Autograph manuscript drafts for articles on Berlin life and society, together with a fragment of...

comprising: (1) 'Adel und Judenthum in der Berliner Gesellschaft', title and five pages, folio; (2) 'Die Juden in unsrer Gesellschaft', title and one page, folio, plus blank; (3) 'Wie man in Berlin so lebt', title and 11 pages, folio, on versos of re-used paper, the rectos used for a variety of notes including, on ff.3-4, a fragment of a draft for Fontane's novel Die Poggenpuhls, as well as drafts for the Fünf Schlösser and Die Grafschaft Ruppin, one leaf with personal memoranda; (4) 'Berliner Ton', title and 25 pages, folio, a number of passages cut and pasted; (5) 'Berliner Sprechanismus', title and 8 pages, folio; substantial emendations, annotations and cancellations throughout, in black ink and plain or blue pencil, altogether 47 leaves, folio, text mostly on rectos only, plus titles and blanks (occasional yellowing and wear to margins), paper wrapper. Provenance: acquired at the sale of Fontane's Nachlass, Meyer und Ernst, Berlin, 10 October 1933, lot 480 ('Berlin und die Juden'). TEXTS ON BERLIN LIFE. The first, and apparently earliest of the articles, contrasts the positions of nobility and the bourgeoisie (in particular the Jewish bourgeoisie) in Berlin life, posing the question as to whether the superseding of the former by the latter is 'a calamity or a step forward', and proposing that it does indeed represent progress. The brief sketch on the same theme in the second essay, dated by Jost Schillemeit (Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft XXX/1986, pp.63ff) to 1892/3, proposes an essay on Jewish sensibility and taste, though noting 'I am not particularly a philosemite. I prefer the Germanic'. The third essay, on 'How one lives in Berlin', dated by the re-used drafts on the verso to some time after May 1894, is of an altogether more light-hearted tone, giving rueful sketches of a day in the writer's life, from a brutal awakening with the sound of the neighbour's toilet flushing, to breakfast, shaving and dressing ('I have the virtue -- or vice -- of doing my own shaving. Torture ... There are good periods. But for a long time now I have been in a low patch ... It no longer seems possible for me to purchase a razor blade with an edge to it'). The fragment of Die Poggenpuhls on the versos is a draft for a subject treated in Chapters 10-12 of the eventual text, the correspondence between the various members of the family; marginal notes offer a running critique of the draft. The most substantial of the articles, 'Berliner Ton', may be dated by the references to contemporary actors to the late 1870s: it sets itself to retrieve the typical Berlin type of speech from its poor reputation through an examination of its characteristic manifestations at home, in society and with strangers ('What first strikes the stranger is the loudness and copiousness of speech. Why not loud? I am after all myself, and why not a lot, since I am well informed, I have after all seen, heard, read everything'). The final essay, on Berlin 'Sprechanismus', examining the compulsive assertiveness of Berlin conversation, may be dated to summer 1893. The first of the articles is referred to by Fontane in a letter to the editor of Die Gegenwart, Julius Grosser, 17 June 1879, 'I have several articles intended for the Gegenwart in my desk ... One of the subjects is 'The Jews and Berlin Society' and is -- something you would perhaps not expect from me -- framed in a fairly anti-noble and very pro-Jewish way. The subject is so serious and such a good one that I do not want to spoil it by perfunctory treatment'.