Offspring

Descendants is the title of a story by Adalbert Stifter from 1864, which ironically deals with the problem of the extent to which a painter can depict reality in the style of realism . For the main character Friedrich Roderer, his stay in the Lüpfinger Tal means a decisive phase of development and a turning point in his life.

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Friederich (Friedrich) Roderer, a 26-year-old young man from a wealthy Viennese family, is gripped by the passion of becoming a landscape painter. He explains his theory at various points in the story.

At the beginning, as an exposition of the story before the start of the action, he ironically describes the multitude of painters "[a] on the edge of the forest [...], in front of the ruins of an old castle, in front of towering rocks, in front of extended plains, on the shore of the sea, in grottos and green-blue ice caves of the glaciers, in front of individual trees, ruins, little water, forest plants [...] which strive to get the things they see there with colors on their canvases. ”When he looks at their pictures, not to mention by the hobby painters and students of the “Staatsmaleranstalt”, who present their works to the public in their private homes, in many collections and museums, etc., if they are not in “junk rooms […] as it were as their own ghost” , he has the high claim to "paint the Dachstein in such a way that one can no longer distinguish the painted and the real one."

In a later clarification, Friedrich distinguishes himself from the individually lively artists: “In the world and in its parts there is the greatest poetic abundance and the most moving violence. Just make reality as real as it is, and don't change the momentum that is in it anyway, and you will produce more wonderful works than you think, and than you do when you paint anus and say: Now there is momentum in it. There is a landscape in Vienna. At the front there is clear water over clay ground, then there are trees, a forest, between the trunks of which you can see the open air again. The sky has a simple cloud structure. That has been hundreds of millions of times in the world, and yet the landscape is the most powerful and harrowing there can be. ”Everything that does not meet this requirement he wants to burn:“ Either I perfect myself from picture to picture, then If there is only one picture of me when I die [...] or I climb up quickly and paint lots of masterpieces on it, then when I die there are those fifteen two-horse wagons full of pictures of me. ”Since he is wealthy and unmarried, he has to do not sell any pictures and can paint to perfection on his own and give his successful works away to his relatives once.

After the programmatic introduction, Friedrich tells in detail about his well-prepared project. He rents a room in an inn on the Lüpf, where the attentive landlady Anna looks after him like a mother with warm milk, white bread and roast duck. From there he descends every day into the Lüpfing valley, "where a witch banned [him]" and which is "not beautiful at all". There he wants to paint a “long moor, from which one gets the fever”, “and the adjoining, single-colored spruce forest and the pasture hills opposite and the likewise single-colored spruce forest behind him, and the blue and gray lights rising up behind this spruce forest glittering mountains [...]. "He adds that there is actually not much to paint," because an unjustly rich man bought Firnberg Castle and had so many stones and earth lead into the moor and so many ditches pulled away from it that the moor has become smaller and the fever less. ”He concentrates entirely on his mission, with his painting“ to wrestle things from their essence […] to exhaust the depths ”, does not visit like the others the surrounding villages on festive days and nobody lets in, which is why the population is partly curious about the mysterious artist, partly smiles at him as a strange owl. Very meticulously in a precise time schedule, he makes sketches on site, depending on the time of day: “Moor in morning lighting, Moor in morning lighting, Moor in midday lighting, Moor in afternoon lighting [...] Moor in the rain I had already planned to close from my window to paint. I haven't thought about moor in the fog yet. ”When hikers come by, he immediately closes his paint box. He invented a device that prevents the colors from blurring on the damp leaves. Because he alone decides who and when to show his sketches. To do this, you need “the consent of the agent,” he explains to a curious group around Susanna Roderer, who surprised him. He secures his room door with a padlock. Only the landlords and Peter Roderer, the "rich man," are allowed to see his pictures, and he praises his painting as unusual and understands his obsession with capturing such an insignificant and at the same time serious and difficult object as the moor, but he prophesies that without knowing his name, from the experience of gifted people in his own family who suddenly, seemingly unmotivated, changed their lives: "You will very likely stop painting one day and then never touch a brush again."

Friedrich gets to know Roderer, the well-traveled castle and landowner, entrepreneur and benefactor of the poor population, who has become rich through trading business, as a guest of the inn, where he drinks his daily glass of beer in the evening under the apple tree, which comes from his own brewery. The two become acquainted with each other, and Roderer tells him his changeful, adventurous family story since Echoz took part in the crusades of the red-bearded Friedrich in the Middle Ages. In genealogy, inherited physical characteristics such as eye color and biographical breaks are evidently typical . The focus is on Peter's own development: learning many languages, doing a business apprenticeship in Amsterdam, setting up his own business, marrying poor, loyal Mathilde, a distant relative. Growing wealth made it possible to buy the Firnberg estate, where he, his wife and children found a new home.

Friedrich has a log house built on the hill, in which his large picture is painted according to the various drafts so that he can also look out of the window at the "real reality". For this he ordered a golden frame, because the last lines should be made on the framed painting. Because of its size, a wall would have to be removed for removal.

During this phase of the synopsis of the sketches and the execution of the painting, a personal counter-development begins. The landlady increasingly warns him of his loneliness and admonishes him to go out among the people. Since he now always paints in the log cabin, he begins with short walks on which Susanna meets him a few times. From the window he now observes the coach with which she is brought to the circular route and picked up with the telescope, and arranges to meet her every day. So they confess their love after a short time. The trigger for the revelation is a previous grotesque situation at a village festival in Lüpfing. Friedrich wanted to draw the scenery and, because he didn't want to be seen, hid behind a wall. Immediately afterwards, the Roderer family settled down with guests on the other side. He heard Susanna's friends making fun of him, while the girl who had discovered him through an opening defended him for his seriousness and profundity and led the company away so that he could leave his hiding place. After the confession of love in the forest, Friedrich woos Roderer for his daughter, explains his family and financial situation and mentions his name for the first time. The father-in-law is not astonished by his information, he suspected the development of young people. Friedrich and his active daughter Susanna would have acted like real harvesters. Everyone meets up with Friedrich's family in Vienna. The Roderer family tree is compiled and the wedding follows in Firnberg. Friedrich ended up in the family again, whose name he did not mention as an individualistic artist. Before that, he took apart his picture, cut up the canvas and burned it together with the paint box. He only keeps the gold frame. He previously explained to Susanna that his large picture “cannot depict the gloom, the simplicity and grandeur of the moor” and she understands him: “[D] a pictures are extraordinarily beautiful; but if your thoughts are higher and you feel humiliated by your creation, annihilate them. "After the destruction of his work, he now feels" a freedom, happiness and greatness in a heart as in a brightly lit universe. "

Narrative form

Friedrich Roderer tells the story of his painting in the first person . He begins in the present tense with his thoughts about the painters and his conception of art and maintains this time level for the arrival in the valley. Then, from the third day of his stay, he switches to the past tense with a look back at the day before, on which he met the squire Roderer. The same applies to his conversations with Roderer and the long family history of the Roderer, which is included as an internal narrative . An exception to this is his reflection on his own family at the time after Peter Roderer's genealogy and before the log house was built. Like an inner monologue , it is in the present tense, as is the continuation of his painting theory.

interpretation

While in research the variation of many motifs and themes from the entire work was consistently perceived in the descendants , e.g. B. the similarities of the protagonists Friedrich, Roderer, Susanna, and their families as well as their educational efforts, interest in art and collections with the staff in the late summer , there are differences in the interpretation of the deviating aspects.

For a long time the narrative was characterized as a humorous, fabulous novella, in which the poet, with self-deprecation or self-parody, playfully doubts the artistry, which is otherwise dealt with in problematic seriousness or sacred pathos, as youth confusion and quirk, and also loosely and humorously the question of the determination of the ego dissolves through hereditary factors in a magical idyllic ending. Friedrich's abandonment of the extremely individual way of life of self-realization and the regression into the family did not lead to despair or a feeling of hopelessness, but was rather felt as a release from a self-imposed compulsion. The ironic cheerfulness reminds one of Gottfried Keller and Wilhelm Raabe .

In recent literary studies and through a new publication, a discussion about a reassessment or other accentuations was initiated. Stifter's late work, in its increasingly radical form, stands out from the earlier prose and isolated the poet from the readers of his time. Descendants can be understood as the epitome of modern storytelling that defies the contemporary commitment to realism. The author is an avant-garde of perception. Various reviewers agree with this judgment: The comedic tone of desperation reads like a skilful parody of the Thomas Bernhard style. It is therefore not surprising that Stifter's contemporaries, whose reading habits were increasingly oriented towards realism, disdained his late work as too artificial, life-pale and abstract. In this context, reference is made to the most “devilish” of the “great” Roder relationship, the demony of the bewitching, abysmal moor as Chronotopos , which, also symbolized by the same names, is inevitable repetition of genealogy cycles and thus to an anti-humorous reading of the narrative.

Further investigations into the question of the author's classification in the context of literary history relate to the narrative structure, the connection between the plot and the narrative situation, the embedding of the story in the narrative discourse and the framing with a metalepse shift, the change between the present and the past tense and the status of family and narrative genealogies. This raises questions about the narrator's point of view and the finality of his decision between being an artist and family.

The artist's conception and the concept of reality in the narrative are judged controversially, and thus the question of whether Friedrich's, or the author's, objective is the program of painting realism ( mimesis , depiction of the visible) or that of the avant-garde (capturing the essence, not just the surface ) corresponds.

Editions and literature

• Adalbert Stifter: Progeny. Late stories , edited by Karl Wagner, Verlag Jung und Jung 2012.
• s. Work editions
• s. literature

Literary reception

In Adolf Muschg's novel Heimkehr nach Fukushima (2018), the architect Paul Neuhaus and the Japanese Mitsuko visited the contaminated area around Fukushima (Fukushima) . Stifter's story with the title “Descendants”, which is symbolic of the future of the people of this region, is her travel reading, from which it is quoted again and again.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ quoted from Max Stefl (Hrsg.): Adalbert Stifter: Later stories . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt 1963. Reprint of the edition of Adam Kraft Verlag Augsburg 1960, p. 541.
2. ↑ s. o. p. 542.
3. ↑ s. o. p. 543.
4. ↑ s. o. p. 578.
5. ↑ s. o. p. 545.
6. ↑ s. o. p. 546.
7. ↑ s. o. p. 547.
8. ↑ s. o. p. 564.
9. ↑ s. o. p. 552.
10. ↑ s. o. p. 556.
11. ↑ s. o. p. 562.
12. ↑ s. o.p. 604.
13. ↑ s. o.p. 605.
14. ↑ Max Stefl (Ed.): Adalbert Stifter: Later stories . s. o., afterword p. 764.
15. ↑ Stefan Seeber: The humor in Adalbert Stifter's "Nachkommenschaften" , in: Yearbook of the Austrian Goethe Society 108–110 (2004–2006), pp. 291–317.
16. ^ Progeny . Kindler's literary dictionary. Kindler Verlag, Zurich, licensed edition for Dtv 1974. Vol. 15, p. 6566 ff.
17. ↑ Adalbert Stifter: Progeny. Late stories Edited by Karl Wagner, Verlag Jung und Jung 2012.
18. ↑ s. o. blurb of the 2012 edition.
19. ↑ Wolfgang Schneider, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, contribution from July 2, 2012, similarly with reference to Schneider. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 24, 2012.
20. ↑ s. o. p. 577.
21. ↑ Stefan Willer: Boundless Time, Looping Ground. Genealogical order in Stifter's descendants. P. 45 ff. In: Michael Gamper, Karl Wagner (ed.) Figures of the transfer Adalbert Stifter and the knowledge of his time . Chronos Verlag, Zurich, 2009.
22. ↑ Cornelia Blasberg: Eyelids of telling. On Adalbert Stifter's framed stories , in: Michael Minden, Martin Swales, Godela Weiss-Sussex (eds.): History, Text, Value. Essays on Adalbert Stifter. Linz 2006 (= yearbook of the Adalbert Stifter Institute of the State of Upper Austria, vol. 11), pp. 89–97, here p. 95.
23. ↑ Stefan Willer s. O.
24. ^ Christian Begemann: Roderer's pictures - Hadlaub's transcriptions. Some reflections on mimesis and the construction of reality in German-speaking realism , in: Sabine Schneider, Barbara Hunfeld (ed.): The things and the signs. Dimensions of the realistic in nineteenth-century narrative literature . Würzburg 2008, pp. 25–41, here p. 28.
25. ↑ Ralf Simon: Realism and Modernity , in: Christian Begemann (Hrsg.): Realism. Epoch - works - authors . Darmstadt 2007, pp. 207–223, here p. 212.