Part of this is because, like all the other people you hate, I’ve been poked and cajoled into starting a Substack. Part of this is because I discovered that WordPress has started adding reams of ads at the ends of my posts, spammy little links to articles titled You’ll Never Believe...
For what, after all, does it mean but: a man is a man.”[1] Mensch ist mensch. Parsing the revolutionary triad, liberty, equality, fraternity, Fontane posits his own variant of nineteenth-century liberalism: he does not expect a modernity marked by individual freedom...