English Language and Literature Studies; Vol. 12, No. 2; 2022,   Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education

Variations of a Story: A Narrative and Literary Comparison

of Johann Peter Hebel’s Unexpected Meeting and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Mines of Falun

Independent scholar, Buckden, United Kingdom

This article, through close textual analysis, compares the oral and literary dynamics of two narrative pieces: Johann Peter Hebel’s Unexpected Meeting (1811) and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Mines of Falun (1819). Against a background of their almost coterminous birth and death dates, respectively 1766-1826 and 1776-1822, and the close publication dates of these narratives, the line of argument explores the individual approaches of Hebel and Hoffmann as they flesh out the same story in completely different ways. It argues that both authors follow their own aesthetic principles, the former influenced by Enlightenment values and the latter mediating the preoccupations of German Romanticism.

Keywords: Hebel, Hoffmann, Falun, mine, calendar, oral rhetoric, Serapion, arabesque

Introduction

In 1719, the corpse of a miner buried in an explosion fifty years earlier, was recovered from the mines at Falun in Sweden, perfectly preserved in vitriolic solution. The miner was recognized by his fiancée, now an old woman, who was compensated by the Medical Authorities. In 1720 two Copenhagen newspapers reported this story, and in 1739, a Stockholm newspaper reported that the body had eventually disintegrated, necessitating reburial (Neubauer, 1980, p. 477). This local story, which fits the newspaper genres commonly known as “strange, but true” and “of human interest”, had verifiable, contemporary referents in the material world. In addition, the reports had three nuclei of great narrative interest: the unearthing of the corpse, the identification of the miner by the old woman, and closure for the miner’s corpse and his former fiancée. Even if shorn of historical immediacy, this story has a strong narrative framework which writers of fiction have developed in several ways. One of these writers, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, inserted a fictionalized version of it into the eighth lecture of his series of scientific lectures, Views from the Dark Side of Science (Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 1807/1808). Achim von Arnim embedded a balladic version in his novel, Poverty, Riches, Guilt and Atonement of Countess Dolores (Armut, Reichtum, Schuld und Buße der Gräfin Dolores, 1810). Furthermore, Johann Peter Hebel rewrote these historical events as a short story, Unexpected Meeting (Unverhofftes Wiedersehen, 1810), and E.T.A. Hoffmann rendered them as a novella entitled The Mines of Falun (Die Bergwerke zu Falun, 1819). Later iterations include Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s verse drama, The Mine at Falun (Das Bergwerk zu Falun, 1899) and his “Fairy Tale of the Veiled Woman” (Das Märchen von der verschleierten Frau, 1900) (ibid., p. 491).

D.H. Lawrence also added to these literary offspring with a twentieth-century version in his short story, The Odour of Chrysanthemums (1911), and Georg Trakl published poems based on Hoffmann’s miner, Elis Fröbom (1914). The story became well-known across Europe and has been much adapted in various genres, while always retaining its climactic parts (Note 1).

Cultural and Literary Contexts

This article compares Johann Peter Hebel and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s renderings of the Falun story in terms of oral rhetoric and literary style. Although the core events of their texts are the same, the fleshing out of these narrative nuclei is starkly different from one author to the other, both proportionally and stylistically. Their different ways of telling the story are partially governed by their perceptions of contemporary readers’ expectations, and are also influenced by the merging of oral and literary traditions. That stories are made up from a limited and fundamental series of plots is an ancient observation. So it is unremarkable that Hebel, Hoffmann and many others have used the Falun corpse plot. As Booker argues “it is virtually impossible for any storyteller ever entirely to break away from (these plots)” (Booker, 2004, p. 6) (Note 2). Hebel’s version features a miner’s outward (downward) journey and return, combined with the narrative element of his fiancée’s quest for something lost and then found. Hoffmann’s version, in comparison, features the literal and psychological journey of the miner and his failed quest, while his fiancée experiences the loss, retrieval and loss again, of a desired object. The development of action in Hebel’s story prefigures rebirth, while Hoffmann’s ends in death. The narrative in both stories entails the working out of interconnected events. Hebel’s version, however, constitutes a moral fable, whereas Hoffmann’s plotting focuses on the twists and turns of a psychological situation.

Hebel’s Profile

The biographical contexts of Hebel’s and Hoffmann’s work differ. Hebel (17601826), was born in Basel, Switzerland, to parents in the service of a local aristocratic family, the Iselin-Rhyhiners. His father travelled on campaigns as a batman to Major Johann Jakob Iselin, an army officer on the French side. His mother, though of peasant stock herself, ensured that he gained an excellent academic education as he grew up. He qualified for a theology degree in 1780, and then began his teaching career in Lörrach. In 1791, he returned to his old school, the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe, Baden, where he taught a broad curriculum, and was promoted to the position of subdeacon which involved regular preaching. By 1793, many professional people were moving further east, away from approaching French forces. As a result, he had to take on teaching botany and biology, in addition to Hebrew, Greek, Latin, geography, mathematics and nature study. He was awarded a Professorship of Theology and Hebrew in 1798, and rose eventually to become head of the Karlsruhe Gymnasium. In 1819, he was promoted to the position of Prelate of the Lutheran Churches in Baden. He did not revisit Basel and the Black Forest until 1794 and 1795. During these botanizing holidays, he saw the devastating effects of war on the population, and witnessed French forces, under the command of General Moreau, requisitioning and looting as they retreated over the Rhine. Many stories about the Napoleonic period find their way into the calendar pieces which Hebel later wrote (of which more below); they are notable for being even-handed towards the French and Germans alike.

The language Hebel experienced in his childhood was effectively diglossic; it comprised the local dialect of Alemannic for everyday communication, as well as standard German in school as both pupil and teacher. His interest in language never faltered, even to the extent that he published many poems in Alemannic. These were aimed at an educated readership who had an interest in regional dialect and customs. The poems reveal his classical and biblical erudition, but maintain a conversational tone. The most famous is “Transience” (Die Vergänglichkeit, 1803), which is in dialogue form. His short story, Unexpected Meeting, was written in standard German for a completely different audience, namely farmers, artisans and workers on the land and in service. It is part of a collection of short prose pieces, A Little Treasury of a Rhineland Household Friend (Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes, 1811), which were selected from a Lutheran calendar. This calendar, renamed The Household Friend of Rhineland, and produced by his Gymnasium, had been a loss-making almanac. The Grand Duke of Baden, Karl Friedrich, motivated to improve the educational standard of his subjects, appointed a committee in 1806 to refresh the old publication. Hebel became its editor from 1808-1811, and continued to contribute until 1819. His innovation was to add short prose pieces of great variety to the requisite date information. These pieces were not original, but covered many genres, including prose fiction, witty yarns, anecdotes, riddles, reports of recent events and famous people, practical instructions, moral fables and descriptions of animals, plants, natural science and the planets. Unexpected Meeting and many others were accompanied by woodcut illustrations, which enlivened the text and aided elementary readers. These prose pieces ranged from grotesque comedy, to explicit moralizing, to straightforward instruction on practical matters, but they were always short. The calendar became very popular and profitable. It contributed to a rise in literacy through its accessibility and invariable lightness of touch, and was often found alongside the Bible as one of the only two printed possessions in the homes of the labouring classes during this period of German history. It is, consequently, easy to underestimate the literary qualities of Unexpected Meeting. The skill which underlies the apparent simplicity of Hebel’s writing stems from his lifelong ability to communicate with all kinds of people and to wear his scholarship lightly. Goethe’s response to reading Unexpected Meeting was to be moved to tears (Goethe, Vol. 22, p. 612), and Kafka was reported to have carried the Treasury around with him in his pocket (Forster, 1975, p. 61). Unmarried and still professionally in harness as an Inspector of Schools, Hebel died of cancer at the age of sixty in 1826.

Hoffmann’s Profile

The German Late Romantic writer and composer, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (17761822) was born in Königsberg, Prussia, now the southern Russian port of Kaliningrad (Note 3). Reluctantly following the family tradition, he trained as a lawyer, but his passion was to become a professional musician. In 1800, he began practising law in Posen, Silesia (now Poland). In 1802 he married a young woman of provincial stock, Maria Thekla Michaelina Rorer (known as Mischa). The forces of history, together with Hoffmann’s own personal propensity to satirize those in authority, shaped their future. He was given a punishment transfer to the backwater town of Plock for drawing and distributing recognizable satiric cartoons of local military commanders, just at the point when he was about to be promoted. This pattern of steady progress followed by a catastrophic setback, often to the point of destitution, became the pattern of Hoffmann and his loyal wife’s domestic life. In 1806, the Prussian government was dissolved during the French occupation, and he was dismissed from his post as a consequence of refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to the French. Reduced in circumstances, he made his way to Berlin, but disappointingly found a war-damaged city. He then found theatre work in the southern city of Bamberg, where he eked out a living by conducting, composing, giving music lessons, and writing musical reviews and short fiction. His short story, Ritter Gluck, is a notable early publication in 1809. His move to Dresden in 1813 placed him in direct line of Napoleon’s retreating army. Indeed, he comments in a letter of 10th May: “I was hit on the shin by a bullet ricocheting from the wall (of the Brühl Palace) …”. By December of that year, the city was under a state of siege, but he writes “Besides composing and my other activities in music, I am also busy writing; that is, I have become somewhat of an author …” (Sahlin, 1977, pp. 188, 212). In 1814 he returned to Berlin, resuming his legal career, while continuing to compose and write. His most acclaimed musical work during this period was the opera, Undine (1816). Social contact in Berlin with key figures of the Late Romantic movement in Germany, such as Ludwig Tieck, Adelbert von Chamisso, Baron de la Motte Fouqué (author of the fairy tale Undine and its libretto writer), Philipp Veit, and publisher and friend, Julius Hitzig, strengthened his leaning towards authorship. He began socializing with a coterie of professional friends who named themselves the Seraphinen Order (later renamed the Serapion Order). Discussion about the arts amongst this group was both well informed and convivial, and the gathering provided the basis for Hoffmann’s fictional Serapion Brothers (Note 4). Remaining in Berlin up until his death in 1822, Hoffmann lived intensely, pursuing his legal career and producing his most accomplished writing alongside poor quality pieces finished in a rush when publishing deadlines were missed. Eventually, exhaustion forced him to use an amanuensis when he became bedridden. He never lost his propensity to speak directly, to ironize widely held belief systems, and to ridicule pomposity and corruption. These character traits contributed to his final professional downfall and to his painful death.

Hoffmann did not fulfil his musical ambitions, although he completed two operas and many shorter music pieces, and was acknowledged as influential by both Wagner and Tchaikovsky. However, his literary excellence, nurtured under the most extreme personal and historical pressures, far outstripped his musical career. He published two novels, extended fairy tales, short fiction, and fifty or more stories and anecdotes, written for book-fairs, periodicals and newspapers. Of his short fiction, The Sandman (1816) and The Nutcracker (1816) are probably the most famous. He was a voracious reader, pursuing an eclectic range of subjects, including natural philosophy (science), medicine, philosophy, folklore and aesthetics. His reading about contemporary scientific matters included the two major works of G.H. Schubert, Views from the Dark Side of Science and Symbolism of Dreams (Symbolik des Traumes, 1814; Sahlin, 1977, pp. 203, 229), and contemporary theories on psychiatry, facilitated through his friendship with the physician, David Koreff (Note 5). In translation, he read Shakespeare, Cervantes, Swift, Sterne and Scott, and was thoroughly familiar with his own literary heritage. Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers, August and Friedrich, Von Hardenberg (Novalis), Fouqué, Wackenroder, Kleist and Tieck (Note 6) are all referred to in his letters and diaries. He, in turn, left a legacy of influence on Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, and Angela Carter. Like thousands of others, he lived through a period of political upheaval and paradigm shift, which, in his case, shaped his ability to concentrate ferociously on the task in hand and to produce a prodigious amount of fiction. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, a reactionary German régime changed the cultural climate again. In 1818, Hoffmann was appointed as a High Court Judge on a commission set up to root out unpatriotic activities. He continued writing while fulfilling this professional work, but repeated a mistake of his youth by lampooning the Director of the Prussian Military Police in his novella, Master Flea (Meister Floh, 1822) (Note 7). In 1822 at the age of forty-six, he was suspended from practising, but while awaiting a libel case, developed spinal paralysis and died.

Hebel and Hoffmann’s Aesthetics

Neither Hebel nor Hoffmann wrote a theoretical literary manifesto of the kind that Wordsworth and Coleridge published. It is necessary, therefore, to infer their aesthetic principles from their own writing practices, their comments on the arts and literature and, with caution, from their fictional characters. Firstly, then, Hebel. His body of published work is smaller than Hoffmann’s, but nevertheless displays consistent features which he clearly valued as essential aspects of communication with the reader. Despite his undoubted erudition and encyclopaedic knowledge, all of his writing takes account of its readership. His poems in Alemannic were written in expectation of a specialized audience. Through the medium of dialogue, he keeps these poems grounded in everyday conversation, but underpins them with unobtrusive classical and biblical references. From a Christian standpoint, they are subtly didactic. His calendar pieces, though hugely varied in subject, are governed by the same principle of matching the style to its audience. They are accessible, entertaining and morally improving. Brevity is the key to encouraging readers to engage with the text and, as with his poems, dialogue plays a prominent part. The skill with which Hebel harnesses his vast erudition in order to write such apparently simple pieces is immense. His guiding principle was: “How is writing anything more than speaking?” (Was ist schreiben denn mehr als reden? Zentner, 1957, letter 19). Closer analysis shows that he understood the grammar of spoken language as thoroughly as he understood the grammar of written language, and he developed a written language which imitates the rhythms and syntax of oral communication. He was not interested in originality, but rather in reusing given materials in such a way as to create the illusion that the narrator was a personal friend of the reader. From this it may be deduced that Hebel worked by the principle that all varieties of discourse, whether literary or not, should be delivered with an appropriate register, tone and vocabulary to resonate with the genre and the reading context. Analysis of Unexpected Meeting will explore these implicit principles. Spoken language tends towards a looseness of form and associative development, particularly in the case of spontaneous dialogue. It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that the tightly compressed narrative structure of this tale creates the illusion of a speaking voice. Its division into three almost equal sections and its repeated references to time and history are suggestive of orderliness, and imply an Enlightenment confidence that the experiential world can be authentically represented in literature through “mimetic imitation” (Behler, 2005, p. 301).

Secondly, then, Hoffmann. An early clue to the aesthetic values he held occurs in the Preface to his first collected works, Fantasy Pieces in the Style of Callot (Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, 1814). Here he excitedly praises Jacques Callot’s etchings for their transformation of what is commonplace into “fantastic apparitions” that “reveal to the deep-thinking observer all the hidden meanings that lie below the cloak of absurdity”. He praises Callot’s magical blending of everyday life and “exuberant fantasy” and commends writers and poets to follow suit by combining their “inner romantic spirit realm” (innern romantischen Geisterreiche) with the figures and forms of everyday life (Hoffmann, 1993, Vol. 2/1, pp. 1718). In his later collection, The Serapion Brothers (Die Serapionsbrüder, 18191821), Hoffmann uses a frame device in which the Brothers take it in turns to tell a story, and then discuss it afterwards. These dialogues yield many observations on what constitutes a successful tale. Their Serapiontic principles, and hence Hoffmann’s, can be deduced from these discussions, although quoting any single brother takes no account of their disagreements. Tieck used the device of a frame discussion for his collection of fairy tales, Phantasus (1812), which probably influenced Hoffmann, but the fictional Brothers, as noted above, were also based on Hoffmann’s friends who were interested in the arts and met regularly to socialize and debate. Serapionism is complex, but its basic literary principle develops and correlates with the seminal ideas in Hoffmann’s praise of Callot’s etchings. Hoffmann’s aesthetics are underpinned by the duality of, and dialectic between, the inner psychological and spiritual world (Geist), together with the outer material world (Natur), which Brown describes as “awareness of the two-sidedness of life” (Brown, 2006, p. 51). The fictional Brother Lothar synthesizes much of their Serapiontic discussion by arguing that the successful artist responds through his (sic) senses to external forms, colours, light and shade in the external world; his imagination is inspired (entzündet) to transform them; and then he completes the creative process by externalising them in an artistic form for readers, listeners or viewers to experience. This transformation should add something transcendent, double-edged or extraordinary to the ordinary (Hoffmann, Vol. 4. 2001, p. 69). It is also Lothar who suggests that the brothers take St. Serapion as their patron saint and follow Serapion’s excellent example as a storyteller (ibid.). Through the second point which his fictional character, Lothar, makes, Hoffmann is almost certainly ironizing the artist who cannot handle the tedium of the real world. St. Serapion is not just a long dead saint. He is also a man of their acquaintance who believes himself to be St. Serapion, a certain Graf P, an aristocratic landowner who lives as a hermit convinced he is this Christian martyr. In short, Graf P’s solipsism within the life of the spirit at the expense of a life of materiality has rendered him mad.

Hoffmann’s tales frequently show that characters who surrender themselves entirely to their inner lives, such as Elis Fröbom in The Mines of Falun; Nathanael in The Sandman; and the eponymous protagonist of Rat Krespel (1819), are self-destructive, while artists, such as Anselmus in The Golden Pot (1814), and Johannes Kreisler in Kreisleriana (18141815) and the novel, Tomcat Murr (18201822) balance precariously in order to maintain an equilibrium of Geist and Natur. As Tatar observes, “Hoffmann’s characters who are blessed with a poetic spirit are beset by … ‘chronic dualism’”, ill-equipped for everyday life but unable to transcend it (Tatar, 1975, p. 381).

These character studies, rather than production of critical theory, indirectly suggest that those possessed of a vivid imagination, which perceives everyday life to be flat and tedious, should cultivate self-irony, keeping one foot on the ground while attempting to reach creative heights (Note 8). Hoffmann’s fiction is preoccupied with artist figures who experience the material world through extremes of emotion, and variously succeed, or not, in transforming these emotional experiences into music, art or literature. Elis Fröbom, in Mines, is fascinated to the point of being obsessed by his vision of the precious stones and ore deep in the earth. His individual response to these elements of the natural world is one of tormented ecstasy, thus placing Hoffmann’s tale squarely within the literary period of Romanticism. Elis’s instability of mind and eventual loss of self-control echo broader aesthetic preoccupations in German Romantic literature, expressed, for example, in the angst-ridden protagonists of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des Jungen Werther, 1774) and Faust, Part One (1808).

Although Hebel and Hoffmann respectively transform the same source material from Schubert and others in Unexpected Meeting and The Mines of Falun, their ensuing stories are very different. Hebel’s adaptation is primarily driven by a desire to teach a Christian message, whereas Hoffmann’s focuses on the psychological duality of the protagonist and his inner struggle to find meaning in his present life. These preliminary observations suggest that the former author’s work draws on the period of the Enlightenment, while the latter’s, with its ironic overtones, manifests strong aspects of late German Romanticism. A more nuanced analysis follows.

Hebel’s Imitation of Oral Story-Telling

Hebel’s readers received The Household Friend of Rheinland in typographical form, but while reading it to themselves or aloud to others, its prose pieces created, and still create, a sense of oral delivery. He clearly understood the differences between written and oral grammar, and produced text which seems entirely natural to speech. In many calendar editions, the narrator, the persona of the household friend, explicitly addresses the reader, but in Unexpected Meeting, this narratorial presence is suggested in colloquial phrases, such as “a good fifty years or so ago” (Hebel, 2008, p. 234). It is also indicated by changes of verb tense. For example, in the exposition and conclusion, his narration is mostly in the past active tense, as is commonplace for a story-teller. However, the middle section, which contextualizes the story within fifty years of historical events, shifts in tone to a frequent use of the past passive tense. For example, Lisbon “was destroyed” (wurde zerstört), the Jesuits “were dissolved” (wurde aufgehoben), Poland “was partitioned” (wurde geteilt), and Struensee “was executed” (wurde hingerichtet), and so on (ibid., p. 235). The change from an active to a passive voice signals that the narrator changes his position from within the tale to a general overview, and hence changes his position in relation to the reader from storyteller to commentator or teacher. Hopwood also draws attention to Hebel’s recurring use of “but” and phrases containing “but”, which, in the sense of “however”, has the effect of explaining and refining, as well as narrating. By expanding the narration to give an alternative perspective, the narrator makes his presence felt (Hopwood, 1994, p. 129). Although Unexpected Meeting presents itself to the reader or listener in print, it subtly suggests that the narrator is both intra- and extra-textual, one of Hebel’s accomplished illusions.

Ong argues convincingly that oral discourse relies on “heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns”, which make memorable whatever is expressed in verbal interchanges, or speeches given to an audience. Speech that communicates successfully with the listener, whether in a conversation or a lecture, contains some redundancy and verbal repetition to allow the listener time to memorize what is said. This is necessary because the interlocutor or listener cannot “backloop” to check what was said earlier, as a reader can with a written/printed text (Ong, 1991, pp. 34, 39). Consequently, writers wishing to imitate an oral style need to reproduce oral features on the printed page. In Unexpected Meeting, Hebel repeatedly uses the conjunction “and”, a natural feature of conversational register, which is “additive rather than subordinative” (ibid., 37). The repetition of this co-ordinating conjunction immediately draws attention to itself in the opening lines:

In Falun in Sweden a good fifty years ago and more, a young miner kissed his young, pretty bride and said to her: “On St. Lucia’s Day our love will be blessed by the priest’s hand. Then we are man and wife, and will build our own little nest.” “And peace and love shall live in it,” said his beautiful bride with a sweet smile, “then you will be my one and all, and without you, I would rather be in the grave than in any other place.” (Note 9)

The syntax of the first sentence begins the story rhythmically, especially in standard German, which places the finite verb in a sentence second, even when the subject does not precede it. “(K)issed” and “said” are co-ordinated by the “and”, so that this grammatical pairing makes kissing and speaking of equal importance. This contrasts with their unexpected meeting fifty years later, when the miner’s corpse can neither open his mouth and eyes, nor smile. The pattern of speech in the dialogue which follows between the miner and his fiancée is additive, and contains formulaic pairings in “man and wife”, “peace and love” and “one and all.” These are rhythmic and easy to remember. Ong comments that aggregative, formulaic pairings are common to speech (ibid., p. 38). The recurring epithetical phrases, such as “young miner”, “pretty bride” and “beautiful bride,” also illustrate this. They function like the language of conversation which does not generally aspire to literary originality. The narrator even repeats the formula of wedding banns: “If anyone knows just cause or impediment why …”, which was familiar then and remains so (Hebel, 1994, p. 235). The middle section of Unexpected Meeting, containing the narrator’s peroration on the historical context of the miner’s death, uses seventeen “and’s”, in only approximately fifteen lines. The rhythm is evident, but the syntax also has semantic significance; the grammatical co-ordination of all the main (independent) clauses implies that the miller who grinds and the blacksmith who hammers and the miner who digs, are of equal importance to Napoleon who conquered Prussia and the English who bombarded Kopenhagen (ibid., p. 235). As Ong argues, a written piece attempting to create the illusion of oral communication is likely to make “more or less close reference to the human life-world, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate and familiar interaction of human beings” (Ong, 1991, p. 42). As shown below, this is in strong contrast to Hoffmann’s writing practice.

The conclusion of Unexpected Meeting, which narrates the recognition scene and the reburial of the miner, contains syntactical co-ordination and dialogue, but also features a greater number of subordinate (dependent) clauses. Jancke, who praises Hebel as both a writer and an oral storyteller, points out that temporal subordinate clauses, both preceding and following main clauses, frequently increase the pace of events, economically reinforcing the urgency of what happens and what happens next (Jancke, 1954, p. 240). For example, “when” and “until” are the subordinating conjunctions in the sentence: “…when (the miners) brought him to the surface …no one claimed to know the sleeping youth or to remember his misadventure, until the woman came who had once been promised to the miner ….” (Note 10). Temporal conjunctions, phrases and adverbs, such as: “twice”, “once”, “never”, “in the meantime”, “finally”, and so on, recur throughout. On the other hand, progress forward in the time span of the story is also halted by phrasal repetition, such as “in the churchyard”, which recurs three times in three consecutive sentences (Hebel, 1994, p. 236). This repetition produces a pattern of halt and release, and so imitates the intonation of speech. In a more literary piece, two of these identical phrases would be edited out, but here the written word imitates the function of redundancy, which gives the listener a protracted period in which to internalize the description of an important event. The rhetorical device of a set of three, much loved by orators, when the subject noun or pronoun is followed by three finite verbs, also adds to the illusion of oral discourse. For example, the bride-to-be sewed a black neckerchief with a red border for their wedding day, “but when he never came back, she put it away, and wept for him, and never forgot him” (Note 11).^”

Most of the vocabulary in Unexpected Meeting, and in Hebel’s calendar pieces in general, is referential, signifying things, characters, or concepts that have a particular immediacy. However, he also uses simple vocabulary which has more depth of meaning than first appears. The bride-to-be in the opening dialogue with her fiancé, for instance, expresses her love for him simply by saying: “without you I would rather be in the grave” (ibid., p. 234). Similarly, on the day of his death, he taps on her window to wish her good morning, dressed in his black miner’s clothing, while the narrator, in an aside using present tense, ominously comments “a miner is always dressed for his own funeral” (ibid., p. 235; Hopwood, 1994, p. 129). After her fiancé’s disappearance in the mine, the bride-to-be puts aside the black silk neckerchief. These three indicators, though entirely grounded in everyday circumstances, ironically prefigure the funeral in the conclusion where the miner’s betrothed, now an old woman, wears her Sunday best clothes and puts the neckerchief on his corpse, as if his grave were a “cold wedding bed” (ibid.). The neckerchief understatedly signifies both an object and a symbol of love and loyalty. Such details are Hebel’s own invention, and therefore imply his favoured aesthetic technique of subtle enrichment when transferring the reportage of an historical event into a story for a calendar.

Forster, in commenting on Hebel’s earlier collection of poems, which were written in his local Swiss-German dialect of Alemannic, argues that Hebel “steer(s) clear of literary or philosophical or scientific jargon, use(s) imagery …derived from a familiar sphere, preferably a concrete one, and state(s) things in common human terms”, thus fusing together the influence of his peasant background, “the normal range of culture of his time”, and a classical education (Forster, 1975, p. 62). This analysis applies equally well to his calendar pieces, although his detailed knowledge of the Bible as a means of reinforcing Christian morality takes precedence over classical references. Unexpected Meeting, although its literary devices are unobtrusive, is more literary than most of his calendar pieces. Wittmann, for example, examines at length the many symbols therein, such as the neckerchief; the corpse as a “symbol of faithfulness” (Symbol der Treue); and the cycle of night and day, indicated by the equinoctial feast of St Lucia, when the wedding was planned, and the solstitial feast of St John, when the corpse was found. Wittmann concludes that Unexpected Meeting belongs to the genre of parable (Wittmann, 1969, pp. 1016). This is a justified detailed analysis, since the unearthing of the corpse in pristine condition could also symbolize Christian resurrection, which is consonant with the old woman’s certainty that she will meet her betrothed in heaven.

Even when Hebel uses figurative language, it is presented within “the normal range of culture of his time”, as Forster observes (above). Unexpected Meeting certainly draws on proverbs, biblical motifs, folk and fairy stories and folksong. For instance, after the reading of the wedding banns, Hebel’s narrator personifies death: “Then Death announced itself” (Hebel, 1994, p. 235). Immediately afterwards, the miner taps on his fiancée’s window to wish her good morning, unaware that he would die that day. The personification does not foreground itself as literary, but rather functions like the clichéd metaphors of everyday conversation. The image of Death unexpectedly announcing itself was familiar to contemporary readers. It was, and still is, present in the frieze of The Dance of Death in Basel, which Hebel refers to in his poem Transience (Note 12). Furthermore, the imminence of Death is part of bible teaching and also situates itself in such German proverbs as: “Remember you must die”; “Nobody is tired enough for the sleep of death”; and “You are really dead, when no one thinks about you anymore” (Note 13). Unexpected Meeting may also be read as an ironic inversion of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, familiar fairy tales, told and written in Europe for centuries. In Hebel’s version, the passionate embrace of the bride-to-be does not revive the “sleeping” bridegroom, but rather, she buries him and prepares to meet him in the grave and the afterlife. German folksongs also frequently encompass the idea of dead bodies which do not stay dead, but disturb the living. The ancient folk ballad, There Were Two Royal Children, exemplifies these motifs perfectly. A surviving royal child embraces the drowned corpse of her dead brother, just as the old woman embraces her dead fiancé. The sister princess kisses the silent lips of the prince, just as the old woman contemplates the closed mouth (and eyes) of her unresponsive miner who will never move his mouth to smile again (Hebel, 1994, p. 236). The princess then drowns herself, so the two royal children “lie together, both of them dead” (Note 14). Hebel reworks this balladic theme of separation and reunion in death by imbuing it with a Christian moral.

As Jancke claims, Hebel writes “without verbosity” (ohne Umschweife) and “seemingly without artifice” (scheinbar kunstlos) (Jancke, 1954, p. 240). The artifice of his work certainly echoes the surrounding traditions of oral culture. It seems impossible that Hebel, as scholar, teacher and Lutheran preacher, was not aware of this. This makes his modest comment, “How is writing anything more than speaking?”, fall short as an aesthetic observation about his own writing, which excels at expressing both the particular and the universal, but can only ever imitate speech.

Hoffmann’s Literary Style

Hoffmann’s transformation of the story of the Falun corpse fulfils his Serapiontic principles in every respect. The protagonist of The Mines of Falun, the miner Elis Fröbom, is presented as a tortured Romantic soul, “split in two” (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 91). He oscillates between a life of wild imagination and a life in the material world and, lacking an ironic view of himself from the outset, he is destined to lose his equilibrium. While struggling to live in both worlds, he imagines non-existent veins of precious ore in the depths of the mine, and his fiancée, Ulla Dahlsjö, notices that, when rapturously describing them, “he entangled himself in such oddly incomprehensible expressions” (ibid.). His madness resembles St Serapion’s, but his psychological state is more negative because he fails to create anything of artistic worth from his visionary experiences. In contrast to Elis, the narrator, Serapion Brother Theodor (surrogate for Hoffmann whose second name is Theodor), tells the story of The Mines of Falun. Hoffmann, through Brother Theodor, paces the development of Elis’s oncoming madness by recounting his physical journey from the Baltic port of Göthaborg to Falun, and then his descent into the mine, yet his main emphasis is on Elis’s mercurial state of mind. Unlike G.H. Schubert’s version, Hoffmann makes an artistic choice to hugely expand the psychological presentation of Elis as a man of dreams and visions. The nuclei of events which bring about the tragic ending of all versions of the Falun story, namely the fifty-year gap, the retrieval of the corpse and the temporary reunion of bride and groom, are reduced to take up the last few pages of his novella. Literary, rather than narrative, devices are in the foreground, including Germanic legends, references to mining in German literature and folklore, and a network of repeated similes, metaphors and symbols. The effect is to bring literary depth and transformation to an already well-known story. The actual historical event of the retrieval of a preserved corpse at Falun has its own uncanny resonance, but Hoffmann enhances this, bringing to it “fantastic apparitions” that “reveal to the deep-thinking viewer all the hidden meanings that lie below the cloak of absurdity” (Hoffmann, Vol. 2/1, 1993, pp. 1718). The metaphoric foreground of The Mines of Falun illustrates his advice to writers and poets to combine their “inner romantic spirit realm” with the figures and forms of everyday life (ibid.). The novella belongs squarely to the late German Romantic period. As Neubauer judiciously argues, the Romantic image of descent into mines and caves “may symbolize a quest for a true self, but also a regression into lifeless, inorganic form”, with The Mines of Falun incorporating both meanings, and “thriv(ing) on the ironic play between them” (Neubauer, 1980, p. 476).

Germanic folklore and literary fairy tales feature many fantastic beings, including dwarves, giants and shapeshifters associated with mountains, caves and mines. Johann Karl Musäus’s Rübezahl (1782), the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White (18121815), Ludwig Tieck’s The Runenberg (1804), and, later, Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold (1869) exemplify this claim. Tieck’s fairy tale, which was well known to Hoffmann, is especially relevant to The Mines of Falun because the protagonist, Christian, is faced with the same dilemma as Elis, of either living in the material or the imaginary world. Failing to suppress the poetic side of his nature, Christian is tempted back to the mountains and its mineshafts by a shapeshifter in the form of an old woman. She gives him a tablet of jewels, thus reawakening his desire to search for precious stones. Later, when he meets his estranged wife again, he shows her his pack of gravel and pebbles which he believes need only to be ground down to reveal the gemstones within. Zipes reads The Runenberg as an allegory of the incompatibility of the domestic and artistic ways of life, neither of which brings self-fulfilment (Zipes, 2002, pp. 8990). As in Tieck’s radical fairy tale, the dark forces in Hoffmann’s tale symbolize a Romantic dualism in Elis, who escapes neither the suffocation of domesticity nor the demons of his imagination.

A contemporary novel also made its mark on Hoffmann’s Mines. In many respects, Elis Fröbom’s fictional life echoes the life of a miner in Novalis’s novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). The protagonist, Heinrich, meets many people who inspire his vocation as a poet, one of whom is an old miner who takes Heinrich underground and tells his life story. Novalis and Hoffmann’s miners have much in common. Both make a long journey to the location of a mine, and both become betrothed to the mine-owner’s daughter. Both are obsessed with the beauty of the world underground, Novalis’s miner regarding it as a “garden of magic” where precious metals hang like “sparkling ruby-red transparent fruits” (Novalis, 1964, p. 88), and Elis seeking “the almandine that sparkles cherry-red” (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 93). Novalis’s miner has a fulfilling, if sad, family life, and reaches a content old age in contrast to Elis’s premature death. They are dissimilar in that Elis has a creative but morbid imagination, while the miner is a ballad singer and a musician capable of transforming the joy of his profession into folk song. Neubauer also points out that Elis is an ironic version of the poet, Heinrich, who, unlike Elis, “re-emerges (from the mine) with heightened consciousness of time and history” (Neubauer, 1980, p. 488). Although Hoffmann reworks The Mines of Falun in his own individual style, the influence of Novalis’s Early Romantic novel is clear to see.

The Mines of Falun also draws on Swedish and German folk tale in its presentation of the power of dark forces that mislead or destroy human beings. When Elis fails to take part in the drinking fest of his fellow sailors once their merchant ship returns safely to port, they warn him that if he does not join in, he will fall prey to the sea devil and all his troll companions (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 49). This is an early indication of the tragic path he is to take. Likewise, the German myth of Faust and the consequences of a pact with the devil, shape Hoffmann’s tale. As an addition to the basic nuclei of the Falun corpse plot, Hoffmann includes the Mephistophelian figure of Torbern. Torbern, a miner who himself died in a catastrophic cave-in, tempts Elis away from life at sea to a life underground by describing the fossils, pyrosmalite, almandine and rock crystal, which sparkle below as if in “an enchanted garden” (ibid., p. 59). Whenever Elis’s resolve to become a miner wavers, Torbern reappears and warns him that he must dedicate himself entirely to his new vocation or he will die. Torbern is well known to the miners as a ghost who haunts the Falun mine and its vicinity, persuading men to become miners whenever the workforce needs reinforcing, and leading the way to new seams of precious ore. Torbern’s spectral longevity allows him to visit Ulla for fifty years, assuring her that she will see Elis, her bridegroom, once more before she dies (ibid., p. 97). The Faustian element in The Mines of Falun is thoroughly Serapiontic in its fusion of the fantastic and the everyday.

The fantastic elements in The Mines of Falun are demonstrably shaped by the literary and cultural context in which it was written. This precludes an interpretation of the narrative as emanating entirely from Elis’s fevered imagination. Indeed, Torbern, like Tieck’s shape-shifter, is real within the parameters of the story, and known to other characters besides Elis. Despite Hoffmann’s research into Swedish travelogues in order to anchor his tale in time and place (Note 15), The Mines of Falun is not generically realist. Arens and Straubhaar’s arguments that, firstly, Elis is a symbol of “Sweden’s capitalist landscape at the end of its cycle … a beautiful corpse ready to disintegrate at the first touch or light of day” (Arens, 2014, p. 337) and secondly, that Elis is “a victim of false promises made by Ulla’s father, (the mine owner), and of an obsessive devotion to a profession that could no longer pay off” (ibid., p. 336), are suspect. Their interpretation focuses on particularization of industrial decline and ignores the oscillating relationship of fantasy and materiality, or Geist and Natur, which characterizes Hoffmann’s novella. Another weakness of Arens and Straubhaar’s argument is that they do not account for the mine owner, Dahlsjö, rescuing Elis from one of his dangerous descents alone into the mine. Arens and Straubhaar’s claim that Hoffmann “adopt(s) the almanac form” in writing The Mines of Falun is particularly unfounded, given its highly literary hinterland and execution in comparison with Hebel’s almanac style (ibid. p. 344). The Serapion Brothers, as a whole, is highly literary. A sounder interpretation, then, of Hoffmann’s novella is that fantastic elements erupt into its recognizably concrete fictional world. Thus, the narrative is more than a narrow political fable, and clearly exemplifies the aesthetics of Serapiontism.

The Mines of Falun is suffused with literary patterns. Repetitions of Elis’s life story are often simple narrative indicators, which are insufficiently developed to be regarded as subplots, but, nevertheless, create a layered recessive texture. For example, the prostitute to whom Elis gives a silk shawl, plans to abandon her trade in search of something better, which is a suitable precursor to Elis’s vocational change of direction (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 51). The helmsman of Elis’s former ship, who dreams of sea monsters, rightly interprets them as a premonition of his own death—another prefiguration of Elis’s death (ibid., p. 67). Torbern’s centuries’ old spectral existence after dying in the mine is an ironic variation of the unearthing of Elis’s preserved body which disintegrates into dust. Ulla’s yearly visits to the Falun mine, in the belief she will see Elis again, is a quest lasting half a century, which matches, and outstrips, Elis’s quest which is also in search of desired equilibrium. These narrative fragments which loop round the main trajectory of Elis’s life can be seen as arabesque devices much favoured by Romantic artists and advocated by the contemporary critic and novelist, Friedrich Schlegel. He aptly describes them as “artistically ordered entanglement” (Künstlich geordnete Verwirrung) (Note 16).

Arabesques also proliferate in the repeated metaphors and symbols of The Mines of Falun, in a process that Friedrich Schlegel calls Verknüpfung, or weaving and entwining together (Note 17). The plotting of Hoffmann’s novella is enmeshed with layers of figurative language throughout, an immensely different writing practice from Hebel’s in Unexpected Meeting. For instance, Torbern’s description of the mine is replicated in Elis’s dream, and, in turn, Elis’s dream prefigures his future dilemma, namely whether to settle for domestic happiness with Ulla or seek fantastical riches below ground. In the dream, what Elis first takes to be sea, sky and a ship, metamorphoses into an underground vault where, “like curling waves there arose from the ground marvellous flowers and plants of shining metal; their blossoms and leaves wound like vines out of the very depths, intertwining attractively.” Matter here is unstable. Even Torbern grows like a “giant made of red-hot cast metal” and then shrinks in size (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 61). He leads Elis to the roots of these metallic, sparkling flowers, which are maidens embracing each other with “roots, flowers and plants …sprouting upward from their hearts” (ibid.). This grotesque image is followed and surpassed by the illuminated revelation of a regal woman, the Queen of the Underworld. Full of rapture, desire and terror, Elis then sees, in a cleft above him, the hand of a pretty young woman, reaching down and calling his name. The rivalry between the Queen and Ulla is thus foreshadowed. When he first meets Ulla face to face, significantly she takes him by the hand and invites him into the Dahlsjö household. She is to him “like a gleaming angel” and he immediately identifies her with the young woman who extended her hand to him in his dream (ibid., pp. 77, 71). During Elis’s first descent alone into the mine, when Ulla’s father rescued him, he felt “as if an ice-cold hand were suddenly seizing him inwardly and a dark voice were saying ‘Is having won Ulla the greatest achievement? You poor fool! Haven’t you beheld the countenance of the queen?’” (ibid., p. 89). The polarization between the treasures from above ground and below ground is reinforced by these repeated images of hands. As the critic, Hamilton, points out, Elis’s fatal insistence on descending alone into the mine on his wedding day, in search of a “cherry-red sparkling almandine”, is symbolic of his desire to reconcile the two sides of his nature (ibid., p. 93). His absurd conviction is that this gemstone is essential to his marriage because it “represents an ideal combination of love and knowledge” (Hamilton, 2014, p. 197), thus reconciling his love of Ulla with his desire to understand dark mysteries. In the event, he is mistaken.

Furthermore, an arabesque pattern of images comprising monstrous or unearthly creatures mirrors Elis’s divided state of mind and his consequent actions. For instance, the helmsman’s dream, which portends death, features the bottom of a drained sea where black, blue and red stones seem to Elis “like repellent monsters extending their ugly polyp-like arms in his direction.” He immediately relates these dream images to soot-covered miners coming off shift who “resemble ugly evil creatures (and) crawled out of the earth” (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 67). When Torbern first describes the wonders of the mine, Elis is repulsed by the idea of descending into such hellish depths “to burrow and burrow like a mole”, and regards the miners as “black earthworms” (ibid., pp. 57, 69). These images are precursory to his first descent alone into the mine after a setback in his relationship with Ulla. He feels beckoned by “a numberless troop of hideous monsters … stretching out their gigantic talons at poor mankind”, and re-experiences all the elements of his visionary dream (ibid., p. 85). In a second iteration of this dream, he perceives the underground as a metallic Eden; is embraced by the Queen; and vows to Torbern to “burrow and bore and work and never again behold the light of day” (ibid.). By his second lone descent, he has irretrievably tipped into insanity, a destiny augured from the beginning of Hoffmann’s uncanny novella. This echoes the madness of St. Serapion who chooses an illusory identity unrelated to the material world around him. Hoffmann offers no explicit interpretation of Elis’s individual quest, but rather creates a web of literary images displaying the transformations wrought by dark forces and the emotional maelstrom that Elis endures.

Thus, Hoffmann allows the arabesque structure, and the reader’s ability to connect sets of repetitions, to do the proleptic and analogical work of reading for character and plot. Rotermund’s critical observations on the poetic arabesques of Hoffmann’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (18191821), which apply equally well to The Mines of Falun, cogently conclude that “the Hoffmannesque variant of the Romantic arabesque style forces the reader himself both to destroy the ‘arbitrariness’ of Tomcat Murr and to piece together its latent coherence” (Note 18). The dynamic process of reading Hoffmann’s Mines is likewise a search for meaning in its enveloping arabesques. Their effect is to offer a surrounding medium of suggestive metaphoric patterns. These indicate several interpretations, but predominantly that Hoffmann’s novella concerns dichotomous artistic inspiration, which may produce great art, but may also induce insanity, an interpretation encapsulated in the sentence: “(Elis) felt split in two” (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 91). However, if the latter sentence were to stand unembellished, or “un-arabesqued”, in a Hebel-like fashion, then the novella would lack the literary richness of Hoffmann’s style, and readers would be denied an active engagement in understanding the whole.

Conclusions

Hoffmann brought his quirky sense of the ridiculous and the grotesque to whatever textual material he reworked. Consequently, as a Late Romantic, the hallmark of his prose fiction tends to ironize artistic self-importance or solipsism. The dark comic edge of his writing was perhaps reinforced by a life in which his very survival was often in doubt. Although Hebel’s Unexpected Meeting is more dramatic than comic, many of his other calendar pieces are similar to Hoffmann’s work by making use of comic or extreme situations (Note 19). Respectively, whether from an eschatological or existential perspective, Hebel’s Unexpected Meeting and Hoffman’s The Mines of Falun have in common a keen eye for the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour.

Hebel and Hoffmann’s stories both display a structure of repeated patterns, orally rhythmic in the first, and verbally and visually metaphoric in the second. They also demonstrate that their authors fulfil their own aesthetic principles. These authors were voracious readers, skilled at retelling stories and anecdotes from their great reservoirs of knowledge, although Hebel’s erudition is less overt than Hoffmann’s. Both were shaped by the cultural and historical period in which they lived and the audiences for whom they wrote. Hebel was an innovator in the use of sensational popular print media, which could reach out and educate a semi-literate labouring class. Hoffmann’s readers included writers who like himself engaged with German Romantic philosophy—indeed, Friedrich Schlegel is generally held to have been the first to use the term “Romantic” to describe the contemporary cultural and artistic debates and the works that stemmed from them (Note 20). In contrast with Hebel, Hoffmann’s literary influence is long-lived and well documented, whereas even Hebel’s literary work, represented by his poetry rather than his calendars, remains largely forgotten.

These broad brush strokes of similarity end here. Close analysis of Unexpected Meeting defines it as a compressed short story, whereas The Mines of Falun is a novella, the former being a Christian parable and the latter a fantastical work exploring the anxieties of a Romantic fictional character. Hebel pares down the nuclei of Unexpected Meeting, barely sustaining it as a story, rather than an anecdote. As Brook argues, a series of three is “perhaps the minimum repetition to suggest series and process” (Brook, 1984, p. 9). To summarize its four narrative nuclei: the betrothed couple express their love for each other and their plans to marry soon; the miner knocks on his fiancée’s window on the day of his death; fifty years later the bride-to-be, now an old woman, is reunited with his preserved body; she holds a dignified funeral to re-bury him, expressing her expectation to join him when she dies. Hebel suggests their characters through dialogue, but does not internalize them, his focus instead being on historical time and eternity. The middle section of Unexpected Meeting is his own invention, and is therefore significant. As described above, it lists the passage of events over the foregoing fifty years, implying Hebel’s interest in the continuity of time in comparison to short human lives. The story’s Christian certainty that another life follows the present one, just as half a century in the middle section passes rapidly within eons of time, is economically and simply expressed by the old woman. The effect of this received wisdom would probably have been poignant and consolatory to a contemporary, conservative reader or listener. The contrasting emphasis on universal truth in Hebel’s version and on individual angst in Hoffmann’s, implies a contrast between Christian belief, and contemporary philosophical doubts, the first being influenced by an Enlightenment tendency to find moral certainties, and the second being shaped by Late Romantic scepticism.

Unlike Hebel, Hoffmann expands the story of the miner in huge proportion to the retrieval of his body, thus shifting his emphasis to the individuality of his central protagonist. Hoffmann brings fantastical elements to the known historical facts of the Falun corpse story, and makes a significant change to the ending. Here the old woman dies while embracing the corpse, “which they mistakenly thought was petrified, (but) was beginning to crumble into dust” (Hoffmann, 2003, p. 97). The effect is to render his adaptation more uncanny, more Gothic and more intense than Hebel’s version, or indeed than the innately dramatic historical source. The miner’s dust and his fiancée’s body are then buried at the church where they had planned to marry. The triumph of death, and the “marriage” of the remains of the bride and groom in The Mines of Falun is macabre, and Hoffmann’s blending of familiar realist details with fantasy, according to his Serapiontic principles, leaves the reader unsettled. The novella is open to several interpretations: as a psychological allegory concerning Elis’s schizophrenia; as a fairy tale about the invasion of dark forces into nature; or as an uncanny fluctuation between the two. As Neubauer argues, and according to Serapiontism, the novella does not ask for a “willing suspension of disbelief”, but rather “suspend(s) (the reader) between belief and disbelief” (Neubauer, 1980, p. 484).

Through differences of tone, oral and literary rhetoric, structure, genre and aesthetic practices, Unexpected Meeting and The Mines of Falun prove the common critical observation that there are many ways to tell the same story.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Marion Treby for her support, which has borne fruit, and her specialist knowledge of folk song, which has given me considerable insight into its influence on literature. Lastly, I have used several standard English translations of Hoffmann’s fiction.

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Notes

Note 1. Friedrich Rückert used the story of the retrieved corpse at Falun for his lyric “Die goldene Hochzeit” (1820) and Richard Wagner wrote a libretto based on this story (Hamilton, 2014, p. 191).

Note 2. In The Seven Basic Plots (2004), Booker lists these as: Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches; The Quest; Voyage and Return; Comedy; Tragedy; Rebirth.

Note 3. Hoffmann changed his third forename, Wilhelm, to Amadeus in homage to Mozart. Note 4. See Brown, 2006, pp. 120121.

Note 5. See Tatar, 1975, pp. 366367.

Note 6. Hoffmann was personally acquainted with Tieck, and described Tieck’s collection of fairy tales, Phantasus (1812), as “magnificent” (Sahlin, 1977, p. 300).

Note 7. See Scullion & Treby, 2013, p. 142. Note 8. See Scullion, 2009, pp. 1518.

Note 9. German original: “In Falun in Schweden küßte vor guten fünfzig Jahren und mehr ein junger Bergmann seine junge hübsche Braut und sagte zu ihr: “Auf Sankt Luciä wird unsere Liebe von des Priesters Hand gesegnet. Dann sind wir Mann und Weib, und bauern uns ein eigenes Nestlein.” “Und Friede und Liebe soll darin wohnen,” sagte die schöne Braut mit holdem Lächeln, “denn du bist mein Einziges und Alles, und ohne dich möchte ich lieber im Grab sein, als an einem andern Ort.” (Hebel, 2008, pp. 234235).

Note 10. German original: “Als man ihn aber zu Tag ausgefördert hatte, … kein Mensch wollte den schlafenden Jüngling kennen oder etwas von seinem Unglück wissen, bis die ehemalige Verlobte des Bergmanns kam, …” (Hebel, 2008, p. 236).

Note 11. German original: “…, sondern als er nimmer kam, legte sie es weg und weinte um ihn und vergaß ihn nie.” (Hebel, 1994, p. 236).

Note 12. See Forster, 1959, p. 280.

Note 13. German Originals: Bedenke, dass du sterben mußt; Zum Todesschlaf ist keiner müde; Der Mensch ist erst wirklich tot, wenn niemand mehr an ihn denkt.

Note 14. The ballad, Es Waren Zwei Königskinder, widely known in Germany, was published in Achim von Arnim’s fairy tale collection, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806, 1808). Verse thirteen describes the princess taking her dead brother in her arms and kissing his mouth. The last verse describes them lying together in death. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=6699

Note 15. Hoffmann researched recent travelogues: Reise durch Skandinavien in den Jahren 1806-1807 by geologist, Johann Friedrich Hausmann, and Reise durch Schweden im Jahr 1804, in order to widen his knowledge of Swedish geography, history and culture (Hamilton, 2014, p. 194).

Note 16. Such arabesque convolutions include embedding, digressions, inner contradictions, and echoing reiterations. Embedding one text inside another is the governing principle of all Hoffmann’s Serapiontic tales, which are told by the Brothers and inserted into their joint discussions of the merits of each tale. See Schlegel, 1967; Atheneum Fragment, 311, p. 218; Lyceum Fragment, 389, p. 238.

Note 17. See Rotermund, 1968, p. 60; Schlegel, 1967; Atheneum Fragment, 1989, p. 238.

Note 18. German original: “Die Hoffmannische Variante des romantischen Arabesken-stils zwingt den Leser, den teils, ‘willkürlich’ zerstörten, teils nicht geleisteten Zusammenhang selbst herzustellen” (Rotermund, 1968, p. 69).

Note 19. See Lee, 2015, pp. 518519.

Note 20. See Schlegel, 1967; Atheneum Fragment, 116, p. 182.

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