The Editor E-Book

Harald Neugebauer

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 83

Beschreibung

As long as you play chess, you depend on moves directed at your opponent. This changes when you start thinking about the game itself rather than the movements. _____________________________________________________________ Ernst Jünger's Commentary on Friedrich Georg's 70th Birthday

Leseprobe

As long as you play chess, you depend on moves directed at your opponent. This changes when you start thinking about the game itself rather than the movements.

Ernst Jünger's Commentary on Friedrich Georg's 70th Birthday

Prologue

Her curly, henna-red hair sparkled in the evening sun that shone in through the window. The young-at-heart woman in her mid-fifties, who could be mistaken for someone in her late twenties by her style of dress, was one of the last representatives of the truly free and independent press in Western Europe. She looked out of the window onto the Danube, paused for a moment and continued to whisper into her dictaphone:

"Today, Europe is no longer free. The culmination will hopefully result in a great, united resistance. We are organizing against all expectations in Eastern Poland ... Poland seems to be the only state besides Hungary that has not yet been infiltrated. We do not have many allies ... But before that, I will describe, for the sake of posterity, from the very beginning the story of which the Austrian book editor Dr. Harald Neugebauer tragically became an eyewitness and one of the protagonists. He told me his story before the Battle of Brussels-Molenbeek, and substantiated it with the diary entries, writings and notes that I use as the basis for this manuscript."

Kimberly M., Budapest, Hungary, Free Europe

Berlin-Zehlendorf, Dr. Neugebauer

The editor reopened the first page of the book and began to read again:

Early autumn in Graubünden. The wind blowing cold announced the impending arrival of a frosty winter.

The dense fir forest on the mountainside was swaying back and forth in the autumnal wind, a many-voiced chorus heralding the approaching cold season.

A man, sitting on the shore of the lake, took off his oval-shaped silver-plated reading glasses and looked out over Lake Silvaplana. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with the damp, cold, clear air, and continued to watch the snow-covered mountain peaks, where the sharp light of the September sun refracted as if in a prism. He felt a little shivery, so he slammed shut the book he was holding and stood up from the park bench at the edge of the lake. "Am I Prometheus or Epimetheus?" he asked himself as he walked back home, following the shore. It was time to leave Sils and go to Basel. As he noticed out of the corner of his eye the cold waters of Lake Silvaplana to his left, he realized that the deep dark water attracted him in a deeply emotional way. "I want to sink down in you," he whispered and stopped. "If the water came up to me, I wouldn't refuse it," he muttered softly to himself. Turning slowly to the left, he walked leisurely toward the water. The water, dark and calm, spoke to him: "Into me you can sink forever. For I am faithful to thee, not am I man that I can refuse thee faithfulness. Come, come, O sink into me, as every tear drop that will fill me." The man approached the water without haste, in small steps. His brown suede shoes touched the wet and he was overcome for a brief moment by the coldness of the water soaking his feet. "Waterdrop I want to become and be submerged within you." He held his breath until his lungs began to burn, wondering how long it would be before he drowned in the cold water.

"But are you ready for me, O you fire of Prometheus? Thou eternal knowledge? Not that thou shouldst dry on my flame," the man said, adding: "Some other time perhaps, but not today." "Down the mountain I will go to tell men what there is to say," he declared in a determined and stern voice. His mind was on the edge of a precipice lost in the deep immensity of the lake. "Not yet," he spoke to himself. "Not yet; first I must articulate it."

"To hold up the mirror to men, to make clear to them their vulgar banality, and to educate man and beast with the sledgehammer," he whispered to the lake. "I have overcome even you, Arthur," he said, "my mentor, who now is nothing but the eristic demagogue, nothing more ..." The words "The barren polar bear zones" slipped out of his mouth as his gaze was lost among the snow-covered mountain peaks. "Failed at teaching," he spoke, looking out toward the lake again, deep in thought. "The loss of man and God."

"So long, eternal friend, I know you will wait for me patiently until we meet again ..." Wordlessly, he continued to watch the lake until a delicate female hand touched his right shoulder from behind. The woman in the long black dress let her left hand rest on him. She looked down at him with glazed and sorrowful eyes: "Your shoes are wet, come home. You need to dry your feet, or you'll catch a cold."

As they walked home, the woman on his right tucked her arm into his. "You must forget her," she said. "Learn to forget her. Write. Writing is good for you. I'll help you pack your things." "Will you stop talking to me about her! You banal soul, you can't understand," he replied angrily. She looked at him and remained silent. The man thought for a moment, then said: "I want to go to Rapallo, by myself. I'm not going with you, sister. Tell mother that all is well." "No," she said, shocked. "Nothing is well."

"You are utterly depressed, and more isolation will make you even more ill. Please come with me." "No sister, finish packing my things, I'm going to Italy. In Rapallo I will be able to write in peace. And I'm going alone, most certainly!" he murmured, growing louder. "To Bertha I will write another letter." "Who is Bertha?" his sister asked in amazement. "The lady of my delight," he said. "You want to go to Rapallo without saying goodbye in person? Why must you always push people away?" she asked angrily. "You can't keep rebuking everyone with your radical ways!"

*

Sitting in the first-class carriage, the man saw through the window how his sister, sad-faced and with tears in her eyes, waved a sorrow goodbye to him with her right hand. He waved back at her stiffly, and as the train pulled away, he took the daily paper, Basler Nachrichten, out of his jacket pocket and looked at the front page. "Failed assassination attempt on Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig of Prussia and the assembled princes," it said. He read on with moderate interest. Anarchists were planning to assassinate William the First with dynamite! "Anarchists are would-be nihilists," he muttered, "would-be but unable-to-be nihilists." The cover story interested him only rudimentarily. So he turned the page and skimmed the next few pages. The report on the new law initiated by Bismarck to introduce health insurance in the German Empire, which was controversial but highly praised, gave him pause for a moment. "You claim your rights, they are not handed to you,” he thought. In the back pages, he read about the aftermath of the Tiszaeszlár affair, which was still ongoing. A peasant girl had disappeared, and the girl's mother had filed charges against Jews. These were charged with alleged ritual murder for the Passover festival but were acquitted. Mass unrest had broken out in northeastern Hungary. The Danube monarchy was seething. "Richard," he said, "my faithful friend, as once you were. You are the pepper and salt of this decadence. Thee will I educate in writing, that thou mayest learn the superhuman, thou who art the sun of the downfall." He slammed the paper shut again, folded it carefully, and asked himself in his mind: "How shall mankind help itself, in spite of mankind?" Ivan Turgenev had died barely a month ago. "The realist," he exclaimed, in a low voice. He thought of the protagonist, Chulkaturin, in Turgenev's 'Diary of a Superfluous Man'. "Mankind," he said, looking through the compartment window into the ravine they were passing. "How far down could a man fall in such a ravine," he wondered. "Tell me, Chulkaturin!" He looked down into the gorge and tried to estimate the depth. "Man is a rope, suspended between beast and superman, he is a downfall and a transition," he thought. "But you are not deep enough for me to fall within you, for I am deeper than you," he said. He closed his eyes and fell into a shallow and restless sleep.

The editor looked up from the text. The final correction of the first part was now complete. But he didn't like the portrayal of Rapallo at all, and he decided to redo the entire description of the small Italian town, jotting the following note in his script:

DESCRIPTION RAPALLO

By now, he knew the text almost by heart. Normally, he wrote bachelor's and master's theses as a ghostwriter. After graduating in anthropology, he had preferred to continue his studies instead of working as an anthropologist. Society as a whole was sick, not sick with any viruses, but mentally sick, he was sure of it. What would happen, he wondered, if suddenly there were no more psychotropic drugs, and he laughed to himself. Now he was correcting the book of some intellectual bourgeois who had written his debut novella as the conclusion of his study of literature. The author tried to set a monument to his intellectual snobbery by writing a book that most likely no one would ever read except a select few from circles interested in literature, because the subject matter of this novella was simply too abstract. But since the payment was good, Dr. Neugebauer had accepted this assignment. Fortunately, the work was soon finished, and the text edited throughout, except for the pointless and boring description of the small Italian town of Rapallo.

Dr. Neugebauer continued reading the text:

Sitting at an old escritoire, he had been writing excessively, as if driven, for the past ten days, interrupted only by some short breaks for sleep and food. Overtired but relatively balanced, he wrote down the last line in the manuscript: