In the year 1795, a few years after his first contributions to botany and optics, Goethe composed a number of short stories and anecdotes, published under the title of Conversations of German Emigrants. The name was given in allusion to the inhabitants of Western Germany who were driven out of their homes by the armies of the French Revolution, and the stories were supposed to represent the tales with which the emigrants amused themselves during the pauses of their flight. There is, however, very little political matter in them. For the most part they are concerned with the supernatural: haunting footsteps, ghosts, premonitions of death, sympathetic reactions between non-living objects, and the like, all treated in a matter-of-fact and circumstantial manner. The last of these narratives is the Märchen, a fairy-tale crammed with mysterious prophecies and allegorical or symbolical fancies. In view of its position at the end of this series, it is difficult to see why the Märchen should have been interpreted, by some commentators, as an allegory of the French Revolution, or of the internal conditions of the Duchy of Wiemar. The atmosphere of the story suggests the supernatural, or at least the occult and the mysterious, as much as those which precede it.

But any interpretation of the tale which pins it down to a particular meaning is bound to destroy rather than illuminate its purpose.