The Serapion Brethren

"The Serapion Brethren was a multi-volume work with a narrative frame in which friends get together at a tavern to drink and tell stories. And in that frame Hoffmann talks about an eccentric recluse by the name of Serapion, and he developed the Serapion principle, which was an eidetic concept of art. He argued that if an artist is going to be devoted to his writing, everything that you see in your imagination has to be as real as reality or, if anything, more real than reality. His fairy tales quite often start off with a very factual or realistic setting and gradually draw you into a world that is imaginative and very complex because it deals with all sorts of questions, such as insanity or the politics of his time. He was writing at the time of the Holy Alliance, 1815-1825, which was an extremely reactionary period. He stood up to the archconservatives in Prussia, and in one of his last stories, Master Flea , he criticises the police chief of Berlin in a very subtle way. I think he also paved the ground for existentialism because he believed there was no God, and he proposed that we are all artists of our own lives and that many of the stories to do with God are fairy tales."