There are advantages to coming late to an outlook and a set of conventions like realism, and arriving there via a different national tradition. It is sometimes claimed that all the realist writers of note subvert the realism they represent. If this is so, then perhaps those who come last are likely to be more subversive than their predecessors. For at least three of the novels I am taking as paradigms in this chapter the claim has been made that they bring the German novel at long last into the European realist tradition; and also that each of them is in some way the culmination of that tradition.

For at least three of the novels I am taking as paradigms in this chapter the claim has been made that they bring the German novel at long last into the European realist tradition; and also that each of them is in some way the culmination of that tradition. Effi Briest, Buddenbrooks and Der Untertan have all been ranked among major social novels in the European canon of realism; they embrace ‘society’ not as a backcloth to individual human experience (as in the Bildungsroman tradition described in chapter 6 of this book), but as its constituent element. (It is however worth noting that none of them deals with the conditions of lower-class life.)