I would respectfully disagree with one point made in the fragment below: it’s not that the audience perceives Hoffmann as the sole master of horror, but rather adores him as the writer of the macabre, which is closer to the Uncanny (or the Unheimlich) than the broader “horror” term.
Peter Wortsman has translated ten of Hoffmann’s pieces under the heading “tales of the uncanny”. Taken together the selection undermines the all-too-common view of Hoffmann as primarily a master of horror. We instead discover the particularly Hoffmannesque uncanny, a more inclusive category. It is, in Freud’s famous formulation, “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”. Hoffmann said it first, and more poetically, in the story “Counselor Krespel”: “[t]here are people … from whom nature or some calamity tears away the veil behind which the rest of us engage in our mad doings unnoticed”. Humankind’s common inheritance is the capacity for overpowering feeling that we pretend to ignore. We repress, however, not only trauma or horror, but also spirituality and artistic passion, which have little use in the modern urban settings favoured by the author. But we all have the ability to recover profound beauty. For Hoffmann’s characters this is unlocked by sudden triggers: a snatch of divine music; an encounter with a madman; a well-constructed story. The subsequent course of their lives depends on how they process such abysmal insights. As the clear-sighted Clara writes in “The Sandman”, our subjectivity “either damns us to hell or uplifts us into heaven”. ©
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