Youth
Fontane was born in Neuruppin into a Huguenot family. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary, his father's profession. He became an apothecary himself, and in 1839, at the age of 20, wrote his first work (Heinrichs IV. erste Liebe, now lost). His further education was in Leipzig where he came into contact with the progressives of the Vormärz. Fontane's first published work, the novella Geschwisterliebe ("Sibling Love"), appeared in the Berlin Figaro in December 1839.
His biographer Gordon A. Craig observes that this work gave few indications of his promise as a gifted writer: "Although the theme of incest, which was to occupy Fontane on later occasions, is touched upon here, the mawkishness of the tale... is equaled by the lameness of its plot and the inertness of the style in which it is told, and Clärchen and her brother are both so colorless that no one could have guessed that their creator had a future as a writer."
His first job as apothecary was in Dresden after which he returned to his father's shop in the provincial town of Letschin in the Oderbruch region. Fleeing its provincial atmosphere, Fontane published articles in the Leipzig newspaper Die Eisenbahn and translated Shakespeare. In 1843, he joined a literary club in Berlin called Tunnel über der Spree (Tunnel over the river Spree) where he came into contact with many of the most renowned German writers including Theodor Storm, Joseph von Eichendorff and Gottfried Keller.
Read more about this topic: Theodor Fontane
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“His youth was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of pleasures, in which he licentiously triumphed, disdaining all decorum. His fine imagination was often heated and exhausted with his body in celebrating and deifying the prostitute of the night, and his convivial joys were pushed to all the extravagancy of frantic bacchanals.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
““I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get ‘em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ‘em as nothing should equal it!””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)