Der Nachsommer
Encyclopedia
Der Nachsommer is a novel in three volumes by Adalbert Stifter
. A 19th century Bildungsroman
that describes the journey of an idealistic, sheltered young man from childhood to maturity, it combines aspects of Biedermeier
thought with elements of German humanism
to create what is generally considered to be a great work of German bourgeois realism
.
Heinrich accepts his regimented upbringing without criticism. His father is a merchant who has planned out Heinrich's early education at home in the minutest detail. When it is time for Heinrich to head out on his own, his father allows his son to choose his own path. We are told that his father is a man of great judgement, as is his mother a model of the matronly virtues. Heinrich's narration is understated. His retrospective examination of his personal development is presented with what seems to be humility, objectivity and emotional distance.
Heinrich becomes a gentleman Natural scientist exploring Alpine mountains and foothills. He is interested in the geology, flora and fauna of the region. On one of his hiking excursions, Heinrich attempts to avoid what he believes will be a dousing by an approaching thunderstorm. Going off the main highway, he approaches the almost fairy-tale like residence of the man of mystery, Freiherr von Risach. The Rosenhaus is the center of Risach's carefully ordered world devoted to art and gardening, among other things.
His mentor's life-choices and interests, and the model of his day to day, season to season, orderly life in the Rosenhaus, expand Heinrich's understanding of the way to live his own life. Heinrich's repeated visits to the Rosenhaus influence his future life choices, including his eventual marriage.
James Sheehan
writes, "Heinrich's Bildung is a gradual, indirect process; he does not learn by confronting crises or dramatic events (of which Stifter's plot is totally devoid), nor does he gain much implicit instruction from Risach. Instead, the hero is slowly absorbed into Rosenhaus and the social and moral order it represents. Eventually, he sees that, just as Rosenhaus's beauty comes from its integration into its natural setting, so Risach's moral strength comes from his harmonious relationship to the external world. In art and in life, one must seek to avoid the dislocations that can be caused by unbridled passions and excessive spontaneity."
As Christine Oertel Sjögren notes, in her discussion of the importance of light to the novel, Der Nachsommer is not one-dimensional. In fact, "while Heinrich's attainment of full and perfect manhood is the goal of the action, death, the extreme form of solitude, is also woven into the world of Der Nachsommer, for awareness of death is essential to maturity. The malignant forces in nature and the insignificance of man in the face of the universe are problems not ignored in the novel. The threat of annihilation has here, however, no final dominion over the man with a capacity for love."
Milan Kundera
discusses Der Nachsommer in his non-fiction book The Curtain
. He describes it thus: "I wonder who first discovered the existential significance of bureaucracy. Probably Adalbert Stifter." and goes on to describe the section of the novel where Risach explains his office of a civil servant that he had to leave. "His break with bureaucracy is one of the memorable breaks of mankind from the modern world. A break both radical and peaceable, as befits the idyllic atmosphere of that strange novel from the Biedermeier period."
famously derided the novel, is, according to Christine Oertel Sjögren, "precisely a source of fascination for modern scholars, who seize upon the number of objects as the distinguishing characteristic of this novel and accord it high esteem because of the very significance of the 'things' in it. Far from being extraneous elements, as Hebbel regarded them, the art and nature objects provide a rich setting of beauty and a mirror-background to the human story in the foreground."
On Friedrich Nietzsche
's appreciation for the book, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek notes that "it is only Stifter's novel that Nietzsche will mention again in one breath with Goethe
: 'I have,' Nietzsche writes in October 1888, 'absorbed Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer with deep affection: in fact, it is the only German book after Goethe that has any magic for me.'"
Adalbert Stifter
Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was especially notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing, and has long been popular in the German-speaking world, while almost entirely unknown to English readers.-Life:Born in Oberplan in Bohemia , he...
. A 19th century Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
that describes the journey of an idealistic, sheltered young man from childhood to maturity, it combines aspects of Biedermeier
Biedermeier
In Central Europe, the Biedermeier era refers to the middle-class sensibilities of the historical period between 1815, the year of the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and 1848, the year of the European revolutions...
thought with elements of German humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
to create what is generally considered to be a great work of German bourgeois realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
.
Plot summary
This first-person narrative describes the main character Heinrich's maturation in the regimented household of his father and his subsequent encounter and involvement with the owner of the Rosenhaus, the home, and part of the estate, of a wise, but mysterious older man who becomes a mentor to Heinrich.Heinrich accepts his regimented upbringing without criticism. His father is a merchant who has planned out Heinrich's early education at home in the minutest detail. When it is time for Heinrich to head out on his own, his father allows his son to choose his own path. We are told that his father is a man of great judgement, as is his mother a model of the matronly virtues. Heinrich's narration is understated. His retrospective examination of his personal development is presented with what seems to be humility, objectivity and emotional distance.
Heinrich becomes a gentleman Natural scientist exploring Alpine mountains and foothills. He is interested in the geology, flora and fauna of the region. On one of his hiking excursions, Heinrich attempts to avoid what he believes will be a dousing by an approaching thunderstorm. Going off the main highway, he approaches the almost fairy-tale like residence of the man of mystery, Freiherr von Risach. The Rosenhaus is the center of Risach's carefully ordered world devoted to art and gardening, among other things.
His mentor's life-choices and interests, and the model of his day to day, season to season, orderly life in the Rosenhaus, expand Heinrich's understanding of the way to live his own life. Heinrich's repeated visits to the Rosenhaus influence his future life choices, including his eventual marriage.
Themes
According to the English translator of Der Nachsommer, Wendell Frye, the novel "presents an ideal world, in contrast to what Adalbert Stifter saw to be a degenerating period." He goes on to explain that in this novel "the reader finds one of the most complete statements of the 'Humanitätsideal' [ideal of humanity]: the young geologist becomes totally immersed in traditional values and culture, thereby becoming a more complete and fulfilled human being."James Sheehan
James J. Sheehan
James J. Sheehan is an American historian of modern Germany and the former president of the American Historical Association .Born in San Francisco in 1937, Sheehan earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1958 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964...
writes, "Heinrich's Bildung is a gradual, indirect process; he does not learn by confronting crises or dramatic events (of which Stifter's plot is totally devoid), nor does he gain much implicit instruction from Risach. Instead, the hero is slowly absorbed into Rosenhaus and the social and moral order it represents. Eventually, he sees that, just as Rosenhaus's beauty comes from its integration into its natural setting, so Risach's moral strength comes from his harmonious relationship to the external world. In art and in life, one must seek to avoid the dislocations that can be caused by unbridled passions and excessive spontaneity."
As Christine Oertel Sjögren notes, in her discussion of the importance of light to the novel, Der Nachsommer is not one-dimensional. In fact, "while Heinrich's attainment of full and perfect manhood is the goal of the action, death, the extreme form of solitude, is also woven into the world of Der Nachsommer, for awareness of death is essential to maturity. The malignant forces in nature and the insignificance of man in the face of the universe are problems not ignored in the novel. The threat of annihilation has here, however, no final dominion over the man with a capacity for love."
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...
discusses Der Nachsommer in his non-fiction book The Curtain
The Curtain (Milan Kundera)
The Curtain is a seven-part essay by Milan Kundera, along with The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed composing a type of trilogy of book-length essays on the European novel....
. He describes it thus: "I wonder who first discovered the existential significance of bureaucracy. Probably Adalbert Stifter." and goes on to describe the section of the novel where Risach explains his office of a civil servant that he had to leave. "His break with bureaucracy is one of the memorable breaks of mankind from the modern world. A break both radical and peaceable, as befits the idyllic atmosphere of that strange novel from the Biedermeier period."
Style
James Sheehan also writes that "Stifter's style seems to replicate the moral lesson he wants his hero—and his readers—to learn; he writes without passion or spontaneity, self-consciously submitting to the material he describes, depicting in painstaking detail the cohesive universe of which he wishes us to be a part."Reception
The excessive detail, for which Stifter's contemporary Christian Friedrich HebbelChristian Friedrich Hebbel
Christian Friedrich Hebbel , was a German poet and dramatist.-Biography:Hebbel was born at Wesselburen in Ditmarschen, Holstein, the son of a bricklayer. He was educated at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums...
famously derided the novel, is, according to Christine Oertel Sjögren, "precisely a source of fascination for modern scholars, who seize upon the number of objects as the distinguishing characteristic of this novel and accord it high esteem because of the very significance of the 'things' in it. Far from being extraneous elements, as Hebbel regarded them, the art and nature objects provide a rich setting of beauty and a mirror-background to the human story in the foreground."
On Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
's appreciation for the book, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek notes that "it is only Stifter's novel that Nietzsche will mention again in one breath with Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
: 'I have,' Nietzsche writes in October 1888, 'absorbed Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer with deep affection: in fact, it is the only German book after Goethe that has any magic for me.'"