In the opening segment of Der Waldgänger (The Forest-Goer, 1846), one of his few stories that Stifter did not revise and reissue in book format, the autofictional narrator reminisces on his definitive departure from his Bohemian homeland. Somewhere near Kirchschlag in the foothills above Linz, “der Verfasser” or “der Wanderer” (the author/the wanderer), as Stifter alternately refers to himself in the third person, crosses a divide separating the Mühlkreis region from the Danube basin of Upper Austria. In the process, he surveys numerous natural features on either side of the ridgeline, including those pertaining to the geosphere (mountains, rolling hills, vales), the hydrosphere (rivers, streams, rivulets), the biosphere (forests, bushes, orchards), and the atmosphere (the meteorological differences between the overcast skies to the north and the sunny climes to the south). Whereas the distant dark-blue strip of the Bohemian Forest blends with the gray ceiling of clouds behind him, the sunlit river basin below seems to beckon toward a new and figuratively bright future. This pivotal point of his journey from Bohemia to Vienna, where he will spend the next twenty-two years of his life, significantly occurs upon a point of partition or Scheidepunkt in the physical landscape. Indeed, this eight-page section of the text (see HKG 3,1:95–102) is punctuated by a leitmotif-like complex of scheiden (to divide/separate) and its linguistic variants, all of which serve to underscore a variety of interconnections between Upper Austrian geography and Stifter's early autobiography. Thus, the wandering-narrating analogue of Stifter crosses a Scheidelinie (dividing line) but tarries at the abovementioned Scheidepunkt, reflecting on his recent separation or Scheiden from both his hometown of Oberplan and love interest Fanny Greipl, who resided in the nearby town of Friedberg and whose parents saw little if any professional promise in the likes of the young and dreamy “Bertl” Stifter.

Adalbert Stifter's monumental novel Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), which spans three volumes in the critical edition, bears the subtitle “Eine Erzählung”—a story. While this diminutive genre designation can be understood as a vestige from a drawn-out process of composition, it leaves open the question of genre and draws attention to the form of the text. In response to criticism the novel received, Stifter moreover claimed that readers had the wrong genre expectations, commenting in a letter to his publisher Gustav Heckenast that whoever “eine Heiratsgeschichte liest und hiebei rückwärts eine veraltete Liebesgeschichte erfärt, der weiß sich mit dem Buche ganz und gar nicht zu helfen” ([whoever] reads a wedding tale and, in so doing, retroactively experiences an old love story, is missing the entire point of the book). This begs the question: What comes to the fore if the marriage plot fades into the background, and how might the formal qualities of the text itself draw readerly attention to what is really at stake? Based on an examination of the stylistic decisions and genre characteristics of Der Nachsommer, and with a consideration of Stifter's landscape painting, I will examine the ways in which both artistic media use formal techniques of creating depth and space rather than guiding the focus toward the protagonists and foreground. In the process, I argue that Stifter's novelistic style relativizes the importance of the human actors, disrupting expectations of the figureground relationship and creating a new kind of narrative in which the surrounding environment and the connections between things come more clearly into view.

To the extent that it is about anything at all, Heiner Goebbels's theater installation Stifters Dinge (Stifter's Things) is as much about the atmosphere in the theater as it is about the things on the stage. In a press release upon its 2007 premier, the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland, described it as a “composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, performance without actors—one might say a no-man show.” Music from mechanically played pianos is interspersed with sounds from archival recordings, while lights illuminate a pool of dry ice, from which smoky tendrils curl into the air. The Théâtre Vidy says of Stifters Dinge that the things (they list “light, pictures, murmurs, sounds, voices, wind and mist, water and ice”) do not function in a merely illustrative role, but rather become the protagonists. The installation is, in that sense, uncanny, but its uncanniness is an atmospheric effect because it arises out of the interplay between the solid objects, components of the atmosphere as a geophysical system, and both pictures and sounds. Goebbels himself says that his aim was to afford the audience “die Entdeckung des freien Raums” (the discovery of free space). “Free space” is not empty space because the theater is not a vacuum. Rather, what the “discovery of free space” means in practice is that the atmosphere in the theater is both a part of and a result of the composition.

There is, at the heart of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 1853), a fundamental emptiness. This might seem like an odd thing to say. For the most part, Stifter's world is painstakingly, perhaps even lushly described. Natural landscapes, social relations, and physical objects are depicted with a care that some might consider excessive. The plotlines are driven by activity that runs the gamut from the measured to the manic, from calm routine to strife and disaster. The text offers us a bounty on the level of both action and description, but something still seems to be missing.

For Walter Benjamin, this absence is a fundamentally linguistic one, a form of what he calls “reticence” [Verschwiegenheit]. Because Stifter is cut off from “the essence of the world” [das Weltwesen] that is language, he cannot give a persuasive account of the relationship between the natural world and the moral one. The homologies that he tries to establish between the two remain restricted to the visual register and therefore mute. Because it is inarticulate, Stifter's world is also disarticulated, for an unbridgeable gulf separates material impressions from the forces that are responsible for them.

Even more surprising than the recent spate of publicity given by international Anglophone newspapers to Isabel Fargo Cole's translation of Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 2021 [1853]) is their common celebration of Adalbert Stifter as the defining European writer of the more-thanhuman world. This is a writer whose friends characterized his work as “kleinliche Detailmalerei unwesentlicher Dinge” (petty detail paintings of unimportant things) and whose reception outside of Central Europe has been largely restricted to academia. This recent embrace of Stifter by a broader audience owes something to the renewed recognition by contemporary pandemic-stricken readers of the ecological importance of the dimensionally insignificant (relative to human magnitude). The insights that Stifter makes into these relationships and the awe that he reserves for small things are derived in no small part from his engagement with geological matters and methodologies through which inquiry into everyday stones leads to earth-magnitude phenomena. In the following, I scrutinize Stifter's motley, multi-faceted stones as they inform his aesthetic geology but also as they are informed by and deformed under the political duress, in particular regarding the public debate around Jewish emancipation and assimilation, that becomes manifest in his novella Abdias (Abdias, 1842).

To say that Adalbert Stifter was born on October 23, 1805, and died on January 28, 1868, may be technically true, but as with so many aspects of his life and work, details of this sort are both murky and misleading. The Ordnung—whether ethical order or petty orderliness—that ruled his existence and dominate his oeuvre is often but a front concealing deeper unrest, including chronic melancholy, self-destructive passion, and existential despair. Thus, to rectify the ignominy of his premarital conception and restore some semblance of order to his very origins, Stifter often tweaked his professional résumés and autobiographical accounts by shifting his birth year to 1806. (His parents, Magdalena Friepes and Johann Stifter, were wedded on August 13, 1805, hence just over two months before his birth.) The circumstances surrounding his death were likewise disorderly, if not messy. Around 1:00 am during the night of January 25–26, 1868, Stifter slit his throat with a razorblade yet did not expire from this self-inflicted wound until two days later. This act of (attempted) suicide might be interpreted as the culmination of Stifter's tumultuous life as lived between the lines of his self-corrective fiction and well over a century's worth of largely reverent literary-historical scholarship. It is, at any rate, an eerie enactment of a lamentation expressed through his analogue Augustinus in the fourth version of Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (My Great-Grandfather's Notebook) which was written during the final years of his life and published posthumously in 1939.

In the decade between the publication of Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) in November 1857 and his death in January 1868, Stifter produced a body of work whose idiosyncratic style and peculiar narrative mode set it apart from his previous writing. In these texts, a starker and more austere form dominated by a highly artificial language of staid rhythms and methodical regularity contributes to a strikingly desolate and often plodding prose marked by ritual and repetition. The tendency toward recursive narration along with the stubborn rearticulation of speech acts, gestures, and superfluous actions result in stories that are empty of conventional content but at the same time full—of narrative excursiveness, of attention to minutiae and mannerism, of language in and of itself. The linguistic excess of these works contrasts sharply with their scarcity of action and significant occurrences, making the reading experience trying, even for admirers of Stifter's famously eventless style. Indeed, for this reason, the late work has until recently often been sidelined, if not simply ignored, by critics and readers alike.

Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (My Great-Grandfather's Notebook; hereafter: Mappe) is perhaps the greatest example of Adalbert Stifter's notoriously finicky writing habits. The text first appeared in installments in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode (Viennese Journal for Art, Literature, Theater, and Fashion) in 1841–42 (hereafter Journalfassung), and Stifter then reworked it for inclusion in the third volume of his Studien collection (Studies) in 1847 (hereafter Studienfassung). Stifter was typical for authors of the nineteenth century in republishing his works in book form, but his republications often comprised radically different works replete with new titles and major insertions, deletions, and emendations within the text. Nevertheless, the second publication usually marked the end of his work on his stories. This is not the case with the Mappe. Stifter revisited the text again in 1864, hoping to turn it into a standalone, two-volume work. After scrapping the third version, he attempted a fourth version in 1867, which he continued to edit in early 1868 on his deathbed. Despite some substantial changes across all four versions, the basic plot remains the same. The unnamed narrator returns to his childhood home and discovers his great-grandfather's notebook in the attic, whose contents he excerpts and transmits to the nondiagetic reader of Stifter's text. The great-grandfather Augustinus, known simply as the Doctor, had picked up the habit of journaling from his neighbor, the Obrist (Colonel), who consoles and soon befriends him after an aborted suicide attempt. The Doctor records his thoughts and daily events, and then seals the text. After several years have elapsed, he breaks the seals and rereads his entries, and is able better to appreciate his personal growth and the unexpected directions his life has taken.

“Melodrama” is not a word usually associated with Adalbert Stifter. The author whose third chapter of his most famous novel infamously turns on the question of whether or not it will rain, the author who devotes pages upon pages of text to detailed descriptions of gardening techniques or parquetry or snowdrifts, the author who seems himself to have lived a life of domestic tedium and bureaucratic obligation, broken up only by the pleasure of his copious meals, is not exactly known for his flamboyant emotionality or action-packed plots. While Stifter's peers admired his eye for detail and patient attunement to nature, they also criticized what they saw as a certain pedantic fastidiousness and a neglect of genuine human concerns in favor of a timeless, God’s-eye view of the world. In the age of the bourgeois tragedy and the social novel, Stifter, so ran the general consensus, was an outlier. At worst, his writings were deemed ploddingly reactionary and insipid; at best, they were seen as the work of a talented if limited miniaturist: masterly, at times even lovely— but dull.

Adalbert Stifter reminded readers in “Wiener Salonscenen” (Viennese Salon Scenes), the final installment of Wien und die Wiener in Bildern aus dem Leben (Vienna and the Viennese in Sketches from Life, 1841–44), that his roots were in rural Upper Bohemia: “Ich glaube dem Leser schon gesagt zu haben, daß ich so glücklich war, meine Kindheit nicht in den Mauern der großen Stadt verlebt zu haben” (HKG 9,1:444; I believe I have already told the reader that I was so fortunate not to have spent my childhood behind the walls of the big city). He explained that writing about the city was not that much different from writing about life in the countryside: “es ist hier, wie überall: die Einseitigkeit gebiert den Ekel, und die Vielseitigkeit die Harmonie” (HKG 9,1:439; it is here as it is everywhere: one-sidedness breeds disgust, and diversity [breeds] harmony). Stifter thought that it could be boring at a Viennese salon, and that there could be plenty of “Koth, Steine und Morast” (HKG 9,1:439; filth, stones, and morass) in an Alpine landscape). Despite his claims to the contrary, the opinion persists that he was more interested in rural than in urban life and that it would be a mistake to claim otherwise. This observation was cemented long ago for a variety of reasons: autobiographical remarks found in his letters and fiction; a narrative focus on nature; a publication history and scholarship privileging realist fiction over administrative correspondence and cultural criticism; an emphasis on single rather than collective authorship; and little scholarly consideration for mid-nineteenth-century city life and leisure.