Marie, upset, bandages him with a ribbon from her dress. She, Fritz, and their sister, Louise, pass him amongst themselves, cracking nuts, until Fritz tries to crack one that is too big and hard, and his jaw breaks. Her father tells her that he belongs to all of them, but since she is so fond of him she will be his special caretaker. Marie notices a nutcracker, and asks whom he belongs to. However, the children quickly tire of it. They receive splendid gifts Drosselmeyer's turns out to be a clockwork castle with mechanical people moving around inside. Marie, seven, and her brother, Fritz, sit outside the parlor speculating about what kind of present their godfather, Drosselmeyer, a clockmaker and inventor, has made for them.

The story begins on Christmas Eve, at the Stahlbaum house. In 1892, the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov turned Alexandre Dumas' adaptation of the story into the ballet The Nutcracker. The story was originally published in Berlin in German as part of the collection Kinder-Mährchen, Children's Stories, by In der Realschulbuchhandlung. Hoffmann, in which young Marie Stahlbaum's favorite Christmas toy, the Nutcracker, comes alive and, after defeating the evil Mouse King in battle, whisks her away to a magical kingdom populated by dolls. ' The Nutcracker and the Mouse King' ( German: Nussknacker und Mausekönig) is a story written in 1816 by Prussian author E. Original publication in 1816 in Berlin in the collection Kinder-Mährchen, Children's Stories, by In der Realschulbuchhandlung.

Hoffmann the nutcracker