Theodor Fontane was born on December 30, 1819, in Neuruppin, Brandenburg. He trained as a pharmacist but gave up this profession in 1849 to establish himself as a journalist and freelance writer. A year later, he married Emilie Rouanet-Kummer. After returning from a multi-year stay in England, his main interest turned to "Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg." In addition to his extensive work as a war correspondent, travel writer, and theater critic, he created his famous novels and stories, as well as the two memoirs "My Childhood Years" and "From Twenty to Thirty." Fontane died on September 20, 1898, in Berlin. Gotthard Erler, born in 1933 in Meerane/Saxony, studied Germanistics in Leipzig, among others with Hans Mayer and Hermann August Korff. Since 1964, he has been a senior staff member of Aufbau-Verlag and served as its managing director from 1990 to 1998. He lives in Berlin. His decades-long research on Fontane and the wealth of his editions have significantly contributed to the dissemination of this work and the exploration of Fontane's biography.