E.T.A. Hoffmann

A central writer of the uncanny in German Romanticism, whose work depicts characters losing grip on reality and trust in their own perception. Born in Königsberg in 1776, he trained in law and worked as a jurist, while simultaneously pursuing careers as a composer, critic and writer.

His stories - often involving doubles, hallucinations, and blurred boundaries between the human and the mechanical - would later become key reference points for Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny. He died in 1822, leaving behind a body of work that shaped not only Romanticism but the later development of psychological fiction.

(This makes me think of Spike Jonze’s film Her, as well as real cases where people form emotional attachments to their chatbots)