Life & Wisdom Quote by Wolfgang Hildesheimer

The slyest flex in Hildesheimer's line is that it treats "perfection" as a reason to quit. Magic is supposed to be a craft you hone forever; here it becomes a completed technology, and completion feels less like triumph than moral vertigo. When he claims he can transform men into animals, he isn't advertising fantasy so much as naming a power every modern system envies: the ability to reduce a person to a category, a function, a specimen. Once you can do that reliably, the trick stops being enchanting and starts looking like administration.

The subtext is postwar, European, and quietly furious. Hildesheimer lived through the century that industrialized dehumanization and then tried to varnish it with good taste. "Transform men into animals" reads like a grotesque shorthand for what propaganda, bureaucracy, and ideology already accomplished without wands: stripping people of rights by first stripping them of personhood. The real performance is the restraint. He doesn't renounce magic because it's false; he renounces it because it's effective.

That final clause - "I believed I could not justify an intervention of this kind in the life of another person" - turns the magician into an ethical witness. It's not squeamishness; it's a refusal to play God, even benevolently, because the moment you claim the right to intervene, you've already rehearsed the logic of domination. Hildesheimer makes art's old seduction (total control) sound like the first step toward atrocity, delivered with a deadpan calm that feels like indictment.