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151 ◆ Stifter’S IndIan Summer ◆ Adalbert Stifter was one of the great German novelists of the nineteenth century. Hofmannsthal’s essay,1 which appeared on Christmas Day in 1924, deals mainly with Stifter’s most important novel: Indian Summer. It is important for understanding Hofmannsthal’s view of German literature and culture, as well as the place of Austrian writers within the German tradition. Much as in “Austria in the Mirror of Its Literature,” Hofmannsthal is attempting to understand the historical experience of Germans as more than just a political history in the conventional sense. He does not emphasize what is distinctively Austrian here, but the essay will be valuable for those who already know German literature and wonder what significance “Austrian literature” has. It has been said that Stifter’s Indian Summer means for Austria what Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Elective Affinities mean for Germany. This is certainly true, but this book is also very important for German intellectual life; indeed, it has a meaning for German intellectual life of the highest specificity. At the same time, it constitutes, along with Grillparzer’s most important creations—among them his still unknown diaries, which are full of substance like a mine—the strongest gift of Austria to Germany. To set forth the many things through which this book reveals itself as Austrian would, of course, be appealing for Austrians. But it would lead too far into detail. This Austrian distinctiveness expresses itself both in the particular circle in which everything takes place and in the way in which sociability is portrayed in the book—in the demeanor of the social classes and individuals toward one another—as well as in the realm of morality, how it is conceived, how it is expressed, and the extent to which it is silently honored, even in the spoken word. But in the present context no such subtle elaborations are appropriate for the reader who has finished such a substantial and profound book and now returns to the atmosphere of everyday life; it is enough just to give a short summary and to allude to the connections among spiritual things when regarded as a whole and seen from one century into another. Two great figures of the German spirit are included in Indian Summer and lie at the basis of the world that is depicted here: the work of Goethe and the work of Jean Paul. The first connection lies, as it were, on the surface, since the name 152 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea of Goethe is mentioned more than once, if not often, with the greatest reverence, and his work is characterized as part of the literary heritage. The connection to Jean Paul is more mysterious but no less profound. Stifter himself expressed it this way: “Everything that I could have said as a youth and even as a young man Jean Paul had already said before me.” With this he meant everything for which passion is the source: the desire, longing, and despair, indeed the madness of the individual, who sees himself awakened by the glaring light of general enlightenment to a vain freedom—as it was in the real inner experience of Germans at the end of the eighteenth century, unmediated by active energy, unaccompanied by the ability to change anything in the world around them. And this passion remained as a dark ground of existence in each individual German instead of, as with French intellectuals, going over into concrete forms and the warlike play of energies of human beings when they compete in an unshackled world for power, wealth, and status. Anyone who calls to mind the world of Balzac and compares it to the world of Jean Paul—for they are nearly contemporaries, when we calculate with longer time spans, and are expressions of the same historical forces— will recognize the significance of this contrast. And perhaps if we could measure forces of this kind, Jean Paul possessed the greater power of the two; but his energy did not express itself in the world but rather, as it were, beneath it, buried under an enormous rubble as though from a collapsed world structure. A passion similar to what appears in the figures of Jean Paul as madness or as enthusiasm and rapture is never visible in the characters of Indian Summer or in what goes on between them. But in a passage where one of the two main characters in the novel, an old man...

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