16. Dark Romanticism

Magical Idealism

It was precisely during the years of the Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums, according to Christoph Schulte, that Christian Romantics appropriated the Kabbalah. Their interest was in reaction to, as Hegel wrote, “the ‘religious’ aridity of the proponents of rationalism.” Their attraction,  as noted Schulte, “to the philosophy of nature, to magic, to myth and to pantheism, or even to cosmogony and theogony, all of this is attracted and inflamed by Kabbalah.”[1] As explained by the editors of Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik (“Kabbalah and the literature of Romanticism”):

At the transition from the late Enlightenment to early Romanticism, a new interest in the Kabbalah arose: while knowledge of Jewish mysticism was still widespread even among enlightened Jews such as Mendelssohn or Salomon Maimon, elements of the Kabbalah now also fascinated Christian Romantic authors such as Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann.[2]

In the eighteenth century, the goal of art and literature was to imitate nature. Romantics, on the other hand, asserted that art should not imitate nature but rather shed light upon its dark, irrational, supernatural secrets, in order to obtain insights into the depths of human spiritual existence.[3] The Romantics praised the world of the Renaissance, which regarded art, magic, science, and philosophy as fundamentally harmonious. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries changed this perception, introducing the idea of rational materialism, which was opposed to mysticism and magic. Impressed by the rapid scientific development of their day, but simultaneously disappointed with rational materialism, the Romantics argued for the need to establish a different type of scientific philosophy that would not distinguish the material and the spiritual, and unite science, philosophy, art, religion and beauty.

According to Marina Aptekman, “This worldview reflects the idealist utopian thinking of German Romantics, which largely echoed the messianic and utopian beliefs of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucian mystics.”[4] The reason why poetic language suddenly began to play such an important role in the literary philosophy of the early nineteenth century, explains Aptekman, can be found in the Romantic conception of the Golden Age, which had its source in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mystical texts. Rosicrucian tradition praised Kabbalah because it regarded it as “a mystical science” that served as a means to allow humans to recover the knowledge, dealing with the mystical significance of letters and numbers, lost after Adam’s fall. Thus, according to Aptekman, “Of all the spiritual knowledge lost by Adam as a result of his fall, the German Romantics were interested primarily in the recovery of the divine language. They believed that obtaining it anew would help to restore lost correspondences between man and nature and would thus bring back the Golden Age.”[5]

German Romantics singled out Kabbalah, and especially its linguistic mysticism, as a basis for their poetic ideology. As explained by Wolfgang Neuser, in Theoretischer Hintergrund für die Rezeption der Kabbala in der Romantik (“Theoretical background for the reception of the Kabbalah in Romanticism”), “Common and formative for the overlapping traditions (Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah) is the idea that the whole world, which is the divine in creation, must be the starting point of all thought.”[6] It was that endeavor that led Romantics to revive alchemical interpretations of Kabbalistic philosophy and place it in the center of their own concept of “scientific mysticism.” This interpretation of the Kabbalah, explains Aptekman, “had previously been widely used by mystics or magicians but had never, prior to German Romanticism, been placed at the center of an aesthetic theory.”[7]

Effectively, according to Schulte, the Kabbalah represents the original tradition in the language of God and the language of Hebrew origin. Hamann’s phrase, in a letter to Jacobi, according to which language is “the mother of reason and revelation, its alpha and omega,” explains Schulte, marks the point of convergence of the Romantics in the face of the pure reason of Enlightenment.[8] This new relationship to language and in particular to Hebrew as being the language of God and the original language of humanity, the language of “Hebrew poetry” and of the Jewish Volksgeist, according to Herder, became the starting point of the Romantic diffusion of Kabbalah. The reason being, as Schulte again notes, that the reference to language and writing as a medium of revelation constitutes the basis of religious opposition to Enlightenment theism.[9]

The idea of the inseparability of the material and the spirit world became the cornerstone of German Romanticism, particularly of Schelling, according to whom these two worlds should be united in one whole Absolute, and all knowledge should be poeticized and spiritualized. For Schelling, the ideal scientist was an alchemist, yet at the same time also a philosopher, often a musician, and usually a poet or an artist. Paracelsus, Agrippa, and other Renaissance alchemists played a significant role in Schelling’s philosophy. Schelling’s work was also influenced by Saint-Martin, and probably by Martines de Pasqually as well.[10]

This belief in the union of art and science, but also in the union of all the sciences, is especially evident in the works of Novalis. This notion of Magischer Idealismus (“Magical Idealism”), which permeates Novalis’ literature and philosophy, is a central element of early romanticism. Between fall 1798 and spring 1799, Novalis wrote a project entitled Encyklopaedistik. In the notes to it, generally called Brouillon, he pursued the plan of combining all the sciences into a “universal science.” In service of the Romantic project of restoring the lost primordial linguistic identity, Novalis employs the language of semiotics, in identifying sign and referent to the magical language concept of the Kabbalah. In the context of a “doctrine of signifiers” and a “grammatical mysticism” of writing as “magic,” he notes under the keyword “MAGIC, (mystical linguistics)” in Das Allgemeine Brouillon, “Sympathy of the sign with the signified (One of the basic ideas of Kabbalists.)”[11] According to Novalis, Kabbalah “is a language of mystical signs, which prove to us that there are mystical correspondences between man, universe, and language.”[12] Similarly, Schlegel called Kabbalah “mystical grammar, a combinatory art that takes ideas through language out of Chaos.”[13] In a note from 1800, Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “The true poetic aesthetic is Kabbalah.”[14] In the previous year, Schlegel had scribbled the following formula: “poetry = absolute science + absolute art = magic = alchemy + Kabbalah.”[15] To Schlegel, “The purpose of the Kabbalah is to create the new language, for this will be the organ to control the spirits.”[16]

Die Serapionsbrüder

Die Serapionsbrüder was named after a circle of writers who met regularly to discuss the arts in the apartment in Berlin of E.T.A Hoffman (1776 – 1822)—a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. In addition to Hoffmann himself, this circle, called the Serapionsbrüder, after St. Seraphin of Montegranaro (1540 – 1604), included Adelbert von Chamisso, David Ferdinand Koreff, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Karl Wilhelm Salice-Contessa, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and his future biographer, a neighbor and fellow jurist called Julius Eduard Hitzig (1780 – 1849), the grandson of Daniel Itzig (1723 – 1799), a court Jew of Kings Frederick II the Great and Frederick William II of Prussia and a leading member of the Asiatic Brethren.

As a young writer, Hoffmann made the acquaintance of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763 – 1825), known as Jean Paul, who was long an important influence.[17] Paul was also listed among the Idealists associated with the Illuminati by the French imperial police.[18] In 1796, Paul settled in Weimar, where he became friends with Herder and came across Goethe and Schiller. In 1800, he went to Berlin where he developed friendships with the Schlegel brothers, Tieck and Fichte. Paul had a considerable influence on the composer Robert Schumann, as well as on Gustav Mahler’s first symphony. In France, he was popularized in particular by Le songe, an approximate translation made by Madame de Staël of the Discourse of the Dead Christ taken from the Siebenkäs, published between 1796 and 1797. Paul was the first to name the literary motif of the Doppelgänger, which he utilized in Siebenkäs. The motif was also adopted by Hoffmann, for his The Devil’s Elixirs (1815), described by some literary critics as fitting into the Gothic novel genre, called Schauerroman in German.[19]

Hoffmann was a friend of Zacharias Werner (1768 – 1823), a German poet, dramatist, and preacher, who became acquainted with Goethe at Weimar and Madame de Staël at Coppet. Several of Werner’s dramatic poems were designed to evangelize Freemasonry. His dramatic duology published in English as The Templars in Cyprus and The Brethren of the Cross was based on the idea that some survivors of the Templar suppression escaped to Scotland and founded Freemasonry. Beethoven considered the first part as a possible opera project.[20]

Although Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777 – 1843) gave up his university studies at Halle to join the army, and took part in the Rhine campaign of 1794, the rest of his life was devoted mainly to literary pursuits. Fouqué was connected to Achim von Arnim, who along with his brother-in-law Clemens Brentano, was part of Madame de Staël’s Coppet Group and who were identified with her by the French imperial police as a member of the Illuminati.[21] Fouqué was introduced to Wilhelm August Schlegel, who deeply influenced him as a poet and who published his first book, Dramatische Spiele von Pellegrin, in 1804. Frederick William IV of Prussia who granted him a pension which allowed him to spend his later years in comfort.[22] Fouqué’s Sigurd der Schlangentödter (“Sigurd the Snake Killer”), from 1808, was the first modern German dramatization of the Nibelung legend combining Icelandic sources such as the Volsunga Saga and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. In 1828, Fouqué published his play, Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (“The Song Contest on the Wartburg”).

Venusberg

Hoffmann was a pioneering writer of horror stories, making him an early example of Dark Romanticism, and influenced writers such as Richard Wagner, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Baudelaire, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka and Freud.[23] Hoffmann was deeply interested in Mesmerism, Kabbalah and the occult.[24] His story Der Sandmann (“The Sandman”) involves the Kabbalistic legend of the golem. Hoffmann’s stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which a heavily fictionalized Hoffmann appears as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia was based upon Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, while Schumann’s Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann’s character Johannes Kreisler. Freud’s famous essay, Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”) of 1919, used The Sandman as its central focus.

Der Kampf der Sänger (“The Battle of the Singers”), commemorating the Wartburg Sängerkrieg, is a story by Hoffmann, in the third section of the second volume of the cycle of stories and fairy tales, Die Serapionsbrüder (“Seraphin Brothers”), published between 1819 and 1821, which also represented a summary of his literary work. Hoffmann was inspired by Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s history and Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a fragmentary novel posthumously by Friedrich Schlegel in 1802. Although Novalis had to give up completing the work, his numerous surviving notes, and Ludwig Tieck’s report, make it quite easy to follow the planned continuation of the novel. The well-known symbol of the blue flower, which has become emblematic of Romanticism, symbolizing desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite, also derives from the novel.

Ludwig Tieck also published the tale of Venusberg in his Romantische Dichtungen collection of 1799. The earliest version of the narrative of the  Venusberg legend, without the mention of the name of Tannhäuser, is first recorded in the form of a ballad by the Provençal writer Antoine de la Sale (1385/86 – 1460/61). In 1434, René of Anjou, made La Sale tutor to his son, John II, Duke of Lorraine, to whom he dedicated, between the years 1438 and 1447, his La Salade, a textbook of the studies necessary for a prince.

Tannhäuser was a German Minnesinger and traveling poet who lived between 1245 and 1265. The illustrated Codex Manesse fourteenth-century manuscript depicts him clad in the Teutonic Order habit, suggesting he might have fought in the Sixth Crusade led by Emperor Frederick II in 1228/29. Based on a legendary account in his Bußlied, Tannhäuser found the Venusberg, the subterranean home of Venus, and spent a year there worshipping the goddess. After leaving the Venusberg, Tannhäuser is filled with remorse, and travels to Rome to ask Pope Urban IV (c. 1195 – 1264) if it is possible to be absolved of his sins. Urban replies that forgiveness is impossible, as much as it would be for his papal staff to blossom. Three days after Tannhäuser’s departure, Urban’s staff bloomed with flowers. Messengers are sent to recall the knight, but he has already returned to Venusberg, never to be seen again. Having refused a penitent, the Pope was punished with eternal damnation.[25]

In German folklore of the sixteenth century, the narrative of Venusberg, a motif of European folklore rendered in various legends and epics since the Late Middle Ages, became associated with the minnesinger Tannhäuser who becomes obsessed with worshipping the goddess Venus. Venusberg as a name of the otherworld or fairyland is first mentioned in German in Formicarius by Johannes Nider (c. 1380 – 1438) prior of the Dominican convent at Nuremberg. Nider gained a wide reputation in Germany as a preacher and was active at the Council of Constance. He became identified with the Council of Basle as theologian and legate, making several embassies to the Hussites. The most important among his many writings is the Book Five of the Formicarius, the second book ever printed to discuss witchcraft after Alphonso de Spina’s Fortalitium Fidei. Sections on witches would be published later as part of the Malleus Maleficarum, usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, the best known treatise purporting to be about witchcraft, written by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer and first published in 1486. The version by Praetorius (1630 – 1680) was included in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano.

Gespensterbuch

Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs includes a gamekeeper who claims to have a feud with Freischützen, who are unable to kill him due to his faith. When the gamekeeper’s apprentice, Franz, fails to shoot what he thinks is the devil, a rumor begins that the devil had approached Franz and offered him magic bullets.[26] Der Freischütz was based on a story by Johann August Apel (1771 – 1816) and Friedrich Laun (1770 – 1849), from their 1810 collection Gespensterbuch, a collection of German ghost stories. Both Apel and Laun knew Goethe, whose play Claudine von Villa Bella (1776) may have influenced Laun’s Die Todtenbraut (“The Dead Bride”). Robert Stockhammer had noted that Laun’s Der Todtenkopf (“The Skull”) contains characters inspired by Cagliostro, who Goethe had written about, and who may have been discussed when Laun visited Goethe in 1804.[27] Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782), which depicts the death of a child assailed by a supernatural being, the Erlking, a king of the fairies, also inspired Apel’s poem Alp.[28]

Most of the stories for Fantasmagoriana, a French anthology of German ghost stories, translated anonymously by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès and published in 1812, are from the first two volumes of Apel and Laun’s Gespensterbuch, with other stories by Johann Karl August Musäus, a member of the Illuminati and the Anna Amalia lodge of Weimar. Musäus was one of the first collectors of German folk stories, most celebrated for his Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1782–1787). Musäus’ Nachgelassene Schriften (1791), continued to be published by the Illuminati publisher Nicolai—a friend of Moses Mendelssohn—with contributions by Ludwig Tieck.[29] After Musäus’ death in 1787, his widow requested Christoph Martin Wieland publish a re-edited version of the tales, which he did as Die deutschen Volksmährchen von Johann August Musäus (1804–1805).

Julius Eduard Hitzig was friendly with Hoffmann, de la Motte Fouqué, and Adelbert von Chamisso (1781 – 1838), who joined the circle of Madame de Staël, and followed her in her exile to Coppet in Switzerland.[30] Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (“Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story”), written in 1813, is a fairy tale of a man who sells his shadow to the devil for a sack full of gold that never runs out. Late in the text, it is mentioned that Schlemihl is a Jew since the name is taken from Jewish folklore.[31] Chamisso’s work served to popularized the word Schlemiel, a Yiddish term referring to an “inept/incompetent person” or “fool.”[32] In Hoffmann’s Die Abenteuer der Sylvester-Nacht (“The Adventures of New Year’s Eve”), Schlemihl appears as a supporting character and thus illustrates the fate of the protagonist in Die Geschichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbild (“The Story of the Lost Mirror Image”). Hans Christian Andersen used the motif of the lost shadow in his fairy tale The Shadow in 1847.

Hoffmann also wrote an opera based on Fouqué’s Gothic story Undine (1816), for which Fouqué wrote the libretto. Undine is a fairytale novella (Erzählung) by in which Undine, a water spirit, marries a knight named Huldbrand in order to gain a soul. In Book on Nymphs, the alchemist Paracelsus coined the term “undine,” who can gain an immortal soul by marrying a human, and mentions the story of Melusine as an example, and the story of Peter von Staufenberg, which can be classed as a variation of Melusine legend or as belonging to the Knight of the Swan tradition.[33] A more direct influence on Fouqué would have been the Comte de Gabalis (“Count of Cabala”), a Rosicrucian novel published in 1670 by the Abbe Montfaucon de Villars, which adapted Paracelsus’ ideas.[34]

Both Achim von Arnim and Fouqué wrote stories about the Medieval superstition that the humanoid-shaped mandrake root was produced by the semen of hanged men under the gallows. Mandrakes contain hallucinogenic properties and since ancient times, were believed to possess aphrodisiacal virtues. The root is associated with fertility in the Bible in the Book of Genesis and the Song of Songs. In one superstition, the mandrake root would scream and cry as it was pulled from the ground, killing anyone who heard it. This reference is incorporated into the fictional mandrake described in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Alchemists claimed that hanged men ejaculated after their necks were broken and that the earth absorbed their final “strengths.” The root itself was used in love philtres and potions while its fruit was supposed to facilitate pregnancy. Witches who “made love” to the Mandrake root were said to produce offspring that had no feelings of real love and had no soul.[35]

In Arnim’s story, titled Isabella von Ägypten, Kaiser Karl des Fünften erste Jugendliebe (“Isabella of Egypt, Emperor Charles the Fifth’s First Childhood love”), Duke Michael, ruler of all the Gypsies of Egypt, is wrongly hanged in Ghent as a thief. After her father’s death, his only daughter Isabella discovers occult books among her father’s possessions, which she uses Isabella produces an Alraun, a miniature man, from a mandrake root, who calls himself Cornelius Nepos. Isabella falls in love with the young prince Charles, later Emperor Charles V. In order to get the Alraun out of the picture, Charles enlists the help of a Jewish magician who creates a golem, Bella, a close of Isabella clone. The golem Bella attacks Isabella, but Charles erases the first syllable Ae of the word Aemeth inscribed on the forehead which turns her back into a pile of clay. Charles V and Isabella have a son, but she leaves him to bring her people scattered across Europe back to Egypt. Gypsies would make use of mandrakes as love amulets.[36]

Hoffmann is another Romantic who deals with the golem motif. In his novella Die Geheimnisse (“The Secrets”), published in 1822 in the Berliner Taschenkalender, Hoffmann links the golem with the figure of the teraphim. In the Bible, the teraphim are originally Semitic idol or household gods. According to Ibn Ezra, they are described as human figures designed under certain signs of the zodiac or as human heads that have been prepared and under whose tongue a metal plate is placed on which magical words are engraved so that they then give oracles. In Die Geheimnisse, the teraphim are assigned the role of an “artificial image which, by awakening secret powers of the spirit world, deceives through apparent life.” A Kabbalistic magician sculpts a beautiful youth from clay, who is presented to a princess in place of a real person. However, the princess herself possesses magical powers and when she touches her “beloved,” he crumbles into dust.[37]

Gothic Horror

The Grimm brothers, who were directed to collect fairy tales by Brentano, also published a tale of the Jewish legend of the golem, a being said to be created from mud or clay through Kabbalistic magic, which was later adopted by Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851) as a model for her story of Frankenstein.[38] Dark Romanticism, which arguably began in Germany, with writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Fouqué, von Arnim and Chamisso, also developed in England with authors such as Shelley, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824), and John William Polidori (1795 – 1821), who are frequently linked to Gothic fiction. In London, de Staël met Lord Byron and William Wilberforce the abolitionist. Byron, at that time in debt, left London and frequently visited de Staël in Coppet in 1815, where she headed the Coppet Circle. For Byron, de Staël was Europe’s greatest living writer, but “with her pen behind her ears and her mouth full of ink.”[39] In 1815, Byron published his Hebrew Melodies, a poem considered to is one of the first literary works of Jewish nationalism.[40] They were largely created by Byron to accompany music composed by Isaac Nathan (c. 1791 – 1864), who played the poet melodies which he claimed (incorrectly) dated back to the service of the Temple in Jerusalem. Nathan was born in Canterbury to a hazzan (Jewish cantor) from Poland, Menahem Monash, and his English Jewish wife, Mary (Lewis) Goldsmid. Many composers wrote settings of translations of Byron’s words, including Moses’s grandchildren Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Max Bruch, Mily Balakirev and Modest Musorgsky.

Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), were also closely associated with Byron. Mary’s parents, William Godwin (1756 – 1836) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), were part of a circle of radical artists known as Romantic Satanists, for their having the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a heroic figure who rebelled against “divinely ordained” authority.[41] Influenced by Milton’ work, Byron wrote Cain: A Mystery in 1821, provoking an uproar because the play dramatized the story of Cain and Abel from the point of view of Cain, who is inspired by Lucifer to protest against God. Among Percy Shelley’s best-known works were The Rosicrucian, A Romance and Prometheus Unbound, equating the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost with Prometheus, the Greek mythological figure who defies the gods and gives fire to humanity.

In 1816, at the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Mary, Percy and Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story, which resulted in Mary’s Frankenstein, inspired by the Kabbalistic legends of the golem. Two short stories from Apel and Laun’s Gespensterbuch and Die schwarze Kammer (“The Black Chamber”) were included in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès’ Fantasmagoriana (1812), were read by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Polidori and Claire Clairmont at the Villa Diodati, inspiring them to write their own ghost stories, including The Vampyre and Frankenstein, both of which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre.[42] Another story they were inspired by from the Fantasmagoriana was the Stumme Liebe, translated into French as L’Amour Muet (“Mute Love”) from the Volksmärchen der Deutschen by Illuminati member J.K.A. Musäus.[43]

Polidori was an English writer and physician, known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story The Vampyre (1819), produced by the same writing contest, and the first published modern vampire story. The children of Polidori’s sister Frances and Gabriele Rossetti (1783 – 1854), an Italian poet and a political exile, included Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) and William Michael Rossetti (1829 – 1919), who were founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English painters, poets, and critics, established in 1848 along with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais. The Pre-Raphaelites were championed by John Ruskin (1819 – 1900), who was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era. Ruskin’s gravestone at Coniston where he is buried betrays his occult beliefs, featuring Celtic triskele symbols, a swastika within a Maltese Cross, and St. George slaying a dragon.

Shelley had also been romantically infatuated with American short-story writer Washington Irving (1783 – 1859).[44] Irving was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he encouraged other American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. He was also admired by some British writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Francis Jeffrey, and Walter Scott. Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. also included the short stories for which he is best known, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), which was especially popular during Halloween because of a character known as the Headless Horseman believed to be a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball in battle. One particularly influential version of the folktale was the last of the Legenden von Rübezahl (“Legends of Rübezahl”) from the Volksmärchen der Deutschen by Illuminati member J.K.A. Musäus.[45] In 1824, Irving published the collection of essays Tales of a Traveller, including the short story “The Devil and Tom Walker,” a story very similar to the German legend of Faust. The story first recounts the legend of the pirate William Kidd, who is rumored to have buried a large treasure in a forest in colonial Massachusetts. Kidd made a deal with the devil, referred to as “Old Scratch” and “the Black Man” in the story, to protect his money.


[1] Goethe. Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Hamburger Ausgabe, t. IX, éd. par E. Trunz, (Hambourg, 1961), 350-353; cited in Christoph Schulte. “Les formes de réception de la kabbale dans le romantisme allemand.” Renue Germanique Internationale, 5 (1996). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.4000/rgi.547

[2] E. Goodman-Thau & G. Mattenklott (ed.). Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. vii.

[3] M. H. Abrams. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953); cited in Marina Aptekman. Jacob’s Ladder: Kabbalistic Allegory in Russian Literature (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), p. 110.

[4] Aptekman. Jacob’s Ladder, p. 112.

[5] Ibid., p. 116.

[6] Wolfgang Neuser. “Theoretischer Hintergrund für die Rezeption der Kabbala in der Romantik. Am Beispiel von Novalis: Die Lehrlinge zu Sais.” In E. Goodman-Thau and G. Mattenklott (ed.). Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. 168.

[7] Aptekman. Jacob’s Ladder, p. 111.

[8] Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Hamburger Ausgabe, t. IX, éd. par E. Trunz, (Hambourg, 1961), 350-353; cited in Christoph Schulte. “Les formes de réception de la kabbale dans le romantisme allemand.” Renue Germanique Internationale, 5 (1996). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.4000/rgi.547

[9] Ibid.

[10] Aptekman. Jacob’s Ladder, p. 114.

[11] Novalis. Das Allgemeine Brouillon; cited in Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophische Fragmente. Zweyte Epoche. II, Zur Rhetorik und Poesie 1799 fin; cited in Detlef Kremer. “Kabbalistische Signaturen. Sprachmagie als Brennpunkt romantischer Imagination bei E. T. A. Hoffmann und Achim von Arnim,” in Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope, ed. E. Goodman-Thau and G. Mattenklott (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. 201.

[12] A. B. Kilcher, “Die Kabbalah als Trope im ästhetischen Diskurs der Frühromantik,” in Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope, ed. E. Goodman-Thau and G. Mattenklott (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. 164.

[13] Kritische Friedrich Schlegel-Ausgabe; cited Wolfgang Neuser. “Theoretischer Hintergrund für die Rezeption der Kabbala in der Romantik,” p. 164.

[14] Detlef Kremer. “Kabbalistische Signaturen. Sprachmagie als Brennpunkt romantischer Imagination bei E. T. A. Hoffmann und Achim von Arnim,” in Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope, ed. E. Goodman-Thau and G. Mattenklott (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. 201.

[15] Kilcher, “Die Kabbalah als Trope im ästhetischen Diskurs der Frühromantik,” p. 163.

[16] Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophische Fragmente. Zweyte Epoche. II, Zur Rhetorik und Poesie 1799 fin; cited in Kremer. “Kabbalistische Signaturen. Sprachmagie als Brennpunkt romantischer Imagination bei E. T. A. Hoffmann und Achim von Arnim,” p. 201.

[17] Robert Herndon Fife. “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann.” PMLA 22: 1 (1907), pp. 1–32.

[18] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, p. 709

[19] Lee M. Roberts. Literary nationalism in German and Japanese Germanistik (Peter Lang, 2010), pp.114–116.

[20] Crumey, Andrew. “Was Beethoven a Freemason?” Retrieved from https://crumey.co.uk/beethoven_6_was_he_a_freemason.html

[21] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, p. 709.

[22] John George Robertson. “Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte. In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 10, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 749–750.

[23] Ned Pennant-Rea. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Strange Stories.” The Public Domain Review (May 22, 2018). Retrieved from https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/e-t-a-hoffmann-s-strange-stories/

[24] James M. McGlathery. Mysticism and Sexuality. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Part I: Hoffmann and His Sources. American University Studies I, 3 (Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1981), Chapter 9: “Spiritualism.”

[25] William Morris. The Earthly Paradise (Psychology Press, 2002), p. 714.

[26] Ronald Taylor. “Part 1, Chapter 3: The Adventures of the Journey.” The Devil's Elixirs (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 1963), pp. 95, 101, 107.

[27] Patrick Bridgwater. The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft (Editions Rodopi, 2013), p. 51.

[28] M. W. Götzinger. “Balladen von J. W. Göthe.” Deutsche Dichter (in German). Vol. 1 (Leipzig: J. F. Hartknoch, 1831), p. 301.

[29] Hugh Chisholm (ed.). “Tieck, Johann Ludwig.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 962.

[30] Hugh Chisholm (ed). “Chamisso, Adelbert von.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 5, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911). pp. 825–826.

[31] Richard Block. “Queering the Jew Who Would Be German: Peter Schlemihl's Strange and Wonderful History.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 40: 2 (2004), pp 94.

[32] Max Zeldner. “A Note on ‘Schlemiel’.” The German Quarterly, 26: 2 (1953), pp. 115–117.

[33] Richard Ernest Walker. “Peter von Staufenberg.” In John M. Jeep (ed.). Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 2001), pp. 616–617.

[34] Edward D. Seeber. “Sylphs and Other Elemental Beings in French Literature since Le Comte de Gabalis (1670).” PMLA, 59: 1 (March, 1944), pp. 71-83.

[35] Hanns Heinz Ewers. “Alraune.” Frank Braun Trilogy #2 (1911). Book description. Retrieved from http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18464748-alraune

[36] Gerina Dunwich. Herbal Magick: A Guide to Herbal Enchantments, Folklore, and Divination (Weiser Book, 2019).

[37] Eveline Goodman-Thau. “Golem, Adam oder Antichrist.” In in Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope, ed. E. Goodman-Thau and G. Mattenklott (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. 119.

[38] Stephen Bertman. “The Role of the Golem in the Making of Frankenstein.” The Keats-Sjelley Review, 29:1 (April 2015), pp. 42–50.

[39] Joanne Wilkes. Lord Byron and Madame de Stäel: Born for Opposition (London: Ashgate, 1999).

[40] Thomas L. Ashton. Byron’s Hebrew melodies (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

[41] Per Faxneld & Jesper Aa. Petersen. The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 42.

[42] D. L. Macdonald & Kathleen Scherf. “Introduction.” The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Œdipus (Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2008). p. 10.

[43] Ibid., p. 10.

[44] See Sanborn, F.B., ed. The Romance of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, John Howard Payne and Washington Irving (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1907).

[45] Daniel Hoffman. Form and Fable in American Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 1961). p. 85 (footnote).

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