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 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.

Attempts have been made, especially in older scholarly works, to assign the names of some of the real Serapion Brethren to the fictitious ones.