grgr (34): "no return channel from gottfried to the ground" (751)//:: hans henny jahnn

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 ... the intimacy between gottfried & blicero in their final scenes touches me 
as the most tender moment in the novel ... their love grew and matured while 
the one between roger & jessica could not get beyond the magic beginning (which 
seems to be the corresponding episode in the early parts of gr) and, eventually, 
died ... with the sacrifice of gottfried (- be it imaginary or "real") 
weissmann fulfills his black gnostic dream:firing an arrow across the abyss ... 
the energized substance of a loving male couple melting into --- 
t r a n s c e n d e n c e ... blicero & gottfried found the grace to live their 
fate as lovers ... this boy's "death-wish" in incurable ... on the sacrifice of 
boys by men here comes something on the love-murder motif in some early works of 
hans henny jahnn:

                                     "- - - - knaben, 
                                     schwindsüchtig, mit bezitzter brust."

                               (hhj: fluss ohne ufer, epilog, paralipomenon 5)

                                     (- - - - boys,
                                     consumptive, with teated breast)
    

 "two works, the play 'die mauer' and the novel 'ugrino und ingrabanien', model 
the atlantis motif, the separation of an elitist group of young men. in 'die 
mauer' another motif comes along, that of lust-murder, which one must, more 
accuretely, call love-murder. 'cause the extinction of the love object as a 
result of goal-and orientationless erotic energy is meant to symbolize the 
magical unification of victim and perpetrator - nearly a stereotyped obsession 
one meets again and again in jahnn's plays. here he was deeply convinced that 
only up growing boys do possess the highest loving skills. the totality of love, 
the unification with the loved one, is according to jahnn possible only in 
death. thus, the early death of the central figures in his early works 
shelters them from the crippling of their ability to love truly, and it also 
saves them from aging, the slow decay of the body, in which jahnn already 
recognizes symptoms of putrefaction." (elsbeth wolffheim: hans henny jahnn. 
reinbek bei hamburg 1989: rowohlt. page 43)

 kfl