Re: Desinvolture

[fs6y097@public.uni-hamburg.de (John King)]

>> describes the situation as a meeting of 'dilettants' (the mob) and 'artists'
>>  (police and army) in respect to the art of war or battle - the author on the
>> side of the well trained, prepared and armed (machine guns) party not really
>> having anything serious to fear from the demonstrators.
>
>Do not agree with the above. It may be that the military unit and the
>police stood no risk of being hurt but it could have turned into
>a nasty situation if EJ had not shown 'desinvolture'. First it was
>a matter of discipline. Had EJ not handled the situation with such
>coolness the soldiers might have started to fire into the crowd. This
>might have caused a backlash in favour of the demonstrators. Next
>days newspapers would have described possible injuries.


Again, we must be careful not to overestimate EJ's role in things. He was an
infantry lieutenant and thus not in a position to exert decisive influence
on events. Instead, he was under the orders of one of the Stülpnagels. If we
look at the text more closely we will see that EJ is highly sarcastic about
the entire thing - all he had to do was to allow "Sonntagsspaziergänger"
through police lines, filtering the respectable from the rabble and little
more. I maintain my position that in this text the "desinvolture", if there
is any, is on the part of EJ the narrator.

>Maybe I expressed myself unclearly. I used the quote from the Juenger
>biography by Karl O. Paetel. He writes (and I return to German): "Kenn-
>zeichnend fuer die distanziert-unemotionelle Haltung, mit der Juenger
>noch waehrend des Kapp-Putsches einer 'nationalen Revolution'
>gegenueber-
>stand, ist auch ein 'Lagebericht' aus seiner Reichswehrzeit an Friedrich
>Georg."

And not just EJ, but the most of the Reichswehr were curiously uninvolved in
the Kapp Putsch and let Kapp rapidly fall victim to the general strike
called by the SPD led government which rendered his administration, if it
could be graced with that title, immediately impotent. They obviously
preferred working for such people as Noske.


>Paetel continues with a few interesting comments on EJs distance to the
>Freikorps. EJ can for a short time involve himself with a collective but
>he never has the need to totally identify himself with the collective.

Hm, he does try in the late 1920s to identify himself with the collective of
the front soldiers and German youth. It is my belief that the memory he
produces in this period of the First World War is quite synthetic - compare,
for instance, Stahlgewittern 1 with Feuer und Blut 1, not to mention the
journalistic excesses of his essays.

>> EJ in the trenches of WW one as described by himself reminds of a kind of
>> aesthetic James Bond (allow the connection), doing cold blooded and
>> emotionally undisturbed the right thing and thus beeing able to reflect his
>> observations and produce literature for us. It would be interesting to
>> examine wether there are more records of front-soldiers of the time in a
>> similar state of mind or not - I could imagine he was not the only one of the
>> like. Maybe someone already researched in this direction.

The name's Jünger, Ernst Jünger. (Now, what was J's favourite drink,
definitely not a vodka martini, shaken not stirred :-) (Let's not start on
comets and wine again!!!) Here again, I think we should be very careful of
taking texts such as "In Stahlgewittern" at face value. They (the various
versions) are autobiographical re-writings of his war diaries, texts laid on
top of texts. And let's not forget the texts which J was reading, the
intertexts if you like of Stahlgewittern - from Löns, to Sterne, to Ariost,
to Karl May, to Homer - and within whose heroic gambit J wanted to depict
himself. Stahlgewittern was composed out of, I would suggest, a combination
of the heroic plan on the one hand and the devastating memory of the war on
the other with the hundreds of friends and comrades slaughtered in front of
him. Thus any doubts, grief, confusion etc have been carefully edited out in
order to conform to the public version of the public text. Desinvolture is
posture, an emotional armouring.

JK