The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings

Abstract

t's a convention, so I've been told, that whoever gets the Fontane Prize for literature says something about Fontane. And it should be in the form of an address that should be in some way festive. I have in consequence ventured upon the title: "What Fontane says to us for example." In doing so I wanted to stick to the "for example." The consequence of this for me was that I had first to read Fontane thoroughly. It would certainly be easier for me if I were allowed to speak about Holderlin, Kleist, Kafka, Doblin, Joyce, Amo Schmidt, or about Marx. Marx, for example, in literary and linguistic terms would be a great practitioner of the montage work of art. His apparently esoteric theory contains a startling number of narratives and stories. If you resolved the theory into the experiences and the stories it contains, you would very quickly notice, as soon as you tell it in the form of stories and narratives, that the theory has nothing to do with orthodoxy. Back to Fontane. What occurs to me is that Fontane is often quoted but that these quotations do not fully grasp him. He shows a notable indirectness in everything that he writes; that is the conversational tone. And for that reason I don't want to try today to present you with a col-