Aprominent Berlin bookseller recently posted this employee recommendation above Theodor Fontane's novel Mathilde Möhring: “Try something different by Fontane!” (“Versuch mal was anderes von Fontane!”) Different indeed. Other novels of society by Theodor Fontane (1819–98) take place among the landed aristocracy and the nouveau riche, but Mathilde Möhring (1891/1896) begins in a noisy Berlin neighborhood in a lower-middle-class apartment. Marriage is often an unavoidable and sometimes unbearable social contract in Fontane novels that frustrates, bores, or annoys his protagonists, particularly the women—some of them to death. But for “Thilde,” as we come to know her in the novel, marriage is Plan B. It is, however, quite nice while it lasts. And although for every other Fontane female protagonist, looks and sexual attractiveness seem necessary to achieving marriage, Thilde's average (or, in her future husband Hugo's words, “rather odd”) looks are far less important than her intelligence, energy, and self-confidence. These latter gifts are what enable her to engineer her social and economic advancement through marriage, and beyond it.

This clearly unusual novel by the nineteenth-century master of German “Poetic” Realism has led a double life. Never published in the author's lifetime, it is technically unfinished, yet it has been in nearly constant publication since it first appeared in book form in 1908. Many literary scholars have viewed this last work by Fontane with puzzlement or even suspicion. Why, they have asked, didn't the author sign off on a novel so close to completion? Why is it so different from his other novels? Why does it begin among people struggling with poverty? Why is Mathilde so unlike other Fontane female protagonists? But while the literary scholars debate, readers keep reading Mathilde. The Theodor- Fontane-Archiv in Potsdam lists sixty-three published versions of the novel, including translations into Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish, and Mathilde Möhring has been filmed more frequently—five times— than any other Fontane work, including his famous Effi Briest.

At the center of the novel is Mathilde's plan to achieve economic security and social advancement for her mother and for herself. At the start, the plot seems to follow familiar contours. Perhaps it's a mix of Cinderella and a novel of education (Bildungsroman)?