Abstract
IN HIS MONUMENTAL OPUS, Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre criticized the tendency of human consciousness to orbit familiar ideas and experience. He described this kind of limited thinking as sticky or slimy, and warned in particular of the invisible suction of the on our understanding of the present and on our awareness of the possibilities offered by the future.' Sliminess was an antivalue at war with freedom and creativity.2 Sartre was writing this during a world war against a regime that had built an aggressive national cult around mythological history. By manipulating cherished historical symbols, such as the nobility of the medieval Teutonic Order, Hitler's propagandists justified the rise of a cruel contemporary reality. Stuck in more recent history, moreover, post-war Germans are loathe to explore the positive elements of their medieval and tribal past, because the past has become linked with the atrocities of Nazism.
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