E. T. A. Hoffmann

Hoffmann added 'Amadeus' to his own name in homage to Mozart, and lived a genuinely double life: by day a Prussian judicial official rising through the ranks of the Berlin courts, by night a composer, caricaturist, and writer of fantastic fiction. His music criticism, especially his praise of Beethoven's instrumental works, helped define what Romantic listeners meant by the sublime.

The Sandman (1816) and other tales fused this same double vision (rational bureaucrat and feverish dreamer) into fiction where automatons, doubles, and the uncanny destabilize ordinary Berlin life; Freud later used the story as his central example in the essay that coined 'the uncanny' itself. Alcoholism and a degenerative paralyzing illness closed in on him in his last years; he kept dictating fiction even as his body failed.

He died in Berlin in 1822.