Re: Nobel Prize???????

[C.Ujma@lboro.ac.uk (Dr Ujma)]

As to Nobel-Prize for Ernst Juenger, why should he get it, even the
greatest admirers of his amongst the literary critics have never ever said
that he produces great literature, or that any of his novels come anywhere
near the great literature of the 20th century, or that his narrative could
be compared with the novels of the great modernists, for example Woolf,
Joyce, Th. Mann or even hermann Hesse or the great 20th century Italian
authors. As a 'Literaturwissenschaftlerin' I can simply say, Juenger's
novels are not very convincing as novels, if you judge them from a
traditional or a modernist perspective, his narrative techniques as well as
his characters are not very skillfully developed. His fictional work is a
mere fictional illustration of theoretical ideas, which of course are very
interesting. But since there is no Nobel prize for political or literary
theory the idea of giving him the one for literature seems to be mildly
absurd and has nothing to do with political correctness.
Did I detect in Haggman's remarks about the 'Polish poetess' who got the
Nobel prize an antipolish and antiwoman undertone? From what I read of her
poetry, (only in translation unfortunately) she is certainly quite an
interesting author and certainly rather more of a literata than Juenger,
and she certainly was not a Stalinist and what is more important, because
that is the only thing that matters, her work (from what i know from
translations) is certainly not Stalinist. I wonder if you could say that
much - if you exchange Stalinism for Totalitarianism - about 'In
Stahlgewittern' or about 'Der Arbeiter'.
 It is a bit absurd to moan about Political Correctness in connection with
Juenger, because nearly all the prizes he has received, he received for
political reasons, as for example the 'Goethe-Preis'. He is the only really
important conservative intellectual in the country and if he dies our poor
CDU politicians will be in real trouble, because there is nobody left who
could serve as a standardbearer or as we say 'Gallionsfigur'.

His early works are definitly important, but not so much as literary works
as as examples for conservative or reactionary modernist thinking, which
are quite special because German reactionaries are usually radical
antimodernists.
Therefore Juenger has his place in German literary history, but one should
not overestimate his achievements.

c. Ujma