E. T. A. Hoffmann and Alcohol: Biography, Reception and Art (review)

Anyone who knows the German Romantic author E. T. A. Hoffmann solely from his depiction in the Offenbach opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann will be excused for viewing him as the producer of drunken fantasies. Even those who have read some of his most bizarre narratives, such as the early masterpiece Der goldne Topf (1814), may be pardoned for wondering whether in writing them he may have been under the influence of one mind-altering substance or another. In this study, Victoria Dutchman-Smith is not out to challenge that perception, as most all scholarly critics have done, but rather to investigate how his well-known and self-proclaimed—even self-depicted—indulgence in much drinking affected how critics from his day forward judged him as an artist and person, and how those judgments reflected contemporary attitudes toward alcohol or views as to the role of the creative artist.

The discussion is divided into two sections, “Part I: The Artist as Drinker” (9–86) and “Part II: The Drinker as Artist” (87–167). In the first part Dutchman-Smith focuses largely on the shift from the nineteenth-century concern that artists, and especially writers, serve as exponents of the national culture—morally worthy monuments to the country’s cultural achievements—to the twentieth-century’s turn away from making a religion of nationhood to making a religion of art, though she does not quite put it in these terms. The second part of the study turns with an open mind to questions such as how Hoffmann uses depictions of drinking in his works and what they tell us about the meaning of the works. The works discussed include the tales “Das Majorat,” “Die Brautwahl,” Meister Floh, Der goldne Topf, “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen,” “Der Magnetiseur,” “Ignaz Denner,” “Geschichte des Schneiderleins aus Sachsenhausen,” “Die Geheimnisse,” and the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels, in that order.

The study’s intent is not so much to offer or defend a proposition, but rather to provide a discussion and analysis; it is in that sense very much a dissertation as opposed to a thesis. The research is broad, the content informative, and the writing quite engaging. While Dr. Dutchman-Smith does not directly approach the big question as to what Hoffmann’s tales are all about, she does wish to portray him as a thinker, an author concerned with ideas. Thus she writes in her conclusion, “I have demonstrated that alcoholic themes, structures, and symbols were used by Hoffmann in his literary works to express many different ideas, touching on many different areas of concern, be they artistic, political, medical and/or moral” (170). She also seems clearly to adhere to the view, especially prevalent among critics influenced by the neo-Romanticism of the turn to the twentieth century in its making a religion of art, that Hoffmann is largely concerned with depicting what came to be called the problem of the artist or the development of artistic sensibility. She comments, for example, regarding Der goldne Topf (107), “I do however wish to show that Anselmus’s use of and attitude toward alcohol features early on in the tale, and his changing relationship with drink plays an important role in locating him at particular stages in his artistic development.”

In sum, Dutchman-Smith has produced the most interesting and informative discussion of Hoffmann’s relationship to drink and the use made of that relationship by him in his literary works and by his critics in judging him, all in the context of attitudes toward the use of alcohol in their respective times.