Hans Henny Jahnn by Henrik Eger
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JAHNN, Hans Henny. Born December 17, 1894, in Stellingen, near Hamburg, Germany; died November 29, 1959, in Hamburg, West Germany. Jahnn changed his family name of Jahnn after his family and he came to blows over his homoerotic relationship with his schoolmate and (later) life friend, Gottlieb Harms. Jahnn’s sense of alienation from society, combined with his homophilia, became key factors in his life and in his work. He saw art and love—“the little eternities”—as a defence in the battle against decay to which he believed all human life was doomed.
Lifelong pacifists unwilling to be drafted, Jahnn and his friend Harms went into their first exile in Norway in 1915 where they stayed until the end of World War I. Jahnn’s dramatic works, mainly written in Scandinavia at the beginning of his literary career, have been characterized as “poetic visions of a creation that has been recognized as tragic, full of heathen, anti-Christian culture-critique” (Uwe Schweikert, quoted in Metzler Autoren Lexikon: Deutschesprachige Dichtler und Schriftsteller vom mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart [German-Speaking Poets and Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present], Stuttgart: J.P. Metzler, p. 312). |
Hans Henny Jahn, 1894-1959
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The writing of his first play, Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1916-17), was guided, in Scheweikert’s words, by his intention to write “no literature like the one they all write, not that which they drill into you as literature at school, not that kind of language” (p. 313). Response to Pastor Ephraim Magnus ranged from condemnation as originating from the “underworld” and unnecessary in its terrifying explosion of dementia—one critic wrote that its state of “being nothing but a grandiose, ghastly document of an extreme condition” had nothing to do with theater and that the script should be kept under lock and key in the “poison chest of humanity” (Julius Bab, quoted in Schweikert)—to the coveted Kleist Prize and a production under the direction of Bertolt Brecht in 1920.
Hans Henny Jahnn, Handwritten script, Fluß ohne Ufer (River without Banks)
Written in exile, Pastor Ephraim Magnus led to heated controversies in Jahnn’s native country. The controversy grew out of Jahnn’s attacks on Christian morality, his protest against the “violence” of “bourgeois order,” his willingness to portray aspects of pubescent erotica, and his expressionistic depiction of physical desperation. The eponymous hero of Jahnn’s drama undergoes castration and crucifixion before he can pass through his soul’s journey. The work, as well as Jahnn’s experience of exile, spurred on his lifelong wrestling with language and the beginning of his stream-of-consciousness writing. In exile, Jahnn also developed his utopian vision of Ugrino—a community of fellow believers in the rebirth of an archaic culture which he and his friend Harms founded in Eckel in northern Germany in 1920. Ugrino did not survive, however, except for the Ugrino Music Publishing Company, which, among others, produced Buxtehude’s complete works. Jahnn became well-known as an inventive and productive organ builder and worked for the city of Hamburg as its organ expert. In 1933 he was dismissed for “political unreliability.”
Jahnn’s second exile period began in Switzerland in 1934 and continued into Denmark where he lived as a writer, farmer, horse breeder, bio-scientist, philosopher, and visionary. Apparently he did not see himself as an emigrant and, consequently, did not seek out the company of other literary exiles. Jahnn in fact kept his passport, traveled to Germany, and had some of his work published there during the Third Reich. During the German occupation of Denmark in the 1940s, Jahnn was left unharmed by the Nazis.
In 1950 Jahnn returned to Hamburg and became active in the literary and political world there, including association with the German PEN Club and the anti-nuclear and anti-rearmament movements. His visionary despair is perhaps best represented by Gustav Anias, the main character in his homoerotic novel Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn (1949/50, The Apologia of G. A. Horn), in which a sailor murders the fiancé of Horn (who is a composer), and through his intimate relationship with the survivor (the composer) finds forgiveness for his crime. Horn, in turn, is convinced that his relationship with the murderer is modelled on the love of Gilgamesh and Engidu of the ancient Sumeric Gilgamesh epos. It is in this exile-inspired novel that Jahnn, through the character of Horn, expresses one of his visions of the terrible: “on the weak spot of the single human, a renegade who tries to think . . . in whose ears the words reverberate which one speaks, [which one] teaches, [words] in whose name one judges, with which one dies—and [the renegade] no longer believes them. . . . In vain I bless a single creature the horse. In vain I vote for the party of the weak and conquered—I can save nobody—it is as it is” (Lexikon der deutschesprachigen Gegenwartsletints, Munich: Nymphenburger, p. 245).
Indeed, it may be said that in his epic trilogy, Fluss ohne Ufer (1949-61), of which Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anais Horn is a part and whose Epilog (1961) was published posthumously, Jahnn was attempting to bring together those compartmentalizations of reality which have splintered modern men into beasts of power and monsters of indifference. He saw the decline of German society as an inevitability of the pursuit of the divisiveness of the Western world into fields of science and humanity. Trained as a biological scientist, and self-trained as a musician–organist, Jahnn utilized his interdisciplinary experience as a continuing method of awareness. Throughout his early fiction, from the experimental Perrudja (1929) through the trilogy Fluss ohne Ufer, Jahnn pursued a notion of totality that included reason, super-reason, and an illumination of reason that was positioned so far beyond it that it might be called Ur-reason or meta-reason. In this forest world of the soul, this tossing sea of knighthood and darkness through which a ghostly ship must pass, the baptism of the hero is invariably accompanied by symphonic-like passages of exaltation, which draw on Jahnn’s vast knowledge and love of music. His heroes must undergo initiation into violence, passionate sexuality, and even murder as a passage through the dark center of the journey into being. Jahnn thus posited that reason, once it is shorn of its companionship with the mythic, undergoes a decadence in its sanity. At the same time he recognized that madness is inevitable without the profound healing presence of reason. His view was a tragic one: he saw evil as triumphant in its corruption of society, a corruption the artist could not prevent, yet against which the artist was obliged to struggle.
Critics continue to remain in separate campus about the value of Jahnn’s work and his literary heritage. Some champion him as a writer of mythic power; others see his vision as morbid and grotesque. Many readers cannot fathom his multitudinal talents and forms, his sexual orientation, and his experimental language. He is often labeled an outsider in the German canon. Yet a steadily growing number of critics compare his work to Alfred Döblin* and James Joyce,* and see in Jahnn’s prose “one of the greatest writers of the German language in our century” (Autorenlexikon, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988). As in the past, Jahnn remains an enigma; at the same time, one of his critics, Uwe Schweikert, believes that his future as a great modern author is in the process of gestating.
Selected titles: . . .
HENRIK EGER and MARTIN TUCKER
Short biography, bibliography, and other links
Originally published in Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis and Biographical Dictionary , edited by Martin Tucker.
New York, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 448-50.
Jahnn’s second exile period began in Switzerland in 1934 and continued into Denmark where he lived as a writer, farmer, horse breeder, bio-scientist, philosopher, and visionary. Apparently he did not see himself as an emigrant and, consequently, did not seek out the company of other literary exiles. Jahnn in fact kept his passport, traveled to Germany, and had some of his work published there during the Third Reich. During the German occupation of Denmark in the 1940s, Jahnn was left unharmed by the Nazis.
In 1950 Jahnn returned to Hamburg and became active in the literary and political world there, including association with the German PEN Club and the anti-nuclear and anti-rearmament movements. His visionary despair is perhaps best represented by Gustav Anias, the main character in his homoerotic novel Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn (1949/50, The Apologia of G. A. Horn), in which a sailor murders the fiancé of Horn (who is a composer), and through his intimate relationship with the survivor (the composer) finds forgiveness for his crime. Horn, in turn, is convinced that his relationship with the murderer is modelled on the love of Gilgamesh and Engidu of the ancient Sumeric Gilgamesh epos. It is in this exile-inspired novel that Jahnn, through the character of Horn, expresses one of his visions of the terrible: “on the weak spot of the single human, a renegade who tries to think . . . in whose ears the words reverberate which one speaks, [which one] teaches, [words] in whose name one judges, with which one dies—and [the renegade] no longer believes them. . . . In vain I bless a single creature the horse. In vain I vote for the party of the weak and conquered—I can save nobody—it is as it is” (Lexikon der deutschesprachigen Gegenwartsletints, Munich: Nymphenburger, p. 245).
Indeed, it may be said that in his epic trilogy, Fluss ohne Ufer (1949-61), of which Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anais Horn is a part and whose Epilog (1961) was published posthumously, Jahnn was attempting to bring together those compartmentalizations of reality which have splintered modern men into beasts of power and monsters of indifference. He saw the decline of German society as an inevitability of the pursuit of the divisiveness of the Western world into fields of science and humanity. Trained as a biological scientist, and self-trained as a musician–organist, Jahnn utilized his interdisciplinary experience as a continuing method of awareness. Throughout his early fiction, from the experimental Perrudja (1929) through the trilogy Fluss ohne Ufer, Jahnn pursued a notion of totality that included reason, super-reason, and an illumination of reason that was positioned so far beyond it that it might be called Ur-reason or meta-reason. In this forest world of the soul, this tossing sea of knighthood and darkness through which a ghostly ship must pass, the baptism of the hero is invariably accompanied by symphonic-like passages of exaltation, which draw on Jahnn’s vast knowledge and love of music. His heroes must undergo initiation into violence, passionate sexuality, and even murder as a passage through the dark center of the journey into being. Jahnn thus posited that reason, once it is shorn of its companionship with the mythic, undergoes a decadence in its sanity. At the same time he recognized that madness is inevitable without the profound healing presence of reason. His view was a tragic one: he saw evil as triumphant in its corruption of society, a corruption the artist could not prevent, yet against which the artist was obliged to struggle.
Critics continue to remain in separate campus about the value of Jahnn’s work and his literary heritage. Some champion him as a writer of mythic power; others see his vision as morbid and grotesque. Many readers cannot fathom his multitudinal talents and forms, his sexual orientation, and his experimental language. He is often labeled an outsider in the German canon. Yet a steadily growing number of critics compare his work to Alfred Döblin* and James Joyce,* and see in Jahnn’s prose “one of the greatest writers of the German language in our century” (Autorenlexikon, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988). As in the past, Jahnn remains an enigma; at the same time, one of his critics, Uwe Schweikert, believes that his future as a great modern author is in the process of gestating.
Selected titles: . . .
HENRIK EGER and MARTIN TUCKER
Short biography, bibliography, and other links
Originally published in Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis and Biographical Dictionary , edited by Martin Tucker.
New York, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 448-50.
