The novel Der Nachsommer [Indian Summer, 1857] is generally viewed as Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter’s greatest achievement, and as one of the most significant examples of the nineteenth-century German Bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe’s 1795 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship]. Though the work was not to find great critical resonance until the twentieth century, and was scathingly received by contemporaries such as Friedrich Hebbel, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche considered it one of the few books that deserve to be read repeatedly. Stifter had been confronted while living in Vienna with the failure and violent excesses of the liberal revolutions of 1848, as well as with forces of capitalism and modernization. After he left the metropolis for the provincial city of Linz, he turned to the genre of the Bildungsroman, and fashioned a narrative that...
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Citation: Macleod, Catriona. "Der Nachsommer". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 August 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=15113, accessed 07 December 2025.]
