Part of this disintegration of the community structure via these gothic elements is the dissolution of family bonds and the illusory sensibility of nature that lies squarely within the tradition of the "crime story" as it was first composed and established as a genre by August Gottfried Meissner. An educated member of the jurisprudence, well-known literary writer and professor of philosophy in Prague, Meissner sought to shed light onto the causes for abnormal behavior visible in criminals and threatening to social structures by expanding the usual accounts of lawyers, theologians, and doctors. Recruiting "alle Forscher des menschlichen Herzens"3 (all investigators of the human heart), both he and Friedrich Schiller, who composed the foreword, attempt to appeal to the readers' sympathy, patience, and understanding to re-evaluate the signs of criminal behavior visible to the yet uneducated public. Fontane shared their concern “to expose what is deceitful and pure façade, and often his characters, like those of Ibsen, being enclosed within the cramped and suffocating confines of their social position, yearn to be free. [However,] he was much more skeptical… about the degree of freedom and self-determination that it was reasonable to seek or expect in life.”4 Impossible to be ignored, the judgments of society, in Fontane’s opinion, inevitably become part of our own assessment of ourselves, and thus all the more crucial to analyze in Fontane’s fictional works. The failure of the justice system, and thereby discrepancies in the values and judgments of social institutions, become apparent in the three crime stories analyzed, "Ellernklipp" (1881), "Unterm Birnbaum" (1885), and "Quitt" (1890). Even though all outline murders, one of the rarest
Vogt, Jochen (ed.). Der Kriminalroman: Poetik, Theorie, Geschichte. München, Germany: W. Fink, 1998. p. 322. 4 George, E. F. “Illusions and Illusory Values in Fontane’s Works.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 7.1 (Jan. 1971): 69. 3
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