Fluid “Heimat”: Water and Nature Writing in Theodor Fontane’s Ramblings through Mark Brandenburg

Abstract

From 1859 onwards, Theodor Fontane embarks on a series of walks and excursions to the Mark of Brandenburg around Berlin and reports on them in his travelogue Ramblings through Mark Brandenburg (4 volumes, 1862–1882). To date, researchers have assumed that nature is not a primary topic of this work but only a medium in Fontane’s method of linking places to facts and stories. A rereading from a new materialist and ecocritical approach and with a focus on the role of water can demonstrate that Fontane’s text accords agency and productivity to nonhuman nature in a manner similar to the nature writing of English and American traditions. The contribution shows the Ramblings to be an inventory of Mark of Brandenburg’s lakes, streams, canals, and wetlands, a record of their place names, and of the stories related to them. While water is revealed to be a formative force of the Mark Brandenburg’s topography and history, it also organizes the discourse of the Ramblings, and the material agency of water proves to be constitutive to the production of the text. Water is essential in the Ramblings’ construction of Mark Brandenburg as “Heimat,” but this water-based “Heimat” is fluid, ephemeral, and precarious.

Translation by Alexandra Schwind, including all citations marked “[transl. AS].”

1 Introduction

In the 1860s, Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), whose life until then had not been entirely care free, became a famous and commercially successful writer. This wasn’t due to his novels that are so well known today; they were written many years later: Vor dem Sturm, Fontane’s first novel, was published when its author was nearly 60, in 1878; Effi Briest was released in 1896 and Der Stechlin in 1899. It is Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Ramblings through Mark Brandenburg) (NB: Here, “mark” means “boundary land”) that made him famous in his day and gave him financial security until the end of his life (Erhart 2000, 820; Wruck 2003, 373–393). In field trips into the surroundings of Berlin lasting one or several days, Fontane explored manors and castles, monasteries and churches, villages and small towns, inns, monuments and cemeteries, gardens and parks, forests and meadows, hills and plains, rivers and lakes, and he met their residents, present as well as past. He reported on this in short articles that appeared in various newspapers and magazines from 1859 and in four volumes from 1862 to 1882.

It is obvious that Fontane included natural environments in his travel descriptions, but to what extent does nature play more than a supporting role in his project? Can parallels be drawn to nature writing such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), published five years before Fontane’s first Wanderungen article and paradigmatic for the genre of American nature writing (e.g., Elder and Finch 2002, 24)?¹ Nature writing can be defined as “a first-person, nonfiction account of an exploration, both physical (outward) and mental (inward), of a predominantly nonhuman environment” (Scheese 2002, 6). While Fontane’s Wanderungen show some of these characteristics,² they aim primarily at an exploration of Mark Brandenburg as a cultural space whose history Fontane wants to bring to view: “Made a plan: the Mark, its men and its history. For the sake of the fatherland and future poetry, collected and edited by Th. F.” [transl. AS] [Einen Plan gemacht: die Marken, ihre Männer und ihre Geschichte. Um Vaterlands und künftiger Dichtung willen gesammelt u. herausgegeben von Th. F.] (HF II/3, 812).³ Fontane outlines his project in an early diary entry. Walter Erhart explains Fontane’s strategy in Wanderungen: Brandenburg is to be “discovered as a historical terrain that is not visible at first, indeed, it is to be brought forth through imagination” [transl. AS] [als zunächst gar nicht sichtbares historisches Terrain entdeckt, ja durch Einbildungskraft erst hervorgebracht warden] (Erhart 2000, 823).⁴ In Wanderungen, Fontane wants to “make the Prussian landscape … ‘speak’” [transl. AS] [die preußische Landschaft … zum ‘Sprechen’ bringen] (Erhart 2000, 827)⁵ by seeking out historically significant places in Brandenburg and linking them to bodies of knowledge in his descriptions. Indeed, the Wanderungen are an impressive document of historicism. Before each of his journeys, Fontane researches thoroughly: he studies works of history, geography, and art history, collections of tales, biographies, church books, and chronicles; he consults specialists and attends the lectures of historical and local history societies (Grawe 2002, 35). The Wanderungen, Erhart notes, “do not describe a romantic escape from modernity into the pristine worlds of speechless nature and mythical lack of history; rather, nature and landscape are merely the medium for a reclaimed history that has been ‘revived’ and ‘rewritten’” [transl. AS] [beschreiben keine romantische Flucht aus der Moderne in die unberührten Welten sprachloser Natur und mythischer Geschichtslosigkeit; vielmehr bilden Natur und Landschaft nur das Medium für eine wiedergewonnene, wieder ‘belebte’ und ‘erschriebene’ Geschichte] (Erhart 1992, 236 f.). In this context, (nonhuman) nature has a “mere sign and reference character, paving an ever newly varied path from the present to history” [transl. AS] [hat bloßen Zeichen- und Verweisungscharakter, um einen stets neu variierten Weg von der Gegenwart zur Geschichte zu bahnen] (Erhart 2000, 828).

However, the theoretical approaches of new materialism and material ecocriticism can make visible the share nonhuman nature has in the production of the meanings and stories Fontane relates. Rereading the Wanderungen against the background of these theories can show that nonhuman nature in Fontane’s texts is not a passive object of meaning attribution but reveals a distinct productive potential and brings itself to view in the Wanderungen in a diversity and intensity that can be aptly described as nature writing.

2 Writing the Mark—Writing Water

2.1 Brandenburg as “Heimat”

At the beginning of his preface to the first volume of Wanderungen, Fontane declares that his aspiration is to show “what we hold in the homeland” [transl. AS] [was wir an der Heimat besitzen] (HF II/1, 9). In numerous other paratexts, Fontane also declares the Wanderungen’s aim to make visible a hitherto hidden knowledge of the “Heimat.”⁶ The emphatic insistence on “Heimat” as the object of the Wanderungen project must be seen in the context of Fontane’s attempt to establish himself as a patriotic writer after his return from England (cf. Wruck 2007, 46–65).

Grimm’s German dictionary defines “Heimat” as “the land or even just the stretch of land in which one was born or has a permanent abode” [transl. AS] [das land oder auch nur der landstrich, in dem man geboren ist oder bleibenden aufenthalt hat] (Grimm and Grimm 1854–1961 [1871], 865). In Fontane’s Wanderungen, however, “Heimat” has already become “a compensatory space for the loss of a closed life-world” [transl. AS] [[ist] zum Kompensationsraum für den Verlust einer geschlossenen Lebenswelt geworden] (Borgschulze 2001, 257). In German Romanticism, the concept of “Heimat” combines the spatial notion of an area of origin with the temporal one of a group memory; in modern times, it becomes “essentially related to the past” [transl. AS] [wesentlich auf Vergangenheit bezogen] (Piepmeyer 1990, 95).⁷ This applies to the “Heimat” Fontane describes in the Wanderungen. Walter Erhart explains that the Wanderungen altogether aim to “resurrect the wholly lost totality of a closed life context [transl. AS] [die gänzlich verlorene Totalität eines geschlossenen Lebenszusammenhanges wieder auferstehen [zu] lassen] (Erhart 2000, 838). The Wanderungen conceptualize “Heimat” as something that (allegedly) existed in the past and now no longer exists in this form but must first be retrieved from oblivion through writing (Erhart 2000, 834–839). A creation and representation of “Heimat” must therefore reconstruct this absent whole but at the same time conceal its constructional character. The waters, watercourses, and lakes of Brandenburg play a central role in this creation and representation of “Heimat” in the text.

2.2 Wanderungen as a Hydrography of Mark Brandenburg

Fontane’s Wanderungen provide a detailed inventory of the waters of Mark Brandenburg. Fontane describes Mark Brandenburg as a space that was wrested from the water and that is strongly influenced by water up to the present. In Fontane’s descriptions, water determines the topography of the mark as well as—in line with climate theory—the character and social forms of the inhabitants, the economy of the mark, and very fundamentally the interactions of human and nonhuman beings in this area: Fontane describes relationships that today we can call ecological. Fontane characterizes in detail the manifold manifestations of water in the mark: the large rivers Havel, Oder, and Spree, and the smaller ones, Rhine, Dosse, and Nuthe; lakes Ruppiner and Rheinsberger, the Großer Stechlin, Lake Schermützel, the large and small Tornow lakes, the Teufels lakes, Lake Werbelliner, and the Müggelsee. He also describes various transitional forms between flowing and stagnant waters as well as between water and land, peculiar to the mark: rivers with low gradients forming large bays that appear as independent lakes. Thus, Havel River forms a “long chain of lakes, bays, and basins [transl. AS] [lange Kette von Seen, Buchten und Becken] (HF II/2, 171), some of which Fontane describes in more detail: “The Schwilow is a Havel bay on a grand scale like the Tegler See, the Wann-See, the Plauesche See. All of them are river lagoons which have been given the name ‘lake’ to honor or dishonor” [transl. AS] [Der Schwilow ist eine Havelbucht im großen Stil wie der Tegler See, der Wann-See, der Plauesche See. Allesamt sind es Flußhaffe, denen man zu Ehre oder Unehre den Namen ‘See’ gegeben hat] (HF II/2, 378). The Spree “forms a large number of magnificent lake surfaces connected by a thin thread of water” [transl. AS] [bildet eine große Anzahl prächtiger Seeflächen, die durch einen dünnen Wasserfaden verbunden sind] (HF II/2, 506 f.). And the Spreewald is so crisscrossed by waters that it has a “network and island character” [transl. AS] [Netz- und Inselcharakter] (HF II/2, 459). The Rhine flows through a chain of lakes that are a tourist destination, the “Ruppiner Schweiz.” In the wetlands, water and land merge in seasonal changes. Regional names for the mixed forms of water and land, such as “Luch,” “Bruch,” “Horst,” and “Lanke” (HF II/2, 104 f.), give an idea of the variety of forms that the interlocking of water and land produces and that the hiker encounters in the Rhinluch, the Havelländisches Luch, the Dosse-Bruch, and the Oderbruch. Fontane repeatedly draws attention to the fact that the territory of the mark was wrested from the water in the course of a centuries-long process of drainage and cultivation. He describes the historical canalization projects in the Dosse-Bruch (HF II/1, 387–388), in the Oderbruch (HF II/1, 568–574), in the Rhinluch (HF II/2, 105 f.), and in the Havelländisches Luch (HF II/2, 106 f.) and relies on geological literature such as Karl Friedrich Klöden’s Beiträge zur mineralogischen und geognostischen Kenntniß der Mark Brandenburg (1828–1837) as well as on historical sources such as Ludwig Gleim’s notes on Friedrich II’s conversations during his visit to the Dosse wetland (1784), which Fontane quotes over many pages (HF II/1, 388–405). And he describes the artificial waters of the mark: canals and ditches, such as the “71 miles of channel connections” [71 Meilen Kanalverbindung] in the Wustrauer Luch (HF II/1, 350), a stretch of which the hiker explores in a boat. He makes it clear that only the artificial containment and redirection of the waters into fixed, orderly courses produces land that could be colonized and cultivated, forming the current landscape of the “Heimat.” Fontane thus describes the landscape of the markprecisely not as pristine, unmodified wilderness-nature but as a culture-nature produced by the interaction of human activity with nonhuman nature (cf. Blackbourn 2006).

2.3 Water Organizes the Walks

Water courses and water surfaces define the production and presentation of the topography of Mark Brandenburg in the Wanderungen, and they organize the text. The choice of titles shows this—three of the four Wanderungen volumes are named after rivers: Das Oderland (vol. 2), Havelland (vol. 3), and Spreeland (vol. 4). Numerous chapter titles place bodies of water at the center of the topography, for example, “Am Ruppiner See,” “An Rhin und Dosse,” “Das Oderbruch und seine Umgebungen,” “Jenseits der Oder,” “Der Schwilow und seine Umgebungen,” “Die wendische Spree,” “Der Müggelsee,” “Links der Spree,” and “An der Nuthe.” At the beginning of many Wanderungen chapters, Fontane describes relevant topographical structures of the area in overview passages; water plays a central role, for example at the beginning of the chapter “Der Müggelsee”:

The Spree, once in view of the Müggelsberge, forms or flows through a wide basin of water: the Müggel or the Müggelsee, which is one of the largest and most beautiful among the lakes of the Mark. Where the Spree enters the Müggelsee and also where it leaves it again—thus separated from each other by the entire length of the lake—rise the only two villages of these areas: Rahnsdorf and Friedrichshagen … [transl. AS].

[Die Spree, sobald sie sich angesichts der Müggelsberge befindet, bildet oder durchfließt ein weites Wasserbecken: Die Müggel oder den Müggelsee, der mit zu den größten und schönsten unter den märkischen Seen zählt. Da wo die Spree den Müggelsee betritt und ebenso da, wo sie ihn wieder verläßt—also durch die ganze Länge des Sees voneinander getrennt—erheben sich die beiden einzigen Dörfer dieser Gegenden: Rahnsdorf und Friedrichshagen …] (HF II/2, 559)

This description is not determined by a panoramic view from a fixed vantage point characteristic of the Wanderungen (cf. Erhart 2000, 830–833) but follows the course of the river Spree: the course of the Spree defines the constitution of the topography represented and produced in the text. When the Spree “forms or flows through” [bildet oder durchfließt] Lake Müggelsee, marking its beginning and ending, the text accords an active potential to the river. The river Spree becomes an anthropomorphic wanderer who “finds itself in view of the Müggelsberge” [[sich] angesichts der Müggelsberge befindet] and “enters” [betritt] and “leaves” [verlässt] the Müggelsee. Conversely, the narrator of the Wanderungen takes on the perspective of the river. The wanderer’s movement in the section “An der Spree” follows the course of the Spree and is oriented to the same geographical conditions as the topographical description: the chapters “The Müggelsberge,” “Der Müggelsee,” and “Rahnsdorf” follow successively. The topography presented and produced on the level of the plot, as well as the arrangement of the textual elements on the discours level are oriented to the course of the Spree: the river organizes the textual topography.

2.4 Water Narrates the Wanderungen

It is no exaggeration to say that water not only shapes the topography of Mark Brandenburg, but also Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg. Drawing on approaches of New Materialism and Material Ecocriticism, I argue that the material agency of water has a constitutive part in the production of the Wanderungen. New materialist philosopher Karen Barad explains that matter is not something statically given but is constituted in a performative process: “Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things” (Barad 2007, 137). Literary scholars Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman explore the implications of this concept of matter for cultural studies, specifically for ecocriticism, by focusing on the interactions between the processes of matter and meaning. On the one hand, they analyze how narrative texts describe and represent the agentic potentials of nonhuman matter. On the other hand, their focus is

on matter’s narrative power of creating configurations of meanings and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co-emerging interactions. In this latter case, matter itself becomes a text where dynamics of diffuse agency and non-linear causality are inscribed and produced. (Iovino and Opperman 2012: 79–80)

The agency of (nonhuman) material nature can be the object of language—and it can also, in its interaction with human beings, produce meanings and narratives itself. Under both perspectives, water emerges in Fontane’s Wanderungen.

When, in the preface to the first volume of the Wanderungen, Fontane presents a boat trip on the Scottish lake Lochleven as the alleged origin of his idea of a description of Mark Brandenburg (HF II/1, 9–11), he emphatically places water at the beginning of his Wanderungen project. The waters of the mark are the destinations of numerous walks (“Die Ruppiner Schweiz,” “An Rhin und Dosse,” “Der Müggelsee,” “Das Havelländische Luch,” “Die Havelschwäne,” and many others), they form the waterways on which the wanderer explores the area by steamboat, boat, or barge (e.g., “In den Spreewald,” “Von Frankfurt bis Schwedt”), they are places of meditation and aesthetic edification (e.g., “Baumgartenbrück,” “Am Werbellin”), and they are constitutive elements of the loci amoeni the wanderer describes (e.g., “Major von Kaphengst,” “Steinhöfel,” “Petzow”). As such, water plays a significant role in the journeys Fontane undertakes for his Wanderungen, in his experiences and adventures as well as in their depictions in the individual chapters, even if these depictions are often strongly modified through imagination.⁸

In the Wanderungen’s process of linking the places of the mark with stories, the waters of the mark fulfill a specific, active function. In this process, the special physical properties of water come into focus. In contrast to the buildings, monuments, and ruins and boulders, forests, and meadows the wanderer visits, the waters in the Wanderungen can establish a link between the present and the past not only by referring to a past event that took place there; they can also reveal the past as a visual phenomenon. Water, producing light reflections and mirror images, allowing or hindering glimpses into its more or less transparent depths, and making visible the passing of time by its flows and illustrating eternity by its fluid homogeneity, becomes an actor in the Wanderungen. Due to its specific materiality, it participates in the production of the narrated stories. A reading of the Wanderungen with a focus on the waters and their characteristics can reveal the ways in which these texts emerge from an interaction of the agency of nonhuman matter with the perception and imagination of the wanderer and cultural memory or archival knowledge. Thus, in the preface to the first Wanderungen volume, the past appears as a sequence of images on the water’s surface (HF II/1, 9–11), and in various descriptions of lakes and rivers, the narrator plays—often an ironic mode—with the idea that stories from the past or from folk tales can appear in or on the water. Thus, in the Werbellinsee:

Small waves are foaming on the shore, in front of us, the wide water surface, still lies in the light, while to the north bluish shadows spread over the forest and the lake. The ruins of the old Grimnitz Castle, which has become a legend, also lie there. And if now a golden ship would come down the lake, and on the deck of the ship, under a fluttering tent roof, Margrave Otto would be sitting with Heilwig von Holstein, joking and laughing over the chess game, we would let it glide by, perhaps less amazed at the golden ship with sail and tent roof than at the poor skipper’s boat, which just now comes along with net and fish trap.

It is a fairy tale place where we sit, because we sit on the shore of the “Werbellin.” [transl. AS]

[Kleine Wellen schäumen ans Ufer, vor uns, die breite Wasserfläche, liegt noch im Licht, während sich nach Norden hin bläuliche Schatten über Wald und See breiten. Dorthin liegen auch die Trümmer des alten, halb Sage gewordenen Grimnitz-Schlosses. Und wenn jetzt ein goldenes Schiff den See herunterkäme, und auf dem Deck des Schiffes, unter flatterndem Zeltdach, säße Markgraf Otto mit Heilwig von Holstein, scherzend und lachend über dem Schachspiel, wir ließen es vorübergleiten, vielleicht weniger verwundert über das goldene Schiff mit Segel und Zeltdach, als über das ärmliche Schifferboot, das eben jetzt mit Netz und Reuse des Weges kommt.

Es ist ein Märchenplatz, auf dem wir sitzen, denn wir sitzen am Ufer des “Werbellin.”] (HF II/1, 1013)

The legendary past of the place becomes visible for the wanderer—and, thus, also for the reader—in images triggered by the movement of the water. The lake functions both as a projection surface for these images and as a material repository that, in interaction with the viewer, can bring to light the events at the place where they once (allegedly) took place. Fontane attributes the origin of these images not to the knowledge that the wanderer brings with him but to the lake, that is, to nonhuman nature. This is part of a rhetorical strategy that characterizes the Wanderungen: by ascribing to the rivers and lakes of the mark—even if in an ironic mode—the function of storing, preserving, and showing the images of a collective imaginary of the mark, Fontane is able to naturalize the archival knowledge of which he makes use in order to link the places of the mark with (historical, cultural, poetic) meanings. In doing so, he obscures his own part in the selection, construction, and production of these meanings, as well as the part of the archives he has consulted. At the same time, however, this archival knowledge, these images, and these meanings in the Wanderungen only vividly emerge in the descriptions of the material objects. And it is the places in their materiality⁹ that cause Fontane to search for information about them in the archives and historical societies of the mark and that are the reason and the goal of his travels. To be more precise, it can be concluded that only the interaction of the diverse material and immaterial, nonhuman and human actors produces the stories of the Wanderungen.

3 “Buckow”: Fluid “Heimat”

The way in which water is involved in the production of stories and in the constitution of the “Heimat” (however precarious) in the Wanderungen can by way of example be shown in the chapter “Buckow” from the volume Das Oderland. At the beginning of the chapter, Fontane describes the small town of Buckow and its “life-threatening” [lebensgefährlich[es]]” pavement (HF II/1, 640), its economic degradation, and its insubordinate inhabitants, characterized by a “Wendish [Slavic]-German blood mixture” [transl. AS] [wendisch-deutsche[n] Blutmischung] (HF II/1, 641), who even recently had taken up arms against “their” count in a dispute over a forest (HF II/1, 641–644). He speculates about the changes to be expected from the newly projected railroad and describes the geographic location of the town at Lake Schermützel, as well as possible tourist field trips. Then an intradiegetic narrator appears, describing his walk to a high vantage point with a panoramic view of Lake Schermützel. The wanderer’s eye “returns again and again to the enigmatic lake that lies below us in lines that can be followed precisely” [transl. AS] [kehrt immer wieder auf den rätselvollen See zurück, der in genau zu verfolgenden Linien unter uns liegt]” (HF II/1, 646). The lake lets the viewer sense [ahnen] that it “must include, among other treasures, a treasure of legends” [transl. AS] [unter andren Schätzen auch einen Sagenschatz umschließen muß] (HF II/1, 646). In this way, the lake is transformed from a picturesque landscape element into a reservoir for something that is hidden from immediate perception: possibly things, but in any case tales (Sagen), i.e., linguistically composed meanings. To unearth this hidden part, the wanderer makes use of a fisherman from Buckow, who is introduced rather abruptly at this point in the text and tells the legend of a town and an oak forest that have sunk into Lake Schermützel. The text stages this tale as a local, oral tradition and thus makes it appear as part of a continuous local memory. Through numerous deictic expressions, the fisherman localizes the legend in the lake. The text thus presents the lake as the location of the sunken city:

Down there lies the old town. Over on the other shore, where you see the mirror-smooth spot, that’s where Old Buckow used to stand … From the corner there, where the rushes go a hundred steps into the lake, to here just over from us, where the willows hang into the water,—that’s how far the town ranged. [transl. AS]

[Dort unten liegt die alte Stadt. Drüben am andern Ufer, wo Sie die spiegelglatte Stelle sehen, dort hat Alt-Buckow gestanden … Von dem Eck dort, wo die Binsen hundert Schritt weit in den See hineingehen, bis hier gradüber von uns, wo die Weiden ins Wasser hängen,—so weit ging die Stadt.] (HF II/1, 646, emphasis in original)

However, this description does not present the legendary sunken city itself. The fisherman asks the wanderer (and with him the reader) to believe (glauben) (HF II/1, 646) that he has seen the city and the oak forest himself in the lake and can therefore vouch for the truth of the legend; from a shared point of view, however, nothing can be seen of either. The wanderer therefore counters the invisibility of what is assumed under the surface with an attempt to verify the legendary with his own eyes:

But now I knew what it was, that the Schermützel had looked at me in a completely different way than many other lakes, and I threw myself down and stretched my head out over the abyss, at least wishing in my heart to see an oak skeleton at the bottom rising up to the water surface and the fish looking through its jagged crowns. I really saw it, but with the consciousness that it was deception. [transl. AS]

[Indessen ich wußte doch nun, was es war, daß mich der Schermützel so ganz anders angeblickt hatte wie manch andrer See und ich warf mich nieder und streckte den Kopf über den Abgrund hinaus, wenigstens den Wunsch im Herzen unten ein Eichenskelett bis an den Wasserspiegel heraufragen und die Fische durch seine Zackenkronen hindurch huschen zu sehn. Ich sah es auch wirklich, aber mit dem Bewußtsein, daß es Täuschung sei.] (HF II/1, 647)

The wanderer places himself with his whole body in an observer position, just as natural scientists do. But he is aware of the subjectivity of his water visions: While the fabulous apparition becomes truly (wirklich) visible to the wanderer when he looks at the surface of the water, he immediately identifies it as a deception (Täuschung), a product of his imagination.¹⁰ The lake, in connection with the fisherman’s story and the wanderer’s imagination, creates meaning, namely, the visualization of the legend of the sunken city. At the same time, however, it also brings out ignorance, namely, the question of the extent to which the legend is based on historical facts.

To answer this question, the wanderer turns to the archive.¹¹ He begins “looking up books and searching for the back story of the ‘great Schermützel’” [transl. AS] [in Büchern nachzuschlagen und nach der Vorgeschichte des ‘großen Schermützel’ zu suchen] (HF II/1, 647). There he finds a geological explanation of Mark Brandenburg’s sagas of sunken cities as tales of “sinkholes,” geological events in which an underground cavity filled with water suddenly collapses. Fontane describes these sinkholes as catastrophes in which “the released waters smash over all that has fallen down and—a lake stands calmly over town and forest” [transl. AS] [die freigewordenen Wasser über allem was niedergefahren ist, zusammen[schlagen] und—ein See steht ruhig über Stadt und Wald] (HF II/1, 647). In this way, Lake Schermützel becomes an example for many other lakes in the Mark Brandenburg area; it illustrates the geological theory that such sinkholes were decisive for the formation of the Mark Brandenburg landscape. Thus, the lake leads to an insight that can be applied to Mark Brandenburg as a whole: The landscape the wanderer travels through had already undergone great changes long before its artificial transformation by the drainage projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it had only become the way it is at the time of the wanderer. As a witness and testimony to these geological processes, Lake Schermützel preserves and transmits a geological memory of Mark Brandenburg.

However, the knowledge that the narrator conveys here does not agree with the sources to which the text implicitly refers, such as Heinrich Berghaus’ Landbuch der Mark Brandenburg and Karl Friedrich Klöden’s Beitrag über die Senkungen in der Mark.¹² In neither of these sources is Lake Schermützel counted among the sinkhole lakes of the mark, and the features of land formations mentioned by Berghaus that indicate a sinkhole do not apply to Lake Schermützel.¹³ In addition, it is not only the geology that contradicts Fontane’s text. Not even the legend of the sunken city near Buckow, which Fontane has the Buckow fisherman tell, agrees with the sources on which Fontane’s text is based. It is indeed told in Adalbert Kuhn’s collection of sagas of Mark Brandenburg, which Fontane used extensively for the Wanderungen.¹⁴ But the lake that is the subject of this saga is not Lake Schermützel but the adjacent Buckow lake; Klöden and Berghaus, citing Kuhn, also reproduce the saga about the sunken city in Buckow lake. However, Fontane’s description of the small town of Buckow and its surroundings completely omits this lake, which is closer to Buckow but less picturesque than Lake Schermützel.

Apparently, Fontane is concerned with something other than conveying exact geological, geographical, and cultural-historical knowledge. The location of the saga as well as its geological explanation in the relatively well-known, touristically interesting Lake Schermützel, which perfectly fulfills the criteria of the picturesque landscape, means a condensation of aesthetically relevant elements in a meaning-bearing object. In this way, nature becomes a landscape linked to a specific knowledge of the past and, thus, a “Heimat.” This “Heimat,” however, which Lake Schermützel in Fontane’s text helps to constitute and make visible as a landscape element, as a storage and transmission medium, is precarious. It is not only produced by the water, but also endangered by it. The narrator of the “Buckow” chapter illustrates the frequency of sinkholes in the natural history of the mark by means of a number of lakes that, according to the geognostic theory he refers to, were created by sinkholes:

The Kressinsche See not far from Saarmund, the Gohlitz-See in the Amt Lehnin, the Gudelacksee near Lindow, and the large Paarsteiner-See near Kloster Chorin are said to have been formed by such sinkholes, not to mention the numerous devil’s lakes occurring everywhere. [transl. AS]

[Der Kressinsche See nicht weit von Saarmund, der Gohlitz-See im Amt Lehnin, der Gudelack-See bei Lindow und der große Paarsteiner-See bei Kloster Chorin, sollen durch solche Erdfälle entstanden sein, der zahlreichen, überall vorkommenden Teufelsseen ganz zu schweigen.] (HF II/1, 648)

It follows from the sinkhole theory that the landscape of the mark does not form a reliable solid foundation for its culture developed in the course of history but must still be riddled with water-filled caves that could potentially collapse at any time. However, a ground riddled with water caves as a foundation for modern projects such as the railroad that, according to the narrator, will soon connect rural Buckow with the big city of Berlin (HF II/1, 644) is an apt image for the diagnosis of modernity riddled with the unpredictable voiced by Rosalind E. Krauss: “the foundations of modernism were mined by a thousand pockets of darkness, the blind, irrational space of the labyrinth” (Krauss 1993: 21). Although the Wanderungen narrator ironically dismisses the dangers posed by sinkholes in the present, his story of the creation of Lake Schermützel draws attention to the fact that unpredictable abysses lurk beneath the surface of the “Heimat” of Brandenburg. The water, which in the texts of the Wanderungen not only shapes the landscape of the “Heimat” but also materially (co-)produces it, and which functions as a storage and transmission medium for its material remains as well as for its cultural and geological memory, at the same time holds the potential of its dissolution.

Numerous chapters of the Wanderungen echo this potential of water to undermine the fabric of “Heimat,” which was created both through cultivation of the landscape and through martial and cultural achievements. In this context, water is repeatedly given as the condition of the Mark Brandenburg area before Christian-Germanic “colonization.”¹⁵ It is precisely the potential attributed to water to store and transmit meanings and images that is the dangerous feature in these cases. For water also stores the memory of the pagan state of the mark under the rule of the Slavic Wends, and in some passages Fontane’s text hints at the possibility that the water could also bring about this state again. Thus the river Müggel transmits the memory of the Wendish gods:

The Müggel is evil. It is as if the old heathen gods still dwell in it, whose images the hand of the monks once threw down from the Müggel mountains into the lake. The old powers are defeated, but not dead, and in the twilight hour they rise up and think their time has come again. [transl. AS]

[Die Müggel ist bös. Es ist als wohnten noch die alten Heidengötter darin, deren Bilder einst die Hand der Mönche von den Müggelbergen herab in den See warf. Die alten Mächte sind besiegt, aber nicht tot, und in der Dämmerstunde steigen sie herauf und denken ihre Zeit sei wieder da.] (HF II/2, 562)

Water can be dammed and diverted, but as a substance it is not affected by the changes that have shaped the landscape of the mark since the Christian “colonization” and, increasingly, since its industrialization and modernization¹⁶; in this way, it can evoke the memory of the former state. Thus, in the chapter on the Oderbruch, the narrator describes conditions before the wetland was drained as an interplay of water and the Wendish, counter-Christian way of life. The inhabitants of this water landscape, he writes, have “despite their Christian confession, never really broken with the old Wendish gods … Superstition had a true breeding ground in these swamps” [transl. AS] [trotz ihres christlichen Bekenntnisses mit den alten Wendengöttern nie recht gebrochen … Der Aberglaube hatte in diesen Sümpfen eine wahre Brutstätte] (HF II/1, 577). The water explicitly contrasts with Christian culture: The clergyman rarely comes to the churches in this area because his way “was complicated by flooding and groundless paths” [transl. AS] [war durch Überschwemmungen und grundlose Wege erschwert] (HF II/1, 577). The water does not even stop at the dead. They have to be buried outside the breach “because the floods would have stirred up the graves” [transl. AS] [denn die Fluten hätten die Gräber aufgewühlt] (HF II/1, 577).

In a summary look at the function of water in the Wanderungen, the first thing that stands out is the great importance of water bodies for textual strategies that aim for coherence, connection, and continuity and, thus, form a counterweight to the often stated formal heterogeneity of the Wanderungen.¹⁷ The water bodies function as media that store the past of the mark and transfer it to the present, seemingly making the mark of Brandenburg visible as a “Heimat” all by itself: they provide the topographical structures that make the area a geographically unified and coherent space, and they illustrate the idea of an unbroken connection between nature and historical narrative, between present and past. Yet in the Wanderungen, water is not only a mirror and projection surface, not only a medium of memory and organization of space, but it also constitutes the unstable ground of the mark of Brandenburg. As such, the water poses a threat to the coherent fabric of landscape and culture that the Wanderungen conceive as “Heimat.” Just as water does not form solid structures, many of the bodies of water depicted in the Wanderungen, upon closer inspection, not only serve to produce a topographically and historically-culturally coherent “Heimat” but at the same time contain a reference to its disintegration.

4 Nature Writing in the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg

In his award-acceptance speech for the presentation of the first German prize for nature writing to Marion Poschmann, Jürgen Goldstein describes nature writing, “the mindful writing about one’s own experiences in nature” [transl. AS] [das achtsame Schreiben über die eigenen Erfahrungen in der Natur], as “a language-guided school of attention … a discovery of the visible but overlooked” [transl. AS] [eine sprachgeleitete Schule der Aufmerksamkeit … eine Entdeckung des Sichtbaren, aber Übersehenen] (Goldstein 2018, 104). Can Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg be read as nature writing? Certainly, writing about Fontane’s own experiences in nature is not the primary goal of his Wanderungen; the focus is on the historical and cultural meanings with which he associates the places of the mark. Even in his descriptions of nature, Fontane does not focus his attention nearly as intensely and persistently on nonhuman objects as, for example, Thoreau does in his meticulous account of Walden Pond (2008, 119–137). Yet Fontane presents his Wanderungen quite decidedly as journeys of discovery in an area that, though on Berlin’s doorstep, is nevertheless hitherto untapped for tourism and unknown to his readers, which he contrasts with established tourist destinations such as Switzerland, the Rhineland, or Italy. In this way, Fontane chooses an approach that is characteristic of nature writing: the exploration of the nearby. Thoreau, too, seeks out his piece of nature not three miles from his childhood home. “Thoreau’s nature expeditions led him to the near, not the far and strange. His appreciation was for the magic of the ordinary, not the allure of the exotic” [transl. AS] [Thoreaus Naturexpeditionen führten ihn zum Naheliegenden, nicht zum Fernen und Fremden. Seine Wertschätzung galt dem Zauber des Gewöhnlichen, nicht dem Reiz des Exotischen] according to Jürgen Goldstein (Goldstein 2018, 102). Fontane’s declared strategy in his Wanderungen is to make the supposedly familiar, unspectacular, and ordinary recognizable unique through poetic description:

The purpose of my book is … to redeem the “locality” like the princess in the fairy tale. Alternately, my task was to penetrate to the unknown, completely hidden in the forest, or to free the one lying in front of all eyes from her spell, her magic sleep, if possible. [transl. AS]

[Der Zweck meines Buches ist … die “Lokalität” wie d[ie] Prinzessin im Mährchen zu erlösen. Abwechselnd bestand meine Aufgabe darin zu der Unbekannten, völlig im Wald versteckten vorzudringen, oder die vor aller Augen Daliegende aus ihrem Bann, ihren Zauberschlaf, nach Möglichkeit zu befrein.]¹⁸

The hitherto overlooked aspects of the individual places are to be made visible in their uniqueness. This interest in the local, which Fontane shares with nature writers from Thoreau to Robert Macfarlane,¹⁹ is directed in the Wanderungen not only to historically significant places but also fundamentally to nonhuman nature. The waters of the mark, in particular, emerge in the Wanderungen as individualized phenomena endowed with agency and each with its own atmosphere. Fontane’s description draws attention to the extent to which the landscape of Mark Brandenburg is shaped by water and the variety of topo- or hydrographic formations that it produces in the mark. By using precise terms such as Flusshaff, Luch, or Lanke, he emphasizes the regional characteristics of the waters in the mark while preserving the diversity of topographically related language. Such regional terms are “place words” whose “power … to shape our sense of place” Robert Macfarlane systematically demonstrates in Landmarks (2015, 1).²⁰ Fontane describes the civilizing process of the mark as that of centuries of channelization and drainage efforts in which human agencies interact with those of water. And he suggests that a landscape (or “Heimat”) shaped by water, washed out by water, is subject to its fluid agency and can never be completely stable or of unlimited duration. This becoming visible of the hitherto overlooked is made possible by specific linguistic strategies. In the Wanderungen, “language is the space of appearance to let nature emerge” [transl. AS] [[ist] die Sprache der Erscheinungsraum, um Natur hervortreten zu lassen] (Goldstein 2018, 104).²¹ This is characteristic of nature writing: “Language becomes a means of directing and enhancing attention” [transl. AS] [Sprache wird zu einem Mittel der Aufmerksamkeitslenkung und -steigerung]; it “does not have a purely reproducing function, but a function that shapes perception” [transl. AS] [[ihr] kommt dabei nicht eine rein wiedergebende, sondern eine wahrnehmungsformende Funktion zu], Goldstein (2018, 105) explains. With linguistic procedures such as the anthropomorphization of the waters and their depiction as actors that can store past events and bring them to light again as visual phenomena, Fontane’s description endows the waters of the mark with their own distinctive, individual atmosphere—which, in addition to their phenomenology, includes the historical events associated with them, the legends, stories, and anecdotes told about them, but also the personal experiences and memories of the narrator. Nature descriptions, stories, and memory are intertwined, as in Edward Thomas’s essay The Icknield Way (1913) or its reception by Robert Macfarlane.²² Even though Fontane, who preferred driving to walking, describes his role as an explorer with self-irony, the Wanderungen repeatedly testify to the “elemental and, as it were, lived-through experience[s] of nature” [transl. AS] [elementaren und sozusagen durchlebten Naturerfahrung[en]] (Fischer 2019, 56) that, according to Ludwig Fischer, are prerequisites for nature writing. For example, when the narrator, on a water journey through the Wustrauer Luch, gets caught in one of the infamous thunderstorms (“Luchgewitter,” HF I/1, 352) in which the boundaries between water and land blur, he describes the “almost cozy resignation” [fast gemütliche Resignation] with which he “feels the last dry place getting wet” [transl. AS] [die letzte trockne Stelle naß werden fühlt] (HF I/1, 352) and afterward looks back on his adventure from the warming hearth fire “as if we had driven across the Kansas River or a prairie “far in the West” [transl. AS] [als wären wir über den Kansaß-River oder eine Prairie “far in the West” gefahren] (HF I/1, 353). In humorous exaggeration, this comparison to the “Wild West” illuminates the creaturely experience of being exposed to the untamed elements.

Nature writing in the Wanderungen is not so much a persistent tracking down and recording of details as a meditative immersion in the atmosphere of individual places; in this form, however, as a sensitive perception and description of nonhuman nature, Fontane ascribes to it, against all modern attempts at canalization and control, autonomy and a voice of its own. By making the natural places of Mark Brandenburg visible in their respective uniqueness, the Wanderungen place themselves in a series of literary, local nature writings, which, according to Robert Macfarlane, can contribute “to closing the gap between knowledge and place” and thereby “to restore particularity to place, to provoke intimacy, or a sense of what is remarkable in a stretch of land” (Macfarlane 2005).²³ Fontane’s Wanderungen succeed in what Macfarlane hopes these works will achieve: “to discover in landscapes values that transcend the commercial and the consumerist” (Macfarlane 2005).