His tales are about singing automata, somnambulistic girls, mysterious snake women, fairies and alchemists, misguided monks, vampires and witches. Everyone knows the stories of “Ghost Hoffmann”, as the poet and one of the most important representatives of German Romanticism, ETA Hoffmann, was called during his lifetime. His supernatural, sinister characters are incredibly apt representatives of the German Dark Romanticism, known as Gothic Literature in England. However, not only the fantastical, the marvellous and the eerie, but also comedy, satire and irony as well as social criticism permeate Hoffmann's entire artistic œuvre, and thus his fantastical tales and grotesque characters are often written with a wink.
Known today primarily for his literary works, it is often forgotten that ETA Hoffmann, a multi-faceted artist and universal genius, also practised as a lawyer, composer, Kapellmeister, music critic and illustrator. “On weekdays I am a lawyer and at most a bit of a musician, on Sundays, I draw during the day, and in the evenings I am a very funny writer until late at night,” he wrote to a friend.
Born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann on 24 January 1776 in the Prussian capital Königsberg (today Kaliningrad), he changed his last middle name to Amadeus as a gesture of admiration for Mozart's music. Hoffmann grew up without a father in a bourgeois household, surrounded by uncles, aunts and grandparents, dreaming of an artist's existence. He wrote novels, which however remain in a drawer, he composed and was plagued by artistic escape fantasies from an early age.
As desired by his family, he pursued a legal career and took up law studies in 1792, passing the second state examination in 1798. After a legal clerkship in Berlin he was transferred to Posen in 1800; from 1804 he was a government councillor in Warsaw, where he worked until the Napoleonic invasion in 1806. The French presented the Prussian officials working in Warsaw with the choice of either taking the oath of allegiance to Napoleon or leaving the city within a week. Hoffmann left and now strove to finally deepen his musical and creative work.
While his compositions met with little approval at first, he was able to secure a position as Kapellmeister in Bamberg in the autumn of 1808. However, in the spring of the same year he was already plagued by financial worries and wrote to his long-time friend Theodor Gottlieb Hippe: “I am working myself tired and weary, I am putting my health at risk and am not earning anything! I do not want to recount my misery to you. For five days I have eaten nothing but bread, it has never been like this. Is it possible for you to help me, [...] otherwise I don't know by God what will become of me!” His tenure in Bamberg, although it could at least ease his financial worries, was marked by defeats. His debut as music director failed due to an inadequate performance by the orchestra and singers at the opera he conducted, and intrigues against him caused Hoffmann to lose his position as Kapellmeister after only two months. His theatre compositions weren't profitable enough either. Instead, Hoffmann received an offer from the publisher of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung to write music reviews for the paper after his successful publication of his story Ritter Gluck.
With Ritter Gluck, his first printed work was published in 1809 – he was 27 years old at the time. Before then he only pursued his artistic activities as a sideline. It was not until his mid-thirties that his literary and musical works, which had been kept under lock and key, broke out and there seemed to be no stopping him, for within a few weeks the whole of literary Germany was talking about him, about “Ghost Hoffmann”.
The night was his métier and in it the Dark Romanticist brought bizarre fantasies to life, drove his dark doppelgangers, ghostly souls and revenants through the streets and thus elevated himself to the master of his spooky stories, but was also driven by them. He was the first Romanticist to narrate the dark, the “night side” of human existence and to illuminate it with the aid of fantastical, sometimes macabre stylistic devices. His medical and psychological knowledge, which Hoffmann could draw on thanks to his friendships with doctors in Bamberg, but also thanks to his reading of relevant psychiatric literature, was crucial. The founding of numerous secret societies in the 18th century, the most well-known being the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati Order, greatly influenced his literary work. Their mysterious, secretive and clandestine activities were predestined to be reflected in Hoffmann's stories. Hoffmann is believed to have written secret society novels as early as his twenties, but they were never published due to a lack of interest and were later lost. However, he eventually took up the genre again in his story Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren). Another important model for him were the gothic novels of his English contemporaries. And so Hoffmann's novel The Devil's Elixirs was largely inspired by Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk.