It'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 first had to read Fontane thoroughly. It would certainly be easier for me if I were allowed to speak about Hölderlin, Kleist, Kafka, Döblin, Joyce, Arno 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 told 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 collection of quotations; instead, I want to argue roughly with the attitude (Haltung) taken by this realist who is so rare in Germany. Everything he writes corresponds to a certain attitude.

This fact has to do with celebratory hours like the present one, with the celebratory as such, and with all forms of address. Fontane would say: ‘That situation will never turn into a dialogue'. It's unnatural. My mother, who is also sitting in this hall and who always argues very practically, says: ‘Help yourself by keeping it short'. Fontane, it must be said, would have been indifferently sarcastic. He was, by the way, secretary for three months of the then Academy of Arts - that was still the Royal one. A biographical note states, ‘Once again his friends found a civil-service post for him: at the age of fifty-six he became secretary of the Academy of Arts.