-- [ From: e-ensign * EMC.Ver #2.5.02 ] -- Underneath an excerpt from Nicholas Shakespeare's brandnew biography on Bruce Chatwin. Regards, RBR ----------------------- "(...) At this time he also discovered Ernst Juenger's >>On the Marble Cliffs<< . In June 1974, the magazine published Bruce's interview with the German aesthete, soldier and botanist ... Bruce at this time had 'an unlimited and obsessional regard' for Juenger's work, says the critic John Russell. 'More than once when we met he went back and back to >>On the Marble Cliffs<<. I put this down to his interest in extreme cruelty and the ways in which it could be inflicted.' Bruce continued to be fascinated by Juenger to the end of his life. Wanting to write another essay on him, he squeezed his German publisher for fresh information. 'In those days I was a kind of Juenger expert,' says Michael Kruger. 'The mystery about him has never been solved, even now. Here was a man in the middle of occupied Paris with bombers flying overhead and he's standing on the roof with champagne in his hand making little remarks. Bruce was deeply affected and involved by this coolness: how, in the middle of the biggest possible chaos, is it possible not to move, not to run away, not to accept all kinds of moral commitment? He would ring me up. 'Did you see Juenger? What is he doing? Was he a Nazi?'" Nicholas Shakespeare "Bruce Chatwin", p. 276f., (Harvill Press, 1999)
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