"When I was five years old, my parents gave me a magic chest. I learned to cast spells, although of a childish kind, before I had learned to read and write"
About this Quote
A “magic chest” is a perfect child’s metaphor for the first private archive: a box of props that lets you rehearse power before you can name it. Hildesheimer frames enchantment as something pre-literate, instinctive, and frankly improvisational. The spells are “childish,” but the point is that they arrive before grammar, before school, before the adult world’s permission. Imagination, here, isn’t a decorative extra; it’s an early technology for shaping reality when you don’t yet have the sanctioned tools.
That sequencing matters. By placing spell-casting ahead of reading and writing, Hildesheimer quietly demotes literacy from origin story to refinement. Writing becomes the later, socially legible version of the same impulse: to transform, to control, to conjure. The subtext is a sly defense of artifice. “Magic” is not opposed to seriousness; it’s the prototype of authorship. A writer, after all, makes things happen with objects and words other people agree are inert.
Context sharpens the edge. Hildesheimer’s life spans dictatorship, war, and postwar German cultural reconstruction; he’s associated with a literature that distrusts grand, “authentic” narratives and leans into performance, irony, and the manufactured. The chest reads like an origin myth that refuses heroism. No solemn calling, no sacred book, just a kid playing at spells - which is to say, practicing the craft of making believable fictions in a world where belief has consequences. The sentence isn’t nostalgic; it’s diagnostic: the artist’s first education is in illusion, and that may be the most honest training available.
That sequencing matters. By placing spell-casting ahead of reading and writing, Hildesheimer quietly demotes literacy from origin story to refinement. Writing becomes the later, socially legible version of the same impulse: to transform, to control, to conjure. The subtext is a sly defense of artifice. “Magic” is not opposed to seriousness; it’s the prototype of authorship. A writer, after all, makes things happen with objects and words other people agree are inert.
Context sharpens the edge. Hildesheimer’s life spans dictatorship, war, and postwar German cultural reconstruction; he’s associated with a literature that distrusts grand, “authentic” narratives and leans into performance, irony, and the manufactured. The chest reads like an origin myth that refuses heroism. No solemn calling, no sacred book, just a kid playing at spells - which is to say, practicing the craft of making believable fictions in a world where belief has consequences. The sentence isn’t nostalgic; it’s diagnostic: the artist’s first education is in illusion, and that may be the most honest training available.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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