Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1776 - 1822) | Introduction
Introduction
(Born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, changed third name to Amadeus) German short story writer, novella writer, novelist, and music critic.
Composer, musician, and artist E. T. A. Hoffmann is best known as a writer of bizarre and fantastic fiction. Drawing from English Gothic romance, eighteenth-century Italian comedy, the psychology of the abnormal, and the occult, he created a world in which everyday life is infused with the supernatural. Hoffmann's tales were influential in the nineteenth century throughout Europe and America. Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Heinrich Heine, and George Meredith are among the authors who derived plots, characters, and motifs from Hoffmann.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
The child of estranged parents, Hoffmann lived with his uncle, a pragmatic civil servant who did not encourage his nephew's prodigious talents. Hoffmann studied law and accepted a government appointment, but cared for music above all and devoted himself to composing theatrical scores, opera, and ecclesiastical pieces. A public official by day and a composer of romantic music by night, Hoffmann experienced the conflict that became a
MAJOR WORKS
Hoffmann's first published works were reviews of the works of composers such as Ludwig von Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the last of whom Hoffmann honored by changing his own third name from Wilhelm to Amadeus. Believing that music was the supreme mode of expression, Hoffmann tried to replicate in his fiction what he viewed as music's superior traits, such as its immediacy, emotional power, and supernatural qualities. Hoffmann hoped to transport readers beyond the physical realm by thrusting them into an environment palpably real, yet strangely unfamiliar. Hoffmann's stories range from fairy tales to traditional narratives, but his most characteristic works feature doppelgängers, automata, and mad artists and each has a dark, hallucinatory tone. His most famous story is "Der Sandmann" (1817; "The Sandman"). The tale begins in epistolary form and centers on a young man, Nathanael, who believes a salesman he encounters is a gruesome childhood fairy tale character come to life. As with many of Hoffmann's stories, the line between fantasy and reality is blurred. Nathanael links the Sandman to an associate of his late father's, by whom he was once attacked. The eerie similarities between the Sandman, the father's friend and the salesman inspired Sigmund Freud's celebrated essay "The Uncanny," in which Freud uses Hoffman's story to illustrate his ideas, which eventually led to his theory of the Oedipal castration complex.
Hoffmann himself considered "Der goldene Topf" (1814; "The Golden Pot"), in which the supernatural enters a poet's everyday life, as his best piece of writing. Additional stories in the Gothic tradition include "Die Automate" (1814; "Automata") a two-part tale containing a ghost story and a mystery centering on an automaton or robot, and "Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht" (1814; "A New Year's Eve Adventure") in which two characters in two different settings represent polarities of the same personality. In both stories, Hoffmann underscores his belief that real-life activities can open doors to the supernatural. In "The Golden Pot" the impetus is creative expression while in "A New Year's Eve Adventure" it is alcohol. One of Hoffmann's recurring themes was the descent of the artist into a madness caused by being forced to live in a mundane world. While "The Golden Pot" centers on a poet, "Rat Krespel" (1819; "The Cremona Violin," also translated as "Councillor Krespel") portrays a musician's fall into what E. F. Bleiler describes as "sane insanity," a result of his hypersensitivity to daily occurrences. "Die Bergwerke zu Falun" (1819; "The Mines of Falun") was inspired by the real-life discovery of a preserved body in archaic clothing in a Swedish mining tunnel. Hoffman's miner became a supernatural being with intimate knowledge of nature and creation. Hoffmann also produced one Gothic novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815–16; The Devil's Elixir), a doppelgänger tale in which two characters' identities are so intermeshed that neither can tell where one begins and the other ends.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Hoffmann's potent language and images sometimes shocked and offended his contemporaries. Sir Walter Scott wrote that Hoffmann required "the assistance of medicine rather than of criticism," and an anonymous reviewer in The Literary World insisted his plots and characters stemmed from "a diseased imagination." Many critics, however, still appreciate the grotesque humor, social satire, and extravagant artistry beneath the horrific surface. Commentators have noted Hoffmann's adept placement of the supernatural against the backdrop of the everyday. An anonymous writer for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1824 called Hoffmann "a man of rare and singular genius" and noted his ability to "mix up the horrible notion of the double-goer, with ordinary human feelings of all kinds." Hoffmann is credited with influencing the work of numerous literary descendants, from Poe and the symbolists to the surrealists and modernists.
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