Historical Rupture and the Devastation of Memory in Adalbert Stifter’s Der Hagestolz

This article examines how Stifter’s novella Der Hagestolz uses the desert, dust, and sand to address questions of memory and oblivion. The article proposes that the dust covering the people and objects in the text points to their erasure from memory and that attempts to keep the dust at bay represent efforts to preserve the human experience that these things have the power to contain and transmit. The text’s rhetorical similarities to Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on history and historiography are emphasized. In addition, Heidegger’s reading of the growing desert in Nietzsche’s poem “Unter den Töchtern der Wüste” is incorporated to suggest that Stifter’s text similarly casts doubt on the possibility of all memory, even generational memory.