Das Ende des Anthropozentrismus. Anthropologie und Geschichtskritik in der deutschen Literatur zwischen 1930 und 1950 (review)

Gregor Streim has produced an exceedingly useful and reliable study of a generally rather dubious realm of philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. There are some things about bad thinking that interest us far more than good thinking. Naturally, establishing the difference sometimes counts as one of those, but focusing attention on what could emerge all too immediately about what is wrong with a body of ideas will unfailingly divert our attention from what remains as the more interesting task for a scholar. What is so useful and so impressive about this book lies in the limitations it has imposed on itself in the stringency of its scholarly approach. It assumes a reader who does not need to be constantly reminded of the obvious—the connection between the ideas represented here and the catastrophe that fell in the same period. It also devotes its efforts to representing the material as far as possible through the sequence of its own textual expression rather than analyzing where it strays into contradictions and into void terminology. That is to say, it takes responsibility as a project in cultural history, not in philosophical critique.

There is a certain arbitrariness in the way Streim has assembled the material in so far as the boundary that encloses and connects the figures does grow less and less essential as one looks more and more closely at the positions each occupies within it. The dubious nature of the ideas they each developed contributes to the dubiousness of the realm they might be supposed to define. Chronological contemporaneity and a limited common vocabulary does imply something of an engagement in a common debate, but the indiscipline of the thinking involved leaves Streim's project with the task of documenting a set of fragments that do not add up to a whole no matter how one attempts to latch them together. Or one might put it this way: his study documents a phenomenon one encounters frequently, namely that while writers who use language with care and clarity generally use it in essentially the same way, among those whose language flounders in a welter of aggression, each flounders in it differently.

In seven chapters Streim treats the ideas of Gottfried Benn, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Arnold Gehlen, Ernst Jünger, Horst Lange, Gerhard Nebel, and Egon Vietta. Two lines of division emerge with particular significance. Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger stand apart from the other writers to whom the book devotes independent chapters because these two rank so much higher in their literary achievements; also, Benn and Jünger themselves stand apart from one another in their political orientation, their personal history, their circle of relationships, and above all in their positions vis-à-vis aesthetic modernity. Jünger, characteristically, seems to have been rather patient with the way their names were often paired, which provided more cover for Benn than any benefit to himself, yet, as Streim points out, Benn came to resent that pairing simply for its patent absurdity.

Streim focuses on the ideological and publicistic side of these two figures' work at the expense of their literary significance. This strategy fits perfectly well with the chosen emphasis of the scholarly enterprise, but does produce some possible distortions of its own when a literary text is considered primarily as representation of an ideological abstraction. Jünger has repeated often enough that his novel Auf den Marmorklippen draws on many models and explores the experience of many situations, and hence loses aesthetic resonance when taken as a precise system of allegorical references. Nonetheless, the account of that work in the chapter on Jünger insists on finding exact emblematic correspondences to motifs that seem ill-confined by such specificity. For example, where the novel describes how "die Lust zu leben und die Lust zu sterben sich in uns einten" when the brothers are brought to see a very common weed as the revelation of...