RE: EJ and Woman

["Thomas Friese" <tfriese@intergate.bc.ca>]

Fascinating indeed - "behind every great man ..." - true also of this one
perhaps. Do you have any bibliographical information about Gretha's books?
It seems worth following up on.
Thomas Friese
Association Eumeswil
Vancouver, Canada - Florence, Italy

"I am not an nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing
in. On this point, I am like a bride in her chamber: she listens for the
softest step."
Ernst Juenger, Eumeswil

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ernst-juenger-l@maillist.ox.ac.uk
[mailto:owner-ernst-juenger-l@maillist.ox.ac.uk]On Behalf Of Rebing
Sent: December 4, 1998 3:34 AM
To: ernst-juenger-l@maillist.ox.ac.uk
Subject: EJ and Woman



"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