E.T.A. Hoffmann and the fantastic: The Sandman and The Golden Pot

Coppelius, the automaton Olimpia and the salamander Lindhorst: E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales between alchemy, elemental spirits, doubles and Freud's uncanny.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, born in Königsberg in 1776 and died in Berlin in 1822, led a life divided among several professions. He was a jurist and Prussian civil servant, a composer, conductor, music critic and draughtsman. Out of admiration for Mozart he replaced his third name, Wilhelm, with Amadeus. But his fame came above all from his tales, in which the supernatural bursts into the everyday life of German towns.

The Golden Pot and the elemental spirits

The Golden Pot, published in 1814 in the collection Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot, is a fairy tale set in Dresden. The student Anselmus, clumsy and dreamy, meets three little green-gold snakes among the branches of an elder tree and falls in love with one of them, Serpentina. Her father, the archivist Lindhorst, is in truth a salamander, a fire spirit exiled from the kingdom of Atlantis.

Here Hoffmann draws on the doctrine of elemental spirits, which goes back to the writings attributed to Paracelsus and had been popularised in the seventeenth century by the Comte de Gabalis of the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars. Against Lindhorst works an old witch, representing the hostile forces. Anselmus, having passed his trials, reaches the land of poetry with Serpentina, while the narrator returns to his room.

The Sandman

Far darker is The Sandman of 1816, the first of the Night Pieces. The student Nathanael is haunted by a childhood memory: the lawyer Coppelius, who at night carried out mysterious alchemical experiments with his father, and whom the boy identified with the fairy-tale figure who steals children's eyes. His father had died during one of those experiments, in an explosion.

Years later, at university, Nathanael thinks he recognises Coppelius in the travelling optician Coppola, who sells him a spyglass. Through that lens he falls in love with Olimpia, daughter of Professor Spalanzani, without realising that she is an automaton. When he discovers the truth he falls into madness, and in the end throws himself from a tower after seeing Coppelius reappear in the crowd.

Freud and the uncanny

In 1919 Sigmund Freud devoted an important part of his essay The Uncanny to The Sandman. In it he described the peculiar fright that arises when something familiar suddenly appears strange, like a doll that seems alive or a known face in the wrong context. For Freud the fear of losing one's eyes, in the story, pointed to deep anxieties of childhood.

Hoffmann also explored these themes in the novel The Devil's Elixirs of 1815-1816, inspired by Lewis's The Monk, in which the friar Medardus drinks a liquid kept among the relics of his monastery and meets his own double. The motif of the double, which German Romantic culture called the Doppelgänger, becomes a true narrative obsession in his work.

Hoffmann's influence was immense. Jacques Offenbach made him the hero of the opera The Tales of Hoffmann, staged in 1881, and Tchaikovsky drew the ballet The Nutcracker from one of his stories, by way of Alexandre Dumas's adaptation. Gogol, Baudelaire and many others looked to him as the master of a fantastic that springs from within the mind.