Consumption, Creativity, and Authors around 1800: The Case of E.T.A. Hoffmann

Specialization, or the division of labour, defined European economies around 1800. The cultural response of German literary writers such as Goethe, Schiller, and the Early German Romantics to the conceptual nexus of consumption and production is well known. But other canonical writers, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, have been misunderstood in relation to classical-cum-Romantic thought. This essay offers an overview of contemporary authors’ attitudes towards specialization, and to consumer culture around 1800 specifically. It then embeds a close reading of Hoffmann’s story Der Sandmann (1816) into that historical context. Consumerism is the source of Hoffmann’s creativity and becomes the subject of his critique. But it is not the counter-concept of his art. Hoffmann’s literary works achieve their critique of consumption through an immanent form of irony that is enacted within literature as a self-conscious commodity, without transcendence or some theoretical (Hegelian) overcoming. Thus the final part of this article asks how we might describe Hoffmann’s position theoretically, drawing critically upon the twentieth-century thought of Guy Debord.