Stifter’s Natives and Wandering Exotica: The Circulating Canons of “Die Narrenburg”

Abstract

Against the backdrop of readings of Adalbert Stifter’s 1844 Studienfassung of “Die Narrenburg” as an expression either of orientalist fantasy or of Austrian inner colonialism, this article traces the text’s confusing geographies through its intertwined figurations of native and exotic plants. Often thought of (due to the etymology of vegetare) as idle, passive, inert, and mute, flora in this text suggests the tracks of colonial exploration and horticulture, as well as of orientalizing literature, and is implicated in the literary framings and formats that promote a nineteenth-century canon of “Germanness.”

Keywords:

• Adalbert Stifter
• “Die Narrenburg,” colonialism
• plants
• India

Notes

1 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, in Gesammelte Schiften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 4: 257–59; here, 257; on the paperweight as paradigmatic nineteenth-century kitsch object, see Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 55–86.

2 Though she does not mention this early scene set in a Gartenlaube—an apparently idyllic space between nature and domestic space—Saskia Haag helpfully traces its appearance throughout Stifter’s later narratives as a locus of contingency, fragility, and even trauma. See Auf wandelbarem Grund: Haus und Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2012), 171–212.

3 Adalbert Stifter, “Die Narrenburg,” Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Wolfgang Frühwald (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978-), 1.4: 319–436; here, 412. All further references to the text (Studienfassung) will be provided parenthetically.

4 As Erica Weitzman elaborates, the Claude glass is featured in Stifter’s early novella “Feldblumen” (1840) as an optical technology of miniaturization and control. Erica Weitzman, At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021), 43; Adalbert Stifter, “Feldblumen,” Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe 1.4: 43–171; here, 63–64.

5 Adalbert Stifter, “Granit” (Studienfassung), Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, 2.2: 21–60; here, 60; Mary Douglas, Purity and Dirt: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2003), 50.

6 Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 129–42.

7 Carl Förster, Handbuch der Cacteenkunde (Leipzig: Wöller, 1846), 107–08.

8 Adalbert Stifter, Der Nachsommer, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, 4.1: 134.

9 On the Stifterian oikos, see Timothy Attanucci, The Restorative Poetics of a Geological Age: Stifter, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Aesthetic Practices of Geohistoricism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 162.

10 See for example the recent volume Floriographie: Die Sprachen der Blumen, ed. Isabel Kranz, Alexander Schwan, and Eike Wittrock (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016).

11 Joseph Metz, “Austrian Inner Colonialism and the Visibility of Difference in Stifter’s ‘Die Narrenburg,’” PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1475–92; here, 1484.

12 Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, 1.9: 208, for the historical reference to Pückler-Muskau, who was also a notable horticulturalist and garden designer, activities reflected in Jodok’s garden. Freya Schwachenfeld, in a helpful analysis of Pückler-Muskau’s intertwining orientalist endeavors ranging across garden design, collecting, and travel writing, notes that Pückler-Muskau’s designs for a new family castle with historicizing elements also shore up dynastic interests. Freya Schwachenwald, “Art, Nature, Ghosts, and Ice Cream: Transcultural Assemblages of Prince Hermann Von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871) and Machbuba/Ajiamé/Billilee,” The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10 (2): 78–120; here, 89; on Stifter’s contact through Viennese salons such as that of Maria Anna Schwarzenberg with orientalists and Ottoman diplomats including Prokesch-Osten and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, see Eva Eßlinger, “Stifters Orient: Dichtung und Diplomatie im Haidedorf,” Poetica 46.1-2 (2014): 197–238; here, 216–17. Prokesch’s thinly fictionalized Machbubah story, “Gegensätze,” appeared serially in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode in the three issues of 11, 13, and 14 April 1840.

13 As noted by Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

14 While publishing in Johann Graf Mailáth’s Pest journal, Stifter was simultaneously working on the feuilleton pieces on Vienna, Wien und die Wiener.

15 Metz, “Austrian Inner Colonialism,” 1483, 1481.

16 Ibid., 1476.

17 Eßlinger, “Stifters Orient,” 199.

18 Michael Titzmann, “Text und Kryptotext. Zur Interpretation von Stifters Erzählung Die Narrenburg,” in Adalbert Stifter. Dichter und Maler, Denkmalpflege und Schulmann. Neue Zugänge zu seinem Werk, ed. Hartmut Laufhütte and Karl Möseneder (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 335–73, here, 342.

19 Adalbert Stifter, “Die Narrenburg,” in Iris: Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1843: 231–360; here, 236. Ulrich Dittmann’s commentary in the Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe notes that so-called “Renegaten” from Germany and Austria supported Abd-el-Cader and chose the Bedouin life “aus poetischer Neigung”; 1.9: 211.

20 “Die Narrenburg,” Iris, 340.

21 “…fast wie eine Moschee aussehend”; ibid., 296.

22 “idyllisches Capriccio,” “phantastisches Capriccio”; see the commentary in the Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, 1.9: 203. The capriccio, of course, gains much currency in Germany with E.T.A. Hoffmann.

23 Nicholas Saul, Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (London: Legenda, 2007), 51.

24 Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe 1.9: 223. Attanucci also proposes that Chelion “is in fact Hebraic, a Biblical name,” though without providing supporting references. Restorative Poetics, 72.

25 Ibid., 52. Stifter’s Jewish Abdias likewise belongs to an outcast desert community and fails to assimilate into European life. “Abdias” was also first published in 1842.

26 Mrs. Colin Mackenzie (Helen Douglas Mackenzie), Six Years in India. Delhi: The City of the Great Mogul. With an Account of the Various Tribes in Hindostan; Hindoos, Sikhs, Affghans, Etc. (London: R. Bentley, 1857), 287. Translations of “Die Narrenburg” had appeared in English three times by 1852: in Pictures of Rural Life in Austria and Hungary (London: Richard Bentley, 1851); Castle Crazy and Maroshely (London: Richard Bentley, 1851); and as “The Castle of Fools,” in Pictures of Life (London: Simms and M’Intyre, 1852). A devout Presbyterian, Mackenzie had traveled throughout Britain and Germany and drew on these experiences in India. David Arnold discusses Mackenzie’s indebtedness to the picturesque tradition, a regime that visually structured the colonial gaze since the eighteenth century, as well as her contact with early photography—she made use of a portable camera obscura to record her travels; David Arnold, “The Traveling Eye: British Women in Early Nineteenth-Century India,” in British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940, ed. Rosie Dias and Kate Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 31–50; here, 45.

27 Saul, Gypsies and Orientalism, 7. See also Dorothy Figueira, “Goethe and Günderrode: German Poetic Readings of Indian Fatalism,” in Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia: Transnational Perspectives since 1800, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas T. McGetchin (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 41–63.

28 For the reference to Irving’s 1819-20 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which is quoted without attribution in the epigraph to the book version of “Die Narrenburg” and was translated into German in the 1820s, see Jessica Resvick, “Picturesque Mediations: Adalbert Stifter, Washington Irving, and the Transfiguration of the Mundane,” PMLA 137.5 (2022): 841–56. Irving’s work is told from the perspective of a “sauntering” observer of nature. On Heinrich as a literary copy of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in the scene in which he recognizes himself as a genetic “copy” of Sixtus, see ibid., 850. On the narrative’s “collage” of Romantic literary allusions, see Christian Begemann, Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 210–11. On the Grimms, who are evoked in relation to Anna’s reading habits, see Jutta Müller-Tamm, “‘Alles nicht zu Ende, alles falsch…’ Allegorie und Erzählstruktur in Stifters ‘Narrenburg,’” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 17.3 (2007): 561–74; 566, 573.

29 Adalbert Stifter, “Die Narrenburg,” Iris, 324.

30 The gendered opposition between classicist architecture and oriental shrubbery is noted by Metz, “Austrian Inner Colonialism,” 1488, n. 16.

31 On Joseph Hooker, one of the most notable Kew collectors, and his expeditions to the Himalayas between 1847-51 which he undertook while surveying the Bengal Sikkim border on a government assignment, see Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 84. On Stifter’s phantasmatic response to global botanical expeditions more generally, see Christian van der Steeg, Wissenskunst: Adalbert Stifter und Naturforscher auf Weltreise (Zurich: Chronos, 2011).

32 “…aus dem Oriente stammend.” Martin Balduin Kittel, 3^rd ed., Taschenbuch der Flora Deutschlands; zum Gebrauche auf botanischen Excursionen (Nuremberg: J. L. Schrag, 1853), 195.

33 Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 42.

34 On three forms of affect provoked by ekphrasis—indifference, hope, and fear—see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 152–57.

35 Saul, for example, sees in him a locus of utopian hope, a departure from the Romantic orientalist fantasies of Jodok; Gypsies and Orientalism, 52. Metz views “the free-floating Orient” in the text as a haunting “background melody” and Chelion as a displaced figure for inner-colonial anxieties; “Austrian Inner Colonialism,” 1482, 1485; Rezvick considers the exotic elements to have been killed off or fully domesticated by the end; “Picturesque Mediations,” 853.

36 Further intensifying this mortification of plant life, Anna in the next passage in the narrative remarks that Heinrich ascribes spiritual life to the (now dead) flowers, “recht liebe, kleine Seelen” (358).

37 Adalbert Stifter, “Feldblumen,” 70.

38 Ibid., 71. I am establishing a deliberate link with what would be the most grandiose—if architecturally fragile—manifestation of the imperial glass house, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace housing the Great Exhibition of 1851. Paxton’s previous career was as a pioneering greenhouse designer at Chatsworth House.

39 Metz astutely observes that this, her last mention in the text, is the only time where Chelion is described explicitly as “dark.” “Austrian Inner Colonialism,” 1490, n. 28.

40 See the note included in the Journalfassung; “Feldblumen,” Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe 1.1: 33–159; here, 50. Beverly Seaton associates the rise in popularity of “the language of flowers” gift books in the early nineteenth century with the literary Taschenbuch, which often bore floral titles. Seaton, The Language of Flowers, 67.

41 On Stifter’s publications in miscellanies, see Nicola Kaminski, “Wien/Pesth 1840-42 (mit einem Blick in die Zukunft bis zum Jahr 1844)” in Optische Autritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur, ed. Stephanie Gleißner, Mirela Husić, Nicola Kaminski, and Volker Mergenthaler (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2019), 173–207.

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Catriona MacLeod

Catriona MacLeod is Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the College and the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller and Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century, and has co-edited several volumes in the areas of word and image studies and translation studies. Her present book project, Romantic Scraps, investigates how Romantics work with paper both conceptually and materially. MacLeod is Editor in Chief of the journal Word & Image.