Adalbert Stifter and the “Biedermeier” Imagination A Debate on Localism & Cosmopolianism

F. ROGER DEVLIN is the author of Alexander Kojève
and the Outcome of Modern Thought (2004).

An historian once suggested that the continued
availability of classic works of
literature in the Soviet Union helped victims
of the communist “experiment” retain their
grip on sanity by reminding them what
normal human life and society were like.
With the progress of social engineering in the
West, we may be approaching the point
where imaginative literature is called upon to
perform a similar service for us.

Not all literature is equally suitable for
such a purpose, however. Many of the “classics”
of modernism are marked, like the
modern era itself, by a tendency to sacrifice
the normal to the abnormal and by a morbid
fascination with the violent and grotesque.
What our age most needs is precisely what it
characteristically rejects: an imaginative literature
informed by a grasp of the normal
and normative in human experience, or, in
Chesterton’s overfamiliar formulation, by a
centricity rather than eccentricity of genius.
Such a countercurrent certainly exists within
modern literature, but often finds it difficult
to get a hearing. This is in part because
literary appreciation has in recent decades
been monopolized by a kind of guild bound
by a shared set of assumptions hostile to the
main tradition of Western humanism.

Some national literary traditions have suffered
at the hands of this gatekeepers’ guild
more than others, and German literature has
fared worse than most. In the first place,
Germany is a self-consciously “late born”
nation: an accepted canon of classic English,
French, Italian, and Spanish literature already
existed at a time when Germany was
still recovering from its confessional wars and
producing little serious literature in its own
language at all. Goethe came to maturity at
the high tide of the Enlightenment, on the
eve of the French Revolution. So there was
no great period of the national literature
unmarked by the political preoccupations of
modernity.

Furthermore, literary studies in Germany
have been marked to a greater extent and for
a longer period than in Britain or America by
political partisanship centered upon the conflicts
of the Revolutionary era: the left/right
and progressive/reactionary distinctions,
“democracy,” the “emancipation” of
women, and so forth. The specialist who
immerses himself in dusty nineteenth-century
German literary controversies is liable to
experience an eerie sense of familiarity in the
overriding concern he finds for the political
tendencies of works under consideration. In
a word, Political Correctness had about a
century’s head start in the German speaking
world. Not all such political distortions of
literature, be it noted, were of a strict Jacobin
character: there was also a trend, more pronounced
toward the end of the century,
toward germanomania or hypernationalism,
which was quite as willing as any politics of
liberation and leveling to sacrifice literary to
political concerns.

Perhaps the best example of the German
triumph of politics over literature is the
success of the term Biedermeier. Standard
histories of the literature (those in German
itself more than those in English) work with
a periodization in which the age between
Romanticism and late nineteenth-century
Realism is designated Biedermeier-Vormärz.
This literary epoch is said to coincide, ideally,
with Metternich’s regime in Austria
between the fall of Napoleon and 1848.
Viennese society during this time was extensively
penetrated by a network of police
informers; the government feared that any
lowering of its guard would clear the path to
power for some new Robespierre. A similar
situation existed in many of the other German
States. Writers of this period are accordingly
treated either as part of the
Vormärz, the “progressive” movement in
society leading toward the Revolutions of
1848, or as part of the “reactionary”
Biedermeier tendency. To mainstream German
critics, in other words, the central fact
about authors designated Biedermeier is not
anything actually found in their writings, but
the lack of progressive or revolutionary political
concerns there.

The term Biedermeier derives from bieder,
which originally meant morally upright, but
later developed negative connotations: unsophisticated,
naïve, stolid, “square.” A
Biedermann was a philistine, a narrow-minded
conformist, a man of conventional beliefs
and attitudes who never questioned authority.
There was actually a popular fictional
character named Gottlob Biedermaier under
whose name execrable verses were published
in a Munich newspaper, meant to satirize the
bieder outlook of the German middle class. It
was this character’s name which evolved into
the term German literary historians use to
describe some of the greatest writers in their
national literature. None of the authors so
designated have achieved the recognition in
the English speaking world of their more
“progressive” contemporaries such as
Heinrich Heine or Georg Büchner.

Leaving aside some secondary figures,
four writers of lasting importance are commonly
considered part of the Biedermeier
tendency: Franz Grillparzer, Eduard Mörike,
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and, most
importantly, Adalbert Stifter. These authors
never constituted a school or self-conscious
movement, but they undoubtedly shared a
tendency to turn away from Zeitfragen, the
political questions of the day, toward timeless
human concerns.

Franz Grillparzer was a prolific dramatist
influenced by the Spanish theatre of the siglo
de oro as well as by classical drama. This
speech from his play Der Traum ein Leben is
often cited as typifying the Biedermeier
mentality: “There is only one happiness here
below: peace of mind and a heart free of
guilt. Greatness is dangerous and glory an
empty game. It gives only empty shadows; it
takes so much away!” Critics are quick to
point out that this is more or less what the
Metternich regime would have liked its
subjects to believe. Yet the sentiment hardly
depends on the specific political situation of
its time and place: even in antiquity, writers
had expressed the view that the happiest
human condition is “the middle state” between
anonymous destitution and royal magnificence.

Eduard Mörike reluctantly earned his
bread as a provincial pastor. As a lyricist, he
may be seen as Goethe’s successor: beginning
as a romantic author of delicate lyrics evoking
moods and impressions, he was increasingly
influenced by classical models as time
went on. Common themes in his work include
the transience of life and the need to
accept the inherent limitations of the human
condition. His acknowledged masterpiece,
the delightful novella Mozart on the Journey to
Prague is an evocation of the world lost
through the French Revolution.

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was a Catholic
author chiefly of religious poetry, and an
embarrassment to “progressive” literary historians
in somewhat the same way Jane
Austen is in the English-speaking world:
while universally recognized as the greatest
woman writer in her language, she does not
offer feminists a straw to clutch at. Her
poetry is not easy to enjoy in translation, but
the novella The Jew’s Beech, a kind of murder
mystery, is available in English.

Adalbert Stifter was a poor country boy
who rose through natural talent and education
to serve as private tutor to the children
of the Viennese aristocracy before going on
to produce thirty novellas and two full-length
novels.

Little or nothing in this literature is counterrevolutionary
in the sense of being directly
concerned with the suppression of
revolution or “progress.” It does not
polemicize against Vormärz writers or satirize
socialist agitators; it includes no lionizing
portraits of authoritarian restorationists
of the Metternich type. It is not, in other
words, a mirror image of progressivism, but
merely represents a conscious turning away
from it in favor of the timeless aspects of the
human condition. In a letter to his publisher,
for example, Stifter protested that he had
devoted considerable study to economic and
political questions, but did not see why he
should share with readers of his stories his
thoughts on the German Customs Union.

Like virtually all Germans, these authors
revered Goethe, but they distinguished themselves
from most others by what they revered
in him. Goethe’s popular reputation has
always been due to his less mature works. To
the very end of his life, he was best known to
the general public as the author of the sentimental
novel The Sufferings of Young Werther,
completed when he was twenty-four. Even
when Faust came to be considered his central
achievement, the passages which especially
penetrated public consciousness and continue
to form the popular image of the poet
today are mainly those already found in the
Urfaust, a draft which already existed when
the poet was twenty-six years old, rather than
the other six-sevenths of the work composed
over the following half-century. The
Biedermeier authors were more likely to
focus on the works of Goethe’s maturity, or
even Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe
during the Last Seven Years of His Life. Stifter,
for example, wrote dismissively of Werther,
but admired Hermann and Dorothea, Iphigenia,
Wilhelm Meister and The Italian Journey.

Stifter is the writer with whom we shall be
principally concerned. Because he is largely
unknown to the English speaking world, it is
worth emphasizing to readers that he is a
recognized classic of German literature. Secondary
works on him appear regularly;
schools and streets are named after him;
public monuments and plaques commemorate
places associated with his life and fiction.
His stories are also assigned reading in German
Oberschulen—not necessarily a good
thing, perhaps, for his works are most likely
to appeal to mature readers; they largely lack
the dramatic action and surprising twists
which appeal to the young.

Adalbert Stifter was born in 1805 in the small
village of Oberplan in the Bohemian Forest,
at that period a remote corner of the Austrian
Empire. A couple circumstances of his childhood
may be reasonably inferred from the
autobiographical motifs in his mature works:
first, he spent a fair amount of time roaming
and observing the natural world around him,
the countryside and woods of the upper
Moldau valley; and second, his youthful
imagination was fired by his grandparents’
tales of “the old times,” relating mainly to
places and sights with which he was familiar.
His father, a textile merchant, died when the
boy was eleven. The family, at some sacrifice,
sent him to the Benedictine abbey
school at Kremsmünster in the Austrian mountains
south of Linz; he later described his time
there as the happiest of his life.

He went on to study at the University of
Vienna—first law, later physics, mathematics,
and astronomy—supporting himself by
tutoring others. These years were also marked
by a love affair which ended unhappily. He
married a capable housewife who lacked the
ability to appreciate her husband’s intellectual
or artistic interests. The couple struggled
financially, but Stifter’s intelligence and learning
permitted him a modest living as tutor to
the children of prominent Viennese families,
eventually including Metternich’s son.

Stifter did not publish his first story until
he was thirty-five years old, although he may
have been writing significantly earlier. A
famous, perhaps apocryphal story relates that
his hand was forced by one of his students.
She saw a wad of manuscript sticking out of
her tutor’s pocket, grabbed it out, began
reading, and exclaimed “Mama, Mr. Stifter
is secretly a writer—here’s a girl flying in the
air!”

The story, eventually published as The
Condor, deals with a young woman’s determination
to prove herself just as good as the
boys by taking part in a hot-air balloon
ascent. To her profound embarrassment, she
becomes ill from the altitude; the flight is
aborted amid ill-tempered remarks from the
men. Her fiancé, put off by this competitive
stance toward men, breaks off his engagement
to her and, in the first version of the
story, his parting words are “become a
woman!”

Stifter’s early stories, published in Viennese
magazines and almanacs, are written in the
romantic style of Jean Paul and E. T. A.
Hoffmann, but the natural bent of his genius
developed quickly in another direction. In
his third published story, The Village on the
Heath, he begins to come into his own with
a tale about a young man who spent years
wandering the world before deciding that
happiness was most to be found in the rooted
agricultural community of his ancestral village.
The hero pays a price for his return,
however: the rejection of his marriage proposal
by a lady whose family cannot comprehend
his lack of “ambition.”

The romantic poet Eichendorff, in a contemporary
review, remarked that Stifter’s
work contained “not a trace of modern
Zerissenheit (turmoil; literally torn-ness).”
Indeed, his mature work is alien to the whole
central aesthetic current of romantic and
postromantic literature. By the same token,
it can be difficult for modern audiences to
approach him in the correct spirit. To many
readers today, the very definition of a good
story is a “page turner,” a book that one
“can’t put down.” To appreciate Stifter, on
the other hand, one must above all learn to
slow down. The reader who becomes impatient
for him to get to the point is probably
missing his point.

Stifter bears constantly in mind that men
live in a cosmos whose order they can never
understand more than in part. Their limited
understanding, moreover, must grow slowly
and gradually; there is no way the process can
be forced. Wisdom consists partly in an
acceptance of this state of affairs.

Moreover, men must act without ever
having all the relevant information concerning
others and their motivations. In Stifter’s
narratives, characters are revealed gradually,
both to other characters and to the reader. He
would undoubtedly have approved of the
young George Washington’s sixtieth rule of
conduct: “Be not immodest in urging your
friends to discover a secret”; a number of
Stifter’s characters in fact show particular
delicacy on this score. Human intimacy is
something we all long for, but which is
inherently difficult and problematic. Put
differently, Stifter is at the farthest possible
remove from the “tell all” biography or
confessional autobiography in the manner of
Rousseau, where sincerity and “honesty”
(understood in a peculiar sense) are the highest
virtues.

One of his finest stories, The Recluse, begins
by describing a lively boy who spends his
days wandering the gorgeous Austrian countryside
with his friends, returning to plentiful
suppers with his devoted family. Comically,
the boy strikes a pose of romantic Weltschmerz,
insisting he is deeply unhappy and shall never
marry. He is then sent to visit his uncle,
whom he has never met before. He is to
inherit the uncle’s property, and comes at the
old man’s request.

The uncle lives in almost complete isolation
on an island in a lake, amid the ruins of
a disused monastery. The boy is bewildered
by these new surroundings and by the old
man’s taciturnity and standoffishness. The
central section of the story is a leisurely
account of the manner in which he gradually
adapts himself to his new circumstances. He
explores his physical surroundings and has
some tense interactions with his uncle. He
writes to his family but mysteriously gets no
response. His stay is unexpectedly prolonged,
again at the uncle’s request, and we begin to
suspect that the old man cares about the boy
more than he is able to express.

Shortly before the boy absolutely must go,
he discovers that his uncle had intervened
with the family to prevent their writing to
him during his long, lonely stay on the island.
The boy is understandably upset, and, in the
climactic moment of the story angrily expresses
to his uncle the confusion and frustration
he has long been feeling. The uncle
responds unperturbed: “You are judging it
all according to your lights; you may well
find many things strange when they have a
point and purpose which you do not know”—
a statement which might serve as a motto for
much of Stifter’s fiction.

The uncle’s explanation of his unexpected
conduct involves once more the theme of
sexual complementarity, but the treatment is
incomparably subtler than in the author’s
first story:

By constantly writing you letters they would
have kept you in the same sickly-sweet state of
dependence as you have grown up in. I had to
snatch you out into the sun and air, to prevent you
from becoming a soft creature like your father, an
irresolute creature who betrayed the person he
thought he loved. You ought not to squander
your strength on trembling women, but use it
against rocks—and in me you would find more
rock than anything else. No one can give real help,
profound help, unless from time to time he can do
a deed of force. You occasionally show your teeth,
and yet you have a kind heart. That is as it should
be.

Having assured himself of his nephew’s
independence of his overly feminine family
milieu, he startles the perhaps fourteenyear-
old boy with this stern injunction: “At
present, the most important thing for you to
do is to get married.” We are provided an
indirect glimpse into the uncle’s own character
and motives: the longing for offspring,
grown acute in the childless old man, expresses
itself in his emphasis to the nephew on
the importance of founding a family in a
timely—indeed, a comically over-timely—
manner. (The story’s German title might be
better translated The Old Bachelor.)

Many of Stifter’s stories improve on rereading,
because the significance that is
gradually revealed casts back light on earlier
episodes, and especially on those which the
impatient modern reader will be most likely
to dismiss as “boring.” Stifter’s manner of
composition accorded well with this view of
the world. He did not invent a cast of
characters and then set them in motion; he
did not begin stories without knowing how
they were to end. Most of his novellas exist in
two versions—the first published in a magazine
or almanac, and another, longer, studiously
rewritten version in book form. He
drove his publisher to distraction by a refusal
to hand anything over which had not been
repeatedly revised. A common pattern is that
the later versions are noticeably more subtle
and understated; one critic refers to his
“mania for moderation.”

Another stumbling block for many readers
of Stifter today is the frequency of leisurely
natural description in his pages. He is,
by common consent of the critics, the great
master of descriptive prose in German literature.
Eric Blackall notes that his descriptions
benefit from not being “static”; he draws the
reader in by evoking the fluid impressions
made upon characters by natural objects as
they wander through a landscape. This dynamic
mode of description does not, however,
imply a nebulous romantic subjectivism.
For the romantics nature was a realm of
escape, an object of reverie as much as
reverence, an undifferentiated notion as much
as an observed reality. For Stifter, a child of
the countryside, nature was an object of
conscientious study. Qualified specialists have
remarked upon the scientific accuracy of
Stifter’s descriptions; the plant species he had
in mind, for example, often admit of precise
identification. His preferred subjects for description
are the forests and mountains he
knew from Oberplan and Kremsmünster,
but as he gained artistic confidence he went
on to transport his readers to areas of which
he had no personal experience, including the
Hungarian Puszta and even North Africa.

The eminent Swiss critic Emil Staiger, in
an essay perceptively entitled Adalbert Stifter,
Poet of Reverence, notes that nature is no mere
picturesque ornament in Stifter’s work, but a
means of conveying to readers his essentially
religious view of the world: “the landscape is,
again and again, the image of God, the
unchanging space which, like a ring of
eternity, frames changeable human existence.”
This does not mean, however, that
Stifter’s interest is limited to “unspoiled”
nature, as is the case with many romantic
primitivists and most of today’s environmentalists;
on the contrary, the human activity
he frames within the unchanging natural
landscape is very often agriculture, a pursuit
he held in particularly high regard.

These observations may be illustrated with
reference to Brigitta, one of the author’s most
characteristic works and that rare thing—a
genuinely great love story. The narrator of
Brigitta is a man who has devoted his youth to
travel, “hoping to experience and to investigate
God knows what.” He describes his
journey to visit “the Major,” a man he first
met in Italy, who by this time was managing
an ancestral estate in Eastern Hungary. The
Major has invited him for an extended visit,
writing that “he was now finally of a mind to
stick to one tiny point on this earth and to let
his foot touch no soil other than that of his
homeland, in which he had found a goal that
he had looked for elsewhere on the globe in
vain.” The younger and more restless man
accepts the Major’s invitation because he has
not yet seen Hungary, and also because he is
curious what momentous thing the Major
could possibly have found there.

The German narrator, a native of the
Alps, describes the profound impression made
upon him by the endless desolate plain of
Hungary, where he could see “nothing for
whole days but the distant reddish-blue glow
of the steppe and the thousand little white
dots on it which were cattle,” and where
every object was twice as distant as it appeared.
After casually wandering for weeks
among shepherds and mounted herdsmen, he
finally decides to make straight for his friend’s
estate. In the vicinity, he comes upon a
“woman about forty years old wearing,
strangely enough, the wide trousers of that
country and sitting on horseback like a
man.” We later learn that this is Brigitta. He
borrows a horse and guide from her and
arrives at his destination late at night, where
a servant leads him to well-appointed quarters
to await the Major’s return the next
morning.

After a happy reunion with his old friend,
the narrator spends several days making the
rounds of his estate and observing its activity.
He keeps meaning to ask the Major about the
goal which had attached him so strongly to
such a place, but repeatedly forgets. In the
meantime, he visits gardens, vineyards, fruit
plantations, wheat fields, breeding stations,
and stables. Observing the Major’s glasshouses,
he remarks that he understood “as
much and as little as a ceaseless traveler who
has visited countless glasshouses can understand.”
His friend tells him “if one really
wants to get results from these charming
pursuits one has to study them from scratch.”

Gradually he gets to know the men who
work the estate. The life he observes is
patriarchal: the people of the country are
intensely devoted to their paterfamilias the
Major, and he reciprocates with a deep
concern for their well-being. Meals are large,
communal affairs. Everywhere he observes
order, harmony, and purposeful activity.
Eventually it occurs to the narrator that he
need no longer ask what goal the Major has
discovered. He begins to feel dubious about
his own wandering life, and even interrupts
the narrative to reveal: “I have the Major to
thank that I now have a dear wife and
household for whom to work.”

The Major always speaks of his neighbor
Brigitta in terms of the highest praise, but the
narrator only begins to piece together her
story when he starts visiting other nearby
estates. She had come to the area fifteen years
previously and “worked miracles on the
stony ground,” inspiring others in the area to
imitation, including the Major himself.

Brigitta had been a homely child who
grew up in the shadow of her more beautiful
sisters. Stifter limns with great empathy the
hightened sensitivity this produced in her.
Brigitta rarely came into company, and
compensated for the lack of human attachments
with a rich, solitary life of the imagination.
Mysteriously, one day her quiet
demeanor attracts the notice of a particularly
handsome young officer desired by many
other girls. She vaguely anticipates trouble
from such an unusual match and attempts to
dissuade him from courting her, telling him
she would demand greater love than the most
beautiful girl in the world, and that he would
regret his decision. Unsurprisingly, this interests
the young man even more. Eventually
they are married and she bears him a son.

Shortly thereafter, the young husband goes
on a hunting trip. He innocently makes, and
then incautiously continues, the acquaintance
of an exceptionally beautiful girl. One day in
a moment of high spirits “he pulled her
suddenly to him, pressed her to his heart, and
before he could see whether she was angry or
joyful, leapt onto his horse and fled.”

They do not meet on purpose after that
day, but both are visibly embarrassed by an
accidental social encounter, and Brigitta
guesses the truth. Several days later she quietly
asks her husband for a divorce. Shocked,
he entreats her repeatedly, but she only
answers “I told you you would regret it.”
Finally he cries “woman, I hate you inexpressibly!”
and rides off. Six months later
papers arrive granting her a divorce, custody
of their son, and generous financial conditions.
Nothing further is heard from him.

Brigitta responds to this personal sorrow
by moving with her small son to a family
estate in a remote corner of the Puszta where
she is entirely unknown. As the boy grows,
she begins exploring the surroundings with
him, and soon she finds new purpose in
working from dawn to dusk on the estate
with him. By the time the Major arrives on
his own neighboring estate, she is leading an
agricultural revival of the entire area.

The novella culminates in a moment of
unbought grace which ranks among the
finest scenes from Stifter’s pen and reveals the
essentially Christian cast of his imagination.

Stifter’s novellas did find an appreciative
audience among his contemporaries, but
contrary as they were to modern tastes,
dissenting voices were heard as well. One of
the latter was Friedrich Hebbel, a dramatist
engagé with a preference for extravagant
characters and situations. He ridiculed Stifter
publicly in a somewhat clumsy epigram for
his focus on (as Hebbel saw it) ordinary things
and insignificant events. Stifter resisted the
urging of friends to respond directly and in
kind; instead, Hebbel’s challenge provided
the occasion for him to explain his artistic
credo in the preface to his next collection of
stories:

The gentle breeze, the murmur of water, the
growth of grain, the greening of the earth, the
radiance of the sky, the twinkling of the stars I
consider great; the splendidly rising storm, the
lightening that splits houses, the tempest that
lashes the breakers, the fire-spewing volcano, the
earthquake that lays waste entire countries I do
not consider greater. Indeed, I consider them
smaller, because they are merely the particular
consequences of much higher laws. Such phenomena
are only more conspicuous and catch the
eye of the ignorant and inattentive; while the
mind of the true observer tends especially toward
the whole and the general, because that alone is
what sustains the world.

As in external nature, so in the human race: an
entire life full of just dealing, simplicity, selfmastery,
reasonableness, effective activity within
an allotted sphere, admiration for the beautiful,
combined with a cheerful, serene death I consider
great; terrible outbursts of anger, the lust for
vengeance, the inflamed spirit that tears down,
changes, destroys, and in its passion often throws
away its own life, I consider not greater but
smaller.

Stifter’s own aim, he says, is “to try to
observe the gentle law that guides the human
race.” Or, in our own terms, to grasp the
normal and normative in human experience.

The story Limestone is perhaps the best
example of the undramatic and unprepossessing
sort of life Stifter considered great.
Originally entitled The Poor Benefactor, it was
probably inspired to some extent by his
fellow “Biedermeier” author Grillparzer’s
novella The Poor Musician, in which a narrator
discovers moral greatness in a humble
social outcast.

The narrator of this tale is a surveyor,
employed by the state in mapping an unfrequented,
hilly karst region whose few inhabitants
eke out a living extracting lime from
the otherwise useless soil. Some years previously
he had been present at the consecration
of a new church, and had noticed a shabbylooking
priest who compulsively pushed his
shirtcuffs back beneath his worn out tunic as
if ashamed of them. The man ate and spoke
as little as possible, and was the first to leave.
Now the surveyor stumbles upon this man
again sitting in quiet meditation on a hillock
in this desolate region, and discovers that he
is the local priest. After introducing himself,
the surveyor comments: “and so we have met
again in this dreadful part of the country!”
The priest responds: “It is as God made it… Sometimes it is more beautiful than anywhere
else in the world.” The priest has
served this parish twenty-seven years, and is
the first it has ever had who did not request
a transfer to a more desirable location.

One day the surveyor is forced to seek
shelter from an approaching storm at the
priest’s miserable presbytery, where he shares
the man’s supper of black bread, wild strawberries,
and milk, and learns that the man
sleeps on a bare wooden plank with a Bible
for a pillow. In sharp contrast to the rest of
these surroundings, the priest is supplied
with the finest linen money can buy. It turns
out that his nervous pushing back of his
shirtcuffs is due to embarrassment at an
inability to overcome an attachment to this
one worldly luxury.

The following morning the meadow in
front of the presbytery is flooded as the
narrator takes his leave. Schoolchildren are
wading through the muddy water on their
way to school. The surveyor spots his host
standing in the water up to his armpits
guiding the children across.

Later, when the priest falls ill, the surveyor
helps tend him and learns about his
past. He was from a well-to-do family, but
lacked his brother’s practical bent for managing
the family business. He became a
priest after this business was suddenly and
unexpectedly ruined. His taste for fine linen
turns out to be the souvenir of an early,
innocent but thwarted love. The priest asks
the surveyor to guard a copy of his last will
and testament, and the man agrees.

Many years later, when the will is opened,
it turns out that the priest’s extreme poverty
was due to his putting aside any money he
acquired for the purpose of building a school
on the other side of the river, so the children
would no longer be endangered when the
river flooded. The priest’s parishioners had
always assumed he was merely a miser, and
he had even been robbed three times on the
assumption that he must be hiding his wealth.

The sum the priest had been able to put
aside was pitifully inadequate for building a
school, but when the story gets around,
wealthier people are so struck by the man’s
unselfishness that a collection is taken up and
a new school is in fact built. “On the grave
of the school’s founder stands the one and
only cross that has been erected for a priest of
that parish. I daresay many who visit it are
filled with an emotion which the priest did
not inspire in them during his lifetime.”

For all his unpopularity with “progressive”
critics, Stifter held, as they did, that
literature is vitally linked to the larger life of
the society in which it is produced. To those
who accused him of ignoring the “great”
political issues of his time, he responded with
words his critics have not always pondered
carefully enough:

Declining peoples first lose their moderation.
They go after the particular, they throw themselves
shortsightedly upon what is insignificant,
they set the contingent above the general, then
they seek pleasure and the sensual, they seek
satisfaction of their hatred and envy, their art
depicts what is one-sided, then the distracted, the
untrue, the adventurous, eventually the sensuous,
the exciting, and ultimately immorality and vice.
The distinction between good and evil is lost, the
individual scorns the whole and pursues his pleasure
or his destruction, and thus the nation falls
prey to its inner confusion or to an external, more
savage but more powerful enemy.

Further Reading

The best anthology of Biedermeier prose in
English is Novellas of Realism I, (vol. 37 of The
Continuum Publishing Company’s German
Library), Jeffrey Sammons ed., 1989; it includes
works by Droste-Hülshoff, the Swiss
Jeremias Gotthelf (another “reactionary” storyteller),
Grillparzer, Mörike, and by Stifter
Granite, Limestone, and the important Preface
to Colored Stones. Mention should be made of
David Luke’s edition of Mörike: Mozart’s
Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems,
available from Penguin, short and carefully
chosen, with a fine introductory essay.

David Luke also produced the first English
volume of Stifter in 1968: Limestone and
other Stories, the “other stories” being Tourmaline
and The Recluse, and his introduction
is again especially good. Another collection
of Stifter’s novellas is Brigitta: with Abdias,
Limestone and The Forest Path, edited by
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, published in the
United States by Dufour Editions, 1990;
reprinted by Penguin as Brigitta and Other
Tales. Dufour makes a ludicrous attempt to
gain an entrée for Stifter with contemporary
audiences by describing him in their blurb as
“far ahead of his time in portraying the
diseased subconscious” and making reference
to sexual repression, childhood alienation,
and Kafka; ignore these inanities in
favor of the unpretentious translations themselves.
Rock Crystal, one of Stifter’s most
popular tales, can be found in Harry
Steinhauer’s German Stories/Deutsche
Erzählungen: a Bilingual Anthology from The
University of California Press, 1984. Stifter’s
masterpiece is the “novel of education” Indian
Summer, published by Peter Lang in a
translation by Wendell Frye, 1985. Several
important novellas remain untranslated.