Nur in Freiheit wird man frei

Revolution came before "world literature" - Theodor Fontane's early political texts
The fact that Theodor Fontane is one of today's best-known writers was not foreseeable for a long time during his lifetime. His major works, such as "Irrungen und Wirrungen", "Effi Briest" or "Der Stechlin", which make him one of the most important representatives of literary, poetic "realism", were all written later in his life.
Much less well known is the young, "political" Fontane, whose early texts are collected here for the first time. In 1848, the year of the revolution, he was an ardent representative of the democratic forces that were also gaining enormous momentum in Germany as a result of the February Revolution in Paris. There was ferment everywhere in the German states, including of course in Berlin, where the 29-year-old now worked as a clerk in the pharmacy "Zum schwarzen Adler" on Georgenkirchplatz.
More staggering than purposeful, he gets caught up in the fighting and barricade battles that break out on 18 March of that year. In the autobiographical opening text of the second volume of the "Library of Early Democrats", Fontane describes his experiences of the revolution. For the first time, his radical democratic articles from the years 1848 to 1850, which he wrote for the "Berliner Zeitungshalle" and as "Berlin correspondent" for the "Dresdner Zeitung", are also collected here, as well as his political correspondence.