Motley Stones Read online

  adalbert stifter (1805–1868), the son of a provincial linen weaver and flax merchant, was born in the rural Bohemian market town of Oberplan, then part of the Austrian Empire but today in the Czech Republic. When Stifter was still a child, his father was crushed under an overturned cart; the family was left poor, but Stifter’s grandfather sent him to school at the Benedictine monastery of Kremsmünster and he proved a brilliant student. Stifter attended the University of Vienna, where he studied law but failed to obtain a degree. Instead he supported himself as a much sought-after tutor to the children of the high Viennese aristocracy while also acquiring a small reputation as a landscape painter. For a number of years Stifter eagerly courted the daughter of a rich businessman, but his lack of worldly position turned her family against him, and in 1835 he married Amalia Mohaupt, a milliner. In 1840, he published his first story, the success of which started him on a career as a writer, and in 1850, after working as an editor on two newspapers, he was appointed supervisor of elementary schools for Upper Austria. Stifter’s works include numerous stories and novellas, as well as Witiko, a historical novel, and Indian Summer, considered one of the finest examples of the German bildungsroman. Stifter’s mental and physical health deteriorated in his final years. In 1868, suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, he committed suicide.

  isabel fargo cole is a writer and a translator of such authors as Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Franz Fühmann, Wolfgang Hilbig, and Klaus Hoffer. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

  MOTLEY STONES

  ADALBERT STIFTER

  Translated from the German by

  ISABEL FARGO COLE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Translation and foreword copyright © 2021 by Isabel Fargo Cole

  All rights reserved.

  This translation has been published with support from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Art, Culture, Public Services, and Sports.

  First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2021.

  Cover image: Adalbert Stifter, Study of Rocks (Stag’s Leap, Hell’s Valley, Black Forest), 1840; © Vienna Museum; photograph by Birgit and Peter Kainz

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stifter, Adalbert, 1805–1868, author. | Cole, Isabel Fargo, 1973– translator.

  Title: Motley stones / Adalbert Stifter; translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole.

  Other titles: Bunte Steine. English

  Description: New York City: New York Review Books, 2021. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020015769 (print) | LCCN 2020015770 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375205 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375212 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Stifter, Adalbert, 1805–1868—Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PT2525 .A15 2020 (print) | LCC PT2525 (ebook) | DDC 833/.7—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015769

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015770

  ISBN 978-1-68137-521-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Translator’s Foreword

  MOTLEY STONES

  Preface

  Introduction

  Granite

  Limestone

  Tourmaline

  Rock Crystal

  Cat-Silver

  Rock Milk

  TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

  The wafting of the air the trickling of the water the growing of the grain the surging of the sea the budding of the earth the shining of the sky the glimmering of the stars is what I deem great; the thunderstorm that looms in splendor, the lightning that cleaves houses, the storm that drives the breakers, the fire-spewing mountain, the earthquake that buries whole lands, these I do not deem greater than those first phenomena, indeed I deem them smaller, for they are the mere effects of much higher laws.

  —Adalbert Stifter, preface to Motley Stones

  “We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race,” Stifter concludes, both modestly and grandly. His “gentle law” reflects the aspirations of the Biedermeier period between the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutions of 1848, a time when peace came at the price of a stifling conservatism. Today, Biedermeier is a scornful byword for bourgeois piety, the retreat into private idylls; Stifter is regarded as a paradigmatic writer of the period and popularly misunderstood as a stodgy sentimentalist. Yet Thomas Mann called him “one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature,” and for Franz Kafka he was “my obese brother.” With a sensibility too idiosyncratic for his contemporaries to grasp, Stifter explored the abyss in the idyll.

  Adalbert Stifter was born in 1805 to a family of small tradesmen in the village of Oberplan in the Bohemian Forest (now Horní Planá, in the Czech Republic). A bright child, but prone to self-destructive mood swings, Adalbert was mentored by the village schoolteacher, and in 1818, a year after his father’s accidental death, was admitted to the prestigious school at the Benedictine abbey in Kremsmünster. A country bumpkin among children of privilege, he was homesick but thrived academically.

  It was a pivotal moment in European history: In 1814, on the eve of Napoleon’s defeat, Europe’s great powers met at the Congress of Vienna to negotiate a new, reactionary order, stamping out the liberal aspirations that had sparked the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The congress was chaired by Prince Klemens von Metternich, who would maneuver the Austrian Empire to dominance and turn it into the first modern surveillance state.

  In 1826, Stifter enrolled as a law student at the University of Vienna, but he became sidetracked by science and literature courses and a growing interest in painting. Meanwhile, he earned his way as a private tutor for wealthy families. With a talent for teaching, he found himself in demand, but it was a precarious job, marked by the social gulf between himself and his employers. Unprepossessing in appearance, smallpox-scarred, socially awkward, and plagued by depression, the young man struggled with the anonymity of the big city, yet found solace in its cultural offerings. Vienna’s sparkling artistic life was the sugar on the pill of Europe’s most repressive regime.

  During a summer visit to Oberplan, Stifter fell in love with Fanny Greipl, the daughter of an affluent merchant family in a neighboring town. From 1827 to 1835 he would pursue a conflicted, largely epistolary romance with the woman he saw as his soul mate and a “saint.” She appears to have reciprocated his feelings, but their relationship was thwarted by opposition from Fanny’s parents—a student moonlighting as a tutor was hardly a desirable match—and by Stifter’s own insecurities. He vacillated between his artistic pursuits and his studies, quitting the university in 1830. And in 1832 he began a relationship with a beautiful demimondaine called Amalia Mohaupt, the daughter of an impoverished military family. The two had little in common; unlike Fanny, Amalia was uneducated and uncultured. Stifter went on pining after Fanny and dithering until she stopped answering his letters and married another man in 1836. She died giving birth to her first child. Her death, and the lost chance at true love, left a deep mark on Stifter and his work.

  Meanwhile, in 1837, he had married Amalia. He was at a professional dead end and had committed to an incompatible relationship. But amid personal crisis, he forged ahead with his writing, achieving his first publication in 1840: the novella “Der Condor.” Written with the surreal intensity of Romantic writers such as Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann, it featured a young woman who accompanies scientists on a balloon flight beyond the stratosphere. Bold in form and touching on cutting-edge issues of science and women’s emancipation, “Der Condor” was a sensation. Overnight, Stifter found himself a sought-after writer.

  For years, he would produce short stories and novellas, along with several longer works marked by an episodic or assemblage-like quality: the epistolary Feldblumen (Flowers of the Field, 1841); Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (My Great-Grandfather’s Portfolio, 1841); and Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 1853), a cycle of six thematically related novellas. Later Stifter would produce two novels of truly epic dimensions—Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857) and Witiko (1865–1867)—but as his recent biographer Wolfgang Matz points out, both were modestly subtitled Erzählung (story or tale). For Matz, this reveals “something very significant about his entire oeuvre: its rootedness in storytelling as the transmission of lived experience.” Stifter braids acts of storytelling into the rhythms of daily life, not as flights of fancy but as his characters’ homely, often groping efforts to tell the truths of their and others’ lives. Stifter was celebrated (and attacked) for the realism with which he detailed everyday tasks alongside spectacular natural panoramas. His characters often seem sketchier by contrast. But the lacunae and gray zones of their perspectives lend his writing a more challenging realism—realism as the insight into the difficulty of truly grasping reality.

  Stifter thwarts expectations of clear-cut dramatic arcs, with an open-ended quality that is often startlin
gly modern. His tales lend themselves to nested and assembled narratives, inviting readers to trace connections. Many are rooted in the Oberplan region, so that landscapes, villages, castles, historic incidents, and legends recur, forming one vast web that he obsessively wove and rewove.

  Stifter had quickly been picked up by the book publisher Gustav Heckenast, based in Pest, who would become one of his closest friends, providing him with financial and moral support all his life. In 1842, Stifter proposed a collection of his short stories, which ultimately swelled to six volumes under the typically modest title Studien (Studies). While writing new stories, he was revising and often completely rewriting his old work; for instance, five of the six novellas in Motley Stones are reworkings of earlier stories.

  Despite his newfound success, Stifter struggled financially. Though Amalia was a skilled housekeeper, they had a tendency to live beyond their means, suggesting a shared hunger for the trappings of bourgeois prosperity. Quite a literal hunger—their meals were known for their opulence. Stifter lapsed into a habit of binge eating, a contrast to his credo of moderation, which disturbed his contemporaries and has plausibly been tied to his lifelong depression and to the tensions of his marriage. His relationship with Amalia lacked intellectual and emotional rapport, and remained childless, failing to live up to the familial idyll that Stifter so desperately strove for. As a pedagogue and a writer, Stifter had a strong affinity to children, a keen awareness of their aspirations and vulnerabilities. However, he never successfully assumed the role of father, and that failure haunted him and his oeuvre. In 1845, when Amalia’s widowed brother Philipp asked for help bringing up his four children, Stifter initially hedged, citing his financial insecurity. Ultimately, in 1847 he and Amalia agreed to take in Philipp’s daughter Juliane—a decision that would end in tragedy.

  As a tutor, Stifter was now working for Austria’s most powerful families, foremost that of Prince Klemens von Metternich himself, whose son Stifter instructed in math and physics. Now that his literary talent had been recognized, he was able to use these connections as an entrée to Vienna’s influential intellectual salons. However, his relationships with the elite remained marked by subservience. His bent toward liberal humanism and social reform was counterbalanced by an emotional need for order and authority—a stance that grew increasingly conflicted as political rebellion brewed and finally broke out in 1848.

  Beginning in Paris that February, a wave of uprisings swept Europe, releasing tensions that had been bottled up since Napoleon’s defeat. Diverse coalitions of rebels demanded constitutional monarchies, freedom of speech, ethnic self-determination, and better conditions for peasants and the proletariat. In Austria under the Habsburg monarchy, forms of serfdom still prevailed, and Metternich kept the lid on nationalist aspirations within the multiethnic empire. In March, uprisings in Vienna led to Metternich’s resignation and the promise of a constitution.

  Initially, Stifter was eager to contribute to a freer society. In April he helped select Viennese delegates to the Frankfurt Parliament, the revolutionaries’ momentous (but ultimately failed) attempt to unite German-speaking lands as a federal state with a liberal constitution. Soon, however, he felt overwhelmed by the political turmoil and retreated to the provincial town of Linz; intended as a brief respite, the stay would become permanent. By mid-May the situation in Vienna grew so tense that the Imperial family fled to Innsbruck. For Stifter, this symbolized a dangerous slide into chaos. Horrified by the violence on both sides and the nationalist movements tearing apart the empire, Stifter began to long for peace and order at all costs. Ultimately the Hapsburgs’ absolutist monarchy emerged victorious but made a few concessions such as ending serfdom and instituting bureaucratic and educational reforms.

  Seeing an opportunity to put his reformist pedagogy into action—and earn a desperately needed steady income—Stifter sought a position in the educational ministry. In 1850 he was appointed inspector of schools for Upper Austria. Drawing on his own experience to address the difficulties of hardscrabble rural communities, he pushed to move away from rote learning and toward a more individualized focus on children’s needs and aptitudes. He embraced the new task at first, but found that it left little time or energy for writing—in the decade after 1848 he would produce just two significant works. Soon he felt crushed by the grind of travel and paperwork and frustrated as his reform proposals were regularly rejected. Meanwhile, a family tragedy was brewing: in 1851, Juliane, now eleven, ran away for two weeks. It is unclear whether Stifter ever developed a close relationship with her, as he rarely mentions her in his letters or papers. Meanwhile, Amalia’s relationship with Juliane was outright abusive; there is ample testimony that she treated the girl like a servant and even beat her.

  Motley Stones reflects Stifter’s conflicted relationship toward children. It proclaims itself to be “an assortment of fancies for young hearts,” tales of unassuming goodness not “meant to preach virtue and morals, as the custom is, but rather to work solely by what they are.” Yet he gave Juliane a copy for her twelfth birthday with a moralizing dedication:

  Receive here for the first time a book your father has written, for the first time read in print the words you have hitherto heard only from his lips, be good like the children in this book; keep it as a keepsake; if ever you should desire to deviate from the Good, let these pages plead with you not to do so.

  This reads as an admonishment of the rebellious Juliane, who, according to Stifter’s biographer Alois Hein, was described by family acquaintances as having “something Gypsy-like despite her golden hair and violet eyes, an innate flightiness and lack of restraint.” Yet a different note is conveyed by the story “Cat-Silver,” in Motley Stones. Its protagonist is a Gypsy-like “brown girl,” vibrant and keenly intelligent, whose inability to find a place in bourgeois society is described with profound sympathy. This story—the only one written specifically for the collection—reads as a veiled attempt to connect with Juliane, or at least to grapple with their relationship. The preachy birthday dedication, by contrast, rings false on many levels. The children in Motley Stones are not “good” in a Goody-Two-shoes sense—they are mainly good at surviving. They are constantly endangered by the recklessness, neglect, abuse, or clueless good intentions of the adults, most shockingly in the warped father-daughter relationship of “Tourmaline.” Far from “fancies for young hearts,” the tales in Motley Stones suggest an adult heart’s unarticulated self-recriminations.

  In other ways, too, Motley Stones suggests a reckoning with certain tensions of the preceding years. Not only was Stifter politically homeless, stranded between revolution and reaction, but he was becoming passé as a writer, especially among liberal intellectuals. In 1849, Friedrich Hebbel, a writer who grappled dramatically with social issues, had satirized the “new nature writers” such as Stifter who, according to him, rhapsodized about beetles and buttercups while ignoring the cosmos and the depths of the human heart. Stifter’s preface to Motley Stones was a direct rejoinder to Hebbel, an apologia for “small things,” for harmony and balance as an alternative to the strife of 1848. At the same time, the stories themselves belie Hebbel’s critique, riven by glimpses of peril and psychological extremis and illuminated by flashes of cosmic consciousness.

  Needled by his reputation as a “miniaturist,” Stifter had long toyed with ideas for a sweeping, dramatic epic (on the life of Robespierre, for instance). At last, in 1857 he published the novel Indian Summer—nearly a thousand pages long but almost entirely devoid of drama, conflict, and, indeed, plot. Stifter had produced a bildungsroman, a novel of education, in a radically literal sense. The affluent young narrator, Heinrich, rambles across the country, engaging in scientific pursuits at whim. One day he seeks shelter from a thunderstorm in the country villa of Baron von Risach, a haven for the arts and sciences. Over the years, the kindly baron becomes Heinrich’s mentor, and through him Heinrich meets the woman he will marry. The narrative consists of descriptions of the characters’ intellectual pursuits, their philosophical conversations, and the serene spaces of Risach’s house and garden. Risach’s home is a utopian vision of Stifter’s humanist ideals and his “gentle law.” All is dreamlike harmony—Heinrich’s sentimental and scientific education unfolds smoothly; love is restrained tenderness, free from doubt or passion. Only the end reveals what is held at bay: romantic tragedy and political strife. We learn that Risach was forced out of government service by intrigues and lost the love of his life through misunderstandings, finding reconciliation only in old age. The idyll of Indian Summer is indeed too good to be true. It expresses the yearning for an unattainable tranquility, a phantasm captured only in words. Striving for a language of utter objectivity that would set his vision in marble, Stifter went to an extreme that alienated even his supporters.