3 See “Old Toys,” where Benjamin makes reference to the display at Zimmermann’s Confectionery as part of “a Berlin advertisement from the Biedermeier period” and again to the advertisement for Julius Linde’s marionette theater (99).
4 See Heinrich von Kleist, “Über das Marionetten Theater” (On the Marionette Theater), Berliner Abendblätter (December 12–15, 1810).
5 Johann Christoph Winter (1772–1862) founded the Hänneschen puppet theater in Cologne.
6 Franz Graf von Pocci (1807–1876) collaborated with Josef Schmid in founding the Munich Marionette Theater and was one of its writers.
7 Benjamin gives a similarly worded account of Schwiegerling’s puppet theater in his “Lob der Puppe: Kritische Glossen zu Max v. Boehns ‘Puppen und Puppenspiele’ ” [In Praise of Puppets: Critical Comments on Max von Boehn’s “Puppets and Puppet Plays”] (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1929), in GS, 3, 215–16 (published in Die literarische Welt on January 10, 1930).
8 Pole Poppenspäler [Paul the Puppeteer], by Theodor Storm, originally published in 1874 in the journal Deutsche Jugend, and then in book form in 1875.
CHAPTER 4. Demonic Berlin
I will begin today with an experience I had in my fourteenth year. At that time I was a student at a boarding school. As is customary at such institutions, children and teachers would assemble several evenings each week to make music, or for a recitation or poetry reading. One evening the music teacher gave the “oratory,” as these evening assemblies were called. He was a peculiar little man with a grave, unforgettable gaze; he had the shiniest bald pate I’ve ever seen, and around it lay a half-open wreath of tightly coiled curly dark hair. His name is well-known among German music lovers: August Halm.1 This August Halm held the oratory that day to read us stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, the very writer I want to tell you about today. I no longer know what he read and it doesn’t really matter, because what I do remember is one single sentence from the introductory speech he gave before reading to us. He elucidated Hoffmann’s writing, his predilection for the bizarre, the unconventional, the eerie, the inexplicable. I think what he said was meant to fill us children with suspense for the stories to come. But then he concluded with this sentence, which I have not forgotten to this day: “To what end someone would write such stories, I will tell you sometime soon.” I’m still waiting for this “sometime soon,” and as the good fellow has since died, this explanation will have to come to me, if it ever does, in such an uncanny way, that I prefer to preempt it and will try today to honor, for you, the promise that was made to me twenty-five years ago.
If I wanted to cheat a bit, I could make it a lot easier on myself. Instead of the words “to what end,” I could have said “why,” and the answer would be very simple. Why does an author write? For a thousand reasons. Because he enjoys making things up; or because ideas and images take such possession of him that he can only achieve peace once he has written them down; or because he’s burdened with questions and doubts to which he can find a resolution of sorts in the destinies of his invented characters; or simply because he has learned to write; or because, and unfortunately this is very often the case, he has learned nothing at all. Why Hoffmann wrote is not difficult to say. He was one of those writers possessed by his characters. Doppelgangers, monstrous figures of every kind: when he wrote, he actually saw them all around him. And not only when he was writing, but sometimes in the middle of the most innocent dinner-table conversation, over a glass of wine or punch. More than once he interrupted one or another of his dinner companions with these words:
“Pardon me for cutting you off, my dear, but do you not see that accursed little imp creeping out from under the floorboards in the corner, just over there to the right? Just look what the little devil’s up to! Over there! Over there! Now he’s gone! Oh, don’t be bashful you sweet little creature, won’t you please stay here with us? And kindly listen to our exceedingly pleasant conversation — You wouldn’t believe how much we would appreciate your amiable company — Ah, there you are again — Wouldn’t you care to come a little closer? — What’s that? — You say you’ll stay a while? — Come again? — What’s that you’re saying? — Eh? — You’re leaving? — Your humble servant am I.”2
And so on. Hardly had he finished speaking such gibberish, his vacant eyes fixed on the corner from where the vision came, when he would reemerge, turn again to his dinner companions and beg them altogether calmly to carry on. Such are the descriptions of Hoffmann by his friends. And we ourselves feel the presence of similar spirits when we read such stories as “The Deserted House,” “The Entail,” “The Doubles,” or “The Golden Pot.” Under favorable conditions, these ghost stories can have an astonishing effect. This happened with me, where the favorable condition was that my parents had forbidden me from reading Hoffmann. When I was young, I could only read him in secret, on the evenings when my parents were not at home. I remember one such evening. There was not a sound to be heard in the entire house. I was reading “The Mines of Falun,” sitting alone under the hanging lamp at our giant dining room table — this was on Carmerstraße — when all the terrors, such as fish with stubby snouts, gradually gathered in the darkness along the edge of the table. My eyes clung to the pages of the book, the source of all these terrors, as if to a life raft. Or another time, earlier in the day: I still remember standing at our library cabinet, its door slightly ajar, reading “The Entail” and ready to stuff the book back onto the shelf at the slightest sound of disturbance, my hair standing on end, and so wracked with the double horror of the book’s terrifying contents and the fear of getting caught, that I understood not a word of the entire story.3
“Even the devil,” Heinrich Heine said of Hoffmann’s work, “could not write such devilish stuff.”4 Indeed, there is something inherently satanic in the eerie, spooky, uncanny quality of these works. Pursuing this line further, we proceed from the answer to the “why” of Hoffmann’s stories and arrive at the answer to the mysterious “to what end.” Along with his many other peculiarities, the devil is renowned for his ingenuity and knowledge. Those who know a little of Hoffmann’s stories will immediately understand when I say that the narrator is always a very sensitive, perceptive fellow able to sniff out spirits in all their cunning disguises. In fact, this storyteller insists with a certain obstinacy that all the reputable archivists, medical officers, students, apple-wives, musicians, and upper-class daughters are much more than they appear to be, just as Hoffmann himself was more than just a pedantic and exacting court of appeals judge, which is how he made his living.5 In other words, Hoffmann did not simply conjure the eerie, ghostly figures that appear in his stories out of thin air. Like many great writers, he pulled the extraordinary not from his mind alone but from actual people, things, houses, objects, streets, and so forth. As perhaps you have heard, a person who can observe other people’s faces, or how they walk, or their hands, or the shape of their head, and can tell from this their character, their profession, or even their destiny, is called a physiognomist. So, Hoffmann was less of a seer than an observer, which is a good synonym for physiognomist. And a principal focus of his observation was Berlin, the city and the people who lived in it.
In the introduction to “The Deserted House”—which in reality was a house on Unter den Linden — he speaks with a certain bitter humor about the sixth sense that was conferred on him, that is, the gift of beholding in every phenomenon, whether a person, a deed, or an occurrence, the most unusual things, to which we have no relation in our everyday lives. His passion was to wander alone through the streets, to contemplate the figures he encountered, and even to cast their horoscopes in his mind. For days he would follow strangers who had something unusual about their gait, their clothing, their voice, or their glance. He felt he was in constant contact with the supernatural; even more than he was pursuing the spiritual world, the spiritual world was pursuing him. At noon, in the light of day, it blocked his path in this rational Berlin; it followed him through the noise of Königstraße to the few remaining traces of the Middle Ages in the area around the crumbling City Hall; it let him smell the mysterious scent of roses and carnations on Grünstraße; and for him it cast a spell over the elegant gathering place of refined Berlin, the Linden. Hoffmann could be called the father of the Berlin novel, whose vestiges were later lost in generalities as Berlin became the “capital,” the Tiergarten the “park,” and the Spree the “river,” until our own time, when it has come alive again — Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz comes to mind. As one of Hoffmann’s characters says to another, whom he thinks of as himself: