‘So lange die Natur so bleibt’: The Alpine Abstract in Stifter’s ‘Bergkristall’

Through a close re-reading of Stifter’s canonical story, the article investigates how a geological setting, a mountain named Gars, becomes a venue that both prefigures and challenges contemporary Anthropocene discourses. The abstract, elemental language used to describe the higher regions of the mountain, on which two children get lost on Christmas Eve, turns an apparently stable “nature” into a stage for disorienting and alienating aesthetic spectacle. On the mountain, the children’s movements become subject to an austere Alpine calculus, articulated in variants of the word fortgehen, which recur obsessively throughout the text, pointing at an unsettling force beyond the human.