By Nikolai Worms Who doesn’t have this problem? Once again, you urgently need to make an elephant disappear — or a bus filled with passengers — but you lack the know-how for the magic trick.That’s when you might turn to Andreas Meinhardt for help. The Stuttgart man is a magician and inventor of new illusions. Or, as the 39-year-old describes himself, he’s a “magic technical consultant.”Magicians from around the world go to him for new magic gadget inventions, ranging from a small trick with hidden pockets all the way to illusion acts with giant-sized objects.But in contrast to the glittering show-biz world of his clients, Meinhardt’s workplace is surprisingly common-looking.It’s a large room in an old factory building, stuffed with materials and tools — a typical workshop. Except for a few paper flowers, nothing points to what is being created here.And yet, “Everything lying around here has a function,” Meinhardt says. He shows items such as folding coins, knotted spoons and magical books. But this is not everything. The technology is only one part of a trick.“I have to divert attention away from the mechanical or the electronic element. That’s why a psychological component is part of every trick,” Meinhardt explains. And he provides clients with help on this as well.“It’s only at the point when the viewer gives up and says ‘I can’t figure this out’ that you have created a magical effect,” says Meinhardt.Until that moment is achieved it can take months or even years of practice. Tricks are often adapted to individual magicians “almost in orthopaedic fashion,” he says. “Every trick is a new invention. After all, nobody wants to do something that someone else has already done.”Dirk Omlor, a board member of the German magicians’ organisation Magischer Zirkel, disagrees. “In the magic arts, rarely is there is any invention that is genuinely new,” he said.Usually, old principles are refashioned and then a new trick is concocted. All the same, people like Meinhardt, of whom there are only a handful in Germany, are extremely important for the magic-trick business, Omlor adds. “These new ideas have always advanced the magic arts further forward,” Omlor said.“The people who ponder over the existing principles and develop them further are very important. Otherwise, we would be doing magic tricks the same way today as 100 years ago.” Omlor says the price for a new trick can be anything from €20 to many thousands of euros. Meinhardt, who is a master goldsmith by trade, has been doing his magic invention work full-time for six years now. “I just sort of slipped into it,” he says. He himself began to do magic, under the name “Nils Bennett,” at the age of 14. In 1996, he became German champion in the category of manipulation.“At some point you have to get on stage with your own tricks,” Meinhardt said. “But in the beginning I had hardly any contacts, and above all, I didn’t have any money.” And so he began to invent his own tricks.In the meantime Meinhardt has become a consultant for TV shows, trade fairs and cultural events. Most recently, he assisted the Stuttgart State Ballet in its staging of the show Krabat.The one drawback to his trade, however, is that he rarely gets a kick from watching a magic trick show. “I’m really happy when there’s a colleague who still manages to deceive me,” Meinhardt says. But unfortunately, such moments are all too seldom. Still, he naturally can appreciate a successfully executed act of illusion. “In our enlightened world, it’s great that there are still some things that we can’t explain,” he says. – DPA