African games

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

African Games is a short story published in 1936 by Ernst Jünger .

content

In this story, Jünger has processed a key personal experience from his youth in the period before the First World War relatively freely in literary terms, whereby the key data and content points of “African Games” are identical to the key data and events of the real Foreign Legion adventure Ernst Jünger.

The relatively short story tells in first-person form in a humorous and at the same time somewhat wistful tone how eighteen-year-old Ernst Jünger (his "alter ego" here is "Berger") decided in 1913 to leave school and his parents' house behind and to begin a career with the French Foreign Legion. Jünger was - as he or his alter ego Berger admits at the beginning of the story - a miserable student and escaped from this adverse reality during his school days - as he himself not only in the "African Games" , but also in 1929 "Adventurous hearts" explained - by "gobbling up" tons of adventure literature and indulging in more or less heroic daydreams in class. At the end of the spiritual escape movement, the story tells of the real escape of the minor from his parents' house in Hanover and the trip to Verdun , where he is then successfully recruited by the Foreign Legion . Berger is brought to a garrison in Sidi-Bel-Abbès , a city in northwestern Algeria and a center of the Foreign Legion. The troop that Berger gets to know in this garrison is a motley bunch of stranded outsiders and losers, some with a criminal past, from all over the world, who are held together by their superiors with strict discipline. The service in these desolate barracks is depressing and boring, so after a short time Berger tries to escape with his comrade Benoit in order to cross the border to Morocco and find freedom there. But Berger and Benoit are not up to the hardships of a long walk; the company is also poorly prepared. The next morning after the escape, the runaways are discovered and brought back to the barracks by gendarmes, where the commander of the garrison punishes them with fifteen (Benoit) and ten (Berger) days of arrest. After a few weeks, Berger's father succeeds in buying the underage son out of the Foreign Legion through diplomatic contacts and considerable financial resources - Berger's or Jünger's father was wealthy - and have him transferred back to Germany. The novel ends with Berger's return trip to Germany.

The author's conclusion on the penultimate page of the novel after this ridiculously failed and disappointing attempt to break out of the reality of the Wilhelmine school and the paternal family order: "I got caught up in the ink and the old man's practical reason (...) got me out again . The experiment had failed; I had only increased the number of sensitive journeys by the last one. I had to go back, had to live like the others "and" The time of childhood was over "

For interpretation

As a teenager, Ernst Jünger had considerable difficulties with the realities of the Wilhelmine school and was an absolutely miserable student in terms of his grades. In addition, he was burdened by a typically youthful father problem, which in psychoanalytic categories could perhaps be described as "Oedipal". The father - an extremely distant and strictly rational character - often changed his place of residence for professional reasons during Ernst Jünger's childhood, which forced the son to constantly change schools and made him a loner with no steadfast friendships. Heimo Schwilk vividly describes the family and school character that Ernst Jünger and his brothers received in his childhood:

“He (Ernst Jünger) was not born to be a loner, but made him through countless moves and school changes. In addition, he experienced the small world of his family as extremely dissonant, even labyrinthine. The father looked mockingly at his own parents, he despised the Catholicism of his mother-in-law and also repeatedly hurt his wife with his harsh manner. Ernst Jünger never got to know a middle-class family life, only the coexistence of very different characters, each of whom his own Walked away as far as could be reconciled with his father's plans. However, he did not consider anyone in his decisions, especially not his children. Whether friendships were broken by the change of residence, whether the school career was made more difficult, he was not interested in his decisions, which were exclusively determined by the pursuit of economic success. This will have lifelong consequences for his sons. Only the son Wolfgang will later meet the conventions of a bourgeois existence ”.

"African Games" is an interesting and informative story by Ernst Jünger in that he points to the genesis of his lifelong search for the liberating adventure and also explains why he cultivated non-bourgeois, solipsistic, anarchistic and heroic ideals all his life. Ernst Jünger's design conceptions - the first was that of the “warrior”, the second that of the “ worker ”, the third that of the “ forest walker ” - culminated in 1977 in his “posthistorical” novel “ Eumeswil ” , in which, based on Max Stirner, the “ Anarch ”as the fourth and final figure of Ernst Jünger is proclaimed as the new ideal of life. The "anarch" is - just like the other Gestalt conceptions before it - nothing more than an "alter ego" by Ernst Jünger, and the novel "African Games" shows that Ernst Jünger's conception of the "anarch" has childish roots that in Ernst Jüngers problematic family and school socialization are to be sought.

Ernst Jünger - the biographical details are mainly in Heimo Schwilk's “Ernst Jünger. A life of the century ”presented in all breadth and clarity and they are also visible in the “ African Games ” in a less veiled way - had already failed in the bourgeois sense as a teenager, his school career was a nightmarish experience. In “Strahlungen III” , the diary entries from the time shortly after the Second World War - Ernst Jünger is already almost fifty years old here - he reports of tormenting exam dreams that are much more haunting than his memories of the battles in World War I. And more than twenty years later, in an entry dated April 1, 1972, Ernst Jünger, who is now approaching eighty years of age, mentions in his diary volume "Seventy Drifted II" : "School is still after me, much more intensely than the military" .

Jünger achieves a considerable degree of psychological self- disclosure in the "African Games" , and this is quite unusual for an author who has worn the mask of the elite warrior and loner all his life, and he does what he usually does for him typical heroic and elitist vocabulary completely dispensed with. That he did this in 1936 should not be a coincidence: At that time, Ernst Jünger had definitely understood that his right-wing, anti-bourgeois, elitist, conservative-revolutionary ideals, which he cherished during the Weimar Republic, were in the form of Adolf Hitler and his racist and demagogic tyranny had found their most repulsive and disappointing expression. And Ernst Jünger may also have instinctively understood that he and his right-wing, elitist, conservative-revolutionary circles were not entirely innocent of Hitler's rise, which is why in “African Games” he makes an admittedly indirect guilty admission in a self-masking manner, in which he himself admitted to the childlike psychological roots that drove him not only into the adventure of the Foreign Legion, but above all as a volunteer in the First World War, from which he was to emerge as an officer - and as a war hero with numerous medals and above all the Pour le Mérite . Because after the unsuccessful breakout of the Wilhelmine school reality and the paternal family order to the Foreign Legion, father and son made the pact in 1913 that Ernst Jünger should first take his Abitur and that his father should finance a Kilimanjaro expedition as a reward. But it did not come to that, a year later the bored and unwilling to perform at high school graduated from high school in the light of the beginning of World War I - for Ernst Jünger this was a godsend - and volunteered for the 73rd Fusilier Regiment in Hanover. Ernst Jünger deliberately establishes the connection between the first, unsuccessful adventure and the second, successful adventure in the “African Games” : "The foray into the lawless is instructive, like the first love affair or the first battle; what these early contacts have in common lies in defeat, which awakens new and stronger forces. We are born a little too wild and heal the fermenting fevers with potions of a bitter kind "

In August 1914, Ernst Jünger began the real, great and formative adventure of his life, the First World War, from which his equally autobiographical first novel In Stahlgewittern emerged . It was with him that his journalistic career began in the right-wing extremist, elitist conservative-revolutionary circles.

literature

swell

  • Jünger, Ernst: African Games, Deutsche Hausbücherei Hamburg, one-time edition 1936, volume 7 of the 24th year series only for members, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt Hamburg-Wandsbek, 232 pages with 3 pages of the original manuscript and biography.

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Jünger: African Games, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1978 (Vol. 15 of the Complete Works, Narrative Writings I), p. 241ff.
  2. ↑ Quoted from Heimo Schwilk: Ernst Jünger. A century of life, Munich / Zurich: Piper 2007, p. 45f.
  3. ↑ Ernst Jünger: Siebzig Verweht II, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1981, p. 74
  4. ^ Ernst Jünger: African Games, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1978 (Vol. 15 of the Complete Works, Narrative Writings I), p. 245.