Des Schrecklichen Anfang
The terrible beginning

Summary/Abstract: The author of this wartime essay ponders on select aspects of complex relations between the categories of Imagination and Horror in modernistic Western culture. Upon the basis of Bruno Schulz’s visions of an encroaching annihilation of the entire pre-war European world and his wish to preserve this doomed world within artistic creativity, the essay – via images of the Angel of History (Walter Benjamin) and the Angel in Rilke’s Duino Elegies – thematizes the dialectic of the visible/invisible, Beauty and Horror, considers the essence of anchoring Horror in Imagination: annihilation, disintegration, suffering caused by loss, as well as posing a question about the possibility of imagining horror via vision (pro-vision), knowledge based on experience (pro-knowledge), and opportunities revealed via the immanent structure of language (pro-prognosis). At the same time the essay delves into the very nature of imagination conceived as one of the most powerful sources of the possibility of Evil in its relationship with Horror, i.a. via the register of the Imaginary (Jacques Lacan). The text ends with an attempt at defining certain essential personal dimensions of phenomenological relations between Beauty and Horror in wartime.

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