Heft 
(2017) 104
Seite
99
Einzelbild herunterladen

»Wo liegt das Glück?« Jantzen 99 much more material here than Zieglschmid listed in his article, all of it po­tentially easily available to Fontane. 37 Nonetheless even Zieglschmid´s partial listing of Fontane´s sources is telling, for those critics of Quitt who do not list his article in their biblio­graphy are the ones who see Fontane´s America as an unsuccessful uto­pia. 38 Much additional work has been done by James Bade on Fontane´s American setting, documenting the maps and other sources he used. We thus now know that all the place names with one exception that Fontane used in the second half of Quitt are actual places. The lone exception is Fort O´Brien, which is a name he invented for the historical Fort Cantonment that the government did in fact transfer to the Mennonites to use for mis­sion work. 39 The reason for this name change lies in the special attention that ­Fontane gave to the setting of Fort Cantonment/Fort O´Brien. In prepara­tion for writing the second half of the novel, he sketched the position of a fort, as yet unnamed, close to the mountains and directly on the way from Nogat-Ehre into the mountains. The satellite farm where the Kaulbars of­ten were lay on another parallel way into the mountains, and only half as far away from them as Nogat-Ehre was, so that the three locations formed a triangle. In addition to changing the name he also changed the actual location of the original Fort Cantonment. On the sketch Fontane wrote, »Es müssen zwei Hauptwege ins Gebirge hinführen, einer am Vorwerk vorbei, der andre am ehemaligen Fort vorbei. Im erstem Kapitel wird der Vor­werk-Weg genommen. Beide, sowohl Vorwerk wie Fort müssen einen bestimmten Namen haben.«(See page 100). This sketch is the American pendant of the one he made for Krummhügel that Brieger published in her appendix. 40 Fontane´s initial interest in this fort is likely the reason it gets a new name, it had to be specific. The satellite farm, however, is never given a name. In the manuscript, the chapters set in America are numbered start­ing over with one, but the road from the station in Darlington to the village of Nogat-Ehre is not described until the second chapter, numbered eight­een overall. 41 The notes on the sketch were simply preliminary and were not followed precisely. The way to the satellite farm from the Hornbostel farm that Lehnert and Kaulsbar rode along matches the sketch. 42 But no one ever rode from there into the mountains, so that this path, and maybe the satellite farm itself, ended up not being that important to Fontane. ­Lehnert´s ride on Sedan Day, when he had the vision of seeing a corpse laying in the mountains, the excursion to fetch a Christmas tree with Ruth and Toby, and the picnic during which he won Ruth´s hand by saving her life all went along the second way that was sketched from the farm to Fort O´Brien. 43 Thus in this setting that was particularly important to him,