Auf dem Staatshof

Auf dem Staatshof, a Novelle by Th. Storm, written in 1858 and published in Argo in 1859. It describes through its narrator, Marx, the eclipse of a family of landowners, the van der Bodens, whose last descendant, Anne Lene, inherits the impoverished Staatshof. Her fiancé, a fortune-hunting nobleman, abandons her, and at a party not long after she falls through the rotten floorboards of a garden pavilion and drowns in the stream which flows beneath it. No one knows whether her death was accidental or intentional. After her death the Staatshof is demolished and a new house built.