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Adalbei ITSTIFTER
Brigitta and Other Tales
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BRIGITTA AND OTHER TALES
ADALBERT STIFTER (1805—68), the son of a poor weaver, was bom in
Oberplan in Upper Bohemia. After his father’s death Stifter became a
scholar at the Benedictine monastery of Kremsmiinster, before going
on to study law at the University of Vienna. In order to support him¬
self, Stifter started tutoring for prosperous Viennese families but at the
time he still harboured hopes of becoming a professional painter. In
1837 Stifter married, but it proved a difficult and childless union.
Attempts by himself and his wife to adopt ended tragically when one
of his foster children vanished only to be found drowned four weeks
later. Stifter’s disillusionment grew further after the failed uprising of
1848 and he left Vienna to become a school inspector in Linz, the cap¬
ital of Upper Austria. Here he remained until various illnesses forced
him to retire from his posidon in 1865. During the last years of his life,
as his health failed, Stifter became increasingly depressed, ending with
his suicide in January 1868.
Although Stifter did not start writing until he was thirty-five years old,
he had by the time of his death written over thirty stories as well as
two novels: Der Nachsommer (The Indian Summer, 1857), which is one of
the finest examples of the Bildungsroman, and Witiko (1867). His stories
appeared in six volumes of Studien (Studies, 1844—50) as well as in a
single collection, Bunte Steine (Coloured Stones, 1852-3).
HELEN WATANABE-O’KELLY is a Fellow of Exeter College and Lecturer
in German at the University of Oxford. In addition to her translation
of Schiller’s On the Make and Sentimental in Literature, she is the editor of
the forthcoming Cambridge History of German Literature and has written
widely on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
ADALBERT STIFTER
» • «
BRIGITTA
AND OTHER TALES
TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY HELEN WATANABE-O’KELLY
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the USA by Dufour Editions, Inc. 1990
First published in Great Britain by Angel Books 1990
Published in Penguin Books 1994
13579 10 8642
Translation and introduction copyright © Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, 1990
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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Contents
Introduction 7
Abdias
1. Esther 21
2. Deborah 30
3. Ditha 47
Brigitta
1. Journey in the Steppes 97
2. House in the Steppes 108
3. The Steppes in the Past 121
4. The Steppes in the Present 133
The Forest Path 145
Limestone 197
Translator’s Acknowledgement
My thanks are due to Antony Wood, publisher and
translator, for many helpful and stimulating suggestions
during the making of these translations and for saving me
from numerous solecisms. v.
Stifter and I are very grateful to him.
Introduction
There is nothing glamorous or sensational about Adalbert
Stifter the man. He was a country boy, born in 1805 in the village
of Oberplan in Upper Bohemia. His father died when he was
twelve and it was only thanks to his grandfather that he was able
to continue his schooling, rather than start work in the fields to
support the family. He studied law at the University of Vienna,
though he never took a degree, earning his living as a tutor with
various notable families in Vienna. In the late 1820s, he fell in
love with a girl called Fanni Greipl, whose parents forebade the
match. On the rebound, as it seems, he married the beautiful
but uneducated Amalia Mohaupt in 1837. Stifter did not publish
anything until 1840, when he was already thirty-five, and, as far
as we know, he did not write very much before this either.
During the 1840s his stories became increasingly popular,
though he continued to earn his living from teaching, tutoring
among others the son of Chancellor Metternich. He was in
Vienna during the abortive revolution of 1848, to which he lent
his support at first but from which he recoiled in horror when
he saw the violence and chaos which was its inevitable con¬
comitant. In 1850 he became the Inspector of Primary Schools
for Upper Austria, a post he held for fifteen years and filled
conscientiously, though he found it hard to reconcile the
demands of the civil service with those of authorship. He was
also very much interested in landscape painting, devoting more
and more time to it in his later years. He and his wife were
childless and they made at least three disastrous attempts to
adopt nieces of Amalia’s. One of these children ran away, aged
ten, and another vanished and was found four weeks later
drowned. Stifter was filled with grief and depression and in the
1860s his health and general state of mind began to decline. In
December 1867 he took to his bed in great pain from cirrhosis
of the liver. In January 1868 he cut his throat with a razor and
died two days later.
8 Introduction
His entire oeuvre, apart from some journalism, consists of
prose fiction. He published first of all in the fashionable
periodicals of the day, the so-called Taschenbucher, where three-
quarters of his stories appeared between 1840 and 1848. These
magazines were the reading-matter of the bourgeois public,
particularly women. They were attractive little books containing
stories, poems and engravings which were often given as
presents and there was a veritable explosion of them in the
1820s and 1830s, with between thirty-three and forty-eight new
titles a year.
The Revolution brought about a decline in the number of
such periodicals which coincided with Stifter’s development as a
writer. Quite soon after the first appearance of his stories, Stifter
began extensively rewriting them and publishing them in collec¬
tions. Thirteen of the stories that first appeared between 1840
and 1852 reappear in the six volumes known as Studies (Studien,
1844-50), from which Abdias, Brigitta and The Forest Path (Der
Waldsteig) in the present volume are taken (first published in
1843, 1844 and 1845 respectively), and five more in the single
volume entitled Coloured Stones (Bunte Steine, 1852/3), which
contains Limestone (Kalkstein; first published in 1848 with the tide
Der arme Wohltater - The Poor Benefactor). Stifter was therefore
moving away from individual stories in ephemeral publications
towards works on a larger scale, though we have to remember
that earlier stories were appearing in their second or book
versions at the same time as other new stories were appearing in
magazines. His first and best-known novel, The Indian Summer
(Der Nachsommer), appeared in 1857 and the unfinished histor¬
ical novel Witiko - one of the works Dietrich Bonhoeffer read
and reread in his concentration camp - appeared between 1865
and 1867.
So in Stifter we have a childless civil servant, detached from
the great currents of European history and art, who wrote thirty-
two stories and two novels, whose work is virtually unknown
outside the German-speaking world and not all that well within
it. Yet he is the writer whom Thomas Mann called ‘one of the
most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly
daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world
literature’.1 It is not just that Stifter is an unknown writer. His
reputation has suffered even more from the fact that where his
