Introduction

Summary

ÜBER HOFFMANN KÖNNTEN WIR leicht einerlei Meinung sein. Sein Genie kann nur von Genielosen verkannt, von Absprechern geläugnet werden,” wrote Heinrich Voß, the son of the well-known translator of Homer, Johann Heinrich Voß, in his letter of March 1821. Hoffmann, had he learned of this encomium, would surely have been flattered. Nonetheless, it was an opinion shared by few people during his lifetime and even fewer after his death. Hoffmann's oeuvre, much like Hoffmann's biography was then — and still is today — the subject of considerable disagreement. Despite harsh criticism, especially from Goethe, Hoffmann attracted an enthusiastic readership during his lifetime. However, in the years following his death, he gradually developed the reputation as “Gespenster-Hoffmann,” a reputation that, at least in the German-speaking world, lasted for almost a century. Although this hardly spoiled the enjoyment of those readers attracted to his fiction, it was partly responsible for his works being largely ignored by critics.

It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that there was a revival of interest in Hoffmann's work, at least on the part of literary scholars. This interest was prompted by the predominantly biographically-oriented studies of Georg Ellinger, Carl Georg von Maassen, and Hans von Müller, and was the first serious attempt to produce a critical edition of Hoffmann's collected works. In the early 1920s Hoffmann's fortunes rose, possibly because his reputation as a tortured and misunderstood artist coincided with the view of the artist figure espoused by the Expressionist writers of the period.