MLR, ioi.i, 2006 295 Der Schmerz des Vermissens:Essays. By Gerhard Nebel. Ed. by Gerald Zschorsch. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 2000. 286 pp. ?21.50. ISBN 3-608-93458-8. Briefe 1938-1974. By Ernst Junger and Gerhard Nebel. Ed. by Ulrich Froschle and Michael Neumann. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 2003. 989 pp. ?49. ISBN 3608 -93626-2. Gerhard Nebel has long been forgotten; as Sebastian Kleinschmidt writes in his epi? logue to Schmerz des Vermissens,a selection of Nebel's essays, Nebel was never a name in the GDR, and in the BRD his popularity waned quickly on his death. Born in 1903 in Dessau, Nebel studied philosophy, Greek, and Latin at Freiburg, Marburg, Hei? delberg, and Cologne under several luminaries: Husserl, Natorp, Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Bultmann, Jaspers, and Gundolf among others. During his time as a stu? dent he befriended Talcott Parsons and Hans Jonas. While Nebel's more than thirty books testifyto his lifelong loyalty to both philosophy and the classics (in 1927 he defended a doctoral thesis on Plotinus at Heidelberg; he published books on Hamann (1973), Homer (1961), and Pindar (1965); and he also spent a considerable part of his life as a high-school teacher of philosophy, Greek, and Latin), his political affiliations were rather more volatile. Nebel started as a Social Democrat, but soon abandoned the SPD to join, as co-founder, the Socialist Workers' Party?clear evidence of his radicalization, an occurrence far from unique or isolated on the eve of the breakdown of Weimar democracy. Late in 1934 Nebel fledto North Africa, tryingto escape the insecurity and poverty of his daily life. He became a private teacher near Cairo, a position procured through the services of Siegfried Landshut, a Jewish emigre best known for his later dis? covery of some of Marx's early writings. While still in Africa, Nebel read Ernst Jiinger's Blatter und Steine, and that was the start of his lifelong fascination with the slightly older author oiDer A rbeiter. Back in Germany in the summer of 1935, Nebel joined the NSDAP, citing in his denazification statement impecuniousness and the need to offsetthe risks arising from his former membership of the Socialist Workers' Party as the reasons forhis choice (strangely, Kleinschmidt does not mention Nebel's Nazi membership in his otherwise very helpful epilogue to Schmerz des Vermissens). Nebel's post-1945 career was that of a high-school teacher and then, for about two decades afteran early retirement in 1955, of a freelance writer. He died in 1974, aged seventy, in Stuttgart. The nine essays selected for publication by Gerald Zschorsch in Der Schmerz des Vermissens span almost thirty years of Nebel's writing (1947-73; or even more, if one takes into account the fact that 'Betta splendens' comes from the 1947 book Von den Elementen, which was a reworked version of Nebel's firstbook Feuer und Wasser (1939)). What unites these essays is a critique of modernity and a conservative af? firmation ofthe archaic in its various manifestations: the riches of intuitioncelebrated over the narrowness of reason; the rural or forest landscape privileged over the desert of the big city; the moderation of progress through a preservation of fundamental moral values (the only fruitof progress which Nebel does not wish to relinquish is the idea of liberty and individual rights; see his essay 'Fortschritt'). The long essay on Stefan George, another spiritual guru for Nebel and many of his generation, stands somewhat apart, in that it offersless of Nebel's trademark 'practical' philosophizing and Zeitkritik, characteristic of most ofthe other essays, and more ofa slightly tedious exegetic exercise on poetry submerged in an almost ritual pessimism in the face of God's abandonment ofthe world. Nebel's predominantly conservative political and cultural orientation presented ample ground for a long friendship with Junger. As a matter of fact, Nebel was to earn for himself the somewhat dubious reputation of one of the most dedicated promoters of Junger. The young Heinrich Boll firstheard the names of Ernst and 296 Reviews Friedrich Georg Jiingerprecisely from Nebel, at that time his teacher (as a substitute fora couple of weeks) of German and boxing, another of Nebel's passions, in...
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