THE BEGINNING

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INTRODUCTION

I

E. T. A. Hoffmann is Germany’s supreme story-teller. As such, he occupies a key place in the making of modern fiction. Others may have greater range or a better grip on social issues, but Hoffmann is unequalled in displaying the sheer joy of unbridled story-telling, with a voice that is friendly, cosmopolitan and humane. Moreover, in his hands, the strenuous ideas developed in early German Romanticism become infused into supple, fast-moving tales, peopled by a host of sharply-drawn, often comic characters. Figures like Anselmus, the clumsy student in The Golden Pot, René Cardillac, the demonic jeweller in Mademoiselle de Scudery, and the highly-strung composer, Johannes Kreisler, in The Tomcat Murr are both plausible individuals and living embodiments of Romantic ideas. With its brightly-painted characters and lively views linked by masterly plotting, the amusingly titled The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper shows Hoffmann at the height of his powers. His last great work, it is perhaps the most readable of all the German Romantic novels. It is certainly the funniest.

Hoffmann’s writing vividly encapsulates the romantic fascination with the individual and the imagination, with both nature and the supernatural, and with art itself, yet sets these concerns into the humdrum bustle of everyday life. There, Hoffmann explores the bizarre, the fantastic, the ridiculous and the sublime. His characters are students, officials, courtiers and bureaucrats, men and women who must toil to earn their bread, beer and tobacco. Professionals – priests, lawyers and doctors – also people his world, as do servants and market-folk. And he scrutinizes the effete German aristocracy, too, who feature so prominently in The Tomcat Murr. Against the background provided by the three chief social classes represented by servants, bourgeoisie and aristocrats Hoffmann focuses on the exceptional characters, the artists and craftsmen, who belong nowhere and suffer the agonies inflicted on them by stifling social conventions because their insight sets them apart from other mortals, confronting them with the abyss that yawns between mundane reality and the infinite. Facing these two worlds, Hoffmann revels in contradiction. Rationally, he analyses the spirit, laying bare extreme psychic states and yet, giving way to the irrational, he seems to lose himself, probing the occult phenomena that lie at the penumbra beyond empirical experience. He delights in playing with gothic horror, yet humorously uncovers the myth that lies behind the sublunary world. Throughout, Hoffmann’s narrators display such a warmth towards humanity, so welcoming an affection towards the reader, that they charm and beguile us, his ‘dear readers’, endearing to us the story-teller and his tale in the very act of ensnaring us in a frequently, but by no means always, fantastic world. In thus modulating Novalis’s esoteric definition that Romanticism heightens the ordinary and concretizes the spirit (‘The world must be romanticized…’), Hoffmann renegotiated the relationship between the real and the supernatural. He handles writing as a flexible dialogue between fact and fantasy, and these are the thematic ingredients he mixes in ever-new and startling combinations. By inventing this method, and borrowing heavily from popular writing, he effectively re-wrote serious fiction’s contract with the reading public. Both urban realism and mythic fantasy achieve major formulations in his work. Hence his popularity with ordinary German readers in his day, and the distaste with which the contemporary élite, represented by Goethe, regarded him. Ironically, though, despite his dubious literary status, he was one of Germany’s most popular writers. It was also in large measure via Hoffmann that early German Romanticism’s aesthetic discoveries, notably the ideas of the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck and Wackenroder, as well as popularized versions of Romantic philosophy, based on Fichte and Schelling, reached a wider European audience. As Thomas Mann observed, writing in 1940, Hoffmann was the only nineteenth-century German writer to achieve European status.

It comes as a surprise to realize that the list of writers whom Hoffmann directly affected reads like a roll-call of nineteenth-century literature. In France, his followers include Balzac and Baudelaire. Merimée and Gautier also belong to Hoffmann’s school, as does Nerval, whose whimsical idea of walking a lobster on a lead through Paris translates a typical Hoffmannesque fantasy into life. In this way, Hoffmann’s arabesques fuelled the very real protest of later dandies and rebels. In English and American literature, both Poe and Dickens owe him a debt. Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher recalls Hoffmann’s The Entail as, indeed, does Wuthering Heights, and the imaginary megalosaurus ‘waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’ at the start of Bleak House bears an uncanny affinity with the mythical Salamander inhabiting contemporary Dresden in Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot. Similarly, the dual character Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde recalls Hoffmann’s René Cardillac in Mademoiselle de Scudery, the demonic red-haired craftsman who at night exchanges his persona as the finest jeweller in Paris for that of a malignant murderer.¹ Thackeray and Meredith also have their Hoffmannesque moments. In Russia, among others, Pushkin as a story-teller as well as Gogol and Dostoevsky likewise testify to Hoffmann’s influence. Both the actual crime-story (Hoffmann’s innocent lady detective, Mlle de Scudery, is an ancestor of Miss Marple) and the metaphysical crime-novel, developed in works such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Kafka’s The Trial, extend Hoffmann’s fascination with the darker side of life, just as their explorations of spiritual guilt intensify and deepen Hoffmann’s earlier psychological probings. Of course, Hoffmann did not invent such preoccupations, but his contribution is considerable, and often overlooked. Thus, in a fine essay on Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera credits Kafka with paving the way for modernist fiction by reinventing the imagination; but in doing this, Kafka was also revisiting Hoffmann, whose predilection for the uncanny he shares. Kafka’s painstaking realism as the scene for logically impossible events, like Gregor Samsa’s realistically represented transformation into a beetle in The Metamorphosis, harks back to the Romantic writer, who was probably the first to formulate this technique as an aesthetic tenet, his so-called ‘serapiontic principle’. Today, Italo Calvino’s narratological pyrotechnics, Garcia Marquez’s century of solitude, Mario Vargas Llosa’s effervescent scriptwriter, and Umberto Eco’s fantastical monastery all betray recognizable Hoffmannesque traits. This does not, I hasten to emphasize, indicate an actual dependence. His inventions have become so widespread that no first-hand acquaintance with Hoffmann is any longer necessary for us to fall under his spell – though not to know him is to miss one of reading’s great delights. He is the true father of magic realism.

Hoffmann’s stories and novels are a major channel through which fiction from Cervantes onwards passed into our own time. His mediations include not just German Romanticism, but, more widely, a significant style in fiction, which runs counter to the predominantly realist mode which established itself above all in the nineteenth-century novel, namely the zigzag lines of satire and whimsy – the eccentric dart that flies from Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne.

The Tomcat Murr fully participates in this dialogue.

Looking back, in the tomcat himself we meet a feline descendant of Cervantes’ loquacious canine, the dog Berganza, duly honoured in the novel; in Murr’s artistic counterpart, Johannes Kreisler, we discern the literary fascination with a musician earlier evidenced in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau; in Hoffmann’s satire on biographical method in the Kreisler story, we note the comic echoing of Tristram Shandy, recalled by the novel’s verbose title; and the cat-novel’s friskily fragmented structure recalls Enlightenment bravura pieces such as Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. The Tomcat Murr, therefore, recapitulates and varies key ideas and devices drawn from satire and comic fiction, yet at the same time invents new motifs and techniques, adopted and extended by later writers.

The novel has had an extraordinarily wide-ranging influence. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or adapts its polar structure, and Bulgakov varied the same technique in The Master and Margarita. No less a stylist than Thomas Mann turned to The Tomcat Murr when, at the height of his career, he planned his own magnum opus, Dr Faustus. Even today, Hoffmann’s cat (like Flaubert’s parrot) continues to afford literary inspiration, as can be seen in the work of the contemporary German novelist, Christa Wolf, who recently took up the tomcat’s tale.

The far-flung variety of the Hoffmannites indicates that Sainte-Beuve, in an article on Nodier, was only stating the obvious with urbane simplicity when he christened them ‘Hoffmann’s poetic family’. Belonging to the clan in the nineteenth century, one may infer, signified unconventionality, rebellion and aesthetic liberation. Sir Walter Scott, in his essay ‘On the Supernatural in Fictitious Compositions’, drew the battle-lines between convention and realism on the one hand and imaginative fiction on the other, and in so doing unwittingly fed the very appetite for Hoffmann that he sought to quell:

To the modern eye, schooled in aesthetics after Baudelaire, Scott’s damnation reads more like an invitation, and that, at least, is to his credit. Fortunately, though, criticism has got beyond Scott, who somewhat confused the artist with his model. Most readers now prefer Hoffmann’s omnipresent wit and irony, which seem to have eluded Scott, to the sanctimonious pomposity of Scott’s critique. Today’s reader, moreover, to whom Hoffmann’s narrative self-consciousness has become second-nature, will better distinguish between madness and its representation, and will more approvingly recognize Hoffmann’s sharply-delineated portraits of derangement: his sympathetic probings invite not condemnation but empathy, as he enables us to understand our own, innermost selves via the tortured beings who exist somewhere between sanity and madness; indeed, we now know that far from having been produced by a sick mind, Hoffmann’s studies in psychic disorder, to which the characterization in The Tomcat Murr owes so much, profited from his familiarity with the latest in early nineteenth-century psychiatry. As to the narcotics and other stimulants, a more careful reader will note that far from displaying the symptoms found in exclusively drug-dependent writings, works like The Golden Pot problematize such delectably psychedelic substances as tobacco, beer, wine, punch and brandy. A drawing of Kreisler done in 1822 shows him pipe-in-hand, dancing deliriously. He may – possibly – be smoking opium. But Hoffmann’s own works are enriched and not side-tracked by his psychedeclic visions, being subjected to formal control.

Later writers redrew the battle-lines laid down by Scott. Thus George Sand, whose own Le Secrétaire intime recalls The Tomcat Murr, vigorously defended Hoffmann against the recurring charge of insanity:

If Sand underplays Hoffmann’s reliance on the imagination, her judgement on his sanity, and his work’s health, is incontrovertible.

Flaubert likewise answers Scott when, in Madame Bovary, he satirizes Scott’s fiction, to which Emma reverts in her passion. Ironically, in this passage, it is Scott’s writing, not Hoffmann’s, that is unmasked as escapist and essentially unhealthy. Emma herself experiences a typically Hoffmannesque musical ecstasy. She succumbs to ‘the thunder of the music’ and ‘let herself be lulled by the melodies: she felt a vibration pass through her whole being, as if the bows of the violins were being drawn across her own nerves…’.³ In mocking Emma’s response to music, Flaubert’s narrator at the same time archly exploits the very style which Hoffmann, famously, introduced to music-writing. This deployment of such Hoffmannesque flourishes at realism’s very core, at the moment when Flaubert is ‘exorcizing the demons of Romanticism’, indicates how thoroughly Hoffmann’s poetic family won out against Scott.

II

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in the maritime city of Königsberg, capital of the provincial government in East Prussia, on 24 January 1776. In 1804 he adopted the name Amadeus as a sign of his love for Mozart, becoming known as E. T. A. Hoffmann. His childhood was unhappy, not least because he was neglected by his parents, who divorced some years after his birth. His father left Königsberg. His depressive mother returned to her family home, where the boy grew up in the company of his maternal grandmother, his three aunts, and his puritanical and grumpy uncle Otto Wilhelm Doerffer, the ‘O Woe Uncle’ in The Tomcat Murr. In the same house another future writer, Zacharias Werner, was growing up under similarly distressing circumstances with a mother given to frequent bouts of madness. Hoffmann entered school in 1782, meeting Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, nephew of a well-known author, and the boys became firm friends. From the first, as he wrote in 1818. Hoffmann had an ‘overwhelming interest in music’. There was an active musical life in the city, in which the family fully participated, holding regular musical evenings. Hoffmann was taught the piano by his ‘O Woe Uncle’. He first heard Mozart in these years, encountering The Magic Flute, which shaped his writing, from The Golden Pot to The Tomcat Murr, with its fairy-tale story of initiation and the conflict between the dualities of body and soul, male and female, good and evil. Sarastro and the Queen of the Night live on in Archivarius Lindhorst and the Apple Woman in the Pot, and in Master Abraham and Madame Benzon in The Tomcat Murr. Rousseau’s Confessions inspired him with thoughts of musical composition, and he went on to write over eighty musical works, several of which The Tomcat Murr attributes to Kreisler. However, aged sixteen, Hoffmann entered the University of Königsberg to study law, much against his inclination, though he later enjoyed the subject, and became a distinguished lawyer. Hoffmann’s writings from these years already show the traits that typify his best work. A surviving fragment written around 1796 displays strong traces of Sterne and even whimsically varies the diagrams from Tristram Shandy.⁴

Hoffmann’s crooked line provides early evidence for his acquaintance with Sterne’s zigzagging narrative technique that later plays such a part in The Tomcat Murr.⁵

During his probationary period as a lawyer at the court in Königsberg, Hoffmann did not develop his writing but took up painting. He also worked as a piano teacher, falling passionately in love with his pupil, Johanna Dorothea Hatt, a married woman in her late twenties. She returned his affection, and her husband, who was in his sixties, tried to end the affair, which however dragged on by correspondence until 1798. Hoffmann found in her the first embodiment of unattainable feminine perfection he was later to celebrate as Künstlerliebe, the artist’s love which involves rejecting carnality and devoting oneself to an inaccessible ideal. Hoffmann had a similar if deeper experience in Bamberg, where he fell in love with another pupil, the much younger Julia Marc, and Julia’s transfigured image reappears, the object of Künstlerliebe, as Veronica in The Golden Pot and as Julia Benzon in The Tomcat Murr. The affair with Johanna may have driven Hoffmann from home. He had removed from Königsberg to Glogau in 1796, where his uncle Johann Ludwig Doerffer, whom he recalls in The Entail, oversaw his legal work. In Glogau he passed his so-called referendary examinations in 1798, doing ‘exceptionally well’. He followed his uncle’s family to Berlin, experiencing the hustle and bustle which he later celebrated as the first German writer of city life. Around this time he was engaged to his uncle’s daughter, Minna, and through her friendship with the fiancée of the great comic novelist, he met Jean Paul, who subsequently assisted Hoffmann in launching his career.

Having in 1799 passed his finals as an assessor with distinction, he moved the following year to Posen as a Government Assessor, but jeopardized his career by some typical buffoonery. He drew caricatures of several local dignitaries which a friend distributed during the Carnival in February 1802. This cost Hoffmann his job. He was exiled to the dull provincial town of Plock, where he remained from 1802 to 1804, when he was transferred to Warsaw. Before leaving Posen, he dissolved the engagement with Minna, and married the daughter of a Polish court clerk, Michaelina Rorer, with whom he remained until his death. In Posen, too, he witnessed the first public performance of his own work, the Cantata for the Celebration of the new Century. Indeed, as late as 1802, he was still torn between music and painting, wondering ‘whether I was born to be a painter or a musician?’, but in 1803, his first literary work saw print, The Letter from a Monk to his friend in the City, and his third and major talent unfolded.

Hoffmann’s life took an upturn in Warsaw. According to Julius Hitzig, Hoffmann’s future biographer, it was a bustling, cosmopolitan town, typified by the very exoticism Hoffmann evokes in his tales: Hitzig’s description of the streets swarming with Punch-and-Judy shows, dancing bears, camels and apes reads like a tale by Hoffmann himself. Hitzig certainly seems to capture Hoffmann’s appearance in descriptions like this:

The picture is corroborated by Hoffmann’s self-portraits, especially by his engravings. His agile features reappear as caricatures in the descriptions of Kreisler in The Tomcat Murr. Hitzig now introduced Hoffmann to the work of the earlier Romantics, with whom he was of an age, and he also formed close contact with his childhood acquaintance, Zacharias Werner.

However, politics intervened. When Napoleon marched into Warsaw on 19 December 1806, all Prussian officials who refused him their oath of allegiance, as Hoffmann did, lost their posts. The episode is recalled in The Tomcat Murr when Kreisler loses his job. Hoffmann’s wife returned to her family in Posen with their baby daughter Cecilia, who was born in 1805, but sadly died in 1807, and Hoffmann headed for Berlin. The town was flooded with refugees, however, and his attempts to strike lucky as an artist, caricaturist or composer failed, leaving him to endure severe hardship and, on occasion, hunger.

Protracted negotiations brought him an appointment as theatre director in Bamberg, which he took up in 1808. Initially, he voiced delight at the artist’s life, but looking back, he largely remembered his ‘apprenticeship and martyrdom’. After losing his post, and struggling again, he was re-engaged in 1810 as machinist, scene-painter and composer, inter alia contributing to productions of Calderón, Shakespeare – whose plays, like Mozart’s operas, constitute a permanent frame of reference for his stories – and Kleist’s fairy-tale drama, Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. Hoffmann shared with Kleist a fascination with such apparently occult phenomena as dreams and somnambulism, which the latter depicts in terms that recall the popular Romantic classic, G. H. von Schubert’s Aspects of the Dark Side of the Sciences (1808). This book later inspired Hoffmann, too, providing the plot for his tale, The Mines of Falun.

In Bamberg, Hoffmann encountered modern psychiatry, developing the common concern with psychology evident among contemporaries like Tieck and Kleist, and acquainting himself with theories that ultimately issued in the work of Breuer and Freud, and Viktor von Weizsäcker’s holistic medicine. He befriended Adalbert Friedrich Marcus, director of the Bamberg asylum, and the doctor, Friedrich Speyer; the former enabled him to study his patients, and the two men introduced him to contemporary ideas, such as animal magnetism, which recur in his stories and, not least, in The Tomcat Murr. Marcus was familiar with a broad range of theories, including Brownianism, Mesmerism and Gall’s craniology, as well as with J. C. Reil’s influential speculations, and together with the philosopher Schelling edited the Yearbook of Medicine as a Science (1805–8). The technical acuity with which Hoffmann later describes clinical cases, like the imbecile Prince and the Princess’s catatonic state in Murr, and his many characters with split personalities, has caused him to be credited with the first accurate depiction of schizophrenia. As Hoffmann observed, he did not wish simply to reproduce existing views, but to explore a ‘hitherto untouched aspect of magnetism’, i.e. to develop his own psychology, as he does in Bettina’s Strange Illness (1816). Despite its bizarre style, which echoes Diderot and Sterne, this story gives a precise case-history, based on a true event in Berlin. It seems that contemporary medicine was unable to solve the problem debated by its three characters – a Doctor, a Kapellmeister and a Travelling Enthusiast – who discuss the fate of the singer Betty Marcuse after she mysteriously lost her voice, with no apparent physical cause. The early Freud would have called this hysteria. Today, it would be classed as a dissociative disorder. The story’s Doctor concludes that the disease is ‘more psychological than physical’, but it is left to the Enthusiast to see that the problem began after Bettina left church in the middle of Haydn’s D minor Mass. Deserting God in this manner produced a psychological trauma requiring treatment. He cures her by recounting a parallel case, enabling Bettina to see herself, as if in a mirror: miraculously, her voice returns. This early psychotherapy depends on confronting the patient with an identical case-history as a means to self-knowledge. Such self-reflection runs like a red thread through Hoffmann’s work. Where self-consciousness fails, psychological breakdown prevails, as in the The Sandman and the tale of Saint Serapion. Where it succeeds, as it does triumphantly in Princess Brambilla, the subject attains higher knowledge. Ironically, even the Tomcat Murr undergoes a similar cure when, suffering from acute rowdyism, he sees himself in a mirror and mends his ways. Hoffmann also brings to insanity a forensic concern with human responsibility, evident for example in Mademoiselle de Scudery, and this line was subsequently pursued by Georg Büchner, an attentive reader of Hoffmann’s work, in his own drama of crime, guilt, madness and the forensic problem of responsibility, Woyzeck (1836-7).

The Bamberg years, and the affair with Julia Marc, subsequently found their way into Hoffmann’s continuation of Cervantes’ story, The Latest Experiences of the Dog Berganza. These were the years when Hoffmann’s literary career began to flourish with the articles on Beethoven for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, which earned him Beethoven’s respect and established him as a major critic, and the publication of his first mature story, Ritter Gluck, in 1809. This tale, which revolves around the composer Gluck, already displays Hoffmann’s inimicable style: it is told by a convivial narrator speaking with the urbane realism through which uncanny events unfold, revealing beyond the everyday both mental instability and a colourful myth of the ‘higher world’. Hoffmann’s work cannot be fully grasped without reference to music, partly because of the role music plays in his writings, not least The Tomcat Murr; but mainly because his early advocacy of a non-representational, imaginary realm depicted in words derives from his notion of music as an autonomous spiritual world.

Hoffmann’s reviews, and especially the Beethoven essays, are a milestone in modern music-writing, providing a model for later musical writers from Schumann to Wagner, and their lessons also feed into the musical ideas of The Tomcat Murr. In the Romantic age, for which criticism belonged to creative writing, Hoffmann’s music essays set a new standard, comparable to that marked by Friedrich Schlegel and Coleridge on literature or Baudelaire on painting. In his day, Hoffmann’s championing of Bach and Gluck was perhaps more remarkable than his Mozart worship, but historically, recognizing Beethoven’s genius was perhaps his chief gift to public taste. As to aesthetics, Hoffmann contributed to a decisive turn. His theory continues the shift from an aesthetic based on ‘imitation’ according to which vocal music deserves pride of place, to a non-representational ideal, developed in early Romanticism, for which instrumental music represents the highest variety, being as Tieck said ‘independent and free’. Affirming music’s priority in Romantic aesthetics, the reviews contribute to the wider turn from painting and the ut pictura poesis doctrine towards music as the paradigm for all art. In his keynote reviews later united as ‘On Beethoven’s instrumental Music’, Hoffmann calls music ‘the most Romantic of all the arts’, and even ‘perhaps the only Romantic art’. By emphasizing music’s priority, he expresses the credo later developed by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1819), for whom music represents ‘an objectification and reflection of the entire will as is the world itself’, possessing ‘the same objectivity as that possessed by ideas’. For Schopenhauer as for Hoffmann, then, music assumes a metaphysical role, mediating the absolute. This turn from painting to music was subsequently emphasized in Symbolism, as in Verlaine’s ‘Art poétique’, which pointedly rejects Horace’s ars poetica with its ut pictura poesis doctrine in the opening words, ‘De la musique avant toute chose…’⁷ As will be seen, Hoffmann provided a vital input to French nineteenth-century aesthetics, which proved another major route by which his ideas impacted on modernity.

In April 1813, having signed the contract for his first collection of tales, Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner, Hoffmann, aged thirty-seven and still more musician than writer, left Glogau for Dresden and Leipzig, in which two cities he was engaged as a music director in Joseph Seconda’s theatre. The two years in Dresden and Leipzig inaugurated his major phase. The lively German towns, his musical activity and the sweeping political changes in those years may have combined to inspire him as a writer, too. He now wrote the major works included in the Fantasy Pieces: the Kreisleriana fragments, which revolve around the same Kapellmeister Kreisler later depicted in The Tomcat Murr, and his first great fairy-tale, The Golden Pot. In narrative terms, it is the Pot which is Hoffmann’s chief work of these years. The Pot bristles with scintillating imagery and ideas. In a dazzling display of narrative skill, Hoffmann invents a new style of fairy-tale, ‘set fair and square in ordinary life’, which amusingly relates the initiation of the student Anselmus into a ‘higher world’, a lyrical Atlantis which brings him into direct contact with a realm comprising both noble ideals and life’s primordial origins, embodied in the little green snake, Veronica. Irony and humour lend the tale’s more serious ideas – on life, love, virtue, society and art-as-religion – a joyous insubstantiality which, in character, can only be compared to music. The operatic freedom Hoffmann brought to literature may have been stimulated by his work during these years, when he conducted Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute as well as operas by Gluck, Cherubini and Weber. A sense of the operatic imbues all Hoffmann’s writing with an awareness of its own fictionality. Yet this should not be misunderstood as escapist. Anyone who doubts Hoffmann’s political awareness could do worse than read his pamphlet of 1814, ‘Vision of the Battlefield near Dresden’, in which he records the slaughter of Napoleon’s army that he witnessed on the journey to Dresden, which several times almost cost him his life. Something of this horror lives on in Hoffmann’s first novel, begun immediately after the Golden Pot, namely The Devil’s Elixir, which is an intricately plotted gothic fiction indebted to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). The monastic setting recurs, albeit with a more minor role, in The Tomcat Murr, and Murr also shares with the earlier work the use of spine-chilling techniques borrowed from popular literature.

The close links Hoffmann forges between opera and fiction will also have been enhanced by his experience as the composer of six operas. In the Leipzig–Dresden years he wrote his wonderfully rich and evocative Undine, the first Romantic opera. Among its innovations – taken up by Weber and Wagner – is his use of recurring themes or leit-motivs to identify characters, comparable perhaps to the formulaic expressions in his fiction. An operatic synthesis of artistic vision with musical evocativeness permeates his writing. Through such musical evocation, he rehearses his idea, indebted to the Romantic physicist J. W. Ritter, that music constitutes a universal language, a language articulated equally in Kreisler’s sublime choral works, which the reader never hears, and in Murr’s caterwauling.

After the first two volumes of Hoffmann’s Fantasy Pieces had appeared in early 1814, with a Preface by Jean Paul, and following a disagreement with Seconda, Hoffmann returned to Berlin, where he took up a position in the Supreme Court or Kammergericht. He was fêted on arrival in the city at a dinner organized by Hitzig, which was attended by the cream of the Berlin Romantics, including Chamisso, Tieck and Fouqué. He subsequently met Eichendorff and Brentano, too. His literary vocation was now clear and his writing entered its final, most productive phase. He published his second collection of stories, the Night Pieces, in 1818, and The Serapiontic Brotherhood followed in four volumes in 1819–21, in which the framework narrative, a dialogue between several friends, elaborates the aesthetic of the serapiontic principle. The title celebrates Hoffmann’s own ‘Serapiontic’ friends, including Hitzig, Salice Contessa and Chamisso, with whom he spent his evenings. Avoiding the salons which had welcomed him on his arrival in Berlin, he preferred conviviality, drinking regularly at celebrated venues such as Lutter & Wegner. There is a particularly delightful portrait of him showing him glass in hand at this pub in the company of his bosom pal, the actor Ludwig Devrient. Something of the wit honed at Lutter & Wegner informs the narrative voice in the later tales and, not least, that of Kreisler’s biographer in The Tomcat Murr, a voice remarkable for its satire and demotic pungency. The novel also reflects his contemporaneous theory in the much-debated serapiontic principle. This develops Hoffmann’s aesthetics in dialogic form, expanding his long-standing ideas. In the Fantasy Pieces, he took his cue from the grotesque artistry of the French engraver, Jacques Callot, and this pictorial inspiration survives in the serapiontic insistence on visualization. The principle involves other key ideas. Above all, it recommends ‘inner vision’, as does the Abbot in The Tomcat Murr during his speech on modern painting. This entails ‘pictorial vividness’ and ‘sculptural plasticity’. The fantastic requires a realistic context, a point also made by the Abbot. Similarly, visionary inspiration requires rational control, too, and it is this ‘reflectivity’ which reveals life’s ‘duality’. Related to this is the emphasis on ‘balance’ and a clear ‘goal’. Like the earlier Romantics, then, Hoffmann elaborates an aesthetics of mixture. This, as Gerhard Kaiser points out, culminates in the idea of ‘kaleidoscopic’ form.⁸ Referring to Brewster’s recent invention of 1817, the serapiontic discussion opposes the idea of classical organic form by that of kaleidoscopically arranged ‘heterogeneous elements’ which resolve themselves into ‘attractive figures’. This montage theory, which develops Novalis’s idea of the ‘figure’ as an organizational principle, is reflected in The Tomcat Murr, arguably Hoffmann’s most kaleidoscopic work. However, despite its wide reference, the serapiontic principle does not exhaust Hoffmann’s aesthetics. Callot, for example, still remained a touchstone in the Berlin period, providing the inspiration for the bizarre capriccio, The Princess Brambilla. Jokingly adopting the Fichtean terminology of ‘I’ and ‘Not-I’, also used in The Tomcat Murr, the capriccio – it is impossible to ascribe the work to any pre-existing genre – rehearses Hoffmann’s comic ideal. A confused ‘I’, lost in a sublunary carnival world, discovers its higher self in the ‘Not-I’ through humorous self-cognition. Thus the capriccio rehearses the ideal of ‘humour’, rated higher than ‘irony’, which suffuses Hoffmann’s late work. The capriccio divided, and still divides, the critics. Even supporters, like Jean Paul and Hitzig, found its arabesques excessive. On the other hand, Heine and Baudelaire particularly admired it, the latter, in his essay ‘On Laughter’, praising its ‘absolute humour’ and provocatively calling it a ‘catecheism of higher aesthetics’.

Hoffmann’s legal career flourished in Berlin, no less than did his career as a writer. As a Kammergerichtsrat, roughly equivalent to a QC, he was promoted to the Appeal Court in 1821, at which he deputized for the Court President. In 1819, as the political reaction against the freedoms heralded by the French Revolution asserted itself, Hoffmann was placed on a Commission of Inquiry set up by Frederick William III to investigate the alleged perpetrators of high treason. Hoffmann distinguished himself by his fairness, writing testimonials for unjustly imprisoned intellectuals. The climax came over the investigation into Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (‘Turnvater Jahn’), the philologist, teacher, nationalist and pioneer of the physical training movement, which was to play a major role in developing German self-consciousness, and who was a key figure in the German clubs or Burschenschaften satirized in The Tomcat Murr. Though he was a man hardly to Hoffmann’s taste, he defended Jahn with masterly balance, but could not prevent him from being detained at Spandau from 1819 to 1825. Hoffmann’s position brought him into increasing conflict with Karl Albert von Kamptz, Director of the Police Commission, whom he satirized in his last great fairy-tale, Master Flea. The book was cut by the censor and proceedings were initiated against Hoffmann, but he did not survive to see them concluded. As staunch a defender of liberty at the end, as, from the start, he had been a proponent of aesthetic freedom, after being struck for some time by progressive paralysis, E. T. A. Hoffmann died in Berlin on 25 June 1822.

III

The Tomcat Murr, Hoffmann’s second and last novel, was to be his magnum opus, as he implied in a letter to Hitzig. ‘What I now am and can be, will be shown pro primo by the Tomcat…’ Its centrality can be explained partly by the novel’s long prehistory, through which it became imbued with all Hoffmann’s multivarious vitalities – including musical freedom, operatic excess, judicial balance, pictorial clarity, psychiatric insight and narrative zest – and partly by the choice of protagonists, the agonized Kapellmeister Kreisler, Hoffmann’s long-standing alter ego, and – whimsically – the delightful tomcat Murr, his own dearly beloved pet – a classic dark tabby with some paler striping⁹ – aged about two when Hoffmann began the novel, and whom, to judge by Hoffmann’s moving account, he and his wife seem to have cherished as a surrogate for the child they so tragically lost.

Hoffmann started the Tomcat in spring 1819, completed Volume One in the autumn, and it appeared before Christmas 1819, dated 1820. He promised to begin Volume Two immediately, but did not start before the next summer, working simultaneously on Master Flea, and completing it early in December 1821. It appeared before Christmas 1821, dated 1822. The book concludes with a postscript which promises to publish Volume Three the following Easter. However, when Hoffmann died, he had not begun writing it, and the novel remained unfinished. Yet even as it stands, the fragment is complete in itself. It remains unique among his works, not least because Hoffmann produced his own cover-designs for each volume, by virtue of which The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr becomes a literary Gesamtkunstwerk.

The novel’s roots extend to the start of Hoffmann’s career, from the early parody in the 1790s to the Kreisleriana of 1810–14. These first introduced the Kapellmeister and one of Murr’s ancestors, the speaking chimp in A Letter from Milo the Educated Monkey to his Friend Pipi in North America. Such motifs may have crystallized into the first thoughts for a novel. According to Hoffmann’s diary for February 1812, he then considered a ‘musical novel’ and, writing to Hitzig in April, he planned further essays to be collected as ‘The Clear Moments of a Crazy Musician’. He mentions a novel again in 1812 and 1815, but abandoned it in 1818. By the time the Tomcat surfaced, the scheme had, according to Hoffmann, become ‘something completely different’. We may infer that the idea for the double-novel belongs to his final phase.

The novel’s central idea, presented in Hoffmann’s Foreword, is the fiction that a talented autodidact, the cat Murr, has written his autobiography, and in so doing used the printed sheets of a book about the musician, Johannes Kreisler, as a blotting-pad. When Murr’s autobiography went to press, Kreisler’s biography was accidentally reprinted too with the result that both stories now alternate in the final product. The Tomcat thus depends on fictions – the fiction of Murr’s talent, of his book, of Kreisler’s biography, and of their accidental splicing. Such serendipity is the mother of comic invention and creates a bizarre narrative situation, shot through with ironies, as a web of illusion develops around genuine facts such as Murr’s existence in the real world and the autobiographical data Hoffmann attributes to the fictional Kreisler. There are constant mirrorings in the novel as well when art reflects life, and life imitates art. At one point, the plot follows The Marriage of Figaro, and elsewhere talismanic paintings both reflect and affect the action. Not the least irony is the further fiction that Murr’s biography is the main work, whereas Kreisler’s is an incidental appendage. Length redresses the balance. Murr’s tale takes up about forty per cent, Kreisler’s about sixty.

Murr’s wilful destruction of Kreisler’s book, by which his work becomes a palimpsest, signals the novel’s fascination with reflections and plagiarism. This is also evident in the innumerable quotations from Goethe, Shakespeare, Mozart and many others. Literature arises through a dialogue with earlier art, being both imitation and aesthetic cannibalism. While Murr’s pompous name-dropping satirizes cultural pretensions, at a deeper level the literary cannibalism affirms how art depends on earlier art to survive. Names like ‘Hector’ and ‘Achilles’ indicate that art after Homer consists in rearranging shards – like shaking coloured glass in a kaleidoscope.

There are some parallels for Hoffmann’s narrative method. The double-biography recalls Plutarch’s parallel lives of Greek and Roman heroes, to which Hoffmann’s well-educated tomcat duly refers. And the method suggests Jean Paul’s Life of Fibel, which comprises a life-story and various snippets torn from another book. The title, as already noted, recasts Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and the speaking-cat recalls Tieck’s Puss in Boots. By contrast, the Kreisler tale recalls the genre of the artist’s biography, as represented by Wackenroder’s novella about the mad musician, Berglinger. These recollections not withstanding, in structure and character the Tomcat is unique.

Nothing quite prepares us for The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. The book effectively reinvents reading. As we turn the page, we confront alternating fragments, to be hurled inexorably from one narrator to another, by turn delighted and bewildered, teased and enthralled. Just as we become familiar with a story, it breaks off at a dramatic climax, whereupon confusion and momentary tedium set in as we accustom ourselves to the other tale, which again stops just when we have become absorbed. By its repeated shocks the narrative buffets us between two worlds.

The novel’s two halves are linked by Master Abraham, Murr’s owner and Kreisler’s mentor. This effects a structural unity. Other details, like the references to Kreisler in the Murr biography and that to Murr in the first Kreisler episode, strengthen the connection. Hoffmann’s final postscript promises closer links in Volume Three, which was presumably to create the synthesis in this witty dialectic. As it is, the elements remain antithetical.

The protagonists prove to be opposites, too, Murr being the lovable cat, a calm, integrated, vain, self-satisfied and confident bourgeois who enjoys an unproblematic relation to his comrades and the opposite sex. Yet as lover, scholar, singer, poet, philosopher and fighter, Murr is also a remarkably integrated all-rounder, a true Renaissance creature. Kreisler, by contrast, is the neurasthenic, anguished genius, unable to find a niche in society or to satisfy his desires; an artist whose wildly pendular moods swing between radical extremes, from the plainly ridiculous to the loftily sublime. He is presented as Hamlet, Touchstone and the melancholy Jaques rolled into one, and his fictional birthday elides Mozart’s name-day (Johannes Chrysostomos’ Day, i.e. 27 January) and Hoffmann’s own birthday (24 January) into one. His sparkling volatility, his inner turmoil and intellectual insight exercise a powerful fascination. Indeed, in a footnote to his classic Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler claims for Kreisler’s character a significance comparable to Faust or Don Juan.