„Ex Oriente Lux“. Das Feenland Dschinnistan von Christoph Martin Wieland

The broad echo that Herder's text Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts evoked is reflected in many a contemporary literary production, in which the utopian projection of an ideal of humanity finds expression in the allegorical and eloquent prose of the fairy tale world. Christoph Martin Wieland's three-volume collection of fairy tales, Dschinnistan, paved the way for a literary genre that coupled hope in the future, through the education of man, and merciless social criticism. Thus emerged the literary motif of the fairy kingdom of Dschinnistan, an oriental fantasy landscape that inspired the imagination of major authors of German literature in the centuries that followed. In Novalis, Wieland's cosmopolitan arabesque becomes a symbolic journey into inwardness, and later, in Karl May, an unrealisable consoling dream. Each time the fairyland of Dschinnistan comes to life in literary history, it marks the state of humanity on the temporal edge of a new great historical crisis.