Re: [ejlist] Chatwin & Juenger

[Gary Kern <gkern@alumni.Princeton.EDU>]

e-ensign wrote:
> 
> -- [ 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)
> 
***********************
Very interesting.  Please remind me, who was Bruce Chatwin?

GK