Hoffmann, ERNST THEODOR WILHELM, German writer, musical composer and critic, and caricaturist, was born at Königsberg on 24th January 1776. (Later in life, to show his admiration of Mozart, he substituted for Wilhelm the name Amadeus.) Hoffmann qualified himself for a legal career, and in 1779 was appointed assessor in a court at Posen. But his irrestrainable love of caricature got him into trouble with his superiors, and he was degraded to an inferior post at Plock. Recovering ground again, for he was all his life long most exemplary in the discharge of his official duties, he was transferred to Warsaw (1804); but the occupation of that city by the French two years later threw him entirely out of office. For the next ten years he led a very precarious existence, being often on the verge of want, yet always painting, composing music, and leading a wild and merry life. His great ideal was to live for and by art, especially music, and in 1808 he was for two months director of the theatre at Bamberg. During these same years he wrote a remarkable essay on Mozart's Don Juan, and composed an opera on Fouqué's Undine. In 1815 he was enabled to resume his career in the service of Prussia; and from 1816 down to his death in 1822 (25th June) he held a high position in the supreme court at Berlin.
His career as an author did not properly begin until 1814. But his tales cannot be rightly understood without some acquaintance with the strange personality of the writer—a little restless man, with a Roman nose and thin lips, and hawk-eyed, a brilliant talker, full of drollery and wit, vain, wayward, fantastic to an extreme, the child of impulse, and the bond-slave of his wild imagination. Educated on the dreams and ideals of German romanticism at the period of its most exuberant growth, he became himself the arch-priest of ultra-German romanticism. At Posen, at Warsaw, at Bamberg, and in his last years at Berlin, he was the brilliant centre of the literary and artistic Bohemianism of the place. Amid the riot and revelry at Posen he learned two of the lasting lessons of his lifetime, to wit, that company—amusing company—and much rum were essential to his happiness. A fierce hater of dullness, Hoffmann waged incessant war upon the stiff-necked sticklers for routine and commonplace conventionalism, and upon the dilettanti who dealt so glibly in the phrasemongery of art-criticism. His wit constantly bubbled over in irony, ridicule, sarcasm, and was often both savage and malicious. His imagination was inexhaustible, but utterly undisciplined, wild, and fantastic, yet wonderfully vivid. Apart from music and painting, nothing fettered his interest so keenly as the extravagant and the marvellous, the grotesque, the weird, and the horrible. An impressionist above all things, Hoffmann's literary strength lies in his power of graphic and vivid description: he describes what he actually saw and felt, and he describes, as a painter paints pictures, in the spirit of concrete realism. He used to affirm that he did actually see the imps and hobgoblins and nightmare apparitions which his perfervid imagination conjured up before him. In short, Hoffmann's tempest-tossed soul was put in such jeopardy by his uncontrollable imagination, conjoined with his lack of firm principle, that it barely escaped being wrecked upon the rock of insanity.
His shorter tales, upon which his reputation as a writer mainly rests, were mostly published in the collections entitled Phantasiestücke in Callot's Manier (1814), Nachstücke (1817), and Die Serapionsbrüder (1819–25). His longer works include Elixiere des Teufels (1816; Eng. trans. 1824), Seltsame Leiden eines Theaterdirektors (1818), Klein Zaches (1819), and Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (2 vols. 1821–22), this last being partly autobiographical. Of his fairy tales Der Goldene Topf was translated by Carlyle (1827). Hoffmann's Ausgewählte Schriften appeared in 10 vols. in 1827–28, the latest and the most complete edition of his Gesammelte Schriften in 15 vols. in 1879–83. Collections of his tales have been translated into English in 1826 (Gillies), 1885, with biography (Bealby), and 1886 (Ewing). His writings, and translations and imitations of them, have been very popular in France. See Hitzig, Hoffmann's Leben (1823); Funck's Erinnerungen (1836); and Carlyle's Miscellaneous Essays, vol. i.