Fairytales of New York

Around the corner from the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, on Charlottenstraße, is the house where E.T.A. Hoffmann lived, and the tavern where he drank (Lutter and Wegner … it’s still there); across the street is the former National Theatre (now the Konzerthaus) where Hoffmann’s most successful opera, Undine, had its première, although its run was cut short when the building burned down a few months later. While Hoffmann’s mortal remains are located a few miles to the south in a Kreuzberg cemetery, he continues to haunt the old centre of Berlin in the form of a statue in the Gendarmenmarkt to which remarkably few tourists pay homage.

If the real Hoffmann is closely bound to the mythology of Berlin, the fictional Hoffmann – the hard-drinking hopeless romantic who is improbably redeemed by his own art – has earned a place in the pantheon of…