108 Fontane Blätter 104 Literaturgeschichtliches, Interpretationen, Kontexte this reason that Fontane gave the Mennonite village in Indian territory the sobriquet Ehre to suggest a new meaning for this loaded term. 64 There is no doubt that Fontane was thinking about Wildenbruch at the time he was writing Quitt. On June 1, 1885, he arrived in Krummhübel to start work on the novel. He noted in a letter to his wife that he was doing better, but still not ideal.»Wenn ich doch ´mal einen Sonntag hätte, wo ich mich fühlte, wie Wildenbruch sich alltags fühlt. Ich mag aber doch nicht mit ihm tauschen. 65 He also initially used Wildenbruch´s misspelling of Mennonite with one»n« in his letter to his son Friedrich asking him for help finding Mennonite literature. 66 There is no explanation for Wilden­bruch´s persistent misspelling. 67 As a theater critic Fontane, of course, saw a lot of his plays. Their rela­tionship in 1885 was still somewhat tense since Fontane was blunt in his criticism of Wildenbruch´s romantic hero worship and arbitrary plot twists, for example, Maria´s sudden and unexplained death. Fontane devel­oped his own neologism,»das Wildenbruchsche« for this consistent disre­spect for»dem natürlichen Gang der Dinge.« 68 The conflict between an old­er German idealism and an emerging realism was on open display here. Wildenbruch´s influcence on Quitt has also already been noted by Grawe. 69 Wildenbruch was controversial for other reasons too. On occasion his plays were banned for being inciting Anti-Catholic hatred. Der Menonit was not allowed onto the stage of the Königlichen Schauspielhaus for a different reason, its negative portrayal of the ruling house in 1809 as also being insufficiently active in the national cause. Those Mennonites who had decided to stay in Prussia were incensed about the play since they now served and had completed the switchover to the national cause that Rein­hold had demanded of his congregation. Hinrich van der Smissen and H. G. Mannhardt were leaders in the campaign to keep the play off any stage in Germany, but above all, away from the royal stage. In 1884 Mannhardt read in the Vossische Zeitung that Wildenbruch had gotten his historical information about Mennonites from a somewhat unreliable biography of Frederick William III by Bishop Eylert. The bishop recounted how a mem­ber of the Elbing-Ellerwald Mennonite Congregation, David van Riesen, had fought as a volunteer in 1813 and was subsequently therefore banned from his congregation. Many of the details in Eylert´s account cannot be corroborated, but this van Riesen had been a member, had fought, and had been banned for it. Mennonites in the province of Prussia had flatly refused to fight in the Napoleonic Wars, although they did agree to pay additional taxes to maintain their exemption and gave several voluntary contribu­tions to the government on top of that. Assuming Fontane read his own paper, he would have known about the play and its actual historical con­nection to the Mennonites of Nogat-Ehre, as would have other readers. From 1882 to 1884 Fontane could have also read a lot in the Mennonitische