Effi Briest (1895)

This passage is from Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. The novel is a Prussian novel of adultery. It was one of Thomas Mann’s favorites (there is a minor character towards the end by the name of Buddenbrooks) and was one of the few realistic novels in German before Mann wrote. The characters are of the Prussian nobility and their reflections on honor and the complications of maintaining a code of honor in which you no longer believe could have been written in 17th century England. But this is near the beginning of the last century, in one of the final outposts of such beliefs in Europe. Today you would have to go to another society on another continent to hear this, or perhaps an American prison. (The convict actors in the prison performance of Hamlet which formed a This American Life show were well aware of the similarity). Innstetten has just discovered that his wife had had an affair six years earlier. He decides to challenge her lover to a duel and in the quoted passage is asking Wullersdorf to be his second:

“Innstetten, your situation is terrible and your life’s happiness is gone. But shoot the lover, and your life’s happiness is doubly gone, so to speak, and to the pain you already have from the injury you’ve suffered you will add the pain from the injury you’ve inflicted. At the heart of the matter is the question, do you absolutely have to do it? Do you feel so offended, wounded, outraged that one of you has to go, him or you? Is that how matters stand?

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“You must know.”

 

Innstetten had jumped to his feet, he walked over to the window and, filled with nervous agitation, tapped on the panes. Then he turned back quickly, went over to Wullersdorf and said, “No, that’s not how matters stand.”

 

“Well, how do they stand?”

 

“The fact of the matter is that I’m infinitely miserable; I’ve been insulted, scandalously deceived, but in spite of that, I feel no hate at all, much less any thirst for revenge. And when I ask myself why not, the only explanation I find is the years that have passed. People always talk about inexpiable guilt; it’s certainly not true, not in the eyes of God, and not in the eyes of men either. I would never have believed that time, pure time, could have such an effect. And then there’s something else: I love my wife, strange to say, I still love her, and terrible that I find everything that has happened, I’m still so much under the spell of her delightful nature, of that vivacious charm which is all her own that in spite of myself I feel inclined, in my heart of hearts, to forgive her.”

 

Wullersdorf nodded. “Quite with you, Innstetten, would perhaps feel just the same myself. But if you take that attitude to the matter and tell me, ‘I love this woman so much that I can forgive her anything,’ and if we also take into consideration that it all happened so long, long ago, like something on another planet, well, Innstetten, if that’s the position, why bother with this whole business?”

 

“Because there’s no way round it. I’ve turned it over in my mind. We’re not just individuals, we’re part of a larger whole and we must constantly have regard for that larger whole, we’re dependent on it, beyond a doubt. If it were a matter of living in isolation I could let it go; then it would be for me to bear the burden that had been put upon me, it would be the end of real happiness, but plenty of people have to live without ‘real happiness’ and I would have to too—and would manage it. You don’t have to be happy, that’s the last thing you have a right to, and you don’t necessarily have to do away with the one who robbed you of your happiness. You can, if you’re going to turn your back on society, let him get away with it. But wherever men live together, something has been established that’s just there, and it’s a code we’ve become accustomed to judging everything by, ourselves as well as others. And going against it is unacceptable; society despises you for it, and in the end you despise yourself, you can’t bear it any longer and put a gun to your head. Forgive me for lecturing you like this, when all I’m saying is what we’ve all told ourselves a hundred times. But—well, who can actually say anything new! So there it is, it’s not a question of hate or anything like that, I don’t want blood on my hands for the sake of happiness that’s been taken from me; but that, let’s call it that social something which tyrannizes us, takes no account of charm, or love, or time limits. I’ve no choice, I must.”

[….]

Wullersdorf stood up. “I find it terrible that you’re right, but you are right. I won’t plague you any further by asking if it has to be. The world is as it is, and things don’t take the course that we want, they take the course other people want. All that pompous stuff you hear from some people about ‘divine justice’ is nonsense of course, there’s no such thing, quite the reverse: this cult of honour of ours is a form of idolatry, but as long as we have idols we have to worship them.

 

Innstetten nodded.