ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the question of how emotional detachment—'coolness'—is represented and mediated by war images in texts, art objects, and sculptures in the years between World War I and World War II. It concentrates on works by the artist, art professor, voluntary military medic, and writer Max Beckmann, and by the entomologist, soldier, and writer Ernst Junger. Like Beckmann, Junger was also highly interested in questions of organic life or living matter. In light of Rickel's vampire theory of the in-corporation of the unmourned—leading to all the undead, ghosts, vampires, and revenants populating the minds—Beckmann's sculpture Adam and Eve has to be read as birth fantasy or ex-corporation to be regarded as the result of a successful mourning process. The achievement of a successful mourning process might seem at first glance similar to the achievement of emotional detachment, or coolness.
