The "Atlantic Crossing" and Ernst Jünger's look at Brazil

Jüngerian chronicles of a 1936 cruise to South America: the fatal element of the Amazonian "Wildnis" emerges from the Brazilian shops of the German philosopher, the "memory of forms" on which the entire Creation and unconditional love for life is based. oceanic element, vector of the "original song of life that is lulling itself over the times".


di Marco Maculotti

“In these parts there is a proverb that I like very much; it says: “The wood is large”, and it means that anyone who is in difficulty or is a victim of persecution can always hope to find refuge and welcome in this element. "

- E. Jünger, letter to his brother Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Jünger, Santos, November 20, 1936 (Atlantic crossing, p.p. 146-147)


The first book of Ernst Junger published after the end of the Second World War, titled Atlantische Fahrt (tr. it. Crossing atlantic, Guanda, Milan 2017, curated by Alessandra Iadicicco), contained the annotations of a trip to Brazil undertaken by the author in 1936, during which, starting from Hamburg and passing through the Azores archipelago, he landed in Para to then reach Belém, Recife, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia.

Published in 1947 - almost simultaneously with the best known Parisian diaries (Irradiation, 1949), which attracted the most attention and reviews of public opinion -, gli Brazilian outlets passed almost unnoticed, also due to the lack of publication at home due to the so-called Democratic cleanup which also banned Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.

Se Irradiation, which collected the notes relating to the period spent by Jünger as an occupation officer in the French capital, presented itself as an absolutely historicized, Atlantic crossing on the contrary, it appears as a document exceptionally outside of time, more like the travel shops of the great writer-explorers of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century (such as Kipling and Stevenson) than anything else the German thinker had ever given to print until then.

Like the Brazilian Sketches by Rudyard Kipling (1927-'28), written not even a decade earlier, the Jüngerian annotations were able to frame with a touch of melancholy, but also with great clarity, the first dramatic conformations of wild globalization in the tropical areas of South America, with regard to both the overwhelming virginity of the Amazon forest and the soul of the Carioca population, which at the time appeared granitically divided into ethnic castes, a legacy of Iberian colonialism of previous centuries.

«Once the eye has become accustomed to the foreign environment», Jünger notes, «it distinguishes three great strata, that is, first of all the elementary world of the tropics, then the sediment of the old colonial style and finally the formations shaped by civilization"(P. 35); "The white man", he adds, "surrounds himself with his technique as a protective cloak" (p. 38):

“Each observation point is thus related to the web of civilization. In essence, we are dealing with relationships that are not spatial but spiritual; and what we call wilderness, the "wild nature", it will always be seen by us only from an external perspective, while we should sink into it. "(P. 39)


Yet, although oriented towards the globalized future, every corner of Brazil seems to carry within itself the events of the recent past: such as the rusty wrecks that rot in the port canals, depopulated following the yellow fever epidemic of 1908, or the "silent residences" of the colonial period in which "it seems that something unknown is mysteriously waiting - motionless yet alert, like the scorpion that sleeps below the threshold" (pp. 37-38).

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In this swarming racial of "admixture occurred by infusion", in which the author intuits "the image of future worlds is concealed" (p. 142), civilization and barbarism do not always adapt to the definitions and clichés reiterated for centuries by virtue of the Eurocentric conception on which Brazil itself was founded: paradigmatic in this regard is a scene that Jünger witnessed and that he later told al brother Fritz in a letter. The overbearing raid by some German travel companions in the modest huts of the local Indians, located on the banks of the Rio Parà, a tributary of the Amazon River, and the consequent and understandable reaction of the natives, leads the author to a bitter reflection on their compatriots:

“In this case one could no longer even be in doubt as to which was the inside and the outside, as in front of the monkey cage; it was clearly the encounter between a kind of civilized and cordial man and barbarian boors of the worst kind. What I have always observed in this circumstance has annoyed me and at the same time has reassured me; it was really funny how this Berlin plebe, when she later found herself on the ship, was chatting about "Wild". So sometimes a favorable case makes evident to us, through a concrete situation, relationships about which for some time we would have no longer harbored any doubts. There is no better teaching than this. "(P. 137)


However, it's not just the landscape anthropized to allow himself to be observed by the author, a that "eye made of amber" to which images "are attracted like electrically charged particles" (p. 21): no less full of “coded messages” for the observer's soul is the wilderness, that wild and limitless nature that acts on his senses «with a narcotic and at the same time dangerous force of attraction " (p. 41), in which "the matriarchal element acts in its most luxuriant fullness, with its enchanted nets in which the thorn that causes perpetual sleep is threatening" (p. 43):

«The whole is arranged in such a way that the sheer strength of the growing vegetation dominates and represses any idea of ​​individuation. Here the overwhelming power of the vital impulse is manifested vehemently, which the observer also feels turned against himself. "(P. 40)

The direct consequence of this intense excitement aroused byfatal element of the Amazonian cosmos it can only be "the temptation to tune in to this vortex of darkness and lights, to marry it, to abandon oneself totally" (p. 43). Several pages are devoted to visiting a vast Santos reptile house, in which the antidotes against snake bites are obtained, which the author considers "not only the most perfect animal but also the most perfectly animal, raw material of life", whose "bodily perfection [...] corresponds to the Luciferian nature of the spirit"(P. 47).

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The crushing action of a gargantuan boa, of which an unfortunate example of surucuckoo, appears to the observer's eye as a paradigmatic puzzle for the entire existence within the merciless Amazonian jungle, in which "it manifests itself the unity of the executioner and the victim that appear the light and the shadow on a single and identical object ", to the point that" it is difficult to distinguish who devours and who is devoured "(p. 50).

The entire Amazonian cosmos appears to Jünger - who in the following decades not coincidentally developed a real passion forentomology - as an immense framework in which the vegetable and animal forms do not present a solution of continuity and in which the "Memory of forms" (a phrase that seems to anticipate the theory of morphic resonance of the biologist Rupert sheldrake) allows the attentive observer to "grasp the will with which creation has come to express itself in that very being - to guess the task that it has assigned to that certain creature" (p. 95):

“The characters, the scratches, the magic runes on the masks - they are keys that always open the same life force. The circle of figures, of original beings, of thoughts of creation, of hieroglyphs, instills confidence like no other spectacle in this world and reveals the generative richness that hides in its treasure chambers. Because all these figures are certainly only fleeting schemes, they are small coins that are scattered freely to the four winds. Yet each of them bears the sovereign's coat of arms and blazon. "(P. 95)


Although they take a little backseat to the peaks subjectivists which have always characterized Jüngerian prose, are not rare anthropological references to the colorful and heterogeneous humanity of the Rio de Janeiro, in all its many ethnic and cultural facets. Among other things, the author describes the vision of the nocturnal bonfires of "blacks gathered in the landfills from ancient dreams" (p. 143) and the discovery of "a red bull mask, similar to a large wooden horse", which it was worn «for parties of the Boi, during which blacks, African-style, dance the whole night, sing and indulge in whatever is considered entertainment "(p. 33), near entire villages of huts" at least as genuine as those who they would be in Africa "(p. 141); a garland of features reduced heads the "size of a fist or a lemon", "dark skulls of Lilliputians […] intertwined by the hair like a bundle of dried onions" (p. 54); without forgetting the quick but singular reference to turtle ragout, typical dish of the Amazonian jungle (says nothing Cannibal Holocaust?) to the point that it is not uncommon to see the poor animals "displayed in certain low basins, a bit like lobsters in front of the restaurants in Paris" (p. 46).

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A large part of the annotations, however, are dedicated tooceanic element, in which the author spends most of the journey and to which he was then able to declare his visceral love also in the Sardinian diaries (collected by the publisher Il Maestrale in the anthology Sardinian land, Nuoro 1999). "In the spell of the sea", notes Jünger in Atlantic crossing, “We feel our being flowing and dissolving; everything that is rhythmic in us comes alive, resonances, beats, melodies, the original song of life that is cradled over time"(P. 77). An intense nostalgia pervades him at the appearance and disappearance of the islands, and in the clear splendor of the oceanic expanses he recognizes

« the enormous depth and fertility of the elements, the high fullness of serenity that lives in the palaces of Neptune, […] the taste of a timeless world. "(P. 14)

But, as is typical of Jüngerian production, even in Brazilian outlets the ontological level of the coveted Ideal is intertwined and merges seamlessly with the all too earthly one of the real: in this sense forced isolation at sea, "invisible as Gordon Pym", Appears to him as a metaphor of the" destiny of the individual within modern society with its technicality " (p.79).


Bibliography:

  • E. Junger, Irradiation. Diary (1941-1945), Guanda, Milan 1993
  • ID., Sardinian land, The Maestrale, Nuoro 1991
  • ID., Atlantic crossing, Guanda, Milan 2017
  • R. Kipling, From Brasil, New Berti Publishing, Parma 2019

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