Hoffmann's "Two Worlds" and The Problem of Life-Writing: Julian Knox, Georgia College

Chapter Ten
Hoffmann’s “Two Worlds”

and the Problem of Life-Writing
Julian Knox, Georgia College
“Two Worlds” and the Problem of Life-Writing
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der goldene

Topf ” (“The Golden Pot,” 1814) as “the Book of the Two Worlds” in his
riotous 1822 translation of “sundry select chapters” (SWF 2: 964)1 from
the tale, he seizes on a theme that – in typical fashion for Coleridge the
translator – holds no small relevance to his own anxieties regarding his
relationship as poet and philosopher to a society he feared was unwilling
to understand him. Had Coleridge read more Hoffmann – he certainly
possessed a copy of Hoffmann’s debut collection, Fantasiestücke in Callots
Manier (Fantasy-Pieces in Callot’s Manner, 4 vols., 1814–15), in which “Der
goldene Topf ” appears – he would have seen that nearly all of his German
counterpart’s work offers variations on the theme of the “Two Worlds.” Be
it the student Anselmus, torn between the poetic world of Atlantis and the
quotidian confines of Dresden, or Nathaniel, unable to reconcile Clara’s
appeals to rationality with the uncanny machinations of the Sandman, or
Prinzessin Brambilla’s2 use of commedia dell’arte to navigate the intersec-
tions between carnival-season Rome and the mythic kingdom or Urdar,
Hoffmann’s portrayal of such seemingly irresolvable binaries reflects a deeper
ambivalence regarding the compatibility of a life in art with the quotidian
demands of life in a bourgeois, materially-oriented German society. As is
borne out in his correspondence and notebooks, Hoffmann himself felt
this ambivalence keenly through his struggles to reconcile various official
duties as jurist and theater-manager with his artistic aspirations of writing,
1
Printed as “The Historie and Gests of Maxilian” for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
in January 1822.
2
Prinzessin Brambilla: Ein Capriccio nach Jakob Callot (Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio
in the Style of Jacques Callot, 1820).
191
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E.T.A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism
composing, and drawing. Coleridge’s suggestive diagnosis of the existential

divide that characterizes “Der goldene Topf ” finds resonance still in modern
critical assessments of Hoffmann such as that of Horst Daemmrich, who
holds that “to do justice to Hoffmann’s works one must observe the prevailing
ideological and structural tension between self-transcendence in a sublime
vision of cosmic consciousness and self-realization in a harsh, adverse world”
(23). As I will argue here, it is in Hoffmann’s final novel, Lebens-Ansichten
des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes
Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on
Random Sheets of Waste Paper, 2 vols., 1819–21)3 that these tensions undergo
a profound reconstitution, not towards an overarching, epiphanic unity,
but manifesting instead an ironic recognition of the pressures exerted by
prevailing narrative forms of Bildung or personal development to instantiate
those very unities.
Building on the formal experimentation of Prinzessin Brambilla, in
which Hoffmann incorporates reproductions of Jacques Callot’s commedia
dell’arte engravings into each chapter to drive the story forward, Kater Murr
presents the “Two Worlds” as two life-narratives that have been inadvert-
ently bundled together in consequence of a printer’s error. The first of
these is an autobiography written by the tomcat Murr, suffused with self-
laudatory encomia on the steady progress and eventual culmination of his
aesthetic education, but recounting also his vexed attempts at ingratiation
into various strata of contemporary society. Perpetually interrupting Murr’s
Bildung-narrative, however, is the biography of his master, the orchestra-
conductor Johannes Kreisler, the pages of which Murr has used “partly as
an underpad, partly as scratch paper,”4 only for them to be mistaken by
the printer as parts of the feline’s story. Within each competing narrative,
Hoffmann delineates further binaries, the Doppelgänger of his earlier fiction
replaced now with a thematic hall of mirrors in which each respective tale
reflects, refracts, and even inverts the concerns of its counterpart. Chief
among these concerns is the aforementioned split between artistic purpose
and quotidian life. For Murr, the attainment of culture and the harmoni-
zation of the individual self with society that constitutes the apotheosis of
Bildung as envisioned by Goethe in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96) becomes hilariously misconstrued as the
acquisition of “higher” culture and society: “One glance in the mirror
was enough to persuade me that merely the earnest intention to strive for
3
For the sake of brevity I will refer to the novel henceforth as Kater Murr.
4
“teils zur Unterlage, teils zum löschen” (DKV 5, 12). All translations into English are
mine.
192
higher culture had already begun to benefit my appearance. I viewed myself

with deepest satisfaction.”5 Murr’s poetry, which he recites at meetings
of his cat-fraternity and, later, at a soiree of aristocratic poodles, is itself
a manifestation of this obsession with appearances, and yet despite this,
Murr remains an outsider to the social circles into which he had hoped
his Bildung would earn him admission. Kreisler, here and in other works
effectively Hoffmann’s alter-ego,6 approaches his music with a rather more
sincere purpose – it answers and transmutes his “obscene, insane desire […]
for a certain something that I am driven to seek outside of myself even
though it is concealed within me; a dark secret, a confusing and puzzling
dream of a most highly satisfying paradise that the dream itself is unable to
name, only to forebode.” 7 This intensely inward nature of Kreisler’s artistic
calling puts him at cross-purposes, however, with the petty intrigues of the
princely court at Sieghartsweiler in which he finds himself, having already
just fled his post in the larger Grand Duchy on account of being tasked with
adapting “altogether senseless and tasteless arrangements” for “fashionably
tasteful Italian singing.”8 Kreisler’s creative drive is so fundamental to his
being that social graces – and any advantage he may derive from them,
which may be considerable considering his unrealized and, within the court,
contested love for Julia – effectively fall by the wayside:
Kreisler was now caught up in a dissonance; naturally he had to resolve

this and hence could not join the princess in admiring the Geierstein and
the setting sun. “Is there truly any spot, far and wide, more delightful
than our Sieghartshof?” Hedwiga asked, more loudly and pointedly
than before! – Now Kreisler had no choice but, after striking a powerful
final chord, to join the princess at the window, courteously obliging her
summons to talk.9
5
“ein Blick in den Spiegel überzeugte mich, daβ der bloβe ernste Wille nach höherer
Kultur zu streben, schon vorteilhaft auf meine äuβere Haltung gewirkt. – Ich betrachtete
mich mit dem innigsten Wohlgefallen” (DKV 5, 429).
6
Hildegard Emmel has described him perhaps more accurately as “like a partner or
friend by means of whom the author attempted to understand himself and his position
in the world” (103).
7
“ein wüstes wahnsinniges Verlangen bricht oft hervor nach einem Etwas, das ich in
rastlosem Treiben auβer mir selbst suche, da es doch in meinem eignen Innern verborgen,
ein dunkles Geheimnis, ein wirrer rätselhafter Traum von einem Paradies der höchsten
Befriedigung, das selbst der Traum nicht zu nennen, nur zu ahnen vermag” (DKV 5, 82).
8
“allerlei sinn- und geschmacklosen Anordnungen […] [für] geschmackvoll[en] italiä-
nischen Gesang[]” (DKV 5, 85).
9
“Kreisler war eben in einer Dissonanz begriffen, natürlicherweise muβte er diese
auflösen, und konnte daher nicht mit der Prinzessin den Geierstein und die Abendsonne
bewundern. ‘Gibt’s wohl einen reizendern Aufenthalt weit und breit, als unser Sieghartshof,’
193
For Kreisler, this aesthetic need to resolve dissonance never comes to fruition
in matters of love, nor is it satisfied or reciprocated within the courtly circle
he ambivalently inhabits.
On a structural as well as thematic level, Hoffmann forbears resolving
this dissonance. Neither hero achieves his final aims, and neither narrative
half of the novel connects with the other. The only point where Kreisler
and Murr appear in the same scene, on the space of the same page, is when
Kreisler’s mentor, the magician and inventor Meister Abraham, boards the
cat with the orchestra-conductor prior to departing on a journey. These
suspended and pervasive divisions have led critics to rank Kater Murr among
Hoffmann’s most existentially-devastating works. As Gerhart Mayer puts it,
“The antithetical structure points to the breaking-apart of a meaningful unity
of being, to the irreconcilable opposition between subjective inwardness and
living-in-society. Hoffmann’s work is marked by a deep uncertainty regarding
its values, manifested in a formal principle of ambivalence” (116).10 Where
Mayer finds “uncertainty of values” (“Wertunsicherheit”) and “ambivalence,”
Daemmrich similarly sees a “final picture […] of deep gloom” emerging
from the inability of artist and society to coexist, let alone communicate
(46).11 One might augment such conclusions by drawing attention to the
persistent sense of duplicity that colors the cast of characters surrounding
Murr and Kreisler. Though their parting is amicable, Murr and his first love,
Miesmies, drift apart on account of her having been captivated by a hyper-
masculine tomcat who has recently returned from the army, where he won
“Burned Bacon Badge of Honor”;12 his final romantic interest, the whippet
Minona, instantly wins Murr’s heart on account of having appreciated and
even memorized specimens of his poetry, but later in the same evening avoids
sprach Hedwiga lauter und stärker als vorher!—Nun muβte Kreisler wohl, nachdem er
einen tüchtigen Schluβakkord angeschlagen, zu der Prinzessin an das Fenster treten, der
Aufforderung zum Gespräch höflich gnügend” (DKV 5, 169).
10
“Die antithetische Struktur deutet auf den Verlust der Sinneinheit des Daseins, auf
den unversöhnbaren Widerstreit zwischen subjektiver Innerlichkeit und gesellschaftlicher
Lebensform. Hoffmanns Werk ist von einer tiefen Wertunsicherheit geprägt, die sich
besonders in dem Formprinzip der Ambivalenz offenbart.”
11
Although he forbears joining Mayer and Daemmrich in reading the novel as a document
of despair – and rightly so, as I shall argue – Howard Gaskill gives a lucid account of
the depth and pervasiveness of the novel’s thematics of division, and insists along with
Segebrecht that such thematics are indivisible from the novel’s unique structure: “The
discontinuity of life, the maladjustment of the artist in society, the warring claims of
reason and instinct, ecstasy and sobriety, sentiment and wit, the same fundamental polar
tension in multiple variations is not simply treated thematically, but built into the novel’s
structure in such a way that the reader cannot avoid being subjected to it himself as he
reads” (22).
12
“das Ehrenzeichen des gebrannten Specks” (DKV 5, 223).
194
him in favor of mixing with more socially-distinguished company. While the

courtly surroundings in which Hoffmann places Kreisler are stocked with self-
serving schemers and plotters such as the Court-Councillor Benzon and the
diabolical Prince Hektor, perhaps more troubling still for readers of Hoffmann
is the fact that a seemingly benevolent figure such as Meister Abraham, in his
penchant for constructing automata and in possessing a mysterious alternate
identity as an Italian named Severino, shares characteristics with the demonic
Coppelius/Coppola of the tale, “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman,” published
in Hoffmann’s 1816 collection of Nachtstücke).13 Such duplicitous figures are
not unique to Kater Murr, but what distinguishes the novel among Hoffmann’s
works is how this theme’s treatment within the structural conceit of two
disparate manuscripts that perpetually interrupt one another elevates it into a
reflection on the duplicitous aspects of narrative form, particularly when that
form concerns itself with an individual’s Bildung or development. Hoffmann
is at pains to show us that no single narrative is or can be what it seems when
it comes to the intricacies and contradictions of the human life.
About midway through the novel, in the section of Murr’s autobiography
titled “The Life-Experiences of the Youth: I Too Was in Arcady,”14 the poodle
Ponto relates to Murr the story of two men who have just nearly trampled the
poor cat underfoot in their eagerness to exchange greetings. As the story goes,
one of these men, Formosus, falls in love with Ulrike, the daughter of a rich
man who, upon seeing Formosus’s overwhelming melancholy with regards to
this seemingly impossible match, benevolently gives his blessing to the couple’s
engagement. Formosus however, soon finds that his closest friend Walter – the
other man on the street – has secretly been pining away for Ulrike to the point
of suicidal despondency. In a spirit of seemingly genuine love and concern for
his friend, Formosus reliquishes the engagement, allowing Walter to woo Ulrike,
who indeed becomes Walter’s wife. Impressed at Formosus’s selflessness, Ulrike’s
wealthy father offers him a three-thousand-taler stipend, which he refuses on
the condition that the money be paid instead to a poor widow “with a virtuous
daughter”15 who are both living in grinding poverty. In return for these sacri-
fices, Walter gives up his “handsomely remunerative position”16 in the town
so that Formosus may have it, and in the words of the poodle, “Town and
country were astonished at both friends’ rivalry in gallantry; their deeds were
seen as an echo of long-departed, more beautiful era, and were hailed as an
example of a heroism of which only great spirits are capable.”17 Unconnected
13
See Paola Mayer’s essay in this collection, where she discusses transgressive scientists
of this type in several Hoffmann tales, including “The Sandman.”
14
“Lebenserfahrungen des Jünglings. Auch ich war in Arkadien” (DKV 5, 117).
15
“mit einer tugendhaften Tochter” (DKV 5, 142).
16
“seinen schönen einträglichen Posten” (DKV 5, 142).
17
“Stadt und Land erstaunte über den Wettstreit des Edelmuts beider Freunde, ihre Tat
195
to any plot-point, this anecdote of two seemingly exemplary individuals within

Hoffmann’s novel of two lives functions as an interpretive frame for both of the
novel’s narratives, insofar as it draws attention to a critical distinction between
lived lives and the published accounts of those lives. Murr, significantly, has
already read of these two gentlemen and their mutual sacrifice: “‘Indeed,’ I
began when Ponto was silent, ‘indeed, according to all I have read, Walter and
Formosus must be noble, full-blooded men who in their faithful sacrifices for
one another know nothing of your vaunted worldliness.’”18 The harmonious,
tidy, and edifying resolution offered up by these written accounts – and by
Ponto’s story thus far – is, however, entirely arbitrary.
As Ponto goes on to relate with a “gloating”19 smile, the universally-
lauded tale of the two men’s noble selflessness is not the whole or even the
real story, for he has become privy to information that casts these events in
an altogether different light. While engaged to Ulrike, Formosus has been
sneaking off at night to the destitute widow’s daughter, who is not in fact
her daughter but rather a partner in crime. Ulrike, meanwhile, turns out to
have had a long and sordid history of love affairs at the palace, and as for
Walter, he gave up his well-paid position only because he was in imminent
danger of being fired for his poor performance on the job. The seemingly
tender embrace of the two friends on the street is thus, in fact, an awkward
one, intended entirely to keep up appearances. This episode is foundational
to the novel’s conceptual framework, insofar as it reminds us of the point
that the life-narratives that we digest as members of a reading public – and
particularly as readers of Bildungsromane – are always to some extent artificial,
and that it spells certain disappointment to model one’s life, or at least one’s
expectations for life, upon such contrivances. If, as critics have argued, Kater
Murr structurally instantiates themes of despair, disconnection, and futility
to paint an overall picture of “deep gloom,” then the novel also ironizes
that picture by drawing attention to the assumptions of necessary apotheosis
that inform it. In defending Kreisler to the worldly Benzon, whose primary
motivations are to forge an advantageous match for her daughter Julia, and
herself to climb the ladder of prestige within the court,20 Meister Abraham’s
wurde als Nachklang aus einer längst vergangenen schönern Zeit vernommen, als Beispiel
aufgestellt eines Heroismus, dessen nur hohe Geister fähig” (DKV 5, 142–43).
18
“In der Tat, begann ich, als Ponto schwieg, in der Tat, nach allem was ich gelesen,
müssen Walter und Formosus edle kräftige Menschen sein, die in treuer Aufopferung für
einander nichts von deiner gerühmten Weltklugheit wissen” (DKV 5, 143).
19
“hämisch” (DKV 5, 143).
20
She accomplishes this goal by becoming Countess von Eschenau in the novel’s final
pages, but this distinction is superfluous and not a little absurd considering that the court
of Sieghartsweiler has been absorbed by the larger Grand Duchy and consequently exists
in name only.
196
incisive diagnosis of Kreisler’s character doubles as an assessment of the unique

character of the novel itself:
He will not recognize the perpetuity of the contracts which you have
drawn up for the organization of life; yes, he thinks that a harmful
delusion in which you are ensnared prevents you from seeing actual
life, and that the solemnity with which you believe yourself to rule over
a kingdom that is unfathomable to you appears quite droll – and you
call all that bitterness. He loves above all things the jest that originates
in a deeper contemplation of human existence, and that one might call
nature’s loveliest gift, which it creates from the purest source of its being.21
What Benzon calls bitterness, and what some readers of the novel will recognize
as division and fragmentation, Hoffmann here recasts as a cosmic jest that, in
a “spirit of true love,”22 undercuts the artful expectations for the “organization
of life” held by Benzon and propagated by prevailing narratives of Bildung.
Building on the insights of Herbert Singer,23 George Edgar Slusser details
how Kreisler wields his idiosyncratic, passionate, and decidedly unfashionable
music as a weapon of “ironic attack” in order to “maliciously […] interject false
notes into the dull and trite harmonies of society” (335). Slusser’s attention to
the disruptive and destabilizing aspects of Kreislerian irony leads him to the
suggestive conclusion that, for Kreisler, retreat from society into the confines of
the cloister or “ivory tower” is unsustainable if not impossible, given the social-
critical instrumentality of his music, and that consequently “the way to creation
lies in participation in society” (340). I would add, however, that this dimension
of irony alone offers no balm for Kreisler’s bifurcated state of being (nor for
that of his author); it may dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate arbitrary and vacuous
codes of decorum, but it cannot re-create new orders or perspectives. As “nature’s
loveliest gift,” the “jest” or irony that Meister Abraham ascribes to Kreisler –
and that, as I contend, shines through even more brightly in the novel’s broader
engagement with the structure and “organization” of lived and written lives alike
– exceeds the merely satirical in its mode of operation; it is “prolific” as well
21
“Er will die Ewigkeit der Verträge die ihr über die Gestaltung des Lebens geschlossen,
nicht anerkennen, ja er meint, daβ ein arger Wahn, von dem ihr befangen, euch gar nicht
das eigentliche Leben erschauen lasse, und daβ die Feierlichkeit mit der ihr über ein Reich
zu herrschen glaubt, das euch unerforschlich, sich gar spaβhaft ausnehme, und das alles
nennt ihr Verbitterung. Vor allen Dingen liebt er jenen Scherz, der sich aus der tiefern
Anschauung des menschlichen Seins erzeugt und der die schönste Gabe der Natur zu
nennen, die sie aus der reinsten Quelle ihres Wesens schöpft” (DKV 5, 257).
22
“Der Geist der wahren Liebe” (DKV 5, 257).
23
See Herbert Singer, “Hoffmann: Kater Murr,” in von Wiese (1963), cited in Slusser
334–35.
197
as “devouring.” Against Benzon’s logic of ascent and accumulation, against the

illusion of tidy resolution conjured by Walter’s publicized nuptials (which even
today would not be out of place in the “Vows” section of the Sunday Times),
and – as we shall see – against the reiteration of these and similar prerogatives
in contemporary novels of Bildung, Hoffmann in Kater Murr embraces the
accidents, inconsistencies, and interruptions inhering in any given moment of
a life. The loving “jest” that shapes the novel’s “organization,” always deferring
denouement, always privileging life-as-(aesthetic) play over and above life-as-
synthesis or product, allows the reader to “fathom” what Benzon and admirers
of the Sunday “Vows” section cannot – namely, that the “kingdom” is just as
beautiful without a king, to whose injunction all subjects and all moments must
conform or be cast out.24 In this way, Kater Murr represents a watershed in
Hoffmann’s thinking on the disparity of the “two worlds,” in all of their various
configurations; it is here that he comes closest to laying these disparities to rest,
or at least to achieving some peace with the impossibility of their resolution.
The means by which he effects this are through a close interrogation of the
Bildungsroman form and its embedded assumptions of apotheosis, or to put it
differently, a “happily ever after,” and also through a formal experimentation
that challenges the linearity and teleology of such narratives.
If not the first, then certainly the most paradigmatic Bildungsroman, Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96) had
an impact upon German Romanticism that cannot be overstated. Novalis
is famously purported to have committed large portions of the novel to
memory, before disavowing it on account of what he had increasingly come
to regard as an odious capitulation to anti-poetical bourgeois values, reflected
most clearly in its eponymous hero’s renunciation of his theatrical calling in
favor of full devotion to familial and civic life. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen
(1800) Novalis responds to Wilhelm Meister’s purported dearth of poetry25 by
24
Recognizing the purposeful preponderance of “impotence, error, misnaming, and
disappointment” in Kater Murr, Christopher Clason identifies “a thematic paradigm of
chaos” that suffuses the language of the novel (Clason “Chaotic Contours” 95, 86). In
the context of questions regarding life-writing and Bildung that I take up here, I would
stress that this “chaos” – and the multivalent irony (on the level of character and narrative
structure) that engenders it – is essentially productive: in dismantling received assumptions
about both the conduct and narrative representation of a life, it offers an alternate portrait
of the “messiness” of life in all (or at least a cross-section of) its contingencies, contradic-
tions, and ephemera. Clason, too, gestures toward this affirmative aspect of chaos when
describing one of its results as a “higher kind of order, on the model of complexity in the
natural sciences” (86).
25
Novalis writes in one of his fragments that “Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship is to some
extent prosaic – and modern. Within it, the Romantic perishes – as does nature-poesie, and
the wonderful – it deals only with familiar, human things – nature and the mystical are
entirely forgotten. It is a poeticized story of the civil and domestic.” (“Wilhelm Meisters
198
working out in novel-form his aphorism that “the world must be romanticized.
For it is thus that man finds his primal purpose. Romanticizing is nothing
other than a qualitative potentiation. Through this operation, the abject self
finds identity in a better self.”26 For Novalis, this recognition of the self’s
latent potency must take place not through an abdication or forswearing of
art, but rather through an immersion in it. Like Ludwig Tieck, whose novel
Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Journeys, 1798) describes the
development of a young painter in Albrecht Dürer’s circle, Novalis refuses to
accept Wilhelm Meister’s depiction of aesthetic education as merely one point
or segment along the path to complete Bildung. Although Novalis disagreed
with Goethe regarding the constitution of the fully-realized or “better” self,
Wilhelm Meister’s instantiation of a progression from abjectness and division
towards a harmonious unity within oneself, and between self and world,
nonetheless captivated the younger Novalis and fellow writers of his generation.
In the preface to Hyperion, Oder der Eremit in Griechenland (Hyperion, or
The Hermit in Greece, 2 vols., 1797–99), written even sooner in the wake of
Wilhelm Meister 27 than Sternbald and Ofterdingen, Friedrich Hölderlin states
that “The resolution of dissonances in a certain character is a matter neither
for mere memory, nor for vacant pleasure,”28 at once suggesting the gravity of
his purpose in contrast to writers of didactic novels and of innocuous pleasure-
reading, and revealing that the development of the particular “character” with
which his novel is concerned will proceed holistically through a dissolution of
discordant elements. Not all of Goethe’s contemporaries, to be sure, regarded
Wilhelm Meister as a paradigm of harmoniousness. Schiller beheld in the novel
a “beautiful solar-system, in which everything belongs together,”29 but he also
identified the figures of Mignon and the Harpist as “monstrous”30 outliers to
this unity. For the young Friedrich Schlegel, these very incongruities were
Lehrjahre sind gewissermaaβen durchaus prosäisch – und modern. Das Romantische

geht darinn zu Grunde – auch die Naturpoësie, das Wunderbare – Er handelt blos von
gewöhnlichen menschlichen Dingen – die Natur und der Mystizism sind ganz vergessen.
Es ist eine poëtisirte bürgerliche und häusliche Geschichte” [2, 800–1]). For Novalis, a
novel must instead “be poesie through and through” (“Ein Roman muβ durch und durch
Poësie seyn” [2, 754]).
26
“Die Welt muβ romantisirt werden. So findet man den urspr[ünglichen] Sinn wieder.
Romantisiren ist nichts, als eine qualit[ative] Potenzirung. Das niedre Selbst wird mit
einem besseren Selbst in dieser Operation identificirt” (2, 334).
27
The first volume of Hölderlin’s Hyperion was published in 1797. The second volume
followed in 1799.
28
“Die Auflösung der Dissonanzen in einem gewissen Charakter ist weder für das bloβe
Nachdenken, noch für die leere Lust” (1, 579).
29
“Es steht da wie ein schönes Planetensystem, alles gehört zusammen” (Schiller 220).
30
“Wie schön gedacht ist es, daβ sie das praktisch Ungeheure, das furchtbar Pathetische
im Schicksal Mignons und des Harfenspielers von dem theoretisch Ungeheuren, von den
199
essential to what he regarded as the novel’s self-reflective, ironic fabric: “This

novel beguiles the customary expectations of unity and cohesiveness as often
as it fulfills them.”31 That Schlegel could praise the novel both for its ironic
detachment and, later in his life, for its didacticism and “its high cultural
and moral concern” testifies to the fact that, as Martin Swales has put it,
“both positions are appropriate to Wilhelm Meister and to its responsiveness to
different readings” (27–28). However variously the Romantics responded to
the formal dimensions of the novel, they were nonetheless captivated by its
vision of the self in the state of becoming. Goethe, Novalis, and Hölderlin
each figure Bildung as a quasi-alchemical process of transmuting extraneous
and conflicting qualities into a unified substance, and for all their significant
differences concerning the particular execution of this process, they concur
in associating its culmination with the discovery of what Novalis calls one’s
“primal purpose.” In Wilhelm Meister’s sixth book, the “Confessions of a
Beautiful Soul”32 – a standalone spiritual autobiography told by the aunt
of Wilhelm’s eventual wife, Natalie – the narrator’s uncle tells her that “the
largest share of mischief, and that which one calls evil in the world, arises
merely from the fact that people are too negligent to get to know their aims
truly, and when they do identify them, to see them seriously through.”33
Wilhelm is indeed able to know his own aims, and it is no coincidence that
his initiation into the Turmgesellschaft or “Tower Society” follows directly upon
his realization that he can only fulfill his potential by leaving the stage, and
building around himself a family. As Jarno affirms to him in the novel’s final
book, this discovery of one’s purpose has been a prerequisite for entering the
Tower Society all along:
The formation of his character is not the chief concern with every
man. Many merely wish to find a sort of recipe for comfort, directions
for acquiring riches, or whatever good they aim at. All such, when
they would not be instructed in their proper duties, we were wont to
mystify, to treat with juggleries, and every sort of hocus-pocus, and at
length to shove aside. We advanced none to the rank of Masters but
such as clearly felt and recognized the purpose they were born for, and
Miβgeburten des Verstandes ableiten, so daβ der reinen und gesunden Natur nichts dadurch
aufgebürdet wird” (221).
31
“Die gewöhnlichen Erwartungen von Einheit und Zusammenhang täuscht dieser
Roman ebensooft als er sie erfüllt” (Schlegel 460).
32
“Bekenntnisse einer Schönen Seele.”
33
“Glauben Sie mir, meine Liebe, der gröβte Teil des Unheils und dessen was man bös
in der Welt nennt, ensteht bloβ, weil die Menschen zu nachlässig sind ihre Zwecke recht
kennen zu lernen, und wenn sie solche kennen, ernsthaft darauf los zu arbeiten” (Goethe
9, 778).
200
had got enough of practice to proceed along their way with a certain
cheerfulness and ease.34
In the inscrutability and seeming arbitrariness of the Tower Society, paired with
its apparently conservative spirit in an age of revolutions,35 one can see how the
apotheosis of Wilhelm’s Bildung gave a reader such as Novalis serious pause.
Hoffmann shares with Novalis an unwillingness to accept the culmi-
nation of Wilhelm’s development as a culmination at all; Murr is royal fool
to Wilhelm’s “master,” and the showy vapidity of the society he endeavors
to join, having considered his Bildung complete, is a condemnation of the
Tower Society’s elitism.36 Kreisler’s narrative, in turn, reflects Novalis’s critique
of Wilhelm Meister as insufficiently poetic, and insufficiently about “Poësie”
or art; as a Künstlerroman or “artist-novel” like Ofterdingen and Sternbald,
it emphasizes those aspects of Bildung pertaining to artistic creation as
a corrective to the perceived social and worldly capitulation inherent in
Wilhelm’s attainment of Meisterschaft or “mastery.” It also, however, evinces
Hoffmann’s reservations regarding the ability of the Romantic “artist-novel”
to interrogate substantively the fundamental assumptions underlying Goethe’s
paradigm of Bildung, and to accommodate his own fraught relationship to
34
“Nicht allen Menschen ist es eigentlich um ihre Bildung zu tun, viele wünschen nur
so ein Hausmittel zum Wohlbefinden, Rezepte zum Reichtum und zu jeder Art von
Glückseligkeit. Alle diese, die nicht auf ihre Füβe gestellt sein wollten, wurden mit Mystifi-
kationen und anderm Hokus-Pokus teils aufgehalten, teils bei Seite gebracht. Wir sprachen
nur nach unserer Art diejenigen los, die lebhaft fühlten und deutlich bekannten, wozu sie
geboren seien, und die sich genug geübt hatten, um, mit einer gewissen Fröhlichkeit und
Leichtigkeit, ihren Weg zu verfolgen” (Goethe 9, 930).
35
As Jarno tells Wilhelm, “We shall insure a competent subsistence to each other, in the
single case of a revolution happening, which might drive any part of us entirely from their
possessions.” (503; “Wir assekurieren uns unter einander unsere Existenz, auf den einzigen
Fall, daβ eine Staatsrevolution den einen oder den andern von seinen Besitztümern völlig
vertriebe” [Goethe 9, 945]).
36
Murr’s brush with incest, in which he begins to court the charming and intelligent
Mina before learning from Miesmies that she is in fact his own daughter, is likely also a
parody of Wilhelm Meister. At the close of Goethe’s novel, the reader learns that Mignon
is the product of incest between the Harpist and his sister, and as Michael Minden has
argued, Wilhelm’s staging of Hamlet earlier in the novel represents a confrontation with
“his Oedipal sense of the catastrophic nature of engagement with sexuality” that must be
overcome and entsagt or renounced (38). As Minden puts it, “this sublimation is key to
socialization and development” (38); no wonder, then, that Wilhelm renounces the stage
following the production of Hamlet. In having Murr unknowingly flirt with his own
daughter, Hoffmann seems to suggest that in Goethe’s model of Bildung, the threat of
incest is not only never fully exterminated, but that on account of the hero’s own egotistical
drive towards “mastery” over the self and “oneness” with the world, it might even impose
itself on the next generation.
201
creating art. Kreisler, in fact, directly invokes Tieck when describing the
nature of his creative urge to Benzon, but only for the purpose of drawing a
contrast: “It is not the longing which, as that profound poet says so majesti-
cally, having its source in the higher life, lasts forever because it is forever
unfulfilled, neither exchanged nor deceived, but only not fulfilled so that
it does not die; no.”37 Even if this consciously-unfulfilled yearning offers
a subtle repudiation of the notion that Bildung can be consummated and
concluded – precisely because, according to Tieck, the creative spirit can
never rest or reach an end-point – for Kreisler, as for Hoffmann, this remains
insufficient as an account of the artistic drive, which for them seems to resist
progressive Bildung altogether, insofar as it does not develop cumulatively or
tidily, but rises instead from the unconscious like a “confusing and puzzling
dream.”38 As a response to Wilhelm Meister, as well as to Romantic novels
of Bildung that themselves reframe Meister’s paradigmatic journey as one of
abidingly aesthetic self-realization, Kater Murr refuses to affirm or otherwise
to assume those aspects of the Bildungsroman-form that his fellow-Romantics
and Goethe alike held as its foundational principles – namely, its portrayal
of the hero’s challenging but sure progress towards a harmoniously unified
self with a meaningful place in the world, and its emphasis on the discovery
and cultivation of one’s purpose as the key to achieving that all-inclusive
unity. Considering the novel’s forbearance “to idealize and to unify” (BL 1:
304) its diverse narrative structures, whose existing configuration is itself the
result of (at least one) accident, Christopher R. Clason is right to suggest that
“If rupture, discontinuity, dissonance, disjointedness, and other synonyms
of disorder typically inform (post-)modern art, then one must consider
Hoffmann’s Kater Murr one of the most forward-looking works of the
Romantic period” (95). In splitting the one life of the Bildungsroman into two
lives that alternatingly satirize, circumvent, and reshape received trajectories of
growth and development, Hoffmann looks forward to modernity in at least
one major respect out of a dissatisfaction with existing forms of the novel of
individual development in the German tradition. Such dissatisfaction should
not, however, be mistaken for a nihilism or radical absence of meaning of
the sort often attributed to a Kafka, Beckett, or Bernhard; it springs instead
from Hoffmann’s desire for a novelistic form that could accommodate what
Clason would call the “disorder” and “disjointedness” of his experience of life,
while remaining attuned to its high notes and subtler, momentary harmonies.
In the same way that Kreisler quotes Tieck in order to distinguish his
37
“Nicht die Sehnsucht ist es, die, wie jener tiefe Dichter so herrlich sagt, aus dem
höheren Leben entsprungen, ewig währt, weil sie ewig nicht erfüllt wird, weder getäuscht
noch hintergangen, sondern nur nicht erfüllt, damit sie nicht sterbe; nein” (DKV 5, 82).
38
“ein wirrer rätselhafter Traum” (DKV 5, 82).
202
creative drive from the paradigm of Sehnsucht or unfulfilled longing, the

Kreisler narrative quotes Mignon’s song from Wilhelm Meister, “Do you
know the land where the citrons bloom?”39 in order to indicate that the
operative terms of its representation of life will not be those of Goethe. In
the preface to his translation of Wilhelm Meister, Thomas Carlyle states that
“The history of Mignon runs like a thread of gold through the tissue of the
narrative, connecting with the heart much that were else addressed to the head.
Philosophy and eloquence might have done the rest; but this is poetry in the
highest meaning of the word” (20). A young girl whom Wilhelm rescues from
abuse and adopts as his ward, Mignon indeed constitutes the emotional core
of the novel, and she plays a significant part in Wilhelm’s own development by
inspiring in him the sense of fatherly purpose that reaches its fullest expression
succeeding his discovery that the boy Felix is his own son. It is telling, then,
that Hoffmann would reference the opening line of Mignon’s famous song
when describing Prince Hektor’s quest for power and prestige following the
seizure of his father’s throne by another kingdom:
Prince Hektor, who was suited for nothing less than a quiet, peaceful
life – who, regardless of the fact that the royal chair had been pulled
out from under him, liked to stand on his own two feet and who, rather
than rule, wished at least to command – entered the service of France,
was exceedingly valiant, but one day heard a maiden with a zither howl
out, “Do you know the land, where the lemons glow?” and he went to
the land where such oranges actually do glow, which could only mean
Naples, and so he switched out his French uniform for a Neapolitan
one. He was named a general as rapidly as only a prince can.40
In Goethe’s text, the “land where the citrons bloom” is Mignon’s homeland of
Italy, and the “knowing” of this land becomes symbolic for the knowing of
one’s inner purpose, latent since birth and waiting only to “bloom” or come
into consciousness. That Hektor hears a misconstrued version of the song, in
which the lemons “glow” rather than “bloom,” and that upon hearing it, he
immediately switches sides in the Napoleonic Wars from France to Naples
39
“Kennst du das Land? wo die Zitronen blühn” (Goethe 9, 303).
40
“Prinz Hektor, der zu nichts wenigerem aufgelegt, als zum stillen, friedlichen Leben,
der, unerachtet ihm der Fürstenstuhl unter den Beinen weggezogen, doch gern aufrecht
stehen, und statt zu regieren, wenigstens kommandieren wollte, nahm französische Dienste,
war ungemein tapfer, ging aber, als ihn eines Tages ein Zittermädel anplärrte: Kennst
du das Land, wo die Zitronen glühn, sofort nach dem Lande, wo dergleichen Zitronen
wirklich glühn, das heiβt, nach Neapel, und zog statt der französischen Uniform eine
neapolitanische an. Er wurde nehmlich so geschwinde General, wie es nur irgend einem
Prinzen geschehen kann” (DKV 5, 205).
203
– where, on account of his high birth, he can more rapidly ascend the ranks
– is entirely appropriate to his covetous character, fixated as it is upon shiny
objects of power and prestige. “That most urbane man of the world, equipped
with all the weapons of nefariousness, which annihilate everything genuine,
every form of life,”41 Hektor is the polar opposite to the sensitive and creative
Kreisler, and he embodies the corrupt courtly culture that constitutes the
darker of the “two worlds” which Hoffmann’s hero must navigate. Given the
context of Mignon’s song, Hektor is also a vehicle for Hoffmann’s embedded
critique of Bildung; he hears the song, and immediately discovers his purpose,
which is to advance himself by any means possible. To know the land where
the citrons bloom, in Hoffmann’s ironic formulation, is to exploit that land
for one’s own gain. Hoffmann in this way inverts the maxim of the “Beautiful
Soul’s” uncle: to get to know one’s own aims is no guarantee for mitigating
“that which one calls evil in the world.” Depending on the nature of those aims,
they may even perpetuate such evil. If Bildung coincides with the discovery
and realization of one’s purpose, then for Hoffmann “purpose” is a relative
term that can be handily misconstrued to sanction base and worldly ends.
Like its ethics of purpose, the progressive impetus of the Bildungsroman-form
also comes under scrutiny in Kater Murr, whose bifurcated structure resists and
repudiates the overarching unities in which that progress culminates. More
than merely an emblem of disconnection or impossible resolution, however,
the novel’s dual structure also serves as an affirmation that a narrative of
steady teleological development is only one way to represent a life, and by no
means an all-encompassing one. Murr’s narrative of events is sequential and
self-referential, and its chapter-titles carefully mark major stages of development.
Kreisler’s biography, on the other hand, is “fragmentary” and full of detours,
inlets, and back-stories that, together, describe not a straight line, but rather
one that branches out and curls back upon itself to enfold spaces of signifi-
cation otherwise anathema to the headlong march of linear progress. In this,
the Kreisler biography not a little resembles an amalgam of the five at turns
looping and angular lines drawn by Tristram Shandy in Volume VI of Sterne’s
novel, to describe the digressive and perpetually-interrupted narrative trajectories
of his story up to this point. Indeed, Hoffmann exceeds the novel to which
his title-phrase “The Life and Opinions” pays homage by dispensing with the
line altogether, and offering in its place a circle. In using Kreisler’s biography
as blotting paper, Murr has shuffled pages belonging to the end of his master’s
story to underpad the commencement of his own narrative. The “beginning”
of Kreisler’s biography is thus in fact its final scene. The circularity instantiated
by the material arrangement of the novel’s pages is reflected in Kreisler’s name
“Er, der gewandteste Weltmann, noch mehr, ausgerüstet mit allen Waffen einer
41
Ruchlosigkeit, die alles Wahrhafte, jede Gestaltung des Lebens vernichtet” (DKV 5, 422).
204
itself: as he mischievously tells Benzon, for whom a name is nothing more than
a means and marker of progress towards power and prestige, “Show me the
kindness, most esteemed lady, to consider my simple name in its proper light,
and you will find it, as far as design, color, and physiognomy are concerned,
most lovely! Even more! If you reverse it, or dissect it with the anatomical
knife of grammar, its inner substance is even more majestic.”42 The Kreis or
circle describes a structure, but its organizational logic remains inconceivable to
Benzon, blinded as she is to any model of Bildung or self-realization unbound
to a cumulative imperative. Marshall Brown offers one way to think about this
organizational logic when he argues in The Shape of German Romanticism that
“Whenever the romantics use an apparently dualistic vocabulary […] we may
reinterpret it in terms of a circle, which the two contraries somehow cooperate in
forming and in which the center is the primary phenomenon” (34). Recognizing
via the figure of the circle that a central project of Romanticism is to envision
the binaries and polarities of the world holistically and dynamically, and not
simply as fixed antitheses occupying either end of a line, Brown is right to locate
Kreisler at his respective circle’s center (102); though they threaten to tear him
asunder, the warring claims of art and life, irony and sentimentality, and all the
other manifestations of the “Two Worlds,” are constitutive of Kreisler’s being.
If for Brown, however, the circle and its center are “the symbol of teleology”
(38) – a point for which he finds ample support in the writings of Friedrich
Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, as well as in Wilhelm Meister43 – then this is also
where Hoffmann departs from his contemporaries. For one thing, Kater Murr
thoroughly ironizes the model of a unified life with a central, abiding purpose
that epitomizes the teleological approach to Bildung, and not least among the
ways it achieves this is through its forbearance from depicting a grand culmi-
nation to either of its two narratives. Secondly, if we take Kreisler at his word
and dissect or otherwise investigate the “inner substance” of his name, we
will find it “majestic” not because it consists of a solid, unmoving center, but
because it is composed instead of countless component circles, each moving and
intersecting with others to reveal new patterns and configurations.
One of these circles is Kreisler’s own life-story, which he recounts in a
series of exchanges with Meister Abraham and the court Privy Councillor,
and whose trajectory stands in stark contrast to Murr’s straightforward,
progressively-unfolding account of development, and to Benzon’s even more
rigidly goal-oriented understanding of Bildung as a path to civic prominence.
42
“Erzeigen Sie mir die Güte, Verehrungswürdigste, betrachten Sie meinen schlichten
Namen im gehörigen Licht, und Sie werden ihn, was Zeichnung, Kolorit und Physiog-
nomie betrifft, allerliebst finden! Noch mehr! stülpen Sie ihn um, sezieren Sie ihn mit dem
grammatischen Anatomiermesser, immer herrlicher wird sich sein innerer Gehalt zeigen”
(DKV 5, 77–78).
43
See Brown 33–44.
205
Conscious seemingly since birth that “nothing but loud musical blood coursed
through the thousands of veins and arteries inside this young man,”44 and
captivated by the panoply of musical instruments surrounding him in his
childhood home, Kreisler does not set out into the world like Ofterdingen or
Sternbald to realize his artistic destiny, but through a series of unfortunate
accidents is brought under the care of an uncle who “did not push me or
educate me at all, but left me to the arbitrary whims of the teachers who came
to the house”45 and who himself molds Kreisler only with periodic boxes on the
ears in reproof to a perceived over-immersion in books. Kreisler consequently
commences a path of “mastery” as a Councilor for Foreign Affairs that he only
later recognizes as fundamentally contradictory to his inner nature:
That art, which suffused my soul, might be my actual aspiration, the

only true direction of my life, had hardly occurred to me […] The speed
with which I strode forward, unmindful of any obstacles that may have
appeared thanks to my own acquired knowledge and the support of
my uncle, along a path that I had more or less chosen myself, left me
with no time to look around myself and perceive the crookedness of the
course I had taken. The goal had been reached; turning back was no
longer possible when, without any warning, art – to which I had been
disloyal – took its vengeance, and the thought of an entirely wasted life
gripped me with inconsolable pain as I saw myself bound in seemingly
unbreakable fetters.46
This is not at all the model of Bildung envisioned by Goethe and his Romantic
successors, in which the primordial urges of childhood become through
providential cultivation the building-blocks for a fully-realized self. In Tieck’s
Sternbald, such progress toward apotheosis suffuses the narrative structure:
Sternbald begins as an apprentice in the cozy incubator of Albrecht Dürer’s
44
“in dem Innern dieses jungen Mannes durch tausend Adern und Äderchen lauter
musikalisches Blut läuft” (DKV 5, 108).
45
“denn der Oheim zog oder erzog mich ganz und gar nicht, sondern überlieβ mich der
Willkür der Lehrer die ins Haus kamen” (DKV 5, 110).
46
“Daβ die Kunst, welche mein Inneres erfüllte, mein eigentliches Streben, die wahre
einzige Tendenz meines Lebens sein dürfe, fiel mir um so weniger ein […] Die Schnelle, mit
der ich, ohne daβ sich jemals auch nur ein einziges Hindernis offenbart hätte, durch mein
erlangtes Wissen, und durch den Vorschub des Oheims in der Residenz, in der Laufbahn,
die ich gewissermaβen selbst gewählt, vorwärts schritt, lieβ mir keinen Moment übrig, mich
umzuschauen, und die schiefe Richtung des Weges, den ich genommen wahrzunehmen.
Das Ziel war erreicht, umzukehren nicht mehr möglich, als in einem nicht geahnten
Moment die Kunst sich rächte, der ich abtrünnig worden, als der Gedanke eines ganzen
verlornen Lebens mich mit trostlosem Weh erfaβte, als ich mich in Ketten geschlagen sah,
die mir unzerbrechlich dünkten!” (DKV 5, 115).
206
workshop, before setting out on a solitary journey through Europe in search

of his artistic identity. Dürer reappears throughout to offer the young painter
guidance, and at the close of the novel he finally passes the torch, as it were,
to the now mature Sternbald, who also unites with his one-and-only true love
in a garden in Rome despite having seen her only twice before. Coleridge
would find this denouement utterly unconvincing, calling it “a lewd day-dream,
in which the Dreamer at once yawns and itches” (CL 4: 793), and it seems
Hoffmann felt similarly. To satisfy his creative urges, Kreisler must create a
circle that resolves his childhood into his present, for the linear trajectory of
the Bildung-model to which he has unwittingly subscribed – and which such
novels as Sternbald, despite their artistic focus, nonetheless reinforce – has
succeeded only in alienating him from those urges.
There is, however, another Tieck text that informs Kater Murr, and positively
at that, and this is his Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots, 1797), direct refer-
ences to which abound in the pages of Hoffmann’s novel. Der gestiefelte Kater
is mock-drama of the highest order; barely any events transpire on the stage
without the critics in the audience voicing either their dissention or grudging
admiration, and getting embroiled in side-conversations that eclipse in length
the supposed events of the drama itself. Tieck’s metadrama includes a telling
passage in which the boot-wearing cat Hinze, responding to Gottlieb’s exhor-
tation that his fate must soon be decided, says: “Have patience for a few more
days; fortune requires some time in which to ripen; who would try to be
happy on the spur of the moment?! My good sir, such things only happen in
books; in the real world things don’t go so quickly.”47 This might have been an
epigraph for Hoffmann’s novel, for what Der gestiefelte Kater is to the theater,
Kater Murr is to the Bildungsroman. Be it through the parodistic elements of
Murr’s narrative, or the way in which Kreisler’s biography is conspicuously
without an origin or an ending – partly because the cat has scratched away
or scribbled over these pages, and partly because Kreisler’s biographer admits
to having incomplete source-material – Hoffmann is at pains to indicate that
the way lives are written in books are rarely the same as the ways in which
our actual lives are lived. And yet Hoffmann takes some solace in this this. As
Kreisler’s biographer states,
The writer would prefer to have begun: In the small town of N. or B.

or K., and indeed on a Pentecost Monday or on Easter of such and
such a year, Johannes Kreisler first saw the light of the world! But such
47
“Habe nur noch ein paar Tage Geduld, das Glück muβ doch auch einige Zeit haben,
um zu wachsen; wer wird denn so aus dem Stegreif glücklich sein wollen! Mein guter Mann,
das kommt nur in Büchern vor, in der wirklichen Welt geht das nicht so geschwinde”
(Tieck, Werke 2, 227).
207
a comely chronological ordering cannot arise, since the unlucky narrator

has at his disposal only oral accounts, imparted piecemeal, which he must
record immediately so as not to lose the whole thing from his memory.48
What this suggests in the context of the novel as a whole is that Kreisler’s
present is not determined by his past, and that in turn his future is not
determined by his present. Kreisler might be tortured by his forestalled and
interrupted artistic development, but for all his fears that his name itself
predestines an agonizing circle of creation and alienation, a “St. Vitus dance
to which he is constrained”49 and from which he will never escape, his name
also suggests an alternative model of understanding and narrating a life that
accommodates contingency and change without erasing or otherwise eliding
them, as would a line moving from one fixed point to another. As Slusser has
aptly put it, “a wider circle frames the wild dance of the hero. Its function is
to preserve, not to destroy” (342). In this way, Kreisler’s development – and the
relationship to time evidenced through that development – is wholly unique
among contemporary protagonists of the Bildungsroman. In a notebook entry
from his Roman sojourn of 1806, Coleridge writes of “The quiet circle in
which Change and Permanence co-exist, not by combination or juxtaposition,
but by an absolute annihilation of difference/column of smoke, the fountains
before St. Peter’s, waterfalls/God! – Change without loss” (CN 2: 2832).
Although Hoffmann could not have known of this formulation, it describes
with remarkable clarity those affirmative aspects of Kreislerian circularity
that counter the linear-progressive impetus of Bildung by reconceiving time
itself as immanent, as a “quiet circle” in which nothing is lost as the self
comes into shape and inevitably changes shape. Glossing Schlegel’s account
of the individual consciousness of time in his Cologne philosophical lectures
of 1804–05, Brown writes that “the self is everywhere but in the present
instant, everywhere but in its own Ansich. Life is the past and the future, in
memory and intimation […] Between these the present is only an infinitely
thin surface, a point of instability, an empty or divided center” (187). While
this might describe Benzon’s relationship to time – and while it certainly
anticipates Bergson’s idea that “Nothing is less than the present moment, if
you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the
future” (193) – it is not the model that Hoffmann follows with regard to
48
“Gern hätte er angefangen: In dem kleinen Städtchen N. oder B. oder K., und zwar
am Pfingstmontage oder zu Ostern des und des Jahres, erblickte Johannes Kreisler das
Licht der Welt! – Aber solche schöne chronologische Ordnung kann gar nicht aufkommen;
da dem unglücklichen Erzähler nur mündlich, Brockenweis mitgeteilte Nachrichten zu
Gebote stehen, die er, um nicht das Ganze aus dem Gedächtnisse zu verlieren, sogleich
verarbeiten muβ” (DKV 5, 58).
49
“den Sprüngen des St. Veits Tanzes, zu dem er gezwungen” (DKV 5, 78).
208
Kreisler and to Bildung itself. It is instead the state of being-in-the-present,

described by Coleridge in his notebook (and in a later poem as an “Eternal
NOW”50), that rescues Kreisler and Hoffmann alike from the existential hell of
the “St. Vitus dance,” and that becomes their primary solace in a life wracked
by fears of a dark destiny. Such an approach understands the present as a
circle enfolding the past and the future, rather than as an always-disappearing
point on a continuum. This is further evidenced in Kreisler’s conversation with
Meister Abraham over why medieval painters used contemporary settings and
garments to depict Biblical events: “For the devout artist, the sacred history as
he depicted it was taking place in the present; he saw God’s grace taking place
among the people around him, and what he saw in life, he put forth onto the
canvas.”51 Coleridge would recognize much the same idea in his translation of
Hoffmann’s “Der goldene Topf”: in his preface, Coleridge steadfastly refuses
the advice of his fictional editor, Dick Proof, to “lay the scene farther off”
(SWF 2: 968) on account of its supernatural elements, which Dick Proof
worries would lessen the believability of the tale. Like the painter in Abraham
and Kreisler’s discussion, Hoffmann writes what he sees before him, and what
he sees in his own life and depicts in the lives of Kreisler and Murr is neither
a harmonious progression to which all the parts seamlessly correspond, nor a
dark fate towards which all life-events helplessly tumble headlong.
Indeed, one of the things that Hoffmann witnessed while completing work
on the novel was the death of his own cat, also named Murr, at the end of
November 1821, shortly before the novel’s second and final volume went to
press. While this event occurred too late to impact profoundly (if at all) the tone
and shape of the novel, the fact that Hoffmann felt this loss keenly enough to
send out multiple death-notices to his circle of friends52 invites closer scrutiny
into the nature of this singular literary feline. On the one hand, Murr is far
too self-assured as a poet, especially since he is a bad one, and his frequent
apostrophes to fatherland, to sensibility, and to nature are transparent clichés.
That said, it is going too far to dismiss Murr as only a flat character, as a mere
vehicle of satire who serves as a useful foil to Murr’s genuinely creative master,
Kreisler. For one thing, there is the tenderly studied description of Murr that
we get in the novel’s early pages, in the Kreisler section, when Murr’s first
master, Meister Abraham, bequeaths the cat to its new warden, a description
calculated to elicit our sympathy:
50
“Inscription on a Timepiece,” PW 1123.
51
“So ging dem frommen Maler die heilige Geschichte, der er seinen Sinn zugewendet,
in der Gegenwart auf; unter den Menschen, wie sie ihn im Leben umgaben, sah er das
Gnadenreiche geschehen und wie er es lebendig geschaut, brachte er es auf die Tafel”
(DKV 5, 369).
52
For further discussion, see DKV 5, 932–38.
209
With that Meister Abraham opened the door, and there on the doormat,
curled up and sleeping, lay a tomcat that in its own way could really
be called a miracle of beauty. The grey and black stripes on its back
met on the head between the ears, forming the daintiest hieroglyphics
on its forehead. Similarly striped and of quite uncommon length and
power was the majestic tail. There, the cat’s colorful coat glistened and
shimmered in the sun’s illumination, so that one distinguished narrow,
golden-yellow stripes between the black and the grey. “Murr! Murr!”
called Meister Abraham. “Krrr-krrr,” replied the tomcat very clearly,
stretched – raised itself, arched its back in that singular manner of its
species, and opened a pair of grass-green eyes from which soul and
understanding flashed forth in sparkling fire. At least that is what Meister
Abraham maintained, and even Kreisler had to admit that the tomcat
bore something special and unusual in its countenance, that its head
was large enough to contain learning, and that its whiskers, while still
youthful, were already long and white enough to lend it the authority
of a Greek philosopher.53
As the novel’s only scene to feature Murr and Kreisler sharing the space of
the same page, the episode is significant for the genuine sense of compassion
and understanding that radiates, echo-like, between the feline and his human
companions. For all his misadventures in poetry, in love, and in fraternizing
with the wrong crowd, the tomcat bears more affinities to the mercurial
composer Kreisler than we might at first think. When Daemmrich describes
Murr as a “facile poet who has learned nothing from life and is as intoxi-
cated by his importance as ever” (44), he overlooks Murr’s own realization
towards the end of his narrative that the high society whose praise he has
courted does not, in fact, understand him at all. After only a short while at
53
“Damit öffnete Meister Abraham die Türe, und auf der Strohmatte zusammengekrümmt,
schlafend, lag ein Kater, der wirklich in seiner Art ein Wunder von Schönheit zu nennen.
Die grauen und schwarzen Streifen des Rückens liefen zusammen auf dem Scheitel
zwischen den Ohren und bildeten auf der Stirne die zierlichste Hieroglyphenschrift. Eben
so gestreift und von ganz ungewöhnlicher Länge und Stärke war der stattliche Schweif.
Dabei glänzte des Katers buntes Kleid und schimmerte von der Sonne beleuchtet, so
daß man zwischen dem Schwarz und Grau noch schmale goldgelbe Streifen wahrnahm.
Murr! Murr! rief Meister Abraham, Krrr – krrr, erwiderte der Kater sehr vernehmlich,
dehnte – erhob sich, machte den außerordentlichsten Katzenpuckel und öffnete ein paar
grasgrüne Augen, aus denen Geist und Verstand in funkelndem Feuer hervorblitzten. Das
behauptete wenigstens Meister Abraham, und auch Kreisler mußte so viel einräumen, daß
der Kater etwas besonderes, ungewöhnliches im Antlitz trage, daß sein Kopf hinlänglich
dick um die Wissenschaften zu fassen sein Bart aber schon jetzt in der Jugend weiß und
lang genug sei, um dem Kater gelegentlich die Autorität eines griechischen Weltweisen zu
verschaffen” (DKV 5, 36).
210
an A-list dog party to which Ponto, ever the socialite, has brought him along,
Murr is able to recognize that the guests “flattered my vanity, [and] asked me
questions without attending to my answers, [and] praised my works without
understanding them.”54 Uncomfortable and irritated, Murr wishes himself “far
away beneath my master’s oven.”55 Whether or not he is a bad poet, Murr
nonetheless comes to realize that one consequence of his chosen vocation is
an inevitable sequestration and solitude from the social world upon which he
nonetheless must rely for patronage and for material. For Gaskill, who argues
that Murr is in fact “a genuine artist” and that his autobiography is a measured
piece of ironical fiction, “we should never lose sight of the fact that he, no less
than Kreisler, is and remains and outsider figure” (29–30). In this regard, the
mutual feelings of love and caring that Murr shares with Meister Abraham,
and in turn with Kreisler – and that Hoffmann shared with his own Murr –
become all the more important in this novel of fragmentation and dissonance.
Neither Kreisler nor Murr attains the epiphanic unity between self and world
promised to them by the Bildungsroman, but they have attained each other,
and Hoffmann is as keen to remind us as he was his friends upon the death of
his cat that such interspecies understanding is, in its own way, more impressive
than any novelized or otherwise idealized concatenation of self and society.
Hoffmann’s novel concludes on a seemingly ominous note. Murr has
unexpectedly passed away shortly after reaching adulthood, cutting his narrative
of assured and steady progress-in-life short, and Kreisler’s biography ends with
a frantic note from Abraham informing him that his secretly-beloved Julia’s
marriage to the halfwit Prince Ignatius will soon be announced, that Princess
Hedwiga is set to marry the rapist Prince Hektor, and that the diabolical
Benzon has ascended to the rank of Countess. How will Kreisler react? What
will transpire? Hoffmann does not let us know; but he has already let us
know that it need not be the gloomy destiny feared by Kreisler, nor the grand
epiphany of life’s unity and purpose that he saw illustrated in the contemporary
Bildungsroman. Hoffmann leaves Kreisler in a present pregnant with possibility,
and it is this – paired with the stylistic experimentation that, every few pages,
undercuts any resolution as the narrative changes hands – that constitutes
Hoffmann’s declaration of authorial and ontological free will on the heels of
so many works in which he had despaired of finding it.
54
“Nun erst, als Badine einige Worte mit mir gesprochen, schenkte mir dieser, jener
mit wahrhaft hündischer Bonhommie mehr Aufmerksamkeit, redete mich auch wohl an
und gedachte meiner Schriftstellerei, meiner Werke, die ihm zuweilen ordentlichen Spaß
gemacht. Das schmeichelte meiner Eitelkeit und ich gewahrte kaum, daß man mich fragte
ohne meine Antworten zu beachten, daß man mein Talent lobte, ohne es zu kennen, daß
man meine Werke pries ohne sie zu verstehen” (DKV 5, 432).
55
“Nicht lange dauerte es, so überfiel mich solch eine Unbehaglichkeit, solch ein Unmut,
daß ich mich weit fort wünschte unter den Ofen des Meisters” (DKV 5, 432–33).
211

Hoffmann's "Two Worlds" and The Problem of Life-Writing: Julian Knox, Georgia College

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Chapter Ten