hoffmann: the turk tales

Excerpt from The Puppet Tractates:
Victoria Nelson. Secret Lives of Puppets. 2001.p 65

... Enthusiast of puppets and automatons (like Goethe, he had puppets, and even as an adult he would often bring them out for guests), composer, and supreme innovator, E.T.A. Hoffmann was also the bearer of what is, on the surface, a more immediately familiar notion of the human simulacrum-- that of the "soulless" automaton that falls far short of its human model. By virtue of his very fascination with puppets and mechanical androids that pass for human, however, Hoffmann kept alive the debate over the presence of souls in matter in the new intellectual environment of the nineteenth century. The entire worldview of Hoffmann's stories, for that matter-- with their alchemical manipulations, metal queens, and talking vegetables that marry humans--remains that of the old living cosmos, the nostalgic worldview of Romanticism that coexists in a certain tension with his views on the sinister imitation of the human by the puppet-machine and is reinforced by the fact that the automaton usually brings about the destruction of the human's hopes and sometimes the human himself...