Children of the past gulped down tales of incest, child murder and mutilation (all of which, to be fair, put in an appearance in Hoffmann’s oeuvre) today’s children, or more precisely their parents, wouldn’t stand for it.

It’s a common belief about fairy tales in general, whether by that we mean traditional, orally-transmitted tales with no named author or the more artfully constructed written narratives of Hoffmann and his Romantic contemporaries. It’s difficult not to conclude that whatever one might be imagining, Hoffmann’s version is even more disturbing. Reviews of Disney‘s Nutcracker reference its “ dark” origins, albeit without ever going into detail. There’s an assumption, perhaps understandable, that someone who died almost 200 years ago, having lived a notoriously dissolute life, wrote tales that were too dark for modern-day consumption. Now, with release of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, it’s been the turn of Disney to repackage what is, alongside Der Sandmann, Hoffmann’s most famous story, Nussknacker und Mauskönig. He provides the raw materials for others: the author Alexandre Dumas, the composers Pyotr Ilyich T chaikovsky, and Jacques Offenbach, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

Although available in direct translation from the German, Hoffmann‘s stories tend to come to us via numerous reworkings and transpositions. Throughout the English-speaking world, ETA Hoffmann is best known for what others have made of his life and works.

Nutcracker by eta hoffmann