Transcription
Hello. Welcome to the Oxford German Classic podcast. My name is Karolina von Tobel, and I'm a graduate student in the sub-faculty of German here at Oxford. I also coordinate our essay competition for sixth-formers called “A German Classic,” and the goal of this podcast is to encourage you to engage with this year’s set texts. Their set text is *Der Sandmann*, or *The Sandman*, an eerie and mysterious short story written by E.T.A. Hoffmann over 200 years ago, in 1816. But before I say a bit more about that, let me introduce to you our guest, Neve Burns, who is, just like me, a graduate student in German here at Oxford.
Thank you for joining us, Neve.
Thank you for having me.
And could you say a bit more about yourself? So, we’re about you, from how long they’ve been at Oxford.
So my name is Neve Bruns. I’ve been at Oxford, I guess, for seven years now, which feels like a very long time, but I’m from Raheny in North Dublin, Ireland, and so I came here to do my undergraduate degree and I stayed for graduate study as well.
Mm-hmm. And I know that E.T.A. Hoffmann was actually one of your favorite writers during your undergrad.
Yes.
And what is your research on now?
So, at the moment, I’m studying mainly philosophy and a bit of poetry as well. So, I like 20th-century philosophers, especially women philosophers, looking at how they try to explain the unexplainable.
Mmm, alright. That sounds good. And today I’ll have a chat with you about Sigmund Freud, perhaps the most famous reader of this short story, *Der Sandmann*, and his ideas about the story. So, why don’t we start by hearing a bit more about who Freud was and why he’s become such a… such an iconic cultural figure?
Yep. So, um, Freud kind of captured the imagination of the sort of Austrian and German public right from the beginning of his work, and he developed… so he was basically the founder of this new therapeutic method called psychoanalysis. So, basically, it was a type of therapy, and it was called, in sort of popular culture, “talking therapy.” So, his theory was that people’s sort of physical anxieties and any kind of weird physical symptoms you might be having in your body are somehow an expression of a kind of inner turmoil, sort of repressed anxieties that you have. And a lot of the time that was down to, you know, childhood traumas, stuff that’s sort of hiding in your unconscious and that you’re trying to… to keep down, but the body’s sort of betraying them. And so I think, I mean, there’s a lot of factors at play in how Freud became so popular, but I think there’s definitely something appealing, and that’s sort of still quite appealing to people, in the idea of there being sort of hidden depths to the self, you know. So, this idea that your body is doing something and you don’t quite get what it is, but there’s some hidden meaning, there’s some real significance to it underneath. And I guess it’s also a way of almost restoring to people the sense of lost control over what their body does, because you can provide them with an explanation of where those inexplicable strange headaches and whatnot come from.
Exactly. So, I think the idea of the talking therapy is to sort of bring these things to the surface then and provide this explanation in therapy. So, you and your therapist talk about these symptoms, talk about your childhood, and you work at this sort of story for yourself. And that’s a story that, kind of like a literary story, finds these sorts of markers, these points of significance where things happen that suddenly start influencing the rest of your life, or that sort of give a shape to your life. So, it’s sort of creating your own personal story. And this takes us straight into *Der Sandmann*, because we find out quite a lot about the childhood of the main character in the story, Nathaniel. And so let me now just quickly talk us through what happens in the story.
So, the story is told by a narrator, Nathanael, who introduces himself as a friend of Nathaniel, a young student. And we find out that, as a child, Nathaniel used to be terrified of the Sandman, this sort of mythical fairytale figure and character from folk tales who puts children to sleep. And Nathaniel came to associate the Sandman with a mysterious friend of his father called Coppelius, who was an alchemist. Many years later, Nathaniel meets a man called Coppola, and he gets it into his head that Coppelius and Coppola are actually one and the same person. Now, his fiancée, Clara, and her brother Lothar keep telling him that this cannot be true. And we find out all this from three letters which form the first third of the story, roughly. And it is then that the narrator, the third-person narrator, steps in and takes us deeper into the strange and mysterious tale of Nathaniel and the aftermath of his meeting with Coppola. We soon find out more about another two key figures in Nathaniel’s life: a professor of natural sciences called Spalanzani and his beautiful daughter, Olympia. Nathaniel falls in love with Olympia, but it soon turns out that she is, in fact, an automaton, so a machine doll, constructed by Spalanzani and Coppelius/Coppola—the question of their identity is still important in the story and not quite resolved. And this is a shock that Nathaniel never quite recovers from.
So, what was it that so fascinated Freud about this story?
So, I think… I think the uncanny is the term around which Freud sort of structures all of his ideas about this story. He identifies in this story an idea of… it’s something more than just strange happenings, right? So, the idea of the uncanny—it comes, I mean, it’s the German word *unheimlich*—it comes from the German word *heimlich*, and he explains this in his essay, which means to be familiar, but at the same time it means, or it can mean, to be concealed. So, there’s a sense that something uncanny is something which is both familiar but which also has this sort of strange and unfamiliar sense to it, kind of… so almost like we can’t quite put our finger on what is familiar.
Exactly.
Exactly. So, the idea of the doppelgänger is a classic example of this. So, I think Freud saw in this novella lots of examples of these strange things, of these slightly familiar but slightly unfamiliar things which become sort of traumatic, which become so sort of exaggerated that it’s impossible not to kind of confront them. So, I think the kind of classic example which people will identify in this story is of Olympia, the automaton, but Freud was particularly concerned with the figure of the Sandman himself as kind of the classic uncanny figure in this novel. So, we’re going to focus on… on the Sandman, but maybe just before we move on to that, in what way do you think Olympia is uncanny?
So I guess the main thing is her eyes, right? So, Olympia sort of functions and kind of like a woman does, and she fools a lot of people, but not quite. And the thing that sort of people pick out about her—and this is all of the people at the party who see her playing piano and who see her kind of trying to function in society—everyone notices that her eyes aren’t quite right. So, in some ways she feels like a normal woman, but then her eyes are somehow lifeless, right? So, everyone notices this, and that’s what’s kind of uncanny about her, this idea that she’s just… she’s there, but she’s not quite there, and you can see that in her eyes.
Yeah. And then what is uncanny about the figure of the Sandman?
So, the Sandman… I mean, this also relates to the theme of the eyes. The Sandman is… and he’s a figure from a fairy tale, but at the same time he’s not… he’s also a real figure from Nathaniel’s childhood, and that is kind of uncanny in itself, the fact that he can be a sort of straightforward real-life person who also seems to have this connection to a fairy tale that… that we know isn’t real, but at the same time it’s sort of… it’s eating at us, you know. And this is in this idea of him stealing eyes, and this comes up again when he appears—or maybe not him, but his sort of alter ego of Coppola—appears with his sort of bag of eyes and glasses and so on. And so all of these themes are sort of creeping back, but we’re never quite sure to what extent these characters are… are really there or are just sort of… what’s real.
Yeah, exactly, whether it’s… to what extent it’s just in our main character’s head, you know, whether he’s just seeing things as being connected in this strange way.
Yeah. So, let’s… let’s go through all these iterations of the Sandman motif in the story, because that’s what Freud also does in his essay, right? So, first we have this character from folktales. Can you give us a short version of who this character is?
Yes. So, there’s a couple of versions of this. I mean, at first his mother says, “The Sandman will come; you have to go to bed,” and it’s only his nurse who tells him the full horrific fairy tale… fairy tale, which is that the Sandman—this weird sort of bird-like figure who comes along—pecks at the children’s eyes, brings the eyes to the bird children, and sort of feeds them to it. So, it’s a very kind of classic disturbing German fairy tale, but this version is sort of… it is a tale. And so, even as the very young Nathaniel associates it with this visitor to his father, once he gets a little bit… a little bit older, he does recognize that it is just a story, it is just a fairy tale, and it can’t be… this visitor can’t really be the Sandman.
Yeah. And it’s worth pointing out that this story is very familiar to German children to this day. In the GDR, there was this very famous fairytale *Sandmann*, which was… the… the *Koifisch*… the story where there are no terrifying bird children pecking at anybody’s eyes. And so, in this version of the story, the Sandman—the little Sandman—just sprinkled some magic powder and magic sand into the children’s eyes to put them to bed. But in this much more sinister version of the story, the eyes actually get taken out. That’s how you… hope this… or you don’t go to sleep; that’s what’s going to happen to you. And why does Nathaniel start to associate Coppelius, the alchemist, specifically with this figure?
So, in very simple terms, he’s always sent to bed when this figure arrives. So, when his father is beginning his sort of… I mean, what we sort of discover is alchemical trials or experiments with his friend or his colleague, Nathaniel is sent to bed at that time every night, and he… we sort of… is told this fairy tale, or told duration of this fairy tale, told to go to bed, and then at the same time he hears this figure enter the house, and so he can hear things happening, can hear who he thinks is the Sandman coming in in real life as he’s hearing the story. And so that’s sort of the root of what associates him with it. But then, of course, there’s this… um… traumatic event later on, and when he sort of sneaks down to see what’s going on, and Coppelius holds him up to the fire, and he’s terrified of losing his eyes, because he’s sort of been discovered spying on his father and his friend doing these trials, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on. So, this all sort of feels like part of a fairy tale to him; it feels like part of that really horrific version of the story.
Mm-hmm. And the motif of the eyes comes up again in this traumatic memory of this experimentation that Nathaniel doesn’t quite understand. Can you talk a bit about that?
Yes. So, and what happens eventually is that his father dies in front of him, and he sees the kind of horrific expression on his father’s face, and that scars him, and it sort of creates this pattern then, this kind of… I mean, if you want to talk about it in Freudian terms, this sort of unconscious pattern that he’s kind of forced to play over and over again. This obsession with the eyes becomes a really kind of essential part of his identity because of this extreme trauma of witnessing his father die in this horrible way.
Yeah. And… and already in this… in this scene, which is recounted to us in the letters at the beginning of the story, we already have this recurring pattern of somebody spying on something that they are not allowed to see. Yeah, so this is… no… looking at the experiment. So, that’s… that’s how it starts, and then almost a sort of punishment for it; his eyes are… he has this vision of his eyes being kind of threatened or taken away from him, and then the thing that he ends up seeing then is the death of his father. So, we can see how this becomes a traumatic memory. And so, how does this traumatic childhood memory impact Nathaniel’s adult life?
So, we see a kind of repetition of this pattern later on. And so, when he encounters the kind of… you know, who we might say potentially is the second iteration of Coppelius—Coppola—comes to his house and sells him this little eyeglass, and he then starts to spy on his neighbors, including Olympia, the daughter of the man next door. And Olympia, who turns out then to be this automaton, but it’s sort of through this eyeglass that he first encounters her, and that is him sort of repeating the pattern of his childhood; it’s him spying again; it’s spying through the window. And of course, that results in sort of some new traumatic experiences once he realizes what Olympia is and finally sees her being sort of… carried… her eyes falling out of her machine head, which is a kind of parallel or sort of like mirror image of the earlier trauma made real again as an adult.
Mm-hmm. And is there anything else about the recurring pattern that Freud was interested in? Or… so he says… it starts with the description of… yes, what we’ve been talking about… what does he do with… with… with this plot of the Sandman?
So, I mean, there are other things by the plot that he’s interested in. One in particular is the idea of the kind of narcissistic main characters. So, that gets back to this Freudian trope of the neurosis, and that goes back to Greek mythology itself. So, Narcissus was this figure who fell in love with his own reflection; he was this kind of beautiful man; everyone was falling in love with him, but he wasn’t interested in anyone else, and then he sees… he’s cursed, and he sees his own reflection in a pool and falls in love with it, and that leads to disaster because it’s not a viable relationship, I suppose. So, and Freud sort of sees in that the idea that a person who’s sort of repressing trauma, right, will look at… into the world and will see the world very much like colored by stuff that’s inside of them, and so they start to see reflections of themselves in the world around them. So, that happens through the eyes of Olympia, you know, there’s that scene where he’s talking at lengths to her, and she… all she responds with is “ah ah,” and he imagines that he’s having this amazing conversation with the woman he loves, but it’s really… she and her kind of eyes… her dead eyes are sort of acting as a reflection of him. So, I think that Narcissus story is quite a big aspect of that. And what that kind of gets down to is the main thrust of Freud’s essay, which is that in the uncanny and in these sorts of like strange patterns that repeat, what we’re getting is people trying to project on the world around them childhood or kind of primitive beliefs that they’ve sort of rejected on a conscious level, but that are still kind of fighting their way to the surface. And so that’s what’s going on and kind of throughout the world of the story in Freud’s eyes.
Mm-hmm. So it would sound like Freud then is on the side of Lothar and Clara in the story who suggests to Nathaniel that he… this is what Clara says to him: “You’ve had this traumatic experience in your childhood, and you’re letting it color your encounters with people in adult life.” What would Nathaniel say to that?
He doesn’t quite… buy into bits, not know. So, he accuses her of being, I think, prosaic and tells her she doesn’t have a kind of poetic soul; she can’t understand the mysterious things that are going on in the world. So, I guess… yeah, he would… he would… and he does respond to her by telling her that she only kind of sees the surface of things and doesn’t… doesn’t get that there are these forces going on around him. And so, I guess… um… I mean, we could argue that Freud would be on the side of Clara and Nathaniel… or of Clara and Lothar, excuse me, but I think maybe Freud wouldn’t want to discount um these traumas and the way that Clara maybe tries to… Freud, I suppose, would want to talk it through, would want to allow these things… these sort of hidden things to come to the surface, and that hopefully would resolve this rather than just trying to kind of dismiss them. So, I don’t know, maybe we can try and find a balance between Nathaniel and Lothar and Clara’s positions.
Yeah, Freud definitely takes them much more seriously. Don’t laugh at us. That’s right. So, part of the question that the story asks and that then Freud’s essay asks is about the source of this mysterious power that we often feel over ourselves in our lives, and different characters in the story and then different readers of the story have a different view on… yeah, what the ultimate source of this power is.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s… try anything else about Freud’s essay that you found interesting?
Well, I think the… I mentioned it at the beginning, but the stuff about the sort of… the language, the idea of *unheimlich*, this German word, I think that’s a really kind of interesting thing just to pick up on again. The idea of the *unheimlich* and the familiar is sort of containing within it different meanings and kind of contradictory meanings, and I think that’s something that’s really useful to sort of apply to the story, because if we think about it, I mean, we’ve mentioned there’s no exact resolution to the question of whether Coppelius and Coppola are the same person. So, I think there’s something about this idea of a story or even a word containing kind of contradictions within it that’s really compelling to me, and that sort of applies to an interpretation of the story as a whole. We don’t necessarily need to land on one meaning and say, “This one thing means this; this story means this and has this message.” I think kind of the beauty of what’s going on here is that you can allow these sorts of contradictions to just sort of exist together, and it’s really interesting when… when you go through secondary literature on this story and how different scholars and academics have approached this story, and many of them actually do take sides. So, even Freud actually has to take a side; he sort of explicitly says that these two characters are the same person.
Yeah.
But we don’t need to agree with… yeah. And… but it’s looking at this history of this… this story’s reception, I think is a very powerful illustration of the… the attractiveness of this concept of *unheimlich*, because we can sort of see it in… Rocco… in real life, exactly as people grapple with this story.
Yeah. And we are certainly looking forward to reading all the essay entries you get for this competition to see where people’s… yes… all these controversial issues about the story. So, I think that’s a good moment to wrap up our interesting conversation. Thank you very much for joining me and talking all things Freud and the Sandman.
And… and thank you to you for listening to this episode. And if you enjoyed it, do check out our other podcasts; have a look at our website as well to find out about all the details of this essay competition. You can just search for “Oxford German Classic Prize.” Thank you very much for listening. Bye-bye.
And to you.