> work concerning WW I which IMHO is taken far too important I would like > to bring to your attention Juenger's experimentations with LSD. You will > find what Albert Hoffmann had to say about our hero at the following: > http://www.dct.ac.uk/www/books/problem-child.html#chap7 >> A number of issues here: first, I don't think one can overexaggerate the effect of the First World War for J's generation of intellectuals. It contained within the seeds of much that was to follow. At the same time it is also emblematic of much of those destructive aspects of modernity which found less obviously violent expression in environmentally destructive Raubbau that J was to turn to criticise much later. Second, the relationship between Hoffmann and EJ is interesting in itself. Significantly, Hoffmann has pushed the value of LSD (in a manner akin to Huxley) as guarantor of metaphysical stability much more than J did in "Annäherungen". J's writing on drugs seems to me to somewhat more circumspect, even if "Besuch auf Godenholm" is slightly way out with its combination of mythic and chemical elements. >Didn't Juenger use WW 1 and violence as a drug too ( just as bookreading >before, and after)? To me "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis" seemed to be a >first version of "Das abenteuerliche Herz". Different looks on the same >thing: Rites de Passage. And the new diary starts as a dream diary of a >"Grosser Uebergang". Quite a productive comparison, I'd say, even if if doesn't tell the whole story - but then what does? One of the most telling lines in "Sturm" is the narrator's comment that the author/soldier's writing was the key to a flight out of time: "Das eigentlich Fesselnde an ihm war wohl, daß er in ganz ungewöhnlichem Maße vom Geschehen der Zeit abstrahieren konnte. So gab er den Freunden durch seinen Verkehr das, was sie unbewußt im Trunke, in ihren literarischen und erotischen Gesprächen suchten: die Flucht aus der Zeit" (SW 15, p. 20) Flight out of time (any one got any ideas on the relationship to Hugo Ball?) is as much a flight out of industrialised forms of time created by instrumental rationality (the bug bear of all honest to God postmodernists :-) and the search for alternative forms (also an attempt to escape death and overcome the human condition in others). Drug consumption can be seen as part of this, just as much as the pleasures of the text (Barthes et al.) or the nihilist-decadent celebration of extremes of experience. >Quiet list, just like the reviewers, why?. Probably because Bertil hasn't said anything controversial for a while :-) Schöne Grüße aus Hamburg, John King -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John King Peterstraße 39b D-20355 Hamburg Tel: +49 (040) 35 11 78 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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