E.T.A. Hoffmann — the German writer whose stories became The Nutcracker and Coppélia — has held his eerie and fantastical fiction in print for 250 years, and dancers and choreographers keep returning to it.

Hoffmann was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann in 1776 in Königsberg, in the Kingdom of Prussia. He was far more than an inventive storyteller: he worked as a lawyer, composer, painter, conductor and music critic. His father played the viola da gamba, his aunt the lute, his uncle the piano. Hoffmann himself learned piano, violin and harp, and dreamed of becoming a composer.

Instead, he reluctantly followed his family into law. He felt "confined in the legal treadmill," as he put it. The post took him to Berlin, where he wrote his first play and took composition classes. A transfer to Warsaw followed, where in 1803 he met his wife, Maria ("Mischa") Thekla Michaelina. Their daughter Cäcilia, named after the patron saint of music, was born in 1805 and died two years later.

Napoleon's invasion of Warsaw cost Hoffmann his job. He refused to work for the French Empire, applied to the Theater of Bamberg — now the E.T.A. Hoffmann Theater Bamberg — and was unexpectedly hired as its music director. He later moved to Leipzig and Dresden, giving music lessons and directing an opera company. In 1810 he published a monumental review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony without hearing the music, working from the score alone.

Hoffmann became a huge figure in German Romanticism, the movement that rejected modernity and Enlightenment scientific thinking. A theme running through his uncanny, sometimes gruesome works is "the discrepancy between surface reality and the mysterious depths beneath." His writing inspired compositions by Robert Schumann and Jacques Offenbach, whose opera Tales of Hoffmann carries his name.

In 1814 Hoffmann and Mischa moved to Berlin, where he rose to senior judge while trying to restart his music career. By then his stories were so popular that publishers pressed him constantly for more.

In 1816 he wrote The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which contemporaries considered too frightening for children. The ballet that premiered in 1892 used a lighter, sweeter retelling by Alexandre Dumas from the 1840s, set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographed by Marius Petipa, finished by Lev Ivanov. Some scholars argue Hoffmann was simply ahead of his time: he understood that children have a rich — and often terrifying — imaginative life they feel adults don't comprehend, and The Nutcracker offered them a way to overcome their fears.

The original is stranger and more unsettling than the ballet. The family is named Stahlbaum ("steel tree"), not Dumas's Silberhaus ("silver house"), and godfather Drosselmeier is a mysterious figure who — like Hoffmann himself — leads a double life as a judge and an eccentric inventor of toys. Scholar Jack Zipes reads the story as a message that we should not accept society's reality but stay in touch with childlike imagination. George Balanchine put it more bluntly: "Actually, it's not a dream. It's the reality that Mother didn't believe."

Hoffmann's darkness has kept attracting choreographers. In 1983 Kent Stowell and Francia Russell of Pacific Northwest Ballet wanted a fresh take on the holiday classic and reimagined a Nutcracker that would be more than a charming diversion. They collaborated with Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, whose spooky sets and costumes evoked a menacing atmosphere and added real danger to Marie's adventures. Their ending diverged from tradition: instead of Marie waking to realize it was all a dream, the audience is left guessing. The production ran for 33 years before being retired and replaced by a new staging of Balanchine's Nutcracker.

Coppélia, choreographed by Arthur Saint-Léon in 1870 with a melodic score by Léo Delibes, is perhaps ballet's greatest comedy. Its plot — the inventor Dr. Coppélius builds robot-like dolls and uses his "daughter" Coppélia to lure Franz away from his fiancée Swanilda — is only loosely based on Hoffmann's story "The Sandman," a sinister tale of genius and madness far more horrific than comic.

Some scholars trace the dark undercurrents in Hoffmann's stories to his own difficulties and inner conflicts; contemporaries described his presence as "restless," "unsettling" and "uncanny." He died in 1822, aged 46.

His works are now read worldwide, translated into Japanese, Yiddish and Esperanto among many other languages. This year he appears on German postage stamps, and museums across Germany and in Paris are holding exhibitions in his honor. A quarter-millennium on, the double life of the judge who invented toys is still on stage every December.