This is one of Stifter's great epic works, a most sensitive account of the formative years in the life of Heinrich, a student of natural sciences, born into a bourgeois environment, but influenced and gently guided by a nobleman, the old Baron von Risach. It is in fact the baron's own reminiscences which give the book its title. Comparable in some ways to Gottfried Keller's
Der grüne Heinrich
this novel, nevertheless, reflects Stifter's own moral values, his ethical thinking and his deep reverence for nature.