Stephan Klenner-Otto’s E.T.A. Hoffmann Illustrations

With his illustrations for E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel and Der Sandmann, the German artist Stephan Klenner-Otto enters into a creative dialogue which combines the writer’s fantastic juxtapositions of the everyday and the supernatural with the artist’s surrealist intertwining of the realistic, the quirky and the grotesque. The latter’s self-irony amplifies the former’s satire, expressing the kinship that forms the basis of Klenner-Otto’s engagement with Hoffmann and his characters. From this 21^st-century vantage point, the illustrator redefines the youthful hero and the beautiful heroine as middle aged and unprepossessing, the eccentric artist as disturbingly non-human, and the threatening ‘supernatural’ figure as a baleful member of the ‘real’ world. Klenner-Otto pays homage to Hoffmann through the intensely personal interpretation of his tales.