EJ and Woman

[Rebing@t-online.de (Rebing)]

"Bevor Frauen für ihn eine Erfahrung sein konnten, war es für ihn der Krieg" (Heiner Müller)

NDR Radio 3 broadcast on 24 November an intriguing essay by Uwe Prall (Die andere Hälfte. 
Ernst Jüngers éducation sentimentale). It discusses the dictum of Heiner Müller that EJ was 
moulded forever by the war experience and thus never overcame his famous "cold glance" of 
the detached observer which prevented any tangible feminine influence on his work and his 
personality. Prall, however, detects subtle changes in EJ's life and his way of thinking due 
to Erfahrungen des Weiblichen. He does not shun explaining them also by details which other 
critics might brush off as trivial (e.g. the fact that EJ became the father of a family at 
the time he turned away from the cutting hard-line political journalism in the service of 
the nationalist far right towards the mellower symbolism of AUF DEN MARMORKLIPPEN). Prall 
taps a source which has hitherto been ignored by most critics of EJ: two 
autobiographical books written by his first wife Gretha, the Perpetua of the diaries. He 
interprets several incidents from the private life of the Jüngers described in Gretha's 
books and some passages from her diaries. When placing them in the development of EJs life 
and work the surprising result is some subtle evidence that the traumatizing effect of war 
on EJ was gradually overcome by encounters with women and their way of thinking and feeling:
 
Doch seitdem Frauen einen Gegenpol in seinem Horizont bildeten und die starke Panzerung 
rissig wurde, die seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg seine Beobachterposition absicherte, ist durch 
die Risse auch eingedrungen, was zu seinem "kalten Blick" nicht zu passen scheint: 
Temperaturen von Nähe, moralische Impulse, Mitgefühl.
Maybe this will intrigue the List, too? Maybe even the women among us?

PS: If anybody is willing to scan the 33 pages of Prall's essay and post them for the List I 
will gladly send him/her the manuscript.

Günter Rebing