Exhibition of the Bamberg State Library on ETA Hoffmann – Munich

Ghosts are extremely rare in ETA Hoffmann’s stories and novels. Nevertheless, the author of the “Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner”, the “Elixirs of the Devil” and the “Night Pieces”, whose 200th anniversary of his death is being celebrated in many places this year with exhibitions and events, stubbornly adheres to the label “Ghost Hoffmann”. There is no doubt, however, that an atmosphere of the ghostly, the uncanny, the fantastic prevails in his work, in which the boundaries between delusion and reality dissolve.

If you leaf through the booklet “ETA Hoffmann. A life in anecdotes” by Bernd Hesse and Jörg Petzel, which was only published last year, you get to know the multi-talented jack of all trades, who also succeeded as a musician, composer and draftsman and in his day job as a judge campaigned for independent judiciary, above all as a tireless, sometimes macabre joker.

Even as a teenager, together with his bosom friend Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, he spared no effort to dig an underground passage from the garden at home, which was supposed to lead to a young women’s convent, which had aroused the curiosity of the pubescents. Even if the plan failed, Hoffmann, who was born in Königsberg in 1776, tried from then on to spice up his life with such foolhardy ventures as he thought it deserved.

He was increasingly fueled by the alcohol, which he enjoyed in order to “put himself together and get into an exotic mood”, as he put it. Then it could happen that he conversed with invisible Tom Thumbs at the table, frightened guests with a devil puppet, or even fooled his poor wife by draping a life-size self-portrait with a rope so that it looked as if he had himself hung.

One of the merits of the successful exhibition, which the Bamberg State Library, which is richly stocked with Hoffmanniana, is currently organizing for the anniversary year, is that it also gives ample space to Hoffmann’s humorous, satirical side. For example, in the first of the two exhibition rooms, Hoffmann’s 1809 sheet “Caricatured depiction: A group of eight men from the BürgerMilitair in Bamberg” painted with opaque paint is on display in one of the carefully lit glass showcases. Hoffmann was a keen and incorruptible observer of his environment.

None of the loitering soldiers look particularly intelligent, one has bright red chubby cheeks, the other a devious face. A tiny one is also among them, but you can only see it in the rear view, as small as it is wide. The group almost seems to anticipate one of Carl Spitzweg’s soldier pictures. Two other autographs are also curious and can be found in the magnificent Scagliola Hall, which is alternately bathed in deep blue and dark red light for the duration of the exhibition. Atmospheric!

One of them is a quarto page smeared with inkblots. The special thing about them is that they come from Hoffmann’s beloved tomcat Murr, the somewhat vain animal to which he has set a literary monument in “life views of the tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary biography of the conductor Johannes Kreisler in random waste paper”. The animal as an artist: His signature is emblazoned in large letters under the ink stains. So it is not surprising that Hoffmann also wrote an obituary for him and sent it to friends when the cat died in November 1821. With a little patience, the elegant handwriting can be deciphered: “Anyone who knew the immortalized youth … understands my pain and honors him with silence.”

Open detailed view

Bamberg, where Hoffmann lived from 1808 to 1813 and, according to his own account, served his “years of apprenticeship and martyrdom”, is one of the three places, along with the Berlin State Library, where the romantic artist is commemorated this year under the overall title “Unheimlich Fantastic”. . While the Berlin exhibition is running at the same time, the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt am Main will follow suit at the end of November.

Admittedly, there is a witch’s mirror, a friction electrification machine and that bizarre doorknob by the Bamberg publisher Carl Friedrich Kunz that inspired Hoffmann to write his perfectly formed fairy tale “The Golden Pot”. However, one mainly encounters flat goods in the form of documents, sheets of music, drawings and first editions of works for which Hoffmann designed the covers himself, as in the case of “Meister Floh”. However, these were selected and grouped so carefully that one gets a representative insight into his multifaceted work. This is convincing and never tiring.

His relationship to music is particularly evident. Hoffmann, who, out of admiration for Mozart, exchanged his middle name Wilhelm for Amadeus and henceforth operated under the name Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, composed the opera “Dirna” in 1809, which was a success in Bamberg. Only a year later he wrote the review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with which he was to coin the term romantic music. Beethoven later thanked him in a letter that is available in a reproduction. Finally, the screen gives insights into Hoffmann’s opera “Undine”, which premiered in 1816 and was the first romantic opera ever.

Then you get to know more of his sources of inspiration, such as the visual artists Jacques Callot and Francisco de Goya. And encounters the sciences and technologies with which he dealt intensively with the times. These include psychology, electricity, optics and, most recently, the construction of machines, which could not be more topical given the AI ​​and robotics of our day and the associated hopes and fears. ETA Hoffmann is a poet who still has something to say to us. The exhibition at the Bamberg State Library makes this clear in an incredibly fantastic way.

Eerily Fantastic. ETA Hoffmann 2022. Until October 22nd. Bamberg State Library, New Residence, Domplatz 8, Mon.-Fri. 9am-5pm, Sat 9am-12pm. Admission free. Catalog (Spector Books Leipzig), 25 euros in the library, 34 euros in bookstores. staatsbibliothek-bamberg.de