Picturing/Staging E. T. A. Hoffmann: (self)representations of a multi-headed author past and present

Abstract

When it comes to (self) representation(s) by himself and by others, German writer and multi-faceted artist E. T. A. Hoffmann offered as many keys to interpret who he was as through his abundant stories. From the famous self-portrait he made during his Berlin years (1814-1821), a matrix of sorts was formed, and extended ad infinitum by artists deeply inspired by Hoffmann’s character and work. Reflecting the strong lines of Hoffmann’s creation—duplicity, heterogeneity and the fantastic suffused with strangeness, bearing in mind the often underlying irony and grotesque—their images of Hoffmann are much more than a mere social and literary mirror of the nineteenth century. They reveal a whole artistic reflection, initiated by Hoffmann, on the status of the artist past and present; they make it possible to question, in a cathartic way, the poetologic impact that a body perceived as unsightly can provoke. In fact, in close connection with the impression of strangeness that arises from the founding self-portrait, painfully felt by its author lacking identity, Hoffmann was often anchored in a form of black romanticism invaded by doppelgangers, devils, and madmen. The diversity of graphic representations, mainly in the contemporary era, makes it possible to shade this aspect by also highlighting other facets that are equally constitutive of his character and his work such as, for example, humor, derision, and distance through the Witz, without ever departing from the Hoffmanian spirit that seemed to inhabit contemporary portrait painters and guide their pencil. Such is, without a doubt, the hallmark of the author’s portraits multiplied in the Germanic sphere from the image of genius Hoffmann.