Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann

Biography

Youth

Ernst is the third child of a lawyer of Königsberg, wire of a Pasteur Lutheran, Christophe-Louis Hoffmann, poet and type-setter at his hours, which leaves his wife in 1778 while taking along with him elder their children, Karl Wilhelm, in Insterbourg, in Petite Lithuania. Ernst is thus high in the family of its mother, Louise Albertine Doerffer, a sick woman and of an excessive nervousness which disappears in 1796, particularly by three people: his/her Doerffer grandmother, her aunt Sophie, called Füsschen (or small foot) and his/her uncle Otto Wilhelm Doerffer, unmarried magistrate, of dark, excessively pious woman and solemn mood whose Hoffmann was to trace, in her letters and through several characters of his work, a portrait without amenity where the ridiculous one disputes it with the odious one. It calls it Onkel O.W. ( Oh Weh! ), that one can translate by “uncle what a misfortune! ” or “uncle catastrophe”. Although it is enthusiast of music, it has rationalist philistine very.

At six years, it enters to the school Lutheran, where it makes good traditional studies. He learns art from the Fugue and the counterpoint near a Polish organist, Podbieski, prototype of Abraham Liscot in the Cat Murr , and appears a pianist wonder. He also tries himself to write poems, novels and to draw. But the provincial medium is not favorable to the acquisition of a technique. Also gifted for painting, the music and the writing, the young man remains ignorant of any discipline a little strict and foreign to the new forms which are born then in Germany.

His/her uncle the constrained one to study the right in its birthplace, but it has little taste for its studies. Its correspondence of youth hardly keeps the echo of it, contrary to its readings, which it is about Voltaire, of Rousseau, of Goethe, Schiller, Jean-Paul or Kotzebue. In music, he admires Bach, Mozart and the Italians; he discovers only later Haydn, Gluck and Beethoven.

At that time, Ernst binds friendship with Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1775-1843), wire of Pasteur, known writer and one of familiar of Emmanuel Kant. In 1792, the two friends find themselves at the university, where they follow in particular the courses of Kant. In 1794, it has a great passion for a married young woman, Johanna Hatt, to which it gives lessons of music and that it calls Cora.

A career of provincial civil servant

In 1796, a great-uncle, notary, take it as clerk, then one sends it to Glogau, in Silesia, in a maternal uncle magistrate, where he works during two years. At the middle-class company of Glogau, he prefers the company of the local artists. And, although it is attached to the Protestant tradition, it chooses his friends among the catholics. Engaged to help to decorate church (topic which it will develop in the church of the Jesuits ), it binds friendship with an Italian painter, name of Molinari, which initiates it with the secrecies of its art and the nostalgia of the South (and singularly of the Italy inspires to him, which is expressed in many its writings. It also becomes engaged to a young cousin, Mina Doerffer, and seems to move towards a marriage of convenience. However, whereas it has just passed its examination of chief clerk, in 1798, it learns that his/her uncle was named in Berlin. Happy to flee Glogau, it leaves with him and passes the examination of assessor. There, it paints, draws, composes a Op3era Comique, the Mask , which it dedicates to the queen Louise (but that the director of the spectacles, Iffland, refuses) and assiduously attends the world of the reviews and the theaters, who are rather active in these years, although the Romantisme still has its principal alive hearths in Germany of the South, with Iéna between 1798 and 1806 (around the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel, of Ludwig Tieck and Novalis), with Heidelberg as from 1804 (around Joseph Görres, of Achim von Arnim, BETTINA and Clemens Brentano). The school of Berlin starts to be essential only as from 1808, with figures like August Wilhelm Schlegel, Adelbert von Chamisso, Friedrich of the Mound-Fouqué, Heinrich von Kleist, Zacharias Werner, Joseph von Eichendorff and Hoffmann.

In 1800, appointed assessor, it sets out again in province, with Posen, a small town of garrison whose population is Polish and catholic. Become a jovial fellow, Hoffmann is allowed to make all kinds of espiègleries with his/her friends, an group of youth German: bouts of drunkenness and jokes follow one another, and Hoffmann draws caricatures of his/her colleagues and its superiors. In the town of Posen, he enjoys a manner of celebrity. One makes play a cantata that he wrote to greet the new century and an opera which he wrote starting from Goethe ( Badinage, trick and revenge ), which one preserved only the title. But its dissension with the middle-class company increases. In 1801, it breaks its engagement to his/her cousin, thus attracting itself the reprobation of its family. In the same way, it alienates the sympathy of his colleagues and its hierarchically superiors by making cruel caricatures, which circulate in the city. These impertinences are worth to him to be sent, in penitence, in a less important center. But, before leaving Posen, in 1802, it there meets and marries a young person Polish, Maria Thekla Michalina Rorer-Trzynska, known as Rohrer (according to a use of germaniser names), which one knows few things, but which will remain until the end at its sides. Exiled with Plock, between 1802 and 1804, a small sad borough of three thousand inhabitants, almost all Poles, Hoffmann starts to hold its diary, writes partly in Greek characters or abbreviations, to escape curiosity from his wife. During these two years, it tests only sadness and trouble and wonders whether it should not give up the magistrature to be dedicated to art, but without managing to be determined, between painting, the music and poetry. It outlines two operas, the Renegade and Faustina . Determined to escape this exile, it multiplies the steps, requests the intervention of his friends. While waiting, it takes again its coffee life, takes the practice of the punch (a drink containing arak, of lemon and sugar that one makes flame) and knows of serious attacks of nervous anguish. Lastly, it obtains to be transferred to Warsaw.

Before joining its new station, it makes a last stay in its birthplace in February 1804. His/her aunt Sophie has just died, and it fears to be frustrated of its share of heritage.

Warsaw and the discovery of art

In the Polish capital, Hoffmann finds finally the environment which had rained to him in Berlin. It finds Zacharias Werner, compatriot of Kœnigsberg and wire of its godfather, and binds with a young Jewish colleague, four years its junior, Julius Eduard Hitzig, which has been with Warsaw for five years and fact part of the Berliner literary group of Nordstern (the Star of North); it remained in personal relations with August Wilhelm Schlegel, Adelbert von Chamisso, Friedrich of the Mound-Fouqué, Rahl Levin. It is him which reveals in Hoffmann the new literature and makes him read Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (the author of Symbolic system of the dreams and the night Aspects of the natural science ). It is Hitzig also which gives to Hoffmann works Carlo Gozzi and of Calderon. These relatively late readings mark Hoffmann deeply, reveal it with itself and put it on the track of its personal work. On its side, Zacharias Werner, complex personality, make him discover the attraction of the religion and an environment of mystery.

In Warsaw also, Hoffmann is impassioned for the theater, makes ten projects of operas, composes a solemn mass, a symphony, a quintet, songs with Italian. He manages to make play opera the opera which he draws from the Joyeux musicians of Clemens Brentano. On the other hand, with Berlin, Iffland the Cross refuses on the Baltic , whose text is of Zacharias Werner and the music of Hoffmann, to which one prefers another type-setter. It continues to paint, in particular the frescos of the palate of Mriszek, seat of the “musical company” But, begun again by its taste of the satire, it gives to the Egyptian gods of one frescos the caricatured faces of the civils servant on which it depends, which creates some troubles to him. In the same way, it makes circulate others portrait-loads of its superiors. In spite of its multiple activities, Hoffmann is bored in Warsaw, he hates his trade more and more, and the too noisy existence of the city exhausts its nerves. A girl, Cecile, see the day in 1805.

But in November 1806, the French Army occupies Warsaw and puts an end to the Prussian administration. he prefers to resign. But, without resources, he manages to leave Poland only in June 1807 and share in Berlin, leaving with the passage his wife and his daughter to Posen.

Music and literature

The last year in Berlin in 1807 - 1808 is most miserable of all the life of Hoffmann. In the city occupied by the Napoleonean troops, it does not manage to be made reinstate within the frameworks of the magistrature, and it is hardly if it obtains thin subsidies. There must resort to friends, borrow money, remain sometimes several days without eating. It in Berlin that it composes the six Cantique S for chorus has cappella , is however dedicated to the virgin, one of her best musical works, that, in the Cat Murr , it will allot to Johannès Kreisler.

In August 1807, it learns that his/her little girl died in Posen. Lastly, having put an advertisement in a newspaper, it is seen proposing, in November 1807, the use of “band master” to the theater of Bamberg, in Bavaria. But its nomination will be effective only in April 1808, and its taking up the duties fixed at the next September 1st. While waiting, it goes in a former friend, in Glogau.

In September 1808, Hoffmann will seek in Posen his wife and takes along it to Bamberg. It will spend five years decisive there, between 1808 and 1813: he discovers Germany of the South and, for the first time, can dedicate himself to the music. But the practice of this art enables him to note the insufficiency of its formation, and it turns to the musical criticism, which opens the way of literary creation to him, without to give up the composition. A choice starts to take place between three arts. The music makes him find its style of writer, while the drawing and painting pass to the row of entertainments. The town of Bamberg likes Hoffmann, with its cathedral, its palates baroques and its catholic population of rather merry mood, which changes it middle-class of Kœnigsberg. But the theater of Bamberg, badly managed by a certain count Soden, is in full decline, and Hoffmann preserves only little time its post of head of orchestra. It should run the seal, to teach the music with the young girls. The things will improve only in 1810, when the actor Franz von Holbein and Doctor Marcus, two friends of Hoffmann, take again the theater in hand, and, during two years, Hoffmann is spent with enthusiasm. He lives opposite the theater and the hotel of the Rose (who east depicts in Don Juan , with his room opening on a cabin), in a narrow small house. The attic is used to him as refuge; it works there, sitted on the edge of the attic window, the legs in the vacuum, the liked vicinity of the ordinary cats (that it will describe in the Cat Murr ). In the floor, it made practice a trap door, by which his wife makes him pass from food. Type-setter, director, leader, decorator, librettist, it becomes in fact the only organizer of the spectacles which gain the favor of the public and enjoys to make play works which it prefers: Shakespeare, Calderon, Gozzi, Heinrich von Kleist, Zacharias Werner, Mozart, Beethoven.

Hoffmann is done many friends, with Bamberg, among which it is necessary to note Doctor Marcus, a cultivated man and a psychiatrist, whom it questions on the mental disorders, Doctor Speyer and a wine merchant, Kunz, which will become its first editor.

During its first years with Bamberg, Hoffmann composes much, that it is about Ballet S, of chorus S, prologs or of opera S. But this a little disordered activity, controlled at the requests of the public ends up wearying it, and he turns to musical criticism, to which he gives an original form, including its comments in a romantic screen. This evolution towards the literature of imagination undoubtedly must much with the passion which it starts to test in 1809 for one of its pupils, Julia Marc. The young girl is only thirteen years old (against thirty-four for Hoffmann), it is of Jewish family, girl of tradesmen and very gifted for the music. In fact, this love, whose its newspaper makes it possible to follow the stages, is very quickly high with the tragic row of myth, which one finds resonances in the Cat Murr and in several of his tales. Its illusions disappear when the young girl becomes engaged to a tradesman of Leipzig.

Its first known tale, the Knight Gluck , date of the autumn 1808. The Kreislerania , composed by a newspaper, follow. On this occasion, Hoffmann creates the character of Johannès Kreiseler, “insane”, double musician ridiculous and marvellous which will haunt it until the end of its days and will dominate, after the Fantaisies with the manner of Callot (1813-1815), the novel of the Chat Murr (1819-1821).

At the beginning of 1813, the war, the diseases frequent and the separation of with Julia Marc decide Hoffmann to leave Bamberg to be fixed at Dresden, in Saxony where one offers a post of “musical director to him”.

Crossing Germany in war, it arrives at Dresden with his wife the April 25th 1813. But the person in charge of the theater, with which it came to sign a contract, is already folded up with Leipzig. He thus spends a month in the capital saxonne, difficult conditions and assists the May 8th with the entry of Napoleon. Ten days later, it gains in its Leipzig turn, before returning to Dresden in June. Its work of leader occupies it much, but it continues its work of writer, writing during this difficult period some of its best tales ( gold Vase, the Hypnotizer , Ignaz Denner ), the beginning of its first novel, the Elixirs of the Devil , and two acts of the opera Ondine , of which it undertook to compose the musical partition with Bamberg according to a booklet drawn from the tale of the Mound-Fouqué.

But, at the beginning of 1814, returned to Leipzig, it is scrambled definitively with its director, Seconda, and is found soon without work, patient and involved in debt, without another resource that some collaborations with musical reviews. Unwillingly, he seeks to return in the Prussian administration and requests for this purpose the support of his Berliner friends. His/her comrade of youth, Hippel, finishes by him obtaining a station in the magistrature. however, Hoffmann refuses to be reinstated in its old rank of advising, preferring to accept a subordinate employment, which guarantees to him material safety without preventing it from continuing its work of writer and type-setter.

Return in Prussia

In September 1814, Hoffmann obtains to find its load of civil servant of the kingdom of Prussia. In the same time, engaged in literature, with the Imaginations with the manner of Stone-block , published by Kunz with Bamberg, with a foreword of Jean-Paul, he attends the artistic mediums of Berlin. In 1817, the theater of Berlin plays its opera, Ondine , whose success is stopped only by the fire of the theater at the time of the twenty-fifth representation. The reviews and the almanacs request its collaboration, all that he writes is published at once, and sometimes he lets himself go to an easy production. However, these last years are remembered by the publication of some of its larger chief-of works: Elixirs of the Devil in 1816, the night Tales in 1817, the Brothers of Saint-Sérapion in 1819 - 1820, then three short novels, Small Zachée, called Cinnabar , Princess Brambilla , Main Chip , like its major work, the Cat Murr .

In Berlin, Hoffmann assiduously attends the taverns of Tiergarten and of Unter der Linden, strolls in all the districts, which it depicts with kindness in its tales, runs the theaters, the concerts and the exposures, excavates the libraries, in search of old chronicles and romantic subjects. It finds friends of youth, Hippel and Hitzig, and ties new friendships with many writers and actors, some already extremely famous like Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, but especially Adelbert von Chamisso, Contessa, Friedrich of the Mound-Fouqué and the Devrient actor, whom it finds with the tavern Lutter and Wegner, where the talks of the “Sérapion brothers proceed almost daily” (who will inspire the collection of the same name). Named in 1819 member of the “Extraordinary Commission of Enquiry against the carried out demagogic ones”, it gives in freedom certain Yahn, put in prison without base. But a second commission, the “Departmental committee mediating” which caps the first (suspected of liberalism) refuses widening, and Yahn passes in judgment. But, during its lawsuit, it decides to continue for calumny it directing of the Kamptz police force, which affirmed by advance, in a note sent to the newspapers, the culpability of the defendant. Hoffmann thus quotes Kamptz to appear, with the fury of the ministry for justice. The king makes classify the business, but Hoffmann, statement of his functions in July 1821 and named at the Court of Appeal, writes a small novel Maître Chip , sold to a bookseller of Frankfurt, where it caricatures Kamptz under the features of an odious character, Karrpanti. Already, in the Cat Murr , it had depicts with humor the life at the court in this multitude of principalities and kingdoms which composed Germany then. The editor prints a version amputated by the most litigious passages (the original version, recovered by Georg Ellinger among the secret files of the State, will appear only in 1906). However, on the request express of Berlin, the magistrates of the free city of Frankfurt confiscate the manuscript with the editor and send it to Berlin. Kamptz requires the displacement of Hoffmann then. The February 6th 1822, this one is quoted to appear in the twenty-four hours to be explained. Its doctor sends a certificate declaring that it cannot rise.

As of 1816, the accesses of nervous fever multiplied. Overwork, an unceasingly exaltée imagination and the abuse alcoholic beverages ruined its health. Starting from 1821 appear the symptoms of the locomotor Ataxie. At the beginning of 1822, the lower extremities paralyze themselves, then the hands. Hoffmann must dictate its last tales with his wife or a secretary of fortune. Among these tales, the trace of its disease is obvious, that it is in the Cure , in the Window of angle of my cousin , in Maître Johannès Wacht or the Enemy , whose end evokes the anguish Dürer. He thinks of other works, which he will not have time to write: “Dream. The police force removes all the clocks of the turns and seizes all the watches, because time must be confiscated”. In June, one diagnoses a tabès, i.e. a nervous syphilis reaching the Spinal-cord. One applies to him red irons on each side of the backbone. The 25, the wounds with red iron are reopened and bleed. He murmurs then: “It is time to think a little of God”. He asks that one turn the face against the wall to him and dies a few minutes afterwards, the June 25th 1822, at the forty six years age.

Reception and influence

Reception of the work of Hoffmann in romantic France: creation of a romantic myth

If the first years of the 19th century are remembered by the popular success of the Romance black, or Gothic (of English gothic bruise ), whose most known authors are Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, and of the historical novel of Walter Scott, the end of the year 1820 in France sees the literature of imagination threatened by the requirements of a new public. Journalists of the Earth , Jean-Jacques Amp and Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, turn then to Germany and see in E.T.A. Hoffmann the author able to regenerate this literature of imagination. Amp forges besides a new adjective, “fantastic” (according to the Greek το φανταστικόν, which indicates faculty to create illusions) to join it with the work of the German author. Thus, the word Fantasiestücke , which appears in the title of its most famous collection, Fantasiestücke in Callot' S Manier , becomes by a slip of translation Tale of fantasies .

Hoffmann had previously been made known in France by the installation in Paris in 1822 (the year of its death) of his/her friend Doctor Koreff, character brilliant and prestigious, who met Adolphe Loève-Veimars (1799-1854), distinguished and ambitious young man. This last, fascinated by the life and the work of the German author, undertook a translation in twenty volumes of the complete Œuvres which it opened by a foreword of itself and an introduction of Walter Scott, “On Hoffmann and fantastic compositions”, in which the Scottish writer showed Hoffmann to constantly violate reality. The first mention of the name of Hoffmann appears in 1828 in the review of Balzac, the Gymnasium , then on August 2nd of the same year in the Earth with an article of Jean-Jacques Ampère who makes his praise by affirming that it “composes like Callot, invents like the Thousand and One Nights, tells like Walter Scott”.

The famous Scottish author, then essential figure of the literary scene, however sees in Hoffmann a rival to be killed, and wants to throw discredit upon the new fantastic kind, “where imagination is given up with all the irregularity of its whims”. The admirors of Hoffmann scorn the warning of Scott, and continue to deliver in particular their praises in the Review of Paris , Saint-Marc Girardin and Loève-Veimars at their head. A rough literary quarrel then bursts in December 1829 between Walter Scott and Loève-Veimars at the time of the publication of the first edition of the Tale of fantasies (translated by this last) at Renduel in four illustrated booklets. This edition of a choice of tales (privileged texts being more ``fantastic''), in an elegant translation but especially very inaccurate, accompanied by the illustrations of Gavarni, as well as the biographical novel written by the translator, constitute the first important contribution to the development of the romantic myth of Hoffmann: Loève-Veimars indeed made of ``its'' author the paragon of the romantic artist, misunderstood genius, with the pathetic existence, mined by drink and the disease, this biographical legend being used as explanation with the eccentricity of the texts presented as well as reference for the new fantastic literary kind. Hoffmann and its literary art are thus set up in example of the new romanticism against the old school represented by Scott, characterized by the ``good taste'' and the prejudices. New romantic esthetics on the contrary fixes the movement as revolutionist and wanting to ensure the complete freedom and the autonomy of Article.

Then begin the triumphal vogue of the author, of which one of the most manifest evidence is the translation, as of February 1830, and the publication of four volumes of its works by Toussenel, rival of Loève-Veimars. Hoffmann more and more becomes a legend, a mythical character, and even a character of literary works, as in Between eleven hours and midnight , of Alphonse Brot, or Kreyssler , of Jules Janin (work signed besides, during its publication in the artist, of the name even of E.T.A. Hoffmann). This passion an exaggerated fashion, characterized by many imitations of poor quality succeeds, which in 1833 a negative reaction on behalf even of the first defenders of the writer comes to stop: Théophile Gautier publishes Onuphrius, or fantastic vexations of an admiror of Hoffmann , which shows the devastations caused on a too weak spirit by the immoderate taste of the Fantasiestücke , while the end of twenty volumes (but in which however neither the elixirs of the devil appear, nor gold vase), Loève-Veimars gives up continuing its translation. The German author preserves despite everything in the same time of enthusiastic admirors, such George Sand, as its Lettre testifies some to a traveller of September 2nd, 1836: “poet bitter and charming, ironic and tender, spoiled child of all the Muses… ”. Lastly, 1836 mark the denunciation of the romantic legend of Hoffmann by some intellectuals, and at their head Henri Egmont, which undertakes in its turn the translation of complete works. He indeed seeks to restore in his foreword historical truth on the character of the author, and the same preoccupation with a truth pushes it to repair the errors and the mutilations of the translation of Loève-Veimars: Egmont insists particularly on the bad translation of the title by " tales fantastiques" , that it only begins again to satisfy and yield the tradition. Gautier also proposes a new more considered and thorough literary analysis to him, to conclude that “one needs in the most put out of order imagination the most insane and one appearance of reason, an unspecified pretext, a plan, characters and a control”, denouncing by there the abuses whose proof the imitateurs of Hoffmann made (article published for the first time in the Chronicle of Paris of August 14th, 1836 under the title “Tales of Hoffmann”).

Literary traces hoffmaniennes in the French great authors

Charles Nodier, the author of Of fantastic in literature (1830), seems to be inspired of Princesse Brambilla for the composition of its masterpiece, the fairy with the crumbs (1832). The intrigues of the two tales present some analogies indeed: a hero dreamer and insane of love (Giglio/Michel) believes to love a woman marvelously beautiful and rich; their poor wretch residence will be transfigured in a palate of dream… The same symbolic system of the ideal of dream which founds the reality of happiness lives two works thus. In its news of 1831, the coffee machine , Théophile Gautier seeks to create effects similar to those of Hoffmann: “like its model, it tells with the first anybody and mixes with the account with the familiar indications which give to the invention a color of authenticity”, P. - G. Castex tells us ( the tale of fantasy in France of Nodier with Maupassant , Paris, Librairie Jose Corti, 1951, p.217). In addition, Gautier makes a great use of the traditional topics of fantastic, like the concern brought by the night, the objects which take life, the intervention of the portraits in the world of alive, the correspondence between the dream and reality. The interest for the menus details and the taste of meticulous descriptions still point out the art of the German storyteller to us, while heroin, Angela, bear the same name as that of Bonheur to the play , and than the hero is called quite simply Theodore like Hoffmann itself. In 1841, Gautier in addition delivers to a true pastiche of the Fantasiestücke with his tale Two actors for a role.

It is perhaps possible that some scenes of the historical novel of Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), were inspired by the man with the sand whose Loève-Veimars had published the translation in 1830, and particularly the moment of the alchemical concerns of Frollo (l.V, ch.1), which curiously evokes the talks of comparable nature between Nathanaël and Coppelius. The large poet and romantic playwright Alfred de Musset, which quoted already Hoffmann in connection with Don Juan in her part Namouna (II, 24), for its part drew the intrigue from sound Fantasio of the biography of Kreisler delivered in the Cat Murr .

Gerard de Nerval finds as for him of the person of Hoffmann a “fraternal genius” (Castex, COp cit. p.283), insofar as this one “separates if little obviously its interior life of its external life which one would have sorrow to indicate in a way distinct the limits from each one” (Nerval, foreword with the Aventures of the night of New Year's Eve , Mercure, 1831, T. XXXIV): which revelation indeed for that which will attempt to describe in the continuation of its work “épanchement of the dream in the real life” (in 1855 in Aurélia )… Adventures of the night of New Year's Eve , Nerval translates the first two chapters (also let us note that it will somewhat help Egmont in its translation of complete works), and from the Elixirs of the devil , it wants to draw the subject from a drama, the hypnotizer . In the Gastronome of December 2nd, 1830, it publishes under the title “favorite liquor of Hoffmann” a page on the virtues of the punch, “this marvellous liquor where the gnomes and the salamanders are fought” (i.e. geniuses of the ground and those of water). Lastly, one of its tales, the hand of glory (1832), seems to be made up in the wake of Hoffmann, insofar as it oscillates unceasingly between tragedy and burlesque like between imagination and realism. the evenings of autumn , they, put in scene the hero Theodore and his Lothaire confidant, who carry the same first names as two brothers of Saint-Sérapion, while that of heroin, Aurélia, is borrowed from the Élixirs of the devil ; moreover, work comprises several explicit references to the Aventures of the night of New Year's Eve and to Don Juan (tale of Hoffmann of 1814 writing according to the Don Giovanni of Mozart).

Influence and posterity in Europe

The work of Hoffmann profited in addition from a considerable fortune, in fields as various as the literature, the cinema, the opera or the psychoanalysis.

Hans Christian Andersen, celebrates it Danish storyteller, owes for example its first literary success with a fantastic account directly inspired of Hoffmann, Promenade of the channel of Holmen to the Eastern point of Amagre (1829). One of the rare Spanish contributions to fantastic romantic, the collection Legends ( Leyendas , 1871) of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, watch appreciable effects large romantic German, such Arnim, Heine, and especially Hoffmann. Several Russian writers them also let feel their impregnation of fantastic the hoffmannien, such Alexandre Pouchkine in the queen of spades (1834) or Nicolas Gogol in “the Nose” ( in Nouvelles of Pétersbourg , 1836), where the fantastic one nourishes reality and multiple details of the daily newspaper to exist. In addition, a Russian literary group of the years 1920, in period post-revolutionist and against the futurism of Maïakovski, asserted its attachment with the Russian traditional tradition, and was made call the Brothers of Saint-Sérapion (1921), according to the work of the German storyteller: carried out by Victor Chklovski and Evgueni Zamiatine, they asserted the literature as an autonomous activity where dominated imagination and creative independence. Perhaps finally would be necessary it to detect some analogies between the Fantasiestücke and the first writings of at the same time fantastic and realistic inspiration of Franz Kafka, like the Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung , 1915), where one can still see, in the middle of the mixture between fantastic and realism middle-class, the romantic image of the misunderstood artist (the language of Gregoire Samsa metamorphosed became incomprehensible) so expensive with Hoffmann. We can finally establish a parallel between the news of Natsume Sôseki I am a cat (1905-1906) and Chat Murr celebrates it ( Lebensansichten of Kater Murr , 1822): the account of Hoffmann undoubtedly was for the Japanese writer a “stimulant”, even if it would seem well that Sôseki does not have any had a direct knowledge (cf the foreword of Jean Cholley to I am a cat , Gallimard/UNESCO 1978, p.10).

The cinema did not forget the work of the romantic author either to him. We can retain in particular two adaptations of the Tale of fantasies : in 1914, in Germany, Richard Oswald turns Hoffmanns Erzählungen , where it puts in scene the large German actor of Rumanian origin Lupu-Pick; and in 1951, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger carry out The bruise off Hoffmann , film only sung and danced. In addition, if the Fantasiestücke and the other fantastic parts of the German author reached well the modern forms of expression by the means of the cinema, a proof perhaps even larger of their richness and their adaptability would be their many re-uses by the musical art, in particular the opera and the ballet: thus were born famous the Contes from Hoffmann of Jacques Offenbach, Casse-Noisette of Tchaikovsky, but also Coppélia (Léo Delibes) and Cardillac of Paul Hindemith. The Kreisleriana of Robert Schumann in addition draw their title from the character of the choirmaster Kreisler, invented by Hoffmann.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung as for them analyzed its work from a psychoanalytical point of view.

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