The Sandman

A generation before Poe, when the idea of a gothic horror story was decidedly more a German than an English or American notion, E.T.A. Hoffmann was widely regarded as the master of the genre. Not all of Hoffmann's stories involved horror as such -- but they were all "tales," in the sense that they set aside, for a moment, all the particularities of everyday life and took place in a generalized, imaginary realm halfway between moralistic parables and frightening fancies, where children were quite often in the thrall of cruel and unpredictable adults, and fears took palpable form. His tales in many ways resemble those of the Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were first published just four years before "Der Sandmann."

Hoffmann was also a musician and a stage director, with the result that his tales often have  a theatre-like three-act structure, with powerful visual imagery and strong atmosphere. These have led them to be frequently adapted for stage, and later for screen; among the more notable versions have been Arthur Saint-Léon's "Coppélia" (1870), Offenbach's opéra fantastique "Tales of Hoffmann" (1881), Powell and Pressburger's 1951 film based upon it, and Paul Berry's 1993 Oscar-nominated stop-motion animation "The Sandman." Most recently, the young German director S. Andreas Dahn has brought out a relatively faithful period version, one which -- alas -- is not yet available on disc or streaming; the image above is of "Bela B." Felsenheimer in the title role.

But there's much more to this story than its dramatic touches, and vivid imagery. There's the primal scene of a child excluded from the adult world, the implicit threat of the Sandman, stealer of eyes (Freud read this as a displaced threat of castration), and the peculiar charms -- or lack thereof -- of an automaton woman. We often think that we today -- with our Terminators, cyborgs, replicants, and other semi-human robotic figures -- have invented the uncanny notion of a non-human human being, but in fact the idea is far older, going well back into the eighteenth century. Some of the automata built then still exist today, such as Maillardet's writing automaton. This small boyish figure, designed to sit at a writing desk and draw, was hard to identify when it was deposited at the steps of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute many years ago. Under patient care, its mechanism was restored, and a pen placed in its hand -- after which it produced six drawings, one of which the machine itself "signed," declaring, "I am the automaton of M. Maillardet" -- and so it identified itself (the idea was incorporated by David Selznick into his graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was adapted as a film by Martin Scorsese.

So read the story -- I suspect you will soon join the ranks of those haunted by its peculiar, shadowy scenes. Then choose one of this week's discussion questions, and post your answer below.