It has been described many times that Romanticism, with its poetics arising from dark forebodings, fears and desires, is a clairvoyant predecessor of psychoanalysis.

The uncanny, Sigmund Freud defined at the beginning of the famous essay of the same name, “is that kind of frightening that goes back to the familiar and long-known”.

Freud quotes the psychiatrist of the uncanny, Ernst Jentsch, as a special case of the uncanny with the description "Doubts about the animation of an apparently living being and vice versa about whether an inanimate object is not animated".

In ETA Hoffmann's “Fantasy Pieces” and especially in the story “The Sandman”, the writer uses the “trick” to cast doubt on his protagonists as to whether they are dealing with machines or real people.

For one hundred and fifty years, theater has watched ballerinas dance a puppet come to life.

The ballet of the Paris Opera celebrated the premiere of "Coppélia" in 1870. Charles Nuitter's and Arthur Saint-Léon's libretto was mainly based on Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" from 1816.

The more virtuoso the ballerina dances, the more uncanny the effect - even today.

It is hard to bear when Swanilda's fiancé Frantz falls for Coppélia's kissing hands, almost before she has even danced the first step.

Because when Frantz first sees her, she's sitting motionless by the window, funny enough holding a book in her hands.

From nature to artifact

In this dance-historical moment, one could say, based on Freud, the ballet shifts the source of the uncanny from nature to the artefact.

Until then, the figure world of the ballet had been populated by ghosts, by nymphs, by the Wilis, those undead abandoned brides, by the sylphs.

In "La Sylphide" it is still a ghost who tries to ensnare a bridegroom, in Coppélia it is already a machine man.

Ballet has just distinguished itself by dancing between the natural and the supernatural world.

Now it documents how the scientific experiment and the art of engineering arrive at results that are highly irritating – for humans.

And yet, in both cases of the uncanny, it is true that his literary motifs found ideal expression in the ballet.

Seeing the uncanny on stage exceeded the effect of reading it many times over.

The literary motifs merged with the aesthetic innovations of the dance of the time in an ideal, symbiotic way.

And although the ballet "The Nutcracker" from 1892 is also based on a fairy tale by ETA Hoffmann, "Nutcracker and Mouse King", and here too the "old familiar", rustling mouse steps in the nightly room and a friendly nutcracker as a Christmas present, to the source of the uncanny dance and literature fall into one another far less intensively here.

No Nutcracker production shows the terrible mouse king with the seven heads that Hoffmann has, and never can dancers in gray fur costumes with pointy mouse noses come anywhere near the terrifying effect of Hoffmann's descriptions.

Even the best dancer seems a bit wooden as a nutcracker, i.e. naive.

For the most important dances, the sugar fairy and prince darling unite in the realm of sweets for the pas de deux.

However, one cannot necessarily see this as proof of the superiority of literature and the aberration of virtuosity in ballet.

Tchaikovsky's music lifts Lev Ivanov's magnificent choreography into spheres into which we still want to be carried away to this day.

The uncanny story behind it is unimportant to the dance like in a fairy tale, comparatively.