The fantastic tale, which we want to discuss today, is one of those primal tendencies. It is as old as the epic itself. It would be a mistake to think that the magical tales, the fables, the transformations, and ghostly deeds contained in humanity’s oldest stories are nothing more than traces left by the oldest religious ideas. Certainly the Odyssey and the Iliad and the 1001 Nights are material that was merely told; but it is equally true to say that the material of this Iliad, this Odyssey, this 1001 Nights was only woven together in the telling. The tale took no more from humanity’s oldest legends than it gave back. To tell a story using other words — with the fabulation and playfulness, the fantastical, all unfettered by responsibility — is, however, never merely invention but a transmitted, modifiable conservation within the medium of fantasy. This medium of fantasy is certainly of a very different concentration during, on the one hand, the first bloom of Homeric or of Oriental epic and, on the other, during the latest flowering of European Romanticism. But true storytelling always retained its conservative character, in the best sense of the word, and we cannot imagine any of the great storytellers as detached from humanity’s oldest body of thought.
The reason for the seemingly arbitrary permeation of eternal and current moments in a story emerges perhaps all the more sharply the more fantastic it is. This is palpable in Hoffmann as well as in Panizza. Palpable, too, is the tension between the two writers, stretched over the arc between the beginning and the end of the Romantic intellectual movement in Germany during the past century. The inexpressibly convoluted fates in which E. T. A. Hoffmann mires his characters — Kreisler in Tomcat Murr, Anselmus from The Golden Pot, Princess Brambilla, much maligned in Germany, much loved in France, and finally Master Flea2—these fates are not only directed or influenced by supernatural powers, they have been created primarily in order to preserve the figures, arabesques, and ornaments in which the old spirits and natural demons seek to cast their endeavors in the bright daylight of the new century as inconspicuously as possible. Hoffmann believed in effective connections to the most distant, primal times, and as his favorite characters’ figures of fate are basically musical, he particularly established this connection through the auraclass="underline" the fine singing of the little snakes who appear to Anselmus, the heartbreaking songs of Antonie the daughter of Krespel, the legendary tones he thought he heard on the Courland Spit, the devil’s voice on Ceylon, and the like. Music was to him the canon through which the spirit world manifested itself in daily life. At least insofar as we are dealing with the manifestations of benevolent spirits.
The greatest magic of the people Hoffmann described, however, rests precisely in the way that in even the most noble and exalted characters, with the exception of some of his girl figures, there is something satanic going on. This storyteller insists with a certain obstinacy that all the reputable archivists, medical officers, students, apple-wives, musicians, and upper-class daughters are much more than they appear to be, just as Hoffmann himself was more than just a pedantic and exacting court of appeals judge, which is how he made his living.3 Hoffmann’s uncommon observational ability, coupled with his character’s satanic elements, enabled something like a short circuit between moral judgment and physiognomic views to emerge. The ordinary person, who had always been the object of his entire hatred, seemed to him more and more to be, in his virtues as well as in his beauties, the product of a heinous artificial mechanism, whose innermost parts are ruled by Satan. He equates the satanic with the automatic, and this ingenious schema, which underlies his tales, allows him to claim life entirely for the pure and genuine side of the spirits so as to glorify it in figures such as Julia, Serpentina, and Antonie. With this moral conflict between life and appearance, Hoffmann has articulated, unless I am very much mistaken, the primal motif of the fantastic story. Whether we speak of Hoffmann, Poe, Kubin, or Panizza, to name only the greatest, the work is always based on the most definitive religious dualism; one might call it Manichean. And for Hoffmann this duality did not stop at what he considered most holy; it did not stop at music. Could one not produce the primal tones of which we spoke, this last and most certain message from the spirit world, by mechanical means? Were not the Aeolian harp and the clavichord successful first steps on this path? It was then that it became possible to ape our deepest, holiest yearning with mechanical art works; it was then that every love that spoke to us in tones from home became a phantom. These questions constantly move Hoffmann’s writing. And we will find them again, unchanged, although in a thoroughly transformed, thoroughly alienating atmosphere, when we now turn to Panizza.
At the present time, Panizza’s name and work are in exactly the same state as were Hoffmann’s from the middle of the last century through the turn of this one. He is as unknown as he is discredited. But although the memory of Hoffmann, extinguished in Germany, had never ceased to be celebrated in France, it is not to be expected that similar amends will be made to Panizza. There are unimaginable obstacles in Germany today to compiling his writings with anything approaching completeness. Although a Panizza Society was established last year, it has not yet found the ways and means to reprint his most important works. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that one of these writings would today be forfeited to the district attorney, just as it was thirty-five years ago. In fact, Panizza’s brief fame can be tied to a few scandalous trials. In 1893, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s appointment as a bishop, his The Immaculate Conception of the Popes appeared, with the apocryphal comment: “Translated from the Spanish by Oskar Panizza.”4 Two years later, it was followed by The Love Counciclass="underline" A Heavenly Tragedy in Five Acts, for the publication of which he spent a year in the Amberg prison.5 After serving his sentence, he left Germany, and when, forced by the confiscation of his property, he returned in 1901, he spent six weeks in investigative custody in a psychiatric clinic, after which he was declared certifiably insane and released. The cause of this last custody was Parisjana, German Verses from Paris, pervaded by fierce attacks against Emperor Wilhelm II.6 Besides these reasons for the condemnation of his name and the disappearance of his writings, every feature of a certain characteristic, more closely examined, will add a few more. For this characteristic we can discard mental illness, to which one might be tempted to make a connection. There is no doubt of its reality: it was paranoia. If, however, the paranoid systems already exhibit theological tendencies, then one can say that this illness, insofar as it had any influence on his creative work other than to impede it, in no way contradicted the fundamental nature of the man. Panizza was — and here his radical attacks against the Church and the papacy cannot deceive us — a theologian. Admittedly, a theologian who stood in irreconcilable opposition to professional theologians, just as E. T. A. Hoffmann stood, as an artist, in opposition to the art-loving circles of Berlin society, upon which he heaped all his scorn and ire. Panizza was a theologian, and, from his own point of view, Otto Julius Bierbaum saw quite rightly when he wrote after the publication of The Love Council, which in its devastating sarcasm left all other anticlerical writings far behind, that the author had not seen far enough. “What is rebelling,” says Bierbaum, “is actually the Lutheran in him, not the whole, free person.”7 And it certainly is also a paradox — although a paradox of righteousness — that one of Panizza’s most loyal friends, the man who stayed close to him throughout his long illness and who saw to his estate, admittedly not without incident, was a Jesuit, the now eighty-six-year-old Deacon Lippert.8