In 1937, Rudolf Kuhn joined the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition architects’ team, and when the exhibition opened, he wrote his second and last novel on Entlebuch Alp. It came out in 1941 as the first published by Eugen Rentsch Verlag, based in Erlenbach in the canton of Zurich, under the title of “Junge Kräfte grünen” (which translates as “Young workers in full bloom”). The national socialist censors, whose verdict is unknown, enjoyed reading it. Love in the granary and on the ground, girls with “wide hips” riding nude through the wilderness, women who consider giving birth a religious act – if ever a Swiss novel from that time met the blood and soil ideology of the Third Reich in terms of natural mysticism, fertility rites and cult heroes, it was this federally financed publication.
Yet, this profound, atmospherically dense work also shows the fascination that can result from such a mystically veiled, epic fertility romance. A reaction that can bring the contemporary and all too easily irked reader to a level of self-awareness, as Kuhn understood only too well the celebrated and ultimately victorious powers of Mother Nature and the earth against modern technical civilisation in the most egregious of its conceivable negative consequences.
“Beware,” preached Simon, “that the stillness of your fields is not shattered by worldly noise and don’t fall victim to the disruption of war, boosted by greed for power and money. Watch out that the rattle of machinery does not drown out the song of the larks in the fields or the mating call of fornication the cheerful call of youth.”
From: Rudolf Kuhn, “Junge Kräfte grünen”. Novel. Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Erlenbach 1941. Out of print.
The explosion of an atom bomb above Linth plain, described with visionary power and impeccable technical knowledge three years after Otto Hahn first split the uranium atom and five years before Hiroshima, is the most amazing aspect of this most disturbing and frighteningly fascinating Swiss novel from the darkest days of the Second World War.
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