Kunz's crack

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General view of the Kunz crack
Detail from a city map of Berlin. Hoffmann's house is marked in red.

The Kunzsche Riss or Kunzische Riss was a pen drawing by ETA Hoffmann , which he sent to his Bamberg publisher Carl Friedrich Kunz in July 1815 after he moved to Taubenstrasse in Berlin . The work has only survived in a facsimile form; the original is burned.

History and description

On July 1, 1815, Hoffmann and his wife Michalina moved into an apartment in Taubenstrasse 31. The house was part of a block between Charlottenstrasse , Taubenstrasse, Friedrichstrasse and Jägerstrasse ; the street-side windows of the apartment faced Charlottenstrasse and some of Taubenstrasse. The house belonged to the secret senior building officer von Alten . The actor Devrient, who was friends with Hoffmann, lived in a neighboring apartment . The building was demolished in 1905 and replaced by a successor in 1907. A plaque there commemorates Hoffmann, whose last residence was the apartment on Taubenstrasse. The Kunz crack does not provide any information about what the house looked like from the outside, but Günter de Bruyn says: “It was a three-story house with a hipped roof , cuboid plaster and wreaths of stucco on the well-proportioned facade [...] Hoffmanns lived upstairs on the second floor, which, like the first floor, was lower than the magnificent, high-windowed middle floor. "

In his 24.1 by 39.1 cm large crack, Hoffmann combined a - not north-facing - site plan of the house with an apartment floor plan of his new dwelling and numerous figurative representations. He did not depict these and various buildings from the area around the apartment from above, as the layout of the sheet actually required as an apartment and street plan, but switched to the perspective of a passer-by. Most of these figures are aligned like the drawings of the two churches and a large part of the lettering, so that the viewer can find out where "above and below" should be on this sheet and the drawing is to be viewed as landscape format. However, there are exceptions: The rehearsing dancers in the theater and Fouqués' carriage are rotated by 90 degrees compared to the other figures and the church representations, although for the dancers the ground is to be thought on the left and for Fouqués with the carriage and horses on the right, the heads of these So point the shape towards the center of the picture.

Hoffmann's apartment

The apartment floor plan

The apartment floor plan is in the lower right quarter of the drawing. The apartment was accessed via a house entrance on Taubenstrasse; According to Hoffmann's drawing, the apartment could be entered via stairs and hallways either through a door to the anteroom or through the kitchen door. The anteroom faced Taubenstrasse and was laid out as a passage room, behind which there was a so-called state room, the two windows of which also faced Taubenstrasse. Behind this state room were two smaller rooms, on the one hand the corner room, referred to in the Kunzschen Riss as the "woman's room", on the other hand the so-called "work room". From the window of the work room, the "Government Councilor Hoffmann" looks out onto the street, smoking at the Kunz crack. He has turned to the left and is apparently talking to his neighbor Devrient, who is also smoking. Between Hoffmann's study and Devrient's apartment, however, there is still the Hoffmann family's bedroom, in which, seen from above, the couple is shown lying in separate beds. From this bedroom a door leads into a “cabinet”, behind which there is a narrow “domesticated room” and the kitchen.

Devrient's apartments and the other residents of the house are not shown in detail; instead, the house owner is shown within the lines that mark the outer walls of the house: von Alten has just measured a mousetrap in the shape of a Gothic church with a ruler , which clearly towers over the building council .

Passers-by in front of the apartment

There are three women walking under Hoffmann's window on Charlottenstrasse. Further to the left, just before the corner of Jägerstrasse, a soldier is marching with a dog running, and two street musicians are playing a waltz. According to the inscription, there is a "large magazine" here.

On the Taubenstraße, bottom right of the Kunz's plan, is racing under the windows of Hoffmann's apartment of the "Baron Fouqué from Nennhausen " in a two-horse over. By Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué the 1811 published came Undine fairy tale , the Hoffmann as the basis of his romantic magic opera Undine used. This opera was premiered a good year after the creation of the Kunzschen Riss on August 3, 1816 at the Royal Theater in Berlin.

The theater

The theater around 1815

The theater, which opened in 1802, was across from Hoffmann's apartment on Gendarmenmarkt . In the summer of 1817 it was destroyed by fire, in which the decorations on Undine were also destroyed. Hoffmann watched the fire from his apartment.

On the Kunz crack, the theater building takes up the middle as an elongated rectangle with a triangular gable attached. On the narrow left side, towards Gendarmenmarkt or Jägerstraße, an entrance is marked, behind which rehearsing dancers are sketched. To the right of this group, the theater clock, whose dial is divided somewhat unorthodox, shows the noon or midnight hour. Below the clock you can see the heads of rehearsing choristers, above which the ground floor of the actual theater space is indicated by a few curved pen strokes. A large part of the building is, however, taken up by the “restoration in the theater”. On a floor covering made of beef steaks comes the corpulent “Capellm. Weber ”, both arms apparently loaded with delicacies and flanked by two cups in which Madeira and Chambertin are located. Hoffmann's fictional Kapellmeister Kreisler stands with his arms crossed and watches Weber's appearance. To the right of the scene and turning his back to it, Count Brühl , the artistic director , receives four poets who bow submissively to him. On the triangular gable, which is attached to the long side of the theater building facing away from Hoffmann's house, there is a monkey that stands on its hind legs. Michele Cometa wrote about this that it was difficult to decide whether the monkey "alludes to the pantomimes that took place in the theater or to a too literal application of a Greec stylistic element by the architect Langhans ."

At various points in the Kunz crack there are references to the theater program in Hoffmann's time. On the Gendarmenmarkt, on the other side of the junction with Jägerstrasse, there is a group of people gesticulating vigorously, labeled “Our traffic” and “Jews”. The anti-Semitic piece of our traffic from Carl Sessa was performed on September 2, 1815 after several delays. The one-act act sparked heated controversy.

Above the top left corner of the rectangle that denotes the theater, an antique draped figure can be seen on the Kunz crack, which is inscribed with "Epimenides". The premiere of the play Des Epimenides Awakening by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took place on March 30, 1815 in the opera house. A little further away from the theater, almost at the top of the picture and a little to the left of the center of the sheet, there is a figure labeled “ Armide ”, holding a goblet in his raised hand. The actress Anna Milder-Hauptmann , who lived in the same house as Hoffmann and Devrient, played the leading role in Gluck's opera Armide on June 9, 1815 . Between the Armide figure and the theater building there is a bird “Strauss” walking along Markgrafenstrasse, to Armide's right a lion; both animals could be allusions to stage names. To the left of the bouquet, turning his back to the viewer of the drawing, stands a figure called "Nemo". On the right narrow side of the theater, two smoking cisterns can be seen on the Kunzschen crack.

Passers-by and objects in distant areas

Several contemporaries of Hoffmann can be seen on Markgrafenstrasse, to the right of the theater house gable with the monkey. August Ferdinand Bernhardi , walking to the right, meets Ludwig Tieck , who, followed by Clemens Brentano , holds a walking stick in his hand.

The theater building is flanked by the French and German Domes , on whose domes oversized "bell ringer" sit, each holding a bell in their hand. Their faces are facing each other. Below the "German Church" you can see some vegetable vendors who are selling their goods. Around this church you can also see an oversized rose, a bird in flight and, in the upper right corner of the Kunz crack, an unknown person who has lowered his pants in front of Hoffmann's place of work, the Supreme Court, and is relieving himself.

Bars, shops and Hoffmann's creatures

The area encompassed by the Kunzsche Riss is limited by several bars and shops that Hoffmann frequented. In the lower left corner, for example, the Lutter & Wegner wine shop is entered. Both Hoffmann and Devrient were regulars there; Hoffmann drew two visitors seated at a table in the rectangle that indicates the outline of the building. Across from Lutter & Wegener - on the Kunz crack on the left edge of the picture - the "Italiänische Waarenhandlung" Moretti had its seat. Hoffmann sketched part of the offer of this action and also provided his drawing with the note "Extrafeiner Rum". He noted the same thing in Thiermann, another “Italian act”, which was located in Markgrafenstrasse and is located on the Kunz crack at the top of the picture to the right of the bell ringer of the French Cathedral. In addition to the rum, "Oyster Caviar pp " are also noted in this action. Finally, further to the right on the Kunz crack at the upper edge of the picture, the restoration and large wine bar near Schonert is entered, which, at least according to the drawing, was characterized by meter-long menu and wine lists and in which, among other things, “H. Kunz from Bamberg ”, the addressee of the Kunz crack, can be seen. Finally, on Jägerstrasse, in the block of houses that Hoffmann lived, a “Magazin de Modes” has been drawn in and adorned with a few sketched hats.

This universe is populated not only by real contemporaries of Hoffmann and extras such as the vegetable women, but also, especially in the left part of the crack, by characters from Hoffmann's stories. In the upper left corner, for example, the pipe-smoking student Anselmus, behind whom the serpentine serpentine is curling around a branch, moves to the left out of the picture, whereas the Vice-Principal Paulmann below this scene, striding to the right and tucking his tricorn under his arm , will disappear just behind the French Church. All these figures are known from the golden pot . Other figures, on the other hand, come from the adventures of New Year's Eve : Doctor Dapertutto leads the courtesan Giulietta across the Jägerstrasse / Charlottenstrasse intersection, Schlemihl smokes his pipe almost at the top of the picture above the raised hand of Epimenides and between Schlemihl and Armida one sees, but apparently one A little further back, Erasmus Spikher, who tries to find his lost reflection in a hand mirror.

The Kunzsche Riss as a poetic program

The aforementioned Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, Hoffmann's alter ego , appears in the life views of the cat Murr . Klaus Deterding complained that Friedrich Schnapp , the editor of Hoffmann's correspondence, had assigned Kreisler to the real sphere and the non-fantastic figures. Hoffmann is "not identical with Kreisler because he remains in dualism ", while Hoffmann achieves duplicity . Kreisler stands in the middle, the entire graphic revolves around him, and around him, the real-unreal, the real and the unreal become even closer. Deterding considers the Kunz crack to be an essential part of Hoffmann's oeuvre. The drawing "exemplifies Hoffmann's poetic worldview as an integration of the real and the unreal" and is thus "a concentrate of Hoffmann's entire poetics."

Web links

Commons : Kunzscher Riss  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. The date July 15, 1815 can be found at www.has-augsburg.de , other sources mention July 18, 1815.
  2. a b Hoffmann. The Kunzian Rift. Caricature based on a drawing on sammlung-online.stadtmuseum.de
  3. This is the apparently more widespread address information that Hoffmann also used. On etahoffmann.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de , where an interactive version of the Kunz crack can be found, the address Taubenstrasse 32 is given.
  4. a b Hoffmann's apartment at Taubenstrasse 31 at www.hs-augsburg.de
  5. ETA Hoffmann at www.gedenkenafeln-in-berlin.de
  6. ^ Günter de Bruyn: Reading joy. S. Fischer Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-104-03274-0 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  7. a b Dichterfreunde on www.hs-augsburg.de
  8. The playhouse on www.hs-augsburg.de
  9. Michele Cometa, Framing in Crisis. Literature and Optical Devices in the Age of Hoffmann , in: Valeria Cammarata: Archaeologies of Visual Culture. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016, ISBN 978-3-847-00220-8 , p. 176 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
  10. Theater scenes on www.hs-augsburg.de
  11. Wine bars and stores at www.hs-augsburg.de
  12. Figures from Hoffmann's stories on www.hs-augsburg.de
  13. Klaus Deterding: Hoffmann's stories. Königshausen & Neumann, 2007, ISBN 978-3-826-03630-9 , p. 87 f. ( f. # v = onepage limited preview in the Google book search)
  14. Klaus Deterding: Hoffmann's stories. Königshausen & Neumann, 2007, ISBN 978-3-826-03630-9 , p. 88 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
  15. Klaus Deterding: Hoffmann's stories. Königshausen & Neumann, 2007, ISBN 978-3-826-03630-9 , p. 82 ( limited preview in the Google book search)