Into the Crystal you shall fall!

 

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s father was an attorney at law. He came from a long line of innkeepers selling booze to the peasants in Warschallen and Tonk (the Polish part of Frederick Le Grand's Prussia). In the evening the snifters and nightcaps lined up like Frederick's guards on parade. The younger of his two sons was four when the parents divorced. The father took the older son with him to Insterburg in Lithuania, while Hoffmann and his mother moved in with his aunt Sophie Dörffer in Königsberg.

On their arrival undulating squeals greeted them, cutting through the air like knives. The screaming came from Frau Werner, the woman living in the apartment upstairs. She suffered from schizophrenia. Her son, Zacharias (1768 – 1823) later became a popular dramatist, briefly joined the Free Masons and after three divorces and uncounted one-night-stands converted to Catholicism. He took holy orders and became a popular preacher. So in the end, he fulfilled what Frau Werner had known all along – her Zacharias was actually Jesus Christ. Over the years the constant squealing from upstairs made Hoffmann’s mother grow hysterical. When he came home from school, she greeted her son with long sobbing sessions.

Hoffmann’s uncle – “the old Sir” (Hoffmann, Letters) – was a magistrate of the city and confirmed bachelor. He took charge of young Hoffmann’s education. His nephew immediately set the tone by emptying “the content of several chamber-pots over the uncle’s laundered breeches hanging out to dry.” The unexpected sight of the washing line sagging under the weight of his dripping pantaloons, not to mention the rather peculiar odor, brought tears to the uncle’s eyes. The women came out to commiserate. Hoffmann, too, chimed in with sympathetic noises and after a cool glance at the sky he said: “This always happens when the clouds look so green.” Apparently the prankster was never found out. Hoffmann enrolled at the university of Königsberg to study law. It was the Alma Mata of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. The philosopher was already world-famous then, but as far as Hoffmann was concerned, the great man could just as well have lived on the far side of the moon. Neither in his books nor in his correspondence Hoffmann ever mentions Kant – not with a single word. Instead, he studied the Italian language. A labor of love, paying attention to every shade of difference between the local vernaculars, and this long before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) had published his Italian Journey in 1816 and made Italy a fashionable destination for the German tourist. For Hoffmann Italy was the land of the commedia del arte and the dramatist Carlo, Count Gozzi (1720 –1806). In his stories Hoffmann is not particularly good on historical subjects – the needlessly famous Master Martin the Cooper is the pits, if you ask me – but to rustle up some fluff in Italian costumes he managed to do with consummate ease, despite of never having seen Italy with his own eyes.

He was slow and selective in the choice of his acquaintances, yet once committed a loyal friend for life – a friendship that was reciprocated. A fellow student, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1775 – 1843), was the son of a famous satirical writer; he and Hoffmann looked ahead to a promising career in Prussia’s judicial system. Another friend from this period was the son of a Jewish wine merchant, Julius Eduard Itzig. In 1804, in the process of assimilation, Itzig would change his name to “Hitzig” and later become one of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s publishers, leaving us his biography.

Already as a boy Hoffmann had penciled recognizable portraits of his family; so whenever his studies left him the time, he continued practicing drawing and oil paint, in our days he would have been a caricaturist, but the hands in his graphic work always look more like bushels of bananas. His true love, however, was music. Hoffmann devoted to it every free hour of the day, while "at night I am a very witty author" (Hoffmann, Letters, 1796). Except for letters, nothing of his writing has survived from this period, but he already added to the family’s income with giving music lessons.

In 1798, Hoffmann passed his bar-exam with distinction. As a treat he went to bed with his piano student, Mrs. Dora Hatt. She was a married lady with a heart of gold. She also had the syphilis and passed it on to Hoffmann. The bacteria incubated and bid their time. Unaware of his condition the young attorney fell in love with his cousin Minna Dörffer. He was 22 with a promising career ahead, so what could possibly stand in his way? "When such a gifted man asks a girl who has grown out of romantic infatuations, i.e. has reached the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, the innocent question: ‘will you make me happy by giving me your hand, my precious one?' she generally answers, with blushing cheeks and downcast eyes, ‘Speak to my dear parents; I obey their command, I have no will of my own!' Her parents, however, fold their hands and say: ‘If it is God's will, we can have no objection, dear son-in-law!'" (Hoffmann, Master Flea). But the betrothal never materialized and after four years of waiting, Hoffmann lost patience. He now had risen to the position of an assessor to the district court in Posen, Silesia, and in 1802, he married heels over head Maria Thekla Michalina Rorer-Trzynska, a down to earth Polish woman from the town’s middle-class. Maria had a pair of fine blue eyes, a head of raven-black curls, a fair complexion and curves in all the right places. She took nonsense from nobody, least of all from her husband. It turned out to be a good marriage.

Hoffmann continued to advance in the judicial system and the young couple received an invitation to the annual costume ball. After a couple of drinks, Hoffmann pulled out his sketchbook and began drawing caricatures of the local dignitaries. Everybody had a good laugh – "this chap has talent" ­– but when confronted with one's own portrait things didn’t seem so funny anymore.

Retribution was swift. The Hoffmanns spent the next two years in Plock, a godforsaken hamlet in Poland. The soft thud in the name clings to the tongue as persistent as the squishing mud roads clung to Hoffmann's shoes. There was no money, no educated conversation, no nothing. Hoffmann binged on nightcaps until he hallucinated. "I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps. You are enfolded by a dazzling glitter, all the objects on every side appear illuminated and surrounded by rays of light in all the colors of the rainbow – this shimmering light makes everything quiver, shake, and rumble – you are floating and unable to move a muscle, in what seems like frozen ether, squeezing you so tightly, that it is in vain for your spirit to issue commands to your lifeless body." (Hoffmann, The Golden Pot). At last, von Hippel’s already considerable influence engineered Hoffmann’s transfer to Warsaw and Hitzig sent money to cover travel expenses. Hoffmann threw himself into Warsaw’s society life. He founded a musical academy and produced his first opera. He wrote the lyrics and the music, painted the decorations, rehearsed the orchestra and trained the singers. Clients who came for legal advice tell us, that "if Hoffmann wasn't in his office then with certainty he could be found at the opera house underneath a mural he painted on the ceiling, dressed in a painter's smock and sitting on a scaffold, surrounded by pots of paint and a bottle of wine. It happened quite often that the parties in a legal action had to ask their way around to find him and when meeting him couldn't believe their eyes. But when presented with the administrator's decree he would climb down from his scaffold right away, wash his hands, and hurrying ahead, dictate on the go a legal instrument of such competence, that even the most discerning scrutiny could find no fault with it."

Hoffmann was a fashion conscious dresser, however if confronted with him, one could barely avoid staring, his incessant grimacing and the twitch on his brow left an unforgettable impression. Two mighty sideburns descended from an unruly shock of black hair deep down into a clean-shaven face with eyes of a pale grey, an aquiline nose, and a thin-lipped mouth. Hoffmann seemed of a small frame, almost a midget when standing up, but in a sitting position was just as tall as his wife and everybody else. People noticed sudden spasms in his gait; in his conversation Hoffman spoke in a somewhat husky voice, accentuating the rapid torrent of his words with gestures and bobbing nods.

In 1805, Maria gave birth to a daughter, Cäcilia. In 1806, in celebration of King Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Louise’s jubilee, the new opera house in Berlin called Hoffmann to the podium to conduct the opening performance. The world was his oyster. Yet in October of the same year, under the ill-advised influence of the queen and of the hawks in the cabinet, Prussia entered into war with France. Bonaparte defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Jena-Auerstädt, and even flashing the queen’s enormous cleavage at the man from Corsica – Louise was a looker – didn’t safe the country from a humiliating treaty with losses of territory and large indemnities payable to the French occupants. Every civil servant refusing allegiance to the new master found himself on the street. Suddenly the Hoffmanns were without income and adding grief to misery, little Cäcilia died of the measles. Hoffmann began considering music as a career. He really had the gift. In the coming years, Carl Maria von Weber and even Richard Wagner professed to have drawn inspiration from his work. Hoffmann himself, with a respectful bow to the towering Beethoven, looked up to Mozart as his model. In 1808, he replaced the “Wilhelm” in his initials and became “Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann,” accepting a call to the opera house in Bamberg. He got off to a bad start.

Hoffmann's first production flopped after only three nights and the theatre went into receivership. A new management continued to employ Hoffmann's talents. He painted the backdrops and composed the odd overture, yet when he suggested bringing Shakespeare and Calderon to the stage, he was politely ignored. So, for most of the time, Hoffmann scrounged together a meager living from giving piano-lessons. He sold an anonymous novel that still is missing from the academic editions, and for good reason. Sister Monica is an emulation of Diderot’s La Religieuse amplifying on the sex.

The nuns and the prioress in a convent discuss variations of coitus interruptus and the effects of flogging the athletic lover's bare tush with thorny rose-flowers during the act. The thing brought quick money and Hoffmann felt encouraged to start publishing under his own name, not fiction yet, but essays and critical reviews on contemporary music. It earned him well-deserved recognition and covered a few bills. Hoffmann took an interest in hypnotism. Under the term of “Mesmerism,” it was all the rage with the ladies in the drawing rooms. Hoffmann acquainted himself with literature on psychotherapy and even paid the local asylum a visit. The doctors still believed in the therapeutic benefits of forcing a leather mask on the patient, making him look like Hannibal Lecter. Bamberg was and still is a pretty medieval town; the food was good and the people hospitable. Although money was tight, Hoffmann began to feel at home. Frau Hoffmann, however, began to suspect something else lying behind her husband’s attachment to Bamberg; and she was right. There was a pretty face in town, with blue eyes and glossy black hair tied in a bun.

It belonged to Hoffmann’s piano student, the fourteen-year-old Julia Mark. For two years Julia’s caprices continued sending the infatuated Hoffmann on an emotional rollercoaster ride, an entirely platonic affair, costly, and never consummated. Years later, Hoffmann has rationalized the situation: "A competent professional novel writer would now have the ideal opportunity to discourse theoretically upon the vast difference between loving and being in love. Much might be said about the sensual urges, the curse of Original Sin, and how the heavenly Promethean spark should also light the torch of Hymen, a good clear household lamp, in whose light you can read, write, knit, and sew. And if a crowd of cheerful progeny should sometimes smear their faces with raspberry jam, just like other children, why, that is the way of things here below. Besides such heavenly love is an admirable subject for sublime poetry, and the best thing about it is, that this love is no mere idle fancy, but really does exist, as many people can attest, who have fared both well and badly with such love" (Hoffmann, Princess Brambilla). In Hoffmann's case it was the "faring badly" part.

Over long stretches his diary is a delirious record of his alcoholic and amorous obsessions, sometimes in a German spelled out in Greek letters, so that his wife would not read it. A tad touchy and given to sudden mood swings at the best of times, Hoffmann kept a cryptic account of these changes, recording his “romantic and religious mood,” in one moment, only to be “wound up to satirical griping,” in the next, and then start to “obsess to the point of madness.” He described himself as “humorous and angry,” until a switch in his head turned and he became “musical and over the top,” “content yet indifferent,” “romancing and in an unpleasantly anxious mood,” “extremely angry,” and “excessively romantic and capricious.” He would feel “exotic and out of sorts,” “wound up, yet poetically pure,” “very comfortable with myself,” “brash, ironic and morose,” “completely screwed,” “exalted to utter awe of myself and my state of poetic mastery, constantly patting myself on the back without measure,” all this within a matter of hours and days. Knowing that his wife was reading in, he switched to Italian: “Senza entusiasmo,” “senza exaltazione,” “getting by,” “un poco exaltato,” “senza poetica,” “very gay,” “ma senza furore ed un poco smorfia,” etc., everywhere between these entries interspersing images of a winged wineglass and a “Kt” for “Kätchen,” a character from Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Kätchen of Heilbronn. Hoffmann used it as an acronym for Julia Mark. His finances deteriorated to a fuzzy cloud of petty loans and Hoffmann saw no other way out but sending his wife back to her parents, while he would stay behind and clear the debts.

That is what he was telling Maria. What Hoffmann really was hoping for is unclear. Unlike him, Julia knew exactly what she was doing; a penniless piano teacher was not part of her plans. When in the end even this blindest of all lovers came to the realization that Julia had lost her virginity to another man, he could no longer close his eyes to the fact that the teenager was not the angel of innocence he’d made her out to be. In a fit of jealousy and rage Hoffmann lost it completely.

At a soiree with Julia, her family and many of Bamberg’s notables present, he drunk himself delirious and made a scene. Two burly attendants threw him out into the street, but Julia’s little secret was no longer a secret. The next morning, abject and overhung, Hoffmann realized he would never see Julia again and he couldn’t bear the thought. He wrote a long letter of apology to Julia’s parents. It makes painful reading. The ambiguity of Julia’s character became the great theme in his fiction. Hoffmann is on record with 72 stories and three novels. In most of them Julia appears in one or the other guise, usually as the story’s femme fatale. At long last, in 1813, the opera house in Dresden offered him a position as musical director. A loan from his friend von Hippel helped Hoffmann to pay off his debts. He wrote to his wife, asking her to meet him in Dresden. He promised to be good.

The Hoffmanns reunited in a city under siege. It was Bonaparte’s last stand against a coalition of Russian, Austrian and Prussian troops. Both armies left their casualties to the care of the citizenry. The wounded slept on the cold flagstones inside the churches, covering themselves with their coats. Anesthetics were unknown, surgeons didn’t wash their hands and the surgical instruments carried the stains of previous amputations. Amazingly fifty percent of all amputees did actually survive.

For lack of proper bandages their wounds were dressed in torn sackcloth from a local salt-mill. A change of dressing tore off the flesh. Twice a day the convalescents were fed a bowl of soup or porridge from kegs very similar to those used to collect the soldiers’ feces. Proper plumbing was still a thing of the future. Most households sent their maids to draw water from the public wells. There was the constant threat of cholera. Even in the finest restaurants it was not uncommon to spot fleabites underneath the waiter's sleeve cuff. The allies bombarded the city with canister and mortar bombs; the barrage killed people in the streets. The Hoffmanns had rented a loft studio. Together with the women, men and children in the house they sought shelter under the arched basement arcade. There was no food and nobody dared to approach the water-well further down the road; a grenade, tearing off half his head – “an absolutely disgusting sight” (Hoffmann, Diary) – had killed a soldier pumping water there. Shrapnel hit the civilian standing next to him in the belly, and with his own hands still pulling together his spilled intestines, the man bled to death. Only minutes later the Emperor Napoleon passed by on horseback at the exact same spot. Hoffmann sneaked away and through the winding back lanes made it to the shop of his wine merchant. The shop was closed. Hoffmann rattled the shutters and hollered up to the windows until the merchant opened and provided him with wine and rum. Back in the shelter, Hoffmann shared his loot with the others, while his wife accompanied a Frau Stein to her apartment upstairs, where the women scraped together victuals from the pantry. It was not always that bad, but the fighting went on for two weeks.

In the city, despite the curfews, people made every effort to go on with life as usual. The opera continued to perform. After concert, Hoffmann used to escape from the curfews into his favorite basement tavern. He smoked dozens of clay pipes and held long conversations with a walking carpet of a golden retriever. The dog rested his mighty head on Hoffmann's knee and for hours worshipped him with his brown eyes. Now and then he drummed the floorboard with a heavy wag of his tail. Back home an incoming mortar bomb shattered the windowpanes of Hoffmann's studio-loft. There was a moment of stunned silence. Then the smoke dispersed and the neighbors heard Hoffmann’s hysterical laughter and the popping of champagne corks. On the way to work, Hoffmann had to cross the bridge at the Brühlschen Garden. It happened to be a crowded place. Emperor Napoleon and his generals peered through their pocket telescopes at ammunition barges further down the river.

The Emperor was in a foul temper, he thundered at his staff, his horse tried to find a spot to put down its hoofs, and Hoffmann "with danger to my person" (Hoffmann, Diary) squeezed by, trying to draw on himself as little attention as possible.

After the retreat of the French, Hoffmann and a companion from the opera surveyed the battlefield. The bodies of the French were being undressed and buried in unmarked mass graves, their uniforms and arms collected in piles at the wayside. The bodies of the Russian grenadiers were still lying where they had fallen during the final attack, crumpled and with torn off limbs, often an expression of fury on the faces. A young officer – “barely older than 23”– had fallen, still holding his saber high, smashed in the chest by a cannonball. “His death was easy” ­(Hoffmann, Diary). Only a few yards away Hoffmann’s companion sighted a Russian grenadier sitting upright and cheerfully chewing his ration, both his feet shot to pulp. He had been sitting there in his blood for four days. The man was thirsty and the two hustled to find him water.

In the same week Hoffmann’s wife slipped on the stairs and suffered a deep head wound. The incident left Hoffmann badly shaken. It was a stark reminder what he had in Maria. Coming home from his binges, he used to work on his fiction all nightin the small hours until the light in the windows turned grey. Sometimes Hoffman began screaming when he saw the teapot on his desk pulling faces and the ornamental lilies on the wallpaper turn their snakeheads. Maria would arise from her sleep, light a candle and in her laced nightcap shoo away the demons from Hoffmann’s desk. Sitting next to him with her needlepoint she would keep him company until he had finished with work. It was time to put an end to this kind of bohemian life; Hoffmann felt his wife deserved better.

In 1814, the indomitable von Hippel again pulled strings and the couple returned to Berlin. Hoffmann was reassigned to the Prussian Court of Appeal as deputy of the Chief Justice. His first caseHe was an investigation intoto investigate "demagogic" activities at the universities in Prussia. But Hoffmann was a public prosecutor, not a hired gun. Although hHe  felt no sympathy withfor these wannabe revolutionaries;, yet he knew it was wrong to prosecute people for their thoughts for what they were thinking if they didn’t commit any crime. He sent a courageous memoir to the chief of police in Berlin, Karl Albert von Kamptz. Hoffmann, insistinged on the "necessity for justice to be strictly impartial and without regard for person and position" (Hoffmann). Von Kamptz didn’t respond, his orders came directly from the king, but he took mental note of what he thought to be Hoffmann’s insubordinate impertinence. To him thinking “was in itself a dangerous undertaking, and all the more so when performed by dangerous individuals” (Master Flea).

By now Hoffmann and his wife occupied a small but expensive loft apartment which oversawoverseeing the opera house and the elegant boulevard at the centre of Prussia’s capital. The flat had low ceilings and lacked in plumbing, but was connected to fresh water and the couple shared their home with a very respectable cat. The passerby would see him sit by the window, dressed in a robe of fine silk and a red skullcap, smoking a long pipe while petting the purring tabby. Hoffmann’s good-natured generosity made him a local celebrity. After his death people in the markets would still remember him supplementing the insufficient funds of some or other poor child so that it could buy itself a large bag of fresh plums without being told of the benefactor. But it was characteristic for this benefactor, to agonize on the way home over the possibility that these plums could actually become the cause of cholera and in the end kill the child. Still not entirely debt-free, the Hoffmanns lived the good life with champagne breakfasts and oysters at sunset. The whine merchant delivered a never ending supply of Italian wine, fine cognac and plenty of less respectable booze, except for beer. "Beer makes you stupid," Hoffmann used to say. The couple ran up sizeable bills with their caterers. They could afford it. By now Hoffmann had become the biggest earner in German literature. Local restaurants asked for his endorsement. As a writer Hoffmann was an innovator and the living proof that originality must not be an obstacle for popular success.

He also possessed the enviable ability to completely ignore his critics. As one of the first, Hoffmann developed in his fiction the protagonist’s character through his actions instead of summarizing it in an introductory description. The people populating his stories are allowed to have a subconscious. The hero might, "as it often happens in our excessive anxiety to do something,” forget “the crucial point: he had run through the streets until he was out of breath before it occurred to him that he should have asked for the address" (Hoffmann, Princess Brambilla). Hoffmann was not the only writer of his generation, who was captivated by Cervantes, especially by the Exemplary Tales. The material came handy for his own yarns of conflict between the imagined and the real, and in turn Hoffmann inspired the generations to follow. The great Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837) was the first, but not the last of noted authors, who stooped to lift an entire story from Hoffmann. With a few very minor changes, Pushkin translated the Queen of Spades into Russian and sold it as his own. In Sweden the writer Clas Livjin used Hoffmann’s story to make a novel of it, which De La Motte Fouqué (1773 – 1831) translated back into German in 1825. However Hoffmann’s way of threading through his best stories – The Golden Pot, Little Zaches, Princess Brambilla, Master Flea – appearances of the supernatural remained entirely his own. His “system,” if you want to call it that, is known since the days of the philosopher Plotinus (204 – 270 AD), a Plotinus, however, who in his latest incarnation has become the guru of a 60s commune in Orange County, denouncing austerity and asceticism for psychedelic acids. He is now always wearing a pair of sunglasses. Every character in Hoffmann’s fiction is living double and triple lives: Archivarius Lindhorst is a salamander from Atlantis and at the same time a librarian in Dresden, Klein Zaches is actually a Mandrake root, the fairy who opened for this little miscreant the doors to a political career is living incognito as the prioress of a convent, and sorcerers from bygone ages survey the modern world from the heights of abandoned water towers and factory stacks. Georg Pepush is also the Thistle Zeherit, and the petite Princess Gamaheh is known to her neighbors as Dörtje Elwerdink. Physically, the thistle and Georg Pepush are separate embodiments, little dissonances in the great empathetic consonance of the Universe. In Hoffmann’s own words “a network of interwoven threads at least a hundred times thinner than those of the finest spider’s web, which seem endless, as they twine out of the mind into some entity invisible even with the aid of a microscope, generating a medley of flowers assuming human shape, and of people melting into the earth and gleaming forth as stones and metals. Among them move all manners of strange animals, incessantly changing their shapes and speaking wondrous languages. None of these entities matches another, and the heartrending melancholy ringing through the air seems to be an expression of the dissonance among them. Yet this very dissonance is adding new splendors to the underpinning harmony that triumphantly breaks through, uniting all apparent discords in an eternity of unutterable pleasure.” Sometimes, as in Princess Brambilla, the individual impersonation is understood to be a mere mask, an assumed character, before the events reveal that the “mask” is actually the real deal. Yet “let this not confuse you, my good Sir, what you behold is a dream” (Hoffmann, Master Flea).

In 1819, Hoffmann published his last and technically most brilliant novel. The Life and Opinions of Murr, the Tom, interspersed by a Fragmentary Biography of Johannes Kreisler, the Musician. The book pretends to be a cat's "memoir" written by the ingenious animal on the wastepaper from a discarded biography, which the bookbinder "accidentally" had forgotten to separate from the cat’s manuscript. The novel was an immediate success and Hoffmann wrote a sequel. Royalties came in, in paper-wrapped rolls of gold-coins, and the grateful publisher added a crystal bowl with the carved portrait of the feline genius.

Hoffmann received applause from the most unexpected places. On March 28, 1820, his wife found in the mail a letter written in Beethoven’s own hand, expressing the composer’s admiration. Sadly, only a few weeks after the publication of the second part of Murr’s biography, people found in their daily paper the cat's obituary: "Hereby I beg humbly to announce to sympathetic patrons and friends, that on the night from 29th to 30th November this year, after a short but severe illness, my beloved ward, the Tomcat Murr, died in the fourth year of his promising existence, and awakened to a better life. Whoever knew the immortal youth and saw him tread the path of virtue and justice, will understand my deep grief and honor it – in silence. Berlin, November 30th, 1821; Hoffmann."

Readers who expect from their author their daily fix of social concern often dismiss Hoffmann out of hand, and it is true, first and foremost he is an entertainer. But this doesn’t mean he was blind to "the progressing age and the deteriorating situation of our noble classes,” which explained “their tactless behavior towards the cultured commoner; a mixture of appreciation and intolerable condescension and of a deep despair that the triviality of their past glory will be exposed to the knowing gaze of the wise, and their shortcomings held up to ridicule" (Hoffmann, The Devil's Elixir). Feeling the shadows lengthening, Hoffmann became reckless in expressing his criticism. In chapter four of Master Flea we read: "A strange man, strange both in his clothing and in his whole demeanor, appeared before the Town Council. He said that he was a Privy Aulic Counselor, and that his name was Knarrpanti. He then produced from his pocket a paper with a large seal and handed it over with a civil bow. His expression clearly conveyed how surprised the Council would be by the exalted station which he, Privy Aulic Counselor Knarrpanti, occupied, and by the important task which had been assigned to him, and what respect the Council would now accord him. With a self-satisfied smile, he assured the Council that his exceptional sagacity had already succeeded in identifying the culprit. On being reminded that there could only be a culprit if a crime had been committed, Knarrpanti observed that once the culprit had been identified, the crime would follow automatically. Even if the principal charge could not be proved, owning to the obduracy of the accused, only a shallow and superficial judge would be incapable of introducing issues into the enquiry which would blemish the accused somehow and justify the arrest." And Hoffmann concluded: “What a skill it is to make the most trivial matter seem important and derive ill-feeling from it! Born with this skill, the counselor aimed to appear judicious, wise, adroit, and above all, so loyally devoted to his prince that he was called a pillar of the state, on whom the monarch’s wellbeing depended, when his only concern was about Number One – himself” (Hoffmann, Master Flea).

As it turned out, even before the book was published, somebody recognized in Knarrpanti the portrait of the chief of police, von Kamptz. This somebody was the Prussian censor. He dropped von Kamptz a note. What was Hoffmann expecting to happen? That von Kamptz would “retire in disgrace, and the people, seeing him walk past, hold with loathing their noses and surrender their seats if he happened to patronize the same restaurant” (Hoffmann, Master Flea)?

Given the facts it is easy to express contempt for von Kamptz, but even this authoritarian careerist had his redeeming graces. The writer Karl Gutzkow (1811 – 1878) came from a poor family. In 1831 von Kamptz had become the minister of justice and took a shine to the student, who was just beginning to publish. Von Kamptz allowed Gutzkow to accompany him on his daily walks. He helped out with tickets to soirees at the Royal Palace (not without discretely improving the young man’s wardrobe) and even slipped him confiscated literature from the censor's office. Their ways parted when Gutzkow associated with the liberal opposition and was forced to leave the country.

In Hoffmann's case, on the other hand, no love was lost between the two. Von Kamptz ordered a disciplinary inquiry. On February 23, 1822 two deputies of the justice department climbed up the stairs to Hoffmann’s apartment and at his bedside were taking down a dictated deposition for further investigation. Hoffmann's syphilis had progressed to the final stages. He was paralyzed and tied to a wheelchair. To test his neural responses, his doctors were singeing spots of flesh along the spinal cord and he greeted guests with a "can you smell the bacon?" In the evenings Maria pushed her husband in his wheelchair to the opera house. She was aware that her husband had a crush on the prima donna singing the title part, the charming Johanna Eunicke (1798 – 1856). The lithographed images depict the actress dressed in a flowing empire line, with bare arms and a somewhat uptight hint of a cleavage. Miss Eunicke was not exactly what you would call a “knockout,” not like her famous colleague from Sweden, Jenny Lind. However in Johanna’s endearing face one may detect an expression that can make a man wish to know her better. Maria didn’t seem to mind – in 1822, Madame Eunicke was the mistress of Prince Hermann of Pückler-Muskau (1785 – 1871). The ice cream is named after him. He was a dandy of obscene wealth who used to show in public in a carriage drawn by a team of reindeers. The prince attended the premiere of Hoffmann’s last and most popular opera, Undine, a great event for the still somewhat provincial Berlin.

After only five performances a fire destroyed the theater’s magazine with all the decorations and costumes. The hot air carried the first actor's baroque hairpiece high into the sky and it sailed majestically and threatening through the night, like a meteor of fire. In a drawing Hoffmann has preserved the moment when a royal guardsman aiming his musket through the window of the apartment next door, was trying to shoot down the truant hairpiece.

Hoffmann continued working from his deathbed. When he was no longer able to hold a quill he dictated to his wife. Hoffmann's last short story is a sketch in green, green, and more green. Spring has sprung and the first person narrator is waiting for his sweetheart “Johanna” under the trees at a parkway. Maria stopped writing and gave her husband a long look. Shaking her head, she continued taking his dictation. Trying to avoid further trouble in the pending investigation, Hoffmann instructed his publisher in Frankfurt to excise offensive passages before giving Master Flea into print. Frankfurt was outside of von Kamptz’s jurisdiction, but the turd of a publisher voluntarily handed over Hoffmann's incriminating letters. The plot thickened, but Hoffmann passed away just in time. His sendoff was on June 28, 1822 on the Jewish cemetery, an arrangement by Julius Hitzig. Again it was the assiduous von Hippel who secured a pension for the widow.

The file in the von Kamptz affair has been officially closed in 1908, after eighty-six years. Only then it became possible to publish in full the text of Hoffmann's Master Flea.

© – 1/11/2009 – by michael sympson, 5,900 words, all rights reserved