Eugen Engel’s opera Grete Minde (Holocaust victim’s opera stored for years in trunk gets premiere at last, 14 February) is based on a short novel with this title by the influential 19th-century German writer Theodor Fontane. Generations of older Germans at secondary schools have read it as a set book and should be well acquainted with its contents.
Fontane, whom some critics have described as the German Charles Dickens, wrote the story after he had researched real events that happened in Tangermünde in the 17th century. Fontane’s Grete Minde takes revenge on her bullying family by setting fire to the town. Apparently the libretto of the opera contains long passages of the book’s dialogue.
In Grete Minde, as in most of his novels, Fontane attacks the vices he detects in the bourgeois German society of his time: misogyny, dogmatism, injustice, envy and an ambivalent attitude to honour.
Harry Schneider
Mill Hill, London