Der Lesekreis — The Reading Circle

Theodor Fontane and Effi Briest

Theodor Fontane, who lived from 1819 to 1898, is the great realist novelist of nineteenth-century Prussia and Berlin. He started as a pharmacist and journalist and published his best-known novels late in life. Effi Briest, from 1895, tells of a young woman married off to a much older official, a brief affair, and the rigid social code that destroys her years later. It is one of the most widely read German novels and a fixture of the school curriculum. Fontane's style is known for its conversations, its irony and its understatement: much of what matters is hinted at rather than said. Effi's father, old Briest, repeatedly ends difficult conversations with his wife by saying that something is ein zu weites Feld, too wide a field, and the phrase Das ist ein weites Feld has become a common German idiom for a subject too big or awkward to discuss. Reading circles, Lesekreise, are popular in Germany, often hosted by independent bookshops, libraries or adult-education centers. Many independent bookshops remain part of their neighborhoods, helped by fixed book prices, the Buchpreisbindung, which require new books to be sold at the same price everywhere.