Re: Desinvolture

[Gary Kern <gkern@ucr.campus.mci.net>]

Wahe@aol.com wrote:
> 

> Another inquiry:
> Does anybody know the autobiographical book by Ernst Niekisch who I think was friends or at least acquainted with EJ in the Weimar republic time and should have some histoires in it and could give title, publisher etc.?
> 
> Walter Hedderich
> Wahe@aol.com
******************
Juenger recalls Niekisch in his interview with Julien Hervier, part VII
in THE DETAILS OF TIME, telling of his attempts to save him from
destruction.  The only book by Niekisch noted there is HITLER: A
MISFORTUNE FOR GERMANY.  Perhaps you already know all this.

Presently reading Stuart Hood's translation of AFRIKANISCHE
SPIELE--AFRICAN DIVERSIONS.  The book was written after the WWI books,
but based on diaries, and the author tells Hervier that it was quite
accurate.  So then, it strikes me as significant that the "desinvolture"
that has been discussed in recent postings can be found there.  In
Chapter One we learn that the autobiographical hero, a schoolboy, can
find no profession within society to admire.  "It seemed to me quite
impossible that I should ever 'be' anything--the very word was repellent
to me; and of all the thousands of stations which life had to offer,
none seemed made for me."  He resolves on adventure, but with a
difference (chap. 3):  "My goal was a land in which everything had
greater significance.  The flowers must surely be bigger, their colours
deeper, their scent more heady.  Yet people who had had the good fortune
to live in these parts seemed to me to be reticent on such matters. 
When you heard that someone had caught a fish, then you wanted to see
every grain of it, every anamelled scale, every speck of colour.  You
wanted to draw blood from your fingers, tearing them on the barbed
proturbances of its head, to spin its body tightly with both hands and
feel how smooth and moist its skin was, how strong and pliant the
muscles.  I resolved not to neglect this and promised myself that
whenever some such strange image came my way I would a least hold my
breath for a moment and never let things come to such a pass that I did
not bear my resolve in mind."  Indeed, when he catches a lizard in the
Foreign Legion round-up center, he puts it in a matchbox to examine it
in detail.  His attitude toward the toughs in the center is
appropriately distanced; he makes the obligatory trade of good clothes
for bad and then settles down to observe them.

I take these descriptions not to be later impositions on the young man,
but a summoning up of Juenger's true approach at the time.  Each of us
works out a survival strategy early on, without even being conscious of
it as such.  Often we have to revise it or jettison it.  Juenger had his
strategy steeled in the WWI.  It worked then, and it has worked up to
the present day.

Gary Kern