Introduction to the Special Issue: The Two-Hundred-Year Legacy of E. T. A. Hoffmann Transgressions of Fantastika

Just over two hundred years ago, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann published some of the most influential literary fairy tales in the Western cultural tradition. Born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Russian Kalingrad), in 1776, Hoffmann has been remembered, on the one hand, as a mentally ill and amoral figure; and, on the other, as a responsible civil servant and artist. The son of a lawyer, Hoffmann was raised in a strict middle-class family and grew to resent and critique systems of social class. Hoffmann first worked for the Prussian government and developed a reputation for being scrupulous and fair, yet, the corruption of the aristocracy troubled him. While he maintained his friendship with the wealthy and well-connected Theodore Hipple, Hoffmann distanced himself from positions of power and went as far as publishing comical sketches of Prussian officers and later abandoning civil service altogether to pursue the arts. After failing to make a career in music, Hoffmann began writing his short fiction—stories that would be remembered to this very day.

In his dissatisfaction with “neatly trimmed bourgeois conventions of his time,” Hoffmann pushed the boundaries of the fairy tale as a genre (Zipes, Introduction ix). In his provocative tales, Hoffmann blurred the boundaries between reality and fantasy, evoking uncanny conflations. Doppelgangers and animated dolls populate his tales, cajoling readers to reconsider their perceptions of reality and social convention. While Hoffmann’s work can be read in relationship to German Romantics Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, and Novalis, tales like Hoffmann’s “The Golden Pot” (1814) can be read as an example of European magical realism. In Hoffmann’s work, the realms of fantasy are continuously encroaching and populating the realms of the real.

Hoffmann’s works were well received in his own lifetime, and he met regularly with his contemporaries to discuss culture and politics. Hoffmann’s tales did not stay in Germany; they traveled quickly to the Ukraine and Russia as evidenced by his influence on Nikolai Gogol.¹ Hoffmann’s influence spans time and geography and can be seen in the twentieth-century novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) by British author Angela Carter. Her novel depicts a war between reality and fantasy in a way that literalizes the symbolic tensions in Hoffmann’s work.

Outsideof literary circles, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories are often best remembered for the works that they inspired. Nutcrackers, an iconic part of the Western Christmas tradition, are associated more with Tchaikovsky’s ballet than Hoffmann’s original The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816); for its part, “The Sandman” (1817) is most critically acclaimed as an exemplar of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny. Indeed, Hoffmann’s material has served as inspiration for generations, influencing the works of authors from Théophile Gautier and C. S. Lewis to A. S. Byatt.² Thus, no matter how we remember him, whether for his originals or for the texts he inspired, E. T. A. Hoffmann has maintained an impressive influence on Western cultural texts to this day. In this special issue of Marvels &Tales, we will explore Hoffmann’s work, as well as his profound influence, and interrogate the many varied facets of Hoffmann’s two-hundred-year legacy.

In the Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Maria Nikolajeva argues, “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’ (1816) is internationally acknowledged as the first fantasy explicitly addressed to children” (50). Meanwhile, Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn position Hoffmann’s work among the German Romantics (52), and argue, “Children’s fantasy has far stronger roots in tales of the fantastic than it does in tales for children: the history of children’s fantasy is essentially one of appropriation” of texts never intended for children, such as fables and fairy tales (11). As for the fairy tale, Zipes argues that, with The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, “Hoffmann sought to revolutionize the fairy-tale genre and wanted his readers to envision the world in a different...