A description that designates itself as a problem can offer no solution. Deeds and images still attack one another. "I am in action," Jellicoe radioed to the Admiralty when it demanded reports from him during the naval battle.
Today, solutions are really white lies, for they do not belong within the framework of our times: perfection is not their task. The approach can only be gradual. Aladdin's problem was power with its delights and dangers; yet it seemed to me that Phares had nothing in common with the genie of the lamp. It makes a difference whether demons or messengers knock at the door.
The initial contact was fairly banal; it resulted from one of the letters that arrived at Terrestra. The precipitous development of the firm required more and more advertising for open positions. It is an old experience that mid-level positions are easy to fill. But top-level positions are a different story. The China market had soon reached first place. It began with inquiries and orders from the peripheral areas: Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, scattered communities in South East Asia, New York's Chinatown. Plus the Chinese restaurants, the silk and porcelain boutiques in all the big cities around the world. Their proprietors along with their staffs wanted to do something for themselves and their ancestors. A coffin was once again considered a nice present.
Then, with the return to capitalism and the loosening of borders, the flood of mail came from the Middle Kingdom itself. It was overwhelming. We needed a senior executive who both had special experience and was a genius at planning.
In such cases, it is hard to choose. Some people waste their time and energy on secondary stipulations, others wreak havoc with outlandish ideas. The category to which each belonged was usually apparent in the applications, which were read by various people in the company, including graphologists; I received the digests.
Thus, Phares's application likewise reached my desk after being routed through numerous offices. Good knowledge of languages, many years in the Far East, excellent penmanship. Several passages were painted in ideograms. This was not unusual, for some of the applicants were Chinese. We had special readers for them.
The question about nationality was answered with: "Cosmopolitan." Place of residence: "Adler's Hotel." While, or rather before, reading it, I saw that the letter was addressed to me personally. The impression was that of an afterimage: we close our eyes, and the inner text appears. I read it like a painting and discovered unmistakable engrams — for instance, among the positions previously held: "Landscape gardener in Liegnitz, Silesia." Some details could be known only to Bertha and myself, others to myself alone.
I remembered the signs as if I had carved them into a tree trunk years ago. Now they became visible; I did not notice that they were in the Chinese text. But I grew more and more dumbfounded as I read the letter if it was a dream, then it was no ordinary one. It dawned on me that I could not invite the sender to come to my office, for I was the recipient of the invitation — so I immediately dropped what I was doing and walked through the Tiergarten to Adler's Hotel. It was a spring morning, and I was gratuitously cheerful — elated.
Wilflingen, January 6, 1982
AFTERWORD. THE PARABLE ALADDIN'S PROBLEM OF BY MARTIN MEYER
A major influence on the German novelist Ernst Junger was the philosophy of Swedenborg, who presented his cosmic spirituality in De commercio animae et corpods (1769): God must envelop all spiritual things in visible garments, for that is the only way a finite human being can perceive the intention of Creation. Hence, matter must also be viewed as the reflection of the spiritual. The soul is the organ that must forge the link between the phenomena and their divine origin — but it can only be the soul of an initiate, whose "internal breathing" carries thoughts. In this manner, the mystical experience ofin-tuition "reconstructs" the primal images. What we have here is the neo-Platonic notion ofthe soul.
Junger, haunted by the issue of matter in the modern materialistic world, rejected any metaphysical deprecation of that concept. And that was the start of the "problem" — a term he even considered worthy of being used in a title: Aladdin's Problem, initially published in 1983. At first, this brief four-part novel seems to have little to do with a metaphysical "appreciation" of matter. In his habitual way, the author introduces a first-person narrator who, although not yet forty, has already dealt with and transcended a number of experiences. Friedrich Baroh begins his story by mentioning a "problem," one that bedevils him, casting gloom on his existence. He is forced to spend more and more time mulling over it, whereby his everyday life becomes secondary to this preoccupation. He therefore recalls his past, filling us in on his background. However, we learn nothing about the nature of his problem.
Baroh has served in the Polish People's Army — originally as a soldier, bullied by a vicious sergeant; then as an officer. In the military, he makes no waves, living as what Junger labels an "anarch," conforming unenthusiastically to the system; he spends quiet hours with a friend, a Polish officer, meditating on historical events and on their causes and premises. One day, Baroh flees to the West, where he attends university, marries, and eventually becomes an executive trainee in his uncle's funeral parlor.
After realizing that people without history have no peace and that even our graves fit in with the "chauffeur style," Baroh attempts to compensate for this lack. He starts deepening his knowledge of funeral customs and — in "a countermove to the motor world" — he founds Terrestra. His firm offers interested clients resting places for all eternity, permanent gravesites. Terrestra buys an extensive and intricate catacomb system in Anatolia; and before long, business is booming. "A primal instinct was rearoused."
But ultimately, success merely increases Baroh's frustration, and the fewer the demands placed on him, the more his problem gains the upper hand. In the last part of the novel, he admits, or at least hints at, the location of his pain.
My complaint is not housed in my brain. It is lodged in my body and, beyond that, in society — the cause of my illness. I can do something about it only when I have isolated myself from society. Perhaps I will soon be interned.
Baroh is spared this fate not only by camouflaging his existence as an outsider. In the end, he also finds salvation. He tells about "messengers" knocking on the door. The response to his vague yearning for the absolute are voices and inspirations.
Something wishes to alight — an eagle, a nutcracker, a wren, a jester? Why near me of all people? Perhaps a vulture — I have liver problems now too.
The delicately ironical allusion to myth does not cloak the issue for long. Baroh, now living in an expectant mood, receives a letter of application from a man named Phares. He knows — although he cannot really know it — that this person will initiate him into the mysteries of a world that conceals meaning behind the phenomena. For Phares, we are told, is conversant with the "primal text, of which all human as well as animal languages are merely translations or effusions."
Now we understand what this "problem" is all about: the narrator is tormented by the both personal and social dilemma of having to live in a nihilistic culture that, in the wealth of available knowledge, has lost all connection to "meaning": "Aladdin's problem was power with its delights and dangers." And also: "Aladdin too was an erotic nihilist…."