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collections. He published the first under the title Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (1814-1815; Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner, 1996). Included in this collection are Hoffmann’s important first story, “Ritter Gluck: Eine Erinnerung aus dem Jahr 1809” (“Ritter Gluck”), as well as his most famous fairy tale, “Der goldene Topf: Ein Märchen aus der
neuen Zeit” (“The Golden Flower Pot”). Hoffmann’s second collection, Nachtstücke
(1817; night pieces), contains his most ghostly, even ghoulish, creations. Its opening
story, “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”), still served Sigmund Freud in 1919 as a case
study of the human sense of the uncanny. Into the four volumes of Die Serapionsbrüder (1819-1821; The Serapion Brethren, 1886-1892) Hoffmann incorporated “Rat Krespel”
(“Councillor Krespel”), “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (“The Mines of Falun”), and—im-
mortalized by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in 1892 as The Nutcracker Suite—the fairy tale
“Nussknacker und Mausekönig” (“Nutcracker and the King of Mice”). The first detective
story in European literature and Hoffmann’s most popular tale during his lifetime, “Das
Fräulein von Scudéri” (“Mademoiselle de Scudéri”), also appeared in The Serapion
Brethren.
During the last three years of his life, Hoffmann wrote three lengthy, complex tales in
which he tried to achieve a unique blend of fairy tale, social satire, and aesthetic speculation: Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober (1819; Little Zaches, Surnamed Zinnober, 1971),
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E. T. A. Hoffmann
(Library of Congress)
Prinzessin Brambilla: Ein Capriccio nach Jakob Callot (1821; Princess Brambilla: A
“Capriccio” in the Style of Jacques Callot, 1971), and Meister Floh: Ein Märchen in sieben Abenteuern zweier Freunde (1822; Master Flea: A Fairy Tale in Seven Adventures of Two Friends, 1826). Hoffmann’s letters and diaries were published in the four-volume Tagebücher in 1971, and a volume of his letters was published in English in 1977.
Achievements
In his own day, E. T. A. Hoffmann became a successful writer in a remarkably short
time. His ghost and horror stories were received with favor by critics and with enthusiasm by the general reading public. Still, few would have considered Hoffmann to be more than an admittedly original and masterful entertainer. With his mixture of the miraculous, the fantastic, and the horrible, he clearly catered to his generation’s fascination with the occult 130
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and his readers’ thirst for the thrill of a spine-chilling story.
After Hoffmann’s death, his reputation as a writer diminished rapidly and was finally
destroyed by a formidable opponent from abroad. In 1827, Sir Walter Scott published in
Foreign Quarterly Review a scathing attack against the excessive employment of supernatural elements in fiction titled “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann.” Using the works of Hoff-
mann to make his point, Scott concluded that only an opium-inflamed mind could have
conceived such frightful chimeras. Scott’s assault on Hoffmann’s reputation proved fatal, because Johann Wolfgang von Goethe then made it his personal mission to recommend
Scott’s indictment of the unsavory Hoffmann to the sane sensibilities of his German
compatriots.
That Hoffmann’s writings survived this Olympian disapproval is largely the result of
their success in France. Though none of Hoffmann’s works had been translated into a for-
eign language during his life, French translations of several of his tales appeared shortly after his death and were quickly followed by a veritable Hoffmann vogue among France’s
most distinguished writers. Honoré de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire showed themselves
to be greatly impressed, and in 1836, Gérard de Nerval summarized the French concep-
tion of Germany’s literary pantheon by speaking of Germany as the land of Friedrich
Schiller, Goethe, and Hoffmann. Stimulated by the French reception, enthusiasm for
Hoffmann caught fire in Russia as well. Indeed, no major Russian writer of the nineteenth century—from Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol to Fyodor Dostoevski and Leo Tolstoy—failed to acknowledge Hoffmann’s impact on his work.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, by contrast, Scott’s article squelched whatever interest
there might have been in the achievements of Hoffmann. Still, as if by an ironic twist, it is in that world that Hoffmann doubtless found his most congenial successor, Edgar Allan
Poe. The precise nature and extent of Hoffmann’s influence on Poe, however, remains a
much-debated and apparently elusive issue among literary historians.
Hoffmann would certainly have derived special gratification from the fact that, while
his own musical compositions did not bring him fame, composers throughout the nine-
teenth century set his literary inspirations to music. Thus, for a wide and international audience, Hoffmann’s name is often linked, if not identified, with the names of his greatest musical admirers. Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana (1838; eight fantasies for keyboard devoted to Kreisler, the hero of Hoffmann’s second novel), Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881; The Tales of Hoffmann), and Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker Suite are only the best known of many musical offerings to the genius of Hoffmann.
In the twentieth century, Hoffmann finally emerged, even in Germany, as one of that
country’s most brilliant writers of fiction. He became especially valued as a fearless explorer of the labyrinthine qualities of the human psyche in its desperate search for inner order in the face of instinctual lust and aggression. Hoffmann’s works definitely began to 131
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cast their spell again, although more than ever before readers often found themselves feeling ambivalent about what is charm and what is curse within that spell’s obsessive power.
Biography
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann—who in later life replaced his third baptismal
name with Amadeus, in honor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—was born in Königsberg,
then the capital of East Prussia, now a Russian city known as Kaliningrad. The disastrous marriage between his father, an alcoholic lawyer, and his mother, a mentally unstable recluse, was dissolved when Hoffmann was only three years old. He subsequently grew up
under the pedantic tutelage of a bachelor uncle. The precocious boy spent a loveless and lonely childhood from which only his instructions in music and painting provided some
much-needed relief.
At the age of sixteen, Hoffmann enrolled as a student of law at the University of
Königsberg. Three years later, he passed his examinations with great distinction. He then joined the legal branch of Prussia’s civil service and was employed in various capacities in Glogau (1796-1798), Berlin (1798-1800), Posen (1800-1802), Plock (1802-1804), and
Warsaw (1804-1806). All through these years, Hoffmann combined a punctilious execu-
tion of his official duties with an increasing interest in music as well as a wild bachelor existence in which the consumption of alcohol played an increasingly significant part.
Hoffmann’s marriage in 1802 to Michalina Rohrer, the daughter of a minor Polish civil
servant, was entered into almost casually and seems to have been of little consequence to Hoffmann for the rest of his life.
It was in Warsaw that Hoffmann seriously started to cultivate a second career as com-
poser and conductor. When, in 1806, the collapse of Prussia’s Polish empire under the Napoleonic ons
laught deprived him of his position and livelihood in Warsaw, he decided to
embark on a musical career. For more than a year, he tried to establish himself in Berlin—
an impossible task, as it turned out, in the defeated and impoverished capital of Prussia. He finally accepted a position as music director at the theater and opera house of Bamberg, a small town in northeastern Bavaria.
Hoffmann began his career in music with great expectations and, in spite of an almost
immediate disenchantment with the new occupation, remained in Bamberg for four and a
half years, supplementing his frequently uncertain income by giving music lessons to
members of patrician families in town. His hopeless passion for the gifted vocal student Julia Marc was to become the most embittering experience of his stay. In 1813, Hoffmann
joined an opera company that traveled between Leipzig and Dresden, yet this change only
caused his professional frustrations to reach new heights. When an influential friend,
Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, managed to have him reinstated in Prussia’s legal service in 1814, Hoffmann eagerly jumped at the chance. He returned to his beloved Berlin, where
he was to reside until his death in 1822.
In 1814, Hoffmann was thirty-eight years old. Until that time, little in his life suggested 132
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that during the eight years left to him he was to become one of the most prominent writers of his age. In the preceding ten years, he had made a concerted effort to establish himself as a composer. By 1814, the list of his compositions included several operas, two masses, and one symphony as well as a considerable quantity of vocal and instrumental music, yet it was only with the publication of his first collection of tales, during the same year, that Hoffmann finally gained the recognition that had eluded him in all of his musical productivity. Obviously exhilarated by the experience of success, Hoffmann set out to write with single-minded fervor. Publishers sought him out, and so did the literary salons of Berlin.
The publishers Hoffmann tried to satisfy; the literary salons, however, he more and more regularly exchanged for the wine cellar of Lutter and Wegener, where he and his alter ego, the famous actor Ludwig Devrient, drank themselves into states of fantastic exaltation.
In spite of his private excesses, Hoffmann’s professional career—he was to become
vice president of the Supreme Court of Prussia—and literary career proceeded with unim-
peded speed until his body gave way under the triple strain. In 1821, Hoffmann began to
suffer from a rapidly advancing paralysis, perhaps the result of a syphilitic infection. Writing—finally dictating—at a feverish pace, Hoffmann died several months later, at the age of forty-six.
Analysis
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary work constitutes a compelling and insightful expression
of the prevailing anxieties of a deeply unsettled age. The rational improvement of the private self and the enforced stability of the social self were severely shaken by the upheavals of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon I’s will to power. The heroes of this rest-less time revealed to the perceptive observer unexpectedly atavistic passions compared to which all existing social and ethical norms proved exceedingly insubstantial. People came to the realization that they had hardly known themselves to that point and that it was critical for them to learn more about what was asserting itself so menacingly in their lives.
Interest in marginal, even pathological, states of the mind—in hypnosis, telepathy, mag-
netism, somnambulism, dreams, and trances—became a widespread obsession. In the
wake of this trend, there arose the specter of a human existence threatened from within by chaotic instincts and threatened from without by capricious turns of events.
Probably more than any other writer of his time, Hoffmann delved into the vicissitudes
that the defenseless psyche undergoes as it finds itself in the grip of conflicting demands that it can neither adjudicate nor deny. To introduce the reader to the torture chambers of the mind, Hoffmann employed an arsenal of literary devices that his audience knew well
from gothic horror stories. Madness, witchery, cloak-and-dagger intrigues, secret pas-
sageways, mysterious doubles, incest, rape, and human sacrifice follow one another with
baffling speed in mystifying plots that disorient readers until they can no longer tell what is real and what is imagined, what is mere wish and what is accomplished fact.
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The Devil’s Elixirs
In The Devil’s Elixirs, the plot of which was clearly inspired by Matthew Gregory Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk: A Romance (1796; also known as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk), the Capuchin friar Medardus recounts the story of his rebellious flight from the monastery and his repentant return to it. Medardus is born within the precincts of a monastery, grows up in the vicinity of a nunnery, and promptly resolves to live a religious life himself. After having become an extraordinarily successful preacher at his monastery, he suddenly experiences a breakdown of his rhetorical abilities and is desperate for a cure from the mysterious ailment. He knows that among the monastery’s sacred relics is preserved a flask filled with a potent elixir that the Devil had once offered to the hermit Saint Anthony during his temptations in the desert. Medardus takes a drink from the flask and
finds his powers restored, but he also senses new and ominous passions rushing through
his veins. Medardus’s superior, concerned about the peace of the monastic community,
soon finds himself forced to send the agitated and arrogant monk on a mission to Rome.
From the moment Medardus leaves the monastery, the reader is hard put to assess the
actual nature of the monk’s frenzied adventures. Torn between contradictory desires,
Medardus’s personality repeatedly breaks apart, integral elements battling one another as life-size enemies. Presented with a chance to assume another identity—which in fact appeals to everything he has suppressed during his years as a monk—Medardus wantonly
enters an adulterous affair with a baroness while, at the same time, falling in love with her angelic stepdaughter, Aurelie. The resulting emotional turmoil culminates in a scene of
horror in which Medardus poisons the baroness and tries to rape Aurelie. Momentarily ex-
orcised from his evil self by the enormity of the crime, he hurries away in frantic fear of his own passions.
After further wanderings, Medardus meets Aurelie again. This time, he is determined
to court her with genuine love and devotion, yet the demoniac compulsion to subjugate
and destroy the love he awakens never completely leaves him. On their wedding day, the
indomitable strain in Medardus’s soul flares up with renewed ferocity. As he sees his alter ego carted off to execution, he refuses to let it die, rejects Aurelie and everything noble in himself, and runs off, his satanic double on his back, until rage and frustration deprive him of his senses. Several months later, Medardus revives, finding himself in an Italian insane asylum. He proceeds to submit his body to a rigorous course of penance, and, after many
additional adventures, he returns to the monastery from which he had set out. He arrives the day before Aurelie is to take her religious vows in a nearby convent. Overwhelmed by the coincidence, Medardus feels rent apart again. He claims Aurelie for himself and slays her on the steps of the altar. Having thus destroyed the object of his passion, Medardus is at last free to reject the call of instinct and to reenter the tranquillity of monastic life.
The Devil’s Elixirs can be read on at least two levels. Late in the novel, the reader is told that the main characters are, unbeknown to themselves, members of one family that for
several generations has lived under a curse r
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cestor. That curse can be laid to rest only if the remaining members of the family renounce earthly love and thus mark the family for extinction. Medardus and Aurelie, the last of the unholy clan, embrace the necessary self-denial and break the chain of sin and guilt. The notion of an inherited curse was the stock-in-trade of the gothic novel. The introduction of supernatural agencies allowed authors to explain the many otherwise inexplicable coincidences needed to sustain the suspense of their stories. The real impact of The Devil’s Elixirs, therefore, does not arise from Hoffmann’s belated revelations about Medardus’s guilt-ridden family but rather from his relentless depiction of a man’s fearful struggle with instincts that lie, in stubborn and hostile cynicism, beyond the reach of his moral self.
Medardus, of course, does put an end to the curse, not only for his family but also for
his own troubled self. The Devil’s Elixirs, after all, is his autobiography; it contains his retrospective creation of a continuous self and signals a significant victory over his chaotic past. The success with which Medardus has managed to construct—from the fragmented
impulses of his psyche—the notion of a responsible personality shows that he has estab-
lished for himself a basis for moral behavior. Still, he has stabilized his personality at a high price: the exclusion of all instinct, the truncating of his very life. Secure as
Medardus’s self now might be, a unified self it is not, and no amount of Catholic pageantry can disguise the pessimism of that conclusion.
The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr
Hoffmann’s second novel, The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr, remained a fragment, a fact that—considering the less-than-convincing end of The Devil’s Elixirs—rather enhances its effectiveness. In contrast to The Devil’s Elixirs, which in spite of its confusing plot follows the traditional technique of a chronological narration, The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr surprises the reader with one of the most amusingly original structures in German literature. The novel is composed of two distinct narratives bewilderingly conflated: the autobiography of a tomcat (Murr) and the biography of a musician (Kreisler).