Hans Jenny Jahnn: Evening

The 17th of November.  A dreary day, filled with empty shadows.  The clouds are shapeless; they hang against the sky like burlap.  Evening comes early, numb, in a fogless haze.  The world is quiet; only   the sound of people is loud.  You go out walking, you ask yourself questions -- you ask whether there will ever be another day like this one -- one just as vague and dim -- with the same beginnings, those born today, the deaths, the innumerable acts of lustful procreation, the reckonings of fate, the coincidences, the recently launched endeavors and decisions.  You get no answer.  You cannot provide an answer.

[From <i>Jeden ereilt es</i> (It Catches Up With Everyone), translated from the German by Adam Siegel.]

Hans Henny Jahnn

Christoph Bauer: Hans Henny Jahnn

life is the transgression of a prescribed order rather than the order itself.  jahnn's eroticism adheres to no known conventional norms; instead it invents new rituals that have less to do with the compulsive violation of taboos than with the discovery of an individualized sensuality which goes beyond arousal, penetrating, fucking, procreating.  jahnn's sexual innuendos are objectionable only insofar as the imaginative power of the reader of either gender forbids certain individual longings, with sexuality serving ultimately as imperative for a harmony that seems unable to satisfy purely spiritual needs.  the uncertainty, the fear, the forlornness of each individual leads a sensual frenzy.  a man wants to be embraced, even by his murderer.  one almost feels jahnn's figures trembling in all their nordic restraint.  their passions are as unexplored as the most distant planets.  jahnn's eroticism is neither the dogmatic agony of a marquis de sade, nor the metaphysical pornography of a george bataille, nor the theological piquancy of a klossowski, but a lengthy exploration of the often scarcely perceptible sources of passion, which in this respect include both hate and love.

[Christoph Bauer, in: Jahnn lesen: Fluß ohne Ufer (Ulrich Bitz, ed. Hanser, 1993) 201-202.]