BERLIN — Acting on Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that the real world is much smaller than the imaginary one, the German Federal Ministry of Spatial Affairs has formally annexed the imagination and begun installing border checkpoints at every point where a citizen's thoughts cross from the real into the imagined.
The ministry's first survey, conducted over eleven months by cartographers walking the perimeter of what they call the Inner Frontier, puts the imaginary world at approximately nine times the surface area of the real one, with a coastline that cannot be measured because it keeps growing while the measuring is underway.
«We are not restricting imagination,» said Deputy Minister for Interior Cartography Klaus Brenner. «We are simply requiring that anyone crossing into it present a valid transit stamp and declare the approximate size of what they intend to imagine.»
Checkpoints have been erected at libraries, opera houses, kindergartens and one particularly busy intersection in Leipzig where, officials say, more than four thousand unauthorized imaginings cross daily. A separate lane has been opened for professional philosophers, who must now file a route plan before conceiving of anything larger than a small room.
Nietzsche's own works have been reclassified as navigational charts. The ministry has printed a pocket atlas of the imaginary world, but it is already out of date, and a second edition is being prepared with the coastline left blank.