Der goldne Topf; The Golden Pot

[This page by Nicole Sütterlin]

Der goldne Topf; The Golden Pot (1814)

Written in 1814 and published at the end of that same year in the Fantasiestücke, the Goldne Topf; The Golden Pot was probably the most popular of Hoffmann’s works with his contemporaries. Most 19th-century readers considered the author’s first-ever tale to be his most important work, and even Hoffmann’s most averse critics tended to exempt Der goldne Topf; The Golden Pot from their general denunciation of this eccentric author. Literary criticism has regarded it as Hoffmann’s masterpiece and as a salient text in the Romantic corpus, mostly because in this first tale of his, Hoffmann clearly shows and elaborates his poetics. Like most of Hoffmann’s texts, Der goldne Topf is informed by its author’s knowledge and critique of contemporary philosophy (particularly German Idealism as propounded by Fichte and Schelling) and psychology (particularly Johann Christian Reil, Gottfried Heinrich Schubert).

In conceiving Der goldne Topf; The Golden Pot as a tale, Hoffmann follows the Romantic penchant for the folktale. Similar to Novalis’ programmatic tale-like novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801) which Hoffmann knew well, Der goldne Topf tells the story of a young man discovering his poetic talent and becoming a poet. But Hoffmann, unlike his early Romantic predecessor Novalis, moves the tale’s marvellous once-upon-a-time world into the present and into everyday life, as the subtitle ‘Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit’; ‘A Tale in Modern Times’ indicates. Hoffmann’s modern tale thus creates a tension between the marvellous and the ordinary, i.e. between the fantastic world of the imagination, on the one hand, and realistic, bourgeois everyday life, on the other. This tension is characteristic for all his tales and indeed for most of his works.

The tale leads the student Anselmus from his home in Dresden to the fantastic realm of a utopian Atlantis, showing how the hero deals with the discrepancy between his love for the enchanting snake-girl Serpentina and the bourgeois Veronika, between art and real life. After encountering Serpentina with her crystalline voice and her magical golden pot, the clumsy hero Anselmus finds himself torn between the marvellous snake-girl and the bourgeois Dresden girl Veronika with her comforting, steaming pot of soup. The philistine townspeople worry that Anselmus may have gone mad as they hear him fantasize about little snakes that one else can see, while Anselmus himself is helplessly torn between the marvellous and the real world. Serpentina’s father Lindhorst, both an archivarian in Dresden and a scholarly magician in utopian Atlantis, comes to the rescue by hiring Anselmus as a scribe. Three times does the young hero try to gain access to Lindhorst’s poetic world and to become a poet himself, until he finally succeeds. He acquires the golden pot, Serpentina’s dowry, and can now see reflected on its surface a ‘wundervolles Reich, wie es jetzt im Einklang mit der ganzen Natur besteht’ (‘a wonderful realm, at one with the whole of Nature’).

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/etahoff/goldtopf/gtopf082.html

Throughout the tale, there is a conflict that needs resolving, a rift between the ideal ‘wonderful realm’ expressed by art, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. This duality is reflected in the duplicity of characters. Each main character has a fantastic and an ordinary identity: the ‘poetic’ characters Anselmus, Lindhorst and Serpentina find their alter egos or Doppelgänger (for a discussion of the Doppelgänger motif in Hoffmann see Elixiere des Teufels; The Devil’s Elixirs) in three ‘real’, bourgeois personages (Heerbrand, Paulmann, Veronika). Inasmuch as the respective alter egos seem to mutually exclude one another, the Doppelgänger motif points to the overall search for synthesis which informs Der goldne Topf.

The tale’s last sentence reads:

Ist denn überhaupt des Anselmus Seligkeit etwas anderes als das Leben in der Poesie, der sich der heilige Einklang aller Wesen als tiefstes Geheimnis der Natur offenbaret?

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/etahoff/goldtopf/gtopf121.html

Could Anselmus’s bliss be anything else than a life within art, in which [i.e. in art, N.S.] the holy unison of all beings reveals itself as Nature’s most profound secret?

Having become a poet, Anselmus at last seems to have gained access to this original oneness of all things which only art has the power to express. However, by ending his tale with a question mark, Hoffmann both posits and questions the poet’s – and art’s – success! Thus the search for a synthesis between the ideal and the real, between art and life has not been concluded at the end of Der goldne Topf. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre Hoffmann will continue to search for and to question this very synthesis.

German Edition

E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘Der goldne Topf. Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit‘, in: Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. 2/1: Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier, ed. by Hartmut Steinecke et al. (Frankfurt a.M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), pp. 229-321

English Translation

Ritchie Robertson (ed.), E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Further Reading in English

Arnd Bohm, ‘Consumers’ Paradise: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf’, European Romantic Review 2 (1991), 1-22

Liane Bryson, ‘Romantic Science: Hoffmann’s Use of the Natural Sciences in Der goldne Topf’, Monatshefte 91:2 (1999), 241-55

Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. by Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 77-108 on ‘The Golden Pot’

John Reddick, ‘E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf and its “durchgehaltene Ironie”’, Modern Language Review 71 (1976), 577-94

Ritchie Robertson, ‘Introduction’, in E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. vii – xxxii

Further Reading in German

Manfred Engel, ‘E.T.A. Hoffmann und die Poetik der Frühromantik. Am Beispiel von Der goldne Topf’, in Bernd Auerochs and Dirk von Petersdorff (eds.), Einheit der Romantik? Zur Transformation frühromantischer Konzepte im 19. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), pp. 43-56

Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987)

Günter Oesterle, ‘Arabeske, Schrift und Poesie in E.T.A. Hoffmanns Kunstmärchen Der goldne Topf’, Athenäum. Jahrbuch für Romantik 1 (1991), 69-107

Jochen Schmidt, ‘Der goldne Topf. Ein Schlüsseltext romantischer Poetologie’, in Günter Saße (ed.), Interpretationen. E.T.A. Hoffmann: Romane und Erzählungen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004), pp. 43-59

Hartmut Steinecke, ‘Kommentar’, in E.T.A. Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. 2/1: Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier, ed. by H.S. et al. (Frankfurt a.M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), pp. 745-95

Full Text Online in German

http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/3103/1

http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Hoffmann,+E.+T.+A./Erz%C3%A4hlungen,+M%C3%A4rchen+und+Schriften/Fantasiest%C3%BCcke+in+Callots+Manier/Zweiter+Teil/2.+Der+goldne+Topf

German Text with English Translations

https://annotext.dartmouth.edu/texts?language_id=10000

Der goldne Topf in German; click on a word for the English translation