Master Johannes Wacht (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
()
About this ebook
Read more from E. T. A. Hoffmann
The Greatest Christmas Stories of All Time: Timeless Classics That Celebrate the Season Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Nutcracker and Mouse King (Fantasy and Horror Classics) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sandman (Fantasy and Horror Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Big Book of Christmas Tales: 250+ Short Stories, Fairytales and Holiday Myths & Legends Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Nutcracker and the Mouse King (Christmas Classics Series): Fantasy Classic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nutcracker Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Story of the Nutcracker Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nutcracker Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest Christmas Stories of All Time - Premium Collection: 90+ Classics in One Volume (Illustrated): The Gift of the Magi, The Holy Night, The Mistletoe Bough, A Christmas Carol, The Heavenly Christmas Tree, A Letter from Santa Claus, The Fir Tree, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King… Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTHE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING: Children's Fantasy Classic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (Children's Classic) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Weird Tales (Volumes I and II) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Nutcracker Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Uncanny Guest (Fantasy and Horror Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWeird Tales Volume 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Master Johannes Wacht (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
Related ebooks
Master Johannes Wacht Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAs We Were - A Victorian Peep Show Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Goethe Treasury: Selected Prose and Poetry Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Henry James: A Critical Biography Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The King's Betrothed (Fantasy and Horror Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBoucher Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales from Chaucer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry James (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Peter Schlemihl Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry James Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUlysses Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAsmodeus; or, The Devil on Two Sticks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Prince of Bohemia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Irrational Knot: Being the Second Novel of His Nonage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Irrational Knot Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLola Montez An Adventuress of the 'Forties Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGenius in Sunshine and Shadow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Journey into the Interior of the Earth (World Classics, Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Laodicean: A Story of To-day Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Unknown Masterpiece and Other Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Daughters of Men Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGaudeamus! Humorous Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lost King Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFour Years Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVATHEK Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLittle Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDroll Stories — Volume 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Journey into the Center of the Earth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Short Stories For You
Selected Short Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Explicit Content: Red Hot Stories of Hardcore Erotica Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sex and Erotic: Hard, hot and sexy Short-Stories for Adults Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don Quixote Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Finn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus' Son: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ficciones Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The ABC Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Four Past Midnight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lovecraft Country: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sour Candy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: A Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Skeleton Crew Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unfinished Tales Of Numenor And Middle-Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Five Tuesdays in Winter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Master Johannes Wacht (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Master Johannes Wacht (Fantasy and Horror Classics) - E. T. A. Hoffmann
Master Johannes Wacht
By
E. T. A. Hoffmann
Copyright © 2012 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Contents
E. T. A. Hoffman
Master Johannes Wacht
Footnotes
E. T. A. Hoffman
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1776. His family were all jurists, and during his youth he was initially encouraged to pursue a career in law. However, in his late teens Hoffman became increasingly interested in literature and philosophy, and spent much of his time reading German classicists and attending lectures by, amongst others, Immanuel Kant.
In was in his twenties, upon moving with his uncle to Berlin, that Hoffman first began to promote himself as a composer, writing an operetta called Die Maske and entering a number of playwriting competitions. Hoffman struggled to establish himself anywhere for a while, flitting between a number of cities and dodging the attentions of Napoleon’s occupying troops. In 1808, while living in Bamberg, he began his job as a theatre manager and a music critic, and Hoffman’s break came a year later, with the publication of Ritter Gluck. The story centred on a man who meets, or thinks he has met, a long-dead composer, and played into the ‘doppelgänger’ theme – at that time very popular in literature. It was shortly after this that Hoffman began to use the pseudonym E. T. A. Hoffmann, declaring the ‘A’ to stand for ‘Amadeus’, as a tribute to the great composer, Mozart.
Over the next decade, while moving between Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin, Hoffman produced a great range of both literary and musical works. Probably Hoffman’s most well-known story, produced in 1816, is ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’, due to the fact that – some seventy-six years later - it inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. In the same vein, his story ‘The Sandman’ provided both the inspiration for Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppélia, and the basis for a highly influential essay by Sigmund Freud, called ‘The Uncanny’. (Indeed, Freud referred to Hoffman as the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature.
)
Alcohol abuse and syphilis eventually took a great toll on Hoffman though, and – having spent the last year of his life paralysed – he died in Berlin in 1822, aged just 46. His legacy is a powerful one, however: He is seen as a pioneer of both Romanticism and fantasy literature, and his novella, Mademoiselle de Scudéri: A Tale from the Times of Louis XIV is often cited as the first ever detective story.
Master Johannes Wacht
At the time when people in the beautiful and pleasant town of Bamberg lived, according to the well-known saying, well, i.e., under the crook, namely in the end of the previous century, there was also one inhabitant, a man belonging to the burgher class, who might be called in every respect both singular and eminent His name was Johannes Wacht, and his trade was that of a carpenter.
Nature, in weighing and definitely determining her children’s destinies, pursues her own dark inscrutable path; and all that is claimed by convenience, and by the opinions and considerations which prevail in man’s narrow existence, as determining factors in settling the true tendency of every man’s self. Nature regards as nothing more than the pert play of deluded children imagining themselves to be wise. But short-sighted man often finds an insuperable irony in the contradiction between the conviction of his own mind and the mysterious ordering of this inscrutable Power, who first nourished and fed him at her maternal bosom and then deserted him; and this irony fills him with terror and awe, since it threatens to annihilate his own self.
The mother of Life does not choose for her favourites either the palaces of the great or the state-apartments of princes. And so she made our Johannes, who, as the kindly reader will soon learn, might be called one of her most richly endowed favourites, first see the light of the world on a wretched heap of straw, in the workshop of an impoverished master turner in Augsburg. His mother died of want and from suffering soon after the child’s birth, and his father followed her after the lapse of a few months.
The town government had to take charge of the helpless boy; and when the Council’s master carpenter, a well-to-do, respectable man, who found in the child’s face, notwithstanding that it was pinched with hunger, certain traits which pleased him,— when he would not suffer the boy to be lodged in a public institution, but took him into his own house, in order to bring him up along with his own children, then there dawned upon Johannes his first genial ray of sunshine, heralding a happier lot in the future.
In an incredibly short space of time the boy’s frame developed, so that it was difficult to believe that the little insignificant creature in the cradle had really been the shapeless colourless chrysalis out of which this pretty, living, golden-locked boy had proceeded, like a beautiful butterfly. But — what seemed of more importance — along with this pleasing grace of physical form the boy soon displayed such eminent intellectual faculties as astonished both his foster-father and his teachers. Johannes grew up in a workshop which sent forth some of the best and highest work that mechanical skill was able to produce, since the master carpenter to the Council was constantly engaged upon the most important buildings. No wonder, therefore, that the child’s mind, which caught up everything with such keen clear perception, should be excited thereby, and should feel all his heart drawn towards a trade the deeper significance of which, in so far as it was concerned with the material creation of great and bold ideas, he dimly felt deep down