intense kind of identification with the trajectory of the hero's destinies and destinations."61 The suspense becomes a bodily experience that belies a simple dualism of psychological doubling that underlies such a large number of detective works before and in the wake of Fontane's writings. Well before Benjamin's flaneur set foot into an urban arena, the detective novel produced a tale that might, according to some critics, outline a temper opposed to the law, "meaning an order rooted in ...the growing forces of decadence [that] threaten traditional Prussian values."62 As Patricia Howe goes on to state, "the emphasis either on the murderer or on the enigmatic Hilde ignores one crucial aspect of the work, namely, the relationship in which their paths first meet."63 In contrast to a juxtaposition of villain and criminal, a moral-social versus an amoral natural order, Fontane's Ellernklipp creates a deeper pattern of simultaneous production and consumption that involves the creation and undeniable entanglement of its own readership confronted with an outwardly plain Kriminalgeschichte. Its power lies in its repetitive quality that combines supposedly incompatible strands of narrative into one in which not only Hilde, but the engaged reader and detective/criminal Bocholt resemble "ein angenommenes Kind" (10). (an adopted child) Just as the child never fully arrives at home in the Bocholt household, the reader becomes part of a thoroughly modernist cycle that, "in Thomas Hardy's phrase, its 'ache', its awareness of things 'passing', and in Freudian terms its dynamics of
Marcus, Lauren. "Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and Detective Fiction." 201-21 in Chernaik, Warren/Martin Swales/ Robert Vilain (eds.). The Art of Detective Fiction. Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000. p. 203. 62 Howe, Patricia. "Fontane's 'Ellernklipp' and the Theme of Adoption," Modern Language Review 79.1 (January 1984): 114. 63 Howe, 114. 61
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