Lärmhölle und verweigertes Trauma

Abstract

AbstractErnst Junger has been considered as a writer who created the myth of the invulnerable and coldblooded soldier in his diaries and in its aesthetic reshaping In Stahlgewittern. In his self-description he establishes an image of an adventurous hero who seems to be touched by the terror of war only on an aesthetic level. But this heroic fashioning of the self into an armored and futuristic fighting machine becomes fragile when we consider the evidence of the sound of war, which was directly linked to death in World War I and which creates traumatic traces in his texts. Junger tries eagerly to fight a trauma by taming his threatening impressions by textualization. The refused traumatic experiences recur in his dreams and leave noticeable surreal marks in his texts. Writing becomes the personal battleground where Junger’s feelings appear and are aesthetically subdued at the same time. His obsession with reworking reveals a neurotic structure and the reprocessing of the (acoustic) shocks of the battles appear as attempts to interpret the war as a process of meaning formation.