When they woke, as if from a deep sleep, they were sitting on soft moss. The storm was over, the sun was shining brightly, and raindrops hung like sparkling jewels on the gleaming bushes and trees. The children were very surprised to find that their clothes were perfectly dry, and they no longer felt at all cold and wet. “Oh,” cried Felix, stretching his arms up in the air, “oh, the strange child has protected us!” And now both Felix and Christlieb called out loud, their voices echoing through the wood, “Oh, dear child, do come back to us. We long to see you so much, we can’t bear to live without you!”
Then it seemed to them as if a bright ray of light shone through the bushes, and the flowers it touched raised their heads, but however the children called for their dear playmate, sounding sadder and sadder, there was nothing else to be seen. In downcast mood, they went home, where their parents, not a little anxious about them because of the storm, welcomed them joyfully. “I’m glad to see you back,” said Sir Thaddeus von Brakel. “I must admit I was afraid that Master Inkblot might still be roaming the wood and was on your trail.”
Felix told the tale of all that had happened to them. “Those are strange fancies of yours,” said Lady von Brakel. “If you’re going to dream such silly dreams out in the wood you’d better not go there at all any more, but stay in the house instead.”
Of course no such thing happened, for when the children begged, “Dear Mama, do let us go out into the wood,” Lady von Brakel would say, “Off you go then, off you go, and mind you come back like good children.”
However, it so happened that quite soon the children themselves didn’t want to go into the wood. Sad to say, there was no sign of the strange child, and as soon as Felix and Christlieb ventured deeper into the bushes or went near the duck pond the huntsman, the harpist and the doll would rise from the ground and sneer at them, saying, “Silly things, simple-minded creatures—you can do without toys, you didn’t know how to treat fine, well-educated folk like us—you silly, simple-minded creatures!”
There was no bearing that, and the children preferred to stay at home.
THE END OF THE STORY
“I DON’T KNOW,” SAID SIR THADDEUS von Brakel to his good lady one day, “I don’t know what the matter is, but I’ve felt so strange for the last few days. I could almost think that wicked Master Inkblot had something to do with it, for ever since the moment when I hit him with the fly swatter and drove him away, all my limbs have felt like lead.”
And indeed, Sir Thaddeus was growing weaker and paler every day. He no longer strode over his fields, he was no longer busy about the house, but instead he sat deep in thought for hours, and then he would ask Felix and Christlieb to tell him about the strange child. If they talked enthusiastically about the wonders of the child, or the bright and beautiful realms that were their friend’s home, he would give a melancholy smile, and tears came into his eyes.
As for Felix and Christlieb, they were unhappy because the strange child stayed away, leaving them exposed to the malice of the ugly broken toys in the bushes and the duck pond, so that they didn’t like to venture into the wood. “Come, children, let’s go into the wood together,” said Sir Thaddeus von Brakel to Felix and Christlieb one fine bright morning. “I won’t let Master Inkblot’s evil pupils do you any harm.” And taking the children’s hands he went out with them to the wood, which was fuller than ever today of radiance, delightful scents and birdsong.
When they were sitting in the soft grass surrounded by fragrant flowers, Sir Thaddeus began as follows: “Dear children, there is something on my mind, and I cannot put off telling you any longer that I too once knew the strange and lovely child who showed you so many marvels here in the wood. When I was your age, the child visited me as well, and we played the most wonderful games. How my friend left me in the end I can’t now remember, and I cannot explain how I came to forget all about the lovely child, so that when you told me how your playmate appeared to you I didn’t believe a word of it, although I often had a faint glimmering of the truth. But for the last few days I have been thinking more about the happy days of my youth than for many years past. And then the lovely, magical child came into my mind, as bright and fair as your friend appeared to you, and now the same longing that you feel fills my breast, but it will break my heart. I feel that this is the last time I shall ever sit among these beautiful trees and bushes. I shall soon be leaving you. Children, when I am dead keep the strange child firmly in your minds.”
Felix and Christlieb were grief-stricken. They wept and wailed, and cried, “No, Father, no, you won’t die. You’ll live with us for a long time yet, and play with the strange child too!”
Next day, however, Sir Thaddeus von Brakel lay sick in bed. A tall thin man came and felt his pulse, and said, “It will be all right.” But it was not all right, for on the third day of his sickness Sir Thaddeus died. How his good lady mourned him, how his children wrung their hands, crying, “Oh Father—dear Father!”
Soon after that, when the four farmers of Brakelheim had carried the lord of the manor to his grave, a couple of men turned up at the house. They looked like ugly customers, and indeed they rather resembled Master Inkblot. They told Lady von Brakel that they had come to seize the little estate and everything in the house, because the late Sir Thaddeus von Brakel had owed his lordship Count Cyprianus von Brakel money worth all that and more, and now he wanted the debt to be paid. So Lady von Brakel was left in the direst poverty, and she had to leave the pretty little village of Brakelheim. She decided to go to a relation who lived not far away, so she tied up a little bundle with the few clothes left to her, Felix and Christlieb did the same, and they left the house, shedding many tears. They were passing through a forest, just coming to a bridge over a river that they must cross, and they could already hear the water rushing along, when Lady von Brakel fell fainting to the ground in bitter grief. Felix and Christlieb went down on their knees, sobbing and wailing, “Poor unhappy children that we are, will no one, no one take pity on us?”
At that moment it was as if the distant roar of the river turned to sweet music, the bushes moved, murmuring as if in anticipation, and soon the whole forest was radiant with wonderful sparkling light. The strange child stepped out of the sweetly fragrant leaves, surrounded by such dazzling brightness that Felix and Christlieb had to close their eyes. Then they felt a gentle touch, and they heard the strange child’s lovely voice saying, “Don’t be so sad, my dear playmates. Do you think I don’t love you any more? Can I ever leave you? No—though you may not see me any longer with your eyes, I will always be with you, doing all I can to make you glad and happy. Keep me in your faithful hearts as you have done before, and then neither the wicked Pepser nor any other evil-doer can have power over you. Only love me truly for ever!”
“We will, we will!” cried Felix and Christlieb. “We love you with all our hearts!”
When they could open their eyes again, the strange child was gone, but all the grief and pain had left them, and they felt heavenly joy deep in their hearts. Lady von Brakel slowly sat up. “Children,” she said, “I saw you in a dream just now surrounded by sparkling gold, and the sight delighted and consoled me in a very strange way.”
There was delight in the children’s eyes as well, and their cheeks glowed. They told heir mother how the strange child had just been there with them, and she said, “I don’t know why I feel I must believe in your fairy tale today, or why all the pain and grief are leaving me, but let us pluck up courage and go on our way, comforted.”
They were welcomed very kindly to the house of Lady von Brakel’s relation, and everything turned out just as the strange child had promised. Felix and Christlieb succeeded so well in all they did that they and their mother were very happy. And even later they played in sweet dreams with the strange child who came from that marvellous, distant country, and who never tired of showing them all its wonders.
AFTERWORD
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, who changed the third of his
original forenames from Wilhelm to Amadeus in homage to Mozart, was almost as extraordinary a character as the many eccentrics in his works of fiction. Born in 1776, he came from a family of lawyers, and worked as a court legal officer for a number of his forty-five years of life. He was also a talented musician, composer and music critic, and hoped for a while to make music his main profession. His opera Undine is in the German Romantic tradition of which Carl Maria von Weber was the outstanding operatic exponent. He was also a good artist and caricaturist, and—like Councillor Drosselmeier in The Nutcracker—took a great interest in ingenious mechanisms, particularly automata. However, it is for his literary talent that he is chiefly remembered. He left an astonishing number of writings. Hoffmann seems to have been one of those artists in various fields, chief among them his beloved Mozart, whose lives were so full to the brim of creative work that one might think they had a premonition of untimely death.
There is a common misconception about Hoffmann, to the effect that he wrote a book called, in the original, The Tales of Hoffmann. He didn’t; the phrase comes from the title of Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann, featuring Hoffmann himself as protagonist (the role is written for tenor voice) and three of his stories, one act of the opera for each, and naturally enough it has often been borrowed for selections from his works. For of course he did write tales, a great many of them, as well as two novels, The Devil’s Elixirs and The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, the second being left unfinished at the time of his death in 1822. The two stories in this volume come from a work entitled Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brotherhood), published in 1819. It has a framework narrative in which a group of young men interested in the arts meet regularly to talk and to tell stories. The name of their club is taken from the saint’s day of St Serapion, when it met for the first time. A real group of the same name comprised Hoffmann and several of his friends, although he gives fictional names to the club members in the book: Ottmar, Cyprian, Lothar and so on. In the course of this long book of almost a thousand pages, they tell each other many of the most famous ‘tales of Hoffmann’.
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Strange Child are the two claimed by the young men in the framework structure of the book to be specifically for children. Lothar, who reads them aloud to his friends, says that he made them up for his sister’s children; in fact it is likely that Hoffmann wrote them for Friedrich and Marie (whose names are those of the children in The Nutcracker), the son and daughter of his friend Julius Hitzig. The narrative several times addresses a real-life Fritz and Marie directly. When Lothar has finished, one of his friends, Theodor, suggests that it is too complex for children, and later, when Lothar has read aloud The Strange Child, another member of the club, Ottmar, wonders if this too is beyond a child’s imagination. Both stories do have their darker moments. Although Lothar has assured his friends that The Strange Child is more of a genuine children’s story than The Nutcracker, the haunting of the wood where Felix and Christlieb used to play by their malevolent broken toys lends an eerie touch to the atmosphere. The magical child, incidentally, presents a translator with an intriguing little puzzle. The word for ‘child’ in German is a neuter noun, das Kind, and therefore takes the pronoun es, ‘it’, but that has nothing to do with the child’s sex (just as das Mädchen, ‘girl’, is also es). In English, a language without grammatical gender, we do not usually call a child ‘it’. Moreover, Felix in the story sees the children’s new playmate as another boy, his sister Christlieb is sure that the child is a girl. It is therefore up to the translator to avoid any pronoun or possessive at all for the magical child.
In The Nutcracker in particular, the reader might almost have been given entrance to a museum of nineteenth-century German toys. When the clock strikes the witching hour of midnight, Fritz’s toy hussars come to life, ready to fight the Mouse King’s army. Other traditional characters from the toy cupboard join their ranks, “three Scaramouches, one Pantaloon, four chimney sweeps, two zither-players and a drummer”. The first two characters mentioned derive originally from figures in the Italian commedia dell’arte. Meanwhile Marie’s dolls stay in their luxurious doll’s house in the cupboard. Edible models in human form also feature—some are made of tragacanth, or traganth, a sweet gummy substance, the equivalent of modern jelly babies. The Mouse King blackmails Marie into giving them up, along with her large collection of little sugar people, Devisenfiguren, literally ‘motto figures’, because the sugar figures contained ‘mottoes’, maxims written on little pieces of paper, on much the same principle as the jokes in Christmas crackers today. Consumption of a motto proves fatal to a mouse cavalryman who unwisely gobbles up the slip of paper as well as the sugar model itself. We also hear of honey-cake people from Thorn, then in Germany, now Toruń in Poland. This spiced honey cake was a famous local delicacy (in Polish piernik or miodownik), and the figures made from spiced honey cake, like their close relations the gingerbread men of past times, were decorated with edible gold leaf; hence the expression ‘to take the gilt off the gingerbread’.
Here and there Hoffmann allows himself a little in-joke, a literary or musical reference that might well have been above the heads of child readers even in his own time. Marie’s sugar figures include a tenant farmer (whom I have translated as Farmer Caraway) who is a character in a play by the dramatist August von Kotzebue, Hoffmann’s contemporary. And the Maid of Orleans is from Friedrich Schiller’s well-known play about Joan of Arc. Schiller’s name lives on, unlike that of Peter von Winter, a member of the famous Mannheim orchestra of the time, and composer of an opera with a title that translates into English as The Interrupted Sacrifice. Hoffmann refers to it when Marie and Nutcracker (now revealed to be young Drosselmeier), visiting the Land of Toys, witness a chaotic traffic jam in the capital city.
The most famous musical connection of The Nutcracker, of course, is with Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. It is another frequent misconception that the ballet is based directly on Hoffmann’s novella. In fact Alexandre Dumas père, author of The Three Musketeers and many other rousing historical novels, retold Hoffmann’s story in a French version which set out to soften the darker and more grotesque elements. In other words, Dumas prettified it. Good modern productions of the ballet tend to bring the visual details back as close as possible to the sinister side of the original. However, Hoffmann’s written works, fittingly for a man whose other burning interest was music, were certainly an inspiration to composers—not only do we have Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Offenbach’s opera, but also the ballet Coppélia, musical score by Léo Delibes, based on two more stories by Hoffmann.
In her authoritative book Comparative Children’s Literature (originally written in German and published in English in 2005), Professor Emer O’Sullivan of Leuphana University, Lüneburg, presents Hoffmann as a seminal figure in the field of fantasy for children. Of The Nutcracker, she writes: “This pioneering German literary fairy tale for children (as well as adults) depicted, for the first time, a realistic modern setting instead of the other-worldliness of fairy stories. The heroine’s belief in the wondrous—she is a psychologically realistic child figure—is satisfied only when she can experience another, fantastic world … With this work [Hoffmann] became the founding father of children’s fantasy.” Lothar, on behalf of Hoffmann, puts up a staunch defence of the genre, arguing for themes that will expand the imagination of the young. He would have been in agreement with the ever-sensible Dr Johnson, who pointed out, of books for children, that: “Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.”
Of these two stories, The Strange Child is hardly ever translated, and The Nutcracker is usually translated only heavily abbreviated or alternatively retold in simplified form, often for a picture book or a volume of stories from the ballet, and almost always leaving out the story within a story, The Tale of the Hard Nut, told to Marie when she is sick in bed by her
Godfather Drosselmeier. The present volume contains the full text in translation, showing how the internal story interacts with the main narrative around it. Thackeray may have been partly influenced by the humorously grotesque Tale of the Hard Nut in his The Rose and the Ring of 1854. Readers will also notice that C S Lewis was not the first to send a child into a magical kingdom through the gateway of a familiar everyday wardrobe.
Today we would be more likely to back Lothar—and through him Hoffmann—than the other members of the Serapion Brotherhood in contending that complexity and dark moments are not out of place in a story for the young. I rather doubt whether Hoffmann would have drawn a strict dividing line between the childish and the adult imagination anyway; he is regarded as an arch-Romantic to whom the power of imagination in itself was of great importance. He was also one of those rare Romantics (Byron also springs to mind) who had a sense of humour as well as a feeling for horror and grotesquerie. Professor O’Sullivan considers that it was the German Romantics, “in particular E T A Hoffmann”, who in their time introduced “internationally influential innovations in children’s literature”. That being so, many later writers and readers of the children’s fantasy genre owe a debt of gratitude to Hoffmann and his German contemporaries.
ANTHEA BELL
December 2010
Copyright
These stories first appeared as
Nussknacker und Mausekönig and Das fremde Kind
Published in the collection Die Serapionsbrüder 1819–21
This edition first published in 2011 by
Pushkin Press
12 Chester Terrace
London NW1 4ND
Translation © Anthea Bell 2010
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