EJ and PKD

Kai Frederik Lorentzen lorentzen at hotmail.de
Sun Jul 2 04:47:41 CDT 2017


As I just learned, the first German edition of PKD's The Man in the High Castle appeared in a small  publishing house named König in 1973. The novel's dedication was, or so the source cited below plus another informant say, changed for the German readership from "To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book would never have been written" to "An Ernst Jünger für 'Auf den Marmorklippen'" (To Ernst Jünger for "On the Marble Cliffs") . (Later editions do not bear this dedication.) This is news to me but highly plausible. Dick became, inspired by Die Winterreise as well as Doktor Faustus, interested in German culture early on. He even learned, in a more serious way than Pynchon, German on his own and studied original documents from the Third Reich in Berkeley. Jünger's book from 1939 - whether it's a long story, a novella or a short novel is hard to tell - first got published in English in 1947, so it's absolutely possible that Dick read it. The thematic correspondences between Dick and Jünger become obvious when you look at the SciFi thread in the Waldgänger's work, as it manifests especially in the novels Heliopolis and Eumeswil. Also in the long story Gläserne Bienen, where one finds mini drones and a globalist entertainment entrepreneur (Jünger had Disney in mind, today we may think of Zuckerberg).  And then there's what Gravity's Rainbow (p. 582) calls "drug-epistemologies". For Dick this is well known on these shores, in the case of Jünger - who was a close friend of Albert Hofmann - there are, in addition to numerous remarks in the diaristic works, two books of special importance: The long story Besuch auf Godenholm, that came out in 1952 (which makes it one of the very first treatments of the psychedelic experience in Western fictional literature), and the Großessay Annäherungen - Drogen und Rausch from 1970 (a small piece of this was published in English in the Antaios periodical, 1959-1971, edited by Jünger and Mircea Eliade). Dick and Jünger also shared an interest in Heidegger ---

I would be interested if anybody knows more about this!


> ... Das Original des Romans erschien 1962, die deutsche Erstausgabe ist erst 1973 beim Kleinverlag König erschienen, übersetzt von Heinz Nagel. Leider ist bei der Neuübersetzung von 2000 die Widmung verloren gegangen. Offenbar hatte Dick die deutsche Ausgabe des Romans An Ernst Jünger für "Auf den Marmorklippen" gewidmet (leider lässt sich dazu nicht mehr finden) ... <

http://dickkoepfigsammeln.blogspot.de/2017/02/noch-mehr-fischer-2017.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Marble_Cliffs

https://www.google.de/search?q=albert+hofmann+ernst+j%C3%BCnger+picture&client=ubuntu&hs=Kkx&channel=fs&tbm=isch&imgil=K7z2zYTrMCposM%253A%253B4qzWOfErPIT4OM%253Bhttps%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.welt.de%25252Fkultur%25252Fliterarischewelt%25252Farticle118106538%25252FErnst-Juengers-LSD-Trips-mit-Schnittchen-und-Mozart.html&source=iu&pf=m&fir=K7z2zYTrMCposM%253A%252C4qzWOfErPIT4OM%252C_&usg=__DFFxJWHgF45_mLABhpGsUCMIzCs%3D&biw=1276&bih=653&ved=0ahUKEwi23eDHmurUAhUF6RQKHaddDFAQyjcIQg&ei=c7JYWfbXM4XSU6e7sYAF#imgrc=K7z2zYTrMCposM:


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