“The Sandman” (original: “Der Sandmann”) was written by E.T.A. Hoffmann and first appeared in Nachtstücke (1817). Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a major figure of the German Romantic movement and is now remembered for his music and fiction, which is regarded highly. Hoffmann is an important historical figure, both in the Romantic movement and in the history of fantastic fiction.

“The Sandman” is set in Germany early in the nineteenth century. Nathanael, a young college student now, was terrified as a child by the story of the Sandman, who

comes to little children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them into a bag and takes them to the half moon as food for his little ones; and they sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty little boys’ and girls’ eyes out with them.¹

His father would often send Nathanael to bed early, saying that the “Sandman” was coming. Nathanael would hear heavy footsteps walking into his father’s study on the second floor of the house. Naturally, Nathanael becomes more than a little neurotic. Adding to his miseries is one of his father’s visitors, the old lawyer Coppelius, a grotesque, malicious figure who hates and taunts Nathanael and his siblings. Nathanael is convinced that Coppelius is the Sandman. One night Nathanael decides to solve the mystery of his father’s visitor and hides in the study when he is sure that “the Sandman” is coming. Nathanael discovers that it is Coppelius who is visiting his father, and that the pair of them are working together on a mysterious project. Coppelius’ cry, “Eyes here! Eyes!” scares Nathanael into screaming. Coppelius is furious at being discovered and tries to blind Nathanael, but Nathanael’s father pleads with Coppelius not to do so, and Coppelius satisfies himself by squeezing Nathanael’s limbs and saying, “That’s not quite right altogether! It’s better as it was!–the old fellow knew what he was about.”² Nathanael passes out from the pain. When he awakens, Coppelius is gone, and he does not return for a year’s time. When he does, his experiment with Nathanael’s father leads to an explosion which kills Nathanael’s father. Coppelius vanishes again.

Years later, Nathanael and Clara, the sister of Nathanael’s best friend Lothar, exchange letters. Nathanael, now attending university in Italy, tells Clara about how he is bothered by an Italian peddler of optical goods, Coppola, who Nathanael is certain is Coppelius. This reminder of his past brings back terrible memories for Nathanael, and Clara tries persuade him that the only influence Coppelius has over Nathanael is in Nathanael’s mind. Nathanael changes his mind about Coppola’s true identity but becomes increasingly mentally erratic. Coppola continues to bother Nathanael, and Nathanael buys a pair of binoculars from Coppola to make him go away. Nathanael is attending the classes of Professor Spalanzani and falls under the sway of Spalanzani’s daughter Olimpia and furiously woos her, both at a coming out ball for Olimpia and afterwards. Nathanael does not realize that Olimpia is a robot designed to perfectly resemble a beautiful young woman (although she has a limited vocabulary) until he discovers Spalanzani and Coppola, who turns out to be Coppelius after all, quarreling over Olimpia, who Spalanzani describes as “my best automaton.” Coppelius escapes with Olimpia, but not before Nathanael notices her “pallid waxed face” in which there are “no eyes, merely black holes in their stead; she was an inanimate puppet.”³ Nathanael has a breakdown, and Clara nurses him back to health. But then Nathanael looks at Clara through the pocket perspective he bought from Coppelius and he sees something which makes him go insane. Nathanael tries to throw Clara out a window, but is prevented from doing so by Clara’s brother. Coppelius is watching the struggle, and when Nathanael sees Coppelius he throws himself through the window and kills himself.

“The Sandman” is an odd and disturbing story. It is one of the first psychological horror stories, and the one which inspired Freud to write “The Uncanny” (1919), his famous analysis of Hoffmann’s story. What makes the story unsettling to readers even today is its ambiguity. It is never clear whether the events are actually taking place or whether Nathanael’s perception of them is severely at odds with reality. Hoffmann portrays Nathanael as immature and self-obsessed, and some of his behavior can be ascribed to vanity and stupidity. He reads his poetry to Olimpia, for example, and never realizes that her only response, “Ach!” does not mean that she is in love with him or that she, alone understands him. The speed with which Nathanael forgets about Clara and falls in love with Olimpia says something about his immaturity, as does his temper tantrum when, in response to his rattling on about Coppelius’ evil influence, Clara tells Nathanael that “I shall have to scold you as the Evil Principle which exercises a fatal influence upon my coffee.”⁴ And his mental breakdowns and final flight into murderous insanity show that his grasp upon reality is loose. He is a character whose perspective and version of events is an unreliable one, and it is this unreliability and sense of insanity which can make “The Sandman” an unnerving read.

Even taking Nathanael’s shaky mental state into account, however, there are one or two moments when the supernatural seems a viable explanation for events. Olimpia’s “Good night, dear” to Nathanael might be in his head. Spalanzani’s visual similarity to the Italian mystic and fraud Cagliostro might be a coincidence or might be something only Nathanael sees. Coppelius’ statement about Nathanael’s limbs, “That’s not quite right altogether! It’s better as it was!–the old fellow knew what he was about,” might have no meaning at all. But interpreted supernaturally, these things take on a darker hue.

It is this ambiguity that makes “The Sandman” so effective as a horror story. Its single flaw is the number of authorial asides and comments Hoffmann includes. He was clearly trying for a conversational tone in his asides, as when he relates his difficulty in coming up with the best way to begin the story, but these asides disrupt the flow of the story and interrupt the unnerving tone that Nathanael’s narration establishes.

The “Sandman” also has a few moments of humor and satire, so that we might reasonably wonder if Hoffmann was, to a limited degree, sending up certain aspects of the Romantic tradition. At the beginning of the story Nathanael explicitly compares himself with Franz Moor, the jealous brother in Schiller’s The Robbers. The Robbers was an influential play, and Hoffmann’s invocation of Schiller shows that Hoffmann was aware of his predecessors and contemporaries in the genre he was working in. But Nathanael is so clearly a self-important and humorless prat, and Clara’s statement about him being the “Evil Principle” which affects her coffee so nicely puts the needle to him that the reader may well wonder if Hoffmann was, on some level, mocking Nathanael’s Romantic characteristics.

Print: Peter Wortsman, ed., Tales of the German Imagination: From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.

¹ Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Sandman,” in Tales From the German, Comprising Specimens From the Most Celebrated Authors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844), 141.

² Hawthorne, “The Sandman,” 144.

³ Hawthorne, “The Sandman,” 162.

⁴ Hawthorne, “The Sandman,” 152.