In Jahnn's work, the search for the unattainable is described with scientific precision, writes 38-year-old Peter Weiss in his Swedish-language review "In Pursuit of the Unattainable" from 1954. The previously unknown Swedish essays and articles by the author, which originated in Germany, were created over a period of three decades, from 1950 to 1980. The text corpus presented in this edition sheds new light on the author's overall work by documenting Weiss's lifelong search for identity. The narrative, essayistic, dramatic, and cinematic self-understanding and appropriation of reality by the author revolve around the relationship between saying and showing, word and image, communicability and silence. The essay, in particular, seemed to him to be a suitable medium in which he could reflectively process this tension.