Hoffmann's tales are indeed characterised by a peculiar combination of fairy-tale worlds and everyday scenes, supernatural and horror, mysterious and grotesque flavoured with the Romantic taste for irony, satire and parody. But it is exactly this bizarre mix between realism and fantasy that impressed Schumann so profoundly. The contrast between reality and imagination and their mixing evolves from the narrative device that employs couples of characters with opposite and complementary personalities. The doppelgänger, typical topos in German Romantic literature, is very often used by Jean Paul Richter (another author that Schumann venerated) and by Schumann himself through the split of his personality into the characters of Eusebius and Florestan.

Along with the use of doubling present at times in his works (for example Eugenius and Sever in the previously mentioned Datura Fastuosa, or Kreisler and Ettlinger, the mad painter) this brilliant writer goes beyond overlapping reality and fantasy in such manner that the character itself (and the reader) is almost no longer able to distinguish between them. This is the case of the famous novel "Der goldene Topf" (The Golden Pot) published in the middle of the Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy pieces in Callot's manner). Naturally, the title chosen by Schumann for his Fantasiestücke, op.12, refers to the homonymous work by Hoffmann.