Before rising to fame as the author of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, German writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann was a resident of the Bavarian town of Bamberg from 1808 to 1813. Today, you can find many traces of his time spent in the medieval city, perhaps none more fascinating than a doorknob shaped like the face of an old woman.
The whimsical doorknob belongs to the entrance of what used to be the house of Carl Friedrich Kunz, a friend of Hoffmann’s who later became his publisher. Hoffmann would reference this doorknob in his story The Golden Pot, in which a young, frightened student knocks over an old applemonger’s basket and flees after giving her all his money; later he sees the old woman’s face in a doorknob, which causes him to faint.
The doorknob here is actually a only a replica, with the original being preserved at Bamberg’s history museum.
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