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-----Message d'origine-----
De : Ulrich Oswald <[email protected]>
À : [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date : lundi 1 février 1999 00:48
Objet : Re: EJ & Hitler
Jean-Albert Vilmer wrote:
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."
Sorry to respond so late and so rude, but who's Hitler?
Ulrich Oswald
