Visit to Godenholm

Visit to Godenholm (German: Besuch auf Godenholm) is a 1952 novella by the German writer Ernst Jünger. It tells the story of a group of people who are invited to the island Godenholm in Scandinavia, where they take part in a mind-altering séance with strong surreal imagery.

The book was published in English in 2015, translated by Annabel Moynihan.^[1]

Reception

Visit to Godenholm did not receive much attention when it was first published and was for a long time one of Jünger's less read works. In the 1990s it caught the interest of Jünger researchers as a veiled description of one of Jünger's early LSD trips together with Albert Hofmann. In the introduction, Elliot Neaman situates the book in a tradition of linking drug experiences with literary expression, with prominent examples from Romanticism and in the works of Charles Baudelaire.^[2]

Legacy

In the 1970 essay collection Annäherungen, a book focused entirely on drugs, Jünger has a chapter titled "Rückblick auf Godenholm", which means "Looking back at Godenholm". The French composer André Almuró made the 1971 opera Visite à Godenholm, which is based on Jünger's novel.^[3]

References

Notes

Literature

• Streim, Gregor (2011). "Esoterische Kommunikation". In Schöning, Matthias; Stöckmann, Ingo. Ernst Jünger und die Bundesrepublik: Ästhetik - Politik - Zeitgeschichte (in German). Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN 9783110237849.