ON THE OCCASION of Theodor Fontane's two hundredth birthday, his reaction to an earlier birthday yields food for thought. Fontane describes his seventieth birthday celebration to Heinrich Jacobi on January 23, 1890:

The disparity in perception between modern Berlin and old Prussia clearly troubles Fontane; one senses that, at some level, he longs to be acknowledged by traditional Prussia, much as he may despise it, and that his image of himself as a writer does not coincide with the image that the literary world has of him. This tension, even contradiction, mirrors the enigmatic reception of Fontane in subsequent generations and particularly in the English-speaking world. Fontane is sometimes an advocate for the declining landed nobility of Prussia, sometimes the pioneer of the modernist metropolis, the champion of rural Prussia and Brandenburg but also of cosmopolitan London and the world at large. Is he regressive or progressive, an advocate of provincialism or cosmopolitanism, a traditionalist or a modernist? Fontane's staying power comes in part from his resistance to easy classification according to such binaries. He still speaks to us today because he sustains a productive tension between both the modernist idol and the compassionate, albeit ironic, chronicler of “old Prussia.”

With this volume celebrating Fontane's two hundredth birthday, we engage the tension between the modern and the traditional, the contemporary and the historical in Fontane by offering a range of contributions from the world of English-language Fontane scholarship in the twenty-first century. Balancing the competing demands of fidelity to the author's history and literary production in the nineteenth century with the interests of our own era requires recognizing both the striking similarities and the stark differences between the late-nineteenth and the early-twenty-first centuries.