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.

Stifter's body of work is a typical, yet particularly interesting case of how nineteenth-century authors straddled the publication contexts of multi-author journals, anthologies, and annuals and of single-author books and collected works editions. As is the case with nearly all authors in the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of Stifter's writings were first published in cultural journals and anthologies. At the same time, he aspired to have his single-author collections elevate him above the status of a mere writer for journals. His notorious obsession with reworking his texts—polishing and filing them down (ausfeilen), as he put it—is unique in literary history. Stifter's affirmative vision of what Johannes John calls “the utopia of the finished text” is undeniable, something that has led scholars to apply classicizing conceptions of completion and monumentality to Stifter's mature work, with ideals of perfection (Vollendung) informing the critical works editions published not long after his death. These editions sought to profile him as a “classic” German-language author, an aspiration arguably supported by Stifter's stated affinity to Goethe later in life.

Searching for waste in Stifter's Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), a novel in which everything glistens in cleanliness and orderliness, may seem like an odd endeavor.1 The domestic spaces that the protagonist inhabits as a child and visits as an adult are veritable paragons of orderly households. These include the city apartment and subsequent suburban domicile of his parents in Vienna as well as the two country estates that help shape his later development: the Asperhof belonging to his paternal friend and mentor Risach and the Sternenhof, where his future wife Natalie and her mother Mathilde reside. Not a single speck of dust sullies these abodes, nothing lies purposeless within their confines; furniture is looked after with care, household items treated with deference. The same holds true for the extramural gardens and their harmoniously arranged grounds, particularly at Risach's Rosenhaus, where every fallen leaf is instantly removed, sandy pathways are regularly raked smooth, and trees receive a thorough bark-scrubbing every spring. Indeed, even in the otherwise detritus-generating realm of labor—here for instance the Asperhof's artisanal workshop—order and tidiness remain a top priority. Thus, given this initial sampling of hygienic examples drawn from the novel, what is the point of pursuing traces of waste therein?

Adalbert Stifter, “the greatest landscape-painter in literature,” as Hannah Arendt famously described the Austrian author, is renowned for his evocative prose describing the meadows, forests, and mountains of his Central European home, which encompassed both his native Bohemian Forest and the Upper Austrian Alps that he frequented later in his adult life. Yet, glaciers, one of the most striking geological features of the Alps, are largely missing from his oeuvre. The icy masses appear prominently in only two of Stifter's works: the 1845/53 short story Bergkristall (Rock Crystal) about two children who go missing in the mountains on Christmas Eve and Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer), the 1857 three-volume Bildungsroman that follows Heinrich Drendorf up and down the Austrian peaks as part of his ideological and aesthetic development. In a third text, Das alte Siegel (The Ancient Seal, 1844/1847), a glacier is briefly mentioned in one paragraph when the titular seal is thrown into a crevasse.

This dearth of glaciers is particularly surprising in light of Stifter's otherwise deep interest in geology and “lifelong obsession” with wintery landscapes. Indeed, from contemporary reports, we know that Stifter did not ignore glaciers out of a lack of interest—he was fascinated by the frozen forms. He just never stepped foot on a glacier himself. This may explain why he never painted glaciers in his visual works and why he largely omitted them from his literary texts. It makes the instances in which glaciers do appear, however, all the more remarkable. This chapter is not interested in the narrative or symbolic role of glaciers in Stifter's stories, but rather the act of depicting the ice itself. How did Stifter manage to portray glaciers? What do they tell us about his prose and the Austrian landscape he so carefully sought to describe?

Introduction

One of the cardinal notions about rivers and related water bodies is that they have immense social, cultural, spiritual, and economic significance. While the proof of the social, cultural, and spiritual significance of rivers was the objective of most of the previous chapters in this book, the last two chapters focus primarily on the economic aspects of the exploitation of rivers in Africa and the world at large. Both chapters explored the relationship between rivers and other water bodies (such as rivers and seas) in the forging of trade relationships between countries and undertaking intra-regional and international trades and exchanges. It goes without saying that rivers are important means of moving people, products, and ideas from one location to another. While a resilient future for international trade is anticipated by certain current trends and dynamics such as recent technological advancements, rise in the adoption and execution of regional multilateral agreements, and improvements in infrastructure building and transportation logistics, the fact, however, is that river transport systems in Africa are currently facing a multitude of challenges, including infrastructure deficits, security concerns, and environmental impacts. Rivers will remain a significant contributor to the delivery of the projected future of international trade, most especially in intra- African trade and export of agricultural produce, which depends largely on the use of rivers for production, management, processing, and transportation.

As the major economic activity embarked upon by humans since the dawn of time, agriculture is one of the important aspects of human needs, and rivers have been found to have utility and significance.