Zusammenfassung: "In Unwiederbringlich Theodor Fontane represents the connection of “Vorstellung” to power in both personal and national relationships; unstable and false “Vorstellungen” lead to the downfall of both a marriage and a nation. The failure of Holk’s marriage is due to his misguided “Vorstellungen,” and Fontane links this failure in an individual relationship to national affairs, specifically to Denmark’s loss to Prussia in the Second Schleswig War of 1864. The false Prussian ideas about Danish lands and false Danish ideas about themselves manifest as two types of Nordic Orientalism, one that frames Nordic lands as exotic and inferior on the one hand, and one that frames them as progressive and liberal on the other. These Orientalist modes of thinking lead to failed marriages and failed nations. They are geographical transpositions that bind personal relationships to national identity and justify dominance of one person or one nation over another. In transposing a story from Prussia to a territory that was neither national nor wholly transnational, and framing this territory through an Orientalist lens, Fontane’s adultery novel demonstrates how the imagination perpetuates power inequities, whether in failed relationships of national and transnational entities or in irretrievably lost marital bliss."
Empfohlene Zitierweise: Wolfgang Rasch: Theodor Fontane Bibliographie online. Auf der Grundlage der »Theodor Fontane Bibliographie. Werk und Forschung« (3 Bde., Berlin: de Gruyter 2006) hg. v. Theodor-Fontane-Archiv. Potsdam 2019ff. URL: https://www.fontanearchiv.de/bibliographie/b0018559/. Letzte Bearbeitung: 02.10.2023.
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