YMMV / E. T. A. Hoffmann

• Crazy Is Cool: Enough that Jacques Offenbach wrote a Mind Screw opera with Hoffmann as protagonist of his own stories combined into a romance arc.
• Nightmare Fuel: Coppelius, the titular Sandmann.
• Vindicated by History: Has been a controversial author, to say the least (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe outright hated his work), but these days he's firmly established as one of the great writers of German literature, as well as one of the Trope Makers of Magic Realism.