As "l'esprit familier du lieu", the spirit of the familiar home, Charles Baudelaire had described in his "Fleurs du Mal" the relational, equally engaging and mysterious nature of the cat. In three famous poems, he approached the pet without diminishing the magic that irradiates it. Since Baudelaire, many poets have tried to get to the heart of what the attraction of the cat is for humans, be it Rilke, T. S. Eliot or the lyrically otherwise rather homespun Ricarda Huch, who is worth remembering (not only) as a cat lover.
In his "Approximations", published in 1970, Ernst Jünger wrote about the fundamental difference between cats and dogs and the characteristics that humans look for in them – and about the fundamentally different people who identify with dogs or cats. In an eulogy to his Siamese cat Wanda, he left no doubt as to which pet his own nature corresponded best: "The cat belongs to the other side of man – where he enjoys leisure, where he indulges in ideas, writes, fantasizes and dreams . . . their eyes are yellow like amber, blue like sapphire, green like turquoise. The iris reminds me of the blue of the morning glory on a warm, windless morning."
Ernst Jünger's brother Friedrich Georg (1898 to 1977) was at least as contemplatively inclined towards cats. This may in itself be evidenced by the adjacent poem, first printed in his volume "Iris in the Wind", published in 1952, but also by the whole way in which he praises his pet in it. Outwardly, Frederick George may have stood in the shadow of his older brother as far as cosmopolitanism was concerned, although he accompanied him on many journeys and otherwise liked to measure reality and imagination together with him. The two never saw themselves as opposites or adversaries, but as complementary brothers.
Wilderness in view
While one heroically sought to pacify war, technology and natural sciences, the other saw himself with his writing "The Perfection of Technology" already under National Socialism as a critic of a soulless technology and apologist of a green renaissance and praised in his poems written after the war marginal landscapes and nature, which threatened to be leveled by the mechanical acceleration, such as the "Winter in the Moor", the "Snowberries", the "Solling", the "Allwiesen", the "Reinhardswald", "Wall Hedges in Lower Saxony" or "Nut Hunters". Paradoxically, in the poem, it is precisely the animal tied to the household, the cat, that serves him as a guarantor of a stranger who experiences the self not in travel and being on the move, but when looking into the eyes of the strange, familiar house spirit.