#juenger

klau|s|ens, die GROSSEN ZITATE von dir werden gerühmt und gefürchtet. sie sind präzise, klar und unerbitterlich. du meinst „unerbittlich“, zweitklausens. außerdem sind es immer unsere zitate. klau|s|ens und zweitklausens gehören zusammen wie pech und pasch. (unsere zitate ersetzen bekanntlich 10.000 seiten hegel. in nur einem satz.) wie lautet das GROSSE ZITAT vom 31.3.2025? “AUCH EIN ERNST…

“We had long known the Chief Ranger as a grand master of Mauretania. We had often seen him at junketings, and diced and wined with him through many a night. He was one of those figures whom the Mauretanians respect as great lords and yet find somewhat ridiculous - rather as an old colonel of the mounted yeomanry is received in the regiment on his occasional visits from his estates. He left an imprint on one's memory, if only because his green coat with its gold-embroidered ilex leaves drew all eyes to him.

His wealth was rumoured to be boundless, and at the banquets which he gave in his town house profusion reigned. There, in the old style, drinking was hard and stakes were high, so that the oak boards of the great gaming table groaned under its load of gold. Famous, too, were the oriental suppers in his little villas, to which were invited the favoured few. Thus I had frequent opportunities to see him close at hand, and felt the breath of primitive power that surrounded him like a breeze from his forests. At this period I was scarcely disturbed by the inflexibility of his nature, for all Mauretanians acquire with time something of the nature of an automaton. This characteristic is particularly marked in their glance, and so the eyes of the Chief Ranger, too, - especially when he laughed - gleamed with terrifying mirth. Like those of hardened drinkers, they were touched with a red flame, but expressed both cunning and unshakable power - yes, at times even majesty. Then we took pleasure in his company and lived in arrogance at the table of the great ones of the world.

Later I was to hear Brother Otho say of our Mauretanian period that mistakes become errors only when persisted in. It was a saying that gained in truth for me when I thought back to our position when this Order attracted us. There are periods of decline when the pattern fades to which our inmost life must conform. When we enter upon them we sway and lose our balance. From hollow joy we sink to leaden sorrow, and past and future acquire a new charm from our sense of loss. So we wander aimlessly in the irretrievable past or in distant Utopias; but the fleeting moment we cannot grasp.

As soon as we had become aware of this failure we strove to free ourselves. We felt a longing for actuality, for reality, and would have plunged into ice or fire or ether only to rid ourselves of weariness. As always when despair and maturity combine, we turned to power - for is that not the eternal pendulum that drives on the hand of time by day or night? So we began to dream of power and domination, and of the forms that in bold array advance to combat in the deadly struggle for existence, whether the outcome be disaster or triumphant victory. We studied them with the pleasure one finds in watching corrosions form as acid bites into dark mirrors of polished metal. Such being our inclination, it was inevitable that the Mauretanians should seek us out. Our sponsor was the Condottiere who had put down the rising in the Iberian provinces.

Anyone acquainted with the history of the secret Orders knows that their ramifications are difficult to assess. Similarly it is common knowledge with what fertility they form branches and colonies, so that attempts to trace them down end in a maze. For the Mauretanians too this held good. To the newcomer it was particularly strange to see in their meeting-places members of deadly hostile groups in friendly conversation. Among the aims of the Mauretanians was artistry in the dealings of this world. They demanded that power should be exercised dispassionately as by a god, and correspondingly its schools produced a race of spirits who were bright, untrammelled, but always terrible. Similarly, whether their duties lay in insurrection or in order, wherever they won the day they won it as Mauretanians, and the proud "Semper victrix" of this Order applied not only to its members, but to its head and fount of doctrine. Immovable among the wild currents of the times he stood, and in his residences and palaces one was on firm ground.

It was not because we enjoyed peace, however, that we willingly spent our time with them. When man loses his props fear begins to sway him, and he is driven along blindly in its whirlwinds. But with the Mauretanians absolute stillness reigned, as in the heart of a cyclone. They say that if one falls headlong into an abyss one sees things in the minutest detail as though through a crystal-clear lens. This - without the fear - was the vision that one acquired in the air of Mauretania, in an atmosphere which was poisoned through and through. At the very moment when terror reigned, coolness of thought and spiritual detachment increased. In the face of catastrophe good-humour was everywhere, and they would jest at it like the keeper of a gaming-table at the losses of his clients.

A translation by Simon Friedrich at www.ernst-juenger.org, from Ernst Jünger´s Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1929, revised 1938):

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“While breakfasting in the garden, I watched as a baby bird fell from the Redstart nest above my threshold and lay dead on the stone floor. Its body was still naked, and its large eyeballs shone darkly through the rosy skin. These and the wide, tightly-shut beak lent the small corpse a precocious, painful character. The abrupt plummet from safety into nothingness was that much more forceful because in the same moment the little creature disappeared without a trace from the perception of its parents. They continued faithfully flying to and from their little nest with food for the surviving siblings, often passing close by the little dead body with not a trace of interest. I have frequently made the observation that animals are equipped with a different, indeed a sharper perception for the living than we. For them, death very quickly transforms the body into an object; cases exist in which the parents immediately perceive the corpse of their young in its character as food. Animals thereby abide most decisively by Heraclitus’s maxim about the corpse, which it describes as rubbish and which I assume was directed against the Egyptian cult of the dead. It seems that animals do not grasp themselves as images but rather as life phenomena – one must visualize this relation as our own relationship to an electric lamp that illuminates us because, and only as long as, there is current in it. The little incident led me to a consideration which I found a happy one, namely, that a common spirit is developed in the nest in a manner which goes beyond our imagining. Correspondingly, individuation is little developed; one must picture a little family like this as one in which what we call the individual is altogether absent. There is consequently no perception of death in our sense …

… We can be sure that the same thing is hidden in our own life. Here this is indeed the case, even if not within the family. In fact, this ancient form of blindness reigns where we would least suspect – namely where our own I is concerned. We are unable to perceive our own selves as individuals; an image of our own corpse also eludes our imagination. In our highly complex inner order, the I is the last stronghold into which this life-blindness has withdrawn; from there, it sallies forth …”

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