E. T. A. Hoffmann
1776–1822
Biography
E. T. A. Hoffmann was a German Romantic writer who also worked as a lawyer, composer, music critic and artist, and who spent his life moving between official careers and the arts. He was born at Königsberg in East Prussia in 1776 and was christened Ernst Theodor Wilhelm. Later he changed his third name to Amadeus in admiration of Mozart. Trained in law, he served as a judge and administrator in Prussian Poland, including a spell in Warsaw, and between his official posts he worked as a theatre conductor and composer in Bamberg and elsewhere. He died in Berlin in 1822.
His fiction is full of doubles, dreams and disturbing transformations, and it had a lasting effect on the Gothic and the fantastic. The short story Der Sandmann (1816) follows a young man's dread of a frightening lawyer and an automaton-like woman, and Sigmund Freud later discussed it in his essay on the uncanny. Das Fräulein von Scuderi, set in Paris under Louis XIV, is often counted among the earliest crime stories in German. Nussknacker und Mausekönig (1816) is the story behind Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker, and his tales also inspired Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann. In his last years he wrote Lebensansichten des Katers Murr, a satirical novel in which a tomcat's memoirs are interleaved with fragments of a musician's life.
Two of his works are in this library. Der Goldene Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814) is a fairy tale subtitled a tale of modern times, set in Dresden, in which an ordinary young student's life is overtaken by magic. Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil's Elixirs, 1815–1816) is a Gothic novel about a monk whose life is driven by guilt, buried secrets and a double. Together they show the two sides of his imagination, the playful and the dark.
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Books
Der Goldene Topf
by E. T. A. Hoffmann
On Ascension Day in Dresden the clumsy student Anselmus upsets an old apple woman's basket, and soon after hears three little green-gold snakes singing in an elder bush. Hired to copy manuscripts for a strange archivist, he is torn between the everyday world, a girl with plans…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Die Elixiere des Teufels: Nachgelassene Papiere des Bruders Medardus, eines Kapuziners
by E. T. A. Hoffmann
Brother Medardus, a gifted Capuchin preacher, tastes a forbidden elixir said to come from the devil's temptation of Saint Anthony. He leaves the monastery and falls into a nightmare of crimes, mistaken identities and a double who seems to live out his sins. Told as his own…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.