​Of the German writers and poets of the past, only a very few had the chance to have their work penetrate other literatures as a stimulating and fertile force, to become a source of inspiration for works rooted in a foreign cultural milieu. E. T. A. Hoffmann was one of these few: besides Goethe and Heine, he is the only German writer whose influence is equally long-lasting, wide-ranging and lasting in space and time. The modest and limited life of the writer with an impact on world literature took place in two spheres. In civilian life, he was a well-educated lawyer and conscientious official, but as an artist, he embodied the universal artistic ideal of romanticism: a painter with a skillful hand, an excellent musician, a good composer, and in addition to all this, he was one of the most original talents of German romantic literature. Due to his civilian occupation, he himself belonged to a sober, prosaic, unimaginative philistine world, but in his work he created a magical, transcendent world that shines through the gray reality of everyday life. This duality remains the determining factor of Hoffmann's art of writing, which is just as at home in reality as it is in the fairyland of imagination.