92 Fontane Blätter 104 Literaturgeschichtliches, Interpretationen, Kontexte ­Fontane´s writing due to its sharp criticism of Prussia´s dowdy militarism, divisive politics, and rigid society. 6 Peter Demetz largely agrees since ­ Quitt ´s­­exploration of freedom and equality are primal themes for litera­ture in any case and especially for Prussia at the end of the nineteenth century. This novel delivers on those themes despite Fontane´s America being a»sehr buntscheckiges Derivat.« 7 Such views open an important av­enue to seeing America an important symbolic space even as it fails as a realistic physical location. The literary analysis of Fontane´s fourth longest novel is thus stuck be­tween these two positions and the great strength of Fontane to portray the life of his time with finesse and nuance can at best only apply to the first half. Perhaps Fontane simply failed at this point as an author. Another pos­sibility, however, is that the failure lies with contemporary readers who can no longer understand the images of America and Mennonites that ­Fontane used to pose questions to his own society. To argue over whether Fontane created a usable or a failed America is not all that helpful. Instead of debating success or failure, a more fruitful approach might be to ask why Fontane travelled figuratively with Lehnert to America at all. If he had only known what blows from the critics awaited due to this leap, would he have sent Lehnert elsewhere or described his capture and trial in Germa­ny? Obviously without the flight to America the novel would never have been written. And if we then agree with Fontane that America as symbol is somehow key to the novel, does it make sense to continue to assume that describing America as a setting would have been of little concern to him? Germany was large and the only description of it in the novel is of the vil­lage Krummhübel in Silesia. Nonetheless this description of Germany is perceived as successful because in the struggle between the game warden Opitz and Lehnert in this simple village the reader can experience the en­tire complexity and tension of freedom and submission in Imperial Germa­ny. Could a single village, however, ever describe America? Since Fontane was never there, he could never succeed at the task he set himself, critics of the novel assure us. Instead of assuming the task is impossible, what would happen if we would investigate whether or to what extent Nogat-Ehre could serve authentically as an American symbol and setting? To answer that we need to know more about why and how Fontane decided to use America and Mennonites from Prussia settled there as his prototypical Americans.