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WOHNEN • LIVING THEORIE • THEORY

The poet was hit hard by the opinion of his contemporaries, but he wrote to his publisher: “I know it for sure: Your son will reap
the benefits of this book, it has a future because it is too profound for the current generation, and it has to mature first, it has a
more certain future than everything I have written so far.” Even though Stifter was proved right, the failure of his first major novel
was the start of his slow dying over almost ten years. At the end, Stifter, haggard by binge drinking and severe depressions, parted
with the world by slitting his throat. Retrievers of honour, who begrudged the poet his suicide, even spoke of an accident while
shaving – at midnight, when lying in bed! The death certificate, by contrast, succinctly states: “Hectic fever resulting from chronic
atrophy” – liver cirrhosis. In those days, a suicide would have had to be buried outside the cemetery.

„Mein Rosenhaus“ von Uwe Bresan, 2016, Ansicht
The probably most detailed and verbose description of interior design in the history of literature
A fact literary criticism overlooked for a long time: Stifter had not written a novel in the conventional sense but a textbook – a
“textbook on a beautiful life”! Today, we would probably call it a style guide: “If you want to inform yourself about how to equip
your private apartment, your garden, your workshop etc. equally tasteful and functional, you will find the most extensive notes
in this novel.” At the time the novel was written, in 1858, this was a damning review. Today we can maybe recognise in these
words the most farsighted explanation for the success of Stifter’s “Indian Summer” that has lasted for more than 100 years. The
poet used the abandonment of any storyline for the most detailed, long-winded and comprehensive interior design description
in modern literary history. No room of the Rosenhaus omitted. Every single room, no matter how small, is ponderously and elab-
orately described – starting with the different grains of the floorboards, to all conceivable details of the finely chased pieces of
„Mein Rosenhaus“, Schnitt
furniture through to the different atmospheres of the single rooms in changing weathers. That is why the novel is later called a
“song of praise to the house”. The 19th century, an era of revolutionary technical and economic – and thus ultimately also social
– developments, could not acquire a taste for Stifter’s long-winded description. “A person of the 19th century, for whom time is
money, would be gradually driven to desperation by this novel,” said a critic. And so it wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th
century that the “generation was ripe” for the rediscovery of the “Indian Summer”. In the course of the life reform, the bour-
geoisie started to grapple with the consequences of the technical and economic progress, which were increasingly perceived as
a threat. Its uncontrolled effects for humans and nature became more and more obvious. The experience of disturbed continuities,
„Mein Rosenhaus“, Grundriss EG
an unprecedented break with traditions, characterised the attitude towards life around 1900. In the alleged chaos of an increas-
ingly complex world, Stifter’s “Indian Summer” now provided some kind of refuge in a different, seemingly orderly reality. What
about the length of the novel? It turned into “beneficial boredom”.

Stifter’s protagonists speak about design issues like reformers of the Werkbund movement

Leading architects at the turn of the last century – in Austria these were the members of the Vienna Secession, in Germany the
„Mein Rosenhaus“, Grundriss OG
founding father of the Werkbund – now discovered in Stifter’s domestic idyll the artistic culmination of a final building era based
on the common will to pursue a distinctive style, whose end now had to be taken up. So the slogan “Das Biedermeier als
Erzieher!” (Biedermeier as educator) was widely propagated. It was followed by architects such as Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann,
Adolf Loos, Bruno Paul or Heinrich Tessenow. The inconspicuous Rosenhaus nestled in the surrounding landscape, where plain
expediency combined with noble material processing and whose architectural genuineness ultimately seemed to spread to the
existence of its ideal residents, merged art and existence into a unity, evolved into a blueprint of the so-called New Objectivity. It
replaced the style and façade carnival of historicism. Thereby, the Rosenhaus became the predominant ideal architecture of the
incipient modernism. “The protagonists of this novel talk about design issues like the reformers of the Werkbund movement,”
says architectural historian Wolfgang Voigt today. Saying this he also includes the generation of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose
legendary Villa Tugendhat in Brno was “prefigured” in Stifter’s Rosenhaus, and Le Corbusier, who in 1922 romanced about “hous-
es like Indian Summer poems” in “Vers une Architecture”. Munich-based architect Theodor Fischer, in turn, who went down in
modern architecture history as “teacher of the avant-garde” (his students included, amongst others, Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring,
Ernst May, and Erich Mendelsohn), not only produced own sketches of the Rosenhaus but also had his students regularly create
drafts according to the descriptions in the novel – in the 1920s and 1930s, this was common practice at many schools of architec-
ture and in individual cases it still is today. In Stuttgart, too, the novel-based design of the Rosenhaus was a popular task for stu-
dent under the aegis of Paul Schmitthenner. Schmitthenner, who together with his teaching colleague Paul Bonatz was among the
founders of the legendary “Stuttgart School”, may be regarded as the 20th century architect whose work was most decisively
influenced by Stifter. He almost lived and worked, as one of his students put it, in the world of the “Indian Summer”. In 1941,
Schmitthenner wrote about his own approach: “There are very few immortal architects in the world, they are the high priests,
they are the benefactors of the human race. However, even though not every example of architecture can be high art of building,
it can yet be something else that is not lacking every right to exist. Contributing an element of good to the construction of the
lasting has been the intention of my architecture.” One hundred years earlier, Stifter started his novellas published under the title
of “Colourful Stones” with the following words: “There are very few poets in the world, they are the high priests, they are the
benefactors of the human race. However, even though not all spoken works can be poetry, they can still be something else that
is not lacking every right to exist. Contributing an element of good to forming the perpetual has been the intention of my writ-
ings.” Schmitthenner turned people into houses, writings into examples of architecture, poetry into high art of building and the
perpetual into the lasting, apart from that the architect used the writer’s wording in an unchanged form to express his own archi-
tectural theory – a unique occurrence in the history of architecture! Literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki described Stifter’s work
as “outdated” and “very, very boring”. A few years ago, “Die Zeit”, by contrast, rated “Indian Summer” among the “most mag-
nificent novels ever written. Thomas Bernhard, in turn, believed that he would find so much kitsch on any page written by Stifter
that it would suffice to satisfy several generations of poetry-hungry nuns and nurses, whereas Friedrich Nietzsche considered
“Indian Summer” one of the few works of German literature which deserved “to be read again and again”. He called the novel:
“in fact, it is the only German book after Goethe that has any magic for me.”

176 • AIT 7/8.2017