Summary
Despite the fantastic occurrences of its plot, “Eisenheim the Illusionist” is presented in the form of objective nonfiction, as a short biography of a mysterious character.
Little is known of the magician Eisenheim’s origins, other than that he is the product of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and its appetite for stage magic. Son of a gifted cabinetmaker, Eisenheim uses his skill at cabinetmaking in constructing the devices that allow him to achieve his earliest illusions. His appetite for magic can be traced to a meeting with an itinerant magician, and he proves to be a slow developer who nevertheless is capable of prodigious bursts of creativity and talent.
Eisenheim’s early feats are disturbing variations on more traditional illusions, many of them involving a reflection or creation of life, such as the Mysterious Orange Tree, and the Phantom Portrait. The next stage of his career, during which he opens his own theater, the Eisenheimhaus (House of Eisenheim), sees more original creations, which reveal more clearly a thread of darkness already implicit in his earlier tricks: the Satanic Crystal and the Book of Demons. A frightening variation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin brings him to the attention of the police in the person of Walter Uhl, who henceforth keeps a close eye on Eisenheim.
The increasingly unsettling trend in Eisenheim’s career is confirmed in his rivalry with Benedetti, a rival magician whose attempts to outdo Eisenheim climax in his vanishing during one of his tricks, never to reappear. A similar fate appears to await another rival, Ernest Passauer; however, to Uhl’s and everyone else’s consternation and subsequent delight, Passauer turns out to be Eisenheim himself.
For reasons never convincingly explained, Eisenheim retires from performing from near the end of 1899 until the beginning of 1901. During this period, he unsuccessfully courts the daughter of an anti-Semitic landowner and builds the Teufelsfabrik (Devil’s Factory), a building on his property that he uses to store his stage devices and to experiment with new illusions; its name reinforces the darker aspects of Eisenheim’s reputation.
On his return to the stage, Eisenheim’s act becomes minimalistic. With his only prop a glass table, he conjures objects out of thin air that only he can touch and manipulate. Soon he progresses to materializing human beings, most notably a young boy and girl, Elis and Rosa. Such seemingly transgressive feats and the panic they inspire give Uhl the excuse to arrest Eisenheim and close the theater; however, Uhl’s real motivation seems to rest in his fear that Eisenheim’s blurring of the lines between reality and illusion threatens the stability of the empire itself. However, when the police try to seize Eisenheim, they can grasp only air. Like Benedetti, Passauer, and (some say) the itinerant magician who initially inspired Eisenheim, the master slowly fades and dissolves himself, his last and greatest feat—or was it only an illusion all along?
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