The manifestations of fantasy in the creation of E.T.A. Hoffmann are very different. Fantasy is connected with irony, satire and the grotesque, that are variants of romantic irony, also with the Christian doctrine about the battle of the Almighty God against his rival the Satan, and with the typical motives and characters of fairy tales like sorcerers and sorceresses, transformations, which help the good to get the better of the evil. The most important category of German late romanticism is the division into the real and the unreal ones. The division o f the world, that hurts the main characters, is provoked by the events in the real world: this is revealed by means of language. This idea leads to the conclusion that the philosophical, literary and linguistic factors should be studied together in order to make the reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann's work easier.