Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg

It covers the history, architecture, and people of the region as well as its landscape, and influenced the German Youth Movement of the early twentieth century.

In his preface, Fontane wrote that the inspiration for Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg came on a visit to Loch Leven Castle in Scotland in 1858, when he remembered visiting Rheinsberg Palace, a similarly situated castle in Brandenburg, and realised the two were comparably memorable experiences; so he decided to share with the German readership the attractions of his native region.

[3] Fontane noted the earlier work of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Naturgeschichte des Volkes (1851–1869), which also presents the German land and people as fundamentally linked;[5] and acknowledged a debt to the procedure he laid out there: preparation through study, walking in the area and talking to the residents, keeping a diary, and including anecdotes about the journey.

One scholar, Werner Lincke, has divided the work into four main stylistic segments: the feuilleton, the novella, the essay on art history, and the specialised treatise.

[11] Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg influenced the German Youth Movement and völkisch thought in general, in its presentation of the region and its people as "an indivisible whole" (although Riehl's work was even more influential), and remains popular today.