The Fontane City Neuruppin bears the name of the great poet and novelist

Since 1998, the year that saw the 100^th anniversary of the novelist Theodor Fontane, Neuruppin has officially been known as the Fontane City.

Theodor Fontane was born in Neuruppin on 30 December 1819, as the son of the pharmacist Louis Henry Fontane and his wife Emilie. His parents owned number 84 in Friedrich-Wilhelm-Strasse (now Karl-Marx-Strasse 84), with the Löwen pharmacy. After the writer’s father was forced to sell the pharmacy in 1826 to pay off his gambling debts, the family moved first to Friedrich-Wilhelm-Strasse 94 and then in 1827 to Swinemünde on the Baltic coast. 

Fontane lived in Neuruppin yet again, from 1832 to 1833, when for a year and a half he attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium (now the Altes Gymnasium on Schulplatz). Then the 13-year-old moved to Berlin to receive training at the vocational college, with the aim of becoming a pharmacist like his father.

In 1854 Theodor’s mother Emilie and his sister Elise moved to Neuruppin, where they lived  in the Preacher’s Widow’s House at Fischbänkenstrasse 8. Without divorcing, Emilie had separated from her husband. From 1866 Emilie and Elise Fontane lived at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Strasse 7. In 1869 Emilie Fontane died in Neuruppin at the age of 71.

Theodor Fontane  – now an independent journalist and author – took advantage of his visits to his mother and sister in Neuruppin to do the research work for the first volume of his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg [Walks in the March of Brandenburg]. In the 20 years after the first publication of the Wanderungen in 1861 (the book’s publication was postdated to 1862), Fontane kept on revising and adding to the volume on Die Grafschaft Ruppin [The County of Ruppin]. The inspiration for Wanderungen came to Fontane on a trip to Scotland that he made during his time as a correspondent in London.