Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868)

Ich hätte nich geglaubt, dass ein Autor des Biedermeier heute so wirken kann. Seine Naturbeschreibungen sind einfach genial, er entfaltet kräftige Bilder und der oppulente, überholte Sprachduktus ist wie eine angenehm, schwere Tuchent die sich über dem heutigen Denglisch-Business Trash legt.
Das er soziale Lagen ausklammert und Frauen auf ihr schönes kindlich sein verkürzt mag man kritisieren, wenn man die Zeit beachtet in der dieses Buch geschrieben wurde.

Adalbert Stifter is one of those writers who often gets praised and cited as an influence by other writers — famous fans have included Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, W.H. Auden, Ilse Aichinger, Marianne Moore, and W.G. Sebald — but who was never really a popular success, in his own time or since. He didn't publish much, and only a few of his stories have been translated. He was a painter as well as a writer (although the publishers have picked a Caspar David Friedrich for the cover, not one of show more his), and his writing, which sits somewhere between Romanticism and Realism, tends to be very interested in the way characters interact with landscape, much less in the way they interact with each other. Characters observe each other or tell each other long stories, they don't chat. The political and social context is defined visually, by the landscape. His style is rather individual: the heavyweight sentences aren't always easy to navigate through, but it's usually worth the effort.

This Diogenes paperback contains the stories: Abdias (1842), Brigitta (1843), Zuversicht, Bergkristall (1845), Kalkstein (1848), and Der Kuß von Sentze (1866).

The novella Bergkristall (translated as Rock-crystal) is probably his most famous shorter work: it's a story of two children getting lost in the snow on Christmas Eve whilst crossing a mountain pass between their grandmother's house and the village where their parents live. With its gloriously scary descriptions of the disorienting effect of the weather and the children's battle to stay awake and warm, it's a perfect choice for reading aloud in front of the fire over the holidays. I was struck by the way Stifter carefully makes us familiar with the setting and the way the village relates to the mountain and the pass before we get to the real drama: he takes us back and forth over the pass several times in good weather, pointing out all the relevant landmarks along the way, until it becomes part of our own mental landscape. And of course the context of the story allows Stifter to slip in a lot of reflections about what Christmas really means for children and for a modern village community.

The other three novella-length tales here all focus on outsiders: Abdias tells us the story of a Sephardi refugee from North Africa who settles in an Austrian valley with his infant daughter. We get some splendid desert scenery — which Stifter had presumably never seen himself — as well as the gentle, grassy slopes and blue flax-fields of Abdias's new home. Brigitta is another outsider, an "ugly" woman who reinvents herself as a cross-dressing landowner on the Hungarian Puszta in order to renegotiate marriage on her own terms. Kalkstein takes us into the life of a country priest in the barren limestone country of the Tirol, a man laughed at for his simplicity and self-deception, but who still manages to act effectively to improve the lives of the poor people in his parish. All three stories show a huge amount of sympathy for the prickly, marginalised central character, without necessarily making them attractive.

The final piece, the very late story Der Kuß von Sentze, is hard to place: it's a tale of an aristocratic family with a tradition of resolving internal conflicts by means of a formal kiss of reconciliation between the contending parties. Where these are of opposite sexes, the tradition has been known to result in cousin-marriage. I'm not sure whether we are being shown this as a lesson in Christian tolerance or as a satire on the aristocracy's talent for putting family interest above personal preference. show less

Though Stifter is, I fear, largely unknown outside the German-speaking world, he is an exceptional writer. Thomas Mann called him “one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature.” Kafka, von Hoffmansthal, Nietzsche, Hesse, Rilke, and Sebald were fans as well. The appearance of this—one of his better-known works—in the NYRB Classics series several years ago suggests I am not alone in that opinion. This collection of six show more interlinked novellas concerns itself with man’s relationship to nature, broadly construed, the subject of much of Stifter’s work. Each story is quite different from the others and some are stronger works; “Rock Crystal” is easily the best-known of them, having long been in print in English as a stand-alone work for generations (including its own edition in the NYRB Classics series). Briefly summarizing the stories (or even their themes) is a fool’s errand but an excellent essay in The Nation points out that:
“Stifter stands out for the attention he lavished on the natural world. Attacked as ‘psychologically uncurious’ in his own time, his fiction in fact reveals, with great subtlety, the ways in which our sense of self is mediated by our surroundings. Natural phenomena are not simply metaphors in his stories, though they serve a dramatic purpose. Rather, they are the medium through which people come to know their convictions….”
. . .
"As W.G. Sebald has pointed out, his repeated expressions of faith in God ‘bear all the signs of unbelief,’ and nature, which he rapturously praised, reveals a darker face in his fiction, over which storms, floods, fires, and blizzards loom large…. Rejecting the pious ‘constructions of meaning’ placed by Stifter on his own texts, Sebald argues that their “’real gravity [is] in profound agnosticism and a cosmic pessimism.’”
I have been a fan of Stifter’s writing for many years. This isn’t his strongest work, although it contains some remarkable writing and some very moving and sophisticated portions. Still, the translation is mostly an easy read and the curious will be well-rewarded. show less

A curious little book I couldn't put down. Written in the 19thC. Set in the mountains of southern Germany, Stifter writes in long, clear, dense, descriptive sentences. The landscape is everything - forming individuals as much as groups. Two villages a 3 hour walk away are as different as a neighbouring nation. And it takes a generation or more to be accepted. You may not be accepted if you move for marriage from one town to the next.

A cobbler marries the daughter of the next village. Her show more family are very rich. The cobbler had to prove himself. He did. You have to be tough in this world. the neighbourhood is as tough as the mountains.

It's all descriptive prose:

Ascent of the mountain is made from the valley. One follows in the southerly direction a smooth, well made road that leads by a neck or "col" into another valley. A col is a mountain range of moderate height, connecting two larger, more considerable, ranges; and following it, one passes between the ranges from one valley to another.

I hadn't known what a col was. For about ten years, I watched the Tour de France and heard the word as I watched cyclists ascend and descend "The Col XXXX".

And note Stifters's use of semi-colon that makes the rhythm of the sentence. It feels old fashioned but it's very readable.

The cobbler's children, brother and a sister, visit their grandmother in the next visit for a Christmas Eve lunch.

The ground then rises sharply and the ascent is long; one climbs in a worn groove or trench, which has the advantage of preventing one from losing the way over the vast sameness of heath.

They are warned to leave early. Grandma packs them some treats and presents in plenty of time for them to return before nightfall, issuing the same warnings their parents as the parents earlier in the day. The return however goes off course. What we get is a description of weather and landscape change in such detail and drama, it's a kind of cinematic experience in words.

The children's journey is tough, frightening, character and legend forming. They face more than they had known in their brief lives:

As far as the eye could reach there was only ice. Pointed masses and irregular clumps thrusting up from the fearsome snow encrusted ice. Instead of a barricade that could be surmounted, with snow beyond, as they had expected, yet other walls of ice rose from the buttress, cracked and fissured, with innumerable meandering blue veins, and beyond these walls, others like them and beyond, others, until the falling snow blurred the distance in its veil of grey.

Whew! What a read! show less