The Serapion Brethren

The Serapion Brethren (Die Serapionsbrüder) is the name of a literary and social circle, formed in Berlin in 1818 by the German romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann and several of his friends. The Serapion Brethren also is the title of a four-volume collection of Hoffmann’s novellas and fairytales that appeared in 1819, 1820, and 1821.

In 1814, Hoffmann returned to Berlin from Dresden and Leipzig, where he had been working as an orchestra conductor and opera director, to return to work as a Prussian civil servant. In that year, he and a group of friends formed an association for the purpose of reading from and discussing works of literature (primarily their own). The group first met on October 12, which happened to be the feast day of Saint Seraphin of Montegranaro. The friends therefore decided to refer to their group as an “order” and to give it the name The Seraphin Brethren [Die Seraphinenbrüder]. After about two years of gatherings at Hoffmann’s home or the Café Manderlee on the famous boulevard Unter den Linden, the circle gradually dissolved, partly, it is thought, because of the departure of one of its members, Adelbert von Chamisso, for a sailing trip around the world with the Russian Rurik Expedition, which had been organized to find a Northwest Passage (Kremer, 1999, 165).

On November 13, 1818, Hoffmann’s publisher gave him a sizable advance on the publication of a multivolume collection of his novellas and fairytales. To celebrate this happy event (Hoffmann was quite impecunious at the time), the author invited his friends from the old Seraphin Brethren to his home on November 14 for the purpose of celebrating the advance and reviving the literary group. Another reason for celebration was the return of Chamisso from his travels. Hoffmann’s wife Micha brought the calendar, and the date was seen to be the feast day of Saint Serapion. Accordingly, the old order was rechristened The Serapion Brethren (Die Serapionsbrüder) (the Catholic list of saints [see “Catholic Online” at WWW.catholic.org]) shows eleven Saint Serapions; the one after which the group was named was probably Saint Serapion the Sindonite, a fourth-century Egyptian hermit and monk) (Kaiser 1988, 64; Pikulik 2004, 135).

The Serapion Brethren included the following members:

Others participated from time to time in the group’s meetings as guests.

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