The French left-wing newspaper Libération published today an article about EJ & Hitler letters. Here is a very rough summary/translation.
Sorry for my very poor English : I read almost every day your contributions and translations (special congratulations to Bertil Haggman, Thomas Friese, Ulrich Oswald, John King, Umberto Rossi and many others), and by inserting this mail I feel like a beginner musician starting to play in the middle of a famous orchestra. Anyway, here it is (for those who understand French, article may be found at http://www.liberation.fr/quotidien/semaine/990118lunzh.html) : "Adolf Hitler and his secretary Rudolf Hess had a brief correspondence as revealed yesterday the newspaper Welt am Sonntag. In the personal archive of Jünger, the newspaper found three letters from Rudolf Hess and one from Hitler, dated may 27th 1926. "I read all your writings. I valued one of the few testimony of an actor of the WWI" wrote Hitler, thanking EJ for a copy of "Fire and Blood" that Jünger sent him dedicated. A letter from Rudolf Hess, dated June 1926, thanks EJ for another letter and diaries that EJ would have sent to Hitler, and announces an Hitler visit at EJ home in Leipzig. This visit was cancelled due to a change in Hitler Program. Welt am Sonntag interprets these letters like the evidence that EJ was paid court by Hitler but kept distances. Heimo Schwilk, the journalist who found these letters and is working on a biography of EJ writes that "he could have become the "lighthouse" of the nazis but always resisted to the temptation.". EJ himself summarised his own thinking about Hitler as follows : "This man is right" he thought when he assisted to Hitler speech in Munich in 1923, "a key event" he said. Then EJ found Hitler "ridiculous" and then "sinister, awful". EJ differed very quickly differed from the national socialism because the tactic they use to conquer political power seemed to betray the "purity" of the national fight. A letter from Rudolf Hesse in 1929 tries to explain to EJ why the nazi party broke away from the assassination done by nationalists farmers : EJ had reproached the NSDAP to abandon revolutionaries. In 1927 Hitler asked EJ to be candidate for the Nazi party at the Reichstag : "I would prefer to write only one verse rather than representing 60 000 fool people at the parliament". Although the discovery of these letters is new, the closeness of EJ with the beginning of the Nazi party was already known. It did not kept other political men, much latter, to pay court to the writer : François Mitterand and Helmut Kohl were big fans of EJ, to who they paid several visits."
