Ernst Jiinger’s precarious balance of nature
Comet poet: Ernst Jiinger
Quelle: picture-alliance / akg-images/akg
A comet is flying past the earth these days. With a bit of luck it can be seen with the naked eye. Reason to remember Ernst Jiinger, who even traveled to Kuala Lumpur in his old age to catch Halley for the second time in his life.
SErnst Jiinger is even too cool for comets. In the spring of 1986 he looks at the night sky in Malaysia. For the second time in his life he watches Comet Halley pass by. “This time he seemed a little bigger to me, but just as little impressive as then,” the poet notes in his journal, which will later become the booklet “Zwei Mal Halley”, “tailless, diffuse, something like a ball of yarn.”
Nevertheless, Jiinger picks up the ball of yarn and carefully unrolls it – until his whole life lies dead straight in front of him, from the moment when the 15-year-old looked up and saw a radiant point, a veil of gas and trailed dust. 1910 was that.
One could say that the text is Jiinger’s attempt to be even more rambling than the comet. Already on the journey he associates himself with the stopover in Dubai from Jules Verne to the temptation of St. Anthony. “The airports at night seem demonic,” writes Jiinger. And conjectures in the face of fairy lights at two in the morning: “Maybe emirs will return from lavish festivals.”
Ernst Jiinger as an officer in the Wehrmacht, September 1939
Quelle: picture-alliance / akg-images
In Kuala Lumpur on April 8th they say: “Tea in the garden – I recognized the trees, also the bushes, which were in bloom – the day before yesterday there was still snow in Wilflingen.” Jiinger admires a “mighty fig tree in its shell of aerial roots”. He must not be “illuminated, must be treated with reverence at all, because a spirit lives in him”.
In the appearance of Halley, myth and technology come together. While the “Vega-1” and “Vega-2” probes, launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the former USSR, are sending images of the so-called coma, a turbulence triggered by the solar wind, and the comet’s nucleus to Earth for the first time from a distance of around 8000 kilometers, Jiinger reflects on the precarious balance of nature. Humans have been bothering them for a long time. The forests disappear, a “world style” of egalitarian architecture covers the most remote corners, which Jiinger still perceived as untouched in his youth.
In the meantime, with two world wars ravaging the planet, death has proven a more reliable companion than Halley, who only pops in every 75 years. That didn’t detract from human hubris. Towards the end of the journey, Jiinger received the news of the reactor accident in Chernobyl. Jiinger writes: “No surprise for me. We live in the nuclear age and willy-nilly we will live with it.”
We also have to accept that Halley won’t return until 2062. The comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) promises a little consolation. About one kilometer in size, it will fly past Earth at a distance of 42 million kilometers in the coming days, which corresponds to a third of the distance between Earth and the sun. The solar winds inflate his coma to tens of thousands of kilometers. You may be able to see the spectacle with the naked eye. Otherwise a small telescope will do. However, ambitious comet poets have no chance of a second date; he will come back, but only in 50,000 years.