E. T. A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman"

THE CONTEXT

The term "romanticism" not only has various literary meanings, but its usefulness is directly dependent upon its flexibility. It is a comprehensive and imprecise term representing various tendencies for change in such areas as subject matter, attitude, and form. On the one hand, it may be a basically optimistic expression of belief in the natural goodness of man; on the other, it may view man through much darker lenses, see him as a victim of demonic, hostile, and unpredictable forces. In either case, emotions are elevated above reason, the ideal above the actual, and so on. But regardless of the angle of viewing and of the particular tone and mode of expression of romanticism during the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, imagination may well be one of the keys to the concept. Coleridge's words supply helpful information:

The incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections in the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.1

The German romantic in general, and Hoffmann in particular, was essentially concerned with the artistic depiction of a world in which the ordinary and the prosaic were imbued with the extraordinary and incomprehensible, where the "supernatural agency" was given full sway. The deliberate rejection of the prosaic, everyday world led the romantic writer at first to the idyllic past. In Germany this past was synonymous with the medieval world (which surely never existed as the Germans wished to see it) , and it led to the world of the fairy tale and the dream, not as these were viewed through the roseate lenses of the English, who had been greatly influenced by Rousseau, but often, most especially in Hoffmann and his contemporaries, through a much darker and more ominous lense.Unlike the experience in other countries, in Germany romanticism encompassed all fields-art, music, religion, philosophy, history, political science, natural science-and these were no less affected than literature itself.2 It was the hope of the poets that a large cultural synthesis could be achieved to erase the artificial boundaries separating these intellectual areas so that such polar concepts as intellect and feeling, art and life, reality and illusion, would be fused. This is what the German writer Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) meant when he announced that "The world must be romanticized."

German romanticism was not only a continuation of the German Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") literary movement of
the 1770s-a violent protest against the precepts of the Enlightenment--but it was, in great measure, a strong reaction against German classicism (despite the fact that the two terms are often united under the name German idealism) .3 Goethe and Schiller had gone beyond the Sturm und Drang Movement; they reemphasized classical restraint and, by so doing, had more or less isolated themselves.

By 1805 great waves of irrationalism dominated Germany: the imaginative, the fantastic, the colorful, the emotional, the ecstatic, the moody, the hyperbolic, and the patriotic were in vogue. A yearning for freedom was reflected not only in lives, but in works. The harmoniously balanced creations in the classical vein now made way for a cascade of moods and inspirations, an extreme variety of works, a formlessness which had as a common denominator the strong desire for something different and better. The philosophical groundwork for German romanticism was prepared by many-and one always narrows possible sources of indebtedness somewhat arbitrarily-most prominently, by Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling.

The German romantic writers turned to the Middle Ages for their subject matter, especially because they saw it as an era in which society had been unified and made strong by the Catholic Church. They saw modern Germany as politically bankrupt and Napoleon as an inexorable threat to their country; and their vision sought an earlier world of splendor. (Indeed, so attractive was this medieval world to a number of poets that they became converts to Catholicism.) Hoffmann, who at first considered himself essentially a musician, composed music for the Church. The'Grimm brothers collected fairy tales and laid the foundation of philological studies with their investigation of early Germanic languages. Clemens Brentano and his brotherin-law Achim von Arnim collected and published folksongs which were hailed as the "true" expression of man unspoiled by society.6

The dark side of German romanticism stemmed in part from the fact that the German Kunstmdrchen (the art fairy tale) is, perhaps especially clearly in Hoffmann, different from alleged folklore -for one thing, often taking place in contemporary caf6s or in the busy streets of Dresden, Berlin, Frankfurt, or Paris. The uncanny, the mysterious, the horrible, the grotesque, and the prosaic merge and juxtapose with startling and deceptively simple ease. It is this merging and juxtaposition which account for much of the horror beneath the surface, because it shocks the reader into the recognition that the world of the fantastic and the supernatural is not comfortably removed from everyday existence. The novella, which flourished in the Germany of the time, also exploited the uncanny and the mysterious.7

It was Novalis who, in one of his novels, verbalized the tenor of much German literature of the time: "Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt" (The world becomes the dream, and the dream becomes the world) .8 It was he who celebrated night and death and expressed ineffable yearning for the "eternal bridal night." For him light represented the finite world, night the infinite world. Death, not life, seemed more desirable, because death, having been conquered by Christ, was no longer to be feared, but rather to be desired. German romanticism also drew heavily from Anton Mesmer and "scientific" and occultist doctrines. In considerable measure, the development of the double, for example, seems to have stemmed not only from earlier depiction of twin-doubles (in Shakespeare and Moli~re, among very many others), but from studies in psychology and from Mesmer's theory of the magnetic union of souls. The German romantics were eager to exploit imagination, and in the whole question of "doubleness" and duality they found material consistent with their mood and taste and eminently susceptible to imaginative treatment.

Closely related to the yearning for night and death was the German romantic's interest in dreams, in part stimulated by the writings of Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, who wrote two very influential books-one on the night side of science and one on the symbolism of dreams. He called the language of dreams a "hieroglyphic language," a language which man need not learn because it is innate and understood and spoken by the soul when the soul is released from its imprisonment in the body. In The Symbolism of the Dream, Schubert wrote:

The series of events in our lives seem to be joined approximately according to a similar association of ideas of fate, as the pictures in the dream; in other words, the series of events that have occurred and are occurring inside and outside of us, the inner theoretical principle of which we remain unaware, speaks the same language as our soul in a dream. Therefore, as soon as our mind speaks in dream language, it is able to make combinations that would not occur to us when awake; it cleverly combines the today with the yesterday, the fate of distant years in the future with the past; and when the future occurs we see that it was frequently accurately predicted. Dreams are a way of reckoning and combining that you and I do not understand; a higher kind of algebra, briefer and easier than ours, which only the hidden poet knows how to manipulate in his mind.

The romantic writers knew well how to use this hieroglyphic language to reveal the dark forces within man. They focused on areas not accessible to reason, on the subconscious and all its manifestations.9 To depict these dark forces artistically, various techniques were employed; but generally the fairy tale, the myth, and the dream were the three elements that fused in the Mdrchen, as in Hoffmann's "The Golden Pot," where the student Anselmus, ostensibly an ordinary, clumsy boy, is inwardly torn apart. He lives in two worlds, that of the everyday, where nothing goes well, and a fantastic and allegorical dream world, where everything succeeds. The struggle for his soul, or his mind, is carried on by fantastic characters on a supernatural field of battle.

The number of dreams in earlier literature is enormous, but before the German romantics brilliantly exploited the substrata of consciousness (of which the dream is a striking manifestation) , the dream most often served literature as an effective and highly stylized device of another kind-actually of several other kinds.10 Perhaps no one prior to the German romantics understood or consistently and fully explored the dream device and its implications as an organic and inseparable part of a literary work; and in Hoffmann the symbolic dream seems to have fulfilled its potential.

The sentimental novel and the Gothic novel, both very popular in eighteenth-century England and France, contributed to German romanticism as well, the first because it may well have redefined the hero image by removing social position and knowledgeability per se as requisites, thus making possible the pathetic and introspective hero of nineteenth-century literature; and the latter because it more Or less stumbled on the whole realm of the unconscious and converted reality into nightmare, even as it stimulated the individual imagination.

But possible sources aside, German literature of the period was filtered through a particularly German vision, and it is different from almost all of that produced elsewhere at the time. For example, the castles and moats and twilight so much a staple of the traditional Gothic novel were irrelevant or incidental to the designs of the German authors. The overtly frenetic tone of the English Gothic novel would be relaxed because the Germans knew that a single scream shatters an everyday world as many screams can never affect a world of shrieks. The "Italian" villains of "Monk" Lewis and Ann Radcliffe would reappear in some of Hawthorne and Poe, but it is precisely to the point that the Germans found evil beneath the mask of normality. Their attitude, and the quality of their horror at the realization that "the power of blackness" lurks everywhere, pervade their works.

Given the German romantic's predilection for the uncanny, his essential anti-Rousseauism," his sense of the grotesque, his detachment, his concern for what is now called "alienated man," his loathing for Philistinism and burghers, he could not join Melville's Bartleby ("I prefer not [to become involved]") in his self-imposed asceticism. The American romantics were, after all, believers. The Germans had no need to pay for their share of Original Sin. The world as they often saw it, was not an evil place because God willed it to be, but simply because it was.

Aside from Novalis, the list of authors leading towards Hoffmann is considerable. Lawrence Sterne, among the English, exerted a very strong influence, and it is hardly accidental that Hoffmann's long title for Kater Murr is itself a parody of Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen .12 Goethe, to be sure, left a profound and indelible mark on all who followed him. Among the other Germans, Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, Fouque, Chamisso, Eichendorff, and Kerner also had some influence on Hoffmann,-the first two especially in the area of the grotesque; but Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter) and Ludwig Tieck, other contemporaries, seem to have exerted very considerable and direct influence. Jean Paul's forte is the fantastic, the grostesque, lacerating humor-realism turned inside out--inverisimilitude. It was he who invented the term and exploited the concept of the doppelganger [This is what people are who see themselves]) . His are "little" heroes who utilize lush imaginations to remove themselves to the world of fantasy. In his work there is an intrinsic duality in which an "I" participates in life while another "I" merely observes, both in a state of perpetual coexistence. His depiction of the world as appearance and reality, as wakefulness and dream, as rational and absurd, as disjointed and whole, as lyric and grotesque, appealed greatly to Hoffmann. In Tieck the fictional world is often kaleidoscopic, bewildering, unfathomable; here, too, as already noted, the worlds of dream and reality change places. Unlike jean Paul, there is little compassion, little that can be characterized as gentle. Tieck's world is terror-filled and bizarre, one in which peculiarities of personality become manifest simply because characters are forced to react to the unintelligible forces which engulf them. The Miirchen describe an escapist world, but only ironically, for it is a world of irrational foreboding and of the swift and merciless execution of an inexorable fate.13 It seems clear that Hoffmann also owed to Tieck some thing of his fascination for the puppet-man controlled by a capricious or spiteful fate.
In Brentano and Arnim, Hoffmann found, as a direction towards which their tales pointed, the grotesque vision of the world
and the artist's concern with its effect on man.

The term "grotesque" has been so injudiciously and widely used that it is often confused with the horrible or the bizarre. Orig
inally used to designate a certain kind of late Roman ornamental painting, later associated with the decorative work of the painter form, without any necessary reference to real life.... This is the reverse conception to Hoffmann's, according to which the dream revealed a higher reality reality as we know it, but projected in in wondrous dimensions and colouring, so as to transcend present reality, but not to negate it." (Ralph Tymms, German Romantic Literature [London, 19551, P. 76).

Raphael (who abolished all rules of reality and deliberately distorted objects) , it is the effect of this art on man rather than the pictorial image itself which leads to an understanding of the true nature of the grotesque. In the eighteenth century it was this effect of the work of art on the recipient that became a major point of interest. Whether a work was objectively grotesque was not very important; what was important was that the reader, or the viewer, experience the grotesque in a highly personal way.

The essence of the grotesque is that it erases the boundary separating the human and animal realm and, by so doing, frequently reduces man to an impotent puppet who sinks in the fateful determinism of hostile forces. Through personification, the grotesque extends its range to encompass the mechanical, which develops a threatening life of its own (as in the case of Olympia in Hoffmann's "The Sandman"). Also, most decidedly in Hoffmann, the grotesque is assigned a reality which contradicts reality as we know it, while at the same time being seen as a true reality, a higher reality, even perhaps the reality. It is when the unreality described becomes real and the grotesque ceases to become a game that fears become intense and an abyss yawns before us, because we are invaded by the feeling of the true absurdity of the world. We are led to a vision of the world which is topsy-turvy, one in which madness is the only sanity, because the world is itself a lunatic asylum. In the introduction to his collection Fantasy Pieces in the Style of Callot, Hoffmann says of Jaques Callot, a French engraver and etcher of the seventeenth century:

The irony which mocks in an's miserable actions by placing man and beast in opposition to each other only dwells in a deep spirit, and thus Callot's grotesque figures, which are created from man and beast, reveal to the penetrating observer all the secret implications that lie hidden under the veil of the comical. Shakespeare's plays, beautifully translated by A. W. Schlegel, were a revelation to the Germans-who lacked the advantage of a Shakespeare tradition-not least of all because they felt a strong affinity to his use of supernatural elements and to his view of man as an actor. Hoffmann, perhaps at least as much as any of his contemporaries, admired Shakespeare. He was extremely sympathetic to the view expressed by the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It: "All the world's a stage and all the men and woman merely players."

THE LIFE

E. T. W. Hoffmann

BORN K6NIGSBERG IN PRUSSIA

ON 24 JANUARY 1776

DIED BERLIN, ON 25 JUNE 1822

LEGAL COURT ADVISOR

EXCELLENT

IN HIS OFFICIAL POSITION

AS WRITER

AS COMPOSER

AS ARTIST

DEDICATED BY HIS FRIENDS

What is interesting about the inscription on Hoffmann's tombstone is not that it supplies some biographical information, which is, of course, readily available elsewhere, but that by listing his official position and avocations in a certain order it establishes priorities which tell us something of what his friends thought of the whole man. Further, the inscription strongly suggests that Hoffmann was very conscientious, versatile, and gifted, a judgment which has been amply and consistently confirmed by his biographers.

Hoffmann's parents were members of the upper bourgeoisie who had been connected with the law and respectability for generations; but theirs was a preposterously ill-fated marriage, and what Hoffmann called "a comedy of domestic dissension" ended divorce before he was three. The father was a man of c-Karm and professional ability (he had risen to become councillor of the High Court of justice), and he was a talented musician as well; but he was less than stable emotionally. He married a cousin, a highly nervous and hysterical woman whose rigidity and coldness and addiction to her peculiar family doomed the marriage. Following the divorce, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, the younger of two surviving sons, remained in K6nigsberg with his mother; some three years later his father disappeard totally and forever from his life, except as a very occasional memory.

To say that the situation in which the young Hoffmann found himself was something less than conducive to sound mental healt is to understate the case. The houselhod in which he lived was, almost with exception, barren, senitle, and sickly; the grandmother, "a woman of Amazonian proportions who had spawned a race of pymies" ventured from her room only rarely, and then primarily to talk to God and get ready for the final jounery; his mother seems from all accounts to have specialized in staring vacantly into space; his uncle had once taken a law degree, but after mangling his first and only case, he had withdrawn from the world to engage in compulsive rituals hardly befitting a man who saw himself as a disciple of the great Kant; and there was a maiden aunt, by far the most sympathetic adult member of the bedlam, who was extremely overindulgent and seems not quite ever to have have reached emotional maturity.

Despite all this, or perhpas, at least in part, because of it, before Hoffmann was twelve he could play the harpsichord and the viollin beautifully, write musical compositions, and draw devastating caricatures. His uncle, who was entrusted with his early education, instructed him in music and developed in him a sense of discipline, regularity, and hard work which was never to leave him.

Hoffmann, most fortunately, met Theodor Hippel, a boy who would soon attend a Lutheran school with him and would become a life-long friend who more than once would rush to help Hoffmann. . . . Hoffmann was 16 when he became a law student. He was nineteen when he passed the law exam and fell in love with one of his piano students a bored and sentimental married woman. Later he fell in love (one-sided) with his sixteen year old piano student. He did marry a Polish woman who main talent was that she spoke Polish. .. . .He died the best drinker in town, asking only that he be turned to face the wall. He had become paralyzed from the neck down.

i. "Occasion of the 'Lyrical Ballads,' " Biographia Literaria (1817), chap. 14.

' Kant had helped to undermine rationalism with his assertion that knowledge is limited.4 Fichte, his disciple, not only accepted the limitation of the power of human reason, but developed a concept of the limitless potential of the imagination. When he asserted that ego is the only being, he helped prepare the way for a solipsistic world in which one of Ludwig Tieck's characters can proclaim: "Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten" (Beings exist because we thought of them). Fichte did something to shake the fundamental premise that there was both a subjective and an objective world. In may ways, objectivity ceased to exist as a separate entity and became a subjective creation.5 From Schelling the poets adopted the idea of the existence of a harmonious partnership between man and nature -a most appealing pantheistic relationship. If the world is indeed what the poet sees it to be, psychotic states would inevitably be mirrored in the world of nature. Even when the hostile forces in nature conspire to doom man, these forces seem to be projections of a diseased mind. When Hoffmann's eccentric Kapellmeister Kreisler looks into the lake, what he sees is not his own reflection but the face of the insane artist Leonardo.

2. In England, for example, music "had ceased to be a creative art." The English romantic poets seem to have known nothing of Mozart, Beethoven, or Handel. To appreciate how very different the situation was in Germany, one need only look at Hoffmann's wonderful character in Kater Murr, Kapellmeis ter Kreisler, who is a musician precisely because Hoffmann and the German romantics saw music as "the highest art, the art which leads us into the dark abysses of our soul and the mystery of the world." (See Rene Wellek, "German and English Romanticism," Confrontations [Princeton, 19651, PP. 3-33, from which the preceding quotations are taken.)

3. The entire matter is far too complex for adequate discussion here, but it may be of interest to observe that the classical and the romantic coincided in Germany, and it is not surprising, therefore, that the first movement to actually call itself romantic, in 1798, focused primarily on criticism and philosophy rather than on highly imaginative and inventive art.

4. Another of his arguments, that there are necessary rules and limitations in life, literature, and morals, went unheard, or at least unheeded.

5. It is true that when Fichte wrote about imagination he conceived it primarily as a metaphysical faculty, but it is hardly surprising to discover that the German romantic writer interpreted it to mean something deeply personal and special-the poet's fantasy. They believed the world to be what the poet sees it to be.

6. This strong concern with the German past was perhaps also responsible for awakening a love for the fatherland, for a growing national consciousness; paradoxically, what had begun as a determined flight from contemporary reality ultimately led the Germans back to the present, to a clamorous patriotism directed against the French.

7. It is perhaps revealing to note that neither the Mdrchen nor the novella, two genres which were especially fostered in Germany, seem to have been generally known or written at that time outside of Germany.

8. At the end of Der blonde Eckbert (Blond Eckbert), Tieck concludes the story with the following: "He [Eckbert] could not now solve the riddle, whether he was now dreaming or whether he had dreamed before of a wife called Bertha. The- marvelous fused with the ordinary, the world around him was enchanted and he was not capable of thought or memory."

9. See L. J. Kent, "Towards the Literary 'Discover,. ~ Subconscious," The Subconscious In Gogol' and Dostoevskii, and Its Antecedents (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), pp. 15-52.

io. For example, an introductory, "launching" device; an escape-from reality technique; one admirably suited for allegory, for love and dream visions; a prefiguring (suspense-creating) device.

11. Hoffmann's own attitude toward Rousseau seems to have been ambivalent. Kapellmeister Kreisler, a strongly autobiographical character in Kater Murr, tells us that he was only twelve when he began reading Rousseau, and in Hoffmann's diary, 13 February 1804, Hoffmann confesses that he was reading the Confessions "perhaps for the thirtieth time," etc.; but, if the thrust of Hoffmann's fiction is to be believed, what he loved in Rousseau had much less to do with his pervasive optimism than with Hoffmann's feeling of kinship to his

12. Hoffmann admired Sterne's apparently haphazard technique of narration and saw this purposeful breaking of illusion and "detachment" (romantic irony) as a refined and subtle technique which found a parallel in the willful caprice of many of the German novels of the time, especially jean Paul's. Sentimental Journey was one of Hoffmann's very favorite books because, among other things, Hoffmann admired Sterne's humor and felt that he had developed the storyteller's art to a high degree of perfection. (Hoffmann and his close friend Hippel often called one another Yorick and Eugenius, two characters in Sterne's book.)

13- It has been pointed out that Tieck's "success with the Mdrchen genre
depends on the more or less successful translation of the dream into literary

14. See especially Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, tr. Ulrich Weisstein (New York, 1963).

"confusion, his love of and ability in music, his strong attachment to nature, his autobiographical bent, and so on.