Vickie Ziegler

The physician and the artist: psychological issues in E. T. A. Hoffmann's work

more clearly than in the life and works of the German Romantic writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. Hoffmann’s own wide-ranging reading in the new literature on the workings of the mind and his intense interest in madness and altered states of consciousness led him to integrate not only current medical knowledge but also debates about medical ethics into his fictional writing. While the interaction between literature and medicine recurs again and again in Hoffmann’s works, Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brotherhood) is unique in the way in which the theoretical discussion in the frame of problems of literature and the artist, such as the role of madness in the development of the artist, is so clearly juxtaposed with the representation of these ideas in fiction in the inner stories. Written near the end of Hoffmann’s