THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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alchemical ass Bricklebrit who pours forth gold when all ends well. Said in Hauff's fairytale blows the silver whistle which the fairy gave him as a present, and the waves
immediately subside; the piece of wood to which the shipwrecked sailor clings becomes a dolphin that carries him to the shore. The magic table also turns up here
again, this time from the waves, but as dry as if it had stood in the sun for a week, and laden with the most delicious foods. Said's whistle has distinguished relations,
they are all gifted not just musically but with magic technology: Roland's horn in the valley of Roncesvalles already half belongs here, but above all the magic flute and
Oberon's horn. The full glory of technological wishful images erupts, in keeping with its more luxurious needs, in the oriental fairytale. There the magic objects are even
comparatively rationalized and amassed into a technological treasure chamber. The fairytale of Prince Ahmad and the fairy Peri­Banu contains an ivory tube through
which one can see whatever one wishes to see, even if the object of one's wishes is hundreds of miles away. This fairytale contains the flying carpet which carries its
owner in a moment, even if he only utters his wish in his thoughts, to the goal revealed to him by the ivory tube. The fairytale contains winged giants who not only carry
people over immense distances like lightning, but also bring up treasures so rich that people would hardly dare to wish for them from underground, in fact, as in the case
of Aladdin and the magic lamp, from the void. That which appears impossible, that which is almost deliberately arranged to be impossible is thus created with effortless
ease, above all also by means of imaginary instruments. Difficulties fall away on all sides, nothing sounds fantastic in such fairytalest, everything sounds plausible.
Gigantic forces of nature, pictured as spirits, are immediately and slavishly at the command of Aladdin, the master of the ring and the lamp. Or of Hassan the Basorite,
the master of the magic rod, he strikes the ground with it: ‘Then the earth gaped open, and out came ten Ifrits, whose legs still stuck in the bowels of the earth while
their heads towered far above the clouds’ (‘The Arabian Nights’). The fairytale of the ebony horse hallucinates technological wishful images even soberly as it were, in
detail: the magic horse has a lock of hair for ascending and descending, it can be steered according to the direction in which its head is turned, and it is so well equipped
for every purpose that the rider carries off the king's daughter from the inaccessible castle or ascends and escapes from the ranks of his enemies. A Chinese fairytale on
the other hand, called ‘The Suit of Leaves’, enchants with the magic of a raw material which can be transformed at will, almost as infinitely