In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 467
press as "sober and modest, but warm and personal,"104 the party
hardliner Hanns Johst became Blunck's successor. This did not come as
a surprise. lOS Blunck had probably underestimated the power of the party
hierarchy over what he tried to bring into play-namely, individual
artistic and ideological merit. l06 Like Heidegger, Blunck never fell into
disgrace with the Nazi party. He was awarded the Goethe Medal in
1938, and in the same year the government entrusted him with a modest
cultural mission following the annexation of Austria. lO?
In 1926, with some public acclaim but seemingly without any financial
reward,108 Blunck had published his novel Kampf der Gestirne (Battle of
the Stars). It would be the second part of a trilogy entitled Die Urvater­
Saga (Saga of the Forefathers), in which he aimed at "a world view based
on the history of the German people, going beyond the vision of the State
and the divisions between the social classes."109 Despite its prose form,
Kampf der Gestirne uses elements of the heroic poem: the tone, the
archaic vocabulary, the formulaic expressions, and the technique of thematic
contrast. Like Heidegger, Blunck seems to associate such (artificially
produced) discursive archaisms with authenticity and with a
particular truth-value. But it is even more interesting to observe that
Blunck structures his novel like an allegory of the contrast between
authenticity and inauthenticity (Eigentlichkeit and Uneigentlichkeit) as
it is developed, with much greater complexity, in Sein und Zeit. This
contrast is central to Kampf der Gestirne because Blunck's late Stone Age
protagonists (his fictional ancestors of the German Yolk) are divided into
two realms, the Empire of the Day/Sun ("authenticity") and the Empire
of the Night/Moon ("inauthenticity"). Although there is no logical reason
that readers should opt for the Empire of the Sun, Blunck's value
attributions leave as little doubt about the choice he advocates as
Heidegger's parallel arguments do.
The most striking lexical convergence between Kampf der Gestirne
and Sein und Zeit lies in the dominant role that both books assign to the
binarism Sorge versus Furcht ("care" versus "fear"). It first appears on
the third page of Blunck's novel, in the characterization of Larmer ("he
who makes noise"), a conqueror who belongs to the Empire of the
Moon. Larmer wants to win the trust of conquered peoples by reinstituting
the magic rituals which his defeated predecessor Elk, the "innovator,"110
had abandoned. In doing so, Larmer gives in to the fear
(Furcht) that he and his partisans feel at night. Within Blunck's impec-