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).