Showing posts with label transcendence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transcendence. Show all posts

December 19, 2010

Ernst Jünger's readership - more eclectic than you think!

What this guy understands about Ernst Jünger's thought, I cannot judge - he only reads from one of his books here. But I give him the benefit of the doubt, since he has picked one of Jünger´s last, most metaphysical works, Die Schere (The Scissors, untranslated into English). 

The video also clearly shows that Jünger readers come in all shapes and colors!!

(Apparently Joschka Fischer also read Jünger, from Fischer´s left-wing student days all the way through to the year Jünger won the Goethe Prize. He then even defended Jünger´s right to receive it. I might post this letter sometime.)

October 14, 2010

Jüngers Kriegstagebücher - a higher perspective

The press has recently been been full of discussion about the publication of Ernst Jünger's War Diaries (Kriegstagebücher), his original notes from the trenches of WWI. Above all this has provided new opportunities for the usual misuse of his works by left-wing opponents and right-wing "friends", respectively expressing their knee-jerk critique and misguided hero worship.

The disproportion of this attention is apparent when one remembers that it is directed at a single teenage work of an author who lived to 102, wrote dozens of far more interesting and profound works, and was awarded Germany's highest literary prize.

(One wonders if these respected critics, Feuilleton editors and academics are in fact incapable in their 50's or 60's of anything more challenging than analyzing to death Jünger´s teenage works? The reflection of a difference in intellectual level of development? Would they know where to begin with later works like Eumeswil or An der Zeitmauer, works that have not been classified once and for all times in the public mind by these "authorities"? I challenge these venerable gentlemen to "explain" Eumeswil and the anarch to their readers with their tired old politicized cliches!)