E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Marketplace Vision of Berlin

Abstract

A fantastical Berlin features prominently in many of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories and novellas: secret trysts and occult rituals take place in the Tiergarten, an incongruous abandoned house on the luxurious avenue Unter den Linden becomes an object of dangerous obsession, brides show their faces from the tower of the old town hall at midnight on summer solstice, revenants and sorcerers mingle with petty Prussian bureaucrats, frequent local wine cellars and cake shops, and enigmatic women turn the heads of well-established noblemen, causing them to disastrously breach protocol at the fashionable tea parties of Berlin high society. In Hoffmann’s 1821 story “The Errancies” Berlin even becomes an object of reverse ethnology in the fragmentary notes of a quite possibly imaginary Greek princess—notes that reveal her bewilderment about the city’s exotic building materials and the strange dress of its inhabitants, in particular the men’s tall, black and cylindrical headgear, and ultimately leave little to recommend for the would-be visitor but the quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate.