E. T. A. Hoffmann

Abstract

E. T. A. Hoffmann has been described by one commentator, R. J. Hollingdale, as ‘a two-sided, schizophrenic kind of man; by day a decent citizen and lawyer, by night a fantasist with a strong penchant for the freakish and the weird’.¹ He even invented for himself an alter ego in the person of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, who obsessively reappears in Hoffmann’s stories and finally comes to dominate his last, unfinished novel, Kater Murr. Kreisler has been described as being ‘as faithful and complete an author’s self-portrait as literature has to offer’.² Hollingdale develops his summary of the romancer’s life and character in terms of this Jekyll-and-Hyde opposition. Hoffmann’s tales are full of madness, supernatural happenings and fantastic developments, and repeatedly they depict minds divided against themselves to the point of pathology and possession, conjuring up the darkness within as palpable phantasms and fantastic realities which irrupt disastrously into the calm, civilized life with which they are satirically contrasted.