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Drifting towards Disaster? Fontane’s Ambivalent Portrayal of Stralau Landscapes in His Literary Works

Stralau, situated on a peninsula on Lake Rummelsburg, southeast of Berlin, has in recent years developed into a fashionable residential area, characterised by the many stylish apartment blocks facing the waterfront, but it has always been a favourite and readily accessible day-trip destination for Berliners.2 Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 1817 painting “View of the Spree Riverbank at Stralau” (“Aussicht auf das Spreeufer bei Stralau”) appealed to Berliners precisely because Stralau was so well known.3 In Fontane’s time Stralau enjoyed a mixed reputation because of the Stralau fishing carnival (“Stralauer Fischzug”), a festival celebrated every year on 24 August. Because the carnival tended to be increasingly associated with drunken revelry, the police and military were brought in to maintain order, and it was finally banned altogether in 1873.4 Thus in the nineteenth century Stralau held an ambivalent attraction in the minds of the Berliners: it was not regarded solely as an appealing destination on the Rummelsburger See, but also as a place associated with inappropriate behaviour.