This Day in History: German gothic horror and fantasy author E.T.A. Hoffman was born on this day in 1776. While many may not have heard of him, Hoffmann's stories highly influenced 19th-century literature, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker was based on his novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. As a pioneer of the fantasy genre, with a taste for the macabre combined with realism, Hoffman influenced such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Charles Baudelaire, George MacDonald, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vernon Lee, Franz Kafka and Alfred Hitchcock. Hoffmann's story Das Fräulein von Scuderi is sometimes cited as the first detective story and a direct influence on Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".
Grace Isabel Colbron wrote in 1910: "That unique genius E. T. A. Hoffman, whose work undoubtedly influenced Edgar Allan Poe, has given us two or three mystery stories as strong and as characteristic as are all of his writings. Mlle, de Scudery is a thrilling tale of the days of the Great Louis and of the deeds of the great murderer Cardillac. The Deserted House is another wonderful Hoffman story in which a weird house, apparently deserted of normal life but evidently inhabited by something, an uncanny old servitor, a magic mirror, a crazy countess, a gypsy woman, and a beautiful girl, are mingled together in the kaleidoscopic manner which is one of Hoffman's most entrancing qualities. There are snatches and bits of mystery scattered through the many stories signed by Hoffman, but the two above mentioned are most nearly like in form and content to the sort of story we are here discussing."
As Hoffman himself put it: "Perhaps, too, you will then believe that nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life, and that all that a writer can do is to present it as "in a glass, darkly".”
“Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?”
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