10 - Why Reasonable Children Don't Think that Nutcracker is Alive or that the Mouse King is Real

Summary

E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) contains several wonderful, one may even say magical, events. First, it celebrates the birthday of a man who died in his early thirties, then came back from the dead for a couple of days, and then disappeared from view completely, while still managing to stay alive, somewhere (possibly, behind the clouds), for almost 2,000 years. To commemorate him, the grownup characters of Hoffmann's story buy toys for their children and tell them that these gifts come from that man, who brings goodies to hundreds of thousands of well-behaved youngsters of Europe, and who, incidentally, has now become an infant again. So, what we have here is a gift-bearing, omnipresent, 2,000-year-old infant.

Another wonderful event involves a nutcracker, perhaps delivered by that energetic infant. Shaped like a little man with a large mouth, the nutcracker comes alive at night and commandeers a regiment of toy soldiers to fight an army of mice led by their king: a large seven-headed mouse. The battle is witnessed by a seven-year-old girl, who then reports what she has seen to her parents and to her younger brother, Fritz.

One would expect that this event should not strike the parents as very strange because they may already be familiar with its broad outlines, again, through stories involving the two-thousand-year-old infant. When that infant was still a man, he was reported to have successfully fought basilisks, dragons, and many-headed serpents. Somewhere in his 800s, however, he lost interest, so by the eleventh century, the job of dragon-trampling was assumed by St George. St George's exploits were commemorated by many famous artists. One of these artists was Albrecht Dürer (see Figure 10.1), a particular favorite of Hoffmann’s, who used to live in the same city of Nuremberg as do several characters in The Nutcracker. This is to say that an appearance of a seven-headed monster, right around the birthday of the infant, and its subsequent defeat by the very Nutcracker whom the infant may have providently insinuated into the household, should not raise the parents’ eyebrows.

Yet eyebrows are raised. Far from being honored to learn that this year's installation of the sacred battle against evil is unfolding in their living room, Dr Stahlbaum and his wife vehemently deny their little girl, Marie’s, eyewitness report.