The Rudolf Steiner Archive

83. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann

[ 1 ] At the Gottsched Society, which met in the Citizens’ Hall of City Hall, Rudolf Steiner spoke about “Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann” in a carefully crafted lecture filled with enthusiastic warmth, though not particularly suited to a general audience. – Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann—to briefly outline the thread of his remarks—the poetic Romantic was vastly underestimated by the literary historians who came shortly after him as a confused mind, full of talent but lacking self-discipline. It was Griesebach who, in his writings, first accorded him the recognition and justice he deserved; he was the first to demonstrate the systematic unity inherent in Hoffmann’s brilliant versatility and to unravel the guiding threads in the ideas that lead from Hoffmann to Wagner. Hoffmann was by no means merely a flighty dreamer, torn this way and that by shifting inclinations, to whom real life and political currents were incomprehensible and alien; rather, he consciously rejected them only in their sober manifestation, while they nevertheless provided the underlying tones for all his creations. He devoted himself with unwavering determination to whatever he was creating at the time, whether his own poetic works, musical compositions, literary treatises, or the duties of his legal profession. A future generation of Germans—one capable of seeing beyond the mask of aestheticism and of recognizing the spirit even within the materialistic—will be the first to fully appreciate Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, just as France and England—to which he was introduced by none other than Carlyle—already value him today. – The reading of several of Hoffmann’s poems that followed the lecture, handled as best she could by Liddy Pütz-Malten, failed to evoke any particular enthusiasm, since Hoffmann’s whimsical imagination can only be enjoyed when taken in context.