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost province in a not yet united Germany. Holk’s perfect manners and handsome exterior make him eminently suited to the role of the courtier. On his return to Copenhagen, which entails a stay lasting several months, he feels free of the shackles of matrimony, enjoys a more satisfying life of courtly duties and a revitalising round of social engagements. These also expose him to the lure of other women who are more entertaining, more open-minded, freer in their outlook than his wife, albeit often somewhat frivolous, and thus more enticing to a frustrated intellectual lightweight and bon viveur.

The court of Copenhagen at the time is known to be inclined to moral laxity and so to an atmosphere conducive to erotically charged encounters, be it around the king himself or his courtiers. The discontent manifest in Holk for some time before his welcome escape from what he perceives as the tedium of his life at Castle Holkenäs now provides fertile soil for amorous pursuits, notably with Ebba von Rosenberg, a lady-in-waiting. In keeping with Fontane’s penchant for giving his characters meaningful names, ‘Ebba’ may be taken to be a version of ‘Eve’, conjuring up the vision of the first great temptress in the Garden of Eden. What Holk, attractive, well-versed in the rules of aristocratic conduct but otherwise not very sophisticated, does not realize is the fact, obvious to the attentive reader, that Ebba is merely playing an erotically enticing game with him, which he mistakes for love. He is unable to resist the appeal of her entertainingly intelligent conversation, as well as that of her beautiful appearance. The reader is at times reminded that Christine, whose name, too, implies her convictions and character, is also always referred to as a beauty, a fact which clearly no longer safeguards her as an object of desire in his eyes. An unbridgeable gulf appears to have opened up between two incompatible partners. The climax of Holk’s liaison with the bewitching Ebba, hinted at only obliquely by the narrator in keeping with the literary conventions of the age, is swallowed up in a disastrous fire at the castle, seen perhaps as tangible punishment, rather like that meted out to Sodom and Gomorrha of biblical fame.

Having been instrumental in saving Ebba from the fire, Holk is determined to divorce his wife and to embark on a new and more exciting life away from the confines of a stifling marriage. His decision is influenced by the knowledge that his children, who hitherto provided entertainment and loving interest for both their parents, will soon cease to be part of the quiet domestic routine at Holkenäs. For Christine has been engaged in finding them suitable boarding schools so that they may at long last be educated to the level their she deems appropriate for the offspring of illustrious families.

Having made his fateful decision, however, Holk finds to his horror that his hopes for a promising future with Ebba are completely dashed by her rejection of anything more than a playful flirtation: for, with her highly developed and demanding sense of self, she does not see him as sufficiently eligible. The world he has so longingly envisaged collapses and he becomes something akin to a rudderless ship without a haven, the stability of his life having previously, of course, been provided by his wife. He travels for a time in order to give some structure to his days as best he can. While living in London he learns that Ebba is to marry a British aristocrat with a reputation similar to her own, and decides that this is the end of his emotional involvement with her.

Yet the reader may be surprised to learn that several years later the Count and Christine decide to remarry, despite the earlier distressing events that pulled them asunder. The remarriage is celebrated in appropriate style and, viewed superficially, the couple appear to be destined for renewed happiness, based presumably on the conviction that lessons have been learnt by both parties. It soon becomes clear, however, that Christine is unable to forget, or to adapt her emotional and spiritual aspirations sufficiently to resume the life which she and Holk had enjoyed in their earlier union, in which they had managed to accommodate their strongly divergent natures, – the husband with his rather unquestioning superficiality and the wife with her superior attitudes and bigoted religiosity – with relative success. Her faith, having grounded and guided her from a young age and even having caused her to scorn intolerantly other, and in her eyes, lesser denominations, does not prevent her now from succumbing to a deep and dangerous melancholy. Only her friend and companion Julie Dobschütz becomes aware of her dark and increasingly despairing mood, and when Christine suddenly and unaccountably disappears from the castle, she realizes with alarm what the consequences will be. Christine’s lifeless body is soon given up by the Baltic Sea by the shores of which the seemingly privileged Holk family had made its life and in which the unhappy woman has chosen to drown.

One might conclude that the two dominant elements, fire and water, encompass and define the lives of the protagonists of this intriguing story, highlighting as it does the gulf opened up between two people who are willing but ultimately unable to overcome the differences inherent in their character. The reader is made to realize that it is not actually Holk’s adultery which causes the true rift between man and wife but their opposing outlooks on life, as evidenced by their conduct and utterances. One of Fontane’s narrative strategies is to use dialogue to allow the reader privileged insight into the substance, or otherwise, of his characters.

Contemporary critics hailed this novel as one of Fontane’s finest, with its subtle and psychologically astute features, its convincing construction and the poetic aura in which the story is enveloped, down to the use, at strategic points in the narrative of age-old ballads that can be considered to have a bearing on the events depicted in the novel.

English Translations

Theodor Fontane, No Way Back, trans. by Helen Chambers and Hugh Rorrison (London: Angel Books, 2010)

Theodor Fontane, Beyond Recall, trans. and intro. by Douglas Parmée, re-issued as Irretrievable, afterword by Phillip Lopate (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011)

Further Reading

G. C. Avery, ‘The language of attention: narrative technique in Fontane’s Unwiederbringlich’, in Formen realistischer Erzählkunst. Festschrift for Charlotte Jolles, ed. by Jörg Thunecke and Eda Sagarra (Nottingham: Sherwood Press, 1979), 526-34

Alan Bance, Theodor Fontane: The Major Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Chapter 5 on Unwiederbringlich

Peter James Bowman, ‘Fontane’s “Unwiederbringlich”: A Bakhtinian Reading’, The German Quarterly 77:2 (2004), 170-87

Helen Chambers, ‘The Inadequacy of the Wife-and-Mother Model: Female Happiness in Theodor Fontane’s Unwiederbringlich’, Seminar 47:2 (2011), 285-97

Alexander Sorenson, ‘The Bride by the Water: Duty, Procession, and Sacrifice in Theodor Fontane’s Unwiederbringlich’, German Life and Letters 72:2 (2019), 151-67

Frances M. Subiotto, ‘The Function of Letters in Fontane’s Unwiederbringlich’, Modern Language Review 65 (1970), 306-18

Nadine Taylor, ‘Co-Creating Characters with Empathy: Fontane’s Unwiederbringlich’, German Life and Letters 70:2 (2017), 155-73

M. J. White, ‘“Hier ist die Grenze […] Wollen wir darüber hinaus?” Borders and Ambiguity in Fontane’s “Unwiederbringlich”’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 129 (2010), 109-23

Further Reading in German

F. C. Delius, Der Held und sein Wetter. Ein Kunstmittel und sein Gebrauch im Roman des bürgerlichen Realismus (Munich, 1971), pp. 90-101 on Unwiederbringlich

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘Fragmentierung und Unterbrechung als Struktur- und Gehaltsprinzipien in Fontanes Roman Unwiederbringlich’, The German Quarterly 51 (1978), 493-510