»Wo liegt das Glück?«  Jantzen 93 Why America? America as Symbol One could almost assume that neither Fontane nor his researchers have ever had much interest in America. The three-volume bibliography by Raush in chapter 24 deals with his relationship to countries, regions, and settings. America is not mentioned, although the Netherlands has two en­tries. There can be no doubt that England and France were the two most important foreign lands for Fontane, but to suggest America played no role at all would clearly be wrong. 8 The first answer to the question,»why America?« can, of course, be found in the origins of the idea for Quitt, the murder on July 21, 1877, of the game warden Frey in Krummhübel, Silesia, ostensibly by a poacher named Knobloch, who, it seemed, evaded justice successfully by fleeing to Ameri­ca. Fontane in a letter to his daughter Martha noted that he refused to call the killing a murder, since the two fought»ebenbürtig« and therefore the death could not be a murder. In any case, if he wanted to use this kernel of truth as the source for a literary tale, he had to let his own literary killer also cross the Atlantic. The answer could be that simple. 9 Fleeing to America would have had a special resonance for Fontane at the time he heard about Frey´s death. Martha had been working as a com­panion since the end of 1883 for an American, Mrs. Dooly. At the end of February 1884 Mrs. Dooly and her daughter Mamie left for a four-month tour of Italy and took Martha along as Mamie´s tutor. Already at Christmas in 1883 Fontane had wondered what Christmas next year would be like for the family since Martha would likely be in San Francisco or Chicago with the Doolys. Her plan to spend a year in America with them was something her parents finally agreed to after a fair amount of anguish. Following a conflict with Mamie during the trip, however, Martha´s position with the Doolys ended in August 1884 and thus the trip to America was off. Fontane was in Krummhübel right at the end of July and all of August and most likely at that time heard the story about Frey and Knobloch for the first time from the local teacher, Heinrich Lösche. 10 Even without considering his daughter and the Doolys Fontane had a long-standing interest in America. He considered emigrating there him­self in 1849 and by then his Uncle August and Aunt Philippinne had already done so. Friends and acquaintances also left, for example, Hermann Kriege, to whom he dedicated a poem about emigration, or Dr. Georg Günther, the brother-in-law of the revolutionary Robert Blum. His nephew Paul Som­merfeldt emigrated as well. This list could be extended, the point is, ­Fontane knew many people personally who went to America, some of whom returned to Germany for a visit or even permanently. 11 In addition, Fontane had long been interested in American literature. In his youth, he enjoyed reading The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper, as he