Fontane's Aesthetics of the Slavic Race

Theodor Fontane was far from immune to turn‐of‐the‐century Europe's problematic fascination with race. In his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg he lays out a romantic and slanted conception of the Slavic race, which he goes on to employ in works of fiction, such as Cécile or Effi Briest , in which Slavs play a pivotal role in the novels’ development. Impractical, eccentric, pagan and sensual, the Slavic race is deeply implicated in the Polish Cécile's tragedy and in Effi's fall from grace, which occurs in a Slavic milieu and with a Slavic lover. Yet, whatever Fontane's conception of the Slavic race may have been, the casual, playful and artistic way in which he portrayed it reveals that his intentions were aesthetic rather than political. Rather than fetishes of hatred, as in the work of his more jingoist contemporaries, Fontane's Slavs are decorative figures evoking the aesthetics of decadence.