E.T.A. Hoffman - The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

together with a fragmentary Biography of
Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler
on Random Sheets of Waste Paper

Translated and annotated by ANTHEA BELL
with an Introduction by JEREMY ADLER

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL , England
First published 182022
Published in Penguin Classics 1999
Translation and notes copyright Anthea Bell, 1999
Introduction copyright Jeremy Adler, 1999
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator and the author of the introduction has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

978-0-14-193731-1

E. T. A. Hoffmann is Germanys 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 , Ren 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.

Hoffmanns 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, Hoffmanns 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 Novaliss 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 fictions 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 lite, represented by Goethe, regarded him. Ironically, though, despite his dubious literary status, he was one of Germanys most popular writers. It was also in large measure via Hoffmann that early German Romanticisms 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.