His second novel was entitled The Mysterious One.

It was never published, and nothing of it survives except a single paragraph, about a page long, which ETA Hoffmann quoted as a twenty-year-old on March 13, 1796 in a letter from Königsberg to his childhood friend, the pastor's son Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel.

It is about the "male monopoly": an attitude that placed the ideal of male friendship far above love between the sexes.

The reason: "Friendship does nothing for the sensuality, but everything for the spirit".

The narrator feels liberated because before the beginning of the great friendship between two kindred male souls, his "spirit was a prisoner locked up and constantly guarded."

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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A few decades later, another writer returns to his attic room in another city.

It's one o'clock at night.

He just wants to be alone.

Twice he locks the door behind him, takes a deep breath, takes a “bath of darkness” and lets a wasted day pass him by: he was constantly in company, he was constantly suffering from the “tyranny of the human face”.

He spoke to the wrong people, shook the wrong hands, said and did the wrong things.

Now alone, dissatisfied with himself and everything else, he asks God for the honor of being able to create some beautiful verses "that will prove to myself that I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those I am despise".

Friendship?

What was that supposed to be?

Self-imposed solitary confinement would be preferable to her.

The fact that the night-dark loner Charles Baudelaire discovered "absolute comedy" in ETA Hoffmann's work and dealt with it as early as 1855 in his essay "De l'Essence de rire" seems no less surprising today than the fact that Hoffmann was only a few years old was far more popular in France than in Germany after his death.

Adolphe-Francois Loève-Veimars had translated works by Hoffmann around 1830, thereby popularizing the genre of fantastical fiction in France.

Baudelaire and the absolute comedy

One of Théophile Gautier's first publications was entitled "Onuphrius, or the stumbling blocks of an admirer of Hoffmann" and in 1832 told the story of a young man who was driven almost insane by his enthusiasm for Hoffmann's work.

Some of the stories in Balzac's "Comédie humaine" are clearly influenced by Hoffmann, such as the artist's novella "The Unknown Masterpiece" about the painter Frenhofer, who is looking for the absolute in art and kills himself when he realizes that his search is hopeless.

Alexandre Dumas published the novel The Lady with the Velvet Necklace in 1850, in which he transported a young student named ETA Hoffmann to revolutionary Paris, where he wanted to leave his German bride Antonie for a dancer named Arséne.

She wears the velvet collar that the title speaks of.

On their last night together, it hides the cut the guillotine had used to separate her head from her torso the day before.

For several decades, Hoffmann is one of the most widely read authors in Europe.

In Russia he comes right behind Gogol, in France Offenbach's opera "The Tales of Hoffmann" makes him immensely popular.

It begins in the Berlin Weinstube Lutter & Wegner, where Hoffmann, who was more punished than blessed with an almost hellish drinking tolerance, frequented the place.

In the French reception, Hoffmann became not only an admired and widely imitated author, but also a literary figure.

"The reason for the rapidity of Hoffmann's success," Théophile Gautier believed, "lies in the fierce and true feeling of nature which stands out to such a high degree in his most inexplicable creations".

In other words, what France loved about ETA Hoffmann was the sensually tangible authenticity of the supernatural in his work.

It was part of an aesthetic of evil to which Baudelaire, who translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French, may have been particularly receptive.

In "L'Essence de Rire" he defined laughter as ambiguous: it is satanic, but also deeply human.

At least half of the absolute comedy that he believed he had discovered in Hoffmann's had to come from an obscure source.

Anyone who laughs at the torn figures of ETA Hoffmann