THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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by classical ruins, and perhaps also the dilapidated castles from the early Arabian age of chivalry before Mohammed, all the palace­utopias of the Middle Ages
adopted the imperial castle in Byzantium. Its magnificence became a legend, and sprouted into a miracle among the Franconian nations, since the time of Charlemagne.
But even with Byzantium fictitious architecture, since the time of the Crusades, was governed by oriental romanticism. And this was ultimately the case for an important
reason, for the same reason which caused the most highly imaginative stage sets to blossom with a touch of Baghdad. For Byzantium seized the imagination of the
architectural fairytale so strongly simply because it was so close to the Arabian Nights beauty of the buildings of the Orient in its power and dignity. And even to
modern eyes, nothing seems to have risen so directly from the oriental fairytale, indeed even from the German one, as Moorish architecture. If architecture as a whole
was called frozen music, then Moorish architecture interrupts this image: it seems much more like embodied fairytale; which is why this whole world, down to the
catchphrase, appears to be magical down to the Europeans. Thus it is evident that architecture in the fairytale almost continually turns into that fairytale in architecture as
which Moorish architecture acts and exists. Above all in the European view of it, in that Open­sesame wish which conceived all fantastic beauty from Castle Grail to
Armida's magic garden in an orientally enchanted light. This sort of thing extends, though with a fortissimo which does not really suit the fairytale and the Alhambra, to
the castles of the exotic Baroque novel, all the way back to Ibrahim Bassa, to the Great Mogul. Then again, so much later, the Kronenburg in Arnim's highly Romantic
novel ‘The Guardians of the Crown’ masquerades on European soil as a Moorish­inspired glass structure. The fictitious building nevertheless remains in the line of the
architectural style existing at the time, but extends this line in a utopian way, on occasion incorporating legendary architectural images, almost always in the direction of
the world of domes, of the pillared courtyard, and of blue­gold ornaments. So too in Hoffmann's fairytale ‘The Golden Pot’ Lindhorst's azure room, with the golden
palm­trees, passes smoothly from the Empire style into the Eastern style. A path which is the closest to the architectural fairytale particularly in the northern mists. At
any rate, almost all buildings are magically coloured in the fairytale, whereupon they then look like the Fata Morgana where it is at home.