A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520921917

Citation preview

WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM Martin Jay and Anton Kaes, General Editors l . Heritage of Our Times, by Ernst Bloch 2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890—1990, by Steven E. Aschheim 3. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg 4. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, by Christoph Asendorf 5. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret C o h e n 6. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany, by Thomas J. Saunders 7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, by Richard Wolin 8. The New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean 9. The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, edited by William E. Scheuerman 10. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923—1950, by Martin Jay 11. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von A n k u m 12. Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900—1949, edited by Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau 13. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910—1935, by Karl Toepfer 14 .In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, by Anson Rabinbach 15. Walter Benjamin's Other History: of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, by Beatrice Hanssen 16. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, by Anthony Heilbut 17. Cool Conduct, by Helmut Lethen, translated by Don Reneau 18. In A Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945—1948, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated by Kelly Barry i g . A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism, by Elliot Y. Neaman

A DUBIOUS PAST Ernst Jiinger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism

Elliot Y. Neaman

UNIVERSITY O F CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University o f California Press, Ltd. L o n d o n , England © 1999 by the Regents o f the University o f California All illustrations courtesy of the G e r m a n Literature Archive Marbach (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Neaman, Elliot Yale, 1 9 5 7 - . A dubious past : Ernst J ü n g e r and the politics o f literature after Nazism / Elliot Yale Neaman. p.

cm.

(Weimar and now; 19)

Includes bibliographical references and index. I S B N 0-520-21628-8 (alk. p a p e r ) . — 1. Jünger, Ernst, 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 9 8 . 2. Authors, G e r m a n — 2 0 t h c e n t u r y — Biography. 3. Jünger, Ernst, 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 9 8 — P o l i t i c a l and social views. 4. G e r m a n y — P o l i t i c s and g o v e r n m e n t — 2 0 t h century. 5. C r i t i c i s m — H i s t o r y — 2 0 t h century. I. Series. PT2619.U43Z719 1999 838'.gi2og—dc2i

98-39210 CIP

Manufactured in the United States of A m e r i c a 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

T h e paper used in this publication meets the m i n i m u m requirements o f A N S I / N I S O Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my grandfather Ben Noah Shlain (1902—1984)

When you speak about the world of dreams, into which one reaches down to capture something dubious, it has to be admitted that something dubious exists in the author himself. That is why one often has more success describing bad characters than good people. E R N S T J Ü N G E R IN AN I N T E R V I E W W I T H F R I E D R I C H

HANSEN-LÖVE

CONTENTS

L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

/

/

/

xi xiii

1

l. Ernst Jünger: A German Life

/

23

2. The Jünger Circle: Magnetic Repulsion and Attraction 3. The Marble Cliffs: An Allegory of Power and Death

/

4. The Pen and the Sword: Last Knights of the Majestic 5. The View from Above: Logs from a Sinking Ship

/

/ /

6g 104 iss

13g

6. Challenging the Victor's Optic: Jünger as Oracle in the Age of Adenauer / 161 7. Right Turn: Jünger Retrieved in the Age of Kohl Afterword

/

268

ABBREVIATIONS REFERENCES INDEX

/

/ /

277 279

307

/

21s

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Jünger cataloging his beetle collection Following page 138 1. The French Legionnaire, 1913 2. Rear: Jünger (with medals) and his mother Front: siblings from left to right: Wolfgang, Hanna, Friedrich Georg 3. Back of dust jacket of Storms of Steel (1920) 4. Jünger on lead horse, Paris, 1941 5. With Colonel Wildermuth on roof of Hotel Raphael, 1942 6. With Carl Schmitt by the Seine, 1942 7. In the library at home in Wilflingen, 1955 8. In Agadir with snake charmer, 1977 9. Receiving the Goethe-Prize, 1982 10. With Mitterand and Kohl at Verdun, September 1984 11. Kohl at Jünger's birthday celebration, 1985 12. Jünger with his wife, Liselotte

XI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book was originally carried out when I was enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley between 1988 and 1990. It was a great privilege to attend one of this nation's best public institutions. I will forever value the tremendous support I received from the university, the professionalism and intellectual rigor of its faculty, and the profound impact made upon me by my fellow students. This book would not have been possible without the financial support of a number of benefactors. My research in Berlin, Aachen, and Marbach was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the German Academic Exchange Program. I wish to thank the efficient and courteous staff at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, in particular Brigitte van Helt for her assistance with the photographs for this book. I am also grateful to James Kettner and the Berkeley history department for a grant in 1991 to write the dissertation. My deepest intellectual debt goes out to my teacher and friend Martin Jay. He read the manuscript several times and offered his acute insights as well as his famous long lists of books for further reading. I had the unbelievable luck to learn intellectual history from the finest practitioner of the craft in academia. My other history teachers were no less inspiring, Ed Hundert, Gene Brucker, William Bouwsma, Gerald Feldman, and Martin Malia. I am grateful to the following friends, colleagues and professionals who read all or parts of the manuscript. They generously offered their time and wisdom: Franziska Augstein, Albrecht Betz, Carolyn Brown, Warren Breckman, Marcus Bullock, Pam Burdman, Mathias Eidenbenz, Hajo Funke, Jeffrey Herf, Richard Herzinger, Bruce Johnson, Lewis Klaussner, Ben Lapp, Rich Krivcher, Eduardo Mendieta, Armin Mohler, Dirk Moses, Anson Rabinbach, Carola Schulz, and Lars Tragardh. I would also like to thank the xiii

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

following persons for intellectual and spiritual sustenance along the long road to completing what turned out to be a ten-year project: Jeff Baile, Ludger Biilt, Ben Binstock, Alon Confino, Susan Crane, Goran Dahl, Ross Dickenson, Gudrun Egloff, Christoph Egloff, Jeffrey Friedman, J o h n Ely, Peter Fritzsche, Richard Golsan, Markus Hattstein, Peter Hoffenburg, Gerd Horten, Bob Holub, Renate Holub, J o n Hanifin, Dane Johnson, Anton Kaes, Randy Kaufmann, Gordon Kopelow, Akiba Lerner, Michael Lerner, Tom Lucas, Andy Markovits, Cassian Markworth, Sigi Miiller, Tom Noll, Heath Pearson, Henri Plard, Horst Severens, Erhard Stolting, Dirk von Laak, Jeff Verhey, Michael Werz, Richard Wolin, and Jonathan Zatlin. The University of San Francisco, my home institution, has provided me with a stimulating environment to teach and write since my arrival in 1993. I value highly the warm and collegial atmosphere of the university and would like to extend my appreciation to the administration, Stanley Nel, J o h n Pinelli, Gerardo Marin, Jennifer Turpin, and Nancy Compagna, as well as to my wonderful colleagues in the history department, Cornelius M. Buckley, Martin Claussen, Cheryl Czekala, Tony Fels, Elisabeth Gleason, Andy Heinze, Uldis Kruze, Kathy Nasstrom, Paul Murphy, Julio Moreno, Mike Stanfield, and Vicky Siu. My thanks to the editors at the University of California Press, who navigated this book around all obstacles with dexterity and dedication, Ed Dimendberg, Laura Pasquale, Julie Brand, and Sabine Seiler. Finally I want to thank my family for affection and support. My German wife, Barbara, only occasionally tired of hearing stories about old fascists. My brother Noah, with his genial h u m o r and funny imitations, always made me laugh, no matter how bad my mood. My mother, Leah Neaman, was a source of unfailing inspiration, love, and encouragement. Finally, this book is dedicated to my maternal grandfather, who I wish had lived long enough to see me live up to some of the high ideals he held dear and passed on to his children and grandchildren. San Francisco, December 1998

Introduction

In 1995 the world commemorated half a century since the defeat of Nazism. In March of the same year Ernst Jünger celebrated his hundredth birthday, the second time a major European writer has lived beyond a century.1 He died just six weeks before his hundred and third birthday, on February 17, 1998. This book is about his life and the reception of his written work over a period of more than eighty years, with the major emphasis on the period after 1945 when he was embroiled in a series of highly emotional controversies concerning his political and literary activities during the Weimar Republic. Jünger is a widely read, very contested figure in the Federal Republic of Germany; he is followed closely by a substantial reading public in France, but he is known to only few in England, Italy, Spain and other smaller European countries. In North America he has been, until relatively recently, read and discussed primarily in specialized academic circles even though several of his novels have been translated into English. Although in recent years Jünger has been the subject of several excellent treatments by scholars in the United States, as yet no thorough reception history of his entire work has been carried out. This book intends to fill that scholarly lacuna. It is important to do so, not only because Jünger is of general historical interest but also because the controversies that accompanied his long life touch on essential issues in modern German intellectual history, in particular on the key questions of German intellectuals and the Holocaust, the divided memory of West and East Germany after 1990, German identity, the politics of nature and the environment, left and right cri-

1. The other, as far as I can ascertain, was Bernard de Fontenelle ( 1 6 5 6 - 1 7 5 7 ) . I

2

INTRODUCTION

tiques of civilization, the fate of radical German conservatism after 1945, the return of the "primacy of the political," and the future of the German and European political right. This b o o k should be read also as a contribution to the growing literature on two German thinkers w h o were allied with Jünger through intellectual affinities and personal friendship, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Heidegger was a professional philosopher and Schmitt was a professional jurist. Jünger was trained in neither speciality, but as a writer he played a key role in both thinkers' development by providing intellectual stimulation that shaped their ideas in important ways and by fleshing out those ideas for wider consumption. This intellectual collaboration was arguably as important for the legacy of right-wing thought from the Weimar period as the interaction between Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin has been for the left. T h e continuing influence of their ideas is part of the history of postwar German thought that will be traced in this book. Intellectual fascism has been considered for too long either so mediocre as not worth taking seriously or the product of a few misguided, politically naive minds. By focusing on Ernst Jünger and his intellectual circle, this study argues for a reconceptualization of intellectual fascism as a broad critique of liberal humanism and Marxism that should be seen as coherent, challenging, and, for a surprising number of contemporary intellectuals, all too attractive. In this study I have followed Marcus Bullock's lead in steering away from normative j u d g m e n t s about Jünger's character, values, and politics. There will likely be some critics w h o will argue that I am too sympathetic to Jünger, while others will say I am engaged in an intellectual witch-hunt. I reject both claims. In this book the reader will find the evidence on which to make ind e p e n d e n t evaluations. I both c o n d e m n and praise Jünger and have not hesitated to draw my own conclusions based on the same evidence. In The Violent Eye, Marcus Bullock's superb study of Jünger's entire oeuvre, the arg u m e n t is forcefully made that Jünger is so fascinating for the intellectual historian because he represents one of those very rare c o m m o d i t i e s — a right-winger whose range and depth one has to acknowledge, even when one might find the politics and ideology offensive or distasteful. 2 Bullock compares Jünger's ideas to the plans of an engineer w h o imagines a daring, innovative, risky bridge that ultimately collapses upon construction. These reactionary ideas can be j u d g e d as historical errors, but they nevertheless constitute the history of unresolved issues of modernity, such as technology, the nation state, the individual and the collective, and the apocalyptic struggles with reason and unreason in the twentieth century.

2. Marcus Paul Bullock, The Violent Eye: Ernst Jünger's Visions and Revisions on the European Right (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 1 2 - 2 1 .

INTRODUCTION

3

Ernst Jünger attracted my attention because of his unique representativeness for the postwar world and all the ambiguities and problems that correspond to figures whose work supposedly reflects major concerns and themes of an epoch. T h e writer's ideas have an important value for the historian, the measure of which cannot be taken solely by counting readers or book editions. T h e writer captures concepts, moods, dispositions, and feelings homologous to the manner with which the sculptor carves shapes into stone, seemingly frozen in time. These shapes can then be studied long after their creation in order to understand the society in which they were produced. Without having to subscribe to the materialist "realism" theory of Georg Lukács, which argues that the novel, the epic, or philosophy can mirror the objective, external world independent of the author's intentions or motives, 3 a written work can arguably become representative of a period because, in some mysterious way, it touches d e e p chords in a culture's selfunderstanding. T h e frozen moments of meaning that one finds in the artist's words might arguably be the equivalent of the fragments of edifices that the archaeologist uncovers. But whereas the archaeologist is forced to conjure up in the imagination whole works of art and to speculate on how they constituted meaning for a culture, written works, especially in modern times, elicit written responses. In the dialectic of communication constituted by the author and the public, the possibility of an aesthetics of reception becomes possible. 4

This study encompasses three broad themes. T h e first involves tracing the Jünger reception as part of the process of the formation of collective memory of fascism in the Federal Republic after 1945. T h e debate revolved around Jünger's putative role in the intellectual assault on Weimar that prepared the way for National Socialism, his controversial turn against Nazism (so-called inner emigration) and a murky role in the German resistance. Further, he emerged in the early years of the Federal Republic as a public intellectual offering a precarious mix of humanism, German nationalism, and European cosmopolitanism that stirred angry denunciations as well as vigorous affirmation. Second, the politics of literary canonization will be addressed, including the debate over Jünger's place in the pantheon of German writers, the 3. See Georg Lukács, Schriften zur Literatursoziologie (Berlin: Ullstein, 1977), esp. "Historischer Roman und historisches Drama," 1 7 5 - 1 9 8 . 4. See Hans RobertJauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

4

INTRODUCTION

changing nature of testimonials to his work against the background of the maturation of the Federal Republic, the key shift in his reception history with the conservative turn in German politics and the award of the Goethe Prize in 1982, the comparison of the French and German reception, and the celebrity of Jünger in his advanced old age. Third, Jünger's contribution to the project of post-1945 radical conservatism will be considered within the framework of what I call his p h e n o m e nology without a subject, and a related discourse with Heidegger that included a theodicy of the Holocaust, linking up the persecution of the Jews to the history of Western nihilism. Jünger's form of historical revisionism shared with other postwar conservatives a renewal of interest in mythology andposthistoire speculation. Since this latter term may seem unclear to readers, it is worth offering a preliminary definition here. Although ideas about the end of history can be traced back to Hegel, or even Augustine, 5 the radical conservative version in Germany emerged as an apocalyptic reaction to the horrors of modern warfare and the German defeat in World War I. Not only were the traditional elites doomed, but modern technology was turning individuals into interchangeable, faceless u n i t s — t h e worker in the factory, or the machine-soldier, reflected modern life, atomistic, nihilistic, driven by an inexorable will to power. In the early 1930s Jünger, inverting Spengler's pessimism, welcomed the destruction of bourgeois civilization and heralded the creation of a German workers' state, which he thought would be led and shaped by the heroic realism of veterans like himself. After the Second World War, Jünger continued to believe that technological modernity had erected an insurmountable obstacle to history, but like other conservatives, he thought that National Socialism had failed in its attempt to overcome nihilism; in fact, it had succumbed to the worst temptations of technological domination. He now understood the e n d of history as an argument about European culture, an ontological declaration that European civilization was terminally ill, the main symptom of the disease being a vertiginous loss of creative spirit and the concomitant conquest of European culture by routinization, standardization, and mass culture (usually of American provenance). In the early stages of the Jünger postwar reception, most of Jünger's interpreters contented themselves with an explication de texte, drawing out hermeneutically the major themes and motifs of his work, pinpointing the sources of literary and philosophical influences, and exploring Jünger's

5. As Hannah Arendt noted, the coming of Christ heralded a transmundane event, interpreted by Augustine as a departure from secular time and a timeless beginning (modo, or nowtime) that was indifferent to the cycles of antiquity. See On Revolution (London: Penguin,

199°). 27-

INTRODUCTION

5

method and style. His personal political history was, for the most part, not a central concern. Erich Brock's Das Weltbild Ernst Jüngers ( 1 9 4 5 ) , written in exile in Switzerland during the Second World War, was typical of this genre, situating Jünger's texts in European intellectual history as far back as neoPlatonism. Gerhard Nebel's book, Ernst Jünger: Abenteuer des Geistes (1950), portrayed the author's work in glowing terms as a comprehensive metaphysical experience, a spiritual adventure. T h e Christian reception, which mistookjünger's interest in biblical themes for an authentic theological conversion, was represented on the Catholic side by the Jesuit Hubert B e c h e r s Ernst Jünger: Mensch und Werk (1949), and from a Protestant perspective by Hans Rudolf Müller-Schweife's ErnstJünger ( 1 9 5 1 ) and Walter Hilsbecher's Ernst Jünger und die neue Theologie (1949). T h e idea that Jünger's supposed turn away from extreme nationalism to humanism and religion could be a model for all Germans was a constant theme in all these books. Jünger's journal from the Second World War and his treatise about reconciliation between the former enemies, Der Friede (1946) (The peace) ,6 were represented by his supporters as exemplary models of a transition from Germany's militant and shameful past to a more civilized future. In the humanist reception ofJünger the code word for Hitlerism and a shorthand explanation for its rise was nihilism. In Der heroische Nihilismus und seine Uberwindung: ErnstJüngers Weg durch die Krise (1948), Alfred von Martin interpreted German culture as having been pushed off course by idealism, which, taken to the extreme, destroyed all beliefs, values, and civilized morality. Jünger was chosen as a Saul-turned-Paul figure to lead the way out of the crisis because he himself had been a "heroic nihilist" and one of the most eloquent opponents of civilization. O n e of the few voices of dissent in the early Jünger reception came from a philosopher and mathematician. Max Bense argued, in his very astute Ptolemäer und Mauretanier oder die theologische Emigration der deutschen Literatur (1950) that both Jünger and Thomas Mann belong, in terms of literary classification, to nineteenth-century aestheticism, and he derided both authors' mannerist attachment to mythological and religious symbols. O n the other hand, Bense d e e m e d the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn an original voice of literary modernism because he held n o illusions about the saving power of the word; his poems purportedly held u p a clear mirror to the disintegration and chaos of the contemporary world. Bense's book appropriately captured the archaic tension in Jünger's style and the heavy reliance on obscure and esoteric themes from German romanticism. But Bense failed to recognize the other side of Jünger, his innovative essays on modern life, particularly concerning the dialectic between technology and politics. 6. Hereafter cited as The Peace.

6

INTRODUCTION

These first postwar attempts to understand the apparent ideological shift in Jünger's worldview toward humanism and Christianity led to a series of heated discussions of his philosophy and politics. These began in the early 1950s, peaked around i960, and trailed off by 1970. A whiff of scandal and taboo always seemed to surround the mention of the writer's name. The "Case ofJünger" or the 'Jünger Controversy" {der FallJünger) was a concern that went beyond academia and filled the pages of newspapers across the country. These debates were fueled by a new series of books by the author, in which he meditated on the Cold War and the two Germanys' relationship to the superpowers. In the wake of these debates, scholars began to charge that Jünger's self-imposed isolation was a clever pose, that he was positioning himself, just as in the Weimar period, as a powerful voice that remains elusive in an attempt to influence politics by writing encoded but poignantly worded political diagnoses (Zeitdiagnosen). One of the most sharply worded polemical attacks against Jünger was published by the exiled Jewish-German journalist Peter de Mendelssohn in 1953. In Der Geist in der Despotie, de Mendelssohn considered four intellectuals: Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Knut Hamsun, and Jean Giono. His book dealt with the ethical responsibility of the intellectual in a totalitarian society. Although de Mendelssohn wrote with subtlety and fairness of the sometimes insurmountable pressure of conflicting loyalties and other moral dilemmas faced by these authors, his treatment ofJünger was undoubtedly the most harsh and uncompromising. De Mendelssohn's most severe criticism asserted that Jünger's early writings were evidently widely read as supporting fascist ideology, but when it came time to confront the responsibility for his past, Jünger hid himself behind a vast assemblage of metaphysical justifications. The only weakness of de Mendelssohn's approach was that he constructed a rigid liberal, humanistic set of guidelines, against which he measured the words and behavior of radical conservative thinkers. This structure made it easier to convict them of intellectual betrayal in his terms, but the analytic framework was not suited to finding the reasons why many intellectuals genuinely could have believed in the goals of fascism, at least for a time. Nevertheless, de Mendelssohn's b o o k — h e also published many articles on the subject in the more widely circulated press—was a rhetorically effective, critical and enlightened contribution to the early debates on the German past. He was a clear exception to the majority of the intelligentsia in Germany at the time, who tended to be apologetic or very defensive on the subject. A pioneering effort to capture the manner in which Jünger's early and postwar works fit together was undertaken by a German-born professor at the University of Colorado, Gerhard Loose. His monograph Ernst Jünger: Gestalt und Werk (1957) was burdened by long stretches of uncritical para-

INTRODUCTION

7

phrasing ofJünger's texts, and he rehashed Gerhard Nebel's idea of the "intellectual adventurer" without adding any significant sharpness to a hopelessly vague concept. But Loose's research had the merit of incorporating the problematic aspects of Jünger's early work into an analysis of the postwar writings. Loose deftly identified the dangers inherent in the total culte du moi of the author (Ichbezogenheit) and showed how the natural world, foreign lands, and war remained spectacles for the purely aesthetic manipulation of Jünger's literary imagination. By the end of the 1950s, historians were finally beginning to pick up the thread first stitched by Armin Möhler in his definitive study Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918—1932 (1950). Christian Graf von Krockow's Die Entscheidung (1958) succeeded in bringing together the Weimar careers of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Jünger using the political concept of decisionism as a c o m m o n denominator. Krockow's book flattened out the differences between these three very different thinkers and forced them into a conceptual straitjacket, but the investigation proved fruitful as part of a series of nonorthodox, "superstructural" (Uberbau) interpretations of the right-wing Weimar intelligentsia. Some postwar existentialists, for example, saw Jünger as a latter-day Nietzschean and interpreted his early writings as an expressionist, youthful rebellion against the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie between the wars. 7 T h e first comprehensive scholarly work to integrate both biography and a complete review of the sources then available, was Hans Peter Schwarz's Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (1962). Schwarz demonstrated how right-wing revolutionary politics and literary modernism blended together in Jünger's desire to subvert Weimar politics. This insight led Schwarz to coin the phrase "conservative anarchist," indicating that Jünger rebelled against all political systems in order to carve out a niche for personal f r e e d o m in a new hierarchy. In the final analysis, Schwarz undervalued Jünger's politics when he concluded that he was more of a dreamy poet than a serious political theoretician. In the Marxist literature, Jünger has been predictably vilified as an exponent of an irrationalist and aggressively militant philosophy that reflected

7. Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1956), iggff. Löwith includes Jünger with Gide and de Saint-Exupéry in France, D. H. Lawrence in England, Stefan George, Rilke, Spengler, Musil, Benn, and Thomas Mann in Germany. Hannah Arendt also located Jünger in the Nietzsche lineage, but she correctly pointed out that the Front Generation's passion to destroy society cannot be explained simply with recourse to Nietzsche's sublime "transformation of all values." The experience of mass slaughter had a unique and epochally significant influence. See Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich, 1973), 3 2 8 - 3 2 9 .

8

INTRODUCTION

epiphenomenally the capitalist crises in German bourgeois society. T h e Jünger critique from these quarters did not stray, methodologically, far from Lukäcs' analysis of so-called prefascist and fascist forms of Lebensphilosophie in his 1954 book Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. A g o o d example of this research strategy was Armin Steil's Die imaginäre Revolte (1984) .8 Steil analyzes Sorel, Schmitt, and Jünger in an attempt to argue for a stark theoretical differentiation between the critique of capitalism on the left and the attack on bourgeois society on the right among "prefascist" thinkers. T h e aesthetic and political revolution envisaged by these thinkers purportedly offers purely imaginary solutions to social conflict while in reality constructing a basis for fascist politics. A causal relationship between texts and their reception is implicitly taken for granted in Steil's work, as it is in two other significant Marxist contributions from East G e r m a n y — H e l m u t Kaiser's Mythos, Rausch, und Reaktion9 and Joachim Petzold's Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen Faschismus.10 A cogent and comprehensive Marxist treatment of Weimar's right-wing intelligentsia can be f o u n d in Günter Hartung's Literatur und Ästhetik des deutschen Faschismus, where Jünger's Der Arbeiter (The worker) 1 1 is analyzed as a "military-fascist Utopia." 12 T h e intellectual confrontation with the purported exhaustion of modern art, literature, and architecture in 1960s A m e r i c a — a mind-set that gradually evolved into a sustained critique of culture beyond m o d e r n i s m — reached Germany only in the late 1970s. 1 3 O n e of the targets of the postmodernist critique was the hallowed liberal attachment to Enlightenment rationality, to be replaced by pluralistic, nontotalizing epistemologies. 1 4 This denigration of the modernist legacy called for a reexamination of those thinkers w h o had criticized modernism from within the movement and could be recast as postmodernists avant la lettre. Karl Heinz Bohrer's re-

8. Armin Steil, Die imaginäre Revolte: Untersuchungen zur faschistischen Ideologie und ihrer theoretischen Vorbereitung bei Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, und Emst Jünger (Marburg: Verlag Arbeiterbewegung und Gesellschaftswissenschaft, 1984). 9. Helmut Kaiser, Mythos, Rausch, und Reaktion: Der Weg Gottfried Benns und Ernst Jüngers (Berlin-Ost: Aufbau Verlag, 1962). l o. Joachim Petzold, Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen Faschismus: Jungkonservative Ideologen in der Weimarer Republik als geistige Wegbereiter der faschistischen Diktatur (Berlin-Ost: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1978), esp. 1 8 5 - 1 9 0 , 207-209. 11. Hereafter cited as The Worker. 12. Günter Härtung, Literatur und Ästhetik des deutschen Faschismus: Drei Studien (Berlin-Ost: Akademie Verlag, 1983), 75. 13. See Andreas Huyssen, who notes that the Germans in the 1960s were still rediscovering their own moderns, banished by the Nazis, or shifting from one set of moderns to another. "Mapping the Postmodern," NGC 33 (fall 1984): 19. 14. See Elliot Neaman, "Liberalism and Post-Modern Hermeneutics," Critical Review, 2 - 3 (spring /summer 1988): 1 4 9 - 1 6 5 .

INTRODUCTION

markable study, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens,15 brought Jünger into the postmodernist discourse with exactly this purpose in mind. Bohrer took the anti-Enlightenment motifs in Jünger's early work to be representative or anticipatory not of a specific form of German fascism but rather of a general European, aesthetic encounter with the darker side of reason that must be seen in isolation from the rise of fascism across Europe. Bohrer's aim was to valorize certain elements of Jünger's aesthetic critique of the totalizing rationality of technological civilization as more sophisticated than the literal realism of Western Marxism in the 1960s. T h e aesthetically autonomous m o m e n t and unique discovery by Jünger was the modern experience of shock (Schrecken) described in the early war diaries. Bohrer traces this mode of aesthetic experience back to romantic critiques of civilization in Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, and to the aestheticism of E. T. A. Hoffman, Poe, and Baudelaire. Finally he concludes that Walter Benjamin's concept of Chok was partly dependent on material first worked out by Jünger. 1 6 Bohrer's larger claim is that Jünger succeeded in working out a poetical and phenomenological description of the individual subject's helplessness and dread (Grauen) in the face of successive catastrophes in modern experience that defy all rational means of order and prediction. In 1981 Bohrer expanded u p o n this thesis in Plötzlichkeit (Suddenness). 1 7 Bohrer contended that Jünger was an "aggressive-nationalist, right-revolutionary author, w h o developed so-called prefascist motifs in the core of his writings." 18 But he believed that Jünger's writings are not therefore to be denied or repressed, for they contain "deep insights into our modern condition, psychologically, anthropologically, and societally." 19 T h e argument that we must take Jünger's thought seriously, in isolation from its possible relationship to fascism and National Socialism, depends undoubtedly on accepting Bohrer's contention that Jünger's critique of reason is unrelated to his "prefascist" or "protofascist" disposition. In the chapters that follow, I do not accept this line of reasoning. O n e of the reasons for laying such great stress on Jünger's jfrosi/Msfoire vision, a concept I will elaborate presently, is to show how Jünger's dream of aesthetic and historical autonomy was intimately b o u n d u p with the experience of fascism. If Jünger's work provides insights into the modern condition, then one might easily argue that fascism also provides solutions to the crises of modern society. This unexam15. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens: Du pessimistische Romantik und ErnstJüngers Frühwerk (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1978/1983). 16. Ibid., 190 ff. 17. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des ästhelishen Scheins (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). 18. Karl Heinz Bohrer, "Wer hat Angst vor Jüngers Schrecken?" FAZ, March 29, 1980. 19. Ibid.

10

INTRODUCTION

ined, questionable premise underlies m u c h of Bohrer's treatment of Jünger; nevertheless Die Ästhetik des Schreckens remains one of the most innovative and challenging works on the subject. In the wake of the demise of communism, a new debate has emerged among West German intellectuals concerning German tradition and German postmodern identity in art and politics. In particular, the iconoclastic works of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg offer a focal point for testing long-held assumptions about German assimilation of "Western culture." For the majority of postwar intellectuals and artists in Germany, an unequivocal antifascist stance was d e m a n d e d and supplied by the purveyors of culture in both West and East Germany. In part this conformity to Western standards meant denying or at least being extremely guarded about a large part of pre-Nazi German culture, seen as contaminated and compromised by the Nazi assimilation of the romantic-classicist German pantheon. Lately Syberberg has attacked the shallowness of Germany's reflex antifascism and suggested that the romantic tradition, in particular, should be cultivated as a defense against the insipidity of Western (i.e., American) consumer-driven culture. 20 Syberberg's increasingly shrill anti-Western and anti-Semitic tones have caused some observers to label him an archreactionary and his writings "obscene." 2 1 T h e r e is, however, little in Syberberg's "new" position that has not already been anticipated in Ernst Jünger's political writings. As we shall see, Jünger also decried and belittled the influence of the Western occupiers w h o wanted to reeducate Germans with t h e i r — i n his v i e w — i n f e r i o r culture. Jünger also self-consciously cultivated a selective French-German classical taste in literature, claiming to have never read anything modern beyond Zola. Like Syberberg, Jünger also regarded the loss of the old Europe's architecture, art, and way of life as a disastrous result of m o d e r n nihilism.

A comprehensive biography of Jünger still waits for an author. This lacuna in the Jünger literature is explained not only by the obvious fact of his recent death, but also by the difficulty of accessing his correspondence and other papers at the Federal German Literary Archive in Marbach. Researchers must obtain permission from the executors of Jünger's will to look at any material, and access to politically sensitive documents is routinely denied. A n o t h e r problem for future scholars will be the exponential growth of the secondary literature. A recent German dissertation notes there are already at least five different interpretive approaches to his life and work dur-

20. H. J. Syberberg, Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Krieg (Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1990). 21. Eric L. Santner, "Postwar German Aesthetics," NGC 57 (fall 1992): 5 - 2 4 .

INTRODUCTION

Ii

ing the Weimar period alone, each with its own growing bibliographies: classic work-centered literary criticism as well as the psychoanalytic, ideology-critical, cultural, and "poetological" genres. 22 One could add intellectual and reception histories to the list. After Jünger's death, the first biography to make a claim to comprehensiveness was Paul Noack's ErnstJünger: A Biography,23 Unfortunately the work is entirely unoriginal in its theoretical approach and depends to a large extent on secondary literature. Noack's book resembles the apologetic heroworship ofJünger's early postwar admirers, who will be treated below. Some of the best treatments ofJünger can still be found in earlier works, before Jünger became a cultural celebrity. One of those was Wolfgang Kaempfer's ErnstJünger, which can be read as an anti-manifesto to Bohrer. 24 Kaempfer picks up the gauntlet and sets out to prove that Jünger does not diagnose the modern condition of shock but rather flees from it into "auratic" poetry that insulates the reader from the reconstruction of genuine experiences. 25 Kaempfer's book is essential reading because he does not hesitate to interpret Jünger as a challenging exponent of antibourgeois modernism, and he remains committed to delineating the connections between Jünger's texts and the trivial, pathetic, and morally repulsive aspects of Nazi culture. Kaempfer offers an unsurpassed synopsis of all of Jünger's texts available at this time although the reader can become easily distracted by the author's polemical assaults. The study is, of course, incomplete, since some important Jünger texts have been published since 1981. Martin Meyer's ErnstJünger26 is, in contrast to Kaempfer's book, quaintly nostalgic. His is an impressive attempt to situate Jünger's entire oeuvre in twentieth-century literature. But Meyer uses a reverse form of the guilt-byassociation method to make Jünger into a great German writer in the tradition of Rilke, Benn, Thomas Mann, and profound thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Heidegger. The book is full of accounts of the important artists, intellectuals, and academics with whom Jünger rubbed shoulders. But Meyer's assertions tend to be rhetorical rather than convincing. Jünger's works are compared to countless prominent creations of modern literature as if, by contagion, Jünger's books could reach the pinnacle of twentiethcentury literature. Meyer assiduously avoids taking any seriously critical perspective on his subject with the result that the book appears fairly harmless and its author gullible. 22. Jüngers 23. 24. 25. 26.

Klaus Gaugher, Krieger, Arbeiter, Waldgänger, Anarch: Das kriegerische Frühwerk Ernst (Frankfurt, 1997), 11. Paul Noack, Ernst Jünger: Eine Biography (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 1998). Wolfgang Kaempfer, Ernst Jünger (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981). Ibid., 78 ff. Martin Meyer, Ernst Jünger (Munich: Hanser, 1990).

12

INTRODUCTION

Martin Konitzer has noted that despite claiming to be a biography, Meyer's book constructs very few bridges between the life of the author and his literary production. 27 Konitzer offers more concrete connections in this regard, showing how Jünger's early work fits into the tradition of German war literature, and his later writings into the retreat from political engagement evident in the desire for aesthetic and metaphysical redemption found in much conservative German postwar philosophy. But Konitzer's book lacks a sustained and compelling thesis, settling for the platitude that Jünger's long "poetical existence" (Dichterexistenz) reflects in exemplary manner the contradictions of the century. A recent study by Thomas Nevin, a scholar of classical languages on this side of the Atlantic, signals that Jünger is finally being taken seriously as a figure important to any understanding of twentieth-century German history. ErnstJünger and Germany: Into the Abyss 1914 -1945 is a good treatment ofJünger's writings read against the background of Weimar politics and the National Socialist state. Nevin is not reluctant to point to Jünger's political shortsightedness, his antidemocratic biases, and his groundless elitism and egoism. On the other hand, he presents a very complex picture of Jünger's writings and shows how many of the attacks on Jünger are based on misinformation or inattention to the historical context from which his writings emerged. Though Nevin tends to err on the side of supportingjünger's selfinterpretations, this treatment by a non-German scholar (not coincidentally) results in a balanced, if somewhat apologetic portrait of the author that goes beyond polemics and partisanship. JÜNGER IN AMERICA

In the first two decades after the war, Jünger remained relatively unknown in the English-speaking academic world, in spite of some specialized monographs like the work of Gerhard Loose referred to above. Some discussion ofJünger's work was carried out in the late 1940s in the Partisan Review, but there was little follow-up. As late as 1976, Mircea Eliade complained that "in the United States he is not even mentioned as being among the representatives of contemporary German literature." 28 One major exception to this general neglect was an excellent thin volume brought out in 1953 by the Czech exile J. P. Stern and simply titled, Ernst Jünger. Stern argues that the essential question about the German author is whether his own self-understanding as a great representative of his 27. Martin Konitzer, Ernst Jünger (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1993), 13. 28. Mircea Eliade, Journal III, 1 yjo—igyH, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 256.

INTRODUCTION

13

generation is correct. Stern finds the quality of his writings to be overvalued but makes a more important argument relevant to the concerns of the present study. He emphasizes that Jünger is representative of an epoch, not because he gives voice to the inner world of his generation, but because his own contradictions and shortcomings best reflect the tortured path of Germany's youth between the wars: "In this very defection of his, which he shares with a generation whose live and immediate experience of suffering, pain and love is as it were endormie dans la terreur, Jünger is the most powerful and consistent spokesman of all." 29 It is not surprising that Stern was one of the earliest foreign observers to see the epochal significance ofJünger's work. Stern was born in Prague, but was educated in Cambridge, England. Retaining dual loyalty he served both in the Czech army and the Royal Air Force. As a young man he had heard Hitler speak at the beer gardens in Munich and had been present when the Germans occupied Prague in 1939. Stern was one of the first to point out how the camouflaged, even subliminal notes of resistance in some of Jünger's writings of the 1930s both partook in and reacted to the metaphysical bathos of the fascist era. He was also the first to see a parallel between Jünger's postwar apologetic diagnosis of National Socialism and Ernst Nolte's concept of the resistance to transcendence in the Three Faces of Fascism.50 Eliade also believed, erroneously, that none of Jünger's books had been translated into English. In Storms of Steel and several novels had in fact been translated, without much critical echo, but his work had found political resonance in the United States at the start of the Cold War with the publication in 1948 of a translation of his seemingly conciliatory book, The Peace. T h e publisher, Henry Regnery, had been a New Deal Democrat, but converted to conservatism in the 1950s and published many neoconservative theoretical books, including William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at Yale and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind.31 Going back to Harry Elmer Barnes's defense of Germany after the First World War, there remained a strong tradition among American conservatives challenging the American liberal anti-German bias through historical revisionism, in particular on the question of alleged war atrocities. 32 In The Peace Jünger portrayed the Second

29. J. P. Stern, Ernst Jünger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 17. 30. J. P. Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People, 2nd. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 9 6 - 9 7 . 31. Regnery died in 1996; see his obituary in the New York Times, June 27, 1996. 32. Deborah Lipstadt shows how this way of thinking was just as prevalent after the Second World War as it had been in the interwar period and how many of the apologies for the German military later developed into denial of the Holocaust. See Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1993), 6 5 - 8 3 .

14

INTRODUCTION

World War as a European civil war, in which atrocities were committed on both sides, and reconciliation would require that no one nation be held responsible for the catastrophe. This interpretation fit well into the philoGermanic attitude of many Anglo-Saxon conservatives. Since 1989 interest in Jünger has begun to grow among American intellectuals. Besides Bullock's noteworthy work of criticism and Nevin's political biography, continuing questions about Schmitt and Heidegger have led to a number of important studies incorporating Jünger's work in historical context. Michael Zimmerman's Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity (1990) and Mark Lilla's piece on Schmitt in the New York Review ofBooks in 1997 are good examples of the new relevance accorded Jünger's writings. The leftleaning New German Critique devoted an entire special issue to Jünger in the summer of 1993. With the resurgence of a strong intellectual right in Europe since the fall of communism, intellectuals here and abroad are curious and sometimes disturbed by the prodigious influence of the writings of Weimar's right-wing intellectuals. These factors, along with the prospect of new archival material (including substantial correspondence between Jünger, Schmitt, and Heidegger), mean that American scholars, retaining more personal distance from the polemical debates about the German past, will likely have much to contribute to these contentious, ongoing debates.

J Ü N G E R IN F R A N C E

In contrast to the deep divisions in the German reception from extreme left to extreme right, in France Jünger's work was studied and brought to public attention mostly by groups of supporters linked by common political and ideological persuasions on the political right. During the period of occupation, activists of the French National Revolution discussed his work favorably in the French press. Auf den Marmorklippen {On the Marble Cliffs)33 was reviewed several times in La Nouvelle Revue Française, France's most important cultural organ, the guidance of which the German ambassador Otto Abetz had assigned Pierre Drieu La Rochelle from 1941 to 1943. 3 4 Jünger's

33. Hereafter cited as The Marble Cliffs. 34. See Christian Michelfelder, "La cosmologie d'Ernst Jûnger," NRF (Dec. 1942): 6 2 8 636. Typically these reviews were apolitical. Michelfelder writes cryptically that it is better not to attempt to see any contemporary meaning in this book for "it is good that there remains some obscure passages, which even the author himself couldn't explain." (635). On Drieu La Rochelle see Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933—1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 287-294. On Drieu La Rochelle's views o f j û n g e r and Nazi Germany see, "L'Allemagne européenne," NRF (January 1942): 1 0 4 - 1 1 2 .

INTRODUCTION

15

books were also reviewed by the Catholic pro-Vichy Thierry Maulnier and by the fascist sympathizer Paul de Man in Belgium. 3 5 After the war a circle of personal friends of Jünger, many associated with right-wing journals, such as La Table Ronde, Rivarol, Figaro, La Patrie, Renaissance, and La nation française, propagated an image of the German writer as the most vigorous voice for a revival of European culture in opposition to godless communism, Western secularism, and materialism. 36 Julien Hervier, in an important, rigorous, but partisan book, Deux individus contre l'histoire, followed a similar approach, depicting Jünger and Drieu La Rochelle as swimming against the tide of history in a heroic attempt to save occidental culture from the modernist assault. 37 By the 1970s Jünger's books and ideas were propagated regularly by Alain de Benoist and other thinkers of the so-called nouvelle droit in journals like Défense de l'Occident, Eléments, and Nouvelle Ecole.36 By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, mainstream conservative newspapers and journals, such as Le Figaro littéraire and Le Magazin littéraire, regularly featured Jünger as "le plus grand" living German writer. 39 T h e high regard in which President Mitterand held Jünger signaled the m u c h more favorable climate for his work and reputation than the one he f o u n d at h o m e in Germany, though it has been argued that Jünger's books never reached as wide an audience as his French supporters liked to believe. 40 Jünger's works have also played the role of reserve troops in what Richard Wolin calls the "French Heidegger Wars," particularly in regard to the hotly contested debates between the French Heideggerian left and its critics over Heidegger's purported attempts to shift the blame for his support of National Socialism from personal responsibility to the depersonalized

35. Thierry Maulnier, 'Jardins et routes," Revue universelle (August 1942): 1 8 6 - 1 8 9 ; Paul de Man, 'Jardins et routes, par Ernst Jünger," Le Soir, June 23, 1942; Marcel Jouhandeau, "Reconnaisance a Ernst Jünger," Antaios 5 - 6 ( 1 9 6 4 - 6 5 ) : 4 3 8 - 4 4 0 . 36. See for example, Jules Roy, "Témoignage pour Ernst Jünger," La Table Ronde, (June 1948): 1079—1080; J. Schlumberger, "Le cas Jünger: Essai de mise au point," Terre des Hommes November 10, 1945, 1, 5 - 6 ; Marcel Jouhandeau, "Reconnaisance a ErnstJûnger," Antaios 5 6 ( 1 9 6 4 - 6 5 ) : 4 3 8 - 4 4 0 ; Georges Laffly, 'Jünger: Un des mages de notre temps," La nation française, Februray3, 1965, 1 3 - 1 5 . 37. Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre l'histoire (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978). 38. See for example Roberto de Moraes, "Rencontres avec Ernst Jünger: Un témoignage," Nouvelle Ecole 33 (fall 1979): 7 5 - 8 1 ; Alain de Benoist, "Ernst Jünger: La figure du travailleur entre les dieux et les titans," Nouvelle Ecole 40 (fall 1983): 1 1 - 6 1 ; also Benoist, "La figure du travailleur," Eléments 40 (August 1 9 8 1 - 8 2 ) : 1 3 - 1 9 ; Robert Poulet, "Ernst Jünger—Bernanos," Défense de l'occident (June-July 1981): 41—53. 39. See chapter 6, below. 40. See Albrecht Betz, "Qui lit J ü n g e r L e Monde dimanche, September 19, 1982.

i6

INTRODUCTION

"fate" of Western metaphysics and the "forgetting of being." 4 1 Derrida and some of his followers have attempted to interpret Heidegger's attraction to Nazism as a philosophical rather than a political mistake; he considered the movement, so the argument goes, as a spiritual and cultural return to a preSocratic, polis-based renewal of German and occidental culture that would shift theory and praxis away from the subject/object legacy of Western thinking and consequently away from the planetary domination of technology, modern science, and the "flight of the gods." 4 2 In this debate, Jünger's intellectual trajectory can help support such a vindication of Heidegger because Jünger had an important influence in the 1920s and 1930s, while he put much greater distance between himself and National Socialism than did Heidegger. Jünger also "spiritualized" his revolutionary battle against the Weimar Republic in a way that was generally free of völkisch, nordic, and racial clichés. As will be discussed more at length below, some French Heideggerians (along with the general French reception) have overemphasized Jünger's distance from National Socialism or even turned him into a resistance fighter.43 T h e problem here, aside from the fact that Jünger's early support for National Socialism was m u c h stronger than his defenders like to admit, is that, as Rabinbach and others have pointed out, the distinction between "spirit" and "race" erases the large gray zone where plenty of room remained to support alternative, equally problematic "solutions" to Germany's Weimar dilemma. Jünger knew these alternatives were d a n g e r o u s — he called them "matchsticks," and on the day before Germany capitulated in 1945 he predicted they would be blamed for the explosion. 4 4 National Socialism included a h o d g e p o d g e of intellectual currents so that nonracial variants within that range can hardly be turned into doctrines of resistance. O n e of my main tasks will be to illuminate the various nuances of that gray zone in which intellectuals like Jünger and Heidegger could find c o m m o n 41. See Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 4 2 - 6 1 . O n the French Heideggerians see Anson Rabinbach, "Heidegger's Letter on Humanism as Text and Event," NGC 62 (spring/summer 1994): 3 38. Reprinted in Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 97—128. See also Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being (London: Routledge, 1995). 42. For the most important statement of this position, see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 43. See below, chapter 7. 44. "Wenn ein Pulverturm in die Luft fliegt, überschätzt man die Bedeutung der Streichhölzer." Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen II (May 7, 1945), 430. On the oversimplified distinction between spirit and race see Rabinbach, "Heidegger's Letter on Humanism," 33. See also Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

INTRODUCTION

77

ground with National Socialism. Or to rephrase the question from Jiinger's perspective, as he once put it in an interview, "to what percentage were the National Socialists also correct?" 45

The present study strives to offer a critical analysis of the postwar reception of Jünger. In this venture, I have been preceded by two German studies. Lianne Dornheim's Vergleichende Rezeptionsgeschichte46 and Norbert Dietka's Ernst Jünger nach 1945*1 were both contributions to the wave of Rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) in Germany that came in the wake of Hans Robert Jauss's influential inaugural lecture in Konstanz in 1967. 48 Both books display, however, the tiresome German habit of creating a polarized discourse on Jünger's lifework. It is unimaginative and singularly unprovocative to quantify and categorize vast numbers of literary references to Jünger throughout the last forty years in Germany or, in Dornheim's case, in England and France as well. One can be certain that Jünger is a much debated, highly controversial author, about whom much has been written in both strongly negative and positive terms. Since no one disputes this claim, it is difficult to see why one should expend so much energy in proving the assertion. Instead, my work orients itself to particular historical questions that have been outlined above, the problems posed by the Historikerstreit concerning the historical relativization of Nazi Germany and the issue of what is traditional, modern, and postmodern in Jünger's production. It seems to me, finally, not unimportant that a work on reception go beyond printed newspapers, journals, and books. My work touches on radio essays as well as film, and I have been able to include a large number of unpublished letters as well as archived material not previously accessible.

The first chapter of this book examines Jünger's biography, revealing the salient issues that justify the attempt to weld together reception theory and the politics of memory. The author's most important writings are surveyed 4 5 . "Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod," Der Spiegel, August 16, 1 9 8 2 , 1 5 g . 46. Lianne Dornheim, Vergleichende Rezeptionsgeschichte: Das literarische Frühwerk in Deutschland, England, und Frankreich (Frankfurt: Lang, 1 9 8 7 ) . 4 7 . Norbert Dietka, Ernst Jüngernach 1985

1945:

Das Jünger Bild der bundesdeutschen Kritik,

1945-

(Frankfurt: Lang, 1 9 8 7 ) . Dietka is prone to superficial generalizations. In a recent

article, he even portrays me as a "Nolte A d e p t " and apologist of the German right because I studied under Nolte and gave a talk in Berlin in the East German Brecht Archive in 1 9 9 4 on Jünger. See his "Anmerkungen zur Ernstjünger-Rezeption in Deutschland,"Etudes Germaniques (October/December 1 9 9 6 ) : 8 3 2 . 4 8 . Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (Konstanz: Universitätsreden, 1 9 6 7 ) .

i8

INTRODUCTION

against the background of the major events in his long life. A n understanding of the writings and actions of the pre-1945 Jünger is essential in order to c o m p r e h e n d the bitter attacks leveled against him after the war. Well into his old age, critics confronted Jünger with quotes from his early works, some over half a century old, calling upon him to defend his actions before and during the Third Reich. I will advance a hypothesis here to try to explain the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Jünger's admirers' firm belief that the author was a brave resister to Nazism and the opposite position, enunciated in strong terms by his detractors, that he seduced an entire generation by making fascism intellectually acceptable. His personal actions and his philosophical and political worldview must be j u d g e d by two very different sets of criteria. In regard to the former, I think his personal refusal to be coopted by the Nazi movement and the conscientious manner in which he conducted himself as an officer of the occupation army in France were, for the most part, unobjectionable and at times even laudable. 49 These character traits—integrity, courage, and n o n c o n f o r m i t y — h a v e been the basis on which Jünger's defenders both in Germany and in France have built their case over the years. It is quite another matter, though, when one leaves out of consideration the res gestae of Jünger's life and instead focuses on the large body of writings that he has left to posterity. These writings are problematic in the extreme. Contrary to the author's contention that his words only mirrored perceived reality, Jünger's ideas were intended to, and did, give concrete form to totalitarian thought at several crucial moments in German history. His phrase "total mobilization" is perhaps the most famous example. Jünger's critics have long considered this aspect of the writer's legacy to be the most damning. T h r o u g h o u t the book I will offer many examples of how the application of differing criteria in j u d g i n g Jünger has contributed to a confusing plethora of opinions about the author. Here, as throughout the book, all translations from the German are mine unless otherwise indicated. T h e second chapter will offer some glimpses into the private life of Jünger. I shall examine the people who were admitted into Jünger's inner circle as best as can be reconstructed from published and unpublished letters, memoirs, and interviews. T h e study of Jünger's personal friendships discloses that the mechanism of attraction and repulsion, so evident in the public sphere by the sharp division between the author's apologists and detractors, was duplicated in the private sphere by a series of friendships ruptured by

49. As a military censor he spared people who incautiously wrote unfavorably of the regime; he saved a library from destruction at Laon, and, as will be discussed at length below, he was in close contact with Wehrmacht officers who were part of Rommel's failed conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. O n the other hand, he also failed to take any personal responsibility for the brutality of the occupying military government in non-Vichy France.

INTRODUCTION

zp

Jünger's ideological views. This chapter also explores Jünger's outer circle, including his intellectual interaction with a number of writers on the left such as Alfred Andersch, Eric Mühsam, Carl Zuckmayer, Bertolt Brecht, Johannes Becher, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Scholars accustomed to thinking of the German intellectual landscape as clearly demarcated between opposing political camps will undoubtedly be surprised by the respect accorded Jünger by these icons of the German left. The third chapter begins the reception history with an examination of Jünger's 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs, a publishing event that was considered a minor coup against the Nazi regime because of its coded attack on the abuse of power. But the closing lines of the story mark a turn away from politics and capture perfectly the ambiguity of Jünger's resistance to National Socialism and his fascination with its power. It is in the postwar confrontation with this work and the problem of defining the parameters of resistance and collaboration that I locate the origins of the long-standing Jünger controversy. This chapter relates the immediate postwar 'Jünger-debate" to the history and problematic style of the novel. I will conclude with a discussion of how scholars have treated the question of the appeal of fascism, particularly in relation to its aesthetic components, and pose the question whether Jünger's supposedly anti-Nazi novel contains elements of a "fascist style" that helped slip it past the censors and contributed to its tremendous fame in the early 1940s. Chapter 4 contains a critical examination ofJünger's literary reflections on the Second World War. Here I will explore Jünger's relations to the officers surrounding the military commander in Paris at the Hotel Majestic. In particular, I question Jünger's role in the military resistance to Hitler and the so-called Rommel Plan to arrest the dictator in France. Close scrutiny of Jünger's war diaries will reveal how he interpreted the German catastrophe and, keeping in mind the questions posed above, how he dealt with German culpability for the Holocaust. Chapter 5 treats the Second World War diaries from the point of view of the postwar reception, particularly in regard to the question of the aestheticization of violence, Jünger's short-lived theological turn, and his place in the postwar discourse among European conservatives on the "end of history." In chapter 6 , 1 turn to an examination of the debates and controversies that attended both Jünger's published works and his person in the 1950s and 1960s. Jünger wrote about politics in this period through the eyes of the defeated, resisting both what he conceived to be a threatening Americanization of European life and the seduction of Soviet-style collectivism. I situate his writings on the state in the context of other conservative writers of the period who contemplated the changed nature of power politics in an age when Europe's stature on the world stage was decreasing. The much contemplated issue of "nihilism" will show how indebted Heidegger was to

20

INTRODUCTION

Jünger in his post-Holocaust self-delusions, and how Jünger also contributed to Schmitt's thinking about national sovereignty and planetary politics. I argue that the notion of "deradicalized" postwar conservatism is only half right, 50 since Jünger and other survivors of the Conservative Revolution reradicalized their stance towards Western, liberal society under the guise of coded terms, such as "nihilism," "planetary technology," and "sovereignty." Using personal letters, radio, film, television broadcasts, and a broad selection of articles and books dealing with Jünger's literary production, I attempt to reconstruct the m o o d of the Adenauer era and show how the figure of Jünger represented both a confirmation of and a challenge to the status q u o of the so-called Restoration Years. Jünger's ascendancy as a literary personality coincided with the beginning of the establishment of the Federal Republic and waned around the time of Adenauer's death in 1967. Part of this chapter is structured around that peculiarly German p h e n o m e non, the quinquennial celebration of a writer's birthday in books, newspapers, journals, television, and Festschriften, that academic homage by initiates and followers to an intellectual mentor. We will examine the Jünger reception of his sixtieth, sixty-fifth, and seventieth birthdays ( 1 9 5 5 , i960, and 1965), using these dates as markers to register the interaction between the writer as a focus of cultural authority and the reading public as a receptive vehicle of contradictory and competing ethical and political positions. An author puts to the test the values a community shares or at least claims to share. I take Jünger's texts and the critical responses to constitute a general configuration of cultural meaning intersected b y j ü n g e r ' s provocations, a stirring up of conscious and subconscious levels of traumatic and unresolved German guilt. 51 Beginning with Heliopolis, Jünger's first postwar novel, I will examine his fictional writings as well as his contributions during the 1950s to an intense debate a m o n g philosophers that engaged academics, journalists, and the general reading public on the questions of nihilism, Nietzsche, decadence, modernity, German politics, German conservatism, and the reconstruction of German culture and civil society. This chapter ends with a look at the Youth Revolt of the 1960s and at Jünger's role in that cultural event. Chapter 7 brings the relationship between politics and literature into focus by taking into our sights the accolades and public recognition accorded to Jünger in his mature years. In particular the stormy events surrounding the bestowal of the Goethe Prize and the attention of important politicians 50. See Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 51. O n the difficult question of texts and their assimilation by readers of a given cultural community see Roger Chartier, "Texts, Printing, Readings," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198g), 1 5 4 - 1 7 5 .

INTRODUCTION

21

in b o t h France and G e r m a n y are o f central interest. By l o o k i n g at a n u m b e r o f interesting a n d unusual aspects of the J ü n g e r controversy, such as the French attraction to the G e r m a n right, a n d the J ü n g e r contribution to posthistoire a n d p o s t m o d e r n aesthetics, I h o p e to g o b e y o n d the black-andwhite characterizations o f this cultural figure in o r d e r to provide a d e e p e r understanding o f how varied a n d multifaceted is the continuing struggle with the G e r m a n past. T h e rest o f this chapter is devoted to the relationship between J ü n g e r a n d the rejuvenated New Right after the fall o f the Berlin wall in 1989. W i t h o u t r e d u c i n g all o fJünger's work to a political program, I p o i n t o u t that his ideas a b o u t national identity, history, and culture since 1 9 4 5 were at o d d s with the mainstream o f G e r m a n liberal t h o u g h t a n d thus constituted a reservoir f r o m w h i c h the neo-conservative revolt against liberalism has repeatedly drawn. Moreover, h e took a m o r e than passive interest in the fate o f E u r o p e a n radical conservatism, o f f e r i n g moral a n d even token financial support to the y o u n g conservatives in Germany. T h e b o o k closes with the a r g u m e n t that J ü n g e r is o n e of a small n u m b e r o f twentieth-century Germ a n intellectuals whose ideas will play a decisive role in shaping the divided perceptions o f the G e r m a n past a n d r e d e f i n i n g G e r m a n national identity in a politically u n i f i e d future.

CHAPTER ONE

Ernst Jünger A German Life

Ernst Jünger was born into a fairly well-to-do middle-class family in 1895 in Heidelberg. 1 He was the oldest of six children, two of whom died early. He was closest to Friedrich Georg, two years younger, who later became a much admired poet. In his memoirs, Friedrich Georg portrayed their father, a chemist and pharmacist, after whom Ernst was named, as many would later describe the oldest son: he possesses a mixture of "coldness and attentive intelligence . . . and biting irony."2 Though he kept a distance from his children, the father was interested in their intellectual development. He was trained in the sciences, ran a successful pharmacy, and retired early on the money he accumulated to pursue his hobbies, chess, botany, and zoology. Scientific journals and books on a wide range of topics flooded into the house by mail order. The father bought butterfly nets and other insectcatching paraphernalia for the boys, to the consternation of Frau Jünger, who feared that school work would suffer. She was warm and loving, but

1. The only biography yet to appear in English is a thin and long outdated volume from J. P. Stern, Ernst Jünger: A Writer of Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). In German, Karl O. Paetel's Ernst Jünger in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1962) is dependable but, being officially commissioned and overseen by the author himself, lacks a critical edge; see also Gerhard Loose, Ernst Jünger: Gestalt und Werk (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957), which places Jünger within the European intellectual tradition but lacks any other context. T h e best biography ofJünger's prewar activities can be found in Hans Peter Schwarz's Der konservative Anarch ist: Politik und Zeitkritik ErnstJüngers (Freiburg: Rombach, 1962), and more recently Thomas Ncvin, ErnstJünger and Germany; Into the Abyss, 1914—1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). The most recent biography by Paul Noack, Ernst Jünger: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Fest, 1998), is unexceptional and based mainly on secondary sources. 2. F. G.Jünger, Spiegel derJahre: Erinnerungen (Munich: Hanser, 1958), 260. 2

3

24

ERNSTJÜNGER

Jünger's memoirs indicate she was overpowered by the domineering personality and charisma of the patriarch. 3 The family moved often, and Jünger studied at a number of schools, all of which he loathed. A daydreamer, he left a poor scholastic record. He belonged to the generation of youth in Germany that rebelled against the philistinism and suffocating Bürgerlichkeit of Wilhelmine Germany. Jünger escaped early from the ennui of the classroom by creating a private world of romantic adventure. Later he would write: I invented a method of noninvolvement, which connected me to reality like a spider through its untransparent web. In this way I managed to retreat into strange landscapes that I had traversed on the way to school, and which I hadn't left when night came and I closed my eyes; for fourteen days or more I remained buried, as in a mussel, where the light from outside plays against the inner walls of the shell.4

Although Friedrich Georg described the Jünger family as a hearth of warmth and security, Ernst must have been traumatized in some way that only a psychologist may someday reconstruct. 5 Hints of some kind of elementary neurosis can be found directly in the many autobiographical notes about dreams that he published as part of novels and diaries throughout his life. In The Slingshot/' for example, he recounted the alienation experienced at a secondary school in Hanover—the protagonist is a child growing up in a world where all objects and people are a source of fear and anxiety. Friedrich Georg also described his brother as having "Indian eyes," which meant for him that Ernst perceived visual details with uncanny accuracy.7 The combination of enhanced psychogenic consciousness and subconscious activity would eventually lend his writings a surrealistic and hypersensitive aura. The tendency toward flight into a dreamworld sustained him well into adulthood. ADVENTURER AND

REBEL

In 1911 Jünger joined the Wandervogel, part of the German Youth movement, out of which leapt forth, as Fritz Stern aptly summarizes, "defiance, hate, yearning, love, and all the hopes and fears that for decades had been 3. Ernst Jünger, "Rehburger Reminiszensen," in Subtile Jagden, Sämtliche Werke 1 0 : 1 1 - 2 2 (hereafter cited as S\V). 4. Das Abenteuerliche Herz bei Tag und Nacht (Berlin: Frundschberg-Verlag, 1929), 21. 5. For example, Karl Prümm writes that Jünger's preoccupation with the question of war between 1919 and 1934 is evidence of "traumatic-pathological" tendencies, see "Vom Nationalisten zum Abdendländer: Die politische Entwicklung Ernst Jüngers," Basis: Jahrbuch für deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur 6 (1976): 7 - 2 9 . 6. Ernst Jünger, Die Zwille (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983). 7. Spiegel derJahre, 11.

A G E R M A N LIFE

25

repressed, denied, forcibly sublimated." 8 In the fall of 1 9 1 3 he ran off to Algeria to j o i n the French Foreign Legion. His romantic vision of Africa was brutally shattered as the tender eighteen-year-old was nearly raped by a coterie of unsavory mercenaries in Sidi-el-Abbès. After a failed escape attempt, he was successfully retrieved by his father, who had engaged the g o o d offices of the German foreign ministry. 9 Before leaving Bel-Abbès, the son was instructed by telegram from h o m e to have himself photographed. T h e portrait shows a clean-shaven, slender boy in the unadorned uniform of the foreign legion; the sheath and sword had been removed and ostentatiously slung into the foreground. U p o n returning h o m e in early 1 9 1 4 , the indulgent, slightly proud father made a pact: if Ernst finished high school he would be sent back to Africa on a mountain-climbing expedition to Kilimanjaro. When the First World War broke out, arrangements were made for volunteers to take a special high school proficiency exam. Within five weeks, Ernst was on a train to Hannover to enlist in the Fusilier Regiment 73. T h e nineteen-year-old schoolboy had no military training, and thus it took over two months before he was sent to the front. By the time he got there, in December 1 9 1 4 , the initial optimism and excitement had cooled considerably, and machine g u n s — n e w weapons of mass d e s t r u c t i o n — h a d forced both sides to hunker down in muddy trenches. But here Jünger finally f o u n d the adventure that he had h o p e d for in Africa. He had taken along a notebook to keep a record of the experience because "the things waiting for us would never happen again, and I anticipated them with the greatest curiosity." 10 T h e trenches marked a permanent and primary point of reference for Jünger's spiritualization of the war experience. He was to agree with Maurice Barrés, whose "nihilistic nationalism" 1 1 had a seminal influence on him, that the "soil of the trenches is holy ground; it is saturated with blood, it is saturated with spirituality." 12 As a storm trooper, Lieutenant Jünger soon became famous for his unflappable bravery under fire. Like T. E. Lawrence, to whom he was later often compared, 1 3 he was an outspoken individualist

8. Fritz Stem, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Presss, 1961), 176. 9. Jünger tells the story in a novel Afrikanische Spiele (Hamburg: Deutsche Hausbücherei, 1936). 10. Ernst Jünger, "Kriegsausbruch 1914," W i , 541. 11. T h e phrase belongs to Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 94. 12. Maurice Barrés, "The Undying Spirit of France," address ofjuly 1 2 , 1 9 1 6 , inj. S. McClelland ed., The French Right from de Maistre to Maurras (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 204. 13. See for example Margret Boveri, "Der Arbeiter und der Prägestock: Über die Gleichzeitigkeit im Denken von E.Jünger und T. E. Lawrence," FAZ, March 25, 1955.

26

ERNST JÜNGER

w h o refused to fight by the conventional rules of warfare. W o u n d e d a total of fourteen times, he escaped death in a series of miraculously close encounters. 1 4 During the L u d e n d o r f f Offensive, beginning in March 1918, Jünger was one of the elite shock troops that tested a new strategy, initially very successfully, of avoiding the mass frontal assault by breaking through the lines in small formations. In one of these assaults, Jünger took a bullet in the lung. O n September 22, 1918, the Kaiser personally presented him with the highest order of the German army, the Pour le Mérite. 1 5 N o one so young had ever received such high military honors. SPIRITUALIZATION OF THE WAR EXPERIENCE After the November Revolution and the imposition of the Versailles Treaty, Jünger remained an officer in the 100,000-man army. Stationed in Hannover, he helped write a new infantry training manual designed to introduce future soldiers to the technology and tactics of future battles. 16 In it the daredevil Lieutenant outlined a new loose method of attack for breaking through enemy lines based on the individual initiative of the warrior. T h e Reichswehr instituted a ten-day course to train infantrymen in the new method. 1 7 During this time Jünger also worked up his wartime notes into a diary, which he published privately in 1920. This text formed the foundation for In Stahlgewittern (Storms of steel) , 18 Jünger's first and probably most famous book. He reworked and refined the text in a series of revised editions, first in 1922, then in 1924, 1934, and 1935. He even made stylistic changes as late as 1961. 1 9 Storms of Steel, the short novel Sturm20 and several 14. The reported number of times Jünger was wounded during the war varies from ten to fourteen, depending on the source. In Jünger's Wehrpaß he is listed as having been wounded only seven times, April 25, 1915, thigh; Jan. 9, 1916, lower leg; Nov. 12, 1916, lower leg; Sept. 23, 1917, grenade splinter in hand; Dec. 1, 1917, graze to the head; Mar. 22, 1918, breast and head; Aug. 8, 1918, poison gas. 15. Hans Möller, Die Geschichte der Ritter des Ordens Pour k Mérite im Weltkrieg, vol. 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1935). 16. See Militär-Wochenblatt: Zeitschrift für die deutsche Wehrmacht, das Versorgungs- und Abwicklungswesen (Berlin: Mittler, 1 9 2 0 - 2 3 ) , 4 3 3 - 6 8 8 . 17. Walter Schmiele, "Das literarische Porträt: Ernst Jünger," Oct. 10, 1961, NDR, DLAM, Sammlung des Coudres, box 22. 18. Hereafter cited as Storms of Steel. 1 g. Hans Peter des Coudres, Biobliographie der Werke Ernst Jüngers (Stuttgart: Klett, 1960). See also Wilhelm Lukas Kristl, "Ernst Jünger in Selbstverlag," Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, Feb. 27, 1976. 20. The autobiographical novel, Sturm, about a young officer in battle was written in 1923 and published in installments in the Hannoversche Kurier. Jünger claims to have completely forgotten about it until Hans Peter des Coudres dug it up in a library in Hannover in 1960. It was published by Klett in 1975; see Uwe Stamer, "Minenkrieg in Leder gebunden: Ernst Jüngers wiederentdeckte Erzählung Sturm/' SZ, Sept. 15, 1975.

A G E R M A N LIFE

27

essays, "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis" (War as an inner experience) (1922), "Das Wäldchen 125" (Copse 125) (1924), and "Feuer und Blut" (Fire and blood) (1925), brought the young author instant fame. In his writings from the 1920s, the war experience was apotheosized into mythic proportions to justify the enormous loss of life on the battlefields and to give support to the nationalist Utopia as an alternative to the reality of postwar Germany. 21 The ideological bridge to fascism was anticipated in Jünger's early work, which used the myth of the war experience to issue a broad appeal to society to break the fetters of civilization and return to the "natural" condition of untamed man. All antinomies of life, in particular that between culture and barbarism, were overcome in the blood and fire initiations of the trenches. 22 The clearest expression ofJünger's privileging the natural, unchanging order over the social can be found in War as an Inner Experience. Often misrepresented as a war memoir, this essay contains philosophical echoes of Rousseau and Freud: In the c o u r s e o f t h o u s a n d s o f years the wildness, brutality, a n d b r i g h t colors o f desire have b e e n s m o o t h e d a n d d a m p e n e d by a civilization that erects a f e n c e a r o u n d man's s h e e r lust. It is true that r e f i n e m e n t has e n l i g h t e n e d a n d e n n o b l e d m a n , b u t an animal still lies in the substrate o f his b e i n g . . . . A n d w h e n t h e c u r v e s o f life turn b a c k to the r e d line o f t h e primitive, the mask falls, a n d h e e m e r g e s , n a k e d as ever b e f o r e , the O r i g i n a l M a n [Urmensch], t h e c a v e m a n with all his u n b r i d l e d drives. 2 3

Unchanging brutal nature was a standard trope of the fascist literary imagination, whether in the pulp fiction of blood-and-soil novels, or the refined aesthetics of a Gottfried Benn, Jünger, or Knut Hamsun. One can apply easily what Leo Lowenthal has written of Hamsun to Jünger's concept of nature in the early war writings: Nature's timetable r e p l a c e s the timetable o f history . . . the endless r e p r o d u c tion o f natural p h e n o m e n a , the cyclic o r d e r o f n a t u r e , as o p p o s e d to the app a r e n t d i s o r d e r a n d h a p p e n s t a n c e o f all individual a n d historical facts, testifies to the powerlessness o f m a n . . . m a n m u s t e x p e c t a life w i t h o u t m e a n i n g unless h e o b e d i e n t l y a c c e p t s as his own w h a t m a y b e called t h e law o f nature. A n d t h e social c o u n t e r p a r t to the law o f natural r h y t h m is b l i n d discipline. 2 4

Drawing heavily on Nietzsche, this prose is eruptive, antirational, and scornful of civilization. Modern society, understood as being formed by the 21. George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 22. See the excellent analysis of Jünger's mystical reading of the war experience in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 70-108. 23. "Der Kampf als Inneres Erlebnis," Werke, 5:17-18. 24. Leo Lowenthal, Literature and the Image of Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 202.

28

ERNSTJÜNGER

mediocrity of the masses is rejected in favor of nature's eruptive Rausch des roten Blutes (ecstasy of red blood) ,25 Jünger's unique contribution was to portray the powerlessness of man in the face of unchanging nature as a result of all-pervasive dread (Grauen) ,26 Whereas the books of contemporaries like Walter Flex were preachy and moralizing, and the later books of Ludwig Renn and Erich Maria Remarque were satiric and humanistic, Jünger depicted trench warfare as exposing natural, elementary forces at work, and he seemed to revel in describing the explosive brutality that shattered surface reality. Jünger affirmed the war as a test of manliness and saw battle as a chance to overcome the "feminine" decadence of the prewar bourgeois era. 27 In one of the most thought-provoking studies on this subject, Klaus Theweleit has shown how Jünger's writings from this period fit neatly into a larger context of war memorials and novels written by soldiers between 1 9 1 8 and 1923. 28 In these writings, the image of the feminine functions as a metaphor for all the projected fears of socially displaced veterans who would later j o i n fascist movements, in particular, the SA. Moreover, the comradeship of men lent a homoerotic dimension to the battlefield and the memory of the war; the hand-to-hand combat in Storms of Steel was described by Jünger as orgasmic, as a "blood ecstasy," and the tearing up of earth as an act of copulation with nature. 29 Theweleit is correct to point to the subconscious aspect of Jünger's battlefield visions. His fabled coldness and aloofness in the face of horror stem from an inability to distinguish between the subconscious energy Freud called mortido, and violence in the real world. T h e twenty-one-year-old's description of an artillery attack may serve as an example. Here one is confronted not with hardened realism, but with a gift for sublimating violence in order to exploit its energy. T h e colors, sounds, and smells have a hallucinatory quality and render Jünger's prose powerful and disturbing. T h e Dantesque description of an artillery attack includes a milk-clouded craterlike shell hole and twisted bodies creeping like amphibians into a boiling sea surrounded by a strange pink glow. Characteristic for Jünger's ambiva-

25. Cited by Werner Kohlschmidt, "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis: Ernst Jüngers weltanschaulicher Ausgangspunkt in kritischer Betrachtung," Die Sammlung 7 (1952): 27. 26. See Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens, in which Jünger's war writings are characterized as "prefascist nationalism and atavistic glorifications of war and the virtues of war" (78). 27. See George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 60 ff. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 78 ff. 28. Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1977), 57 ff. 29. See Johnannes Volmert, Ernst Jünger: In Stahlgewittern (Munich: Fink, 1985). Volmert uses Theweleit's psychoanalytic model to explore the war writings. See also Bernd Weisbrod, "Kriegerische Gewalt und männlicher Fundamentalismus," Geschichtswerkstatt 49 (September 1998): 5 4 4 - 5 5 6 .

A G E R M A N LIFE

29

lent relationship to violence, the observer wishes to turn away, but "takes in every detail just the same." 30 This sublimation of the war experience into an exploration of the fantastic differed significantly from the blunt military narratives of the Front Generation, though some scholars, like Klaus Theweleit, regard Jünger's prose as an exploration of the "fascist unconscious." 31 These essays cannot be construed as patriotic diatribes, and they lacked any notions of race or biological determinism. Besides the schoolroom Greek classics, the major influences on the adolescent Jünger were French Catholic writers such as Charles Péguy, Maurice Barrés, and Charles Maurras.32 In 1916 Alfred Rubin's book The Other Side serendipitously fell into Jünger's hands in an army book store in Cambrai. The fantasy novel tells the story of an eerie voyage to the mountains of central Asia into an imaginary kingdom, built by a wealthy eccentric as a refuge from all forms of modern progress. The oft-noted macabre images in Jünger's war diaries can be traced, in no small part, to the strong influence of Rubin's chimeric style.33 In the 1920s Jünger read Sorel and sympathized with the anarchists' hatred of bourgeois society and Sorel's repeated exhortations to direct action. This Catholic and revolutionary syndicalist influence on Jünger helped him interpret the war as a struggle against bourgeois decadence and all that was considered the reigning values of nineteenth-century politics: liberalism, democracy, materialism, and mass society. Finally, in the first versions of the war diaries it should be noted that the war's significance was limited and personal, rather than collective. The 1920 version read like a clumsy Homeric tale of heroes controlled by fate and destiny. In the subsequent and much improved published versions, the noble, antiquated view of the soldier, respecting his enemies and obeying unwritten laws of chivalry, is transformed into a victim of the terrifying power of the war machine. The diaristsoldier here is concerned with the erasure of the individual soldier in the modern era of mass organization. 34 Nationalist motifs, modeled on Jünger's reading of Barrés, were added in the 1925 version. 35 Significantly, in all of

30. "Feuer und Blut," S W 1 , 473. 31. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 2, ch. 3. 32. Barrés was the most important, see Albrecht Betz, "Benn, Jünger, et la France," in Gilbert Merlio, ed., Ni Gauche, ni droit: Les chasés- croisés idéologiques des intellectuels françaises et allemands dans l'Entre-guerres (Talence: Editions de Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine, 1995), 289-295. 33. See Jünger's essay "Rückblick" in Ernst Jünger and Alfred Kubin, Eine Begegnung (Berlin: Propyläen, 1975), 9 3 - 1 0 8 . 34. See Wojciech Kunicki, Projektionen des Geschichtlichen (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993). 35. For example the last line of the 1925 edition. See Ulrich Böhme, Fassungen bei Ernst Jünger (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1972). In an interview in the early 1960s, Jünger claimed

JO

ERNST JÜNGER

the versions of Storms of Steel the b o o k ends, not with the defeat of Germany, but rather with the bestowal of the Pour le Mérite, the highest war decoration, and a personal encomium from the Kaiser to the twenty-two-year-old Jünger. Hannah Arendt has pointed out that Mussolini's worldview was based on romantic personality worship of the kind described by Carl Schmitt, where the self becomes an "occasion" for limitless, free-floating expression. Mussolini's self-description aptly applies to Jünger's idiosyncratic brand of fascism: "everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology." 3 6 In the 1929 version, Jünger added a veiled reference to the twin threat to Germany of continued allied interference in Germany's affairs and the related rise of primitive nationalist movements from the inside: "Although force without and barbarity within conglomerate in somber clouds, so long as the blade of the sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under." 3 7 After the war and as a result of direct contact with the cultural avantgarde of France and Italy, Jünger added surrealistic, expressivist, and futurist elements to his nationalist outlook. T h e outcome can be traced in the stylistic changes he made to Storms of Steel in the 1920s. He transformed the schoolboy jottings modeled on the blood-saturated epics of H o m e r into a modern manifesto of barbarism, resonating well with Marinetti's famous call in the Futurist Manifesto to glorify " w a r — t h e world's only h y g i e n e — m i l itarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for." 3 8 In the successive rewriting of his war memoirs, Jünger gradually incorporated the essential ingredients of a "fascist style": references to dynamism, youth, speed, machine power, intuition, instinct, and the sublimation into a new aesthetic of violence. 3 9 Jünger's writing takes on the form of what Andreas Huyssen calls the "armored text," corresponding to "the fascist fantasy of the invincible armored body, whether it be that of the male, the party, or the nation." 4 0 W h e n one considers the essentially Latin roots of his fascist aesthetics, it is n o wonder, though, that Jünger re-

it was Barrés who "led him to nationalism." See F. K. Bastian, "Das Politische bei Ernst Jünger," (Ph.D. diss., University of Heidelberg, 1963), 280. 36. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 168. 37. Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 319. The passage was removed from the final German edition of the collected works. 38. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Enquête international sur le vers libre et Manifeste du Futurisme (Milan: Editions de "Poesie," 1909), 9 - 1 2 , 16. Quoted by Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 2939. Sternhell, 29 ff. 40. Andreas Huyssen, "Fortifying the Heart Totally: Ernst Jünger's Armored Texts," NGC 59 (spring/summer 1993): 14.

A G E R M A N LIFE

j j

m a i n e d fairly i m m u n e to the siren call of the Nazis. 41 M u c h different than B e n n , w h o was also r o o t e d in F r e n c h a n d Italian avant-garde culture, b u t w h o b r o u g h t with h i m the b a g g a g e of race theories and e u g e n i c s f r o m his medical training, J ü n g e r was attracted to fascism f o r spiritual, aesthetic, a n d literary reasons, and h e f o u n d the biological basis o f Nazi ideology vulgar a n d provincial. In the Stahlhelm Yearbook f o r 1 9 2 6 h e wrote, "We don't want to hear anything m o r e a b o u t chemical reactions, b l o o d transfusions, skull shapes, a n d A r y a n profiles. All o f this leads to sheer nonsense, hairsplitting, a n d leaves the m i n d vulnerable to a realm o f values that can only be destroyed, n o t understood." 4 2 O n the o t h e r hand, J ü n g e r was n o t u n c o m f o r t a b l e with Hitler's rhetoric a n d the political platform o f the National Socialists w h e n the party was still tiny, the ideology social-revolutionary, a n d Hitler j u s t o n e o t h e r voice o f the Front Generation. In 1923 h e published o n e o f his first political essays in the Völkischer Beobachter, praising the revolutionary synthesis o f nationalism a n d socialism represented by the f l e d g l i n g National Socialist G e r m a n Worker's Party. 43 The real revolution has not yet even taken place. It marches on irrepressibly. It is not a reaction, but rather a real revolution, with all the usual characteristics. The idea is völkisch, polished to a hitherto unknown sharpness, the banner is the swastika. The form of expression is the concentration of the will in one single point—the dictatorship! A l t h o u g h a few years later h e b r u s h e d o f f the Nazi party hacks w h o wanted to enlist h i m f o r cultural p r o p a g a n d a , J ü n g e r was impressed by what h e considered Hitler's rhetorical talents a n d always stood b e h i n d the Nazi party's opposition to the harsh terms o f the Versailles treaty. 44 A f t e r receiving a signed copy o f Mein Kampf, J ü n g e r sent Hitler an a u t o g r a p h e d copy o f his essay "Fire a n d Blood," in 1926, with the inscription, "To the nationalist Führer, A d o l f H i t l e r — E r n s t Jünger." 4 5

41. See "Zum Erbe des italienischen Futurismus," in Reinhard Brenneke, Militanter Modernismus: Vergleichende Studien zum Frühwerk Emst Jüngers (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992), 1 5 1 - 2 4 9 . 42. Ernst Jünger, "Blut," in F. Schauwecker, ed., Stahlhelm-Jahrbuch (Magdeburg: Stahlhelm Verlag, 1927), 68. 43. "Revolution und Idee," Völkischer Beobachter 1, Sept. 23/24, 1923. 44. "It is no accident that National Socialism has brought forth a series of rhetorical talents, as Hitler himself is possibly Germany's greatest speaker" (Ernst Jünger, "Nationalismus und Nationalsozialismus," Arminius 8, no. 13 [March 27, 1927], 9). 45. The book ended up in the Library of Congress in Washington. Jünger wrote the dedication on January 9, 1926. Hitler read the book and marked some of the pages. Hans Peter Schwarz argues that the wording of the dedication defines Hitler as only one, not the nationalist leader of Germany. See Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers, p. 117.

52

ERNST JÜNGER

Hitler planned to visit him in 1926, but the meeting was canceled at the last minute. 46 Hitler always retained his admiration for Jünger, even during the Second World War when Jünger was kept under constant surveillance by Heinrich Himmler's Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo wanted to intern him for treason. An intimate of Himmler's, Wolfram Sievers, testified after the war that Josef Goebbels had suggested sending Jünger to a concentration camp because of hints of dissent in the novella The Marble Cliffs, but Hitler shielded the war hero, ordering that "nothing happen" to Jünger. 47 THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION Jünger's war writings also brought him into close personal and intellectual proximity with theoreticians of the Conservative Revolution, including Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Ernst von Solomon, Friedrich Hielscher, Franz Schauwecker, Edgar Jung, and Ernst Niekisch. Jünger's war books had a special appeal, especially for those thinkers who viewed the "ideas of 1 9 1 4 " as a kind of antimovement to the "ideas of 1789." 48 T h e war represented an emancipation from civilization and liberalism and a return to an organic community. T h e war had "proven" the end of the idea of progress. T h e "revolutionary" conservatives did not accept the old conservative's desire to uphold the moral and judicial fundaments of the state. They wanted to establish a charismatic base for politics outside democratic institutions and looked for a figure like Louis Napoleon whose appeal to "the people" went beyond warring factions, classes, and parties. 49 A Social Darwinian influence led them to see world politics as a fight for existence in which peoples either triumphed or were destroyed. As Jeffrey Herf has pointed out, the conservative revolutionaries defended the German Volk against cosmopolitanism; the primacy of politics over domestic divisions helped formulate the ideological synthesis of the two most powerful impulses of the era, nationalism and socialism. 50 The extent to which these ideas contributed to the success of Hitler's National Socialist party is a subject of continuing debate, but many scholars have argued that the Conservative Revolution played a

46. Paetel, Ernst Jünger in Selbstzeugnissen, 59. 47. This testimony is contained in a letter sent by Friedrich Hielscher to Ernst Jünger in which Hielscher reports what Sievers told him. T h e letter is dated Nov. 18, 1985, and a copy can be found in Henri Plard's private archive. There is, of course, no way to ascertain the veracity of Siever's statement. It is also known that Jünger and Hitler exchanged several letters during the 1920s; see Horst Mühleisen, "Ernst Jüngers Gefährdungen: Ein neues Dokument der Nazi-Zeit," CW 5, Jan. 25, 1986. 48. See Heide Gerstenberger, Der Revolutionäre Konservatismus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968). 49. See for example Hans Zehrer, "Das Ende der Parteien," Die Tat 24 (1932): 68—79. 50. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 3 5 - 4 2 .

A G E R M A N LIFE

key role at least in making Ultranationalist, antiliberal positions more acceptable to Weimar intellectuals and policy makers. 51 Whether or not the various, sometimes contradictory, ideas of individual conservative revolutionaries add u p to a coherent philosophy or worldview is a matter of contention. It is true that Armin Mohler's original classification contains a disparate lot of intellectual and political entities, including the leagues, youth groups, various völkisch movements, and a wide range of thinkers, many of them obscure and minor figures, mixed in with intellectual giants such as Martin Heidegger. Yet Stefan Breuer's suggestion that these revolutionary impulses be renamed "New Nationalism" begs other questions and defines the group too narrowly. 52 T h e ideas of the Conservative Revolution, although diversely formulated, did form a coherent ideology, particularly in the articulation of the enemy: liberalism, social democracy, the "West," individualism, cosmopolitanism, republicanism, in a word, the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. 5 3 WEIMAR DANDY In the spring of 1923 Jünger quit the army and left Germany to study zoology in Naples, but returned several months later to study science and philosophy in Leipzig. Here he met the philosopher H u g o Fischer and studied zoology with the vitalist Hans Driesch. Both Driesch and Fischer would later play important roles in the Deutsche Philosophie Gesellschaft, the conservative organization of philosophers whose members tried to find c o m m o n ground between German Idealism and Nazi politics. 54 In 1925 Jünger married Gretha von Jeinsen. After a short stint in the Freikorps Rossbach, he j o i n e d the largest veteran's organization, the Stahlhelm. Beginning in the fall of 1925 he wrote for the newspaper Standarte, a supplement to the regular Stahlhelm newspaper that appealed to the younger, more radical, nonmonarchical wing of the veterans' organization, which included m e n such as Helmut Franke, Franz Schauwecker, and Wilhelm Kleinau. He soon became irritated by the bickering and indecisiveness of the Stahlhelm leaders and went to work for the ex-Freikorps leader and nationalist fundraiser Hermann Ehrhardt. Jünger wrote and coedited Ehrhardts journal Arminius in 1926 and a year later j o i n e d up with a young national revolutionary 51. See Kurt Sonntheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1935 (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1968). 52. Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993). 53. For a good overview, see Claus Leggewie, Druck von rechts: Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik ? (Beck: Munich, 1993). 54. Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 8 5 - 9 1 , 1 5 4 - 1 5 6 passim.

34

ERNST JÜNGER

named Werner Lass to publish Der Vormarsch,55 Both journals were attempts to reunite the disparate forces of the right, and Jünger advocated a fasciststyle leadership run by an elite force of workers. He expressed cautious admiration for the Nazis and lauded their emphasis on national integration over class warfare in a second article in the Völkischer Beobachter in 1927. 5 6 But he soon tired of politics and that same year moved his family from Leipzig to Berlin, where he settled into a career as a freelance writer. H e helped edit several volumes of war photography, which was in vogue in the late twenties. In a series of innovative and influential essays introducing the photographs, many of them aerial views of desolate battlefields, Jünger argued that the uninvolved, objective quality of the camera mirrors the decline of the individual and bourgeois subjectivity in the "age of the worker." 5 7 Jünger's status as a war hero, reinforced by the heroic pathos of his war diaries, made him an object of veneration and a chosen leader of the rightwing Front Generation. Sudden fame reinforced in the young man an elite self-consciousness, and he came to believe that destiny had chosen him to survive the war and lead Germany out of political and military submission to the victors. 58 For a while, he willingly accepted the role of the "uncontested intellectual leader of young nationalism," as L e o p o l d Schwarzschild called him. 5 9 Still only in his twenties, he was looked upon as a visionary and a spokesman for the war generation; as Ernst von Salomon testified, everywhere he went "disciples grouped about the master's feet." 6 0 In Berlin Jünger led the life of a free-floating intellectual, enjoying the salons and politically charged atmosphere of the Weimar Republic's culturally most exciting years. He flirted with a number of ideologies and parties butj o i n e d n o n e of them for long, situating himself "in a no man's land between bourgeois nationalism, National Socialism, Utopian socialism, and communism." 6 1

55. O n the National Revolutionary circles, see Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf, NationalBolschevismus in Deutschland, 1918—1933 (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1972), 234 ff. 56. "Der neue Nationalismus," in Die neue Front, supplement to Völkischer Beobachter 40, Jan. 23/24, 1927. 57. See Bernd Hüppauf, "Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation," NGC 59 (spring/summer 1993): 4 1 - 7 6 . 58. Helmut Mörchen, Schriftsteller in der Massengesellschaft: Zur politischen Essayistik und Publizistik Heinrich und Thomas Manns, Kurt Tucholskys, und Emst Jüngers während der 20er Jahre (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973), 8 6 - 8 7 . 59. Schwarzschild published a piece from Jünger on German nationalism, "Selbstanzeige," in the Tagebuch, Sept. 9, 1929. He introduced Jünger as "the most influential voice to glorify the war experience." In Stephan Reinhardt, Lesebuch: Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1982), 1 7 2 - 7 3 . 60. Ernst von Salomon, The Questionnaire (Der Fragebogen), trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 142. 61. Armin Möhler, Die Schleife (Zurich: Verlag der Arche, 1955), 79.

A G E R M A N LIFE

35

Jünger always considered himself an iconoclast, whether in the Weimar or later in the Federal Republic, although he was typical of the turn of the century generational revolt against bourgeois mediocrity and conventionality. He may have considered himself in "no man's land," but his writing after the Great War reflected ever more clearly the mixture of avant-garde nihilism and mythological nationalism that was inspiring fascist intellectuals in France, Great Britain, and Italy. While the German left agonized over the political value of expressionism, 62 Jünger easily incorporated that movement's aggressive, soul-wrenching motifs into his art. His particular sensibility for Schrecken (shock or terror) was not completely original, especially when one considers that Gottfried Benn's poetry, beginning as far back as 1912, used dreadful images as expressive means to shake the reader out of quotidian reality. T h e older expressionist poet had coined the expression Wirklichkeitstrümmerer (reality wreckers) to describe his generation. W h e n Jünger turned to heroic realism in the mid- to late twenties, he was echoing yet another trend away from expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit,63 T h e young poet-soldier was, however, financially independent. A veteran's pension and the proceeds from his publications allowed him to travel and to devote himself entirely to writing. H e continued to contribute articles to a number of right-wing nationalist journals, including Ernst Niekisch's National-Bolshevist paper Widerstand, Aufmarsch, and Die Kommenden.64 A recurring theme in these articles is the irreconcilable gap between the veterans of the war and routinized, bourgeois society. Life cannot return to normal when millions have lost their lives on the battlefields. If the soldiers come together to fight again for a new world, Jünger argues, in a typical appeal to the new generation, 6 5 their deaths cannot have been in vain. T h e desire to overcome and replace the Weimar system is explicit, as in the following passage from Standarte in 1926:

62. See Hans-Jürgen Schmitt, Die Expressionismusdebatte: Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973); see also Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: MacMillan, 1978), 1 1 4 ff. 63. O n the question ofJünger's originality, see the insightful critique by Barbara Klie "Einsicht und Schablone: Ernst Jünger's Ausgangspunkt," radio essay, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, January 21, 1966, Sammlung des Coudres, box 22, DLAM. 64. See Gerda Liebchen, Emst Jünger: Seine literarischen Arbeiten in den zwanziger Jahren (Bonn: Bouvier, 1977); Karl Prümm, Die Literatur des soldatischen Nationalismus der 20er Jahre: Gruppenideologie und Epochenproblematik (Kronberg/Taunus: Scriptor Verlag, 1974); and Armin Steil, Die imaginäre Revolte: Untersuchungen zur faschistischen Ideologie und ihrer theoretischen Vorbereitung bei Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, und Ernst Jünger (Marburg: Verlag Arbeiterbewegung und Gesellschaftswissenschaft, 1984). 65. See Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). 6 0

ff

-

36

ERNST J Ü N G E R W h e r e a s the p r o c e s s o f dissolution (Zersetzung) is taking p l a c e in all the o t h e r parties, we are already thinking, f e e l i n g , a n d living in a c o m p l e t e l y n e w way. A n d t h e r e is n o d o u b t that with g r o w i n g consciousness w e will turn things a r o u n d . T h a t is why w e are the s u m m o n e d warriors f o r the n e w state. 66

Like the Communists at the other end of the political spectrum, Jünger looked forward to the total dissolution of the Weimar Republic with its liberal capitalism and bourgeois individualism. 67 A l t h o u g h Jünger did not indulge in the usual racist rhetoric of the right, one memorable essay he published in a special edition of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte dedicated to the 'Jewish Question" in 1930 came very close to a cultural version of antiSemitism. 68 In the article Jünger claims that the destructive, emancipated Jew (Zivilisationsjude) is a product of liberalism and thus cannot be combated through the spirit of liberalism. Since Germany is on the verge of a revolution, argues Jünger, and liberalism is opposed to the revolution like water is to fire, it would be logical to see the 'Jewish Question" as a problem of defining who is and w h o is not on the side of the nation. From here it is only a short step to define Jews as external enemies who should n o longer exist in Germany: T h e realization of the a u t h e n t i c G e r m a n gestalt separates itself f r o m the Jewish gestalt as clearly as transparent, u n m o v i n g water f r o m oil, a n d takes the shape o f a r e c o g n i z a b l e layer. . . . In the same m e a s u r e in w h i c h the G e r m a n will gains f o r m a n d clarity, it w o u l d b e crazy f o r a Jew to t h i n k that h e c a n b e a G e r m a n in G e r m a n y . H e faces the final alternative: e i t h e r to b e a Jew o r n o t to b e [entwederJude zu sein oder nicht zu sein].

(845)

These are some of the most objectionable lines that ever flowed from Jünger's pen, and they would come back to haunt him many times in later years. T h e association of Germans with pure water and the Jews with black oil and the reference to the life-threatening challenge to be "either a j e w or not to be" seem to put the author unequivocally in the anti-Semitic camp. As Thomas Nevin notes, this article was published as part of a symposium on German-Jewish identity, which included a contribution by Rabbi L e o Baeck, but Nevin fails to add that Jünger simultaneously published the same

66. Ernst Jünger, "Schliesst Euch Zusammen!" Standarte 1, no. 10 (July 22, 1926): 222. 67. See Bruno W. Reimann and Renate Hassel, Ein Emst Jünger Brevier: Jüngers politische Publizistik, 1920 bis (Marburg: BdWi, 1995), a good collection of Jünger's most important and difficult-to-locate articles, with some useful commentary. See also David Roberts, "Individuum und Kollektiv: Jünger und Brecht zu Ausgang der Weimarer Republik," Orbis Litlerarum 41 (June 1976): 1 5 7 - 1 7 5 . 68. Ernst Jünger, "Uber Nationalismus und Judenfrage," Süddeutsche Monatshefte 12 (September 1930): 843-845.

A G E R M A N LIFE

57

article in the more inflammatory pages of Die Kommenden,69 More important, the editor of this issue expressly notes that "this is probably the first time that both Jews and anti-Semites are working together on the same publication," signifying that Jünger was clearly viewed as part of the anti-Semitic camp. 7 0 It is true that Jünger viewed anti-Semitism as a matter of secondary interest in the national struggle, but he did praise Alfred Rosenberg's antiSemitic journal Der Weltkampf and warned that reducing the "horizon of the German Question" to the issue of Jews in Germany gives the Jews too much credit. 71 T h e question of whether or not German Jews should or could assimilate in order to counter anti-Semitism is obviously an old question and was debated repeatedly in Weimar publications like the Jüdische Rundschau. Jünger's position e c h o e d the völkisch anti-Semitism of Paul de Lagarde, w h o had argued that Jews should either emigrate or b e c o m e Germans. 7 2 H e felt compelled many years later to justify his phrasing in the article as "sins of youth," expressed before the genocidal threat to the Jews was evident. 73 Although Jünger was heavily involved in the political activities of the national-revolutionary movement, his elitism made it impossible for him to j o i n wholeheartedly any one of its many groups. In line with the role of the dandy he self-consciously played, politics, in this case right-wing politics, was a means to provoke and ridicule bourgeois society. T h u s it is not surprising that he associated with those writers on the left, most notably Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller, and Bertolt Brecht, who also wanted to scandaliser les bourgeois.74 Jünger was most comfortable alone or in the company of eccentrics and outsiders. His best friends in the Berlin days were other young nationalists, such as Albrecht Erich Günther, editor of Deutsches Volkstum. Besides political essays, he also wrote art reviews for various Berlin journals and counted some contemporary artists among his friends and acquaintances, including A r n o Breker, whose massive Aryan sculptures were ap-

69. Thomas Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany, 256, note 110. See Ernst Jünger, "Über Nationalismus undjudenfrage," Die Kommenden 38 (Sept. 1930): 4 4 5 - 4 4 6 . 70. The other contributors were Ismar Elbogen, Israel Cohen, Gerhard Holdheim, Eva Reichmann-Jungmann, Max Naumann, Josef Hofmiller, Carl Maria Kaufmann, Ernst Moering, Graf Ernst Reventlow, Theodor Fritsch, Kurt Kornicker, and Theodor Seibert. 7 1 . Ernst Jünger, "Die antinationalen Mächte," Arminius 8 (1927), 5. "Tun wir dem Geschmeiß nicht zuviel Ehre an." 72. See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (New York: Anchor, 1965), 1 9 0 - 1 9 5 . 73. In a Spiegel interview Jünger remarked "Who hasn't once said something against the Jews? Didn't Heine, didn't Marx? That is now all seen through a sooty glass. T h e whole question has changed because of the concentration camps. Anyone who can differentiate must ask themselves, did I express my opinion about the Jews before or after the Kristallnacht ?" Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982, 157. 74. See Strahlungen II, Aug. 24, 1945, 5 1 6 - 5 2 0 .

38

ERNST JÜNGER

preciated by the Nazis. He valued the "degenerate" artists as well including Alfred Kubin, with w h o m he shared an appreciation of the grotesque and the surreal, and the dadaist-communist, but later chastened Catholic convert Rudolf Schlichter whose "decadent" paintings and novels rendered him persona non grata after 1933. 7 5 Jünger spent his days as a flaneur on the streets of Berlin, visiting old books shops and antiquariats, and his nights in his small apartment on the Hohenzollenstrasse, reading and writing or gazing into a microscope. Ernst Niekisch described the apartment as dark and dingy, lined with old leather volumes and hundreds of jars of gooey, blue-green biological specimens. 7 6 It was in this stage of his development as a writer that Jünger h o n e d his idiosyncratic style, which critics called icy, likening it to a cut diamond or rarefied air. He himself called it "polished darkness" (geschliffene Dunkelheit) , 77 But this all came after m u c h hard work. His first book, Storms of Steel, was clumsily written, and he refined and reworked the b o o k altogether eight times. T h e final version, not completed until 1952, became part of his Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), but it was a far cry from the maladroit jottings first made by a boy-soldier in the trenches of the First World War. 78 In the 1920s he perfected his essay style that was curiously antiseptic, considering the preoccupation with putrefaction and decay. His first genuine literary success came relatively late, at the age of thirty-four. In this work, Das Abenteuerliche Herz, heavily influenced by Kubin and other surrealists,79 the dark, visionary side of Jünger came to the fore. T h e book was

75. O n Kubin, see ErnstJünger and Alfred Kubin, Eine. Begegnung (Berlin: Propyläen, 1975). See also Heinz Beckman, "Die gemeinsamen Fische," Literaturblatt/RM 49 (December 5, 1975). According to Möhler, when Bertolt Brecht learned that Schlichter had become friendly with Jünger, Brecht warned that the nationalism propagated by Jünger was "shit." "Yes," Schlichter is reported to have said, "but at least it is German shit." See Dirk Heisserer, ed., Ernst Jünger und Rudolf Schlichter: Briefe, 1935—1955 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 308. 76. See Strahlungen II, Aug. 24, 1945, 5 1 6 - 5 2 0 . 77. "Geschliffene Dunkelheit: Ernst Jünger wird 65 Jahre," DPA Brief, March 26/27, i960. 78. T h e book is now in its sixty-ninth printing and is still the best selling of all Jünger's books. See Thomas Kielinger and Herbert Kremp, "Das abenteuerliche Herz hält Titanenwelt auf Distanz," Sonderdruck der Geistigen Welt, March 23, 1985. Wojciech Kunicki has studied in exact detail the eight versions and shown how Jünger's later works are informed by varying and sometimes contradictory interpretations of his own juvenilia; see Projektionen des Geschichtlichen: Ernst Jüngers Arbeit an den Fassungen von In Stahlgewittern (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993). 79. T h e title was derived from Louis Aragon's programmatic surrealist novel Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 80. T h e novel was of crucial importance for Walter Benjamin as well, who was said to have only read it in small doses, for fear his "heartbeat would become too strong that I would have to put the book down." Cited in Max Pensky, "Tactics of Remembrance," in Michael Steinberg, Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 169. See also Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens, 361.

A G E R M A N LIFE

39

first published in 1929 and then entirely revised, so that the 1938 edition is essentially a different work. 80 In the later edition, Jünger indulged in what would become a lifelong preoccupation with the aesthetics of horror. His first teachers in this endeavor were the surrealist artists. T h e b o o k contained a phantasmagoria of scientific and poetic vignettes, a collage of wild associations, and deathly, ghostly images that recalled the war-inspired art of painters like René Magritte, de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst. Like other surrealists, Jünger not just escaped into an inner realm of subconsciousness, he also sought to expand the boundaries of experience to capture the horrors of bodily deformation, disfiguration, and transmutation suffered by most soldiers at the front. 8 1 Predictably Jünger's sensitive probing of the grotesqueness of the war experience and its aftermath, though undertaken with cool and clinical precision, did not sit well with the National Socialist program to refashion the memory of the war as heroic and life-affirming. Goebbels, w h o was eager to enlist Jünger for the National Socialists, was bitterly disappointed after reading Das Abenteuerliche Herz; in comparison to the writer of the Storms of Steel— a book he described as a "war gospel, cruelly g r e a t " — G o e b b e l s now saw Jünger b e c o m i n g solely a "writer, closed off from life, just ink, literature!" 82 Notwithstanding the political disappointment that motivated Goebbel's curses, he was not the only one to feel alienated from the previously adulated writer. Ernst von Salomon wrote that the publication of Das Abenteuerliche Herz precipitated Jünger's first "painful separation" from his earlier ideals of the front generation. 8 3 Jünger's rarefied aestheticism n o longer spoke to the immediate political interests of the disaffected soldiers. It seemed that Jünger was a solitary warrior, even in his aspirations to b e c o m e a great writer. ANARCHY AND FLIGHT As the Nazis began their final ascent to power after winning 107 seats in the Reichstag in the elections of September 1930, Jünger distanced himself from the party while at the same time advocating his own, more radical version of the nationalist revolution. It was authoritarian and ruthless, but not

80. Das Abenteuerliche Herz: Aufzeichnungen bei Tag und Nacht (Berlin: Frundsberg Verlag, 1929); Das Abenteuerliche Herz: Figuren und Cappricios (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt,

1938)81. See Sidra Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (New York: Abbeville, 1990), 26 ff. 82. Elke Fröhlich, ed.,Die TagebüchervonJoseph Goebbels, Sämtliche Fragmente, 4 vols. (Munich: Saur, 1987); see vol. i.,Jan. 13, 1926, and April 4, 1929. 83. Ernst von Salomon, "Ich besuchte Ernst Jünger," Die Welt, Jan. 10, 1950.

40

ERNST JÜNGER

racist. Jünger rejected the Germanic mysticism of Nazi blood-and-soil doctrines. Already in 1927 he had refused to accept their offer of a seat in the Reichstag.84 When the Völkischer Beobachter published excerpts from Storms of Steel without the author's permission, Jünger wrote to the paper forbidding further use of his writings, adding, "It is not my aspiration to be mentioned in the press as often as possible but, rather, that on the question of my politics not a trace of ambiguity develops." 85 In 1930 Jünger publicly supported the terrorist activities of the "Peasant King," Claus Heim and his Landvolkbewegung, displaced farmers who were bombing the offices of the tax collectors in Berlin;86 Hitler opposed the action in the hope of warding off a prohibition of his party. In 1933 Jünger declined a calling to the Nazi-dominated Prussian Academy of the Arts (literature section). In a letter to the Academy dated November 16, 1933, he wrote, "I ask you please to view my rejection as a sacrifice imposed upon me by my participation in the German mobilization, which I have served since 1 1 9 4-" 8 7 In another letter written on the issue of his nomination, Jünger pretended to approve of Nazi cultural politics while pleading for independence, "I wish to emphasize that I have the highest regards for the Academy . .. and that I am prepared to make positive contributions to the new state. . . . I'm sure that I can do this in my own way."88 Jünger's "own way," as the Landvolkbewegung incident indicated, was to work toward a more thorough social revolution than the one offered by the increasingly pragmatic Hitler. At times, Jünger had nothing but scorn for the course of legality embarked upon by the National Socialists.89 But as late as October 1933, he held out hope that the Nazi revolution would lead in a direction he could embrace. In an essay entitled "Decline or New Order," he compared the magnitude of the current revolution in Germany to the French Revolution of 1789 and noted the new discipline in social, political, and military areas with approval. In the end, he argued, there were many problems still to be solved. "And the manner in which we solve them will decide whether the great upheaval, in

84. Paetel, 45. 85. Letter to the Völkische Beobachter, June 14, 1934. Cited in Schwilk, Ernst Jünger: Leben und Werk, 142. 86. Heim's candidacy was organized by Niekisch and supported by Otto Strasser, Erich Ludendorff, and a number of right-wing leagues. See Schüddekopf, Nationalbolschevismus in Deutschland, 3 1 3 - 3 1 4 . 87. Jünger to the minister for science, art, and education, Nov. 18, 1933, in Joseph Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1983), 37. 88. Jünger to Beumelburg, Nov. 18, 1933, in Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im dritten Reich, 38-3989. Ernst Jünger, "Reinheit der Mittel," Widerstand 10 (Oct. 1929): 2 9 5 - 2 9 7 .

A G E R M A N LIFE

41

which we have found ourselves for quite some time, will go down in history as a downfall or as the begin of a new order, a new ascendancy." 90

Jünger laid out his own ideas about the national revolution and his differences with the Nazis in two seminal works from this period, Totale Mobilmachung (1931) and The Worker ( 193 2 ) .91 These books are often taken as evidence o f j ü n g e r ' s complicity with the Nazis or his status as "forerunner," but in fact the Nazis used only the title of the former as a battle slogan, disregarding its contents, and were repelled by the esoteric metaphysics of the latter. Jünger's vision of a brave new world, set forth in steel-cold prose in The Worker, was more uncompromising than the Nazis. He heralded a New Man and rejected Enlightenment and humanist ideas while the Nazis appealed to the common Volk and traditional values. National Socialism appeared to him as a purely technical execution of the total mobilization. It "lacked metaphysics," he later said.92 Jünger was originally attracted to the revolutionary thrust of National Socialism. He entered the political arena as a spokesperson for a new nonreactionary nationalism. But he became disgruntled when the Nazis, like any other political party, began to court the masses for votes and cut deals with the Conservatives. For Jünger's sense of heroic idealism, the Nazi movement came to rest too much on the support of, in his eyes, an unbridled plebeian mass of petit bourgeoisie. 93 He called the political phenomenon of mass parties "typical nineteenth century" 94 and thought they were all led by demagogues and charlatans. He didn't like Hitler's fanatical anti-Semitism or his crusade against the East, which explains his ideological affinity with Ernst Niekisch, Edgar Jung, and the National Bolshevists whose "vocabularies of rupture" sought a more thorough social revolution, one that combined Leninist vanguardism with Prussian sovereignty and order. 95 On the other hand, the National Bolshevist position was too collectivist and not radical enough for Jünger's anarcho-martial hostility to bourgeois society. Jünger

90. Ernst Jünger, "Untergang oder neue Ordnung," Deutsches Volkstum 15, no. 10 (Oct. 1933): 91. Die Totale Mobilmachung (Berlin: Verlag für Zeitkritik, 1931); Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932). 92. Interview with Ernst Jünger in L'Express, Jan. 1 1 - 1 7 , 1 9 7 1 • 105. 93. See Roger Woods, "Ernst Jünger and the Nature of Political Commitment" (Ph.D. diss., St.Johns College, Oxford, 1981), DLAM. 94. In the Totale Mobilmachung, Jünger wrote that mass parties, with their ideas of progress, constituted the "great people's church of the nineteenth century," Werke 5 : 1 2 7 . 95. T h e phrase "vocabulaire de rupture" is from Louis Dupeux, "Ernst Niekisch: De la Gauche au Stalinisme par l'Extrême Droite," in Merlio, Ni gauche, ni droit, 94.

42

ERNSTJÜNGER

dreamed of a postliberal order, in which steel-jawed, clear-eyed soldierworkers ran society like an efficient army. But racism was not part of his equation. "It must be repeated," he wrote, that "on the landscape of the worker, race and the biological concept of race don't play any role—the figure of the worker mobilizes all resources without distinction." 96 This unspecific vision of totality also upset the traditional right, which wanted a German form of fascism, anti-Semitic and Germanic, rather than technocratic. According to Möhler, The Worker made Jünger appear to traditional conservatives as a "left-winger from the right." 97 In fact, many National Bolshevist intellectuals viewed The Worker as dangerously close to communism, and they mistrusted its "apoliticism." 98 Niekisch equated the planetary domination of The Worker with the dictatorship of the proletariat. 99 Fritz Elsholz criticized the book in a National Bolshevist weekly, Der Nationale Sozialist, calling it "a horrible temptation for National Bolshevists. It is a neofascist, state-capitalist experiment in the style of Herr von Schleicher." 100 In the Totale Mobilmachung, Jünger traced the rise of communism in Russia and fascism in Italy to the consequences of the Great War. Not only had the old monarchies been swept away, but the total inclusion of every aspect of society in the war effort also meant for Jünger that the bell had tolled for the old bourgeois elites and their ideology of liberalism. Jünger explained the rise of fascism and communism and also that of Zionism and "Americanism" as a frenetic result of the potent mix of modern technology, which breaks down all old forms of life, and nationalism, which gives orientation in the midst of chaos. 101 Once the "humanitarian mask has fallen," he wrote, "a grotesque, half-barbarian fetishism of the machine, a naive cult of technology" will emerge. 102 In particular, he added, it is "nationalism and socialism that act as the two great millstones, between which progress, the rest of the old world, and finally these two forces themselves will be crushed." 103 This denigration of the mass movements built on the twin pillars of nationalism and socialism was hardly the foundation on which the Nazis could build. But Jünger had his own formula for the German revolution. In the end though, he spoke opaquely, though, of the coming "new supremacy"

g6. Jünger, Der Arbeiter, .SW8, 156. 97. Discussion between Armin Möhler and Klaus Vondung on Kulturreport, narrated by Manfred Franke, NDR, August 11, 1982, manuscript by German Werth, D L A M RFS:AA. 98. Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus in Deutschland, 252 ff. 99. Ibid., 251. 100. Ibid., 252. 101. Ernst Jünger, Du totale Mobilmachung, 145. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid.

A G E R M A N LIFE

43

{neue Herrschaft), a mobilization of the Germans where they would "meet a power stronger than the war: themselves." 1 0 4 In a sentence he later expunged from the Collected Works, Jünger elaborated in "Copse 125" on the apocalyptic meaning of the war: " T h e epoch of the Enlightenment is over, the war has sealed its downfall and thrown us back by necessity on our own feelings." 1 0 5

T h e study of the worker was written as the Weimar Republic was in its death throes. T h e antibourgeois stance of the soldier, so prominent in Jünger's works u p until this point, was transformed into T h e Heroic Worker, a being Jünger asserted was incapable of f r e e d o m and could therefore do without it. T h e inner logic of the book sought to turn the German defeat of 1918 into a proleptic victory. It was a sophisticated version of the stab-in-the-back legend: Jünger's hatred of the Third Estate and liberalism reflected the soldier's resentment of the civilians w h o supposedly snatched defeat from the hands of victory. If the Germans are proudly unfit for freedom in the democratic bourgeois sense, as the first lines of the book pronounce in a trumpetlike fashion, 1 0 6 then the logical historical step would be the establishment of a new world order led by the German soldier-worker state. The Workerv/asJünger's most protofascist book. It is a right-Hegelian representation of the worker, which in conscious opposition to Karl Marx in Das Kapital, seeks to get at the essence of labor through a p h e n o m e n o l o g y of automation. Jünger described all spheres of life in the modern world as having been organized according to the principle, or Gestalt, that the worker yields to increasing predictability, efficiency, and discipline. Evoking Goethe, Jünger used Gestalt as a metaphysical concept to denote the allencompassing reality active behind individual appearances. 1 0 7 T h e book is a good example of Zeev Sternhell's definition of intellectual fascism as a revolutionary revision of Marxism that synthesizes an antimaterialist critique of Marx while advocating revolution by will rather than economic forces. 108 104. Ibid., 146. 105. Ernst Jünger, Das Wäldchen 725: Eine Chronik aus den Grabenkämpfen igjS (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1925), 185. 106. Der Arbeiter, SM7 8, 17: "The domination of the Third Estate has never touched the inner core of Germany, which determines the power and fullness of life. Looking back at over a hundred years of German history, we can proudly say that we have been bad citizens." 107. "Gestalt—this is a word Goethe liked to use; it characterizes the effect behind the things, something all encompassing in any case. Thus I talked about the Gestalt of the Worker, not as a representative of a class or an estate but, rather, as a new titan, with creative and destructive effects." From Gertrud Fussenegger, "Der schöpferische Augenblick: Ein Kurzschluss; Pressegespräch mit Ernst Jünger," SZ, March 30/31, 1985. 108. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

44

ERNST JÜNGER

Jünger believed that Marxism was a false path for Germany because it was simply a negative form of capitalism, based on the primacy of economics in which the proletariat took over and redesigned the capitalist system.109 Radical conservatives wanted instead an antimaterialist, corporative state based on the primacy of politics, that is, a fusing of the realms of state and society into a larger, homogeneous, "spiritual" entity in which economic activities were subordinated to the dictates of national self-interest and molded by German traditions. 110 Jünger's analysis (in contrast, for example, to Max Weber's) was an almost optimistic affirmation of the death of nineteenth-century liberalism and the establishment of an authoritarian soldier-worker state, ruled by Nietzschean supermen who would build an autotelic society of steel-nerved automatons. Jünger valorized the potent mixture of nationalism and socialism. He specifically called for a "young and ruthless leadership" to lead the way to a new state, built on the dual pillars of nationalism and socialism, where "military discipline" and "labor duty" would be implemented "from top to bottom." 111 Jünger's views on technology, urban life, and modern progress were antithetical to the beliefs cherished by Weimar's many völkisch movements. For Jünger, the glorification of the countryside and old "Germanic" values and traditions was simply outmoded. The nationalist revolution would start in the urban centers, or it would not come at all. 112 German Socialism had to reject both antitechnological escapism and liberal internationalism. Jünger's interpretation of technology was both modern and reactionary, in Herf's sense, because he welcomed modern machine culture as a replacement for humanistic culture and the autonomous individual of the Enlightenment. He advocated a resolute break with the past, an idea antithetical to the nostalgia of the right. Jünger's embrace of technology as a growing planetary power borrowed themes from Oswald Spengler's prophecy of the return of imperial powers and the geographer Karl Haushofer's emphasis on geopolitics. From Spengler, moreover, Jünger also borrowed organic and vitalist metaphors of the birth and death of cultural periods: amid the death throes of i og. See Ernst Jünger, "Revolution um Karl Marx—National—Sozial,"/a und Nein: Blätter für deutsches Schrifttum 2 (1930): 4 7 - 4 9 . 110. O n the Conservative Revolution program, see Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 5 9 - 1 1 0 ; on the distinction between politics and economics, see Dick Pels, "Fascism and the Primacy of the Political," Telos 110 (winter 1998): 3 9 - 7 0 . i n . Der Arbeiter 8, 217, 263, and passim. 112. See for example, Ernst Jünger, "Großstadt und Land," Süddeutsche Monatshefte 8 (1926): 5 7 7 - 5 8 1 . "The [new] nationalism is a sentiment of the metropolis . . . any attempt at revolt [Erhebung] that does not start from the center of the city is doomed to failure" (580).

A G E R M A N LIFE

the Age of the Bourgeois, the A g e of the Worker is born. For Jünger, the bourgeois a g e — t h e epoch of the war veterans' parents—was one of striving for security and order behind a facade of transparency and Enlightenment rationality. T h e worker was trained to destroy and create new forms of life whereas the bourgeois wanted to ban all pain from life. Pain was for Jünger an "elementary" power that had shattered the substance of bourgeois illusions of order and progress during the First World War. 1 1 3 Jünger predicted that the vitalistic energy of the elementary powers unleashed by the war would not be forced back into the genie's bottle, but would lead, rather, to "new orders that have not been calculated to reduce danger, but that rather will be born through a marriage of danger and life." 1 1 4

A year after The Worker was published, the Nazis began in earnest to dismantle the bourgeois state. Jünger retreated into the so-called inner emigration. In 1932 it would not have been hard to predict what was coming, but the author of The Worker nevertheless saw n o connection between his "radical Utopia" and the reality of the Nazi state. In 1933 he left Berlin for Goslar, moved again to live near his brother in Uberlingen in 1936, and moved again, just before the outbreak of the Second World War to Kirchhorst, near Hannover. Jünger kept his distance from politics during this period, and apart from one house search by the Gestapo in 1933, he was left in peace by the Nazis. H e also didn't entirely disapprove of Hitler's foreign policy in the 1930s. He later admitted to being "fully in accord" with the occupation of the Sudetenland and the Austrian Anschluss, an action "Hitler succeeded in where our grandfathers had failed." 1 1 5 Not until after 1938 did Jünger perceive the Hitler regime as "obviously unjust" (offenbares Unrecht). In 1936 he published Afrikanische Spiele, a novel about his short adventure in the French foreign legion. Perhaps the novel was not coincidentally about a failed escape. As the mass emigration of intellectual exiles continued, Jünger viewed flight from Germany as a fruitless response. In Uberlingen, in February, he began writing the famous novel On the Marble Cliffs. Six miles to the west of Überlingen the Nazis had established a work camp, where political prisoners were constructing a munitions factory. Since the prisoners were paraded out of the city every morning, causing uneasiness and even criticism among the townsfolk, it is not mere speculation to suppose that Jünger incorporated these images into his book. 1 1 6 W h e n

113. "Über den Schmerz," S W 7 , esp. 1 7 4 - 1 8 1 . 114. Der Arbeiter, SW8, 63. 115. Spiegel Gespräch.* "Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod," Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982, 15g. 116. See Peter Schünemann, "Das Entschwinden der Biographie: Beobachtungen zum Werk Ernst Jüngers," Text und Kritik 105/106 (Jan. 1990): 56.

46

ERNSTJÜNGER

published, the story was immediately interpreted as a roman à clef about National Socialism, complete with caricatures of Nazi leaders. It took the Nazi censors a few months to catch on to the fact that the book had subversive undertones; Goebbels became furious and eventually had the book taken out of print in 1941. 1 1 7 T h o u g h unavailable, the work continued to be publicly discussed. In occupied Belgium and France, reviews of the work even passed the military censor as late as the summer of 1942, including a positive critique written by Paul de Man for the Belgian Le Soir.118 IN THE BELLY OF THE LEVIATHAN In April 193g Jünger moved with his family to Kirchhorst, near Hannover in Lower Saxony. Here, in July, he finished writing The Marble Cliffs. When war broke out in September, he was conscripted to prepare a regiment for duty at the front. In the early part of 1940 he was stationed with the Ninth Army at the Westwall on the upper Rhine. He fought in the French campaign but saw little action. His diary entries from this period, describing the French countryside occupied by the Germans, would later form the first part of Strahlungen, his journal of the Second World War, and were published and reviewed in France in 1942 as Jardins et Routes.119 In June 1941 Jünger moved to the military commander's headquarters in Paris to take up duties under Colonel Hans Speidel. 120 The general had the dubious honor of taking Hitler on a whirlwind tour of Paris the first day of occupation and survived the war to become head of the Bundeswehr. During the war Speidel collected under his aegis a group of scientists and artists, an officer-elite whom he hoped to protect from the threatening reach of the Gestapo. Himmler had managed to convince Otto von Stülpnagel to allow his security forces a free hand in occupied Paris, and the Wehrmacht and the Party lived in constant friction. T h e military command was housed in the luxury hotel Majestic, on the Avenue Kléber, not far from the Bois de Boulogne. Jünger stayed across the street on the Avenue Portugais in the luxury hotel Raphael. His duties included censoring the soldiers' mail sent from France to Germany. In 1941 he was also asked by Speidel to 117. According to Jünger, in his interviewwithJean-Louis Foncine, La Nouvelle Revue de Paris (Monaco: Rocher, 1985), 18. There exist contradictory accounts about the availability of the book during the war in Germany. 118. Paul de Man, "Sur les falaises de marbre," Le Soir (March 31, 1942). See also Louis Fournel, "Sur les falaises de marbre," L'union françaises (July 11, 1942); Henri Thomas, "Sur les falaises de marbre," La Nouvelle Revue française (October 1941 ) : 5 0 9 - 5 1 1 . 119. See Paul de Man, 'Jardins et routes," Le Soir (June 23, 1942); Thierry Maulnier, 'Jardins et routes," Revue universelle (August 1942): 1 8 6 - 1 8 9 . 120. Jünger was part of the occupation army from June 22, 1941, until Sept. 16, 1944,according to Jünger's Wehrpaß, p. 33. A: Jünger, zugehörige Materialien, DLAM.

A GERMAN LIFE

47

investigate and make a report on the power struggles between the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht, in the hope that interference by the party could be limited, particularly in the question of the taking French hostages. 121 Speidel resided in the Hotel George V, where Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel met regularly with German officers w h o were involved in a plot, led by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and General von Falkenhausen, to negotiate a secret armistice with Eisenhower. 1 2 2 Under this plan Hitler would be arrested, the entire Nazi apparatus dismembered, and harsh peace terms accepted. In return, the bombing of Germany would end, and the war against the Soviet Union be prolonged. Jünger was part of this circle but remained on its periphery. 1 2 3 Rommel's ultimate aim was a United States of Europe as outlined in Jünger's secret treatise, The Peace. O n November 29, 1944, Jünger's eldest son Ernstel fell while on a reconnaissance mission in the mountains of Carrara. He had been arrested, along with Wolf Jobst Siedler, in February 1944 for having allegedly j o k e d about the Führer and expressed doubt about a German victory. H e and Siedler were brought before a military tribunal and sentenced to Frontbewährung, a kind of parole in which the penalized soldier was forced to fight in extremely dangerous terrain. T h e passages relating to Ernstel's death in the war diaries reveal a rare m o m e n t of vulnerability in an author w h o seemed dispositional^ incapable of manifesting personal emotions. Jünger asked his friend, the American author Henry Fürst, w h o lived in Italy, to have the body e x h u m e d and brought back to Wilflingen. Fürst told Möhler that two bullets were f o u n d at the back of the neck, indicating an SS execution. Jünger was told the news, but his wife was spared the knowledge. 1 2 4 Siedler survived and established a publishing company in Germany after the war. He recalls that Jünger visited the two boys in jail wearing all his army decorations from the First World War. W h e n asked about them by the guard, he apparently replied, "this is the only time one can wear decorations with propriety." 1 2 5 It is impossible to know whether the anecdote is accurate—Jünger had just escaped the horrible retributions against the conspirators in Paris, so his situation was p r e c a r i o u s — b u t it captures well the dilemma faced by German soldiers since the Wehrmacht had sworn itself to the Führer. Jünger was not prepared to disobey direct orders, and he took the personal oath to Hitler, but he may well have agreed with the sen181. Hans Speidel, Aus Unserer Zeit: Erinnerungen

(Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1 9 7 7 ) , 110.

122. See Constantine Fitzgibbon, To Kill Hitter: The Officers'Plot July 1944 (Stevenage: Bath Press, 1 9 9 4 ) , i 3 7 _ 1 4 3 123. See below, chapter 4, section I. 124. Armin Möhler, letter to the author, August 1, 1 9 9 3 . 125. Christian Graf von Krockow, "Grübler, Deuter, Wegbereiter," Die Zeit 12 (March 17,

1995). 2Ö-

48

ERNSTJÜNGER

timent bitterly expressed by Ludwig Beck, who secretly told his subordinates, "Your soldierly obedience ends where your knowledge, conscience, and sense of responsibility forbid you to carry out an order." 1 2 6 THE HERMIT FROM WILFLINGEN After the Stauffenberg plot failed to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, the Nazis quickly flushed out the military command in Paris and made numerous arrests. Jünger escaped with his life because there was no proof that he had been involved. The end of the war found him back in Kirchhorst, as a commander of the so-called Volkssturm, the last "people's defense" of the Third Reich. T h e only military order he gave was apparently to clear away the useless tank barricades as the U.S. army approached. 1 2 7 Jünger's journal shows how indignant he was that Germany was being occupied by Americans, whose culture he considered inferior. "On the street, an endless row of trucks roll by, driven by Negroes," he observed, with barely concealed contempt, as if Europe were being overrun by African bushmen. 128 He was also concerned about rumors that young girls were being raped by black soldiers. 129 When the Allied questionnaire arrived, Jünger refused to fill it out. By now Lower Saxony was in the British zone. Jünger was put on the blacklist and forbidden to publish. In 1948 he moved to Ravensburg, in the French zone, where the restrictions were more lax. 130 In 1950 Jünger was invited by Count Stauffenberg's cousin to take up residence in Wilflingen-Langenslingen, a tiny town in the hilly, isolated Schwäbische Alb, just northeast of Stuttgart. He moved into the former house of the forester who took care of the large Stauffenberg property. Coincidentally, Pierre Laval had been quartered in the same house after feuding with Pétain, who had headed the exiled collaborationist government in the Sigmaringen Castle (near Wilflingen) in the fall of 1944. Laval fled to Franco's Spain after the liberation before the French troops could find him. 131 That Jünger took up domicile in the forest ranger's house where the arch-collaborationist Laval had lived is an example of the many ironic interplays between life and literature occasioned by the war. That Jünger's son was killed on the marble cliffs of Carrara was another.

126. Marion Gräfin von Dönhoff, Um der Ehre Willen: Erinnerungen an die Freunde vom 20. Juli (Berlin: Siedler, 1994), 15. 127. Karl O. Paetel, Emst Jünger in Selbstzeugnissen, 114. 128. Strahlungen II, April 1 1 , 1 9 4 5 , 405. 129. Ibid., 410. 130. See below, p. 134, note 48. 131. Louis Noguères, La dernière etape: Sigmaringen (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); "Franzosen fanden das Schloss der Verräter leer," Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung, April 22, 1985.

A G E R M A N LIFE

49

Jünger remained in the same house in Wilflingen until his death. He was thus near his friend Martin Heidegger, whom he often visited in Todnauberg on the way to see his brother Friedrich Georg at Konstanz on the Bodensee. Friedrich Sieburg also lived in the area, and Jünger visited him often, or the two writers met in Stuttgart. A large number of ex-military figures and followers of the Conservative Revolution eventually settled in the area around Stuttgart. The conservative publisher Ernst Klett is located in Stuttgart, so that one can speak of this part of southwest Germany as being a center of traditional German conservatism: Baden and Württemberg were the areas least susceptible to Nazism in the interwar period or to neoNazism after the war. 132 After the war Jünger's books found a particularly positive echo among conservatives, theologians, and religious writers. 133 Both novels, The Marble Cliffs and Heliopolis (1949), provided explanations, in the form of allegories, for the purported civil war that had marked the Nazi period. In both novels, the easily swayed masses are the victims while Nietzschean Supermen are the heroes who withstand tyranny and reestablish stability. The protofascist language of higher/lower, ethical purity, and natural social rank still dominates these texts, while the discourse of order spoke to an omnipresent desire for getting on with rebuilding Germany. Since most of Germany's important authors remained in exile, Jünger became one of the few voices of authority in German literature in the postwar period. He was respected as a figure who had survived the brown terror with his dignity intact. Jünger's books also found a sympathetic audience among the surviving soldiers who could identify with the battle experiences of an officer-author. One ex-soldier wrote, "When we could steal away a moment from the horror of the bombs flying overhead and read a few pages of The Marble Cliffs, suddenly we knew what we were experiencing." 134 For most, it was the experience of reading The Marble Cliffs they found emancipating. Heinrich Boll, who didn't like the mysticism and symbolism of Jünger's "heavy German," nevertheless had to acknowledge the personal courage of the author of The Marble Cliffs, a book that "was a sensation, regarded as a book of the opposition." 135 Others were less equivocal. Joachim Besser wrote, "This book [The Marble Cliffs] was unforgettable, because we, as soldiers at the front, took it up as the gospel." 136 Jürgen Wallman re132. Fitzgibbon, To Kill Hitler, 107. 133. See for example Robert Morel, "Ni pour, ni contre, mais avec: Ou les quatre bonnes voluntes de Robert Harcourt, Karl Barth, Ernst Jünger, Werner Bergengruen," Temoignage Chretien (December 27, 1946). 134. Egon Mayer, "Zweideutig, ästhetisch, und verkannt," Vorwärts, March 27, 1975. 135. Heinrich Boll, "Das meiste ist mir fremd geblieben," FAZ, March 29, 1975. 136. Joachim Besser, "Ernst Jüngers Sanduhren," Welt am Sonntag, Jan. 2 1 , 1955.

5 7 9 - 8 ° 1 1 6 . For at least a decade, Carl Schmitt's political theories have enjoyed an enormous comeback in certain intellectual quarters, sparking off a heated debate among supporters and defenders, the details of which will make for an interesting reception study someday. For the early Federal Republic a good start has been made by Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit des Schweigens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993). The analysis needs to be carried forward to the present day on an international basis. Without entering here into the details of these debates,

MAGNETIC REPULSION AND A T T R A C T I O N

95

the Jews openly in his lectures at the University of Berlin. In his memoirs, Niekisch wrote that not long after meeting Schmitt, he surprised me with his anti-Semitic attacks. He claimed to have good reasons for it. He told me that only Jewish judges were being used at the big trials in The Hague, and they were getting enormous salaries. To my amazement he began to praise Stürmer's pornographic newspaper, Der Stürmer. He also was an avid reader of Ludendorff's Volkswarte and agreed with Ludendorff's interpretation of the fatal role played by Jews, Free Masons, and Jesuits. . . . Through a student I heard about the slaps against the Jews he expounded from the rostrum. These crude and drastic anti-Semitic tirades from the mouth of a fine, educated spirit came out in very bad taste.117

In a speech to a g r o u p of National Socialist university teachers, Schmitt employed a series of anti-Semitic caricatures, noting that In relation to our intellectual work, the Jew has a parasitic, tactical, and mercantile [händlerische] relationship. Because of his commercial talent, he often has a sharp sense for what is genuine; with great cleverness and a good nose [schnelle Witterung]

he knows how to hit upon the real thing. That is instinct as

a parasite and genuine trader. (242)

Schmitt concluded this speech by citing Hitler: "By resisting the Jew, says our Führer Adolf Hitler, I'm doing the work of the Lord." (244) Jünger's suspicions of the Nazi regime stood in stark contrast to Schmitt's pandering to Hitler. In response to Schmitt's infamous essay, " T h e Führer Protects the Law" in 1934, Jünger said to Niekisch, "I told Schmitt in all seriousness that now he has gone too far" (242). But in his own Weimar writings, Jünger had gone just as far, minus the explicit anti-Semitism. Jünger didn't seem capable of seeing the logical results of his own theoretical positions. His construction of a "worker's democracy" was predicated on a political state of emergency with no less ruthlessness and absence of civil legal protections for minorities as was Schmitt's notion of the state of exception in the 1927 article "DieDiktatur."

it should be noted that the issue of Schmitt's anti-Semitism is consistently covered up by his defenders. Gary Ulmen's recent claim for example, that "there is no hint of anti-Semitism in any of his writings before the Nazi seizure of power" begs the question of what his unwritten attitudes were, and Paul Gottfried's statement that "there is no precedent for such (anti-Semitic) outbursts before Hitler's accession to power, that Schmitt's editorializing about Jews in the thirties never included Nazi racism" is absurd and belied by the historical record, only a few examples of which I have documented above. Schmitt's defenders need to be honest about Schmitt's embrace of racism and then question more openly the contamination of his theories, rather than engage in constant and disingenuous damage control. See letters from Gary Ulmen and Paul Gottfried to the New York Review of Books (in response to a review by Mark Lilla), reprinted in Telos, 109 (fall 1996): 9 2 - 9 7 . 117. Niekisch, Gewagtes Leben, 242.

9(5

THE JÜNGER CIRCLE

At the foundation of Jünger's theoretical and philosophical differences with Schmitt was a divergent development in attitudes toward the state after 1945. Schmitt continued to subscribe to decisionism, that is, to a counterrevolutionary theory of sovereignty modeled on a secular notion of divine will, unimpeded by the impersonal law ofjuridical norms. 1I8 Jünger's political tracts of the 1950s were anarchic in the sense that they were concerned with individual autonomy and the carving out of a sphere of private freedom, a notion Schmitt negatively equated with liberalism. Jünger protested that the "anarch," a term he used to distinguish the metaphysical from the street rebel, was profoundly antiliberal. In the 1950s both wrote about a "world state," for Schmitt this meant an undermining or neutralization of the state, a bad Utopian, liberal idea; while for Jünger the world state retained a positive Utopian possibility in that it would provide better external order and thus more possibilities for the anarch's withdrawal from the public sphere. Jünger and Schmitt both claimed that the decision of the sovereign was existential, but the latter emphasized the decisionmaker as representing the will of the community, while Jünger valued the sovereign power of individual resistance. Both men continued to share the view that European history had come to an end with the Second World War as a result of technological globalization. Jünger adopted Schmitt's formulations that the technical world had created a vacuum (depoliticization, neutralization, Americanization) -119 The notion that the world wars were being, in effect, European civil wars was also an idea Jünger borrowed from Schmitt's Nomos der Erde (Law of the Earth).120 IV. Strange Bedfellows: The Left and Jünger Though the majority of Jünger's intellectual webs were spun on the right side of the political spectrum in Germany, there were several exceptions to this among his literary connections. The most important of these was the writer Alfred Andersch. His lifelong admiration for Jünger seems completely at odds with his biography. 121 Born in Munich in 1914, Andersch was active in communist youth groups during the Weimar Republic and interned for 118. T h e literature on Schmitt's concept of sovereignty is enormous; for an overview, see Tracy B. Strong, "Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt," foreword to Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ix-xxvii. 119. See Jünger, Strahlungen II, SW3, 283,430. Jünger also credits Friedrich Georg Jünger's Perfektion der Technik as a source of his thinking on technology. 120. See Schmitt's essay "Die geschichtliche Struktur des heutigen Weltgegensatzes von Ost und West," in which he speculates that England, the old sea power, is being replaced by new superpowers in a race for space. See also the Adnoten zum Arbeiter (1964) in which Jünger talks about worldwide civil war. 121. Stephan Reinhardt, Alfred Andersch: Eine Biographie (Zurich: Diogenes, 1990).

MAGNETIC REPULSION AND ATTRACTION

97

a short period in Dachau in 1933 where he was beaten severely in the face. 122 After this brief but violent encounter with the Nazis, Andersch retreated into internal emigration, escaping the totalitarian state by traveli n g — o f t e n to Italy—and by reading and writing. In 1939 he read Jünger's The Marble Cliffs and was convinced that the novel was a roman ä clef, damning Hitler and the concentration camps. 123 Following Jünger's naturalization of history, Andersch accepted Hitler's war as an unavoidable evil that could be resisted only internally. But as the tide of war turned against Germany in 1944, Andersch deserted from the army, something Jünger would never have considered doing. On June 6 Andersch gave himself up to American forces in Italy, and in August he was sent to a prison camp in Louisiana. 124 Andersch was eventually transferred to a camp in Maryland where he was given the opportunity to edit the prison newspaper. The socially-critical journal Der Ruf was born, which he continued to publish in Munich after his return home in the fall of 1945. After sixteen issues the journal was shut down by the American authorities, who accused the contributors of a "nihilistic and nationalistic" attitude. 125 Andersch had insisted—and here he was influenced by J ü n g e r — o n the right of German self-determination, the right to begin cultural reconstruction without the interference of the superpowers. Refusing to accept American censorship, Andersch gave up the journal in 1948 to became a freelance writer. He became very active in the Gruppe 47, a writer's organization of the homeless left that was founded as a reaction to the shutting down oiDerRuf'm. 1947. On some issues he found himself at odds with the majority opinion. The group explicitly denounced Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn and refused to hold readings or discussions of their works. 126 Andersch later edited an important literary journal, Text und Zeichen, which became increasingly sympathetic to the literary left in the course of the 1960s. He also founded and headed the influential radio program Radio Essay from Sender Stuttgart. He became a citizen of Switzerland in 1972 and died there in 1980. Andersch thought the left should learn to appreciate Jünger's radical critique of forms of technical domination in bourgeois society. A good example of his engagement on Jünger's behalf was a widely discussed speech 122. Ibid., 4 3 - 5 0 . 123. Ibid., 6g. 124. Ibid., 105-120. 125. Irene Heidelberger Leonard, Alf red Andersch: Die ästhetische Position als politisches Gewissen (Frankfurt: Lang, 1986), 261-262. 126. Ralf Schnell, Die Literatur der Bundesrepublik: Autoren, Geschichte, Literaturbetrieb (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 113.

98

THE JÜNGER CIRCLE

given in 1973 to the literary elite at Amriswil, a small town in Switzerland known for its annual literary gathering of the most important writers in the German-speaking world. In his keynote address Andersch celebrated Jünger as an ultramodern author who, he argued, had anticipated the insights of Marshall McLuhan in his writings on technology and the end of the bourgeois era. 127 Andersch argued that Jünger's position during the Weimar era was equidistant from the Nazis and the Communists; the tragedy of the Third Reich was that neither the heirs to the radical heritage of the French Revolution nor the conservative reaction to the revolution were able to close ranks and fight the Nazis: "The Monster could only emerge victorious because it was able to split the revolutionary and the conservative elites, who then stood powerless; when they finally joined together, it was too late." 128 The historical argument here is dubious. The Weimar conservative and revolutionary elites (it is not clear who he means) never joined ranks, nor could they have. But Andersch is after something else, namely, to represent Jünger's position as the road not taken, as the consummate outsider and individualist, both radical and conservative. Andersch thought of Jünger's ideas as a combination of both Burke and Nietzsche, downplaying the fact that both were harsh critics of the Enlightenment. In 1977 he wrote to Jünger of his hopes for a conservative-revolutionary synthesis: The left, to which I belong, is still pretty speechless over my reception of your work and personality. But it has also had enough of the middle-of-the-road liberalism of the west so that it is beginning to comprehend. One has to break through the conformity—contemporary literature is certainly boring enough. A synthesis of conservative and revolutionary tendencies can be seen, for example, in the resistance to atomic energy. 129

Andersch's own radicalism was informed by a Sartrean variety of social solipsism: the individual stakes out his or her project in an anarchic and infinite world of self-created possibilities.130 But Sartre's political engagement was too extreme for Andersch. He was more attracted to pure aestheticism, beholden to the absurdity and surreality of the world than to existential projects for changing it. His books exhibited a constant desire to flee from reality. As a model for this kind of existentialism, Jünger proved to be an irresistible master. Up to his death, Andersch continued to propa-

127. Alfred Andersch, "Amriswiler Rede auf Ernst jünger," reprinted in FR, June 16, 1973. 128. Ibid. 129. Alfred Andersch an Ernst Jünger, Feb. 23, 1977, A: Jünger, DLAM. 130. O n the predominant influence of Sartre on Andersch, see Heidelberger-Leonard, op.cit., 259 ff., and Ursula Reinhold, Alfred Andersch: Politisches Engagement und literarische Wirksamkeit (Berlin-Ost: Akademie Verlag, 1988), 106 ff.

MAGNETIC REPULSION AND ATTRACTION

99

gate a differentiated view ofJünger and helped keep Jünger's books on the cultural radar screen. 131 Andersch's attraction to Jünger was a singular and strange constellation in the world of German literature, because the profundity of Andersch's commitment survived despite very basic differences in their worldviews. But there are other early examples ofJünger's influence on the left. Though he later came to disdain the politics of literature, during the Weimar Republic Jünger did not wish to be seen solely as a representative of the intellectual right. After 1945 the polarized categories of fascist and antifascist came to be applied to a period that was ideologically much more fluid. In the late 1920s Jünger and Brecht crossed paths on many occasions. They talked art and politics over beers at the same bars and had common friends in the publishing industry.132 After the war, Brecht surprised his colleagues during a television interview by stating, without a hint of irony, "leave Jünger in peace, I admire and respect his German." 133 We have already noted that, among the German intellectual exiles, Klaus Mann was deeply disappointed by Gottfried Benn's turn to fascist politics. Likewise, Mann admired Jünger as a writer and hoped he would eventually take the side of the anti-Hitler coalition. 134 The communist-expressionist poetjohness R. Becher was more explicit. He emigrated to Moscow in 1935 and remained there during the war as an important spokesman for the intellectual resistance to the Third Reich. Though at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Becher shared with Jünger a disdain for bourgeois politics and a metaphysical interpretation of the worker as a type of soldier to be mobilized in the factories. On October 23, 1943, as the German defeat against the Red Army seemed ever more probable, Becher went on "Radio Free Germany" to urge Jünger and his circle to make a move against the 1 3 1 . Beginning in May 1949 Andersch worked in Frankfurt at the Hessischer Rundfunk. He regularly put together programs on Jünger's new books and organized discussions, such as on the topic of nihilism and Heidegger, for the radio. See Nachlass: Andersch in DLAM. 1 3 2 . Jünger told Heiner Müller that he frequented a Berlin tavern, the Black Pig, where he often met Brecht, Benn, Arnolt Bronnen, and Rudolf Schlichter; see Krieg ohne Schlacht, 278. Jünger's second wife, Liselotte Jünger, confirms that the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, who "loved pyrotechnic combinations," was a facilitator in bringing together intellectuals from various ideological camps; see Günther Nickel, "Der Briefwechsel zwischen Ernst Jünger and Carl Zuckmayer," in Danièl Beltran-Vidal, ed., Les Carnets: Ernst Jünger et la littérature européene, vol. 2, Centre de Recherche et de Documentation Ernst Jünger (Montpellier: Maison de Heidelberg, ' 9 9 7 ) . 1441 3 3 . The anecdote cannot be verified with absolute certainty. Theo Otto, a set designer at the television studio, overheard the remark and passed it on to the journalist Joachim Kaiser, who wrote to Jünger about it on January 22, 1970. Cited in Nickel, ibid., 146. 134. See Armin Kerker, Ernst Jünger—Klaus Mann; Gemeinsamkeit und Gegensatz in Literatur und Politik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974).

ioo

THE JÜNGER CIRCLE

Nazis. In a vast overestimation o f Jünger's i n f l u e n c e a n d strategic position, h e called o n Jünger, Hielscher, Schauwecker, a n d other m e m b e r s of the conservative revolution to j o i n a "total intellectual mobilization" to bring down the Nazi "clique." 1 3 5 In the speech, B e c h e r attests to the fact that h e saw Jünger's cohorts as G e r m a n patriots, to w h o m a nationalist appeal (inc l u d i n g bloated phrases f r o m Moltke a n d Clauswitz) c o u l d lead to a c o m m o n f r o n t against Hitler. A s culture minister in the G e r m a n Democratic R e p u b lic, B e c h e r eventually turned against Jünger, supporting the party line that he was a fascist writer in the service o f West Germany's "reactionary" culture. A n o t h e r unlikely admirer was the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer, whose p o p ular plays in local dialect satirized nationalism a n d the military d u r i n g the Weimar Republic. His opposition to National Socialism led to expatriation a n d an u n h a p p y p e r i o d o f exile in the United States. H e obtained A m e r i can citizenship a n d r e t u r n e d to G e r m a n y in the fall o f 1946 as an o f f i c e r o f the O f f i c e o f Strategic Services, the precursor o f the CIA. 1 3 6 In this capacity, Z u c k m a y e r wrote a report o n intellectuals, writers, publishers, actors, a n d directors d u r i n g the T h i r d Reich. Like A n d e r s c h , Z u c k m a y e r considered Jünger's opposition to National Socialism to derive f r o m an authentic a n d principled m o r a l opposition. In the r e p o r t he wrote, I am of the opinion that Ernst Jünger is the most talented and important of the writers who remained in Germany. I believe that his and his brother's opposition to the Nazi regime was genuine and not identical with the very limited opposition of other conservatives and officers' circles. For the Jüngers it comes out of different sources. It has nothing to do with military-political tactics, in which they differ from Hitler, but rather with the spirit. Ernst Jünger's glorification of war has nothing to do with aggression and plans to conquer the world—his aristocratic ideal has nothing in common with the demagogic nonsense about a superior race. 137 Many y o u n g writers in the f l e d g l i n g culture o f the Federal Republic reg a r d e d J ü n g e r as an i n d e p e n d e n t spirit worthy o f emulation. H a n s Magnus E n z e n s b e r g e r (born 1 9 2 g ) f o u n d a role m o d e l in Jünger's writings b e f o r e h e discovered B r e c h t in the early 1950s. 1 3 8 It is important to note that, whatever objective p r o b l e m s c a m e to b e associated with Jünger's style, ideas, and worldview, subjectively many readers d u r i n g the S e c o n d World War r e g a r d e d

135. G e r a l d D i e s e n e r & W o j c i e c h Kunicki, ' J o h a n n e s R. B e c h e r u n d Ernst J ü n g e r — e i n e glücklose Liaison?" Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 12 ( 1 9 9 4 ) , 1 0 8 5 - 1 0 9 7 . T h e s p e e c h is r e p r i n t e d o n p a g e 1097. 136. See Carl Z u c k m a y e r , Als wäre es ein Stück von mir: Haren der Freundschaft

(Vienna:

Fischer, 1 9 6 6 ) . 1 3 7 . Nachlass Z u c k m a y e r , D L A M , cited by Nickel, "Der Briefwechsel," 1 4 7 . 138. H e l m u t Heissenbüttel, " E n z e n s b e r g e r war J ü n g e r - A d e p t , " in Horst Bingel, ed., StreitZeit-Schrift 6 (Sept. 2, 1968): 23.

MAGNETIC REPULSION AND ATTRACTION

101

his books as an oasis in the literary desert. H e l m u t Heissenbiittel, of the same generation as Enzensberger, is a g o o d witness. A l t h o u g h h e b e c a m e increasingly irritated by Jiinger's style a n d was o n e of Jiinger's important critics, h e attests that during the Nazi period and until the early 1 9 5 0 s , J i i n g e r ' s books constituted "an i n n e r - G e r m a n literature that I c o u l d read. In that time this was a voice of G e r m a n literature that gave m e support [an die ich m i c h halten k o n n t e ] . In this I was not a l o n e . " 1 3 9 T h i s p h e n o m e n o n was not restricted to those trapped in Germany. Erich Fried (born 1 9 2 1 ) , a German-Jewish p o e t in exile ( L o n d o n ) gave testim o n y — h a r d to i g n o r e — c o n c e r n i n g the very positive e c h o that J i i n g e r ' s writings f o u n d a m o n g s o m e active antifascists d u r i n g the S e c o n d World War: After the war, Stuart Hood, my best friend in England, translated The Marble Cliffs into English. Hood was a radical socialist and had led a group of partisans in Italy after his escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. What broughtjunger the admiration of the left—Andersch was not the only example in postwar Germany—was his great courage to take personal responsibility. Both communist and left-socialists, looking to escape the demon of Stalinism, found strength in such characteristics, precisely because Ernstjiinger was a man from the other side, though one who acted, thought, and wrote offering no occasion for inhuman contempt of his opponents.' 40 O n e m i g h t c o n c l u d e that the intellectual situation in G e r m a n y was so bleak that Jiinger's stubborn i n d e p e n d e n c e s e e m e d to be a breath of fresh air c o m p a r e d to the official literature of the T h i r d Reich. E n o u g h significant testimony exists, however, to reach a stronger conclusion: that Jiinger's books w e r e read as a clear repudiation o f Nazism. T h i s was the perception, at least, o f m a n y of his readers. 1 4 1 W h e t h e r or not J u n g e r objectively can b e

139. Helmut Heissenbüttel, "General i.R. als Goethe," Text und Kritik 105/106 (January 1990): 1 1 9 . Heissenbüttel (born 1 9 2 1 ) continued to have an ambivalent relationship to Jünger. In April 1975 he presented a selection of texts by Jünger in a Stuttgart bookstore, Niedlich, where he stressed that Jünger's works had to be analyzed with the help of psychoanalysis to uncover the author's defense mechanisms. But Heissenbüttel also admitted to having come strongly under Jünger's spell at times. See "Von der Höhe herab: Helmut Heissenbüttel las bei Niedlich Texte von Ernst Jünger," Stuttgarter Nachrichten 86 (April 15, 1975). 140. Erich Fried, "Ein Feind, der leicht zu lieben ist: Unsere Geistesgeschichte ist ohne Ernst Jünger nicht zu verstehen," Die Welt, March 27, 1965. 141. Jünger collected many letters from ordinary soldiers during the war who read into The Marble Cliffs a subversive, often religious or mystical message in opposition to tyranny and the contemporary Zeitgeist. The letters, now in the Marbach archive, are of course self-selective, but instructive. One representative example was sent by a certain Friedrich Hermann Jung through army mail (Feldpost-Nr. 1 3 3 1 5 ! ) on April 29, 1941. He writes, "I would like to interpret your Marble Cliffs as taking a stand in the spirit that lies beyond this destruction [around us]" (A: Jünger, Juna-Jüngesblut, DLAM).

102

THE JÜNGER CIRCLE

seen as an opponent of the regime is another issue that was hotly debated after the war and, indeed, continues to this day. V. Against The Grain In "Autor und Autorschaft" ("Author and Authorship"), Jünger incessantly rails against the modern Literaturbetrieb, the business of literature, which had turned authors into businessmen hocking their commodities, and thereby their souls, to the highest bidders. 142 Harking back to the idea of art for art's sake, Jünger argued that the true and authentic author should be purely devoted to the Muses and free of all practical considerations. He poked fun at the German authors who around 1980 were pushing for legislation that would make them Arbeitnehmer, or employees. The author, he replied, is "always unemployed, though never without work." 143 He regarded authorship as the "pure expression of creativity."144 Since the true author is above the fray, he never takes sides, but remains true to the Muses. For this reason an author is always suspect.145 Jünger's ideal artist is remote from public life, cultivating art for art's sake in a pure realm of artistic creation. The artist attends to human nature the way the biologist observes plants and animals, from an emotional distance with an acute eye for types and forms. In all his diaries Jünger rarely mentions money, the financial pressures on writers, or any other utilitarian aspects of the writer's profession. In the chapters that follow, I will trace the myriad controversies surrounding Jünger's career as a writer. It is important to emphasize that Jünger played a double game with his reading public. On the one hand, he refused to be drawn into a dialogue with his critics. On the other hand, far from writing only about a timeless "true and the beautiful," as one of his apologetic critics attested,146 Jünger's writings, sometimes overtly and often covertly, express political positions.147 Jünger's critics noticed with irritation that he liked to provoke but often refused to engage 142. Ernst Jünger, "Autor und Autorschaft," .SW13, 3 8 9 - 5 1 9 . 143. Ibid., 448. 144. Ibid., 429. 145. Ibid., 414. 146. Hans Egon Holthusen, Das Schöne und das Wahre: Neue Studien zur modernen Literatur (Munich: Piper, 1958), 236 ff. 147. In a Standard work on Jünger, Hans-Peter Schwarz declared that he started out searching for a political writer and found only a poet. But this interpretation takes Jünger's selfstylization at face value and misses the important manner in which Jünger was able to camouflage directly political statements in seemingly esoteric guises. See Der Konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (Freiburg/Br.: Rombach, 1962), xv. Compare Curt Hohoff's critique of the Schwarz book, "Ernst Jünger, der politische Dichter: Uber den Weg eines Konservativen," Die Welt, Nov. 23, 1962.

M A G N E T I C R E P U L S I O N AND A T T R A C T I O N

/03

with them. This process was accentuated by Junger's magnetic ability to attract strongly and repel his readers. In one of his aphorisms he wrote of his literary critics, "I am happier when they back off than when they applaud me." 148 But since 1945 Junger's critics did not back off and his supporters did not stop applauding. What followed was more than half a century of continuous intellectual dueling. 148. Ernst Junger, "Autor und Autorschaft," S W 1 3 , 4 1 4 .

CHAPTER THREE

The Marble Cliffs An Allegory of Power and Death

Jünger was one of the most prominent writers of the so-called inner emigration, a term meant to characterize intellectuals who remained in Germany but passively resisted the regime by avoiding its language and not subscribing to its definition of culture. Injünger's case, Myrdun, a 1943 account of his travels to Norway, or Atlantic Travels, not published until 1947, about his trip to the Brazilian jungle, might be considered examples of literature of this sort because the books do not in any way glorify Aryanism, the German state, or otherwise support the Nazi program. The tactics of the inner emigration have always raised controversy.1 Intellectual exiles argued that besides being ineffective as resisters, many so-called inner emigrants possessed alternative ideologies, which, while not National Socialist, were equally authoritarian, or reactionary. 2 The figure of Ernst Jünger acted as a lightning 1. T h e expression inner emigration was coined by Frank Thieß who claims to have written it in a letter to the Reichskulturwalter Schinkel in 1933: "with the damnation and ostracization of non-National Socialist writing... the only alternative will be the inner emigration" (in Karl O. Paetel, Deutsche Innere Emigration: Anti-Nationalsozialistische Zeugnisse aus Deutschland [New York: Verlag Friedrich Krause, 1946], 94). According to Regine Laurent-Girard, the term was first used by Hölderlin; see "Ernst Jünger et la France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale," unpublished typescript, 1970, Sammlung des Coudres, Nr. 40, DLAM. Immediately after the war, Paetel propagated the idea of the "other Germany," referring to intellectuals who stayed behind to, as they claimed, do what they could to maintain a semblance of culture in the face of the Nazi onslaught. A m o n g the intellectuals Paetel documented were Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Ernst Niekisch, Paul Alverdes, Ernst Bertram, Erich Ebermayer, and Fritz Reck-Malleczewen. 2. See Alexander Abusch, "Die Begegnung: Die innere und die äussere Emigration in der deutschen Literatur," Aufbau 3, no. 10 (1947): 2 2 3 - 2 2 7 . T h e communist ideologue Abusch accused Walter von Molo and Frank Thieß, important speakers for the inner emigration, of being "deeply impressed by the fascist spirit in the early Nazi years." As for alternative ideologies, 104

A L L E G O R Y OF POWER AND DEATH

105

rod for both defenders and critics of the inner emigration. As such, the debates that follow represent a microcosm of the political and cultural landscape of Germany in the immediate postwar years. The debate between the exiles and the inner emigrants began with Thomas Mann's famous declaration that the German intellectual community had utterly failed to resist Hitler, that it could have changed history had the intellectuals called a "general strike" against Hitler.3 Walter von Molo responded by publishing an "Open Letter" defending the inner emigrants and accusing Mann of ignorance of the situation in Germany. It was easy, von Molo argued, for Mann to castigate the German intellectuals from his comfortable residence in California, but Mann had no idea of the difficulties Germans faced during twelve years of Hitler's dictatorship. Von Molo ended by calling upon Mann to return to Germany to face the German people. 4 Molo was supported by further public declarations from Edwin Redslob, Erich Kästner, Arnold Bauer, and Frank Thieß. Jünger agreed with von Molo. Asked about Thomas Mann's wartime radio talks, he said, "It always angered me when I heard the English broadcasts—another German city was going up in flames and Thomas Mann was giving his speeches on top of it." 5 For Thomas Mann, the position taken by Jünger went to the heart of the problem of the inner emigration. Though we now know that Mann hesitated to leave Germany and had to be persuaded by his daughter Erika to go,6 he recognized early on the danger of intellectual flirting with fascism. In 1943 Mann specifically pointed to the contradiction in Jünger's behavior. Having contributed to the rise of Nazism through his "saber rattling," Jünger retreated into hiding when he found the results unpleasing. Mann wrote to the writer Harry Slochower, 'Jünger now expresses his contempt for the torturers and their thugs, but he himself flayed a few skins and wallowed with pleasure in inhumanity."7

Karl O. Paetel advocated a "Third Front" well into the 1950s—supposedly a particularly German path between capitalism and communism. He thought of joining up with Otto Strasser in the 1950s to create a nationalist Sammlungspartei, to include old National Bolshevists, National Socialists, old Youth Movement enthusiasts, and others. Likewise, Ernst Niekisch never abandoned his quest for a German form of socialism. On Paetel, see his autobiography Karl O. Paetel, Reise ohne Uhrzeit (Worms: Verlag Georg Heintz, 1 9 7 2 ) , and Werner Wille and Heinrich Sperl, Aufrecht Zwischen den Stühlen: Grüße zum 50. Geburtstag, Nov. 23, 1956 (Privatdruck, Nürnberg, 1956), Sammlung des Coudres, PLAM. 3. 4. 5. 6. Vater, 7.

Thomas Mann, "Leiden an Deutschland," in WerkeXII (Frankfurt:. Fischer, 1974), 6g2. Paetel, Deutsche Innere Emigration, 93. Der Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982, 158. Mann's hesitations are documented in recently published letters, Erika Mann, Mein der Zauberer, ed. Irmela von der Lühe and Uwe Naumann (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996). Thomas Mann, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1 9 6 3 ) , 2 8 9 - 2 9 0 .

IO6

THE MARBLE CLIFFS

Many years later, asked by the French journalist Jean Louis Rambures to respond to Mann's allegation, Jünger replied: "Thomas Mann just packed up and left. An emigrant cannot understand. He didn't share the tragedy of his people. How could he hope to find an echo among the people after that?"8 This statement caused a minor furor in the German press when Rambures's interview for Le Monde became known. In a letter to the FAZ, Erika Laue argued thatJünger failed to notice that Mann would have landed in a concentration camp if he had not fled Germany. 9 Jünger commented on the letter, saying it was a question that touched the core of the civil war in Germany and "Ernst Niekisch affirmed it." 10 In other words, Niekisch had chosen to be incarcerated rather than flee. Mann had, by contrast, not faced his fate as determined by the destiny of his people. The moral question of which allegiance is more compelling, that to abstract principles of right or that to one's country, became the touchstone of the bitter postwar debates between the exiles and the cultural figures of the inner emigration. The debates concerning Jünger in Germany between the late 1940s and early 1950s were clustered around three literary works, all of which represented, in very different ways, Jünger's attempt to forge a new identity beyond militant nationalism. The extent to which he succeeded in this transformation was at the heart of the controversies. The debates can be best understood against the background of the circumstances in which they were written; thus, textual description, publication history, and public reception are the focus. The texts to be scrutinized are The Marble Cliffs (1939), followed by The Peace (begun in 1942, published in 1947), and finally the war journals from 1939 to 1948 (Strahlungen). In the course of examining these texts I want to address the issue of Jünger's apparent conversion from a radical, cultural nationalist to an occidental, universal humanist. 11 First, I am interested in the status of The Marble Cliffs as a novel of resistance. Although the surface plot could, and in fact did, convey a message during the Second World War of opposition to the Hitler regime, 12 the deep linguistic structures of the

8. Jean Louis Rambures, "Entretien avec Ernst Jünger," Le Monde, February 22, 19739. Erika Laue, "Lieber nach Auschwitz?" FAZ, March 5, 1973. 10. "Altere Herrn-Heroiker," FR, March 10, 1973. 11. T h e Standard argument is given by Karl Prümm, ' V o m Nationalisten z u m Abendländer: Zur politischen Entwicklung Ernst Jüngers," in Reinhold G r i m m and Jost H e r m a n d , eds., Basis: Jahrbuch für deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur 6: 7 - 2 9 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1 9 7 6 ) . 12. O f the many testimonies to the powerful contemporary effect of the book, the most eloquent is that o f the left-Catholic journalist Dolf Sternberger (Frankfurter Hefte), "Eine Muse konnte nicht schweigen," FAZ, J u n e 6, 1980: "Among the readers [of The Marble Cliffs], nobody w h o m I knew d o u b t e d that the situation we were in was being spoken about in the vision o f this story. In a secret code, o u r miserable rulers were being convicted." See also the introduction to an English p o c k e t b o o k version written by G e o r g e Steiner, who writes that the book was

A L L E G O R Y OF POWER AND DEATH

107

b o o k prove to b e m o r e e m b e d d e d in what will b e explicated as a "fascist style" than c o n t e m p o r a r y readers realized. In contrast to the claims m a d e by an o f t r e p e a t e d apology f o r the author, J ü n g e r did not m a k e an i n n e r break with revolutionary conservatism until the winter o f 1 9 4 3 w h e n the e x t e n t o f the catastrophe that Hitler h a d inflicted u p o n G e r m a n y b e c a m e an absolute certainty. It was then that the thoughts f o r The Peace crystallized, a short b o o k that played a role in the history o f the G e r m a n resistance. In The Peace J ü n g e r a b a n d o n e d his radical-nationalist past, n o t in the sense o f turning to universal h u m a n i s m but, rather, in r e n o u n c i n g his belief in any revolutionary transformation of E u r o p e . With the ascendancy o f A m e r i c a a n d the Soviet U n i o n , E u r o p e a n culture was relegated to the fate o f terminal sterility. The Peace, read in this light, c o u l d b e likened to the absence o f m o v e m e n t following the failure o f the soldier-worker state. J ü n g e r recoiled f r o m the increasing technological conformity h e associated with the m o d e r n world and f l e d into a private i n n e r space s u r r o u n d e d by the remnants o f elite E u r o p e a n culture. In the war diaries there app e a r e d the first outlines o f a vision f o r the posthistoire archeology: a playful a n d increasingly esoteric j o u r n e y into the ruins o f the past. History h a d "come to an e n d , " in the sense that the present was c o n c e i v e d as n o t h i n g m o r e than a senseless maelstrom o f r a n d o m s o u n d a n d fury. T h e y o u t h f u l apocalyptic anticipation o f the destruction o f bourgeois society was rep l a c e d by the anticipation o f the b o u r g e o i s order's self-dissolution. THE ALLEGORY O n the surface, The Marble Cliffs is a story about two brothers living o n a subtropical island w h o b e c o m e involved in a violent struggle against a powerful warlord, the C h i e f Ranger, an evil genius w h o suddenly disrupts the quiet life o f a marina community. T h e story is full o f ambiguities, b e g i n n i n g with the setting. J ü n g e r wrote the novel based o n a d r e a m h e h a d in 1938 while residing in a friend's vacation h o m e near Carrara, Italy. 13 A dreamc u m - n i g h t m a r e quality pervades the b o o k as the a u t h o r refrains f r o m setting the story in any real g e o g r a p h i c a l or historical context. T h e landscape is typical o f the area a r o u n d U b e r l i n g e n , w h e r e J ü n g e r lived with his b r o t h e r

widely interpreted as the "sole act of major resistance, of interior sabotage, which was carried out by German literature under the Hitler regime." See George Steiner, "Introduction to On the Marble Cliffs," trans. Stuart Hood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 11. 13. "You remember perhaps the name Gerstberger. It was in his house in the late fall of 1938, in a deep sleep, that the plot of The Marble Cliffs came to me."Jünger to Möhler, Nov. 2, 1955. PAM. In an interview with L'Express,]xmger remembered a different location: "This book is based on a dream I had in Switzerland. Where I come from, Lower Saxony, many people have premonitory visions. Some are able to foresee fires, for example. When I was writing The Marble Cliffs, I too had the impression I was seeing a future fire." L'Express, January 1 1 - 1 7 , 1971, 101.

IO8

T H E MARBLE CLIFFS

from 1936 to 1939, but the climate and atmosphere are clearly Mediterranean. In the novel, humans and landscapes are inextricably bound together in an organic fusion; the people of the forest are contrasted with the people of the steppes and of the city.14 Some have "higher" qualities than others. In fact, all objects, peoples, and places in the novel appear to be located somewhere on a hierarchical value scale. 15 The events do not occur at any particular time in the past, but the architecture and people of the island offer a dreamy postromantic vision of premodern life. In fascism there existed a dialectic between antimodern longing and radical futurism, which has often been observed. 16 The Marble Cliffs exhibits this dichotomy by virtue of stunning chronological contrasts. There are small villages with walls from Roman times, churches with spires from the Merovingian period, mills covered in ivy, castles on mountain tops, and dark monasteries surrounded by carp ponds. 17 The inhabitants of the island's seaport are sophisticated urban dwellers. The farmers in the countryside live under feudal lords, while the peoples of the steppes are half-primitive shepherds, "wild and untamed," living in a time that knows no houses or plows.18 The mixed spatial and chronological dramatic imagery allowed Jünger to mask any direct political statements in the guise of a fable, but the allegory conveyed a plethora of mixed messages, both linguistically and formally. The novel could be read as a statement of opposition to the Nazi regime based primarily on the similarity between Jünger's description of the power struggle between the aristocracy and the Chief Ranger, his increasingly violent incursions into the marina and ultimately the seizure of power: At first one only heard the rumors, like a pestilence in some faraway harbor announcing itself darkly. Then the news spread from mouth to mouth concerning attacks and violence, and finally such acts occurred completely undisguised and in clear daylight. Just as in the mountains a thick fog announces the coming weather, a cloud of fear presaged the Chief Ranger. The fear protected him and I'm sure that the source of his power could be sought in this rather than in the man himself. He could begin to work only as the world it-

14. O n the ideological premises of cultural landscapes as a nationalistic trope, see Irmgard Stintzing, Landschaft und Heimatboden: Ideologische Aspekte eines literarischen Themas bei Maurice Barrés, Angel Ganivet, und Michel de Vnamuno (Frankfurt: Lang, 1976). 15. See the examination by W. F. Haug of the philosophical roots of value predicates leading to the distinction between Höherwertigkeit and Minderwertigkeit as an ideological weapon of the Nazis: Faschisierung des Subjekts (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1986), 13—18 and passim. 16. See Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 189 ff. 17. See Volker Katzman, Ernst Jüngers magischer Realismus (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1975). 21318. The Marble Cliffs, S W 1 5 , 265. All translations are my own, though I have consulted and sometimes borrowed from Stuart Hood's translation, On the Marble Cliffs (London: John Lehmann, 1947).

A L L E G O R Y OF POWER AND DEATH

109

self began to fall apart—but then his forests were in a good position to make the attack on the country. 19

Striking in this story is the vocabulary Jünger introduces to describe the violence. Words normally reserved for insects begin to permeate the language of the murderers: "ausgerottet, vertilgt, und ausgeräuchert," (exterminated, eradicated, smoked out) ,20 The Chief Ranger is a daredevil with bravado, more like the outlaw Freikorps leader, Captain Ehrhardt, than like Hitler. He might represent Goering, another Pour le Mérite war hero, whose ridiculous antics and beastliness were both terrible and fascinating.21 In contrast, Hitler used strategy and cunning, utilizing the conventional political system to climb to power after he was momentarily stung in 1923 when he tried to go outside the law. Hitler was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and anything but lascivious in his demeanor or background, all of which hardly fits the description of the Chief Ranger: [The Oberförster's] wealth was supposed to be immense and overabundance reigned in the feasts he celebrated in the town hall. According to the old traditions, everyone ate and drank heartily.... The Asian parties he threw for his acolytes were equally famous. 22

Even Jünger's sharpest critics concede that he had nothing but contempt for the Austrian upstart, if for no other reason because Hitler and the Nazis were too crude for the artist's aristocratic sensibility.23 It is quite doubtful that the narrator has the Führer in mind when he says, "I often had an opportunity to see him and was touched by the trace of ancient power emanating from the forests which surrounded him." 24 If the Chief Ranger was based on a historical personality in contrast to a generic type, then a likely candidate would be the leader of a nationalist

19. Ibid., 269. 20. Ibid., 279. 2 1 . Erich Mayster has pointed out that Jünger calls one of the Oberförster's troops "La Picousiere," deriving from lapicouse, the heroin needle, and might be a play on Goering's morphine addiction, "Auf der Spur eines Monstrums," SZ, Dec. 6, 1986, 50. 22. The Marble Cliffs, 206. 23. Among contemporary scholars, Wolgang Kaempfer is no doubt Jünger's harshest critic. Kaempfer writes that Jünger withdrew from active politics gradually, beginning sometime in 1934 (June 30 perhaps?) and concedes that his aversion to anti-Semitism, völkisch thought, and racism is "beyond any doubt," though, Kaempfer asserts, Jünger remained true to the ideas that originally attracted him to the regime. See his study Ernst Jünger (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1 9 8 1 ) , 3 2 - 3 4 . 24. The Marble Cliffs, SW 15, 265. In an interview Jünger was asked directly "Was Hitler the Chief Ranger?" He answered "To tell you the truth, I dreamed of a dictator much more powerful, much more demonic . . . above all I wanted to express the roots of violence itself" (L'Express, Jan. 1 1 - 1 7 , 1 9 7 1 , 102).

no

T H E M A R B L E CLIFFS

protomilitary group who took part in Hitler's so-called Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. Known as the Oberförster, a certain Escherisch formed ORGESCH (Organization Escherisch), one of the many "self-defense" groups that recruited heavily among the war-disoriented youth in postwar Germany. In the wake of the failed coup attempt by Hitler and LudendorfF, Escherisch climbed onto the steps of Munich's Feldherrenhalle and, undisturbed by the army that was supposed to keep order, gave a rousing speech to the excited and apparently amused bystanders. Carl Zuckmayer happened to be in the crowd and described the Oberförster in his memoirs as a "fullbodied man in hunting uniform, with a solid belly and a thick beard." 25 Like Escherisch, the Chief Ranger in Jünger's novel commands a paramilitary group known as the "Mauretanier" (moors), an army of ruffians whose warrior camaraderie and vigilante mentality resemble the veterans' leagues of the Weimar period. Jünger seems to be reflecting on his own misguided idealism in the following passage: I heard later from brother Ortho, when speaking of our Mauretanian period, that mistakes become errors only when persisted in. It was a saying which gained in truth for me thinking back to our position when this order attracted us. There are periods of decline when the pattern fades, to which our inner life must conform. . . . We move in times past or faraway Utopias while the moment passes . . . so we began to dream of power and domination.... Given this inclination it was inevitable that the Mauretanians should seek us out.26

Two Nietzschean overmen, Braquemart and Prince Sunmyras are sent to assassinate the Chief Ranger, but both are tortured and killed. Sunmyras represents the aristocratic opposition to Hitler, and his plans to kill the Chief Ranger presciently end in failure. Jünger believed that assassinations were futile because they strengthen dictatorships, the reason he gave for keeping his distance from the plotters around Rommel. Another figure in the novel, a priest who takes up the sword against the Chief Ranger, might represent the resistance offered by some elements of the Church. The most memorable image in the book is the torture chamber at a site to which Jünger gives the Old Germanic name Köppelsbleek. The two brothers discover the place while on a botanic expedition. They see impaled corpses around a barn-like structure; inside a dwarf flays the skin and hacks away at the victim's bodies. Readers in 1942 must have been arrested by the comment, "Such are the cellars, on which are built the castles of tyranny."27

25. Carl Zuckmayer, Als wäre es ein Stück von mir: Hören der Freundschaft (Vienna: Fischer, 1966), 386. I serendipitously came across this reference in Zuckmayer's memoirs. As far as I know, no Jünger scholar has yet made the connection between the Oberförster and Escherisch. 26. The Marble Cliffs, S W 1 5 , 2 6 5 - 6 6 . 27. Ibid., 3 1 0 .

A L L E G O R Y OF POWER AND DEATH

i n

Köppelsbleek is arguably the central axis of the novel. The language of horror situates an atavistic regression in the midst of a highly developed civilization. But like the citizens of Uberlingen, who watched silently as the inmates of the concentration camp at Uberlingen-Aufkirch were paraded out of the city every morning to work in the surrounding hills, Jünger does not dwell on the image. 28 One is struck by the ridiculousness of the setting, by the trivial trappings of a second-rate horror movie: Over the dark door on the pediment a skull was nailed, baring its teeth and seeming to invite entry with its grin. . . . Death's-heads also shone palely on the trees that skirted the path, many a one with eye sockets already mossgrown seemed to inspect us with a gloomy smile. . . . Then the shadow of a great bird fell over the place. Its movements were those of a vulture which swooped down on the teasel field with jagged wings. . . . Then we heard the wind rocking itself as if in accompaniment among the pines so that the pale skulls on the trees rattled in chorus. 29

The climax of the story is an apocalyptic battle described in the language of deadly fascist kitsch: giant knife-collared dogs and great poisonous snakes join in the fray. Comic-book figures appear like the old Belovar whose ears are hung with golden rings and his head covered by a red bandanna. He fights with medieval weapons and joins in battle with the two brothers. 30 The battle scenes constitute one of the few plot developments in the book, otherwise consisting of a mosaic of disparate impressions and botanical observations. The horror of senseless destruction is neutralized in Jünger's account by the apotheosis and heroic transformation of death into meaning. As the two brothers come upon the flayed and impaled bodies of Braquemart and Sunmyra, the narrator observes: "Then I was certain of something which I have often doubted: there were still noble beings among us, in whose hearts lived unshakable knowledge of a lofty ordered life." 31 Belovar finds an appropriate end, returning to "The Great Mother whose wild and bloody feasts he had celebrated." 32 Resigned to defeat, the narrator observes that "it is better to fall with the free than to triumph with the slaves" (338). The Chief Ranger succeeds in engulfing the entire island in an orgy of carnage, and the narrator, in a dreamlike trance, literally closes off the sounds of violence from his ears in order to take in the beauty of destruction: "Below me I could hear neither the children crying nor the mothers 28. During the war, a munitions factory was to be built by forced labor in the sandstone cliffs six miles west of Uberlingen. See Peter Schünemann, "Das Entschwinden der Biographie: Beobachtungen zum Werk Ernst Jüngers," Text und Kritik 105/106 (January 1990): 56. 29. The Marble Cliffs, S W 1 5 , 309. 30. Ibid., 28g. 31. Ibid., 3 3 7 - 3 8 . 32. Ibid., 339.

112

T H E M A R B L E CLIFFS

wailing. . . . Of all the terrors of destruction, only the shimmering golden light of the flames rose up to the Marble Cliffs. So distant worlds flare up to delight our eyes in the beauty of their ruin." 33 The two brothers escape at the last moment to return to their homeland somewhere in the north. The work of years is lost, but "one can't expect perfection on this earth," and "no house is built, no plan is made, in which a downfall isn't already part of the foundation." 34 Thus banal epigrams seal a nihilistic and macabre celebration of destruction and dubious renewal. The moment of flight that ends The Marble Cliffs can be followed recursively as an instinctive response in many of Jünger's literary creations. At the specific historical juncture when German intellectuals had to decide for or against working within the parameters of the Nazi state, the message of futility and escape at the close of the Marble Cliffs is homologous to the strategy of the inner emigrants. Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg return to the mythological north, that is, to the imaginative locus of their original fascination with, and then eventual abandonment of, fascist politics. The conservative revolutionaries opposed the reality of the existing regime by deferring the fascist Utopia into the future or the subjunctive. Ernst Niekisch was the first to comment on this flight motif in Jünger's thinking, observing that, A s the q u e s t i o n c a m e u p in 1 9 2 9 to w h i c h f r o n t o n e c o u n t e d oneself, the Bolshevist o r the Fascist, h e e s c a p e d to his " a d v e n t u r o u s heart," his innerness. H e takes n o sides in The Worker; h e r e t h e r e is n o talk o f class warfare

H e doesn't

f i g h t o u t the catastrophe o f The Marble Cliffs to the e n d ; with his b r o t h e r h e climbs into a b a r q u e that carries h i m o v e r the waters. 3 5

Jünger's passivity after 1934 stands in stark contrast to his militant activism of the 1920s. In a private letter he admits to being too complacent but argues that only "sacrifice" would have met the moral requirements of resistance: "You have misunderstood my remark about Hitler . . . my comment was meant in a moral sense: that one should have perhaps made a sacrifice to what intelligence and our better insight told us. In that case, of course, I would no longer be living." 36 It would be interesting to know when the insight became "better"—in 1933, 1939, or 1943? While it is true that open rebellion against the Nazi regime was tantamount to suicide, Germans living under the regime had more choices than either "sacrifice" or obedience. Resistance (in contrast to opposition) could be and was practiced in a large number of different 33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., 342. Ibid., 347. Ernst Niekisch, Gewagtes Leben, 191. Jünger to Möhler, May g, 1955, PAM.

ALLEGORY OF POWER AND DEATH

J13

ways and Jünger entirely discounts the option of exile. 37 These issues form the historical context for evaluating the resistance value of The Marble Cliffs. INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS OF THE GERMAN RESISTANCE The Marble Cliffs first appeared in the fall of 1939. It was published by the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, a conservative publishing house in Hamburg that, under the skilled brinkmanship of its director Benno Ziegler, managed to retain a modicum of independence despite the limitations imposed by Goebbels's propaganda ministry. During the war, rumors circulated that the suppression of the book was avoided because of intervention at the highest levels of the Nazi party. This important detail of the publication history seems confirmed by a memo sent to the editorial staff of Der Spiegel by Paul Weinreich in 1973. 38 Weinreich, a copy editor working for Ziegler, wrote that the publishing staff was well aware of the potentially explosive effect of the novel and went ahead with publication without getting the necessary imprimatur. 39 Consequently, Reichsleiter Bouhler personally brought up the issue with Hitler, who apparently decided that nothing was to be done to hinder the publication of the book. This version of the publication history cannot be independently verified, but it seems plausible that Hitler must have interceded because Jünger had already offended the members of the Reich Chamber of Culture by refusing to join the Nazi-controlled Prussian Academy for the Arts in 1934 and had offended Goebbels, who thought himself caricatured as Braquemart in the novel. 40 T h e publication of the The Marble Cliffs has thus gone down in history as a minor coup against the cultural stranglehold of the party.41 Jünger was able to exploit his standing as a hero of the First World War in order to assert his independence. Among the books published during the Third Reich, it was a rare example of noncomformity. It is not enough, however, to remain on the surface of the text as a story of opposition. It is important to remember that the Nazis were uncomfortable with Jünger's most "fascist" texts, the 37. See Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity and Opposition in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 38. Typewritten memo to Rudolph Augstein from Paul Weinreich, Bargfredestr. 6c, Hamburg 55, May 20, 1973, SA. 39. A seal from the "Parteiamtliche Prüfungskommission zum Schutz des NS-Schrifttums" (Party Regulatory Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature). 40. Braquemart is described as "short, dark, and haggard," an adept of Nietzsche, because he believed in the master race, a "zealot for power and more power [Schwärmer für Macht und Ubermacht] (SW 1 5 : 3 1 4 ) . 41. See H. Keisel, "Auf den Marmorklippen: Ein berühmtes und problematisches Buch über den zwölfjährigen national-sozialistischen Staat," in Internationales Archivfür Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 1 4 ( 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 2 6 - 1 6 4 .

114

T H E

MARBLE CLIFFS

aesthetics of The Adventurous Heart and the techno-utopia of The Worker. These books were problematic not so much because of the content but, rather, because the style was avant-garde, futuristic, disruptive, and subversive; in short, it possessed the qualities of what scholars have called "fascist modernism." 42 The unlikely pairing of the two terms denotes an aestheticization of politics hostile to certain aspects of modernity—for example, the drive for increasing equality—but seeking to channel the energy of the modern into an alternative utopia. Traditionalists and modernists engaged in a protracted struggle over culture in the public sphere during the first years of the Third Reich, represented most clearly by the fierce competition between Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Goebbels was an early advocate of a Nordic version of expressionism, which may explain his patience with Jünger's fascist style, but he lost out to Rosenberg's fundamentalist view of pseudo-Greek classicism by 1937, when he grudgingly implemented the anti-expressionist platform at the Decadent Art exhibition in Munich. 43 Can we isolate something like a "fascist style" in intellectual history? The beginning of an attempt to come to terms with the concept was made by Armin Möhler, in a little-known essay dating from 1974. 44 Möhler argues that the fascist style of Jünger and Gottfried Benn can be differentiated from Nazi literature by the lack of reference to the Volksgemeinschaft, to Nordic clichés of Germanic heroism, to the coupling of the national and the social, or to Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ,45 Möhler understands style as a purely aesthetic phenomenon, as the elevation of the gesture above the idea. An example of the fascist style is "severity and coldness," wringing form "for the sake of pure form from chaos." The battle slogan of the Spanish fascists in 1936, "long live death," is accordingly a typical fascist gesture. 46 In this respect, Möhler and Walter Benjamin would be in agreement that fascism is a transposing of the principle of art-for-art's-sake to the phenomenon of war.47 But Mohler's use of the concept elevates fascism beyond politics, while Benjamin's intent was to locate a seemingly transcendental aesthetic in the historical reality. The aestheticization of politics, as formulated by Benjamin, also misses half the equation: Hitler not only took him-

42. See Herf, Reactionary Modernism; see also the special issue of Modernism/Modernity on Marinetti and the Italian futurists, 1, no. 3 (September 1994). 43. See Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich: Hanser, 1 9 9 1 ) , 7 9 - 1 1 3 . 44. Reprinted in Armin Möhler, Liberalenbeschimpfung: Drei Politische Traktate (Essen: Heitz & Höffkes, 1990), 80—127. Henri Plard applied Mohler's concept to his study "Le style fasciste: Ernst Jünger et Drieu La Rochelle," Etudes germaniques (July—September 1979): 292—300. 45. Möhler, Liberalenbeschimpfung, 94. 46. Ibid., 92 ff. 47. See Walter Benjamin, Kritik und Rezensionen: Theorien des deutschen Faschismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 241. Translated and reprinted in NGC 17 (spring 1979): 1 2 0 - 1 2 8 .

A L L E G O R Y OF POWER AND DEATH

775

self seriously as an artist, as the architect of the New Reich, but he and other Nazi leaders also intervened massively in all spheres of art, from museums to academies to publishing. Historians are coming to recognize that politics was aestheticized as much as aesthetics was politicized in the Third Reich. 48 Mohler's thesis contains in this respect a kernel of truth; the fascist style, in contrast to bourgeois art, does not attempt to civilize but, rather, to disclose and valorize brutality. National Socialism was originally cut, of course, from the same cloth as Italian Fascism. But the Hitler state of the 1930s was a far cry from the gaggles of brass-knuckled thugs who got the movement going in the 1920s. The crucial turning point was the decision by Hitler to eliminate Röhm's storm troopers as a relatively independent force in 1934, putting an end to the street revolution, and binding the Nazi movement to the conservative forces in German society—the Reichswehr, German industry, and above all, ordinary law-abiding citizens. When this happened, the Nazi state lost much of its appeal for a number of intellectuals who had been attracted to the romantic, adventurous, high-fever side of fascism. This dream of pure energy, of "action for action's sake, revolution for revolution's sake," as Eugen Weber once described the fantasy of French fascists,49 fits Jünger's tenure as leader of the new nationalist radical veteran groups in the 1920s. Up until 1933 Jünger's work reflected the futurist dream of tearing down the last remnants of a shaken bourgeois order, while Hitler after 1933 sought to stabilize the revolution. In the collective people's state there was no more room for fascist adventurers. In 1942 a Nazi university official could say contemptuously, "Ernst Jünger is a fascist; he fights not for his people, but for the sake of fighting."50 The fascist goal of a complete social revolution could not be achieved through mere action. Eugen Weber argues that Between Fascism and National-Socialism there is a first and very obvious difference in that the former has always rejected theory in favor of practice.. . . The Fascist ethos is emotional and sentimental; at that level, the ends of action count less than the action itself, and the forces that lead men into the Fascist camp can be enlisted on any side whatsoever, provided they are given an opportunity to indulge themselves—the more violently, the better. 51

48. See Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). See also Neil Levi, '"Judge for Yourselves!': the Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle," October 85 (summer 1998): 4 1 - 6 4 . 49. Eugen Weber, "Nationalism, Socialism, and National-Socialism in France," French Historical Studies 3 (spring 1962): 287. 50. Armin Möhler, interview by author, November 25, 1989. The full quote is 'Jünger ist ein Faschist! Jünger kämpfte nicht für sein V o l k — i m Krieg kämpfte er um des Kämpfes willen." See Möhler, Liberalenbeschimpfung, 96. 51. Weber, "Nationalism," 290.

n6

T H E MARBLE CLIFFS

The Marble Cliffs represents Jünger's retreat from action. It is a transitional work expressing nostalgia for that activism and a realization that the goal was unattainable. T h e first line of the novel expresses the irretrievable loss, "You all know the wild melancholy that seizes us u p o n remembering a time of happiness." 5 2 T h e novel does not resist those memories but rather eulogizes them. Jünger repeatedly denied that The Marble Cliffs was a "resistance piece." 5 3 He wished to have his literary oeuvre seen as a harmonious whole, despite the twists and turns taken."Ich widerspreche mir nicht" ("I never contradict myself") is both a taunt and an admission. He had contempt for those intellectuals, like his former close friend Arnolt Bronnen, who embraced Nazism in the 1930s and refashioned themselves as antifascists after the war. H e even threatened to expose those former friends w h o didn't "have the guts to stand u p for their former views, even though they couldn't wait for things to break loose, while I warned them and was skeptical." 54 Jünger has often been credited for admirable consistency in his refusal to indulge in post facto justifications, though it is somewhat disingenuous to claim that his early enthusiasm for the Nazis was based on their misunderstanding of his motives. Jünger, in fact, once argued to Plard, "Nobody realizes that I don't owe Hitler an explanation, but rather he owes m e one." 5 5 Likewise, Heidegger once insisted that Hitler was "guilty of having misled him." 5 6 Jünger's own reading of the The Marble Cliffs is that it is an "unfinished" novel, having possibly influenced events, but also having b e e n influenced by history itself. He perceived a kind of metaphysical interaction taking place, one that would resist being merely an interpretation of contemporary events. 5 7 1 would also resist reading the novel as an allegory of National

5 2. The Marble Cliffs, SW15, 249. 53. See the postscript to the Ullstein edition of The Marble Cliffs of 1973 and the article "Nachschrift zu den Marmorklippen," Die Welt, April 17, 1973. 54. O n December 31, 1945, Jünger wrote to Schlichter, "I have the unpleasant habit of keeping all my letters and am therefore in a position to hold up to these little people the documentary evidence, which is quite different from what they are rigging up these days. I am just waiting for the right opportunity" (Ernst Jünger-Rudolf Schlichter, Briefwechsel, 266). T h e other line, quoted above, is on the same page. 55. Ernst Jünger to Henri Plard, PAP, August 12, 1968. 56. Cited in Richard Wolin, "The French Heidegger Debate," NGC 45 (fall 1988): 155. 57. Ernst Jünger, .SW 2, 3: "I thought a lot about The Marble Cliffs again. T h e book is open and unfinished. It flows into the events. O n the other hand, the events turn around and change the book. In this sense it is like an ellipse with two fixed points, in which the author stands in one and the facts in the other. Between the two, threads are spun like in a the splitting of an atom. So the book can influence fate. It is also possible that it influences the fate of the author. That signifies that things are working in other spheres than those of language, like in those in which dreams are effective" (Strahlungen I, January 9, 1942, 288).

ALLEGORY OF POWER AND DEATH

n j

Socialism. Much more interesting is the treatment of an aestheticization of politics that fascism at first offered as a conquest of the imaginary but ultimately failed to turn into reality. T H E RITUALS O F DESTRUCTION

Junger's obsession with images of death, decay, and decadence mirrored certain moods of contemporary expressionism and harked back to the symbolists, to Edgar Allen Poe, and to a long tradition in German Romanticism. But Saul Friedlander reminds us that "for the Nazis this motif of death takes on a special dimension—urgent, essential, opaque, intractable to analysis."58 The very first lines of the book immerse the reader in a macabre and ghostly remembrance of things irretrievably past. How irrevocably beyond recall [are the moments of happiness]. We are more mercilessly separated from them than from any other distance. In the afterglow the images stand out even more enticingly. We think of them as we do of the body of a dead lover who lies deep in the earth and who appears to us like a desert mirage, in an enhanced and more spiritual splendor. 59

Nostalgia is cast here as the memory of a dead body. The contrast could not be sharper between the first image of remembrance of happy things past and the second image of a ghostly corpse come to haunt us. In Junger's fascist style, death, love, and memory can be intertwined without seeming incongruous because the author camouflages the language of violence in natural metaphors—the desert mirage, the deep earth. The link between the fascist style and the gothic novel has been overlooked in the critical literature on The Marble Cliffs,60 because "classic" gothic tales were usually set in monasteries or convents where crumbled coffins, medieval vaults, slimy swamps, snakes, vampires, and other flesh creepers dominate the genre. 61 But the sense of impending horror brought on by the increasing violent incursions of the Chief Ranger and, of course, the ossuary extravagance of the charnel house at Koppelsbleek, fit perfectly into the tortured mood of galvanizing anxiety, homicidal frenzy, and scary vulnerability that are the hallmarks of the gothic tale.

58. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 42. 59- Jünger, SW15, 249. 60. See, for example, Hans Jürgen Schelle, Die Marmorklippen: Eine Stilanalyse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962). 61. For examples, see Chris Baidick, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Ii8

T H E M A R B L E CLIFFS

In The Marble Cliffs, the obscene is integrated into normal (or trivial, postromantic) life in a manner that neutralizes the absurd, the painful, and the grotesque. The author turns pain into pleasure, equates danger with beauty, and generally valorizes horror. In what sense might this be called a "fascist aesthetic?" 62 What is the link to the politics of fascism? In an attempt to locate the theoretical juncture of economy, language, and fascism, Jean-Pierre Faye has pointed to Jünger's Kampfsprache (battle language) of the 1920s and 30s as prime examples of "totalitarian language." 63 But this perspective can well be tested on the text of The Marble Cliffs. Faye broached the problem of locating fascism beyond its economic aspects as reproduced in language, spread from text to text until the totalitarian state became capable, as Carl Schmitt wrote, "of monopolizing the new technical means of manipulating the masses and public opinion." 64 Unfortunately, Faye offered few clues as to the theoretical underpinnings of his analysis. In another subtle treatment of the attraction of fascism on certain French intellectuals, Alice Yaeger Kaplan built on Faye's insights to show how fascism transformed not only the means of production or distribution of wealth in the state, but also the technical means by which the state reproduced its own legitimacy in the public sphere. When fascism took power in Germany, it also succeeded in conquering the imagination and desire of its subjects. It did so by using the most advanced and sophisticated technical means: film, radio, architecture, staged rallies, and changing the design of everyday articles of consumption. 65 Kaplan points out that the success of fascist art was certainly not its quality, depressingly cliched and mediocre as it was, but rather the ubiquitous penetration of totalitarian aesthetics into all realms of cultural and everyday life.66 It was for this reason Goebbels tried very hard, if without success, to win Jünger's "sharp pen." 67 Jünger was one of the few 62. T h e term used by Wolfgang Kaempfer, "Das schöne Böse: Zum ästhetischen Verfahren Ernst Jüngers in den Schriften der 30er Jahre im Hinblick auf Nietzsche, Sade, und Lautremont," Recherches Germaniques 14 (1984): 1 0 3 - 1 1 7 . 63. Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages Totalitaires: Critique de la Raison, de l'Economie Narrative (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 6 3 - 6 7 , 7 6 - 7 9 . 64. Schmitt, Mitteilungen des Vereins zur Wahrung der gemeinsamen wirtschaftlichen Interessen in Rheinland und Westfalen (Langnamverein) 1 (Dec. 1932), quoted in Faye, Langages Totalitaires, 702. 65. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 4 1 - 5 5 . 66. Ibid. 35. See also Klaus Theweleit's overwhelmingly psychoanalytic but extremely insightful analysis of the language of right-wing authors: Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). Theweleit is also very indebted to Faye, see vol. 1, 459, n. 20. 67. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Sämtliche Fragmente, vol. 1 (Munich: Saur, 1987), 619. Goebbels wanted to enlist Schauwecker, Bronnen, and Jünger for a "radical feuilleton," but he ultimately became disillusioned by Jünger's rarefied aestheticism. See the diary entry for April 4 and September 26, 1929.

A L L E G O R Y OF POWER AND DEATH

119

talented exceptions among the mediocre pool of writers who stayed behind and continued to work in the Third Reich. The above examination of The Marble Cliffs has been carried out with an eye for relevant links between Jünger's use of language and fascist aesthetics. The ambiguous textual layers and rhetorical strategies of the novel lead us to conclude that the author had struck a chord, on a higher aesthetic plane to be certain, but similar to the brutalization of form found in Goebbel's propaganda tirades, Speer's monstrous architectural fantasies, and common Third Reich Heimat novels.68 Beginning with Siegfried Kracauer, and continuing to the present day, one analysis of the aesthetics of fascism has emphasized the importance of film—in particular the pseudodocumentary films for which Riefenstahl stands as the best example—for the success of Nazism in capturing the contemporary imagination.69 It has even been suggested that the war Hitler launched can be compared to a mise-en-scène for a giant studio production.70 Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe has coined the term "national aestheticism" to capture the mythical quality of Hitler's dream of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk out of the German state, his vision of society as a "collective artwork," and his Wagnerian identification with the self-destructive and final Götterdämmerung.'11 The Marble Cliffs presented a dichotomy of two visions of aesthetic politics that can be viewed as a "docudrama" of the rise of Nazism, depicting a clash between the mythical state of the Chief Ranger on the one side and the heroic resistance of the mythical warriors on the other. Jünger arrives at the truth of the Nazi seizure of power because he himself is firmly rooted on the conceptual horizon within which the absolute appropriation of the political by the spectacle of power in Nazism takes place. The de68. Wolfgang Fritz Haug has demonstrated, using an impressive array of examples, how Nazi terminology remained embedded in German literature, philosophy, and the social sciences well after 1945; see Der Hilflose Antifaschismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). 69. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). On Riefenstahl in particular, see Peter Nowotny, Leni Riefenstahls Triumph des Willens: Zur Kritik dokumentarischer Filmarbeit im NS-Faschismus (Lollar: Prolit Verlag, 1981 ) ; see also Ian Buruma, "A Lethal Thing of Beauty: Leni Riefenstahl's Cloud of Unknowing," TLS (Oct. 9, 1992): 3 - 4 . 70. This is the powerful and not unproblematic message behind Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland. See the film text with introductory essay under the same title (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978). 7 1 . Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), esp. 61—77. Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis of Nazism is so disturbing because he endeavors to "think" Auschwitz in a Heideggerian manner against Heidegger, and he finds in the Ereignis of the Holocaust a caesura that reveals the "truth of the West" as techné ( 4 4 - 4 5 ) . Thinking about the essence of Nazism is, of course, different from approving it, but Lacoue-Labarthe leaves himself open to misunderstanding when he calls fascism "no more aberrant or inadequate" than any other of the "age's possible political forms" (107).

i2o

T H E MARBLE CLIFFS

scription of Köppelsbleek is usually understood as a condemnation of Nazi atrocities. But that interpretation fails to take into account Jünger's fascination with and "higher curiosity" for the aesthetic spectacle of death. Jünger's morbid obsession with the cannibalistic spectacle of the masochistic dwarf, which we have described above in terms of trivial horror literature, unmasks the deeper truth that behind the description of brute facts lies a childlike glee at the concordance between hallucination and reality. The most vivid descriptions of horror are interlarded with fantasies of exoticism that neutralize human suffering through an attempt at poetic sublation. There are many examples of this in The Marble Cliffs, but perhaps the best one is the narrator's comment at the end of the description of Köppelsbleek. Reacting to the "sweet smell of putrefaction," the two brothers have an aesthetic experience: they "feel how inside ourselves the melody of life shifted to its darkest, its deepest chord." 72 The Marble Cliffs thus reveals both the condemnation of the mythology of Nazism and its entrapment in that myth. Jünger's novel attempts to bridge differences, to find identity where there is an appearance of difference, such as in the apposition of the warrior qualities of the Chief Ranger and those of Sunmyra, Belovar, the narrator, and his brother. In fact, all of the characters in the novel are part of the author himself, with the exception of the rabble. In this respect too, The Marble Cliffs is an attempt at a Gesamtkunstwerk. If it seems far-fetched to assert that Jünger understood the Third Reich and its origins in purely mythological terms, the following passage from a letter to Plard demonstrates an alarmingly theatrical understanding of history: Although he had hurricane strength, as a historical figure Hitler was lame, and even weaker as a mythical power. Nevertheless, the same situations repeat themselves, Blücher takes Paris, or Napoleon retreats from Borodino. The whole thing is mythological: the last days in the Reichskanzlei—a twilight of the Gods, the shapes blurred through frosty glass.73

Although it cannot be doubted that the defeat of Nazism changed history in "mythic" proportions, the blurring of mythology and history, as Jünger so often tends to do, overloads the purely literary function of the novel with a plurality of ambiguous, and sometimes self-canceling, messages. Having considered the ideological and stylistic problems associated with the complex historiography of The Marble Cliffs, a final word must be said about the ideas of the German resistance to Hitler in general. The conglomeration of national-conservative, stylistically fascist, and emancipatory resistance ideas—in other words, an incongruous m i x — i s characteristic not 72. The Marble Cliffs, SW 15, 31 o. 73. Jünger to Plard, November 11, 1976, PAP.

ALLEGORY OF POWER AND DEATH

121

only ofJünger's writings but also of many of the ideas found along the spectrum of the German opposition. Almost all of Hitler's opponents were "backward-looking" when viewed in the light of post-1945 democratic values. The values that informed the German resistance have been harshly criticized as reactionary for this reason. 74 But had Hitler been killed in the summer of 1944, how would the national-conservative elite in Germany have accommodated itself to the challenge of ending the war and restructuring the politics of the nation? This thorny issue, which touches the core of the relationship between conservatism and fascism, will be addressed as we now turn to Jünger's involvement in the German resistance.

74. Hans Mommsen, "Gesellschaftsbild und Verfassungspläne des deutschen Widerstandes," in Walter Schmitthenner and Hans Buchheim, Der Deutsche Widerstand gegen Hitler (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1966), 7 3 - 1 6 7 .

CHAPTER

FOUR

The Pen and the Sword Last Knights of the Majestic

After the First World War, Jünger's Weimar critics were outraged by what they conceived to be the mystical and exaggerated identification of the German nation with the lost war by Jünger and his circle of angry veterans. As Walter Benjamin wrote, they "continue [d] to celebrate the cult of war when there was no longer any real enemy." 1 Ironically, the debate over Jünger's activity in the Second World War revolved around his apparent emotional distance from the existential dilemmas faced by combatants during this period. T h e change in criteria had to do with the very different nature of the two wars. JÜNGER AND THE ROMMEL PLAN T h e reception history of Jünger's postwar interpretation of fascism begins with an essay he claims to have begun in 1941, destroyed, and then revised two years later in 1943 and 1944, but not published until 1947. T h e ideas in The Peace are intimately b o u n d u p with the history of German resistance to Hitler, in particular the failed Westlösung, the plan to arrest Hitler in Rommel's French headquarters at La Roche-Guyon and wrest power from the Nazis beginning on the Western Front. 2 Jünger's ideas for a postwar setd e m e n t are said to have reached Rommel through Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commander in France and Jünger's protector at com1. Walter Benjamin, "Theories of German Fascism," trans. Jerolf Wikoff, NGC 17 (spring !979) : !232. Rudolf Lill and Heinrich Oberreuter, eds., 20. Juli: Portrait des Widerstandes (Düsseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1984), 253-269, 287-307. Speidel also gave Jünger's treatise credit for substantial influence on Rommel in Aus unserer Zeit: Erinnerungen (Berlin: Propyläen, 1977), 171 ff. 122

L A S T KNIGHTS OF THE MAJESTIC

123

mand headquarters, the Hotel Majestic, where Jünger was stationed from 1942 to 1944. Rommel was supposed to have been impressed by the Christian sentiments expressed in the b o o k and particularly taken by the ideas for postwar reconstruction in a United Nations of Europe: ' J ü n g e r s proclamation had an effect of almost mythical power." 3 According to rumors that spread a m o n g the French intelligentsia in postwar Paris, Rommel is supposed to have been spurred to "act quickly" u p o n reading Jünger's text. 4 During the occupation period, Jünger lived on the top floor of the Hotel Raphael, the luxury quarters for the higher officers of the military command in Paris. Next door to the Raphael was the c o m m a n d headquarters in Hotel Majestic where Jünger worked censoring mail, adjacent to the administrative staff section that was being run by Werner Best, a friend from his youth, creator of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD (security service), and future Reich-Plenipotentiary of Denmark. 5 Jünger's position was tenuous. H e was protected by his Pour Le Mérite warrior status, and Hitler may well have protected him from the reach of the Gestapo. O n the other hand, he was suspected of disloyalty to the Nazi regime, was never promoted beyond the rank of captain, and was constantly watched by the SS and the Security Service in Paris. 6 Jünger kept his diaries and the notes for The Peace locked in a 3. Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 1 7 1 - 1 7 6 . 4. See the not entirely reliable memoirs of Banine (actually Umm-el-Banine), a French novelist of Arab extraction and admirer of Jünger: Portrait d'Ernst Jünger: Lettres, Textes, et Recontres (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1 9 7 1 ) , 86. See also Antoine Blondin, "Enjuillet42, Picasso proposait la paix au capitaine Jünger," Rivarol, Sept. 6, 1951, 4 - 5 ; Maurice Nadeau, "Le combat d'Ernst Jünger," Combat, Sept. 20, 1951; André Rousseaux, "Ernst Jünger à Paris," Le Figaro littéraire, Oct. 13, 1951. 5. Best was a fanatical and ambitious SS officer who escaped legal prosecution after the war and in fact became a legal advisor to Stinnes and Company, joined the FDP in 1950, and lobbied the government (often successfully) for a general amnesty for all war criminals. He also joined the Werner Naumann Circle, which tried to place unrepentant Nazis in key positions in all the major parties. Best left France for Denmark in the fall of 1942, just after Jünger took up his duties at the Majestic. In his memoirs, Best remembers "many evenings of conversations by the fireplace" with Jünger, but he avoided the literary salons and the circle around Stülpnagel. See Werner Best, "Erinnerungen aus dem besetzten Frankreich," ms., in Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung, und Vernunft, 1903-1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996), 255; see also Philip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). 6. I n a television interview with Henri Plard, Jünger said "What we later found out in Hotel Majestic and Raphael—we were informed about the domestic situation (innere Lage)—that made our hair stand on end. There was no more difficult situation during the Second World War than that of the educated officer, who stood in an ambivalent situation. An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Russian, they could just carry out their national duties, while we had to make sure that the war wasn't lost and that the civil war would be won." Television Interview with Henri Plard, August 4/5, 1973. Note: "not to be aired during the lifetime of the author," A: Jünger, 3b. DLAM.

124

T H E PEN AND T H E SWORD

hotel safe in the Majestic, but he let anonymous copies of the typescript circulate among friends. The group of officers, under the aegis of Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, met regularly in the salon of the Hotel George V Speidel also resided there. Among the inner circle of the conspirators was the legal administrator Walter Bargatzky and lieutenant colonel Caesar von Hofacker. Fritz Dietlof Graf von Schulenberg was the confidential link between the George V circle and Moltke's Kreisau circle. Hofacker threaded the connection to Beck in Berlin and to Goerdeler in Leipzig. 7 Both Stülpnagel and Speidel prided themselves on their knowledge of history, foreign languages, and the arts, cultivating the company of writers and artists. The army officers Horst Grüninger and Rolf Pauls were members of the George V circle, as well as the writers and journalists Friedrich Sieburg, Clemens Graf Podewils, Dolf Sternberger, Nicky von Grote, and Gerhard Nebel.8 Although Jünger was privy to the other, conspiratorial side of the group, the plotters gave him only vague information concerning the plans to overthrow Hitler. According to Bargatzky, Jünger knew no details, but he knew what was planned— he was the "spiritual foundation" of the group. 9 Rommel and Stülpnagel were counting on Hitler to make an inspection of the Atlantic Wall sometime in May, when the landing of the Americans was expected in the Normandy. 10 Inexplicably, Hitler continued to direct the war from Berchtesgaden. After the invasion of Normandy, Hitler made an unexpected visit to the Western Front and was planning to come to La RocheGuyon on June 19. Speidel and Rommel had a golden opportunity to strike. As so often in the history of assassination attempts against Hitler, fate uncannily intervened. The bombing of England with the V-1 had begun from French territory on June 15. On June 18, one of the rockets strayed off course and came down near Margival, just about hitting the bunker where Hitler was meeting with Field Marshall Rundstedt. Depressed and disappointed with the performance of his Wunderwaffe, he returned immediately to Berchtesgaden. 11 This twist of fate along with Rommel's serious injury when a bomb hit his vehicle on July 17 moved the center of the conspiracy to General Beck in Berlin. The idea of arresting Hitler was given up in favor of the plan to kill

7. Walter Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic: Ein Deutscher im besetzten Frankreich (Basel: Herder, 1987), 126. 8. Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 1 1 2 , 1 1 7 . 9. Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic, 143. 1 o. The Germans at first expected a landing in the Pas de Calais, but Rommel rightly ascertained by the patterns of Allied bombing that the invasion would come to the south. Peter Calvocoressi et. al., Total War, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 537 ff. 1 1 . Lill and Oberreuter, 20. Juli, 302.

L A S T KNIGHTS OF T H E MAJESTIC

125

him, famously attempted and failed by Staufifenberg on July 20. T h e r e were many in the German Resistance who opposed assassination, 12 and Jünger was among them. In the week before the conspiracy of July 20, Jünger remembered saying to Von Hofacker: "I'm against assassinations, I don't see anything g o o d about them. Look, the assassination of Louis Philippe extended the Bourbon regime for 30 years, and the attempt against Lenin brought about a horrible catastrophe for mankind. Assassinations strengthen the regimes against which they are directed." 1 3 Assuming that Hitler was dead, the German army in Paris began arresting the SS leadership in order to prepare for negotiations with the Allies. T h e news of Hitler's survival caused terrible confusion and bloody reprisals. T h e military command center in Paris was closed down, and the officers arrested if they hadn't committed suicide. O n July 20 Jünger spent the day away from army headquarters in the Bois de Bologne and could not be tied to the conspiracy. In September he returned to Germany and was called before a People's Court, but the case against him was dismissed. 14 Stülpnagel was not so lucky. He tragically blinded himself in a suicide attempt and was put on trial before the infamous, fanatic Nazi j u d g e Roland Freisler in Berlin. Defying torture in the cells of the Gestapo, Stülpnagel refused to name Jünger or any of the other conspirators before being sent to the gallows. At this time, the entries in Jünger's diary began to take on apocalyptic tones. A m o n g army officers, rumors spread that Jünger had been "bumped off." 1 5 Two days after arriving in Kirchhorst, he met with B e n n o Ziegler to discuss the postwar publication of The Peace.16 As in the case of The Marble Cliffs, Ziegler had to do considerable maneuvering to get the book published. This time he was u p against the American military government. T h e work was ready to go to press in May of 1945, but Ziegler could not obtain approval from the U.S. authorities. Meanwhile, 12. Their opposition was mostly for religious reasons, as in the case of Gördeler, the mayor of Leipzig. See Peter Hoffman, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 127 if. 13. Der Spiegel (August 16, 1982), 161. Louis-Philippe was, of course, not assassinated, though there were ten attempts made on his life in the 1830s, and the Bourbons never returned to the throne. Jünger is probably thinking of the assassination of King Louis XVIII's nephew, the Due de Berry, in 1820. A fanatical Bonapartist hoped to end the line of Bourbon heirs; his act ended a period of moderation and ushered in an era of ultraright intolerance in France. 14. For Jünger's account of these events see "Postscriptum zu Paul Leautaud," and "Ausgehend von Brümmerhof," SW 14, 3 7 2 - 3 9 1 , 102-130. Other details in Johann Mauthner, Internationaler biographischer Pressedienst, 20/24, Bargatzky's Hotel Majestic and Speidel's Aus unserer Zeit. 15. Benno Ziegler to Ernst Jünger, Nov. 20, 1944, "Ernst Jünger sei umgelegt," A: Jünger, des Coudres, box 145, DLAM. 16. Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen 2, 302-305.

126

T H E PEN A N D T H E SWORD

typescripts of the text, containing many mistakes and deletions, began to be "known and discussed in the entire area of the Reich." 1 7 A secret printer in Marburg began distributing copies of the book. After the shop was raided by military police, it was discovered that the publisher was a former leader of the Hitler Youth. In this manner, The Peace was brought into connection with the Wehrwolf (an underground Nazi youth organization that still operated in the first months after the defeat), one of the reasons Jünger was placed on the American and British blacklists. 18 In the summer of 1946 American newspapers reported that the offices of the Action Française had also been raided, and that French translations of The Peace had been f o u n d and confiscated. Jünger commented on these events in August 1946, writing to Karl Baedeker that a visiting American professor Knoll told him former party members everywhere were reading the book. Jünger brushed off the professor's concerns, replying that "the officers are finally doing something worthwhile." 1 9 A n aura of notoriety—peculiar to forbidden scripts—surrounded The Peace. T h e first authorized publication went to press in Amsterdam in 1946. After Jünger moved to the French zone of occupation in 1948, it was followed by the first German edition in 1949. THE NEW EUROPEAN

ORDER

In the introduction to The Peace, Jünger claims to have begun sketching an outline for the work in the winter of 1941 and completed it in the summer of 1943. 20 T h e first mention of such an outline, however, is made in his war diary on January 5, 1942, where Jünger writes: "I bought some paper at lunch for The Peace manuscript. Began the outline. Also made sure the safe was secure." 2 1 A week later Jünger notes that the officers inhabiting Hotel Raphael can be trusted, and after one of the officers told a "mean j o k e " about Hitler, he felt comfortable e n o u g h to relate an "outline" of his ideas for The Peace.22 T h e wording here suggests that only now were the ideas coming into focus. T h e discrepancy of one year is of vital importance because of the invasion of the Soviet Union. H a d Jünger begun to think about The Peace 17. "Aufzeichnung von Ziegler zur Friedensschrift," 19, Sammlung Baedeker, box 3, DLAM. 18. This is Ziegler's version of the story. 19. Jünger to Karl Baedeker, August 6, 1946, Sammlung Baedeker, box 3 f - h , DLAM. 20. Seejünger's foreword to, The Peace, trans. Stuart O. H o o d (Hinsdale, 111.: Henry Regnery Library, 1948): "The essay 'Peace' was sketched in its basic outlines in the winter of 1941, and was ready in its present form in the summer of 1943." Speidel confirms the winter 1941 date; see Aus unserer Zeit, 171. Benno Ziegler in "Aufzeichnung von Benno Ziegler," 19, however, claims to have known about the work only since the winter of 1942. 21. Jünger, Strahlungen, 1:285 (Januarys, 1 94 2 )22. Ibid., 290 (January 13, 1942).

L A S T KNIGHTS OF THE MAJESTIC

127

in the beginning of 194 x, at a time of Germany's highest military successes, he would have shown true prescience and even pacifist leanings. In the introduction to Strahlungen, Jünger's Second World War diaries, the author boasts of having swum against the stream of history: The dates listed here will perhaps help correct some errors, like that this proclamation (The Peace) was a fruit of defeat. Today it is the cheapest explanation one has to reckon with, and often the most vindictive. But just as I have always swum against the current and never in the wake of the reigning powers, such as is the case here. The planning of the text coincides with the greatest extension of the German front. 23

The diary entry of January 5, 1942 probably gives the date of Jünger's first attention to the text that would later be the basis of The Peace. He was far from assured about Germany's military dominance, and the date of the diary entry reflects the impact of the Russian counteroffensives in the early part of 1942. As an informed observer of military strategy, he witnessed the invasion of the Soviet Union with foreboding. In 1941, as the promising spring campaign was turned into a stall by the harsh Russian winter, he couldn't help but foresee a repeat of Napoleon's defeat. Operation Barbarossa depended on a lightning victory as Hitler had not built up enough strategic resources for a long campaign. Jünger must have been aware, as were Jodl and others who have written down how they thought at the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, that the immobilization of the German army in subfreezing temperatures at Moscow in December 1941 led to the first realization of probable defeat. 24 Moreover, the later revisions to the text from the summer of 1943 include comments on the death camps and the Stauffenberg conspiracy, information Jünger obtained only Elfter the German defeat at Stalingrad. 25 The Peace addresses the consequences of that defeat and Germany's place in the new European order to be established after the end of hostilities. In spite of his assertions that The Peace was not a result of impending defeat, Jünger confirmed as much in an interview given to Jean-Pierre Chartier in 23. Ibid., 15. 24. J. P. Stern argues that as early as the winter o f 1 9 4 1 - 4 2 a n d as late as the e n d o f 1942 even Hitler "knew the war was lost." T h e e v i d e n c e f o r this assertion is contradictory, b u t the many m e m o i r s o f the generals a n d their c o m m e n t s at N u r e m b e r g support the view that d e f e a t was very m u c h in the air by early 1942, a year b e f o r e the d e f e a t o f Stalingrad. See Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People, 2nd. ed. (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988), 2 2 1 . 25. A c c o r d i n g to J ü n g e r ' s diary entries, h e b e g a n w o r k i n g o n the revisions o n July 27, 1943, a n d c o m p l e t e d t h e m o n N o v e m b e r 9, 1 9 4 3 . A copy o f o n e o f the illegal typescripts that circulated at the e n d o f the war is in the M a r b a c h archive. T h e tide p a g e contains the line, in parentheses, "written in the last weeks o f the war" (Geschrieben in den letzten Wochen des Krieges). See letter a n d typescript f r o m Dr. W o l f g a n g H e r z o g , A: J ü n g e r , 3b, D L A M .

128

T H E PEN A N D T H E S W O R D

1 9 8 1 , u p o n the occasion o f the first French edition o f Jünger's collected World War T w o diaries. R e s p o n d i n g to a question a b o u t how the officers o f the g e n e r a l staff in Paris viewed the war, J ü n g e r replied: "We believed that it was impossible for Hitler to make peace. It was easy to foresee the entry o f A m e r i c a a n d other countries into the war. T h a t m e a n t it couldn't g o well f o r very long. T h a t was clear soon after 1940." 2 6 J ü n g e r a n d the Stülpnagel circle h o p e d f o r s o m e way o f avoiding the c o n s e q u e n c e s o f an u n c o n d i t i o n a l surrender. If Hitler c o u l d b e disempowered, but n o t necessarily killed, then the party a n d the army m i g h t b e able to j o i n in f o r g i n g internal stability, followed by a truce a n d bilateral negotiations with the Allied forces. A s J ü n g e r wrote years later to A l f r e d T ö p f e r : The circle around Stülpnagel, men of the July 20 [conspiracy] like Goerdeler, Beck, Jessen, Popitz, and Schulenberg, thought about tackling the problem from the west: after a successful internal coup, first a truce and then dissolution of the conflicts, of course with considerable losses. Both conservative and liberal forces occupied themselves with these plans. They thought that an agreement would be possible once the stumbling block was removed, that is, once Hitler and his party were removed from power. The east solution was more radical; it presupposed defeat. 27 T h e s e c o m m e n t s indicate that J ü n g e r was b o t h sympathetic to "the resistance" while searching f o r a solution to avoid total defeat. H e t h o u g h t the best solution w o u l d b e a draw: the neutralization o f the party a n d then negotiations with the Allies f r o m a position o f strength. JLJNGER'S INTERPRETATION OF T H E CAUSES OF NAZISM T h e spectrum representing the ideas o f the G e r m a n Resistance r e a c h e d f r o m the Socialist D e m o c r a t s Julius L e b e r a n d W i l h e l m L e u s c h n e r o n the left to the corporatist, clerical antiparliamentarian J o h a n n e s Popitz o n the right and i n c l u d e d many shades o f o p i n i o n in between. 2 8 From an ideological p o i n t o f view, The Peace d o e s n o t fit well into this left-right spectrum. T h e central critique o f the b o o k is a i m e d at the supposedly nefarious nature o f n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y politics, which, w h e t h e r progressive or regressive, reflected technocratic reason a n d disregarded the welfare o f humanity:

26. Jean Pierre Chartier, "Entretien avec ErnstJünger ä Nice," trans. Ulrich Schwarz, photocopy in Sammlung Jünger: Tagebücher, DLAM. 27. Ernst Jünger, "Ausgehend vom Brümmerhof," S W 1 4 , 125. 28. See Hoffman, German Resistance, 6 1 - 7 0 . T h e Prussian state secretary, Popitz, executed on February 2, 1945, for his role in the resistance, was close to Carl Schmitt, whom he introduced in 1929 to the "Deutsche Gesellschaft" where high ranking bureaucrats and national conservative thinkers met in the Weimar period. Many of Schmitt's ideas on the Ausnahmezustand can be traced to Popitz's inspiration. See Paul Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1993), 102-107.

L A S T K N I G H T S OF T H E M A J E S T I C

129

In the hothouse of war and civil war, the great theories of the past century bore fruit as they were applied in practice. Now it became clear that irrespective of whether they heralded the equality or inequality of man, they had invented cold-blooded reasoning. The yardstick of theory was applied to individuals, to races, to peoples. As always in such cases, the thirst for blood soon passed all measure once the first victim fell. 29

For Jünger the core of the problem was the rise of nationalist ideologies, borrowing Spengler's phrase, "the red and white terror," 30 which could not be contained by the democracies established in the wake of World War I. In his view, these nation-states would be replaced in the post-World War II era by new empires. He prophesied a drive toward greater units, particularly a united Europe, as a necessary outcome of the war. On the surface, there is little that is new or particularly controversial in these arguments. Like many others, Jünger foresaw that Europe's only chance of economic and political recovery lay in extensive integration and unity. The contention that the source of the two world wars lay in the rise of mass nationalistic ideologies was a standard conservative argument that can be found, for example, in Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe of 1946. 31 The stress on unity, authority, and "organic" freedom seemed to favor the national liberal principles of the Bismarckian state extended to Europe. In effect, this meant a combination of the "authoritarian and liberal state," the latter appropriate where "men and things can be organized technically" and freedom is possible "where the organic processes are the rule." 32 Essentially the state must possess wide powers to run society like an army. Only within the strong shell of the state, he argues, does there exist room for freedom. Jünger did not have in mind the freedom of more democratic political institutions, which historically are often crushed by strong states, or even the protection of individual rights. Quite the contrary; "organic" freedom meant liberty informed by custom, rule, and habit. Perhaps mirroring his own political development, Jünger recasts the worker as a deradicalized subject, reconciled to history: "At the same time the figure of the Worker, losing its titanic cast, will reveal new aspects of itself—then it will be seen what relation it bears to tradition, creation, happiness, and religion." 33 The way Jünger uses the word peace does not simply connote the opposite of war. In a letter to Alfred Toepfer, he later argued that since there 29. Jünger, The Peace, SW 7, 200. 30. Ibid., 27. See also Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung (Munich: Beck, 1933). 3 1 . Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Boston: Beacon, 1950). Originally published in German in 1946. 32. Jünger, ThePeace, S W 7 , 224. 33. Ibid., 222.

Jjo

T H E PEN A N D T H E S W O R D

were n o longer real wars in the modern world, perhaps there was also no possibility of genuine peace but only of "power dressed up in a phrase." 3 4 Both the fascist and Bolshevist version of the worker had failed as social experiments (I take this to be the meaning of "lost its titanic cast" in the quote directly above), leading to a period of European cultural deterioration. Although Jünger gives lip service to the energy that will be liberated for creative pursuits, it is clear that the era of peace is a kind of s t a g n a t i o n — t h e "angry torrent has hollowed out the bed in which peaceful waters run" (222). T h e "angry torrent" refers to historical forces that led to civil wars and revolutions. Now all nations must benefit from the peace. This is the core of the argument in The Peace, the equal distribution or, one might say, the "socialization" of war guilt, "We have seen the victims of this war. To their somber ranks all nations added their contingent. All shared the suffering and, therefore, the peace must bear fruit for them all. That is, this war must be won by all." 35 In this essay, Jünger repeatedly shifted the point of perspective on the war from a consideration of German history to a set of diffuse, metahistorical observations. T h e "dark rumors" of bloody atrocities turned out to be true and will remain a "blot on our century" for a long time. 36 He discussed at length the expansion of technology and the accompanying increase in destructiveness brought about by wars ( 2 1 2 - 2 1 3 ) . H e harped repeatedly on the failure of the League of Nations and the harsh terms imposed upon Germany by the Versailles Treaty ( 2 1 5 - 2 1 8 ) . T h e victors, he warned, should not take revenge on the vanquished. Jünger was horrified by the thought that the Allies would repeat the mistakes of 1 9 1 8 and saddle Germany with another war guilt clause, which would only lead to "outbursts of vengeance on the part of the oppressed" (219). Invoking a great-men-of-history argument, the essay also exhorts "world historical figures" to live up to their own ideals. Jünger offers the examples of Napoleon "spreading the seed, but not reaping the crops" and President Wilson's failure to make the world safe for democracy in 1918. In this way

34. Ernst Jünger, "Ausgehend vom Brümmerhof," (March 28, 1974), in SW 14, 128. 35. Ibid., The Peace, SW 7, 207. It is unclear how much Jünger was influenced by the Christian-existentialist revival, Karl Barth in Germany or Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, and even Albert Camus in France. It is significant that a number of French intellectuals drew the same conclusion about original sin and war guilt around the same period Jünger was contemplating The Peace. In 1944, for example, the resistance fighter Marguerite Duras wrote in her diary that "the only possible answer to this crime is to turn it into a crime committed by everyone." See M. Duras, The War: A Memoir, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Free Press, 1986), 50. But this sentiment was motivated by an arguably misguided humanist ideal, rather than by the idea that all nations were "equally" victims. 36. The Peace, 200, my emphasis: "Das wird für ferne Zeiten ein Schandfleck unseres Jahrhunderts bleiben."

L A S T KNIGHTS OF THE MAJESTIC

131

history is represented as a valley of tears and all of mankind as equal subjects of suffering—the line between victim and victimized being erased in the process.

In 1918 the apocalyptic vision of the decline of the West, or the advent of the "postbourgeois worker" in Jünger's language, heralded for the European right an explosive transformation of European society, indeterminate but radical in consequence. In Jünger's post-1945 apocalyptic mood, however, history is not progressing anywhere. The Peace entails a kind of cultural stagnation with historical subjects living off the accumulations of the past. The rhetorical climax of The Peace was a flight backward into the language of salvation. Reflecting neo-Christian concerns with original sin and the collective guilt of mankind, Jünger had turned to a systematic study of the Bible during the war years, and his writing in the 1940s reflected very transparently the influence of the Bible on his intellectual horizon. Not surprisingly, the Christian intellectual community hailed Jünger as a convert and a witness. As we shall see, they were disappointed when the elusive writer soon left his Christian phase behind him. In The Peace he openly repented his previous attachment to a secular, godless worldview. His disappointment with the aims of the conservative revolution was thereby projected onto "everyone," an anonymous historical subject: "If the struggle against nihilism is to succeed, it must be fought out in the heart of each one of us. Everyone shared in the guilt, and there is no one who did not stand in need of the healing powers which are to be found in the realms of suffering." 37 It is interesting that the formerly reclusive writer now clamors for a public role. The book is addressed to the "youth of Europe." In the closing parts of the essay, Jünger recommends a return to the safe harbor of the church. Theology should be elevated to its former status as queen of the sciences. The string of platitudes at the conclusion of the book finds a parallel in The German Catastrophe, where Meinecke suggested that Germans establish "Goethe societies" and return to a study of the classics in order to attain spiritual renewal. 38 The Peace did, in fact, signal a significant shift in Jünger's intellectual development or at least a softening of Jünger's worldview.39 The humanistic turn puzzled many of Jünger's early admirers who regarded his latest writings as a recantation of his prewar beliefs. In a letter to Armin Möhler, Jünger 37. Jünger, The Peace, .SW 7, 228-229. 38. Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, 1 1 5 IF. 39. At least if we can take Ernst Niekisch's word for it in Gewagtes Leben: "In his letters to me Jünger distanced himself from his "Peace" and attempted to explain it by pointing to the situation of the moment in which it originated" ( 1 9 1 ) .

I32

T H E PEN A N D T H E SWORD

tried to harmonize the seeming contradictions by invoking the metaphors of the Old and the New Testament: The more cards that are turned over, the clearer will become the meaning of the pages which lie open. Even the most familiar things can change their meaning, as the Old Testament gains in significance through the addition of the New. I am of the opinion, therefore, that two texts like "The Peace" and "The Total Mobilization" not only do not contradict each other, but that they deepen and elevate each other by dint of the fact that they were written by the same pen.40

To compare his writings to the Holy scripture was hubristic. Beyond that, the metaphor of the Old and the New Testament strikes one as a strange contrast. In what way does writing from one pen solve apparent contradictions in style and content? Why was it so important for Jünger to have his oeuvre regarded as a seamless whole? DECODING THE PEACE Part of the answer to these questions lies in Jünger's initial sensitivity to his critics (he became increasingly indifferent to them in his later years). In 1949 Jünger spoke of the vindictive attempts to see The Peace as a consequence of Germany's defeat. 41 He may have been reacting to the sorts of vociferous attacks launched by the Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Harich in 1946 in the flagship periodical of the East German Communist party, DerAuflau. Harich taught at the Humboldt University and was a rising star in the agitprop office of the Soviet occupiers. Harich had the kind of checkered past that made Jünger and his defenders see red, literally, and the critique remained a sore spot for decades. 42 The young Harich had fished for salvation in the muddy waters of Weimar's religious and political ideologies. As a philosophy student in the Third Reich, he converted to Buddhism and then to Catholicism before becoming in-

40. Ernst Jünger to Armin Möhler, February 17, 1947, PAM. Jünger also applied the terminology "Old" and "New" Testament in a letter from Paris to Edgar Traugott on September 2 1 , 1942, quoted in Schwilk, Ernst Jünger: Leben und Werk, 187. 4 1 . Jünger, Strahlungen II, SW 2, 17. 42. The evidence comes from Heiner Müller who was also a target of Harich's ideological penwork. The common enemy, as Müller describes Harich, provided common ground for the seemingly unlikely combination of the star of the East German intellectual scene and Jünger, culminating in a visit in 1988. In his autobiography, Müller relates how deeply hurt (besonders betroffen) Jünger was by Harich's polemics, forty years later! See Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen, 2nd exp. ed. (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 276. Jünger and Müller share a common penchant for nihilism, anarchy, and anti-humanism or, as Müller writes, "We are both lovers of the catastrophe" (Katastrophenliebhaber), 2 8 1 .

L A S T K N I G H T S OF T H E MAJESTIC

733

volved in politics. He worked initially in Ribbentrop's foreign ministry on German-Japanese relations, saw action on the eastern front but deserted, then was arrested but escaped execution only because of family connections with top brass in the military. In 1946 he became a fervent convert to Marxist-Leninism and rose rapidly in the SED party hierarchy, receiving a professorship at the age of twenty-six. Harich questioned Jünger's claim to be able to speak for Germany from a higher moral vantage point. He attributed the popularity and acceptance of the ideas of The Peace to the rhetorical strategy of folding responsibility for the war into an undifferentiated whole: 'Jünger sinks German guilt in a mystical world guilt." 43 Harich pioneered a method used by many of Jünger's later critics, constructing a word collage from his nationalist phase, intended to establish a link to the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic. 44 For Harich, Jünger was an irrational antihumanist whose Weltanschauung was a "declaration of the irresponsible and carefree lifestyle of the soldier, and a cynical affirmation of war for its own sake" (560). Harich admitted that Jünger was neither a Nazi nor a demagogue for the masses. Far worse in his eyes, Jünger invoked the kind of language that made fascism seem acceptable to intellectuals. While the Nazis played on people's lower instincts, Jünger was a "fatal challenge for many German intellectuals who turned away from human progress" (560). Harich warned that Jünger's distaste for the Nazis could be misinterpreted, since it could be explained by elitist prejudice, similar to the distance from the masses cultivated by the likes of Moeller van den Bruck and Stefan George. His snobbism, rather than a real rejection of the ideas behind Nazism, kept him immune to the barbarous politics of the Third Reich. Harich was particularly repelled by Jünger's characterization of Bolshevism and fascism as children of European nihilism. From a Cold-War and Marxist point of view, The Peace seemed nothing more than an attempt to bolster anti-Bolshevism in order to cloud the issues of guilt and responsibility and rehabilitate Germany in the eyes of the West. For East German intellectuals, Jünger was just as guilty as the big industrialists, financiers, and reactionary Wehrmacht officers in bringing down the Weimar Republic and helping Hitler to power. In 1950 Karl Raddatz published a thin volume entitled Gravediggers of Germany, in which Jünger is portrayed as one of the many ex-Nazis who managed to climb their way back into power and prominence in Adenauer's West Germany, among

43. Wolfgang Harich, "Ernst Jünger und der Frieden," Auflau 1 (1946): 565. 44. See "Für Stalin und für Dich," Der Spiegel, January 5, 1950, 11.

1^4

T H E PEN AND T H E SWORD

them Friedrich Flick, Heinz Guderian, Alfred Hugenberg, Franz von Pappen, Hugo Stinnes, and Fritz Thyssen.45 For Raddatz, Jünger's war books provided the National Socialists with the "indispensable ideological weapons to prepare and carry out the Second World War."46 The liberal and conservative press in occupied Germany was deeply split on the Jünger question and gave considerable space to weighing the pros and cons of the case in light of The Peace and the prohibition placed on Jünger's writings. Typically, an avalanche of critical voices would be followed by waves of apologies, which then provoked renewed attacks on Jünger, creating a vicious cycle of strikes and counterstrikes.47 The history of German cultural politics suggests that whereas other Europeans identify strongly with state symbols, such as flags, holidays, or national hymns, Germans tend to invest more patriotic energy in their cultural figures. For example, in 1949 Goethe's two-hundredth birthday served as a rallying point for reconstituting German identity in the vacuum left by Nazi cultural politics. The postwar discussion ofJünger also became a political rather than purely literary controversy. The first set of debates concerned the question of how to understand Jünger's "conversion" from militant nationalist to universalist philosopher with theological and humanitarian overtones. Jünger's motives for abandoning nationalism were questioned, as was his ideological position in relation to the fledgling democracy of West Germany. In the early postwar years Jünger's independence brought him a measure of respect. He responded to the blacklist by moving in 1948 to Ravensburg, located in the French Zone, where he was treated with considerable sympathy.48 Making a taboo ofJünger's works aroused people's curiosity, and as the Swiss newspaper Die Tat commented, German youth, in the search for a new world, were particularly attracted to Jünger's universalistic meditations.49 45. Karl Raddatz, Totengräber Deutschlands (Berlin-Potsdam: W N Verlag, 1950). 46. Ibid., 36. 47. See Norbert Dietka, Ernst Jünger nach 1945: Das Jünger Bild der bundesdeutschen Kritik, 1945-1985 (Frankfurt: Lang, 1987), 5 8 - 8 2 . 48. The French were more lenient, in many cases, to Nazi fellow travelers because they viewed the issue of collaboration in the mirror of their own experience of conflicting wartime loyalties. In France, the Communists had been ordered to collaborate with the fascists after the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and the French people, for the most part, supported Petain, the Vichy government, and its collaborationist policies, including the persecution of Jews. See Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1 9 8 1 ) ; see also Constantine Fitzgibbon, Denazification (London: Michael Joseph, 1969), 103 if; Stanley Hoffman, "Collaboration in France during World War II," Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (Sept. 1968): 3 7 5 - 3 9 5 49. "Die deutsche Diskussion um Ernst Jünger," Die Tat, April 3, 1948. This Swiss newspaper had nothing to do with the Berlin newspaper of the same name edited by Hans Zehrer in the 1920s and 1930s.

L A S T KNIGHTS OF T H E MAJESTIC

135

Jünger's conversion also reflected in a b r o a d e r sense the transformation o f most G e r m a n s f r o m militant nationalists to p e a c e m o n g e r s . T h e r e was a strong fear in G e r m a n y t h r o u g h o u t the late 1940s, climaxing in the eruption o f the K o r e a n War in 1950, that E u r o p e w o u l d b e thrown back into a military c o n f l i c t that w o u l d h u r t the G e r m a n s most. In this atmosphere, the editors o f the Hamburger Akademische Rundschau devoted several issues to the J ü n g e r controversy in 1 9 4 6 a n d 1 9 4 7 . O n e of the contributions was a collection o f editorials a n d readers' o p i n i o n s in w h i c h the c o m m e n t s f r o m m o r e than 100 newspapers a n d j o u r n a l s were scrutinized. A s was to b e expected, the reactions varied widely, a n d opinions were o f t e n v e h e m e n t a n d emotional. T h e introductory c o m m e n t o f the lead writer was significant, however, in that h e p o i n t e d to the role J ü n g e r played as an empty p a g e u p o n which the G e r m a n s were attempting to write a new script f o r themselves: In this dispute the issue is not so much Ernst Jünger as it is the German position in the world today. The author is merely a symbol, or a measure, by which one apparently tries to designate that type of German who seems best adapted to the domestic and foreign circumstances. The author recognized this himself when he wrote, "It is apparent to me that this whole back and forth has to do with an entirely different person than myself. This is a strange development." 50 In the debate initiated by the Hamburger Akademische Rundschau, the contributions critical o f J ü n g e r featured further sharp c o n d e m n a t i o n s of the author's past. In contrast to the Marxist view o f J ü n g e r as a figure representing capitalist cultural imperialism, 5 1 liberal a n d humanist intellectuals l a m e n t e d the loss o f E u r o p e a n , or abendländische (occidental) culture. Helm u t M u c h e , f o r e x a m p l e , p o i n t e d to Jünger's betrayal o f E u r o p e a n values a n d saddled h i m with contributing to Europe's downfall as the world's d o m inant political and cultural force. A c c o r d i n g to M u c h e , J ü n g e r was an antiE u r o p e a n , antirational w a r m o n g e r whose guilt lay in the fact that h e intentionally sought o u t war while the others h a d only stumbled into it. 52 M u c h e argued, as h a d Harich, that Jünger's antidemocratic ideas p r e p a r e d an entire g e n e r a t i o n for the c o m i n g o f National Socialism. H e was a h i n d r a n c e to c o m m o n E u r o p e a n values at the m o m e n t w h e n chauvinism was o n the rise, a n d only in the aftermath o f war did h e e m b r a c e E u r o p e a n unification. 5 3 T h e F r e n c h writer J. F. A n g e l l o z attacked The Peace f r o m a f o r e i g n perspective. Like M u c h e , he also questioned Jünger's "Europeanness," accus-

50. "Pressestimmen von 1946/47," Hamburger Akademische Rundschauno. 1 (1946/47): 446. 51. See Wolfgang Harich, "Abendland oder nationale Souveränität: Der Kosmopolitism u s — e i n e tödliche Gefahr für das deustche Volk," Neue Welt 75 (June 1947): 5 8 - 6 7 . See also Marsyas, "ErnstJünger als Erzieher," Aufbau 8 (July 1947): 1 3 3 - 1 3 5 . 52. Hamburger Akademische Rundschau 1 (12): 72. 53. Ibid., 74

73 6

T H E PEN A N D T H E S W O R D

ing him of insensitivity toward Germany's neighbors. Angelloz was offended by Jünger's aristocratic vocabulary, pointing to an instance in the war journals where Jünger called General Stülpnagel ritterlich (knightly). Angelloz found repugnant the fact that Stülpnagel had allowed countless Parisians to be shot (presumably Angelloz meant Otto von Stülpnagel, who was replaced by his cousin Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel in 1942). At issue here was also the extent to which the antiliberal, antidemocratic forces of Weimar's radical conservatives represented a threat in the current situation. Was Jünger presenting the same old heroic nihilism under cover of a deceptively mild rhetoric? An editorial from the Berliner Tagesspiegel captured this hermeneutics of suspicion pithily: "The Jünger of Storms of Steel has remained true to himself, one who replaces logical with emotional thinking. Jünger clouded the brains and then prepared the ground on which the essentially more primitive arguments of National Socialism could bear rich fruits." 54 The drama critic Paul Rilla judged summarily, "He proclaims the gospel of Auschwitz." 55 With the same resoluteness, the writer Wolfgang Weyrauch lashed out, "He is to blame that w e — w e and the others around us—almost were destroyed. He should remain silent forever." 56 Eugen GuersterSteinhausen, writing in the Neue Rundschau, declared Jünger to have been a "tool in the service of total mobilization" and added, "Sometimes the only difference between a sentence from Jünger and from Hitler is the latter's bad grammar." 57 Other critics were much more forgiving of Jünger and his past. Karl Korn, who would later take over the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (and who had his own dubious past as feuilleton editor of the Nazi and aristocratically fascist, cultural weekly, Das Reich) ,58 responded directly to Harich's critique. Korn admitted that Jünger had not cut himself completely free from the "mystique of the trench fighter" but claimed that The Peace squarely faced the subject of German guilt and proved that Jünger had entered into a new phase in his literary career, an overcoming of his previous nihilism.59 Like Korn, Jünger's defenders emphasized the author's con-

54. "Im Schaufenster," Der Tagesspiegel, November 16, 1946. 55. Paul Rilla, "Der Fall Jünger,"Dii Weltbühne 1 (1946). 56. Wolfgang Weyrauch: "40 Meinungen über Ernst Jünger," Hamburger Akademische Rundschau 1, no. 10 (1946/7): 4 4 7 - 4 5 0 . 57. Eugen Guerster-Steinhausen, "Emst Jünger: der Prophet des deutschen Nationalismus," Die Neue Rundschau 56/57, no. 2 (January 1946): 238—245. 58. See Norbert Frei and Johannes Schmitz, Journalismus im dritten Reich (Munich: Beck, 198g), m , 113, and passim. 59. Karl Korn, "Ist Jünger ein hoffnungsloser Fall?" Der Kurier, June 6, 1946.

L A S T KNIGHTS OF T H E MAJESTIC

137

version and his "European stature," pointing to the esteem Jünger enjoyed in countries like France.60 Writing in the left-Catholic Frankfurter Hefte, Gottfried Stein conceded that it would be impossible to locate Jünger in the enlightened German tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Goethe. He preferred to view his work as inspired by the romantic and "metaphysically religious" example of Hamann, Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and French Romantics and mystics like Georges Bernanos and Leon Bloy. Sounding a recurrent theme, Stein argued that Jüngers recent writings could help in Germany's "spiritual and moral regeneration." 61 From abroad, Karl O. Paetel, Louis Clair (pseudonym of Lewis Coser), Max Fischer, and other exiled Germans were advancing similar arguments, concerned about the negative image of the German people in the United States. In the American translation of The Peace, dating from 1947, Coser wrote in the introduction: "It is high time that the moral insanity that gripped America during and after the war in relation to everything German—that blind hate which was spread by the Emil Ludwigs, the Morgenthaus, and the Vansittards—gives way to a more rational attitude in regard to what is often arrogantly called the 'German Problem.'" 62 For Coser, Jünger represented the "good European" who could teach the Americans that world peace would be achieved when hatred of the enemy is overcome and the nations of the world worked together. At the same time in the New Yorker Staatszeitung, Max Fischer presented Jünger as a convert from warrior to peacemaker, tracing his conversion back to the publication of The Marble Cliffs in 1939. 63 In another German-American newspaper, the conservative Sonntagsblatt, Friedrich Karl Richter was annoyed that the focus remained on Jünger's "militaristic Prussian past," concluding that the campaign against the German writer must have been coordinated by the East German Communists under Soviet influence. 64 The debates revolving around the publication of The Peace can now be

60. Jean Dudre,"Ein guter Europäer: Ernst Jünger von Frankreich aus gesehen," Der Kurier, May 1 2 , 1 9 4 7 . For other positive responses, see Hans Georg Opitz, "ErnstJünger: Eine Deutsche Position," Der Fortschritt, May 1947; Heinz Weniger, "Der Fall Jünger: Eine Diskussion," Rheinische Zeitung, Dec. 6, 1947; Hans Jürgen Baden, "Ernst Jünger's geistige Wandlung," Die Welt, Dec. 16, 1949; Robert Dvorak, "Von der Metaphysik zur Theologie," FAZ, Jan. 28, 1950; and Reimar Hollman, "Philosophie der Kraft: Bemerkungen zum Fall Ernst Jünger," Hannoversche Allgemeine, Nov. 3, 1949. 6t. Gottfried Stein, "Ernstjünger," Frankfurter Hefte 3, no. 1 (January i g 4 8 ) : 4 4 8 - 4 4 g , 4 5 2 . 62. Ernst Jünger, The Peace, introduction. 63. MaxFischer, "Heute erscheinen Jüngers Gedanken über den Frieden, "New YorkerStaatszeitung, June 22, 1948. 64. F. K. Richter, "Erneuter Streit um Ernst Jünger," Das Sonntagsblatt des Deutschtums in Amerika, August 8, 1947.

Ij8

T H E PEN A N D T H E S W O R D

seen as a prelude to the more extensive controversies initiated by the publication of the first parts of Jünger's war journal in 1949. By then, Jünger had reestablished himself, along with Gottfried Benn, as one of the most important, and most disputed, contemporary authors in Germany. 65 The escalation of the rhetoric concerning Jünger and the significance of Nazism and the war will be the focus of the next chapter. 65. Lianne Dornheim comes to the conclusion that Jünger's fame at first depended on the propagandistic efforts of his sycophants, like Paetel, Becher, and Hohoff. This point has been elaborated above, beyond Dornheim's reliance on secondary sources, in the chapter on Jünger's inner circle. But Dornheim tends to regard Jünger's fame, tout court, as a plot by his supporters. My own view is that the recognition was genuine, though impelled by a mixture of curiosity, disconcertedness, and other factors as well as pure adulation. She grudgingly admits "that this author would come to be regarded as such an important writer in the 1950s and 1960s becomes evident by his inclusion in the literary canon of the historians of literature as well as the interest shown by Gymnasium teachers and literary critics" (Vergleichende Rezeptionsgeschichte, 187).

Figure l. The French Legionnaire, 1 9 1 3 .

Figure 2. Rear: Junger (with medals) and his mother. Front: Junger's siblings from left to right: Wolfgang, Hanna, Friedrich Georg.

Figure 3. Back of dust j a c k e t of Storms of Steel (1920).

Figure 4. J ü n g e r on lead horse, Paris, 1 9 4 1 .

t

Figure 5. With Colonel Wildermuth on roof of Hotel Raphael, 1942.

Figure 6.I. With C a r l Schmitt by the Seine, 1942.

Figure 7. In the library at home in Wilflingen, 1 9 5 5 .

Figure 8. In Agadir with snake charmer, 1 9 7 7 .

Figure 9. Receiving the Goethe-Prize, 1982.

Figure 10. With Mitterand and Kohl at Verdun, September 1984.

Figure i a. Jünger with his wife, Liselotte.

CHAPTER FIVE

The View from Above Logs from a Sinking Ship

Jünger's war diaries consisted of five separate books. The first, Gärten und Strassen (Gardens and streets),1 was published in 1942, but a year later the work was placed on the index of forbidden books because Jünger had refused to withdraw a passage deemed offensive by the Nazi censor. 2 This diary covered the period from April 3, 1939, as Jünger was writing The Marble Cliffs, to July 24, 1940, when the German march through France ended and Jünger took up duties censoring mail for the military administration of occupied Paris. The second and third books, Das Pariser Tagebuch (The Paris diary) and Kaukasische Aufzeichnungen (Caucasian sketches), cover the period of time Jünger stayed in Paris, including a trip to the German front in the Caucasus. This period ended in August 1944 in the aftermath of the failed July 20 coup when Jünger was ordered to return to Germany. These three books were published together under the title Strahlungen (Reflections or Radiations) in 1949 by the Heliopolis publishing house in Tübingen. Strahlungen, or emanations of light, evoke a number of different images, from the radioactive flash at Hiroshima to magic lanterns.3 1. Hereafter cited as Gardens and Streets. 2. T h e contentious passage is Jünger's citation of Psalm 73; Strahlungen, 1 , 1 1 6 (March 29, 1940). Jünger was not actually persecuted for refusing to cut the passage, as he liked to claim; rather the publisher was granted no paper to print the work, and it quietly disappeared from the shelves and soldiers' pockets. No effort was made, however, to hinder the circulation of those copies already in print. 3. T h e translation of Strahlungen suggested by Bruce Chatwin is "Reflections" in the sense that the writer collects particles of light and reflects them onto the reader. In "An Aesthete at War," New York Review of Books, March 5, 1981, 2 2 - 2 3 , K- L. Tank speculated that Jünger was inspired by the "dawn of the age of radioactive bombs." See "Rutengänger und Realist," Sonntagsblatt, June 5, 1955. Nevin thinks the emanations of light are reminiscent of one of

139

140

T H E VIEW FROM A B O V E

T h e war diaries constitutedJünger's first publication in the budding Federal Republic. T h e final books, Kirchhorster Blätter (Pages from Kirchhorst) and Die Hütte im Weinberg (The cottage in Weinberg), weren't published until 1958. T h e y were published together under the title Jahre der Okkupation (The occupation years) and picked up the thread where Jünger had left it in the summer of 1944, ending in December 1948, half a year before the three western zones were united. Jünger's journals represented a departure from the conventional form of the diary genre. Instead of offering the reader unadulterated glimpses into the everyday activities and reflections of the author, Jünger used his private experiences as raw material for creating polished literary accounts in the guise of everyday observations. 4 T h o u g h the writing seems intensely personal, the author carefully avoids revealing any emotions, doubts, fears, or anxieties, the kind of confessional elements one would expect. T h e result is a highly stylized, somewhat stiff, and at times pompous form of autobiography that has been called "anti-Rousseauian" since the author's emotions become detached from the surface narrative. 5 Jünger had begun this practice of eliminating interiority as early as the 19 2 os, as he constantly reworked Storms of Steel and wrote War as an Inner Experience, which carefully avoids treating his subjective experiences. In six consecutive editions of Storms of Steel in the 1920s, Jünger systematically expunged the stylistically weak or revealing passages written in his youth and added entirely new material. 6 T h e final version of The Adventurous Heart was also a depersonalized version of the first edition (1929), which the author removed from circulation because he deemed it too autobiographical. T h e 1938 version can only loosely be called a diary; it is based primarily on the author's zoological investigations, which are transformed into dream sequences and surrealistic descriptions of natural objects and occurrences. In Jünger's diaries from the Second World War, this method of "magical realism," as some have called it, became more fully developed. 7 According to Jünger's own assessment, magical realism followed the lead of expres-

Jünger's favorite toys, a magic lantern (Into the Abyss, 173). Marcus Bullock suggests "radiations" in A Violent Eye, 22. 4. Hans Lehmann saw in Jünger's diaries "eine neue Gattung des Tagebuches entstehen" (a new species of the diary emerge) in Jahre der Okkupation, Das Parlament, 24, June 6, 1959. 5. Hubert Winkels, "Nichts über Zweifel und Abgründe," Zürich Tages-Anzeiger, March 28, 1995,80. 6. See Gerhard Loose, Ernst Jünger: Gestalt und Werk (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957), 2 0 56. For Loose, Jünger's diaries are so detached from the original experience that he calls them a sort of "Bildungsroman" (32 f f ) . 7. See Volker Katzmann, Ernst Jünger's Magischer Realismus (Hildesheim: Olms, 1975). The term "magical realism" was used in the 1920s to describe the works of Otto Dix, Georg Schrimpf,

L O G S FROM A SINKING SHIP

141

sionism in attempting to restore the pictorialness (Bildhaftigkeit) o f words. T h e aim was to represent the metaphysical essence or d e e p e r reality o f the p h e n o m e n a l world. H e called this g e n r e "postexpressionist." 8 T h e c h r o n o logical, g e o g r a p h i c a l , a n d biographical observations in these j o u r n a l s are designed to be, in Jünger's phrase, "stereoscopic," c o m b i n i n g the lens o f exact empirical observation with a s e c o n d o n e o f magical associations that purports to provide a d e e p e r , three-dimensional reality. 9 W o l f g a n g K a e m p f e r sees the origin o fJünger's version o f magical realism in an inversion o f romanticism, a turning away f r o m the unbeautiful present, by inserting the d r e a m state into reality rather than by turning reality into a dream. A c c o r d i n g to K a e m p f e r , this explains Jünger's coldness to the horrors o f war a n d suffering. 1 0 Ferdinand Staehlin has also stressed the romantic side o f Jünger's literary imagination. H e sees Novalis, in particular, as a t r e m e n d o u s i n f l u e n c e o n Jünger's treatment o f death, pain, memory, dreams, a n d mythology. 1 1 T h e so-called "stereoscopic" effect renders the diaries highly c o m p l e x historical documents. In Gardens and Streets, f o r e x a m p l e , Jünger's metaphysical imagination takes the French landscape, p e o p l e , a n d customs as opportunities f o r symbolic reflection. T h e dual reality o f natural objects, as p h e n o m e n a a n d as i n n e r essences, gives Jünger's writings a metaphysical quality. 12 External descriptions o f things are o f t e n a c c o m p a n i e d by imaginative descriptions c o m b i n e d with philosophical assertions, as in the following e x a m p l e , which I q u o t e at length because it is typical o f how J ü n g e r can turn a p i e c e of j u n k into a metaphysical allegory o f the world's secrets: The zinc oven I burned in the reed hut was made from shabby metal. The heat heightened its color into a very beautiful transparent red. According to this model, things and life hide qualities undisclosed to us in everyday l i f e . . . . Life

A l e x a n d e r Kanoldt, and Franz Radiscwil. It was applied to Jünger's literary production in a lecture by L e o n a r d Forster in 1949. 8. In a letter to Plard, Jünger wrote, "My own transition f r o m expressionism to magical realism occurred with the new edition of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1938). T h e transition was anticipated long before with the 'Sizilischer Brief an d e n Mann im M o n d ' (1930). Postexpressionism (Nachexpressionismus) is a g o o d word for it" (Jünger to Plard, J u n e 1, 1 g8o, PAP). 9. Set out programmatically in Jünger's essay "Sizilischer Brief an d e n Mann im Mond," in SW9, 1 1-22. to. Wolfgang Kaempfer, "Ernst Jüngers romantisches Erbe: B e m e r k u n g e n zu einem vernachlässigten Aspekt seines Werkes," Recherches Germaniques 17 (1987): 8 5 - 9 2 . 11. F. Stählin, "Ernst J ü n g e r u n d Novalis oder die Wirklichkeit der Träume," Muttersprache 2 (1949): 1 0 3 - 1 1 9 . 12. Jünger o n c e clarified his use o f the word "metaphysical": "What do I understand by metaphysical power (metaphysische Macht)? Surely it is the inner reality that extends beyond the exterior reality. That author possesses metaphysical power w h o can see through and b e y o n d quotidian reality and can express this in words" (Fussenegger, "Der schöpferische Augenblick," SZ, March 30/31, 1985).

142

T H E VIEW FROM ABOVE

has its springtime blossom wonders that are hard to imagine if one considers only the leaves. The higher potential can unfold in the members, pieces, or levels—in the splendorous beauty of the male birds and insects or in the bosom of a woman. 13

The most enduring feature of Jünger's metaphysical writing is an often observed personal emotional absence in the presence of events. The following example shows how the devastation of a French town by the German army becomes a bacchanalian spectacle in Jünger's eyes: Through Bouillon, which looks out over an old fortress. In the middle of the city, shattered houses, flung-down trains, particularly around the old bridge in the center of town. I sent Rehm on bike to check on the springs. He came back with a bottle of burgundy . . . the whole road of advance is littered with champagne, bordeaux, and burgundy bottles. . . . That certainly also has its tradition in French campaigns. Every invasion by a German army is accompanied by drinking bouts, just like those of the gods in the Edda, for whom no reserves were enough. 1 4

A fall inventory of the alcohol reserves in Paris bears out Jünger's observations: over forty-two million liters of Midi wine, eight hundred liters of Bordeaux, five million liters of cognac, and almost four million liters of rum. 15 The soldiers indulged in the proverbial spoils of war. The mood of the summer campaign and the fall occupation was almost festive on the German side. It was in that spring of 1941 that Jünger began writing his diary in Paris. D A N D Y IN B L A C K SHINY B O O T S

Following the armistice, the occupied zone in France was administered by the Military Command, whose offices were established at the Parisian Hotel Majestic, on Avenue de Kleber. Jünger enjoyed the protection and patronage of two high-ranking cultural connoisseurs, Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the commander of the occupying forces in France, and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, (later to become chief general of the Bundeswehr). At the beginning of 1942, Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel replaced his cousin, Otto von Stülpnagel, who had opposed the execution of hostages and other punitive measures against the French population ordered by Hitler. 16 Jünger assisted Speidel in the administrative section that dealt with army security and military justice. He had to sift through the daily correspondence of 13. Strahlungen, 1, 120 (April 7, 1940). 14. Ibid., 143 (May 26, 1940). 15. Cited by Nevin, Into the Abyss, 179. 16. See Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans. Janet Loyd (New York: New Press, 1996), 88.

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

143

German soldiers and their mail from home. Another administrative section, responsible for economic matters and the surveillance of Jews, was run by Jünger's friend Werner Best and Elmar Michel. There existed constant friction between the Military Command at Majestic and other services there that took orders directly from Berlin. Goebbels had established a propaganda section under Major Heinz Schmidtke and by the spring of 1942 Himmler had installed an SS apparatus of 5,000 men under Karl Oberg. Another important component in the machinery of occupation was the German Embassy, headed by Otto Abetz. His plan to integrate French businessmen and intellectuals in a net of collaboration enjoyed intermittent support from the Nazi hierarchy, but Hitler, in the end, wanted to crush France, not enlist its support. 17 In his spare time, which was apparently considerable, Jünger browsed through museums, enjoyed the architecture of the city, and went to galleries, antique shops, and bookstores. Every new book or art purchase was meticulously registered. The aura attached to objects that have weathered the ravages of time fascinated him. Besides collecting art and books, Jünger also nurtured contacts with famous writers and artists in Paris. In the salon of Marie-Louise Bousquet, a writer for Harper's Bazaar, he came into contact with "l'Hitlerisme Français,"18 with Drieu la Rochelle, 19 Marcel Jouhandeau, Paul Léautaud, and Henri de Montherlant. Jünger also knew Alfred FabreLuce, a supporter of the Pax Germanica.20 Jünger contributed several pieces, mostly from his World War I diaries, to Fabre-Luce's well-known collaborationist anthology. 21 But he was also a favored guest of the "Thursday salon" where the avant-garde met, particularly the one run by Florence Gould (alias Lady Orpington), the wife of Frank Jay Gould, a wealthy American businessman. 22 There Jünger rubbed shoulders with Jean Cocteau, Georges Braques, Pablo Picasso, Sacha Guitry, Julien Gracq, Paul Léautaud, and 17. Ibid., 8 9 - 9 7 . See also Eberhard Jäckel, Frankreich in Hitlers Europa: Die deutsche Frankreichpolitik im 2. Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1966). 18. See the collaborationist journal of Alfred Fabre Luce, Journal de laFrance, (March 1 9 3 9 July 1940), 175 fr. 19. The similarities ofJünger and Drieu 's social background, war experience, and ambiguous relationship to fascism have not been lost on observers. Drieu also was better treated than other collaborationist writers after the war because his writings were taken more seriously as good literature and because his political engagement vacillated between left and right. See Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre l'Histoire: Drieu la Rochelle, Ernst Jünger (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978)20. On Luce, see Pascal Ory, Les Collaborateurs: 1940-1945 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), 27, 160. 21. Alfred Fabre-Luce, Anthologie de la nouvelle Europe (Paris: Blon, 1942), ch. 8. 22. Ernst Jünger, "Postcriptum zu Paul Léautaud," in SW14, 383 ff. Jünger used the pseudonym "Lady Orphington" to hide an affair with her from his suspicious wife.

144

T H E

V I E W

FROM ABOVE

other luminaries, including Jean Paulhan, one of the founders of the resistance newspaper Lettres Frangaises.23 Jünger was also happy to be seen at the salon of Lucienne Didier, a Belgian sculptor. Her husband, Edouard Didier, in contact with Otto Abetz since 1933, had founded an association called Jeune Europe as a forum for Franco-German intellectual exchange. He introduced Jünger to Hendrik de Man, the famous Belgian neosocialist and collaborator. 24 T h e gathering at the Didiers' of progressive Catholics, socialists, and fascist sympathizers organized by Otto Abetz and Max Liebe contributed to what Thomas Fries calls the "unholy alliance of the first period of the occupation." 2 5 T h e warm reception of Jünger in leading French literary and artistic circles contrasts sharply with the experience of most German intellectuals in France, in particular when one considers the enormous difficulties faced by the German exile community in prewar France. T h e French academy closed its doors to German professors, and most exiles experienced a social cordon sanitaire. As Arthur Koestler wrote, "the great mass of refugees in France lived cut off from French contacts and led a kind of ghetto existence." 2 6 By contrast, Jünger consistently emphasized reciprocal and collegial admiration in his descriptions of encounters with the French haut monde, as in the following visit to Picasso's atelier: "First we looked downstairs at old papers and then we climbed up to the top floor. O f the pictures standing there I particularly liked two simple women's portraits. . . . We talked about painting and writing from memory as he looked at the pictures. Picasso asked about the real landscape behind The Marble Cliffs."2,7 A particularly unsettling aspect of Jünger's name-dropping and romps through the art and book world of Paris's cultural elite is the dissonance between his cultural exploits and the terrorization and starvation of Parisians under Nazi occupation. Beginning in the summer of 1942, the city was being plundered and Jews were deported. All of this is barely mentioned in the 500 pages of secret writings that cover the period while he was there. In one poignant passage, Jünger reveals how completely out of touch he was with the sufferings imposed on the French population by the occupation. O n August 18, 1942, he entered a stationery store and was greeted by the cold, spiteful stare of a young salesgirl behind the counter. He notes with surprise that the hatred in the girl's face might spread like a virus or a spark "that

23. Ernst J ü n g e r , " A u s g e h e n d v o m B r ü m m e r h o f , " in S W 1 4 , 1 2 7 . 24. H e n r i Plard, "Ernst J ü n g e r in Frankreich," Text & Zeichen 1 0 5 / 1 0 6 (Jan. 1990): 148. 25. See T h o m a s Fries, " P a u l d e Man's 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 4 2 Articles in C o n text,"in W e r n e r H a m a c h e r et al., Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism

(Lincoln: University o f Nebraska Press,

1 9 8 7 ) , 198. 26. Cited by Frederic V. G r u n f e l d , Prophets without Honour (New York: K o d a n s h a , 1 9 9 5 ) , 2 1 1 . 27. Strahlungen, 1 , 3 5 1 (July 22, 1 9 4 2 ) .

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

145

would take a lot of strength to put out inside oneself." 2 8 It seems never to have occurred to Jünger that the majority of the French people despised the Germans. It is true that Jünger allotted considerable space to ruminations about his distaste for Hitler and the Nazis. But he was ambivalent about his position vis-à-vis the other frondeurs. Even the way he characterized the members of the circle at the George V, "spiritual knights w h o meet in the belly of the Leviathan" (270), points to an act of distancing, of displacement into a medieval fantasy. Jünger kept his journal notes hidden in a locked safe in his room, but with Gestapo agents and informers crawling all over the Hotel Majestic, the project was not without considerable risks. In the diaries Hitler was always characterized as "Kniébolo " ( a word play on "diabolo "), for whom he had nothing but sneering contempt. A n d the Führer appeared menacingly in Jünger's dreams. 29 O n the eastern front, Jünger talked to officers w h o related stories of the brutal activities of the Einsatztruppen. In Paris he saw Jews being rounded u p and noted his displeasure. Like many others, he also heard of atrocities committed in the concentration camps. 30 T h o u g h shaken by these events, his detachment is evident. As m u c h as the barbarism of the Nazis was repulsive, he could not help but interpret the persecution of the Jews and others as part of a fated, cosmological scheme. Particularly in the last books of the war diaries, where Jünger contemplates the issue of German guilt, his stereoscopic vision searched for a metaphysical explanation. In the following passage, Jünger invokes a biblical image, rendering literal the meaning of "sacrificial" in the word holocaust: "Was our persecution the last birth pang before the appearance of the Second Messiah, the Paraclete, with whom the epoch of the spirit shall begin? It is impossible that such a sacrifice won't bear fruit." 31 Jünger's question is troublesome because it provides a metaphysical justification for the suffering of the Holocaust, a kind of theodicy that survivors have disavowed vigorously. 32 Jünger's interpretation of death as the sole authentic experience of life, indeed as having a higher reality than life, is an28. Strahlungen, 1, 368 (Aug. 18, 1942). 29. See, for example, the dream about Hitler's visit to his father's house, Strahlungen, 2 , 4 1 42 (April 16, 1943). 30. Bargatzky, who kept Jünger informed of the plans of the German resistance, wrote in his memoirs: "Then the actual tragedy, genocide, began. T h e French Jews were being transported to the east as well. Drancy and the camp at Compiègne became stopping points on the way to Auschwitz. It was the summer of 1942. But already before that we had received the news that the Jews were being killed, systematically and en masse" (Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic, 101). 31. Strahlungen, 2 , 4 1 5 (April 17, 1945). 32. See, for example, Primo Levi, "Letters from Germans," in The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 1 6 7 - 1 9 7 .

146

THE VIEW FROM ABOVE

o t h e r recurring topic in the war diaries. 3 3 T h e Nazi mass m u r d e r s interested h i m n o t so m u c h f r o m the p o i n t o f view o f the victims, but rather because o f the abstract historical significance o f the method applied in committing the crime. In a c o m m e n t a r y o n the concentration camps he n o t e d that death h a d b e c o m e standardized, m e c h a n i z e d , and sanitized, like everything in the technical world. 3 4 H e thereby linked the administration o f death to the general i m p o v e r i s h m e n t o f the " m o d e r n world." 3 5 In the final pages of the war diaries, J ü n g e r varied this t h e m e by a t t a c k i n g — a n d n o n e too s u b t l y — the thesis o f collective guilt. T h e engineers of the a t o m b o m b m a k e Tamerlane and his atrocities look absolutely royal since death b e c o m e s c h e a p e r a n d responsibility untraceable w h e n millions are killed. T h e advance o f t e c h n o l o g y brings with it a c o n c o m i t a n t i m p o v e r i s h m e n t o f the world, because rational calculation takes p r e c e d e n c e over the h i g h e r faculties o f the imagination. Finally, the collective guilt assertion is j u s t a mantle the Allies use to hide their real interests: " T h e thesis o f collective guilt has two strands that run together. For the d e f e a t e d it means, I have to stand in f o r my b r o t h e r a n d his guilt. It gives the victor an excuse f o r undifferentiated plundering. If the bow is pulled too tightly, the d a n g e r o u s question arises w h e t h e r the b r o t h e r was really so unjust." 3 6 STRAWBERRIES SWIMMING IN B U R G U N D Y Jünger's war diaries m e t twice with a critical reception; in 1 9 4 9 as the first three b o o k s were released a n d again in 1958 w h e n the postwar years were a d d e d to c o m p l e t e the collection. In 1949, with the rebuilding o f G e r m a n y j u s t underway, the debate s u r r o u n d i n g his writings f o c u s e d o n the question o f Jünger's suitability as a positive m o d e l f o r Germany's intellectual r e c o n struction. O n this subject many o f the intellectual exiles questioned the way J ü n g e r h a d tried to establish himself as a spokesman f o r G e r m a n culture, b e f o r e , during, a n d after the war. T h e writer Peter d e M e n d e l s s o h n , an émigré (and editor o f T h o m a s Mann's collected works), was o n e o f j ü n g e r ' s fiercest critics a m o n g the exiles. 3 7 H e m e t J ü n g e r d u r i n g a trip f r o m Ger-

33. Strahlungen, 1, 318, 322, 342, 355, 358; Strahlungen, 2, 401, 412, 422. 34. Strahlungen, 2, 448 (May 12, 1945). 35. There are no hints of anti-Semitism in any o f j ü n g e r ' s published writings after the Second World War. But after a thirty-year friendship, Jünger's translator Henri Plard broke off his relationship to the author because Jünger allegedly repeatedly defended Pierre Laval (Henri Plard, interview by author, March 7, 1990). 36. Strahlungen, 2, 510 (August 20, 1945). 37. T h e author Peter de Mendelssohn ( 1 9 0 8 - 1 9 7 2 ) , ajewish writer and journalist, lived in London during the Second World War and returned to Germany to play an important role in rebuilding a free German press. According to a letter in the DLAM, de Mendelssohn, the son of a worker, appears to have added the "de" to his name after the war (letter from the ed-

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

147

many to Switzerland and Italy in 1949 and soon after published a trenchant critique of the war diaries in the conservative cultural and political journal Der Monat.58 De Mendelssohn saw the author as a man soaking in his own vanity. Borrowing a term Hannah Arendt had used to describe Heidegger in the 1920s, he called Jünger the "secret king of German intellectual life." 39 De Mendelssohn applied the epithet to describe Jünger's aristocratic demeanor rather than any intellectual superiority. He didn't like Jünger's eagerness to show him the original manuscripts of his books, conspicuously bound in expensive French leather. He reported that Jünger avoided sensitive topics and quickly became impatient with probing questions. Reviewing Jünger's diaries, de Mendelssohn raised several important issues that would become routine accusations in the anti-Jünger literature. First, Jünger had written in the introduction to Strahlungen that his book could be conceived of as an "intellectual contribution to the war." De Mendelssohn argued that since Jünger could not have meant a contribution to the war itself, which was four years past, he must have meant an enlargement of our understanding of the war. But the personal nature of the book meant the writing was about Jünger, not the war; it celebrates, he added, "a triumph of irrelevancy."40 Jünger claimed to have lived in constant danger as part of the German occupation forces in Paris, but de Mendelssohn found no hard evidence that this was true. On the contrary, Jünger seems to have lived an extremely comfortable existence, spending much time in antiquarian bookshops and visiting artists and other writers: "a flaneur in the world of the pleasant and the beautiful"(i56). De Mendelssohn wondered how an army captain could have had enough money to buy expensive and rare editions of Latin works from the seventeenth century. He raised the issue of what Jünger was doing in the company of Hitler's and Goebbel's followers, men such as Drieu de la Rochelle, Henri de Montherlant, Paul Morand, Alain Benoist-Mechin, Marcel Deat, and a host of other fascist intellectuals.41 Though supposedly anti-Hitler, Jünger didn't give the slightest itor of the Berliner Tagesspiegel to General Hans Speidel, November 23, 1949, DLAM, Mappe Jünger 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 5 5 ) 38. Der Monat was one of a number of periodicals established all over Europe in the postwar years, partly funded by the CIA, to build support for Western values against communism. See Hermann Glaser, Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik, 1949—ig6y, 2 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1985), 2 : 5 3 . Peter de Mendelssohn, "Gegenstrahlungen," Der Monat 2 (1): 1 4 9 - 1 7 3 . 39. Arendt wrote that Heidegger's "name traveled through Germany like the rumour of a secret king." Quoted in Walter Biemel, Heidegger (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1 9 7 3 ) , 10. De Mendelssohn, "Gegenstrahlungen," 150. 40. De Mendelssohn, "Gegenstrahlungen," 1 5 3 . 4 1 . Ibid., listed on p. 156. On the attraction of a French-German cultural liaison among intellectuals of the right in France, see Zeev Sternell, Ni Droite Ni Gauche: L'ideologie fasciste en

148

T H E VIEW FROM A B O V E

impression that h e supported the resistance. O n the contrary, h e called the persecutors o f M o n t h e r l a n t "lackeys" (Stiefelputzer) ,42 Finally, J ü n g e r o f t e n praised the friendship between G e r m a n y a n d France, b u t friendship m e a n s many things a n d in 1942 it meant, above all, collaboration. D e M e n d e l s s o h n also p o i n t e d t o j ü n g e r ' s ambivalence in the face o f the atrocities b e i n g c o m m i t t e d o n the eastern front. In the diaries J ü n g e r h a d written, "I w o n d e r if it wouldn't b e g o o d to visit the sites o f terror, as a witness, to see a n d record the likes o f perpetrators a n d victims . . . the nausea that grips m e w h e n I j u s t think about such a spectacle speaks against it. I w o u l d b e r e c o g n i z e d immediately as an adversary. W h o m w o u l d that serve?" 4 3 "Me, f o r o n e , " was de Mendelssohn's bitter reply. 44 De M e n d e l s s o h n accused J ü n g e r o f aestheticizing the war e x p e r i e n c e a n d obfuscating history. H e was the first to take issue with J ü n g e r f o r taking perverse pleasure in the destruction o f battle by pointing o u t the following passage in w h i c h J ü n g e r delights in the supposed power a n d beauty o f a night b o m b i n g of Paris: Looking twice in the direction of Saint-Germain from the roof of "Raphael," a squadron flew by at high altitudes as enormous clouds of smoke ascended. . . . The second time, at sundown, I held in my hand a glass of burgundy in which strawberries swam. The city with its red towers and spires lay in a stupendous beauty, like petals blown over in an act of deathly fertilization. Everything was a spectacle, pure power raised and affirmed by pain.45 D e M e n d e l s s o h n c o n c l u d e d his brilliant, if one-sided attack o n J ü n g e r by contesting the author's supposed fine powers o f observation. For d e Mendelssohn, J ü n g e r was blind to the quotidian, the everyday life o f the p e o p l e a r o u n d him w h o o f f e r e d n o t h i n g for his finely t u n e d senses; they are the Pöbel, the m o b , in contrast to a small elite o f "knights" u p h o l d i n g "old G e r m a n i c virtues." 4 6 J ü n g e r was also blind to history. T h r o u g h o u t h u n d r e d s o f pages h e never o n c e attempted to understand the causes o f the war in which h e was fighting. For him, everything that h a p p e n s fits into a preo r d a i n e d scheme. In sum, life was a p u r e spectacle played out, it seems, f o r the sole b e n e f i t o f Jünger's aesthetic enjoyment. A n o t h e r g o o d e x a m p l e o f Jünger's c o l d - b l o o d e d gaze can b e f o u n d in the war diaries in the section w h e r e he was c o m m a n d e d to witness the exe-

France (Paris: Seuil, 1983; repr., 1987), 101 ff. See also Robert Wohl, "French Fascism, Both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternhell Con troversy," journal of Modern History 63, no. 1 (March 1991): 9 1 - 9 9 . 42. SW3, 305 (Sept. 7, 1994). 43. SW3, 284 (July 3, 1944). 44. De Mendelssohn, "Gegenstrahlungen," 168. 45. S W 3 , 270 (May 27, 1944). 46. De Mendelssohn, "Gegenstrahlungen," 166.

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

149

cution o f a G e r m a n army deserter. "At first," h e reported, "I t h o u g h t o f calling in sick, b u t that w o u l d b e too c h e a p . . . in essence it was elevated curiosity [höhere Neugier] w h i c h m a d e m e d o it." 47 T h e three pages in the diaries that describe the e x e c u t i o n exhibit the writer's fascination with the smallest details of the firing squad's shooting m e t h o d a n d the victim's physio g n o m y at the m o m e n t o f death. T h e i n f a m o u s passage in which J ü n g e r describes watching the b o m b i n g o f Paris while sipping b u r g u n d y with strawberries has b e e n cited ever since by Jünger's critics as indisputable evidence o f the aestheticization o f violence a n d perverse glorification o f the spectacle of death. 4 8 To make matters worse, J ü n g e r later p r o p o s e d a sympathetic comparison o f his behavior o n the r o o f o f the Majestic to N e r o watching R o m e burn. 4 9 T h e criticism o f J ü n g e r as an esthete a n d a snob needs, however, some nuancing. While m a k i n g revisions to his first Collected, Works, w h i c h c a m e out in 1960, J ü n g e r considered editing o u t certain passages and wrote to his ex-secretary A r m i n Möhler: I am going to leave in all the parts that have been heavily criticized, like the one about the glass of wine on the roof of the Majestic. My task is not to offer an ethical treatise. This is what mixes up my critics. The spirit of the times is reflected with more force in our mistakes and weaknesses, and thus we should avoid retouching if we want to hand down our work in a true form. Synchronism, the presentation of images, thoughts, and acts next to each other without any transition, belongs to our contemporary style: the evening news is proof. The people who sit there watching television while sucking on chocolates are not any better than I was on top of the Majestic, even though they think they are.50 Is Jünger's comparison to the passive c o n s u m p t i o n o f violence in the media and the synchronicity o f m o d e r n vision a fair one? While it is true that J ü n g e r r e d u c e d m o m e n t s o f p u r e destruction into material for his literary imagination, thus actively creating an ideological e x c h a n g e value that coldly ignores h u m a n suffering, it is a mistake to single o u t Jünger's fascination with the power of violence as "perverse" in the sense of contrary to "ordinary" e x p e r i e n c e . B o t h soldiers a n d civilians have e x p e r i e n c e d the same thing. T h e first G e r m a n airplanes to d r o p b o m b s o n L o n d o n d u r i n g World War I fascinated the city dwellers below, w h o risked their lives to watch the spectacle. A s a c o n t e m p o r a r y reported, "the e n e m y aeroplanes j o u r n e y e d t h r o u g h the clouds like little silver birds a n d their passage was watched by

47. 48. 49. Jünger 50.

SVK 2 : 2 4 2 - 2 4 5 (May 29, 1941). Uwe Wolf, "In der Hand ein Glas Burgunder mit Erdbeeren," SZ, November 9, 1988. "Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem T o d D e r Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982, 162. Note that now refers to the Hotel Majestic instead of Raphael. Jünger to Möhler, PAM, October 12, 1954.

ijo

THE VIEW FROM ABOVE

thousands of men and women. . . . It was amazing because it was so beautiful." One hundred and sixty-two civilians were killed during that particular raid.51 J. Glenn Gray, an American philosopher who served in World War II and can hardly be accused of glorifying the war, wrote that upon landing with his company on the French Riviera in August 1944, the spectacle of violence was hard to resist watching. The passage is worth quoting at length because it is both similar to and different from Jünger's observations. When I could forget the havoc and terror that was being created by those shells and bombs among the half-awake inhabitants of the villages, the scene was beyond all question magnificent. I found it easily possible, indeed a temptation hard to resist, to gaze upon the scene spellbound, completely absorbed, indifferent to what the immediate future might bring. Others appeared to manifest a similar intense concentration on the spectacle. Many soldiers must be able to recall some similar experience. However incomprehensible such scenes may be, and however little anyone would want to see them enacted a second time, few of us can deny, if we are honest, a satisfaction in having seen them. As far as I'm concerned, at least part of the satisfaction can be ascribed to delight in aesthetic contemplation. 52

A first difference to note here is that the "half-awake inhabitants" are terrorized only by the sounds of battle, whereas with Jünger the citizens of Paris are the objects of direct attack. Gray is describing a traditional battle scene involving civilians as onlookers while Jünger confronts the new situation of total warfare. But more importantly, Gray's conscience calls up the apparent contradiction between our moral selves, which tell us that the manifestations of power evident in battle are ultimately threatening to civilization, and our aesthetic sense, which takes as much delight in the excitement of battle as it might in observing the natural violence of a raging tempest.53 Jünger openly admits to eschewing ethics. He does not pause to contemplate the moral side of this equation, so well explicated by Gray, but rather collapses aesthetics and ethics into a state of inexplicable, unchanging nature in which man is only an insignificant part and from which he cannot escape. In an interview years later Jünger stressed the transformation of the world into a distant spectacle through the negation of subjectivity: You see, there is a great historical event, that is the transformation of the world from an object of utility or an object of strife into theater. Spirits like

51. Cited in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880—1918 Harvard University Press, 1983), 3 1 1 .

(Cambridge, Mass.:

52. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 3353. Gray, The Warriors, 49 if.

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

Shakespeare succeeded in this. Suddenly everything is different. Or in the opera: the whole world becomes music. Even the slave in chains becomes beautiful. That is the perfect metamorphosis the museal person accomplishes. And when I am watching the bombs fall with the glass of champagne in my hand, there is something like that going on. 54 J ü n g e r h e r e reduces violence to an a u t o n o m o u s category o f aesthetic value. T h e move is similar to Marinetti's glorification o f militarism a n d destruction as "ideas that kill," or Italy's f o r e i g n minister Ciano's description o f Ethiopians f l e e i n g a b o m b attack in 1 9 3 6 as "bursting flowers," e x c e p t thatJ ü n g e r is present as an observer, n o t an agent. 5 5 H e fixes the cold, amoral stare o f a u t o n o m o u s art u p o n real political events in o r d e r to celebrate the archaic m o v e m e n t o f history, m u c h as an entomologist observing a battle between h o r d e s of deadly fighting ants. 56 A s A n d r e a s Huyssen correctly observes, Jünger's "stereoscopic" gaze situates the narrator outside o f the spectacle, watching f r o m the safe distance o n top o f "Grand H o t e l Horror," while truly modernist narratives o f h o r r o r w o u l d have to subject the narrator a n d spectacle to the same h e t e r o g e n e o u s power of the event. 5 7 Jünger's lifelong fascination with the behavior o f insects was m a r k e d by the same absolute neutrality in the face o f horror. By contrast, J. H e n r i Fabre, the great French entomologist, o n c e r e m a r k e d that the ubiquitous ruthless a n d predatory acts of insects against e a c h o t h e r cast d o u b t o n all h u m a n values and the h o p e o f a reasonable G o d ; o n e "wishes to cast a veil over these horrors." 5 8

T H E W O R D MAGICIAN Many o f the reviews r e s p o n d i n g to the publication o f Strahlungen in 1 9 4 9 e c h o e d the moral a n d political t h e m e s expressed in de Mendelssohn's cri-

54. "Spiegelgespräch: Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod," Der Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982, 162. In the original version Jünger held a glass of burgundy; here he remembers a glass of champagne. 55. Examples cited by Martin Jay, '"The Aesthetic Ideology' as Ideology: Or What Does it mean to Aestheticize Politics?" in Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), 73. 56. Wendy Steiner tackles this problem from the obverse, pointing out that contemporary culture literalizes art, assuming that representations of violence have a real effect on the world. Artists like Robert Maplethorpe are often held responsible for contributing to moral decline, or violent movies are said to be responsible for copycat murders. Fascist aesthetics treats politics in such a way that the move from the representation to the real is intentional, indeed forced. See Wendy Steiner, The Scandal ofPleasure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 57. Huyssen, "Fortifying the Heart: Totally Ernst Jünger's Armored Texts," NGC 59 (spring/ summer 1993): 2 2 - 2 3 . 58. Quoted in Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 63-64.

152

T H E VIEW FROM ABOVE

tique. Jünger's icy, rarefied style was regularly assailed, and he was portrayed as a nihilist, a seducer of the German youth, and a writer who had neither renounced nor learned from his nationalist past. One reviewer called Jünger "a magician of beautiful words" but a "bad and false teacher." 59 Another journalist, who had been a soldier, criticized Jünger for having led the good life while he and other common grunts had to bear the brunt of the crushing defeat at Stalingrad. To him, Jünger's elitist language and behavior seemed incongruent when read against the background of deprivation and economic misery widespread in Germany during and immediately after the war.60 The recently published diaries of Max Frisch show that in the 1940s the Swiss author was occupied extensively with Jünger's war diaries and questions about the literary form of the diary. 61 Frisch was both fascinated and repelled by Jünger's style: it displays, he wrote, a hardness that seems to revel in the pleasure of hardness, a kind of exhibitionism that is "often a feeling of moral masturbation." And yet Frisch felt compelled to read further. He also noted that whereas many writers keep a diary to record the events of life, Jünger's life seems to be focused on the act of writing a diary. In the critiques dating from 1 9 5 8 Jünger's peculiar language and style were still very much an issue. Reviewers did not fail to comment on Jünger's apparent lack of compassion in his interactions with society at large. As the world was going up in flames, 'Jünger observed flowers," wrote one reviewer. 62 Dolf Sternberger complained that the events of the postwar years were heard only faintly in the background. 63 Another reviewer pointed to the ubiquity of military terms and metaphors in Jünger's prose. 64 Many commented on Jünger's vanity and overwrought sense of self-importance. 65 Critics were also quick to assail Jünger's predisposition for "metaphysics." In the existentialist 1950s the term "metaphysical" tended to be equated with irrationality. In this spirit, Max Bense published an important book 59. "Todessüchtige Strahlungen des Herrn Jünger," Kölnische Rundschau, Jan. 28, 1950. 60. Hans Pflug Franken, "Das Ego in der Idee des Ganzen," Erlanger Tageblatt, Dec. ig, !95361. Max Frisch, Jetzt ist Sehenszeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998). 62. Rudolf Goldschmit, "Ernst Jünger's Rückzug aus dem Chaos," SZ, Oct. 1 1 , 1958. 63. Dolf Sternberger, "Der Hüherne Siegfried," Gegenwart 1 3 (1958): 596. 64. Günter Oliass, "Heroische Vokabeln," Deutsche Zeitung, Sept. 24, 1958. Among many other good examples, Oliass notes that Jünger writes "the early fruits are already clearing out the beets," and comments, "troops clear out a field, not beets." 65. See Georg Richterg, "Mensch—nicht mehr Ubermensch: Ernst Jünger im Brennpunkt seiner Strahlungen," Sonntagsblatt, Sept. g, 194g; Cajetan Freund, "Provokation auf Schritt und Tritt: Zum dritten Teil von Ernst Jünger's Tagebuchwerk," FR, Feb. 14, 1959, 30; Hans Joachim Zoch, "Ernst Jünger als Wald-Emigrant," Der Mittag, Nov. 1 1 / 1 2 , 1958; Kurt Lothar Tank, "Der Moralist von Kirchhorst," Sonntagsblatt, Sept. 28, ig58; Heinz Beckmann, "Ernst Jünger's Markierungen," Welt und Wort 13, no. 10 (igg8): 8 o g - 8 i 1.

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

153

comparing Jünger with Gottfried Benn. Jünger fares badly here, and his writing is described as part of a premodern aesthetic, a mix of Jean Paul's cemeteries, Goethean (that is, non-Newtonian) science, Hamann's hieroglyphics, and Christian mysticism with a touch of Moltke and Clausewitz. 66 For Franz Schonauer, writing in the Frankfurter Hefte, Jünger's central mistake was to persist in using "metaphysical models" that gave his diagnoses "barely a glimmer of plausibility." 67 As we shall see, even the bad publicity did not prevent Jünger from becoming one of Germany's best-known European writers in the 1950s and a major force on the German cultural landscape. By the time the complete journals came out in 1958, however, some of the early enthusiasm had faded, as this somewhat sarcastic-melancholic report from a young writer suggests: In those years [of occupation] Jünger was fascinating as never before. As students we tramped halfway through the rump of Germany because somewhere a Jünger-reading was taking place, without Jünger, naturally. . . . So what has happened? Has he succeeded in bringing into full view spiritual, artistic, political, and military phenomena? The attempt fascinates us still, but actually he leaves us cold. 68 In the German Democratic Republic, Jünger was repeatedly singled out as clear indication that fascism still existed in the Federal Republic. For a disappointed Johannes Becher, the culture minister and a leading poet of the GDR, Jünger's worldview now represented a "reserve-ideology" of fascism in-waiting once the official ideology of Nazism had been truly discredited. 69 Jünger's defenders from the mainstream liberal and conservative press continued to see him as an important voice in the literary world and as a man with a sharp eye for the negative aspects of modern civilization. For Margret Boveri, writing in the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jünger was "not liberal, but unbiased" and had "the inner dignity to acknowledge earlier mistakes." 70 Gerhard Nebel, who, as we noted, was one of Jünger's most ardent admirers at first, wrote that in his war journals Jünger had overcome both the Nietzschean style of writing typical of The Worker and the soft lyrical tone of The Marble Cliffs, to find a strong, realistic, and natural voice. For Nebel,

66. Max Bense, Ptolemäer und Mauretanier: Oder die theologische Emigration der deutschen Literatur (Cologne: Kiepenheuer, 1960), 2 8 - 3 1 . 67. Franz Schonauer, "Ressentiment ist ein schlechtes Denkprinzip," Frankfurter Hefte 14 (59): 4 4 8 - 4 5 1 . 68. Alexander Part, "ErnstJünger und die Jahre der Okkupation," Welt am Sonntag, Sept. 14, 195869. "Bücherstunde," Deutschlandsender (GDR).January 29, 1959. 70. Margret Boveri, "Die Frucht des Leidens ernten," FAZ, Sept. 37, 1958.

T H E

VIEW FROM ABOVE

Jünger has "no competitor" in the contemporary literary scene. 71 Kurt Ziesel, a writer of the nationalist right, and editor of the European Cultural Newsletter, printed extracts from the diaries in 1958 that indicate the manner in which conservatives valued Jünger. The newsletter presented Jünger's view on collective guilt, reports of atrocities being committed by Russians against the German population after 1945, and condemnations of both communism and the "Americanization" (that is, vulgarization) of Europe. 72 One of the central issues broached in the discussion of the war diaries was the trajectory of Jünger's thought since it was generally agreed that a significant change had occurred in his philosophical outlook as a result of the experience of the Second World War. Critics and apologists diverged sharply in their assessment of the authenticity of the transformation. For those intellectuals more sympathetic to Jünger, the war diaries proved that the author had always kept his finger on the pulse of the times, but the times having changed, he was seen as offering a vision of a spiritually revitalized, albeit deradicalized conservatism. For Kurt HohofF, Jünger's books proved "that the vanguard of the conservatives, whose world has fallen apart, is being rebuilt." 73 Similarly, Jürgen Rausch regarded Jünger's intellectual path as a consistent and progressive one from the desire to experience life to the fullest, even if that meant destroying civilization, to the realization that "fullness" also required preserving civilization: 'Jünger's path was representative . . . many followed him in the wild search for life's fulfillment into the whirlpool of fire and blood . . . then they joined him in wrenching their hearts from nationalist thinking and turned their attention to the planetary order." 74 For conservatives Jünger seemed to represent a new "spiritual home," 75 a refuge after the aggressive-nationalist aspects of pre-Nazi conservatism had been largely discredited in the first years of the Federal Republic. The conservatives argued that Jünger's so-called nihilistic writings of the 1920s and 1930s had struck a responsive chord in the hearts of his generation because he, better than anyone else, had grasped the brutal reality of his epoch and was able to transform the spirit of the age into representative images.76 In this spirit, Hanna Hafesbrink wrote

71. Gerhard Nebel, "ErnstJünger's große Rechenschaft,"FAZ, Nov. 12, 1949. 72. Kurt Ziesel, 'Jahre der Okkupation: Zu dem jüngsten Werk Ernst jünger's," Europäischer Kulturdienst 8 (January 22, 1958):!. 73. Curt Hohoff, "Tagebuch der Besatzungszeit," Die Welt, Oct. 25, 1958. 74. Jürgen Rausch, "Ernst Jünger auf neuen Wegen?" SZ, Sept. 25, 1949. 75. A term used by Clive von Cardinal, "Am Saum der Ewigkeit: Ernst Jünger's Tagebücher und die Überwindung des Nihilismus," Geistige Welt, Oct. 29, 1959. 76. Most cogently argued by Armin Möhler, "Ernst Jünger und sein Kriegstagebuch," Die Tat, August 6, 1949: "More than any other author, Ernst Jünger has accompanied the dark

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

155

The humanistic emphasis in Jünger's latest works points to a significant development in the history of contemporary German thought. For if a return to human convictions is achieved in those who have striven to undermine them, it does not seem unfounded to assume that the process of moral disintegration that obtained in the preceding decades will not continue irrevocably. . . . Just as in the past Jünger was symbolic of the development of a generation, so today his spiritual fate reaches out over the limits of the individual. 77 In this statement, Hafesbrink reverses the argument that would disqualify Jünger as a spiritual and moral guide on the grounds of his past association with fascism. O n the contrary, she argues, it is his past that lends him authority. In Hafesbrink's thinking Jünger functions as both an individual and a "representative" of his generation, an assumption widely held at the time. Writing in the professional journal for German high school teachers in 1950, William Rey contended that this "most important contemporary writer," succeeded in his work to locate a secure position a m o n g all the uncertainties and destruction of the postwar period. He highly r e c o m m e n d e d Jünger's texts as a way out of the "cul-de-sac of nihilism" and as a means for students to combat the general "breakdown of our times" (Zusammenbruch der Zeit) ,78 Conservatives thought that the charge of nihilism amounted to the logical error of substituting the effect for the cause. Jünger had used this argument himself, comparing his critics to primitives confused by the forces of nature: "After the earthquake everybody hammers down on the seismographers. O n e cannot, however, let the barometer be punished for the typ h o o n , unless one wants to be counted among the primitives." 79 T h e comparison to the seismographer, dispassionately recording the magnitude of the catastrophe, remained one o f j ü n g e r ' s favorite images. His critics seized upon the analogy to show the disingenuousness of sloughing off historical responsibility with a slippery phrase. T h e notion is intriguing, but also strange; after all, how many seismographers have ever been blamed for earthquakes or weather forecasters for the typhoons? SAULUS TO PAULUS Theologians and religious thinkers greeted Jünger as a welcome ally in the postwar attempt to refurbish the image of Christianity after the church had

path of Germany's destiny for the last thirty years and has found the authentic images for every station along the way." 77. Hanna Hafesbrink, "Ernst Jünger's Quest for a new Faith," The Germanic Review 26 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 3°°78. William Rey, "Ernst Jünger's abendländische Wendung," Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache, und Literatur 42, nos. 3 and 4 (March/April 1950): 1 2 9 - 1 4 0 . 79. SW2, 1 1 .

156

T H E VIEW FROM A B O V E

not exactly shown audacity in confronting the Nazis. 80 Jünger built plenty of bridges to a religious constituency. Christians were excited b y j ü n g e r ' s preoccupation with the Bible in the war diaries and believed that he had "come h o m e " to Christian humanism after bidding farewell to the "bloody ecstasy" of his youth. 8 1 Like Heidegger, who claimed to have gone through an essential transformation sometime in the 1930s (die Kehre), Jünger had undergone a spiritual conversion, some believed, in a reaction to the experience of Nazism. In The Peace, as we have seen, he predicted the end of the heroic age of The Worker and the transformation of the energy mobilized by war into a creative, happy, and religious direction. 82 In 1949 he told a visitor, "For me the question is now important whether The Worker can be brought into some kind of relationship to theology or art." 83 Readers of the Catholic journal Neues Abendland could read that Jünger's postwar works helped resuscitate a new mysticism, strengthening Christianity against the onslaught of rationalism and modernity. 84 Jünger even represented the figure of "salvation" (Heilbringer- Gestalt) and the harbinger of a new, archetypical myth for the Occident. 8 5 T h e Evangelische Akademie in Hannover held a series of lectures in 1950 entitled "Christianity and Poetry" in which Hans-Jürgen Baden-Weinhausen d e f e n d e d the thesis that the recently published Strahlungen represented a general turn in modern culture away from materialism and toward Christian faith. 86 T h e Protestant theologian Hans Rudolf Müller-Schweife argued that Jünger's language leads m o d e r n man away from nihilism because it "reestablishes human beings as recipients of the word, just as Christ did." 8 7 These far-flung hopes of Christian conservatives were soon dashed, however, when it became clear that Jünger's attachment to Christianity was superficial. After gleaning as

80. See Wolfgang Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen: Bekennende Kirche und die Juden (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1987) and Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York; McGraw-Hill, 1964). From that period see also E. Gross, "Die Schuld der Kirchen," Die Wandlung2 (1947): 7 3 - 9 4 . 81. Dieter Basserman, "Ernst Jünger und der 73. Psalm," Berliner Hefte 1 (June 1946): 1 0 5 109. Psalm 73 refers to a godless people, rulers who gain riches through violence, and the masses who follow them. Jünger refers to it several times in Strahlungen, such as on March 29, 1940, his forty-fifth birthday. 82. DerFriede, SW J, 222. 83. Eugen Frömmlet, "Perspektiven: Gespräch mit Ernst Jünger," Allgemeine Zeitung, March 22, 1949. 84. Heinrich Ludwig, "Ernst Jünger und der Konservative Mythos," Neues Abendland, 11, no. 2 (1956): 177-184. 85. Ibid., 182. 86. "Emst Jünger und die religiöse Lage der Gegenwart," Evangelischer Pressedienst Hannover, February 3, 1950, Spiegelarchiv. 87. Hans Rudolf Müller-Schweife, "Ernst jünger," Dichtung und Deutung 4 (1951): 76.

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

157

much symbolic material as he could from the Bible, Jünger went on to new sources. Christians realized that Jünger considered Christianity just one of a large number of metaphysical worldviews. 88 O n e might summarize the essential difference between Jünger's critics and his apologists at this juncture by noting that the former rejected any notion of a real transformation in Jünger's philosophy or politics. For them, Jünger remained a militant reactionary, even when his language seemed to suggest otherwise. Secular conservatives, on the other hand, tended to see Jünger's concern for "planetary" questions as the rebirth of old-fashioned humanism. Christian conservatives misread his "cosmological" symbolism as a return to Christianity. T h e r e was a kernel of truth in all three perspectives: Jünger sometimes spoke the language of militant nationalism, at other times he n o d d e d to humanism and "occidental" culture, and at other times he spoke like a pacifist without espousing concretely pacifist politics. T h e c o m m o n thread among these seemingly contradictory viewpoints was an apocalyptic understanding of where Europe stood at the "end of history."

FRAGMENTS OF HISTORY Jünger has been identified as one of the main modern exponents of posthistoire, an understanding of historical progress that surfaced as an intellectual fashion in the aftermath of World War II.89 T h e idea of a posthistorical condition was first developed by the French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot, who distinguished between "prehistorical," "historical," and "posthistorical societies." 90 C o u r n o t used the phrase posthistorique in the 1860s to refer to modern civilization transformed by scientific rationality, but it was his student Bougie who coined the phrase posthistoire. Hendrik de Man referred to Cournot in his book Vermassung und Kulturverfall, and thereby introduced the concept to German intellectuals.91 Francis Fukuyama most recently gave a new twist to this old idea by arguing that Western notions of political freedom combined with the economic principles of capitalism will eventually transform the entire globe,

88. See Hans-Jürgen Baden, "Ernst Jünger's christliches Zwischenspiel," Nette Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 3, no. 3 (1961): 3 2 8 - 3 4 5 . 89. Lutz Niethammer identifies authors associated with posthistoire who were close to Jünger: Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Arnold Gehlen, and Gottfried Benn, as well as those who were intellectually close: Helmut Schelsky, Bernard de Jouvenal, and Hans Freyer. See "Afterthoughts on Posthistoire," History & Memory 1 (fall 1989): 53. See also Niethammers book, Posthistoire: Ist die Geschichte zu End*? (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), esp. 82-104. 90. See François Mentré, Pour Qu 'on Lise Cournot (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1928), 7 0 - 7 7 . 91. Hendrick de Man, Vermassung und Kulturverfall (Bern: Francke, 1961).

158

T H E VIEW FROM A B O V E

constituting an end to ideological competition between various socioeconomic models. 92 Lutz Niethammer traces Jünger's interest in the idea to a revival in the 1930s of Hegelianism on the left and on the right; the former was represented by Alexandre Kojeve's lectures on Hegel's p h e n o m e n o l o g y at the Paris Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to 1939 and the latter by Jünger's The Worker of 1932. 9 3 Both critiques attempt to undermine the rationalism of liberal humanism by adopting Hegel's definition of reason as the cumulative historical outcome of struggle and violence. C o m m o n to both interpretations of history is the idea that political and scientific modernization has violently transformed all world cultures so that each loses its specificity and becomes part of a universal, planetary system. 94 Both Kojeve and Jünger use the term pejoratively, to castigate a bourgeois society that has transformed human beings into mechanized, termitelike, machine-animals. For the right, especially Jünger, Heidegger, Gehlen, and Schmitt (in various versions of the same idea), the posthistoire world was characterized by the decline of Europe as a world power and the rise of purely "technocratic" societies, like the Soviet Union and America, to world dominance. For Schmitt and Jünger, the new imperial drive for hegemony was reaching into space, following the model of British global colonization of the sea. 95 As a result, ancient cultures were now doomed. T h e "system" had come to dominate human history, as technology unified the world and eliminated differences. 9 6 Since the "system" had a stranglehold on human affairs, people could and should not try to change the direction of history. Jünger had already implied as much in The Peace when he wrote,

g2. Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). The characterization of Fukayama's argument as "meliorist" tends to neglect the cultural conservative reservations about a lack of "higher" objectives worth fighting for in modern society, reservations that emerge strongly in the latter half of the book, devoted to Nietzsche. 93. Niethammer, Posthistoire, 73 ff. g4. For Kojeve in the 1930s the end of history was associated with the end of the bourgeois order brought about by Stalin and the sovietization of Russia. In the postwar period, after joining the planning staff of Monet, Kojeve talked about the spread of "the American Way of Life" as a typical lifestyle of the posthistoire period. See Niethammer, Posthistoire, 78—80. Kojeve's lectures have been reprinted in France by Raymond Queneau. T h e American edition is edited by Allan Bloom, Alexander Kojeve: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell, 1969). 95. See Schmitt, "Die geschichtliche Struktur des heutigen Welt-Gegensatzes von Ost und West; Bemerkungen zu Ernst Jüngers Schrift, 'Der Gordische Knoten,'" in Armin Möhler, ed., Freundschaftliche Begegnungen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1955), 1 3 5 - 1 6 7 . 96. See in particular Carl Schmitt, "Der verplante Planet," Der Fortschritt, 15 (April 11, 1952) 3 - 1 2 ; "Die Einheit der Welt, Merkur 6 (1, 1952), 1 - 1 1 . Jünger's version is in An der Zeitmauer, SW8, 532 ff.

L O G S F R O M A S I N K I N G SHIP

J59

There should be uniformity of organization in everything that has to do with technical matters, industry, commerce, communications, trade, weights and measures, and defense. These departments are like the great roads and railways that run gleaming across an empire, the same in all its provinces whatever the nature of the country or its people. 97 T h e "end o f history" implies that after the demise o f E u r o p e a n culture intellectuals can only take stock o f what has b e e n h a n d e d down. N o t h i n g significantly new will appear. Eclecticism in fine art, architecture, a n d literature will prevail. J ü n g e r captured this m o o d in the 1 9 4 9 introduction to the war j o u r n a l s w h e r e h e postulated that the C o p e r n i c a n quest for ordering the cosmos, a n d the diary as a m o d e r n literary f o r m , fall together chronologically. T h e y have in c o m m o n "the bifurcation o f m i n d f r o m obj e c t , the a u t h o r f r o m the world." 9 8 T h e First World War m a r k e d the e n d o f history because it represented the demise of h e r o i c action in a p r e t e c h n o logical sense. T h e e n d o f history, h e o n c e said, can b e equated with the e n d o f the aristocratic order: In the First World War I still believed that man was stronger than the material. But in the meantime it has become clear that the technicians have won and destroyed the old orders. Included is the priest, who plays now only a questionable role, the farmer, who has become a partial slave or a worker operating specialized machinery, and the soldier. The soldier is no longer the soldier of the old estate society and has nothing more to do with heroism, since Mars no longer stands behind the warrior." H e r e two m o m e n t s coincide: the technological c o n q u e s t o f E u r o p e a n d the e n d o f mythological time. J ü n g e r r e g a r d e d the colonization o f space a n d its reflection in science fiction as a marker o f the e n d o f the historical novel. Posthistoire thinkers c o u l d only c o n t e m p l a t e the stranded objects o f history washed u p o n the shore. 1 0 0 J ü n g e r seems also to have believed that the rise o f fascism a n d c o m m u n i s m in the twentieth century constituted another k i n d o f e f f a c e m e n t o f history: In fact history does not exist anymore. This century is nothing but a transition. The astrologists have found a beautiful symbol to express this; the age of Pisces is coming to an end, the age of Aquarius begins. We have had the huge schools of herrings, the masses, and several sharks as well, Hitler, Stalin, Mao. That was the age of Leviathan according to Hobbes. 101

97. Jünger, The Peace, 60. 98. SW 2, 10. 99. "Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod," Der Spiegel, Aug. 16, ig82, 163. 100. This image is taken from a later novel, Eumeswil ( 1977), where Jünger explicitly plays on the posthistoire mood. See below, chapter 7, 235-239. 101. Jacques le Rider, "Le réalisme magique d'Ernst Jünger," Le Monde, Aug. 2g, 1982.

l6o

T H E VIEW FROM A B O V E

The reference to the Leviathan here points to another aspect of the end of history, the diminished power of individuals to shape human affairs. In his diaries Jünger speculated that world history, understood as discrete events in time and space, was subject to traditional laws of cause and effect. The murder of Wallenstein in 1634 was a "retarding moment," while Coligny's death 102 was "expansive." 103 In a posthistorical age, synchronicity would relegate traditional notions of causality to minor importance. Jünger often ventured the prediction that the next century would see the return of the "titans." Human beings will realize the futility of attempting to control nature or construct better societies and submit to the invisible power of timeless mythological constraints on human action.104 At the same time that Kojeve distanced himself from the French Communist Party and went to work as a reformer of postwar Europe, Jünger distanced himself geographically and intellectually from European politics. He moved to a tiny town in the Upper Swabian hills and reacted to the institutions and culture of the Federal Republic by taking an intellectual "walk in the woods." 105 In many ways, he chose to remain in the inner emigration. In Jünger's "New Testament" the posthistorical apocalypse is conceived as a transitional phase: the earth enters a "new" timeless zone and moves "over the line" into a postnihilistic world. The construction and reception of this posthistoire mode of thought will be examined in works such as Der Waldgang, Uber die Linie, and Die Zeitmauer. In our discussion of these works in the next chapter we shall explore the postwar project of a partially deradicalized conservatism that revives certain aspects of radical conservative ideas in a new context. 102. 103. 104. 105.

Coligny was a leader of the Hugenots murdered in the Bartholemew's Day Massacre. SW2, 10. See in particular Ernst Jünger, Zwei Mal Halle") (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987). Jünger's Der Waldgang will be analyzed in the next chapter.

CHAPTER SIX

Challenging the Victor's Optic Jünger as Oracle in the Age of Adenauer

T H E HYPOCRISY AND A U T H E N T I C I T Y OF DENAZIFICATION

In spring 1947 Ernst Jünger wrote from his residence in Lower Saxony to his future secretary Armin Möhler in Basel, expressing some consternation about the growing interest in his authorship. Two recent visits had annoyed him in particular: After Monsieur Raguenet came Mister Stephen Spender, both with greetings and letters that assured them the best reception. How amazed was I then to read of the absurd impressions they had gathered in Kirchhorst and felt compelled to publish. A visit of twenty minutes gave Mr. Spender enough material not only for his book European Witness but also for articles in newspapers. I attribute this strange way of seeing things [merkwürdige Optik] to the particular perspective of the victors that one can apparently not avoid.1

This passage indicates how Jünger perceived his reception in the postwar period: as a marginalized voice in the struggle to defend a defeated Germany. Something had come to an end for himself and for the nation. The "victors" came away with a strange way of seeing things. Jünger expressed no grief for the victims of the German dictatorship. He had disdain for those who were apologetic: they were simulating emotions for the sake of the victors. Like other intellectuals on the right, he hesitated to ask the question how prewar radical conservatism became entangled in fascism. Jünger refused to appear before a denazification tribunal in 1946 and was conse1. Jünger to Möhler, Feb. 17, 1949, PAM. 161

162

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

quently blacklisted. 2 Far from feeling ambiguity, Jünger was indignant about having to justify his past in any manner. Like many other Germans at the time, he felt that denazification was a cynical exercise in self-exoneration. 3 In the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps, occupying troops often forced the citizens of the surrounding area to see what the regime had wrought and contemplate in their own minds the inhuman living conditions imposed u p o n prisoners. It is not surprising that the majority of Germans reacted, on the one hand, by denying knowledge of the camps and, on the other, by exhibiting the appropriate shock and sadness expected by the occupying powers. Despite the evident opportunism and often justified cynicism of the German reaction to denazification, genuine self-reflection and mourning were not, however, as u n c o m m o n as some of the historical literature suggests. 4 T h e public reaction to "reeducation" films and literature was complicated. 5 In the Russian Zone the film The Murderers are Among Us stressed the continuing threat of fascism. In the Western zones, one of the most widely seen documentaries was an American-British production, Die Todesmühlen (Mills of death), made by the exiled German director Hans Burger. T h e film was composed of clips of Bergen-Belsen shot by the liberating army and was originally meant to be the "psychological capper" of the denazification program. 6 T h e short film was eventually incorporated into a sixty-minute newsreel, the compulsory Welt im Film, which was shown at cinemas in every town across the American and British zones beginning in the fall of 1946. Although the audience was reportedly skeptical of the central message of the film—that all Germans share a collective g u i l t — a n d in many cases resented the heavy-handed moralizing of the accompanying narrative, people were 2. It has not been possible to ascertain how Jünger could refuse to fill out the famous Fragebogen (questionnaire) without being taken to prison. Joachim Kaiser writes that "based on his European fame and reputation he could afford to ignore the questionnaire." But this explanation only begs the question. See "Schreckliche und wunderbare Bilder: Zu Ernst Jüngers 75. Geburtstag," SZ, March 28-30, 1970. 3. In an opinion poll taken in 1948, 57 percent of Germans in the Western zones agreed with the statement that National Socialism was a "good idea that was merely carried out wrong," cited in Jürgen Kocka, "Zerstörung und Befreiung: Das Jahr 1945 als Wendepunkt deutscher Geschichte," in Kocka, ed., Geschichte und Aufklärung: Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 127. 4. See for example Lutz Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik: Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns (Berlin: Dietz, 1982); James Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Constantine Fitzgibbon, Denazification (London: Michael Joseph, 1969). 5. See Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 6. Brewster S. Chamberlain, "Todesmühlen: Ein früher Versuch zur Massen-Umerziehung im besetzten Deutschland, 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 4 6 , " Vierteljahresheftfür Zeitgeschichte 39 (July 1981): 4 6 - 8 4 .

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

ji5J

reported to c o m e out of the film seeming dazed and shell-shocked; many wept and broke down emotionally. 7 Even in noncoercive situations, however, many Germans displayed, at least in the saturnine years before the economic b o o m of the 1950s, a genuine attempt to come to terms with the question of personal guilt for the crimes of the National Socialist regime. O n e manifestation of this soulsearching was the interest in the intellectual debate concerning the so-called collective guilt thesis. T h e notion was famously discussed in Karl Jaspers's treatise of 1946, The Question of German Guilt.8 Jaspers argued that there exist four different categories of guilt: criminal, political, metaphysical, and moral. He was not m u c h concerned with criminal guilt, which he viewed as a contravention of positive law. He accepted the Nuremberg definition of war crimes and crimes against humanity, even though these laws had not become statutes of any court before 1945. Political guilt for Jaspers referred to acts carried out by a particular regime, but could extend to citizens w h o accept the laws or actions of the state. In this sense, political guilt can be collective. Moral guilt, on the other hand, is individual but is defined negatively as the failure to act justly. Thus, the general indifference of German citizens to the perpetration of injustice by the regime was a central aspect of moral guilt, and in this sense was also collective. Metaphysical guilt seems to refer to the transformation of individual moral guilt into an imperative of solidarity among human beings, the responsibility for striving toward justice in the world. Even though Jaspers argued against the notion of making a whole people responsible for a crime, the four categories, taken together, cast an inescapable web of culpability over the majority of German citizens w h o were at least guilty of allowing crimes to take place without m u c h resistance. Jaspers's treatise was laden with Christian and existentialist terminology and presupposed that being-in-the-world already constituted a fallen state of moral culpability. His argument satisfied neither the left nor the right. T h e former was dissatisfied because he made n o sociopolitical distinction between victims and the victimized, and according to the latter, he seemed to be asserting that German guilt was so unique that an eternal stain would remain u p o n the nation, while the disreputable deeds of the former enemies would eventually fade into history. Recent critics have pointed to

7. See David Culbert, "American Film Policy in the Re-Education of Germany after 1945," in Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson, eds., The Political Re-Education of Germany and her Allies After World WarII (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 1 7 3 - 2 0 2 . Culbert sharply criticizes the American film policy as a series of blunders and miscalculations, but he admits, with reluctance, that viewing the concentration camps in film had a powerful visual effect beyond words. For a more balanced account of the American reeducation effort, see Jost Hermand, Kultur im Wiederaufbau (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1988). 8. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitragzur deulschen Frage (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1946).

164

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR S OPTIC

the enduring legacy ofJaspers's quasi-religious emphasis on absolution and authenticity as having created an "exaggerated superego" and an almost desperate need of the German left to identify with the victims of oppression everywhere. 9 IfJaspers's existential notion of guilt satisfied few, it did at least spark fierce debates in journals and newspapers across the three Western occupied zones, 10 and lead to sharp divisions within religious and political groups. Historians of the immediate postwar period have also underestimated the extent to which the reading public grappled with the question of the Nazi experience. One of the most widely read reports about the death camps was written by a German political prisoner, the left-Catholic journalist Eugen K o g o n — t h e future coeditor of the Frankfurter Hefte—who survived seven years at Buchenwald. He wrote a chilling account of his experiences at the behest of the intelligence team of the Psychological Warfare Division of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Richard Crossman, an Oxford graduate who was part of the British section of the military personnel, encouraged Kogon to develop his report into a full-length description of the "inner world," as Kogon put it, of the concentration camps. This book, published in 1947 as Der SS-Staat, went through countless editions and is still widely read and highly regarded by scholars. 11 The book's grimly realistic style in depicting the groundless brutality of the SS system of terror was accented by the moral obtuseness of the perpetrators. The reading public's contemporary reaction and later memoirs attest to the indelible imprint this book left on the German collective consciousness. As mentioned, Kogon made such a strong impression on Karl O. Paetel and Hans Peter des Coudres that they planned to "counter the fictions Kogon had perpetrated." 12 That book was never written. The horrors of the concentration camps and the historical roots of Nazism were explored in novels, plays, and reports, particularly from the pens of returned exile writers. Historical novels examined the tortured path from the defeat in 1918 to the rise of Hitler; Anna Segher's Der Kofplohn (The head bounty) took a small town's experience in the last years of Weimar as its 9. See Anson Rabinbach, "The German as Pariah: Karl Jaspers and the Question of German Guilt," in Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1 2 9 - 1 6 5 . 10. For the best overview of the multifarious debates on this subject, see Barbro Eberan, Luther? Friedrich "der Große ? " Wagner? Nietzsche ?: Wer war an Hitler schuld ? Die Debatte um die Schuldfrage, 1945—11)49, 2d enlarged ed., (Munich: Minerva Publikation, 1985). 11. Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, gth ed. (Munich: Heyne Verlag, 1980), 9 - 1 2 . See Robert Gellateley, "Situating the SS-State in A Social-Historical Context: Recent Histories of the SS, the Police, and the Courts in the Third Reich," The Journal of Modern History 64, no. 2 (June 1992): 3 3 8 - 3 6 6 . 12. Karl O. Paetel an Hans-Peter des Coudres, Sammlung des Coudres, box 30, DLAM.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

165

backdrop, 1 3 while Erich Maria Remarque described the problems war veterans encountered in adjusting to civil life in the 1920s. 14 T h o u g h the 1950s are often characterized as a period of Verdrängung when the memories of the immediate past were suppressed, 1 5 German literature was surprisingly o p e n about the internal struggles with conscience. 1 6 T h e following novels dealt in one way or another with the theme of collective and personal responsibility for the rise of Nazism: in West Germany Hans Habe's Off Limits: Roman der Besatzung Deutschlands (Off limits: A novel of German Occupation), 1 7 in East Germany Johannes R. Becher's Abschied (Farewell) 1 8 and Willi Bredel's Die Prüfung: Roman aus einem Konzentrationslager (The examination). 1 9 In addition to the Kogon book, Walter Hornung's widely read Dachau and Wolfgang Langhoff's Die Moorsoldaten (The swamp soldiers) chronicled the darkest period of German history. 20 Jünger had nothing but contempt for all these attempts to "master the past." Particularly foreigners and the German exiles had n o right, in his mind, to j u d g e Germans. " T h e perspective of the victors" meant for Jünger that any foreign critique was disingenuous. Like Schmitt, he divided the world into friends and foes, trusting few outside a small circle of esthetes, ex-generals, friendly politicians, and sympathetic literary critics.

RESTORATION AND CONSERVATIVE RER AD IC ALIZATI ON AFTER 1945 T h e rebuilding of German culture in the period directly after the Second World War was surprisingly rapid and creative. Despite the fact that the need to find adequate shelter and food was foremost on most people's minds, broad segments of the population had an appetite for intellectual stimuli, such as the films, books, theater, and newspapers previously unavailable. T h e desire to partake again in cultural life, even in the face of incredible existential hardship, can perhaps best be captured by recalling the sudden

13. Anna Seghers, Der Kopflohn: Der Weg Durch den Februar (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1951). 14. E. M. Remarque, Drei Kameraden (Vienna/Munich/Basel: Verlag Kurt Desch, 1955). 15. See Hermann Glaser, Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik II: Zwischen Grundgesetz und großer Koalition, 1949—196J (Munich/Vienna: Hanser Verlag, 1985), 59—75, 260—280. 16. Helmut Heissenbüttel, "Literarische Archäologie der fünfziger Jahre," in Dieter Bänsch, Die Fünfziger Jahre: Beiträge zu Politik und Kultur (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1985), 3 0 7 - 3 2 5 . 17. Hans Habe, Off Limits: Roman der Besatzung Deutschlands (Vienna: Desch, 1955). 18. Johannes Becher, Abschied (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1953). 19. Willi Bredel, Die Prüfung: Roman aus einem Konzentrationslager (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1946). 20. Glaser, Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 1, 288 ff.

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

proliferation of countless small journals and newspapers printed on rough paper and feeding a voracious reading public. 21 The hunger for culture was also evident in the flurry of concerts and dramas staged among the ruins of bombed out cities.22 In Berlin the first summer after capitulation saw a strong revival of political cabarets in the Weimar "catacomb" style. In August 1945 Erich Kästner noted with satisfaction in his diary: "If all the plans of this week become reality, there will soon be more cabarets than undamaged houses." 23 In those years cultural activity seemed egalitarian and democratic, disdainful of authority, confident of itself as a reawakening, leading, perhaps, to a new era in German history. But the revolutionary hopes were never realized. Politically and culturally, German life in the 1950s experienced both continuity and change. 24 The euphoria of a cultural renaissance evidently evaporated with the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949. Some historians have pointed to the currency reform ofJune 1948 as the cause of a decline in grassroots cultural activity and a trend toward "restoration" of elitist high-brow culture. With the introduction of a strong, coveted currency, people were less prepared to spend their "good" money on cultural experimentation. 25 The currency reform brought about a precipitous decline of sophisticated literary, political, artistic, and philosophical publications, replaced now in large measure by colored, glossy, trivial reading entertainment meant for quick consumption—the so-called "rainbow press." 26 2 1. Between July 1945 and September 1949, a total of 156 new daily newspapers were licensed (62 American, 61 British, 33 French). See Norbert Frei, "Die Presse" in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 4 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), 371. 22. Henning Rischbieter, "Theater: Wiederbeginn zwischen Kapitulation und Währungsreform," in Benz, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 1, 86—130. 23. Erich Kästner, "Der Tägliche Kram" in Gesammelte Schriften für Erwachsene, vol. 7, Vermischte Beiträge II, (Munich: Knaur, 1969), 14, from Glaser, Kulturgeschichte cUrr Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 2, 266. 24. See Reinhard Kühnl 's polemical, but informative Das dritte. Reich in der Presse der Bundesrepublik: Kritik eines Geschichtsbildes (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 180 ff. 25. Jost Hermand, Kultur im Wiederaufbau, 39. T h e financing of private theaters offers a good example. The currency reform of 1948 initiated a precipitous decline in audience attendance, forcing many theaters to close their doors. Whereas 115 private theaters had been established across the three Western zones by 1947, only 31 survived by 1950. See Rischbieter, "Theater: Wiederbeginn zwischen Kapitulation und Währungsreform," 92. It is interesting to note that a similar phenomenon could be observed as the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. David Remnick reports that the once powerful Novy Mir, in which the writings of Pasternak, Brodksky, Solzhenitsyn, and other famous dissidents were published and reintroduced to the Russian reading public, fell from a subscription rate of 2.5 million to just 250,000 in 1992. See "Defending the Faith," NYRB, March 14, 1992. 26. Heinrich Vormweg, "Literatur," in Die Literatur der Bundesrepublik Deutschlands (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1980), 59.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

i6j

It was more than wealth, however, that changed the cultural politics of the 1950s. The period from 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 4 9 was good for culture because everything in German society was in flux as old institutions and cultural practices were largely discredited. People spoke of Kahlschlag to describe the clean sweep—a sort of mental deforestation—that the experience of the war had left in the German imagination. In this void—a momentary paralysis that was both a suppression and rejection of the past—the voices of radical change and the clamor of new ideas found an uncharacteristically warm welcome. But when the stormy days ended and life returned to everyday routine in the years of economic rebuilding, people's imaginations seemed to shrink, and the clearing of the past tended to lead more to lethargy than bold action. In place of the demanding and innovative cultural activity of the first postwar years, the 1950s experienced an unprecedented commercialization and massification of taste. The phenomenon of mass culture existed already in places like the United States, but many educated Germans were genuinely shocked by the immense popularity, for example, of trivial literature published in mass volumes of newfangled "pocketbooks," the rise of popular music, and the imitation of Hollywood's escapist films.27 It was no wonder that some intellectuals romanticized the Trümmerliteratur (rubble literature) and the few years during which new forms of culture had flowered before being nipped in the bud by crass materialism.28 When Walter Dirks claimed in 1950 that a "restoration" had occurred in Germany, he meant that the experience of National Socialism had done nothing much to change the cultural landscape—Germans were returning to their apolitical ways.29 In this intellectual milieu—a mixture of disgruntlement and contempt for what was regarded as a prevailing cultural void—the work of Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn seemed appealing. These two celebrity writers had few rivals in the Germany of the 1950s. Their works struck such a resonant chord, particularly among young readers, that scholars familiar with Benn's and Jünger's entanglement with fascist politics of the 1930s are often at a loss to explain the discrepancy between their dubious pasts and the 27. Helmut Kreuzer, "Trivialliteratur als Forschungsproblem," in Helmut Kreuzer, ed., Erkundungen: Beiträge zu einem weiteren Literaturbegriff (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 7 - 2 6 . 28. See Heinrich Boll, "Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur," in Boll, Erzählungen, Hörspiele, Aufsätze (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1 9 6 1 ) , 3 3 9 - 4 3 - See also Bernhard Zimmermann, "Das Bestsellerphänomen im Literaturbetrieb der Gegenwart," in Jost Hermand, ed., Literatur nach 1945, vol. 22 of Das neue Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, 9 9 - 1 2 3 . 29. Walter Dirks, "Der restaurative Charakter der Epoche," Frankfurter Hefte 5 (9) (1950): 9 4 2 - 9 5 4 . The theme of restoration is beautifully captured by Heinrich Boll in the novella, Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1966).

i68

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

respect accorded them as intellectual, and moral leading figures in the postwar years. The answer can be summarized in one phrase: modern literature. For all their dubious associations with the political right in Germany, Jünger's and Benn's early work originated in the antibourgeois style and rhetoric of avant-garde expressionism. Benn's poetry and Jünger's prose were forged in the crucible of the early modernist rebellion against all traditional forms of language and politics. In the postwar years the most soughtafter writers in Germany, and Europe in general, were the pioneers of modernism: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Musil, Gide, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mann, and Broch. 3 0 Of the Germans on this list, only Jünger, Mann, and Benn were still alive after 1 9 4 5 , and Mann never returned to Germany. 31 Benn and Jünger's continued opposition to the bourgeois milieu, and their adherence to an autonomous form of aesthetic modernism, fit in well with many intellectuals' distrust and suspicion of the emerging mass consumer society in Germany. Jünger and Benn might best be described as "conservative modernists," a compromise with the radical energy of the modern facilitated by the anticommunist climate of the Cold War. Who was left to continue the radical, democratic tradition of Weimar? The respected writers of the left returned from exile to face the hostility of high-brow modernists and liberal humanists. Many preferred to throw in their lot with the fledgling German Democratic Republic. Among the writers who went East were the most talented Weimar intellectuals: Johannes Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Arnold Zweig, Friedrich Wolf, Ludwig Renn, Willi Bredel, and Edward Claudius. Men like Erich Fried and Peter Weiss never returned from exile. And the German literature written in exile would begin to have an influence only a decade later. Heinrich Boll attributed the relatively late impact of these writers to the fact that the experience of Nazism and the brutal reality of total war had created a particularly hardened cynicism, allowing no initial access to the language of the writers in exile. Recalling this period, he said, We changed along with the change in the German language; we experienced it, it had become our language, and there was little connection to the language of the emigrants. That came later, after we had learned to apply our own vocabulary—emancipated with the help of some foreign authors—in a

30. Thomas Köbner, ed., Tendenzen der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur, 2ded. (Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 1984), 37. 3 1 . During a visit to Frankfurt in 1955 Thomas Mann is reported to have said that he followed only three writers after 1945 with any interest: Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, and Wolfgang Borchert (CW, March 3 1 , 1955).

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

169

complicated process. It was only ten or fifteen years ago that a real confrontation with the literature written in exile took place.32 Jünger's intellectual appeal during this period was not simply due to a resurgence of "reactionary" politics nor did it represent a resigned restoration of the status quo, as many cultural critics of the left tended to argue. Jünger offered both conservatives and the homeless left an alternative oppositional stance to the Federal Republic. This opposition was grounded in a reradicalized, metahistorical discourse, branding the capitalist, consumer society of the postwar years as a cultural dead end, a decaying wasteland, the last dying breath of bourgeois ascendancy. In 1951 Giselher Wirsing, an important member of the Young Conservative 7>17'-Circle in the 1920s and early 1930s, published a book dealing with the end of all possible revolutionary politics. He predicted a World Federation, similar in structure to Jünger's idea of the Weltstadt.33, In the "Einheit der Welt" (Unity of the world), published in 1952, Carl Schmitt announced that the world lacked any viable political alternatives, because the two seemingly opposed blocs were united by the same messianic "belief" in progress and science: "East and West faith flow together here. Both claim to be the true humanitarians, the true democracies. Both also descend from the same source, the philosophy of history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." 34 Friedrich Sieburg first described this condition for Germany in apocalyptic tones as the "last days of humanity" and as a Spätzeit (late era) in his 1954 book Die Lust am Untergang.35 Hans Freyer, the author of the programmatic Revolution von Rechts (Revolution from the right) in 1931, published a sociological study in 1955, determining that the spread of technology would soon eliminate cultural uniqueness and "secondary systems" would gradually absorb all human societies and reduce them to subjects of meaningless technical rationality.36 In the same vein, in 1963 Arnold Gehlen

32. Heinrich Boll, Eine deutsche Erinnerung: Interview mit René Wintzen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981/1991), 94. 33. Giselher Wirsing, Schritt aus dem Nichts: Perspekiven am Ende der Revolution, cited by Gotthard Montesi, "Mutationen der Menschheit," Wort und Wahrheit 7 (1952): 4 5 6 - 4 5 9 . 34. Carl Schmitt, "Die Einheit der Welt," Merkur 1 (January 1952): 9. 35. Friedrich Sieburg, Die Lust am Untergang (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954). See also the review by Otto Forst de Battaglia, where Sieburg is compared to Karl Kraus, "Vom irdischen Katzenjammertal und von der Unlustseuche," Der Standpunkt, Jan. 2 1 , 1 9 5 5 . 36. Hans Freyer, Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1955); see Jerry Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 105—106. Freyer's systems analysis anticipated a much more sophisticated "theory of social systems" in the 1970s and currently enjoys a postmodern reception. See the special issue on Niklas Luhmann, NGC 61 (winter

i-]0

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

used the term posthistoire as a sociological category, d e f i n i n g the intransparency o f E u r o p e a n - A m e r i c a n industrial civilization. 3 7 For G e h l e n the "industrial-technical-scientistic" e n v e l o p m e n t o f the m o d e r n world m e a n t that the E n l i g h t e n m e n t d r e a m o f a u t o n o m y h a d b e e n transformed into its opposite: h u m a n beings, b e i n g "instinct-poor," h a d to a b a n d o n the idea o f e m a n c i p a t i o n a n d a c c e p t the protection o f institutional, technical order. 3 8 A writer like Peter B r ü c k n e r struggled in the 1970s to wrest away a posthistoire critique f r o m the right a n d successfully passed it o n to the left by the 1980s. 39 By the early 1970s J ü n g e r was considered passé by the left. Few imagined the r e s u r g e n c e o f interest in Jünger, Schmitt, a n d H e i d e g g e r across the political spectrum in the 1980s. This p h e n o m e n o n is part o f a complicated, unresolved network o f current cultural self-examination. In the n e x t c h a p ter I will e x a m i n e the revival o f ideas b e l o n g i n g to the conservative revolution in G e r m a n y after 1989. H e r e I want to show how J ü n g e r b e g a n reworking those themes forty years earlier. EMPIRE A N D DYSTOPIA O n July 8, 1949, J ü n g e r p u t the finishing touches o n his novel Heliopolis. His wife a n d A l f r e d A n d e r s c h were the first to read the proofs. 4 0 As the b o o k was g o i n g to press, J ü n g e r asked M ö h l e r to find a picture f o r the dust j a c k e t that w o u l d create an "Atlantis m o o d " (Atlantis-Stimmung) a n d a d d e d this interesting note in which h e self-importantly p r o c l a i m e d the e n d o f an e p o c h : Except for my wife, the book seems to have made an impression on the readers so far. My wife thinks that I have finally exited the twentieth century and have turned to the twenty-first. Perhaps she's right about that. The new centuries begin to take on form fifty years early, and they need fifty years after they have

1994) and the special issue " T h e Politics of Systems and Environments," Cultural Critique 30 (spring 1995). 37. A r n o l d Gehlen, "Ende der Geschichte?" in Einblicke (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1 9 7 5 ) , 115-134. 38. A r n o l d Gehlen, Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie (Berlin: L u c h t e r h a n d , 1963), 3 1 0 ff. 39. See, for example, Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). Hans Magnus Enzensberger made an important Statement in his Kursbuch 3 ( 1 9 7 8 ) that there "is n o more world-spirit, we d o not know the laws of history, and the evolution of nature and society knows n o subject." This statement was widely read as a refutation of the revolutionary h o p e s o f 1968 and a turn away f r o m the belief in historical progress. Enzensberger came close to a Jünger-like view o f technology in his Der Untergang der Titanic. (See Jünger's discussion o f the sinking o f the Titanic in An der Zeitmauer, SW8, 525—529.) A n o t h e r important author to r e m e m b e r in this context is Günter Kunert, whose apocalyptic vision o f a total ecological collapse is well d o c u m e n t e d in VerspäteteMonologie ( 1 9 8 1 ) and Diesseits desErinnerns (1982). 40. J ü n g e r to Möhler, July 9, 1949, PAM.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E AGE O F A D E N A U E R

iji

ended to become reality. According to such a calendar, the nineteenth century is ending in these days, and the twenty-first is beginning at the same time.41 Heliopolis is a negative Utopia, c o m b i n i n g elements o f totalitarianism in the style o f Orwell's 1984 with the subtler forms o f technical d o m i n a t i o n described in Huxley's Brave New World.42 J ü n g e r was fascinated by the history o f the G r e e k D i a d o c h a n states that followed the b r e a k u p o f A l e x a n d e r ' s world empire. T h e novel is set in the future, describing a society having j u s t survived a giant conflagration, perhaps an atomic war. A state o f cold war exists between Heliopolis a n d its neighbors. Internal discipline is also o m nipresent, carried o u t by m e a n s o f a sophisticated net o f h i d d e n optical a n d a u d i o devices. In the style o f H. G. Wells, J ü n g e r equips Heliopolis with futuristic gadgets, p r o d u c e d by c o m b i n i n g a n d e x t e n d i n g existing technology, such as a p o c k e t radio p h o n e , the Phonophor, that is simultaneously a transmitter a n d a receiver. In the immediate postwar period a n u m b e r o f G e r m a n writers were captivated by the apocalyptic m o o d following total defeat. In Stefan Andres's trilogy Sintflut, f o r e x a m p l e , an atomic war has w i p e d o u t m o d e r n civilization a n d left m a n k i n d to struggle f o r a new beginning. 4 3 Similar t h e m e s were taken u p by Walter Jens in Nein: Welt der Angeklagten** a n d A r n o Schmidt's Schwarzer Spiegel.*5 T h e end-of-the-world scenario gave J ü n g e r a platform to c o n t e m p l a t e the postapocalypse. Heliopolis is the capital city of B u r g e n l a n d , a state ruled by two military forces: a proconsul, representing the nobility, a n d a country governor, w h o resembles the C h i e f R a n g e r in The Marble Cliffs. T h e Mauretanier also make a r e a p p e a r a n c e as a secret o r d e r o f Nietzschean technocrats w h o s e goal is the ultimate exercise o f power. T h e protagonist, L u c i e n de Geer, a thinly veiled portrait o f Jünger, is an officer in the administrative staff o f the proconsul. H e tries in vain to preserve his i n d e p e n d e n c e a n d is d r a g g e d unwillingly into a battle between the p r o c o n s u l and the governor. T h e tension between the two military figures may b e m o d e l e d o n the power struggle between the army and the party as J ü n g e r e x p e r i e n c e d it in o c c u p i e d Paris. O n e clue to the historical context is the a p p e a r a n c e o f a persecuted f o r e i g n ethnic g r o u p , the ghettoized Parsens. D e G e e r falls in love with the beautiful a n d exotic, fremdrassige B a d u r Peri a n d takes the side o f the Parsens. To save them, h e decides to serve a secret "World-Regent," a Nietzschean Übermensch in possession o f superior w e a p o n s o f destruction. Finally h e flees

41. Jünger to Möhler, August 20, 1949, PAM. 42. Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis,

SW16.

43. Stefan Paul Andres, Die Sintflut, 3 vols. (Munich: Piper, 1949—59). 44. Walter Jens, Nein: Welt der Angeklagten (Munich: Piper, 1968). 45. Arno Schmidt, Schwarzer Spiegel (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1951).

7 72

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR S OPTIC

Burgenland with Badur Peri and the Mauretanians. He boards a spaceship, the "New Columbus," aiming beyond the stratosphere where the WorldRegent is preparing to establish a new empire on earth once the world civil war has played itself out. As in The Marble Cliffs, Jünger centers the story on the conflict between a conservative aristocracy and a popular terrorist movement and also includes torture chambers representing concentration camps. T h e novel is vague in regard to time and place, and it employs the problematic dichotomy of "higher" and "lower" forms of being. T h e dramatic tension is ultimately resolved through escape. What is the significance of Jünger's choice of the science fiction genre? T h e story transports the reader from the concrete ruins of the war to a distant world where order is restored by a heroic (male) individual. Redemption is f o u n d among a small circle of friends or loved ones, away from power, which the reader is intended to associate with corruption. Going against the grain, Lucien de Geer tries to make a clean break with the past. Science fiction depersonalizes the dictators of the world. With a late expressionist touch, the proconsul and governor are never given proper n a m e s — t h e y remain in the background as abstract and pure symbols of power, as if to say that real dictators such as Hitler or Mussolini were solely embodiments of evil, external usurpers of power instead of the product of concrete social and economic circumstances. T h e attention Jünger devotes in this novel to alchemy and the wonders of nature distract the reader from the concrete past of recent experience. T h e aim is clearly to juxtapose the supposedly eternal qualities of myth and nature with the ephemeral but harsh and painful realities of recent memory. It must be remembered that Jünger began the novel in an occupied land, while army vehicles were plowing through the streets night and day and while plundering, raping, and pillaging took place in his immediate vicinity. At one point the writer himself was physically threatened by an armed soldier. 46 Jünger retreated into a tiny room on the top floor of his house in Ravensburg and lost himself in his botanical and etymological studies and histories of the Roman Empire. Jünger explicitly describes the act of writing during this period as an exigent escape from unwelcome reality. T h e readers of Heliopolis read about troubles at once familiar and removed. T h e m o o d is strangely effervescent, as if one were being transported through a magical or fantastic landscape where the beauty of nature overwhelms the senses and erases the material, historical world.

46. In the final part of Strahlungen, Jünger tells of the constant military presence and relates an incident of being accosted by an American soldier with a pistol as he was cleaning out his garden shed. See Strahlungen II, SW3 (May 11, 1945), 445 fF-

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

173

As we shall see when examining the critical reception of the novel, the book appealed to three distinct audiences: to conservatives dreaming about past worlds, to the war-weary middle classes eager to return to bourgeois respectability, and to the young generation seeking an explanation for the course of history. For the conservative temperament, Jünger described a period when the old values were in decline and being replaced by machines and democracy. T h e protagonist, Lucien de Geer, exudes medieval-aristocratic values and Faustian perseverance in the face of defeat. O n the theme of reconstruction, Jünger offered a parable wrapped into the story, "Ortners tale." A rags-to-riches tale, Ortner is a dandy numbed by a world of aesthetic pleasure until he falls in love and suffers a spiritual and religious crisis. T h e protagonist cedes his worldly wealth and retreats into the circumscribed but secure happiness of marital bliss. Having played with fire and been burned, he finds a way back to family, hearth, and community. But a more sinister message also emerges in the novel. Burgenland is run by machines which an autonomous spirit rules against the will of mankind. Technology conquered the world at first as a titan, filling space with machines, then as a rationalizing agent, turning everything into pure automation, and finally, in the third and "magical" phase, automation took on a life of its own. 47 After years of nighttime bomber raids, air raid sirens, and horrible destruction, the idea of an evil ghost in the machine must have made sense to many survivors of the war. RECEPTION OF HELIOPOLIS T h e critics, whether for or against Jünger, occupied themselves with peeling off the symbolic layers of the novel, attempting to bring to light concrete historical connections. Most interpreted the external, Utopian form of the b o o k as a means for Jünger to ride his personal hobbyhorses. Jünger "veils the concrete references of his novel to political-cultural events of the recent past" and sends back, from the future, "addresses and warnings to the contemporary world." 4 8 T h e novel appeared bloodless, lacking in emotion and psychological finesse. Wouldn't it have been better, asked one critic, "to have made a collection of essays out of this novel, which isn't one." 4 9 T h e details, said another, "overwhelmed the composition of the whole." 5 0

47. Heliopolis, 193 ff. 48. Rudolf Majut, "Der Dichtungsgeschichtliche Standort von Ernst Jüngers Heliopolis," Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 38, no. 7 (1957): 1. 49. Hans-Jürgen Baden, "Ernst Jünger mit Goldmaske: Sein neuester Roman—Symptom de Erschöpfung?"Die Welt, Jan. 10, 1950. 50. Walter Picht, "Die Residenz Ernst Jünger," Badische Zeitung, March 11/12, 1950.

IJ4

CHALLENGING T H E VICTOR'S OPTIC

Though critics were in general agreement that it was a novel of ideas, they contested the value ofJünger's contribution in "diagnosing our time," as one Swiss critic put it.51 Jünger's supporters read the novel as a continuing expression of Jünger's Christian conversion and as a defense of "occidental" values, "overcoming a materialistic epoch," 52 as a "deep Christian experience," 53 a "theological meditation on life," 54 "a deep comfort for our times," 55 "a Christian existentialism that comes close to Kierkegaard," 56 and "a devotional for a few initiates."57 Alfred Andersch wrote a glowing review, in which he characterized the author of Heliopolis as an "intellectual who had transformed himself from a defender of conservatism and nationalism to a great European poet of human responsibility."58 Karl Korn, the chief feuilleton editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, perhaps thinking of his own conversion from Hitleradmirer to Adenauer-supporter, wrote: J ü n g e r was once a prophet of heroic nihilism. People listened to him when he wanted to establish a body of knights to fight for lost causes. T h a t was a mistake, certainly, but it was a piece of an epoch. J ü n g e r has left this false path and j o i n e d those few summoned to defend old occidental humanism. 5 9

At the time Heliopolis was being reviewed, Clems Graf Podewils, a personal friend of the author, complained to Die Zeit that Jünger's critics were playing too much a caesar, deciding by thumbs up or thumbs down about life and death in the gladiator's arena.60 It is true that some commentators were out to vent their spleen. Peter de Mendelssohn continued to harp on the author's empty vanity, arguing that the entire book is a "self-made luxury edition of an identity card," empty except for "instructions of ritual for the Jünger cult." 61

5 1 . "Ernst Jünger versucht eine Diagnose unserer Zeit," Die Weltwoche, June 1 6 , 1 9 5 0 . 52. "Gutachten des Leiters des Flämischen Lektorats in Bonn über Heliopolis, der sich bemüht, eine flämische Ausgabe zu fördern," Sammlung des Coudres, box 24, DLAM. 53. M. Brigitte Hilberling, "Ernst Jüngers Heliopolis," Südkurier Koblenz, March 28, 1950. 54. Joseph Mühlberger, "Ernst Jünger: Heliopolis, " Neue Württembergische Zeitung, Jan. 1 g, 1950. 55. Joseph Mühlberger, "Heliopolis," Welt und Wort 5 (1950): 27. 56. René Marcic, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, March 12, 1950. 57. Ernst Gläser, "Utopische Realität: Zu Ernst Jüngers Heliopolis," Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Dec. 12, 1949. 58. Alfred Andersch, "Ernst Jünger redivivus," Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 25, 1949. 59. Karl Korn, "Der Sprung ins Wunderbare: Zu Ernst Jüngers Neuem Buch Heliopolis," FAZ, Dec. 25, 1949. 60. Unpublished letter to Die Zeit, Sammlung des Coudres, box 22, DLAM. 61. Peter de Mendelssohn, "Höchst edeltrefflicher Rautenzauber: Zu Ernst Jüngers Zukunftsroman Heliopolis, " Die neue Zeitung, Jan. 24, 1950.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

175

Other critics distrusted Jünger's seemingly sudden conversion to humanism and Christianity. For Heinz Friedrich "Ernst Jünger i s — a n d this is very bitter to have to say—simply not true any longer. T h e turn to Christian regions, as clever and as aesthetically embellished as it was carried out, has watered down his militant (not in the negative sense) spirit." 62 Peter Harding accused Jünger of regenerating all the prejudices of pre1945 Germany under the cover of antiquated metaphors. T h e elite military caste that rules Heliopolis, for example, is as conceited and blind as the German military that let the Nazis destroy Germany. For Härtling, Jünger's "obsession" with power and hierarchy is reminiscent of a time past. 63 Beyond politics, other critics complained of Jünger's icy style, "frozen rigidity," 64 and his penchant for sterile scientific observation, slicing up life and putting it onto a microscope slide. 65 Jünger might be a great thinker, was an oft-repeated credo, but he was n o poet; fiction was not his strength. 66 But not all the reviews of Heliopolis simply damned or praised the author. T h e analysis of technology in the novel attracted the attention of more than one favorable observer. Jünger's readers were fascinated by the ambivalent description of technology as constituting a world of magical possibilities, beyond history and progress. Jünger seemed to transcend the negative political Utopias of the likes of Huxley or Orwell by postulating a unified world nation and the possibility of freedom beyond need and conflict. But Jünger's Utopia was a strange mixture of emancipation and nightmare, which led one Catholic critic to observe that "the b o o k offers a plethora of knowledge, fabulous descriptions, capriccios and essays that make up for the lack of composition." 6 7 T h e abundance of knowledge, coupled with formlessness, refers to Jünger's habit of burdening his prose with oracular pronouncements coded for initiates. Recurring figures populate his books, such as the prophetphilosopher Nigromontan or the Mauretanien 6 8 and behind the descrip62. Heinz Friedrich, "Utopie und Wirklichkeit: Zu neuen Büchern von Ernst Jünger," Hessische Nachrichten, April 27, 1950. 63. Peter Härtling, "Ernst Jüngers Heliopolis," Welt der Literatur, April 16, 1964, 9. 64. Paul Hühnerfeld, "Heliopolis oder die Stadt ohne Liebe: Zu Ernst Jüngers neuem Roman," Die Zeit, Feb. 2, 1950. 65. Fritz Kraus, "Dichtung als geistiges Planspiel," Neue Zeitung, April 29, 1950. 66. Kurt W. Marek, "Eine Utopie ohne Liebe," Wirtschaftszeitung, Nov. 26, 1949. 67. Friedrich Hansen-Löve, "Abschied von Nigromontan?" Die Österreichische Furche 6 (12), March 18, 1950. 68. The Mauretanier (moors), make their appearance in Jünger's literary panorama in the second edition of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1938) as the "subaltern, many-sided technicians of power" (den subaltemenen Polytechnikum der Macht) (.SWg, 201). In The Marble Cliffs the Mauretanier are the Chief Ranger's thugs, organized vigilantes like the SA. In Heliopolis they appear in a more positive light as the disciplined troops of the Landvogt. Jünger had a weakness for

Ij6

C H A L L E N G I N G T H E V I C T O R ' S OPTIC

tions of exotic plants and animals Jünger teases the reader with arcane symbolic associations. The impression can arise that great truths are being alluded to but are never clearly spelled out. Jünger's writing offers the promise of a transition from an old world into a new, only to become hazy and undefined. Paradoxically this Janus-face has always made Jünger appealing to the avant-garde, concluded one critic, who thought Jünger was in most respects still a reactionary in disguise.69 JÜNGER AND HEIDEGGER ON THE QUESTION OF NIHILISM George Steiner wrote that after 1945 no "metaphysical-poetic discourse on chaos" comparable to the apocalyptic writings of the 1920s took place in Germany. 70 It is true that the post-1945 era did not see any works published that are comparable to Spengler's Untergang des Abendlands ( 1 9 1 8 ) , Moeller van den Brucks Das dritte Reich (1924), or Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927). But it must be added that Jünger and Heidegger continued this form of civilization-critique after the war. Jünger's interest in the mechanics of power, expressed poetically as a vision of world domination in Heliopolis, received essayistic treatment in a series of books during the 1950s: Uber die Linie (Over the line, 1950) , 71 Der Waldgang (The treatise of the rebel, 1 9 5 1 ) , 72 Der Gordische Knoten (The Gordian knot, 1953), 7 3 An der Zeitmauer (On time's wall, 1959), 7 4 and Der Weltstaat (The world state, i960). 7 5 In all of these books Jünger approached the question of the individual and the state in the context of what he considered an age of nihilistic politics. Curt Hohoff has argued that Jünger's writings from this period can be placed at the end of a long line of thinking about nihilism, "the transition of bourgeois-classical militarily organized, very disciplined organizations like the Prussian army and the Jesuits. He wrote to Plard: "Our task in life is probably quite different from what we imagine—an incessant drive for order, in which succeeding is not important, but rather the process of order itself, which is a metaphor, a mimesis, a confirmation of the world order. Thus I have always been attracted to historical powers of order of all kinds, the English fleet, the Prussian army, the court ofLouis XIV, Roman Law, Linné, Gestalt of the Worker, etc."Jünger to Plard, Oct. 23, 1979,PAP. 69. Werner Picht, "Die Residenz Ernst Jüngers," Badische Zeitung, March 1 1 / 1 2 , 1950. 70. George Steiner, Marlin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 9 7 8 / 1 9 9 1 ) , viii. The new introduction was first published in Salmagundi (Spring/Summer 1989). 7 1 . Ernst Jünger, Uber die Linie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950), hereafter cited as Over the Line. 72. Ernstjünger, Der Waldgang (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1 9 5 1 ) , hereafter cited as The Treatise of the Rebel. 73. Ernst Jünger, Der Gordische Knoten (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1953), hereafter cited as The Gordian Knot. 74. Ernst Jünger, An der Zeitmauer (Stuttgart: Klett, 1959), hereafter cited as On Time's Wall. 75. Ernst Jünger, Der Weltstaat: Organismus und Organisation (Stuttgart: Klett i960), hereafter cited as The World State.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

J77

culture to technical civilization," c o m m o n to H e i n e , Nietzsche, Kafka, a n d T h o m a s Mann. 7 6 We will consider the first three o f these works in the c o n t e x t o f the J u n g e r reception o n his sixtieth birthday in 1 9 5 5 . Over the Line was originally conceived as a contribution to a Festschrift f o r Martin H e i d e g g e r ' s sixtieth birthday, Anteile (participators, shareholders). 7 7 H e i d e g g e r situated the recognition o f nihilism as an issue in Nietzsche's meditations o n the "death" o f G o d . In place o f insipid Christianity new values w o u l d have to b e f o u n d , b u t Nietzsche's desire to g r o u n d a new set o f values constituted f o r H e i d e g g e r a n o t h e r e x a m p l e o f "metaphysical" thinking. 7 8 H e i d e g g e r t h o u g h t that Nietzsche's understanding o f nihilism was nevertheless important because it c o n c e i v e d o f a will-to-power with n o o t h e r object than the infinite selfe n h a n c e m e n t o f power: This title "Will to Power" that everyone uses, meant for Nietzsche an explanation of the essence of power. All power is only power insofar as and so long as it is more-power, that is, power augmentation [Machtsteigerung]. Power can only hold itself, that is, in its essence, in advancing beyond every achieved level of power; we say: overpowered. As long as power remains on the same level it becomes impotent. (36) H e i d e g g e r w o u l d later analyze m o d e r n t e c h n o l o g y as a Nietzschean f o r m o f modernity's will-to-power that achieves ever m o r e efficiency f o r n o o t h e r purpose than to o u t d o itself in its drive to be m o r e efficient. 7 9 H e i d e g g e r t h o u g h t that the m o d e r n technological understanding o f b e i n g was destructive f o r m a n k i n d a n d for nature because everything o n earth, i n c l u d i n g p e o p l e themselves, b e c a m e transformed into raw material f o r ever e x p a n d ing production. T e c h n o l o g y orders, disfigures, a n d frames nature instead o f living in h a r m o n y with it. ( T h e G e r m a n language helps H e i d e g g e r in his explication o f Ge-Stell; h e can rhyme the verbs: bestellen, verstellen, gestellen, a n d the n o u n s Herstellen, Darstellen, a n d Feststellen to give the a p p e a r a n c e o f a semiotic web.) 8 0 H e i d e g g e r c o i n e d the term Gestell to n a m e the flightf r o m - B e i n g encased, literally, in technology. A new p a r a d i g m returning

76. Curt Hohoff, "Geheimcode der Dämonen," RAI, March 28, 1975. 77. Anteile: Martin Heidegger zum 60. Geburtstag (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950). Other contributors included M. Guardini, Karl Löwith, and F. G.Jünger. 78. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), vol. 2, 36. 79. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962), 16. 80. As Tom Rockmore notes, Heidegger's linguistic analogies are either a genial use of or an abuse of the German language. He notes that the etymological similarities Heidegger draws between sending (Schicken), destiny (Geschick), and history (Geschichte) are a "slender reed" upon which the philosopher connects technology to history as a collective happening. See Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 227.

Ij8

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

technology to the original meaning of techne as authentic making, a form of nondomineering production, was the way out. 81 Heidegger thought that, after Nietzsche, Jünger had come closest to understanding the essence of technology as unceasing will to power in The Worker. In his unpublished notes on the book Heidegger wrote: "The figure of the Worker is not a human being, not even primarily a t y p e — r a t h e r as a type just an offshoot [Schlag] of subjectivity, whose being is the certainty of calculation. As Will to P o w e r — t h e last 'truth' of being as a whole." 8 2 T h e scare quotes around truth show that Heidegger thought the form of the worker had to be further dismantled as a metaphysical concept, that is, Jünger's description of technology was itself too technological in the sense of affirming the irreversibility of the machine world. Heidegger elaborated his critique of Jünger in the Letter on Humanism, arguing that language and Being take precedence over human beings: "In order for us to learn to purely experience the n a m e d essence of thinking, and that means in order to carry it out, we must free ourselves from the technological interpretation of thinking." 8 3 Over the Line is Jünger's diagnosis of nihilism; the "line" here is conceived as a meridional demarcation. Going "over" the line means entering the sphere of nihilism. At a less metaphysical level, Jünger's analysis reads like a cultural criticism of the politics of the economic b o o m years. Everywhere he sees feverish production as the dominant activity, speaking of a "workshop landscape," in which all of nature's reserves are transformed by the work process. Work in modern society is a form of nihilism because the individual worker is reduced to a "zero-point" by economic and spiritual exploitation. T h e "highest values" are destroyed and in their place sects and cult religions take over. Jünger's description of the shrinkage (Schwund) of life sounds like a description of the workaday world of the busy 1950s: "Today the contraction takes hold of the entire world, but it is not only contraction, it is at the same time acceleration, simplification, potentiation, and drive to unknown destinations." 84 In an analogous way to Heidegger's famous description of a turbine, which violently presses electricity out of the Rhine, 8 5 Jünger describes the incessant leveling of life by technology. T h e social sciences want to take hold of the world mathematically and finish by reducing social and economic re-

8 1 . See Michael Z i m m e r m a n , Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art ( B l o o m i n g t o n : Indiana University Press, 1990), 2 1 9 - 2 2 1 . 82. H e i m o Schwilk, Ernst Jünger: Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten (Stuttgart: Klett, 199°). ! 3 l 83. Martin H e i d e g g e r , "Brief ü b e r d e n H u m a n i s m u s " ( 1 9 4 6 ) in the Gesamtausgabe, 9, 3 1 4 . 84. U b e r die Linie, 2 68. 85. H e i d e g g e r , Die Technik und die Kehre, 16 ff.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

179

ality to cold measurements. 8 6 Nihilism has created an "inner emptiness" that drives m a n outward to display power in "the conquest o f space a n d acceleration o f s p e e d " ( 2 7 8 - 2 7 9 ) . Athletes have b e c o m e "automats," their b o d i e s trained like m a c h i n e s to break new p r o d u c t i o n records (260). J ü n g e r even attributes the lack o f radical politics in the C D U - d o m i n a t e d postwar era to nihilism. Radical ideologies can motivate p e o p l e only w h e n they are c o n f i d e n t that actions can c h a n g e the world; in an age o f nihilism, the aristocracy, the army, a n d the p e a s a n t s — t h e potential constituency o f a radical conservative m o v e m e n t — h a v e s u c c u m b e d to nihilist apathy (273). For J ü n g e r nihilism is closely c o n n e c t e d to the machine-world because b o t h exhibit precision, predictability, a n d discipline. This link explains, f o r Jünger, the s e e m i n g p a r a d o x o f the c o n c e n t r a t i o n camps: "Even in those places w h e r e nihilism shows its most sinister aspects, as in the large physical camps o f destruction [Vernichtungsstätten], there reigns sobriety, hygiene, a n d strict o r d e r until the very e n d " (258). As Primo Levi tells us, the walls o f the camps were plastered with signs o f trite proverbs a n d p o e m s praising "order, discipline, a n d hygiene," 8 7 but the reality o f sanitary conditions was, o f course, quite different. Levi explains that in the upside-down, irrational world o f the camps, w h e r e "there is n o why," prisoners were accustomed to b e i n g e x h o r t e d constantly to clean their hands in disgustingly filthy water. In the above passage J ü n g e r ignores how the camps actually f u n c t i o n e d , because h e is interested, instead, in the symbolic irony o f nihilism's unpredictable consequences. H e claims that o r d e r as an objective a c c o m p a n i e s nihilism's most destructive tendencies. H a d J ü n g e r e x p l o r e d the chasm between the cruel stupidity of the c a m p rules a n d actual physical conditions, h e m i g h t have c o m e close to a thesis about the banality o f nihilism. Instead, h e is interested in the m a n i f o l d ways nihilism has manifested itself as a topos o f E u r o p e a n literature, as an active a n d a passive f o r c e o f c h a n g e . Joseph C o n r a d ' s work, according to Jünger, brings o u t b o t h sides o f nihilism, resignation a n d action, pain a n d c o u r a g e ( 2 6 1 ) . In the face o f increasing destruction, the question for E u r o p e is w h e t h e r it can continue to exist in the nihilistic maelstrom ( 2 6 1 ) . T h e confrontation with nihilism takes place in the f o r g i n g o f aesthetic m o d e r n i s m , anticipated by the material battles o f the First World War: to name a few: Wolfe, Faulkner, Malraux, T. E. Lawrence, René Quinton, Bernanos, Hemingway, Saint-Exupéry, Kafka, Benn, Montherlant, Graham Greene. What is common to all of them is the experimental, the provisional

86. Uber die Linie, 269. Compare Heidegger's comments on the incommensurability of "true" and scientific thinking using the metaphor of the fish on dry land in the "Brief über den Humanismus," 3 1 5 £F. Cf. also the conclusion to "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950/1980), 94. 87. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier, 1961), 27.

180

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

attitude, and the knowledge of the dangerous situation, the tremendous threat. (261)

This long list suggests that Jünger accepted the perspectivalist view of modern nihilism that Heidegger had sharply criticized in Nietzsche. Jünger's essays offered solutions to the purported sickness of European civilization that Heidegger would find delusional. He conjures up "a heroic soldier" who will take on the force of nihilism the way the Germans overcame the ruins left by war. Confident that nihilism can be overcome, everyone stands in battle, regardless of his or her rank in society, and with each individual victory over nihilism the world might be changed. As nihilism is "rolled back," it might leave "treasures on the shore that will outweigh its victims" (279). Finally, for Jünger, the answer to nihilism is a kind of retreat from the world, in the pose of the Waldgänger, the free wild man of a metaphorical forest, an inner realm of scientific and artistic discovery. Heidegger was convinced that Jünger had accurately diagnosed the connection between automation, modern culture, and nihilism. He agreed with Jünger that the "total mobilization" of technology had taken on planetary dimensions. But he disagreed with Jünger about the possibility of overcoming nihilism. In a Festschrift edited by Möhler for Jünger's sixtieth birthday entitled Freundschaftliche Begegnungen (Friendly encounters), Heidegger responded to Over the Line.88 He began by lauding The Worker as a "successful description of European nihilism in its post World War I phase. . . . The dynamic of the work consisted i n — a n d still consists, in a metamorphized function—in making visible the "total work character" of all reality through the gestalt of the worker" (12). The remainder of this analysis was devoted to dismantling Jünger's argument, showing that he failed to grasp the phenomenon of nihilism. Heidegger made two essential points. First, he was skeptical of the possibility of going over "the line" to escape nihilism. Since language speaks through human beings, language is already nihilistic, and we take it with us when we cross over the line (17). Heidegger was here referring to Jünger's talk about nihilism as an object of discourse that confronts the observer like any other. For Heidegger, nihilism is not an external phenomenon, but has already become part of human practices in the modern world. In Heideggerian parlance, language is the house of being, language speaks through man, and language is in some inscrutable way prior to and primary to the constitution of being human. Thus, for Heidegger, we cannot free ourselves of nihilism just by changing our words, as 88. Martin Heidegger, Über "die Linie" in Armin Möhler ed., Freundschaftliche Begegnungen: Festschrift für Ernst fünger zum 60. Geburtstag (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1955), 9 - 4 6 . In i960 Heidegger published an expanded version of his essay as "Zur Seinsfrage," in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), 3 7 9 - 4 1 9 .

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

181

one would put on new clothes. Jünger thinks that one can talk and write about nihilism from a multitude of perspectives, one version from Conrad, another from Dostoyevski, and so on. Heidegger insists that language cannot be separated from the p h e n o m e n o n being described: "By crossing over the line the position of nihilism is abandoned, so it seems, but its language remains. By this I mean language not just as a means of expression, which like clothes, one can take off and change without affecting that which comes to language" ( 1 7 ) . Heidegger then links up nihilism to his central contention that Western philosophy has forgotten about Being the way the preSocratics understood it, namely that human beings are (if Dasein can be so interpreted) the receptive "clearing" {Lichtung), in which things that are show up. Heidegger taught that later philosophers, starting with Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle, thought not about Being, but beings as substantive objects determined by causal interactions with one another and with us. He wrote: "The essence of being, that manifested itself the last time as will-to-power, is based in forgetting of Being" (42). For him, Jünger's desire to "overcome" nihilism was just another manifestation of Sein's ability to hide its true self. In other words, those w h o want to go on living heroically, so to speak, in a nihilistic world without values and direction might be very brave souls, but they are not facing what Heidegger sees as the essence of nihilism, namely the 2,500-year history of Western metaphysics, only the last stage of which is the domination of the earth by technology. For this condition Heidegger uses for the first time the term: Sein, Being that shows u p as nothingness (crossed out) because the original forgetting of the experience of Being, as wonder or awe (thaumazein), has itself been forgotten. 89 Jünger's attempt to overcome nihilism might be seen as pagan reenchantment of the world, in which going "over the line" means investing the planet itself, animals, plants, and the stars with the value of sheer exis-

89. Heidegger argues that the fifth century B.c. Athenians, in the time roughly from Aeschylus ( 5 2 5 - 4 5 6 ) to Euripides (484-406), still lived in a world in which nature and society were experienced as magical, all-pervasive powers, but one in which pure wonder was giving way to rational inquisitiveness. In such a world, the Athenians did not perceive their environment, for example, their festivals, temples, or Olympians gods, as external experiences apart from subjectivity. Rather, Being disclosed itself in the event. This is the understanding or reception of Sein that gets "covered up" by the time Socrates comes on the scene with his skepticism. For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, the decadence of the Western world begins at this time, when Being comes to be understood either idealistically, as the pure form behind the appearances, as in Plato or Christian theology, or as pure presence, "substance" in the empiricalscientific tradition beginning with Bacon. Both of these traditions are equally guilty, according to Heidegger, of Seinsvergessenheit. In the modern world, the latter tradition has won out, giving rise to a technological understanding of Being in which all of reality must be subsumed under single laws or general theories. In this final stage, all possibilities of miracles or wonders, as the pre-Socratics might have "experienced" them, are systematically covered up.

i82

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

tence. Heidegger had to reject such an attempt because for him only human beings have access to Being. Animals are "world-poor" and material objects have n o "world" at all.90 This strict ontological differentiation between beings and their qualitative access to "world" (poor, rich) meant that a certain form of biologism, even racism, remained present in Heidegger's late works, as some of his critics have noted, a claim that cannot be made about Jünger's mature writings. 91 NIHILISM AND REBELLION T h e dialogue between Jünger and Heidegger on nihilism should be viewed against the backdrop of a more general postwar angst concerning the destruction of European culture in two world wars. After 1945 the term nihilism was generally understood to be the basis of anti-Christian, existentialist philosophy, which explained, for many, Heidegger's and many lesser thinkers' fatal attraction to Nazism after 1933. H u g o Ott has shown that between 1945 and 1949 the French military occupation authorities in Baden and the Senate of the University of Freiburg certainly understood the term in this manner and feared the importation of Heidegger's ideas into France for that reason. 92 Heidegger and Jünger were therefore battling this fairly narrow interpretation of the concept in their postwar discourse. A m o n g German intellectuals there were essentially two interpretations of the relationship between nihilism and German culture after 1945. Representing the first view, the victims of Nazi persecution thought that Germany's tradition of romanticism and Lebensphilosophie (vitalism) had sent her down a dangerous and crooked path. Nietzsche, for example, represented a noble, but deeply flawed attempt to overcome the bourgeois stagnation and naive Enlightenment convictions of the nineteenth century. 93 T h a t was the go. See Martin Heidegger, "Sein und Seiendes: Die ontologische Differenz," in Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), 4 5 2 - 4 6 9 91. Farias is most adamant and typically exaggerated on this point. See Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme (Lagrasse: Editions Verdier, 1987). See also Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). See also Berel Lang, Heidegger's Silence (Ithaca: Cornell, 1996), esp. 31-5992. Franz Schöningh, the editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and publisher of the Catholic journal Hochland, who was generally sympathetic to Heidegger, nevertheless presented a paper at a conference in Lahr/Baden in the summer of 1947 in which he wrote that Sartre was "bringing Heidegger to France like some new discovery," and that "the terrifying nihilism of Heidegger or Sartre is seen only as the reflection of a political and social catastrophe. . . . [Heidegger's past] serves to illuminate the connection between nihilism and National Socialism in a particularly direct way" (cited in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 350). 93. See the excellent summary by Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2 7 2 - 3 0 7 . Aschheim discusses

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

183

view of Thomas Mann who abandoned his dedication to Wagner, but could not entirely jettison Nietzsche. Germany's pact with the demonic forces of nihilism and Mann's own recurrent bouts of cultural pessimism were embodied by Adrian Leverkuhn, the main character in his momentous postwar novel Doktor Faustus. Others blamed Nietzsche's philosophy for the seduction of German youth. These accusations tended to come from antisecularist Christians or conservatives such as Herman Rauschning, who had already "warned the West" during the war that Nazism was a f o r m of nihilism. 94 Marxists took the same stance on Nietzsche from a materialist perspective. Following Georg Lukacs, they tended to equate Nietzsche's philosophy with irrationalism and bourgeois resentment that helped set the stage for the rise of fascist populism. 9 5 Hegelian Marxists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Bloch had a much more sophisticated and, like Thomas Mann, ambivalent relationship to Nietzsche's philosophy. Horkheimer and A d o r n o subscribed to m u c h of Nietzsche's critique of reason in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, while implicating his notion of will-to-power as an example of the instrumentalist logic of modern nihilism. 96 Ernst Bloch detected in the anarchic flight of Dionysos still untapped possibilities of liberation from bourgeois subjectivity. 97 For German humanists, the confrontation with nihilism meant searching in one's own intellectual biography for past errors and illusions. Max Weber's brother Alfred was a quintessential representative of the postwar conversion from German nationalist to European humanist. 98 In Farewell to European History, written as the Allies' bombs were destroying German cities, Weber saw Western civilization as having reached a nihilistic cul-de-sac and called for a revival of democratic values and institutions. Things would never have come to the "zero-point," he wrote, had not the "mentality so opposed to the older spirit of the West gained the ascendant since about 1800, that lack of depth that reached its nihilistic zenith in the later, popu-

Friedrich Georg Jünger's book on nihilism, but only briefly alludes to this debate between Jünger and Heidegger. 94. Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: A Warning to the West (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939). O n other conservative and religious thinkers see Aschheim, 2 8 3 285. 95. Lukacs presented Nietzsche as the philosopher of irrationalism most famously in his controversial Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954). 96. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972). 97. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 359. 98. O n Weber's nationalist phase see Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 77, 80.

184

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

larized Nietzsche, the ostensible conqueror of nihilism."99 Weber's rational, humanistic appeal for an "overcoming" of nihilism by reversion to a preNietzschean worldview was very different from the perspective of thinkers on the right who saw Nietzsche as the most relevant philosopher for understanding Germany's defeat and the relative eclipse of the European countries as world powers. More importantly, they saw Nietzsche as the key to a new, European rebirth. Two examples might suffice here. In 1949 Friedrich Georg Jünger presented Nietzsche to the German public as a prophet of what had occurred and what was still to come. The more Nietzsche is attacked, he argues, the more clearly one sees that his thought "withstands" all the onslaughts.100 Similarly, Rudolph Pannwitz postulated that Nietzsche's philosophy serves a remedial function against nihilism and decadence, "life itself carries out its highest function: its own metamorphosis and regeneration." 101 Between the liberal dismissal of Nietzsche and the conservative affirmation of his critique of Western culture, Heidegger and Jünger opened up a third possibility, namely, that Nietzsche's philosophy was itself a symptom of decline. 102 Heidegger's critique of technological thinking, for example, could represent a valid and trenchant exposé of Western cultural and environmental imperialism and a plea for a kind of paradigm shift in cultural practices that would end technology's grasp on the relationship between humans and their environment. 103 Such an ahistorical view of the intellectual context of Heidegger's philosophy fails, however, to appreciate the extent to which both Jünger and Heidegger were responding after 1945 to the trauma of the war experience. In particular, conservative German intellectuals faced the dilemma of how to account for the fact that much of German philosophy and culture had made such a smooth transition to the party line in 1933. To fight the pariah status of Germany after 1945, a common concern of these intellectuals necessarily entailed confronting the discredit

99. Alfred Weber, Farewell to European History: Or the Conquest of Nihilism, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 156. 100. Friedrich Georg Jünger, Nietzsche (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1949), 1 7 1 . 101. Rudolph Pannwitz, Der Nihilismus und die werdende Welt: Aufsätze und Vorträge (Nuremberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1951), 294. 102. See Arthur Herman, The Idea ofDecline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997). Herman reduces ideas to a one-dimensionality that muddles the differences between left and right versions of similar themes. The book is useful, at least, in showing the tenacity of the decadence theme over a large temporal and geographical span in Europe and America. 103. Much of the attraction of the French left to Heidegger is based, in my opinion, on this reading. In the United States, Hubert Dreyfus and his students take this line as well. See Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall, eds., Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 2 - 3 , 17, 1 7 3 - 1 8 5 .

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

185

into which much of German culture had fallen. Jünger was preoccupied with these issues in the 1950s and developed a posthistoire answer that, I will argue, had a significant impact on, among other things, Heidegger's nonresponse to the Holocaust. The Treatise of the Rebel ( 1 9 5 1 ) 1 0 4 offers a Heideggerian meditation on escaping the technological grip of the modern world. Both the Waldgang and Heidegger's Lichtung (clearing) are forest metaphors that elicit, in a reader informed by German literature, romantic and mythological associations of premodern peasants, pagan Arcadia, or Germanic forest-dwellers. Thomas Rentsch pointed out that the nostalgia for the life of the simple farmer, Bauernromantik, traceable at least to the eighteenth century, was often the product of urban literature and completely neglected the actual harsh conditions of rural existence. T h e forest metaphor is even more ancient and just as ideological. 1 0 5 Jünger certainly was aware that the sylvan image of a timbered refuge in a hostile world resonated in German readers' minds with Tacitus's description of the ethnic purity and woodland f r e e d o m of the ancient Teutons in contrast to the decadent luxury of the Romans. Tacitus's book was such an important c o m p o n e n t of the Nazis' self-image of toughness and racial purity that Himmler ordered the return to Germany of the Codex Aesinas, a ninth-century version of Tacitus's Germania that was taken from Fulda and sold in Rome in the fifteenth century. 106 Jünger's friend des Coudres worked in the SS special research division on race ancestry (Ahnenerbe), which thoroughly investigated the history of the Germanic tribes in the swamps and forests of first-century Germany. T h e preponderant power of the Pax Americana in the 1950s seemed to many Germans like a reenactment of the universal aspirations of the imperial Romans to crush and civilize their Teutonic ancestors. Jünger's treatise was in this sense a commentary on the contemporary political situation of Germany's impotence and defenselessness in the face of geographical division and foreign administration. Jünger begins this treatise by stating that the nature of questioning has changed in the modern world: we don't ask questions so much anymore as

104. T h e archaic sense of Der Waldgang might best be captured in the term "the forest wend," as in Heidegger's spelling of Sein as "Seyn." "Wend" is derived from an Old High German word for making one's way through a winding trail. It is related to wenden, to twist and turn, and to wind. The somewhat old-fashioned word is the best translation of Gang because it captures the active sense of the title. Jünger does not mean just taking a walk or a stroll. Der Waldgänger is supposed to be a tough hiker, who ventures beyond the beaten paths; see Ernst Jünger, Der Wäldganger (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951), 7. 105. Thomas Rentsch, Martin Heidegger: Das Sein und der Tod (Munich: Piper, 1989), 200 ff. 106. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 77—80.

i86

CHALLENGING THE V I C T O R ' S OPTIC

we are inundated by demands for answers from all kinds of interrogators. One thinks of Heidegger's distinction between fragwürdig and fraglich, between what is worth questioning and what is pointless, mechanized inquisitiveness. Jünger's readers could not help but think of the Allies' questionnaires Germans had to fill out in the period of occupation: "We live in times, in which we are constantly approached by powers posing questions"(8). Jünger views not only the questionnaires, but also election ballots as a kind of illegitimate cross-examination. He enforced the suspicions of Germans still skeptical about democracy, writing that, in principle, all "free" elections in mass societies are plebiscites, by means of which the leaders offer the "illusion of freedom" while in reality using "statistics" to entrench their positions of power ( 1 1 - 1 2 ) . Jünger's rebel is the man or woman who says "no," avoiding the trap of the tyrants who hold phony elections. The rebel writes "no" on a bridge where everyone might see it or perhaps just the letter "w," which might mean "us" {wir), "awake" {wachsam), "weapons," "wolves," "resistance" {Widerstand), or "Waldgänger." In this way the individual steps out of the "statistically monitored and controlled world"(25). In this first section of the essay, the discussion of resistance to tyrants might apply equally to Germany in 1934 or to the Federal Republic. On the one hand, Jünger looked to the past to develop a doctrine of pseudoresistance with a built-in apology for those who had refused to take action even before Nazism became open terror. Since resistance means playing against the odds, he claims, nobody can be blamed for keeping quiet. In fact, Jünger turns the equation around so that reticence becomes an even greater act of resistance. This "higher" form of resistance, a veiled, private, quiet "no," is precisely what Jünger practiced in his retreat to the countryside and his travels to foreign lands after writing The Worker in 1932, a book that advocated a postdemocratic, authoritarian regime, not necessarily a national socialist one, but hardly its opposite. On the other hand, the figure of the rebel had a contemporary significance. The rebel was a literary trope, much developed and elaborated in Jünger's later works. He later defined the figure as an "anarch" in contrast to an "anarchist." The latter is a suicidal terrorist who breaks all of society's rules and shouldn't be surprised when the heavy hand of bourgeois law comes down on him. The anarch, on the other hand, is an individual who plays by all the rules, externally, but in the private world refuses to conform to society's expectations. Like Maurice Barres's "cult of the self," Jünger's "anarchism" is addressed to the "small elites who know what the times demand" (8). A year after Jünger published The Treatise of the Rebel, Rainer Gruenter published an essay linking Jünger's works to the tradition of European

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

i8j

dandyism. 107 T h o u g h the argument is overwrought, Gruenter convincingly linked Jünger's individualism and romantic, aristocratic snobbism in a general way to the antibourgeois tradition of the dandy. T h e problem with the analogy is that Jünger's "dandyism" had a political purpose. T h e resistance outlined in the essay only makes sense against the backdrop of the increasing resistance in the West German population to the pressure applied by the United States after the Korean War to remilitarize and anchor West Germany in the fight against something called "world communism." Between 1951 and 1953 there was a massive campaign, partially successful, to pardon and release members of the National Socialist elite convicted at Nuremberg. This political movement for a "general amnesty" was predicated on the idea that Germans had been prosecuted only because they lost the war, and the escalation of conflict in the Cold War was a form of political exploitation by the West. 108 Similarly, Jünger's notion of resistance in the Treatise of the Rebel essay was aimed at "small elites" to resist the powers who divided, "robbed, pillaged, and enslaved Germany," T h e G e r m a n has to t h i n k a b o u t it. A f t e r his d e f e a t , t h e i d e a was tested to d e prive h i m f o r e v e r o f rights, enslave h i m , destroy h i m t h r o u g h t h e division o f G e r m a n y . T h i s trial was m o r e d i f f i c u l t than t h e war, a n d o n e c a n say t h a t h e has survived it, in silence, w i t h o u t w e a p o n s , w i t h o u t f r i e n d s , w i t h o u t a f o r u m in this world. ( 1 2 5 )

Jünger's Treatise of the Rebel can be read as a plea to the German elite to resist the French, British, and Americans, w h o continued to retain many powers of occupation in the 1950s, and of course the Russians, whose colonization of East Germany Jünger detested. In a letter to Möhler dating from 1950, Jünger mentions discussing with Carl Schmitt the partisan war against Napoleon in 1806, comparing it to the quest of the Waldgänger w h o must today "fight against both East and West." 109 Jünger interprets the "enslavement" of the Germans as part of a larger movement brought on by the destructive power of rationality. In Jünger's counter-Enlightenment dialectic, the human ability to transform nature has provoked nature to fight back, leading to synchronization (Gleichschaltung), expropriation, liquidation, rationalization, socialization, electrification, pulverization, and so forth (33). But Jünger sees a way out in continu-

107. Rainer Gruenter, "Formen des Dandyismus," Euphorion

46 (1952): 1 7 0 - 2 0 1 .

108. See Ulrich Herbert, "Als die Nazis wieder gesellschaftsfähig wurden," Die Zeit, Jan. 17, 1997, 16. 109. Jünger to Möhler, Sept. 14, 1950, PAM. Schmitt develops a similar theme in his own work on guerrilla warfare, arguing that the legitimacy of the irregular partisan depends, in the twentieth century, on the political situation of friend and foe. See Schmitt, Theorien des Partisanen, 2d ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1975).

i88

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

ing opposition. The greatest danger is that human beings become "comfortable" in the order of tyranny, lose sight of freedom, and become domesticated. The domesticated animal eventually gets slaughtered. Prewar vitalistic categories still dominated Jünger's interpretation of the social upheavals of the Second World War, which he saw as a "test" for the peoples of the world: "The catastrophes test the measure of how much a people is grounded in the world: if at least one root has opened up the e a r t h — o n this depends the health and life perspective of civilization and its security" (40). The larger picture Jünger draws comes into focus when he writes that the worker and the soldier are the two "great figures of our time," and the third is the Waldgänger (41). The logical trajectory seems to be as follows: The worker is presented as the proletariat of the automated world of the late industrial revolution. The unknown soldier was the victim of the Second World War, "a sacrificial victim (Opfergänger), who carried the burden in the great fiery wastelands" (41). The rebel is the last opposition to liberalism, the West, consumerism, technology: the romantic-aristocratic survivor in a leveled world: We see a change in perspective as the society in decline is replaced by a confrontation of the individual with the technical collective and its world. As the author delves down into its depths, he himself becomes a forest wanderer. Authorship is just another name for independence. (42)

Like Heidegger, Jünger saw the individual as trapped in a technological understanding of being from which it was difficult to escape. The doomed passenger ship Titanic serves as the most powerful metaphor of the twentieth century: "The individual does not stand alone anymore in society like a tree in the forest; rather he or she is like the passenger in a fast moving vehicle, what we might call the titanic, or also the Leviathan"(54). Jünger argues that the return to a pretechnological state of mind depends simply on the resolve of the German people. At the moment when Germans recognize their full power, the "bonds of technology" can be broken (52). He takes comfort in the idea of a new age in which mythology will replace destructive rationality: "Myth is not prehistory: it is timeless reality that repeats itself in history. It is a good sign that our century is finding meaning again in the myths"(54). The final "great figure of our time" is a return to "timeless realities." The essay ends by invoking an interior voyage to contemplation of the "inner sphere of freedom." The initially promising discourse on resistance to tyranny fades away by the conclusion into an essentially apolitical stance. Ernst Niekisch was one of the old revolutionaries who was clearly disappointed with what he saw as a quietistic retreat from political engagement. He confessed to a mutual friend that he thought Jünger would still play a large role in "positive German politics" after 1945,

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

i8ç

but he was perturbed by the author's retreat into isolation. 110 In a two-page critique of the Waldgang, a copy of which Niekisch sent to Jünger, the former editor of the national Bolshevist Widerstand compared Jünger to Max Stirner, whose individualism was nearly solipsistic. According to Niekisch, Jünger doesn't realize how indebted every individual is to the collective: indeed, he remarks, "glorious isolation" is a version of societal exploitation. Niekisch wonders why the figure of the Waldganger has achieved such popularity among conservatives, positing that postwar individualism is the last refuge of the European intellectual, threatened by the mass culture of America and the Stalinist Leviathan of Russia. Niekisch detects in all ofJünger's poses the flight from society, "whether in Africa, as a heroic soldier, a gourmet of aesthetics, as a runaway from Hitler's army in the dreamy reflections of Gardens and Streets, as a mountain dweller in the cosmic sphere of Heliopolis . . . wherever one looks, one uncovers the figure of the fleeing nihilist." 111 Finally, Niekisch asks, "where is the forest?" He considers the trees a natural metaphor for solitude and refuge, comparable to Rousseau's idea of nature. As such the forest "is the somber feeling, the intuitive sense of the inner self, emancipated from the exterior world." Niekisch concludes with the material question, "who finances this freedom?" THE HOLOCAUST AS MYTH AND HISTORY During the 1950s Jünger became ever more preoccupied with the study of mythology and openly advocated myth as a panacea for the sickness of modernity. 112 T h e study of myths clearly suited his temperament and intellectual interests. Myths transcend history and rationality—as such they evolve in an atemporal sphere where legend, heroes, and gods reign. An important intellectual collaborator in this venture was the Rumanian mythologist, Mircea Eliade, with whom Jünger was later to publish and coedit a highly regarded journal devoted to the study of myth, Antaios. Eliade taught at a number of European universities before coming to the University of Chicago in the 1950s. He was considered a leading scholar on religion and mythology, having published over fifty books. Less well known were his

110. "Zu Ernst Jünger: Anlage zu einem Brief" from Ernst Niekisch to Piet Thomisson, Feb. 2, 1952. Sammlung des Coudres, box 22, DLAM. 1 1 1 . Ibid. 112. Again we have the testimony of Niekisch, who wrote: "In his isolation, Jünger has arrived at some pretty strange ways of looking at things. Occult, yes astrological tendencies have become prominent in his worldview" (Gewagies Leben [Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1974], 184).

zj»o

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

propaganda writings in the 1930s for the Iron Guard, Ion Antonescu's mystical, religious-nationalist regime that collaborated with the Nazis. 113 A g o o d example of Jünger's interest in mythology, the occult, and drugs was the novella A Visit to Godenholm ( 1 9 5 2 ) . T h e protagonist, Moltner, sets off on a metaphysical j o u r n e y to the north and discovers a magician, Schwarzenberg, a philosopher-guru like Nigromontanus in The Marble Cliffs.11* T h e novel contains therapeutic suggestions to combat the "disenchantment of the world."115 Jünger's personal solution for reenchanting reality was a regular dose of mescalin, which he took while writing the book. 1 1 6 But to the readers of the 1950s, the story provided more escapist fantasies from the gray routine of life. Two years later, in a very evocative and meditative essay on hourglasses, Jünger reconstructed the practice of mythological timekeeping by calendars based on cyclical rhythms. In short, the essay argues that the modern mechanical clock had put an end to the natural rhythms of life. 1 1 7 Jünger also explores the notion of "lineal contemporaneity," contrasting the flat, synchronic experience of time in modernity to cyclical repetition. He postulates here a contrast between the full awareness of time in antiquity or among so-called primitive peoples and the modern forgetfulness of time because of standardization. This line of thinking was developed in his Sicilian travel diary A w Sarazenenturm {At the Saracen tower, 1955). Under Jünger's pen, the lives of people, flora, and fauna of the island take on a timeless, magical quality. T h e rich archeological finds in Sicily, combined with the fact that so much of the island was still cut off from modern technology in 1955, led Jünger to ponder the contemporaneity of old and new: "the old is always contemporary and the new was always there." 1 1 8 The Gordian Knot,119 offers another example of a mythopoetic interpretation of contemporary politics. Jünger examines the Cold War from the perspective of the West's relationship to the East, particularly to Russia. It will be recalled that the Gordian knot was tied by Gordius, the king of Phrygia, who prophesied it would be u n d o n e by a future ruler of Asia. L e g e n d has it that Alexander the Great cut it with his sword. For Jünger the knot repre-

113. O n his correspondence with Jünger, see Mircea Eliade, Journals, 3 vols., trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). On his Iron Guard phase, see Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 84. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

Ernst Jünger, Besuch auf Godenholm (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1952). Ibid., 42 ff. Interview with Ernst Jünger, L'Express, Jan. 1 1 - 1 7 , 1 9 7 1 > 107. Ernst Jünger, Das Sanduhrbuch (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1954). Ernst Jünger, Am Sarazenenturm, SW6, 224. Ernst Jünger, Der Gordische Knoten, SW 7, 3 7 7 - 4 7 9 .

JÜNGER IN THE AGE OF ADENAUER

içi

sents "the symbol o f all great confrontations between East a n d West" (396). In this struggle the West turns o u t to possess a tradition o f f r e e d o m in contrast to the p r e d o m i n a n t t e n d e n c y toward despotism in the East. J ü n g e r makes some interesting observations o n the nature o f dictatorships. H e asserts that certain characteristics, such as evil, are timeless: Cain a n d A b e l are contemporaneous with all m a n k i n d (408). H e invites the reader to entertain the n o t i o n o f a "timeless b e i n g " living in what h e terms "higher c o n t e m p o r a n e i t y " (höhere Gleichzeitigkeit): We become conscious of this contemporaneity when applying the words "earlier" and "later," in the sense that, for example, Cain, the prototype of the despot, although the older brother, was still Abel's contemporary: the one cannot exist without the other. Man is not only the descendent of both, but both always exist in him. (404) T h e e x a m p l e that c o m e s to Jünger's m i n d is the "eternal Cain" in H i m m ler a n d the c o n c e n t r a t i o n camps w h e r e the ashes o f the d e a d were thrown to the wind in o r d e r to avoid the b a d spirits w h o m i g h t c o m e back to h a u n t the place (429). A n o t h e r e x a m p l e h e offers is Katyn. H e speaks of the "chasms" (Abgründe) that can b e f o u n d in every person a n d that are revealed w h e n the natural o r d e r breaks down. C h a o s is the "law o f Cain" (433). In this m a n n e r , the Holocaust appears as a rupture in time, b u t o n e that exists as an eternal r e c u r r e n c e o f evil. C o n c l u d i n g these historical observations, J ü n g e r notes that the first two world wars were really world civil wars. T h e Russian Revolution b e g a n a process f o r e i g n to the E u r o p e a n spirit. In the West, each individual possesses an i n n e r realm o f f r e e d o m , s o m e t h i n g u n k n o w n in the East. In the West princes only a p p e a r to possess unlimited power. In fact each administration o f power is a test o f greatness j u d g e d by history. W h e n these boundaries are overstepped, despotism begins. B o t h Hitler a n d Stalin failed to recognize this ( 4 4 5 - 4 5 0 ) . But power has yet a n o t h e r face: a l t h o u g h c o n t e m p o r a r i e s see in the likes o f Caesar or N a p o l e o n brutal conveyors o f death, time erases the b l o o d a n d leaves t h e m shining in the m e m o r y o f their p e o p l e s ( 4 5 0 4 5 3 ) . J ü n g e r oversimplified the E a s t / W e s t divide in a m a n n e r characteristic o f conservatives in the postwar era. H a n s Freyer, f o r e x a m p l e , a r g u e d (in 1947!) that Asian culture h a d still n o t e n t e r e d "world history." 1 2 0 T h e superiority o f the West ipso facto r e g e n e r a t e d the myth o f the inferiority o f the Slavs a n d o t h e r n o n - E u r o p e a n peoples. A s to the critics' reaction, Emil Franzel praised Jünger's essay because it demonstrated that p e o p l e "cannot exist without shape (Gestalt), that shapes must have an i n n e r order, n o t without ranks a n d grades a n d i n t e r c o n n e c t e d

120. See Hans Freyer, "Weltgeschichte," Die Sammlung 1 (3/4) (March/April 1947): 151.

IC)2

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

pieces that together build a whole." 1 2 1 Joseph Reeding thought the work had "a unique place in the literature of the twentieth century" because of its "conquest of anxiety," the basic m o o d of the time, and because of replacing it with "clear knowledge." 1 2 2 Carl Schmitt contributed a seemingly laudatory review of The Gordian Knot to Jünger's Festschrift of 1955. 1 2 3 Just as Heidegger's contribution was actually a philosophical critique ofJünger's view of nihilism, 124 Schmitt used the occasion to offer a substantially different view of the East/West divide. In particular, Schmitt was unhappy with Jünger's privileging the f r e e d o m of the West, as maritime powers, over the despotism of the Asian continent. For Schmitt, England's rise to a global maritime power in the seventeenth century represented a turning away from the traditional territorial power relations between land-based princes and therefore marked the beginning of the end of Europe's rich cultural diversity. In the wake of England's decline, however, the new victors (presumably the United States and the Soviet Union) have carried the impulse of world colonization into the outer reaches of space. Schmitt's critique ends in a decidedly pessimistic tone, warning of unspecified dangers awaiting those who try to turn the "earth itself into a space ship." 1 2 5 Jünger's vague and convoluted historical speculations did not sit well with other discerning readers. Karl Heinz Kramberg, who admitted to being as "fascinated and seduced as ever" by the author's prose style, complained that "Jünger's manner of giving absurd claims a mythical appearance through shadowy logic has by now reached a perfidious perfection that borders on the masterful." 1 2 6 This masterful but tenebrous logic also had an influence on Martin Heidegger that has not been fully appreciated by scholars. It has been well established by now that Jünger's pronouncements about the world being in the grip of planetary technology, elaborated in essays during the 1920s and synthesized in The Worker (1932), profoundly influenced the martial language Heidegger employed when he decided in 1933 to place himself and 121. Emil Franzel, "Versuch einer Deutung des Konservativen," Neues Abendland 11 (2) (»953) : i 5 3 - ! 9 8 122. Joseph Reeding, 'Jünger's Brücke in die Zukunft,"/)« Kultur, Jan. 15, 1954. 123. Schmitt, "Die geschichtliche Struktur des heutigen Welt-Gegensatzes von Ost und West: Bemerkungen zu Ernst Jüngers Schrift, 'Der Gordische Knoten,' in Armin Möhler, ed., Freundschaftliche Begegnungen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1955), 1 3 5 - 1 6 7 . T h e essay is reprinted, with additional notes by the editor, Günter Maschke, in Carl Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren, 1916—1969 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), 5 2 3 - 5 5 1 . 124. Martin Heidegger, "Uber 'Uber die Linie,'" in Möhler, Freundschaftliche Begegnungen, 9-45125. Schmitt, "Die geschichtliche Struktur," 166. 126. K. H. Kramberg, "Ernst Jünger über Ost und West," SZ, Oct. 1 7 , 1 9 5 3 .

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

793

the German university in the service of National Socialism's total mobilization, the transformation of the army, the workers, and the intellectuals into "one force." 127 Witnesses from the period of his rectorship (April 1 9 3 3 June 1934) report that Heidegger struck pathetic military poses and elevated the status of the front soldiers to mythical proportions, possibly as a reaction to his own decidedly unheroic military role as a reservist in World War I.128 Less noted in the voluminous literature on "Heidegger's Silence" is the fact that Heidegger remained under the spell ofJünger's ideas when he neglected after the war to reflect on the course of German history and its relation to the Holocaust. Heidegger was notoriously silent on the murder of the Jews, but in the few statements he made about the gas chambers, he compared them opaquely to the mechanized industrial killing of animals. 129 Although, as we have seen, he felt less inhibited about speculating on the Holocaust, Jünger interpreted National Socialism as a logical outcome of the domination of a new technological order, following upon the demise of the age of the soldier and the worker. In a very revealing essay he published in 1959 for a Festschrift in honor of Heidegger's seventieth birthday, Jünger offered a synthesis of his view of the "end of history" that uncannily anticipates Heidegger's stubbornly evasive pronouncements on the relationship between National Socialism and the "essence of global technology" in his famous Spiegel interview in 1966. 130 Jünger and Heidegger both subscribed to a historical understanding of preurbanized humanity as a time in which consciousness was not yet experienced as interior and exterior reality—people experienced nature as gods or, as Jünger put it, the world was still indivisible {ungesondert) .Xil Jünger presents the "golden age" as an actual historical period of abundance, freedom, and simplicity. The decline of the world began with encroachments upon the freedoms of hunters and gatherers by farmers, and eventually by the construction of cities ( 3 1 8 - 3 1 9 ) . In this period, reality was perceived as

127. See Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity, 66 ff. See also Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 8 8 - 9 2 . T h e citation is from Martin Heidegger, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 37128. See Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger, 1 5 0 - 1 5 9 . 129. Robert John Sheffler Manning, "The Cries of Others and Heidegger's Ear: Remarks on the Agriculture Remark," in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996), 1 9 - 3 8 . 130. Martin Heidegger, "Only a God Can Save Us," in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, 104, 107, 1 1 1 , 114. 131. The following is from Ernst Jünger's essay, "Vom Ende des geschichtlichen Zeitalters," in Günther Neske, ed., Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag: Festschrift (Tübingen: Neske, 1959). 3 0 9 - 3 4

1^4

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

the magical presence of things, as the oral remnants of early sagas purportedly testify. The crucial break comes with the advent of what Jünger calls the victory of humans over the gods signaling the "age of heroes," when the disappearance of the gods is "remembered" in awe, wonder, and religion, manifested in the cult of the dead and totemism (324). The current age, Jünger believed, was experiencing the end of world history and the "magical return" of the age of the gods. Just as the preheroic age lived on in remnants called mythology, so in the posthistorical age history will continue to affect reality in unanticipated ways. The manner in which past historical periods go into eclipse but continue to exist in an "afterlife" as the effects of a forgotten past (Heidegger will call this concealment/unconcealment) is key to understanding both Heidegger and Jünger's perception of the meaning of Germany's defeat in two world wars. "It is no accident," Jünger writes, that t h e m o d e l s o f the d e f e a t e d powers in the S e c o n d W o r l d War o r i g i n a t e d in t h e B r o n z e a n d early Iron A g e : the n o r d i c m a n , the a n c i e n t R o m a n , a n d the J a p a n e s e Samurai. T h e r e a s o n w h y they c o u l d n ' t win has to d o with t h e basic rule that a myth c a n n o t b e restored, that it c a n e r u p t into history like a volc a n o , b u t c a n n o t create a w o r l d climate [ Weltklima]. (332)

Does Jünger mean here that fascism is to be understood as originating in a prehistorical myth? What kind of "climate" was fascism trying to bring into existence? It cannot be said for sure, but what is clear is that Jünger's Spenglerian range reduces historical events to almost meaningless causal factors. Jünger admits that what is new in the modern world is the ability of humans to inflict catastrophes upon themselves. The new technologies are in fact proof that we have entered a posthistorical world because the entire globe is electronically connected as a "global Heimat" (334). The essay vacillates between an optimistic "return of the golden age" and a darker vision of an earth where the "gods are in flight" and "civil and race wars" will wreck the planet (336-339). Heidegger trusted Jünger's encyclopedic knowledge of mythology, religion, geography, and ancient history, all of which is provocatively synthesized in an argument claiming that humanity is on the cusp of a posthistorical age. Without the seemingly empirical, anthropological underpinning of Jünger's writings, which are entirely lacking in Heidegger's "dialogues" with dead philosophers, it is doubtful if Heidegger would have felt so confident in speculating about the redemption of some future gods and "authentic" renewal, or in consoling himself with the idea that he had always upheld a "purer" form of National Socialism and had resisted the historical one. 132 132. On Jünger's influence and Heidegger's self-deception, see Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, 94-100, 113, 124, 130-132, 1 8 6 - 8 7 , 2 1 6 - 2 1 8 . Rockmore ex-

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E OF A D E N A U E R

795

TAKING INVENTORY AT SIXTY

Jünger turned sixty on March 27, 1955. It was an opportunity for the German public to take stock of one of its most problematic cultural figures. After perusing the pile of notices and reviews des Coudres sent him, Jünger was unimpressed, responding, O n the occasion of my birthday a flood of reviews has reached my desk that I am sending on to Baedeker, and whose only result is to confuse the representation of my work. But that is unimportant, since I haven't taken the whole lot of these critics seriously for a long time. They all say the same thing. A n d after 1 9 4 5 , when they pounced upon me with the same unanimity, that was an involuntary compliment. 1 3 3

These remarks would suggest that the reviews were mostly negative. In fact, Jünger's sixtieth birthday was an occasion for accolades and laudations. For many, Jünger was still a distinguished humanist as well as an oracle, a prophet, or wise man whose judgment of the times was eagerly awaited. He was honored in all parts of the political spectrum: the president of the republic, Theodor Heuss, sent him a copy of his book Anton Dohm, crediting Jünger as an inspiration. The SPD politician Carlo Schmid telegraphed "thanks for the great work and best wishes for its completion." The publishers Vittorio Klostermann, Günther Neske, and Ernst Rowohlt all sent congratulations.134 From other quarters questions were posed about Jünger's status as a cultural figure. Rudolph Adolph visited the writer on his birthday in Wilflingen and asked him about the amount of "hate" he generated among his opponents. Jünger thought it had to do with the fact that he "affirms the twentieth century," for both evil and good, thus provoking the "powers against me." 1 3 5 Jünger's purported ability to see more profoundly into the historical process of modernity convinced the visitor that "the confrontation with Ernst Jünger is the confrontation with our century." 136 Likewise the Swiss philosopher-historian Erich Brock exuberantly declared, "the tragedy of our times is fulfilled in Jünger." 1 3 7 An Austrian professor of jurisprudence, presses evident dismay that Heidegger "could be influenced by the work of an intrinsically insignificant writer such as Jünger" (218). Obviously I disagree that Jünger is insignificant and have tried to present a cogent explanation for Jünger's strong presence in Heidegger's philosophy of technology. 133. Jünger to Möhler, May g, 1955, PAM. 134. "Ehrungen für Ernst Jünger," Die Zeit, March 3 1 , 1955. 135. Rudolph Adolph, "Wiederbegegnung mit Ernst Jünger," Schwäbische Zeitung, March 25. >955136. Ibid. 137. Erich Brock, "Ernst Jünger zu seinem 60. Geburtstag," NZZ, March 30, 1955. Brock was the author of Das Weltbild Ernst Jüngers: Darstellung und Deutung (Zurich: Niehans, 1945).

196

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

René Marcie, wrote "The fullness of the problem of existence of world and man is encompassed brilliantly in his work." 1 3 8 In an article entitled "The Weather Vane of our Time," Fritz Kraus exuberantly exclaimed, "Jüngers language expresses a universal signature of our times." 139 In the same vein, H. M. Schönfeld wrote that Jünger was such a controversial figure because he "incorporates the contradictions of our epoch." 1 4 0 T h e literary critic Hans Egon Holthusen viewed Jünger's lifework as a mirror image of German history, "the place where certain essential meaningful connections of German destiny are expressed in a significant and very precarious manner." 1 4 1 T h e writer Edgar Traugott compared Jünger to Moses: "Is Jünger the prophet of a new society, who led us through the wars and civil wars in order to point, in the end, to the promised land?" 1 4 2 T h e above examples serve as reminders of the way some intellectuals of the Adenauer era projected the task of restoration onto Jünger's works. T h e notion that Jünger's writings reflected the historical development of Germany presupposed that Jünger was a passive recorder of events, a seismograph. T h e idea that National Socialism had "happened" to Germany was a late reenactment of the decisionist understanding of the "event" that breaks the normal course of history. Some critics emphasized the tension between description and prescription in Jünger's writing. T h e Belgian Holocaust survivor Jean A m é r y 1 4 3 was profoundly ambivalent about Jünger. For Améry, Jünger in some sense represents the "eternal German" desire to offer "all-encompassing cures" for the modern world, according to the motto am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen.14* Thilo Koch emphasized that if Jünger is an "allegory," then the 138. René Marcie, "Ritter gegen den Nihilismus: Ernst Jünger zum 60. Geburtstag," Salzburger Nachrichten, March 29, 1955. 139. Fritz Kraus, "Lebensreise eines Ungemütlichen: Ernst Jünger 60 J a h r e — D e r Wetterwart der Zeit und der Weg seiner geistigen Entwicklung," Südkurier (Konstanz), March 29,

'955140. H. M. Schönfeld, "Vom Stahlgewitter zum Stundenglass: Für und wider Ernst J ü n g e r — Zu seinem 60. Geburtstag,"Der 7ag- (Berlin), March 29, 1955. 141. Hans Egon Holthusen, "Ernst Jünger und das deutsche Verhängnis," Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 26, 1955. 142. Edgar Traugott, "Das Land hinter der Wüste: Zum 60. Geburtstag Ernst Jüngers," CW, March 31, 1955. 143. Originally born in Austria of mixed Jewish and Catholic parentage as Hans Maier in 1912, he fled Austria for Belgium in 1938, was arrested in 1940 by the Belgians, then by the Gestapo in 1943, and spent the rest of the war interned in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. He took the pen name Jean Améry after 1945. See Alvin Rosenfeld, 'Jean Améry as Witness," in Geoffrey H. Hartman, Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes ofMemory (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 61 ff. 144. "The German way is the world's cure." See Jean Améry, "1st Ernst Jünger der ewige Deutscher? Zum 60. Geburtstag des viel bewunderten, viel bekämpften Schriftstellers," Kasseler Post, March 29, 1955.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

197

picture he symbolically represents contains also the "derailments and chaos" of German history. 145 Less ambiguously, Max Frey viewed Jünger as incorrigibly entrapped in the German military past and portrayed the attempts to carry on a diagnosis of the time in the style of The Worker as a continuation of his unique brand of militant romanticism: A f t e r 1 9 4 5 h e w a n t e d t o w r i t e a t h e o l o g i c a l a p p e n d i x t o The Worker a n d s o u g h t t h e a d v i c e o f l e a d i n g J e s u i t s a b o u t it. T h e n h e t r i e d t o s y m b o l i z e t h e p o s t w a r situation in G e r m a n y in the f o r m o f the " W a l d g ä n g e r " a n d the "Partisan bet w e e n E a s t a n d W e s t . " B u t t h e h o p e d - f o r e c h o f a i l e d to b e h e a r d . U n l i k e t h e previous g e n e r a t i o n , the g e n e r a t i o n o f 1 9 5 0 did n o t w a n t to c o m e to terms with J ü n g e r ' s militant r o m a n t i c i s m a n d m o s t certainly n o t with his sniperr o m a n t i c i s m [Heckenschützenromantik]

,14S

Both supporters and critics often used the term romantic to describe Jünger's writings. Did they mean a political romantic? Jünger's translation of the French romantic philosopher Rivarol offers some g o o d clues.

RIVAROL: C O U N T E R - E N L I G H T E N M E N T

HERO

Jünger might be aptly described with oxymorons such as a "conservative modernist" or "romantic assassin," when considering the Janus-faced nature of his critique of civilization. H e was intellectually also rooted, however, in the older antirevolutionary tradition of European conservatism. It was not solely an antiquarian bent that led him to amass a huge collection of rare books, stamps, letters, and other historical artifacts of the ancien régime. O n e of his favorite books was the eighteen-volume chronicle of the court of Louis XIV by St. Simon. But by his own accounts, he was not a romantic. H e continually sought a synthesis unifying what he considered to be eternal truths with the contingencies of the modern world. T h e best example of such an attempt can be studied by looking at his preoccupation with Antoine Comte de Rivarol ( 1 7 5 3 - 1 8 0 1 ) , the French moralist philosopher and a sworn enemy of the French Revolution. Jünger translated Rivarol into German and published the work with a substantive introduction in 1956. Jünger's fifty-page essay, "Life and Work," offered him a forum to discuss the virtues and foibles of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This much neglected text (especially among those w h o concentrate on Jünger's "radical" modernist tendency), 1 4 7 treated an issue Jünger con145. T h i l o Koch, "Ein ganzes G e b ä u d e von Allegorien: Ernst Jünger wurde am 29. März 60 Jahre alt," Die Zeit, March 3 1 , 1955. 146. Max Frey, "Es fehlt ihm an Liebe: Ewiger Leutnant wird 60 Jahre alt," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, March 29, 1955. 147. A b o v e all in Karl Heinz Bohrer, Ästhetik des Schreckens: Die pessimistische Romantik und Emst Jüngers Frühwerk (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1 9 7 8 / 1 9 8 3 ) .

iç,8

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

sidered to be of utmost importance. He said to Möhler, "this is my first field report (Lagebeurteilung)148 since Over the Line."149 That Jünger identified with Rivarol is clear from the following passage taken from a letter in the year of the book's publication: "The critics are going to try to unload Rivarol on me: the values of 1789 are still dominant, a fact this opportunity will fully confirm. . . . It strengthens my conviction that Rivarol is an intellectual litmus test for our times." 150 Friedrich Georg Jünger's judgment of his brother's book is pertinent here because it sheds light on one aspect of Jünger's ambivalence toward the democracy of the Federal Republic. Friedrich Georg hinted at a postdemocratic development for Germany without further elaborating on the specific contours of the new state. Democracy, as the legacy of the French Revolution, is likened here to a kind of poison: The book is exact, insofar as it determines your own standpoint. More important than the translation, as successful and penetrating as it is, is what you say about it. The monarchies came to an end, and the democracies are going the same way—the contemporary significance of the book lies in the turning point. What derives from the French Revolution is dead as a corpse, above all in France. Once this bodily poison has been sweated out, a new hope might arise. 151

As uncompromising as Jünger's anti-Enlightenment position was in this book, he still rejected the kind of conservatism that sought values in a prerevolutionary Europe. Rivarol disliked the ancien régime and the parasitic nobility as much as the Jacobins. Jünger identified with Rivarol's rebellion against French society and viewed himself in a similar position of revolt against the "imposed" laws of the victors: "We know that our constitution was not built on authentic foundations, but was rather woven out of a negation, offered to the victors after our defeat." 152 Rivarol left Paris in 1792, lived in England for a while, and then went to Berlin and died there. Jünger lauded the courage of the French émigrés and compared them favorably to the German exiles' "abandonment of the Fatherland" in the 1930s. 153 Accordingly, a true concept of conservatism embraces "preserving powers" (erhaltende Mächte), in contrast to harmful assaults on the nation. Jünger continued to regard the public sphere as little more than an expression of the power of the mob that threatens to displace 148. Note the military terminology. 149. Jünger to Möhler, Nov. 17, 1955, PAM. 150. Jünger to Möhler, February 17, 1956, PAM. 151. Quoted by Ernst Jünger in a letter to Möhler, Feb. 29, 1956, PAM. 152. Ernst Jünger, Rivarol: Leben und Werk, SW14, 253. 153. T h e point is made by Günther Blöcker, "Am Rande des Vulkans," Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 12/13, 1956. See Jünger, Rivarol, 252.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

199

the dwindling authority in democratic states. In a letter only recently c o m e to light, h e wrote to Carl Schmitt in 1 9 7 5 I have been thinking of you often recently because of the "Watergate scandal" and the difficulties facing Indira Gandhi. In both cases the legislative bodies, with the support of public opinion, are attempting to undermine the last bit of authority contained in democracies. That is how rebellions begin. . . . Our current troubles began with the death of the student Ohnesorg, who was shot during a riot. The situation got out of hand because the state gave more support to those who broke the law than to the executive. 154

A L L E G O R I E S OF T H E MACHINE In 1 9 5 7 A r n o l d G e h l e n published his m a j o r work Die Seele im. technischen Zeitalter, warning that technological progress h a d o u t p a c e d the psychosocial p a c e of h u m a n evolution. 1 5 5 T h a t summer, the Situationist International was f o u n d e d in Italy by radical intellectuals w h o viewed m o d e r n t e c h n o l o g y as e m a n c i p a t i n g h u m a n beings f r o m work, only to enslave t h e m in hete r o n o m o u s social relations. 1 5 6 In 1 9 5 7 J ü n g e r published The Glass Bees, a novel that dealt with the future o f the technological world. T h e work m i g h t b e considered a synthesis o f Gehlen's cultural pessimism a n d the anarchist assault o n the m a c h i n e . 1 5 7 T h e story takes place after World War II. A n a g i n g a n d discharged cavalry officer, Captain Richard, is u n e m p l o y e d and must pass an examination to obtain an unspecified j o b in an automated workplace. T h e factory, run by Zaparonni, a technical wizard a n d dictatorial captain o f industry, prod u c e s tiny robots that perfectly imitate nature. A s Richard takes a n d fails the p l a c e m e n t test, glass-robot bees e q u i p p e d with tiny stingers buzz t h r o u g h the factory grounds. In o n e episode, while walking in a mysterious g a r d e n the protagonist discovers a severed h u m a n ear. T h e ear is o n e o f Zapparoni's fakes. A s Richard is c o n t e m p l a t i n g the strange object, a swarm o f glass bees passes by. With the t o u c h o f a controller's button, the tiny robots c o u l d kill. T h e real a n d the artificial have reversed places. T h e forces o f nature have b e e n harnessed to a zoology o f glass a n d wire. T h e captain reminisces a b o u t his youth in a military school, adventurous a n d unpredictable, in contrast to the routinization o f Zapparoni's factory

154. Ernst Jünger to Carl Schmitt, July x, 1975, A: Jünger, DLAM. 155. Arnold Gehlen, Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter: Sozialpsychologische Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957). 156. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1989), 5 1 . 157. Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Noonday Press, 1991).

200

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

work. T h e anachronistic Richard realizes that the techno-wizard Zapparoni embodies the modern nobility. He reacts by passive resistance: the old captain does not bend to the new circumstances; rather, when facing destruction, the captain decides to go down with the ship. T h e former equestrian master and his circle are portrayed here as the losers in unmartial t i m e s — Richard thinks back with bitterness to the end of the war, when the word "fatherland" had lost its meaning, accusations of guilt were traded, and suicide was rampant. T h e novel ends with a revue of the history of defeated warriors, among them Cato, Hannibal, Indians, Boers, and Montezuma ( 4 6 5 - 4 6 7 ) . T h e novel's elegiac and melancholic tone didn'timpress the critics. Jünger seemed incapable of creating realistic figures made of flesh and blood. 1 5 8 T h e representation of technology to many had n o relevance for the social conditions of the 1950s. Günther Oliass asked, "Are we really confronted here with the technical world? It doesn't appear that technology replaces nature or man the way Jünger thinks . . . he dreams u p romantic constructions." 159 Wolfgang Schwerbrock f o u n d the entire novel "artificial," 160 and Günther Blöcker pointed out that when Jünger can no longer find the words to portray technology realistically, he resorts to aesthetic allegories of the machine. 1 6 1 Some reviewers did note that Jünger's style had improved since Heliopolis, that his writing encompassed more warmth and vitality. 162 Karl Epting found that Jünger had "freed himself" and rediscovered his "greatness." 163 T h e general impression remains, however, that the book just "didn't have m u c h to say." 164 ON THE WALL OF TIME: AN UPDATED CRITIQUE OF BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY In his next book Jünger continued to meditate on history, technology, and time in the form of a long political essay. Jürgen Rausch argued that, of all ofJünger's post-1945 works, "only Aw der Zeitmauer possesses the magnitude and the claim to be a major speculative work." 1 6 5 Peter Silens claimed the

158. See Rudolf Goldschmidt, "Der Rittermeister und die Automaten," SZ, Nov. 30, 1957; Kurt Schümann, "Leichter Reiter Ernst Jünger," Mittag, Dec. 14/15, 1957. 159. Günther Oliass, "Gefährdungen von Morgen," Deutsche Zeitung, Dec. 4, 1957. 160. Wolfgang Schwerbrock, "Ernst Jüngers Science Fiction," FAZ, Nov. 16, 1957. 161. Günther Blöcker, "Zwischen Schauder und Entzücken," SZ, Nov. 16, 1957. 162. Rainer Grünter, "Reflexions-Epik," Neue Deutsche Hefte 41, no. 4 (Dec. 1957): 840— 843; Josef Reding, "Ernst Jüngers Pendant zum Arbeiter," Die Kultur, Nov. 15, 1957. 163. Karl Epting, "Lächeln stärker als Automaten," CW, Oct. 3, 1957. 164. Marianne Regensburger, "Der Rittermeister und die gläsernen Bienen," Die Zeit, Dec. 26, 1957. 165. Jürgen Rausch, "Kosmische Lagebesprechung," SZ, Nov. 15, 1959.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

201

book "reaches the furthest of all Jünger's works." 1 6 6 T h e analysis was supposed to update The Worker. In his diary entry of March 17, 1943, Jünger conceded that the state sketched out in 1932 was radically unstable: "In regard to "The Worker." T h e depiction is exact, but it is like a sharply cut medallion from which the reverse side is missing. In the second part, the Subordination of the described dynamic principles to a stationary order of a higher rank should be depicted." 1 6 7 Sixteen years later he wrote to Möhler: "In October On the Wall of Time will come out. T h e book developed into a continuation of The Worker though it leads in new directions. T h e theme is roughly a description of the overcoming of the world-revolution by an earth-revolution." 1 6 8 T h e title Zeitmauer is a play on the word Schallmauer, the German word for sonic barrier. Like the drag that occurs as an airplane reaches supersonic speed (first achieved in the 1950s), Jünger's metaphor suggests the impetus of history as we approach the "time barrier" of a new age. But which new age? Jünger talks of the e n d of a great cycle and the beginning of a new one, the exit from the "familiar house of history," of a "great caesura." 1 6 9 Jünger uses the term "line" probably in the sense Carl Schmitt advances in his maj o r postwar tract Nomos der Erde, which locates the emergence of the first "global lines" [rajas] established by the Portuguese and Spanish colonial powers in the fifteenth century. 170 For Schmitt, "global linear thinking" can be traced by a straight line from the discovery of America to the U.S. declaration of war against Germany in 1939 as the challenge of the New World to Eurocentric international law (33, 43). Jünger applies the notion of the geographical delineation of the meridian to the conquest of territories in space and to the possibility of global catastrophe in the post-atomic b o m b era. T h e fear of a world-Hiroshima provides Jünger with a literal version of posthistoire, the real possibility of global finitude. 1 7 1 Modern apocalypses differ from earlier ones, in Jünger's view, in the fact that natural catastrophes are not humanly willed in the same manner as technological inventions. T h e current world situation in which "an end-of166. Peter Silens, "Zwischen Diagnose und Prognose," Die Kultur, Dec. 13, 1959. 167. Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen II, March 17, 1943, 21. 168. Ernst Jünger to Armin Möhler, Aug. 9, 1959, PAM. 16g. Ernst Jünger, An der Zeitmauer, SW8, 451, 531, 559, 562, and passim. 170. Carl Schmitt, Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht der Jus Publicum Europaeum, 2d ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974). I quote here from the translation by Gary Ulmen and Kizer Walker, "The Land Appropriation of a New World," Telos 109 (fall 1996): 2 9 - 8 0 . 171. Jünger: "The end of the world is no problem. It would also eradicate the world's problems. The mood of the end-of-the-world, on the other hand, the fear of a cosmic catastrophe, offers thought an area of attack. (Angriffsflächen)" (532). Compare the treatment of end-ofthe-world myths in Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 19 6 3)> 5 4 - 7 4 -

202

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

time m o o d is connected to human action" (527) is unprecedented. Apocalyptic circumstances bring both light and darkness. T h e y are warning signs as well as omens for the future. O n this point Jünger is not very consistent. O n the one hand, he sees technological catastrophes as artificial and thus an exit from history. O n the other hand, he describes the m o d e r n catastrophes as a natural test for mankind, literally a fateful turning (cata-strophe) in the history of the earth. In Jünger's terms, technology is an event in earthhistory, as opposed to world-history; thus it is not entirely of man's making. Catholic theologians liked Jünger's conjecture of an overlap between eschatology and the potentiality of world destruction through the atom bomb. O n e commented by pointing out that St. Paul had said the eschaton (end of time) would come atomos (suddenly). 1 7 2 A major theme in On the Wall of Time is the contrast between the destructive way science transforms society and the harmonious understanding of the world by mythology. "Astrological principles," Jünger writes, "stand in crass contradiction to everything we drive and build, to planning, normativeness, automation, traffic, comfort, and insurance" (426). Many reviewers were puzzled by Jünger's acceptance of astrology, concluding that he must see it as a symptom of modernity's search for meaning, rather than hold it as a personal belief. 1 7 3 In fact, Jünger took astrology very seriously, regularly consulting a Swiss astrologist. 174 He explicitly embraced it in the essay, suggesting that "astrology is the m o d e l . . . of a technique superior to both our history and our science, but ominously, the latter lacks astrology's synoptic qualities" (546). Jünger viewed the m o d e r n revival of astrology as a possible revolutionary movement. Astrology challenges not only science but also democracy, since it is concerned with the fate of the individual rather than the mass. Against Rousseau he argues that the new age will be beyond politics, negating the primacy of society over individual destiny (449). T h e power of astrology preserves the innate dignity of man without being contaminated by the "abstract doctrines of equality and f r e e d o m " (449). Jünger rehearses the antidemocratic, antiliberal gesture of The Worker, writing that new powers, beyond liberal individualism, will contest the stranglehold of the state. These changes will apparently be accompanied even by climatic changes (450). Like Heidegger, Jünger saw modern technology as an event of transcendental significance. Technology changes the face of the globe by copying the functions of the central nervous system. Electronic systems speak, hear,

172. A l f r e d Höntzsch, "An d e r Z e i t m a u e r "Eckart 29 ( i 9 6 0 ) : 5 5 - 5 7 . 1 7 3 . W e r n e r Helwig, "Umsturz o d e r U m b r u c h : Die Zeit ist n a h , " Die Welt, Nov. 15, 1 9 5 9 ; Josef R e d i n g , "Transzendentale Ansätze," Echo der Zeit, Nov. 8, 1 9 5 9 . 1 7 4 . Jünger's visits to an astrologist were n o t public k n o w l e d g e . H e r n a m e was Esther Meerwein. She lived in Basel. F r o m a letter written to M ö h l e r , Feb. 4, 1 9 5 2 , PAM.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

2 oj

and compute, using cables simulating vital nervous systems (501). T h e planet takes on a new skin, an epidermis of light, cables, wires, transmitters, and receivers. T h e illuminated earth speaks a new language, portending a new world order. In the long run, catastrophes are inevitable because human history constitutes a small, contingent part of the infinite cosmos. Jünger invokes the tale of "Sinbad the Sailor" as an allegory for the discrepancy between world and earth history. T h e sailors land on a huge fish lying still in the ocean and take up residence on the surface. As they build fires the fish becomes annoyed and plunges into the deep (583). Before the earth-whale dives into the ocean of the universe, Jünger sees two possible fates for the world. Either mankind will destroy itself and part of the earth, or it will band together in a world government, either by choice or by force ( 5 3 2 - 5 3 4 ) . In the conclusion, Jünger appeals to an ecological, earth-centered theology, an anticipation of "green" philosophy. H e talks of a religion without churches, without romantic murkiness. It is mythical, but not mystical. B o e h m e , Hamann, and Angelus Silesius are its inspirations (631). In the final pages he predicts eschatologically the demise of natural science and posits the reign of the spirit in the name of Joachim of Fiore. Jünger offers a nod here not only to the ecology movement but also to the flower-power generation, indicating redemption in the coming age of Aquarius (645). In i 9 6 0 Jünger published one more diagnosis of the times, introducing the theme of world government in The World State.175 Responding to the question, "where do we stand today?" Jünger claimed that planetary technology had rendered the nation-state an anachronism. T h e standardization and "cookie-cutter culture" of America and the Soviet Union (two places Jünger didn't know very much about and rarely visited) would soon spread itself over the entire world. Following Schmitt, Jünger liked to argue that the nationstate had become an anachronism after the war, contemplating a new constellation of global relations, in which "nation-states should pool together and form a world-empire, a geopolitical unit [raumpolitischeEinheit]."176 In the 1980s, before the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe and before a resurgence of deadly nationalist civil wars in the early 1990s, Jünger was still ruminating about a benevolent world without borders, modeled loosely on the federalist structure of Switzerland. To a certain extent, Jünger anticipated some of the arguments of current communitarians and localists, w h o see a devolution of power from the centralized monoliths of federal bureaucracies to the local communities as the 175. "Der Weltstaat," SW'j, 483-526. Originally published in the collection, Wo Stehen Wir Heute? edited by Walter Bahr, i960. 176. See Eugen Frömmlet, "Perspektiven: Gespräch mit Ernst Jünger," Allgemeine Zeitung, March 22, 1949.

204

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

wave o f the future. 1 7 7 In contrast to those favoring the idea o f a radical, grassroots democracy, however, J ü n g e r envisages a return to the organic, stable orders of small communities, w h i c h h e designated as "matrie" instead o f "patrie," or "Heimat," in an interview for a F r e n c h journal. 1 7 8 In similar terms, Carl Schmitt spoke at the same time o f local cultural units as "regional iconographies." 1 7 9 In The World State J ü n g e r p r e d i c t e d an "end o f history" in the sense that history was d e p e n d e n t o n f r e e will, while the perfection o f t e c h n o l o g y m a d e free action increasingly impossible. T h e d a n g e r to m a n k i n d was, he admitted, "more metaphysical than physical." 1 8 0 If J ü n g e r t h o u g h t that the p u b lic w o u l d react to his interpretation o f the Weltgeist with the same v e h e m e n c e a n d fascinated perplexity that g r e e t e d The Worker in 1932, h e was clearly mistaken. Critical o p i n i o n was mildly interested, but clearly J ü n g e r was n o l o n g e r able to set o f f intellectual waves. G ü n t h e r Oliass s u m m e d u p this m o o d with the understated observation that after the war, 'Jünger became a friendly aging g e n t l e m a n w h o was mostly at h o m e in mythology, saying wise things that turned o u t to b e banalities." 1 8 1 T h e p o p u l a r writer Siegfried L e n z presented a m o r e n u a n c e d argument, wishing n e i t h e r to disqualify n o r to idealize Jünger. 1 8 2 H e accused J ü n g e r o f irresponsible nationalism, romanticism, snobbery, amoral aestheticism, a n d antiliberalism. O n the o t h e r h a n d , h e was impressed b y j ü n g e r ' s u n c o m promising i n d e p e n d e n c e , resistance to the Nazis, k e e n gifts o f observation, a n d masterful ability to coin phrases f o r capturing the Zeitgeist. L e n z conc l u d e d that J ü n g e r was a b u n d l e o f contradictions: That is the continual irritation that accompanies this exceptional writer: on the one hand an extremely sharp consciousness, on the other opaque decisions; here lucid coldness and an unprejudiced view, there nebulous, momentous confessions; a perfect example for the art of eclectic knowledge, and yet again the mystical murkiness of thought. 183 Two weeks later, the editors o f Die Zeit chose for publication the following reactions to Lenz's article, i n t r o d u c i n g them with the c o m m e n t a r y : The quantity of opinions expressed on the article by Siegfried Lenz surpassed all our expectations. . . . A method has not yet been devised that would allow

177. In particular see the special issue on Federalism in Telos 100 (summer 1994). 178. Jean-Louis Foncine, "Entretien avec Ernst Jünger," La Nouvelle Revue de Paris (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1985), 30. 179. Schmitt, "Die geschichtliche Struktur," 139. 180. "Der Weltstaat," SW 7, 515. 181. Günther Oliass, "Gründe, Abgründe eines Ruhms," Deutsche Zeitung, Nov. 26, i 9 6 0 , 1 8 . 182. Siegfried Lenz, "Der Schriftsteller und Philosoph Ernst Jünger: Versuch eines Beitrages zur sogennanten Bewältigung der Vergangenheit," Die Zeit (Feuilleton), April 20, 1962. 183. Ibid.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E OF A D E N A U E R

205

us to extract 1 5 pages from 1 5 0 , so that all the contributors would be happy. We must therefore ask for understanding for our method: to choose so that as true a picture as possible emerges of the often passionate differences of opinion that Ernst Jünger's person and work evoke in so many people today. 184

Only two contributors sought to contradict Lenz; one of them wasJoachim Günther: Whether Jünger paved the way for Nazism or n o t . . . all these questions are unimportant, even inferior, if one is speaking of literature and not collecting judgments for denazification tribunals. . . . It is solely the internal artistic vitality and not the private behavior of an author that decides the future and raison d'être of literary works.

The other was Heinz Ludwig Arnold: 'Jünger's humanity cannot be reduced to formulas, perhaps the nearest one comes to it is his maxim 'Liebend, erkennen' [knowing with love]." The following critical voices emphasized Jünger's lack of a moral and political compass: Renato Berger: "One could compare Jünger with a robot, who registers things with exact precision, but remains completely uninvolved"; and Albert Becker: "Does one need reminding that Jünger's favorite word is 'pleasure' and the one he always avoids is 'guilt.'" Joachim Lampe: "Man, but not the cosmos, can become guilty. We must learn to feel responsible for everything that happens. The excuse that it's not our fault because we can't change anything doesn't count." Paul Arthur Loos: "Is the artist, the person, a functioning technical instrument beyond good and evil? Isn't he responsible for what Goethe's friend Carus called the ethical organ of decision making? " The question of the link between art and morality is as old as Aristotle.185 But in the aftermath of Nazism the question was posed in Germany in a much more extreme manner. Not only could Jünger not let go of old texts, reintegrating them into new strands of metaphysical loops (Schleifen, his term), but he also reworked his persona. The event that brought these issues to the fore was the announcement by the Klett Verlag in 1960 that Jünger's collected works would be published, a decision that seemed premature even at that time. REWRITING FASCISM

The publication of a living artist's oeuvre is not a novelty in Germany Gerhard Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, and Stefan George all lived to see preliminary collections of their writings. When the first volume of Klett's Jünger 184. "Der Schriftsteller und Philosoph Ernst Jünger, "Die Zeit, May 4, 1962. 185. Aristotle, Poetics, 25, 2 0 - 3 5 , in Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1 9 4 1 ) , 1 4 8 3 - 1 4 8 4 .

2O6

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

edition appeared in 1960, two issues, however, became controversial at once. First, the publishers decided to begin the edition with a collection of Jünger's essays, including several of the author's most bristling pieces from his nationalist phase, among them "Die totale Mobilmachung" (The total mobilization) that Goebbels had turned into a Nazi slogan. The republication of these essays, out of print for many years, led the critics to reexamine a sophisticated defense of aggressive German nationalism. Second, Jünger had reworked many of the essays and published them together with the humanistic, pacifist postwar pieces. The claim that all of his writings contained an internal unity led to a debate about political continuity from National Socialism to the Federal Republic. Reviewing these issues in a widely received radio essay (later published), the general secretary of PEN, Walter Schmiele, linked the controversy over Jünger's writings to similar ones involving Gottfried Benn, Knut Hamsun, and Ezra Pound, whose Bollingen Prize in 1948 had raised a furor in England. Schmiele boiled the question down to "poetic accomplishment," ignoring the "external circumstances" of a work of art relevant only to shortsighted contemporaries. 186 Taking issue with Schmiele, Armin Möhler offered a rebuttal. ForJünger's ex-secretary, the writings of the leader of prewar Germany's nationalist youth were historical documents, not literary pieces to be polished up and laid on the literary mantelpiece. 187 He criticized Jünger for arbitrarily placing chronologically disparate writings together in the same volume. Möhler hit a raw nerve (and got into a personal fight with Jünger) by insisting that these ideas not be "explained away" by historical circumstances or watered down by being placed in the context of later, more acceptable nostrums. Mohler's uncompromising stand made perfect sense for the nationalist right in Germany and seemed to validate the left's dire warnings about a revival of fascism. The rebirth of neofascism in Germany became an issue at this juncture as the newly organized German National Party (NPD) consolidated the minute factions of the disaffected postwar right and won a string of victories in the late 1960s, culminating in 4.3 percent of the federal vote in 1969 and between 7 and 10 percent at the state level.188 The circulation of the extreme right's publications also rose in this period (1965 to 1969) from 183,

186. Walter Schmiele, Literatur und Moderne: Freiheit und Engagement, Radio Essay, Jan. 2, 1961, DLAM, Sammlung des Coudres, box 22. 187. ArminMohler, "Ernst Jüngers gesammelte Werke, "Die Literarische Tat (Zürich),Jan. 7, 1961. 188. See Richard Stöss, Die Extreme Rechte in der Bundesrepublik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989), 1 3 6 - 1 3 8 .

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

207

200 to nearly 300,000 issues of various periodicals. 189 These results indicate that neofascism never threatened German democracy but nevertheless was a matter of concern as opinion polls gave the NPD favorable ratings of between 10 and 15 percent. In 1965, when the Collected Works were complete, a new debate emerged in regard to Jünger's tampering with the original texts. In Der Spiegel, Siegfried Lenz demonstrated how extensive the corrections were Jünger had made in the new version of Strahlungen. Lenz concluded that the "frost-flower" ideal of the author's aesthetic perception had begun to m e l t — h e was struck by how much Jünger had softened. 190 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Jünger's secretary at the time, published a reply to the criticisms by Möhler, Lenz, and others. 191 He admitted that an author's revision of earlier work may give the appearance of falsification. But in Jünger's case, Arnold argued, the revisions impart to the Collected Works a unity that exemplifies the intellectual development of the author, from a fiery nationalist to a convinced humanist. Because of this, The minor changes are, in my opinion, secondary in the face of an essential development that becomes visible in the structure of the Collected Works: a development that leads from heroic realism, which is as far removed from us today as ever, to humanism. This progress took place in time and experience according to the motto stamped on Jünger's ex Iibris: "Tempestatibus maturesco"—"I mature in storms."192 THE VANISHING ACT It was often said of Ernst Jünger that his aristocratic-individualistic habitus led him instinctively to be always out of season. In the 1950s, for example, when Germans seemed to be allergic to politics, Jünger published his most political writings, his Lagebeurteilungen. After the death of Adenauer, when the youth revolt was undergoing incubation and West Germany was headed for its first Social Democratic experiment, Jünger retreated into private preoccupations. O n Jünger's seventieth birthday in 1965, the chief feuilletonist of the FAZ wrote "On the whole, the Jünger-topic is barely worth the effort ofjournalistic or literary reflection." 1 9 3 189. Lutz Niethammer, Angepaßter Faschismus: Politische Praxis der NPD (Frankfurt: Fischer,

19 6 9). 5 1 190. Siegfried Lenz, "Gepäckerleichterung mit 70," Der Spiegel, March 3 1 , 1965. 1 9 1 . Also an intellectual of the right, C u r t H o h o f f had raised similar issues even before Mohler's piece appeared. See "Der Revolutionär als Klassiker," ON, Oct. 16, i960. 192. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, "Ernst Jüngers Werke in Z e h n Bänden: Die H o f f n u n g führt weiter als die Furcht," Sonntagsblatt, Oct., 3, 1965. 193. Joachim Günther, "Der Schriftsteller u n d seine Aufgabe," FAZ, March 2, 1965.

2O8

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR'S OPTIC

His diary from 1 9 6 5 - 1 9 7 0 , Siebzig Verweht (Seventy passed), revealed a man astoundingly indifferent to the important issues of the day. In May and June 1968, for instance, Jünger was in Corsica, observing plants and animals. H e recorded reading about the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Verdun in Figaro but ignored the famous political explosions of that spring. 194 Several years later, a visit to the author led the journalist Thomas Kielinger to speculate on Jünger's self-isolation, calling him a "worldly hermit, a master of disguise and discretion." 1 9 5 In a published greeting on the eightieth birthday in 1 9 7 5 his publisher and close friend, Ernst Klett, explained Jünger's disappearance from public life as a result of his "shyness, vulnerability, . . . and the need to have distance from those around him." 1 9 6 Hans Peter Schwarz, a young political scientist at the University of Bonn, speculated in 1962 thatJünger's great influence in Germany from the 1930s to the 1950s had always been based on the "scandal effect" of Jünger's political pronouncements. 1 9 7 Schwarz argued that Jünger's fame was related just as much to the implacable division between fanatical followers and equally fanatical opponents as to purely literary considerations. Jünger's popularity was beginning to eclipse, he argued, because of the "skeptical m o o d " of the 1960s, unfavorable to sweeping metaphysics. 198 Metaphysics would of course return with the youth culture of the late 1960s, along with drugs and wildly unskeptical hopes for social renewal. Like the unmetaphysical realism Schwarz referred to, Jünger's fading fame was temporary. It is worth taking a closer look at the dominant theme of the critics on Jünger's seventieth birthday, namely, his gradual disappearance from the literary and political scene. These premature eulogies represent the equivalent of a snapshot of the liberal-conservative divide in the p o s t Adenauer era. Karl Korn, now evolved into a voice of moderate conservatism, admitted that "the figure of Ernst Jünger has apparently lost its intellectual-political relevance." 1 9 9 Korn did not separate the "old" from the "new" Jünger. He noted the way a generation had been seduced by Jünger's rhetoric (the "liberals were the most fascinated") and concluded that 'Jünger was perhaps never a democrat. O n e can and one must be on guard against people made

194. Emst Jünger, Siebzig Verweht I, (published in 1980), .S'VV'4, 257. 195. Thomas Kielinger, "Autorenporträt: Ernst Jünger, Eremit von Welt," Die Welt, Feb. 24, 1972. 196. Ernst Klett, "Vom Ungesonderten," Merkur Sonderdruck 5 (29) (1975): 492. 197. Hans Peter Schwarz, Der Konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (Freiburg/Br.: Rombach Verlag, 1962). 198. See Kurt Sonntheimer's review of Schwarz's book, "Die wilde Politik eines Unpolitischen,"/)«' Tagesspiegel, March 22, 1963; see also Friedmar Lüke, "Kein Demokrat: Aber ein Herr von Phantasie und Charakter," ON, Sept. 2, 1963. 199. Karl Korn, "Im gläsernen Turm,"FAT., March 27, 1965.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F A D E N A U E R

209

o f Jünger's cut. A society, a culture that still has strength must b e able to 'stand' [verkraften] such figures." 2 0 0 T h e liberal weekly Die Zeit registered the same dissipation o f interest in Jünger. T h i l o K o c h wrote that: It has become quiet around him. Jünger, Benn, and Brecht—after 1945 they belonged to the front row of the great stimulators, who one had to catch up with, rediscover, argue, and praise. . . . Who now is really going to read the ten blue volumes of the Klett publisher's Jünger Collected Works that lie before us complete in time for Jünger's seventieth birthday?201 O n l y a few years earlier, Die Zeit h a d b e e n swamped by reactions to Siegfried Lenz's defense o f Jünger. Now the editors at the Süddeutsche Zeitung f o u n d things so quiet, it was difficult to f i n d any c o m m e n t a t o r s f o r Jünger's seventieth birthday: In the last years it has been more opponents than admirers who have written about him. But both sides were partial, and only a few succeeded in interpreting, in a fair way, the intellectual stance and the literary significance of Ernst Jünger. So it seems to us to be no accident that of all those we asked, almost nobody was ready to respond to our inquiry concerning Jünger's seventieth birthday.202 W h y was the public taking less interest in Jünger? R u d o l f Goldschmitt t h o u g h t the entire controversy had b e c o m e d u l l — t h e same accusations, the same r e t o r t s — e v e r y o n e was just tired o f discussing the 'Jünger Problem." 2 0 3 A t the same time, some y o u n g G e r m a n radicals were discovering that J ü n g e r m a d e a g o o d poster boy to symbolize antimilitarism a n d cultural rebellion. As Egbert H ö h l n o t e d in the Marxist Blätter, We are tired of standing at attention in front of this idol. Jünger's belletristic cynicism is ready for the museum. His contempt for humanity and selfmirroring, his heroic lies, and his irrational mumbling have not got the least chance of gaining our respect. And Jünger is just going to have to accept the fact that world history is taking no notice of his oracles.204 O n e o f the most tation between the short-lived j o u r n a l lemical times). T h e

representative d o c u m e n t s e m e r g i n g f r o m the c o n f r o n y o u n g literary world a n d the "idols" o f the past, was a edited by the p o e t Horst Bingel, Zeit-Streit-Schrift (Pon u m b e r dedicated to J ü n g e r showed the author in a stiff

200. Ibid. 201. Thilo Koch, "Was aber bleibt: ErnstJünger wird 7oJahre a l t D i e Zeit, March 26, 1965. 202. "Begegnungen mit Ernstjünger: Zum 70. Geburtstag," SZ (Feuilleton), March 27/28, 1965203. Rudolf Goldschmitt, "Der Schriftsteller Ernst Jünger: Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag," SZ, March 27, 1965. 204. Egbert Höhl, "Das Orakel von Wilflingen: Zu Ernst Jüngers 70. Geburtstag," Blätterfür deutsche und internationale Politik 10 (1965): 3 5 2 - 3 5 5 .

210

CHALLENGING THE VICTOR S OPTIC

military pose ensconced in a bottle of schnapps. T h e label reads "Made in Germany." 2 0 5 T h e contributions to the issue shifted the debate on Jünger to post-1945. Jünger now became identified with the stale air of the restorative culture of the Federal Republic, whose time to be swept away had come. For Nicolaus Sombart, the spectacle of the author of The Worker receiving the highest order of West Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz) from Konrad Adenauer, a "caricature of the super-bourgeois," while Thomas Mann remained unrehabilitated, was just more proof of the "German misery." 206 Significantly, the Streit-Zeit-Schrift did not make Jünger's authorship the subject of critique. Many of these young male writers reluctantly confessed admiration for Jünger's militant style and independence. Instead, German society was pilloried for embracing his values and his political past. Gerhard Zwerenz wrote, "Ernst Jünger's mistake is the mistake of those w h o wish to preserve what is not preservable any longer," but this verdict was premature. 2 0 7 In fact, the decade of the seventies witnessed the fragmentation of the politicized youth into tiny, self-destructive radical sects and the beginning of a gradual cultural reformation, around feminism, identity politics, gay rights, and ecology. T h e politics of a dubious author like Jünger became less an object of contention, and for some more palatable in this age of personal liberation. In this spirit Karl-Heinz Bohrer, in his Ästhetik des Schreckens, placed Jünger in the esteemed company of nineteenth-century radicals like Morris and Ruskin, compared him favorably to surrealist rebels Aragon and Breton, and attempted to remove Jünger's "decisionism" from the political category and refashion it as aesthetic avantgardism. Bohrer was not turning here against the left so m u c h as criticizing its political romanticism in the name of libertarian anarchism. At the same time Jünger himself entered a phase of second inner emigration in the sense that he retreated further from the political issues facing West Germany in the 1970s. O n the wider national scene, the Social Democratic Party, at first as coalition partners, and then alone, ruled for the first time in German history. Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt took a moderate economic course, established live-and-let-live foreign relations with the communist bloc and fought left-wing terrorism at home. T h e r e were predictions from the left in the 1960s of a revival of neo-Nazism that did not come true as the extreme nationalist right was pushed to the fringes of the political spectrum. Jünger turned to increasingly esoteric pursuits. He continued to travel widely and publish his diaries. He was regarded widely as a remnant of the past by those

205. Horst Bingel, "ErnstJünger: Fakten," Zeit-Streit-Schrift 6, no. 2 (Sept. 1 9 6 8 ) , 3 - 6 . 206. Nicolaus Sombart, ' J ü n g e r in uns," Zeit-Streit-Schrift,

9.

207. G e r h a r d Zwerenz, "Ernst J ü n g e r s U b e r l e b e n s k u n s t , " Zeit-Streit-Schrift,

68.

JUNGER IN THE AGE OF ADENAUER

211

who bothered to follow his work. Many had forgotten his name by the time the Goethe Prize was announced in 1982. By the early eighties, all the remnants of sixties radical politics and seventies lifestyle revolutions had coalesced in the ever more confident and successful Green Party. A seachange in German politics had occurred, and a new chapter in the long battle over Junger's legacy began.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Right Turn Jünger Retrieved in the Age of Kohl

The process by which an author is recognized in the public sphere is not usually a concern of reception aesthetics, because that approach tends to focus, and rightly so for its purposes, on the interaction between texts and real or "implied" readers. 1 A reception history would remain limited, however, if the social and political dimension of an author's public reception, in contrast to the very private act of reading, were to be neglected. The following chapter takes account of the history of prizes, medals, and awards bestowed by public institutions upon Ernst Jünger. It provides a unique opportunity to go beyond the text to the symbolic act of canonization of an author in the public sphere. In a democratic state, the official rewards of the guardians of culture can be questioned, contradicted, and undermined, and alternative models of authority can be suggested. Most literature prizes in Germany originated in the Weimar years.2 The Lessing Prize of the city of Hamburg was founded in 1930, the Georg Büchner Prize in 1923, the Immerman Prize of the city of Düsseldorf in 1935, the Literature Prize of Munich in 1927, the Wilhelm Raabe Prize of Braunschweig in 1927, and the most prestigious, the Goethe Prize of the city of

1. T h e term popularized by Wolfgang Iser. See Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984), 84—85. Holub discusses "alternative models" that address "extra-textual" reality, but these models—hermeneutical, Marxist, or empirical—attempt to situate the reader in more concrete sociological settings, rather than examine the role of literature independently in the public sphere. Even Günter Waldmann's model, based on Habermas's notion of communicative rationality, does not go beyond the reader-text paradigm; see Holub, 1 1 7 - 1 2 1 . 2. Herman Glaser, Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Munich/Vienna: Hanser Verlag,

1985). i:3i3ff212

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

213

Frankfurt, also in 1927. Most of these prizes were not awarded during the Third Reich, except the Immerman Prize, which was created by the Nazis and given to prominent fascist authors. Most of the prizes were reinstated in the late 1940s and tended to be awarded to very conservative, often religious authors such as Werner Bergengruen (Raabe, 1948), Ina Seidel (Raabe, 1949), Gertrud Le Fort (Munich, 1947), Rudolf Alexander Schröder (Lessing, 1947), Emil Barth (Immerman, 1947), and Friedrich Georg Jünger (Fontane, 1949). In Friedhelm Kröll's phrase, these prizes were signposts toward the cultural restoration of the 1950s, embracing inwardness, subjectivity, religious mysticism, and bourgeois sentimentality. 3 We would expect that the public celebration of such a deeply controversial figure as Jünger would lay bare, in the dialectic of apology and critique, the self-understanding of a culture and its national identity. T h e following analysis of Jünger's later years and his relationship to the Federal Republic will constitute an attempt to uncover some essential conflicts in German society regarding its past, its self-identity, and its veneration of cultural figures. As an important point of contrast, the question ofJünger's very different reception in neighboring France will be addressed. Finally I will situatejünger's work in relation to the revival of the intellectual right after 1989 and the question of nationalism and sovereignly in the new unified Germany. JÜNGER AND THE POLITICIANS OF THE FIRST HOUR Two politicians at the center of power in the Federal Republic were friends and admirers of Jünger: the first president of the new republic, T h e o d o r Heuss, and Carlo Schmid, one of the fathers of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law). Jünger corresponded with both men throughout their lifetimes. From an intellectual and temperamental point of view, Heuss and Schmid appreciated the author's wide interests and universal education. Not less important was the Swabian f a c t o r — a l l three felt themselves attached to the Württemberg Heimat. Heuss saw his task as federal president in conserving and cultivating the history of German culture. (He was particularly active in the work of the German National Museum in Nuremberg.) He was a man of integrity, who deeply believed in building a viable democracy in postwar Germany that would include as a central pillar the political memory of the crimes of the Nazi regime. 4 But he was also marked by a stain in his past. Heuss was one 3. See Friedhelm Kröll, "Literaturpreise nach 1945: Wegweiser in die Restauration," in Jost Hermand, Helmut Peitsch, Klaus Scherpe, eds., Nachkriegsliteratur in Westdeutschland (Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1982), 157 fr. 4. See Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3 1 2 - 3 3 1 .

214

RIGHT TURN

of the four elected members of the national-liberal German State Party (DSP), which vainly tried to stem its electoral defeats in the 1920s by making a devil's pact with the conservative Young German Order and embracing the authoritarian "leadership principle." 5 In March 1933 he had voted for the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler to rule by decree. 6 After years of sending Jünger his essays and speeches in special editions, Heuss first visited Wilflingen on October 1, 1955. Albert von Schirnding, Mohler's successor as Jünger's secretary, described the meeting as one between a graceful and bourgeois father of the nation and a stiff, solitary aristocrat. They got along very well, however, and Heuss often visited Jünger. 7 T h e official sanction of the highest officeholder in the land did not hurt the image of an author blacklisted only four years before. 8

NEWS FROM BREMEN T h e first prize for literature Jünger received was awarded by the city of Bremen on January 26, 1956, in recognition of At the Saracen's Tower, a book that, according to the jury, "illuminates historical consciousness at the edge of the world between orient and Occident." 9 Jünger received 5,000 German Marks from the city's senate, which had endowed the prize in the name of the writer Rudolf Alexander Schröder ( 1 8 7 8 - 1 9 6 2 ) . Schröder gave the formal address at the awards ceremony. In a letter to Möhler, Jünger seemed embarrassed about having accepted an official prize, compromising his radical individualism and distrust of the state. He explained his action with reference to the solid "classical and conservative" credentials of Schröder, and then added, "In regard to all these things about honors and awards, I'm about to lose my virginity. That's what happens when you hold the reins a little looser. Perhaps my Rivarol will make up for it." 10 T h e award to Jünger in Bremen began a process of self-examination of the cultural politics of the Federal Republic that was to culminate twenty-six years later when he was awarded the Goethe Prize. Echoes of the main

5. See Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 219 ff. 6. Hermann Glaser, Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik, 2:27. 7. Albert von Schirnding, "Sternstunde der Freiheit: Erinnerungen an einen Besuch des Bundespräsidenten Theodor Heuss bei Ernst Jünger," Di« Tat (Zürich), Jan. 31, 1964. 8. Heimo Schwilk, ErnstJünger: Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten (Stuttgart: Klett, 1990), 236 ff. g. "Literaturpreis für Ernst jünger," Frankfurter Neue Presse, Jan. 27, 1956. 10. Jünger to Möhler, January 23, 1956, PAM.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

275

themes structuring later discussions can already be heard in the voices of dissent raised in response to the Bremer festivities. O n the morning of January 26, the readers of the Bremer Nachrichten f o u n d a page-long editorial by the newspaper's feuilleton editor, Alfred Wien, in which the to-be-honored author was represented as an enemy of peace, democracy, progress, and Enlightenment. 1 1 At the awards ceremony, the senator for culture and education, Dehnkamp, wandered from his prepared text and responded to the editorial by saying that as a long-standing socialist he had certain reservations about Jünger, but The Marble Cliffs must be recognized as a pendant to Storms of Steel.12 A sympathetic newspaper report of Schroder's speech relates that he gave an "eloquent and historical" talk about the "responsibility of the writer." Schröder accommodated Jünger's love of etymology by translating the German word Verantwortung as respondere, asserting that the Latin word contains the notion of being b o u n d to the past. T h e words of the poet, accordingly, keep us "grounded" in an ever changing world. 1 3 Schroeder's questionable etymological exercise 1 4 aimed to canonize Jünger as a "classical" author by diverting attention away from his political writings in order to accentuate his aesthetic and historical meditations. Jünger acknowledged Schroder's audacity of having touched a "hot iron" by choosing a controversial figure to coronate. 1 5 Jünger's acceptance speech was characteristically ambivalent. O n the one hand, he openly spoke of his "allergy to honors" but, on the other hand, he reminded his audience of his greatest wartime honor, the Pour Le Mérite. He reminisced that Hindenburg had told the twenty-three-year-old, "we should never have awarded it to someone so young." Others who had received this highest Prussian Order, he added, had not amounted to much. In the Second World War he was lucky to have escaped with his head intact. Jünger presented himself selfconsciously as an eternal outsider, always the subject of controversy. Only by emphasizing this role could he justify having received a measure of official recognition. In his acceptance speech, he suggested a revealing comparison between battle and literature. His experience taught him that one found the best comrades in no-man's-land, on the battlefield with the troops, a weapon honorably in the hand, in peace with his readers, the hand honorably clasping a pen. 11. Alfred Wien "Der ewig gestrige Ernst Jünger, " Bremer Nachrichten, Jan. 26, 1956. 12. Erhart Kästner, "R. A. Schröder redet für Ernst Jünger," Schwäbische Landeszeitung, Feb. 1, 1956. 13. Ibid. 14. The Latin word for responsibility is actually cura as in est mihi curae (it is my responsibility). 15. "Zur Verleihung des Rudolf-Alexander Schröder Preises," SW 14, 1 6 9 - 1 7 0 .

216

RIGHT TURN

T h i s seemingly u n a p o l o g e t i c militant tone struck s o m e c o m m e n t a t o r s as an embarrassing refusal to learn f r o m history. In an article entitled "Did it have to b e Jünger?" Claus Caspar asked if G e r m a n y h a d sent so many o f its best authors into exile that it only h a d " a J ü n g e r " left to h o n o r , a m a n w h o h a d glorified war and g e n o c i d e ? 1 6 T h e socialist Neue Volkszeitschrift d e c r i e d the "Literature Prize for a F o r e r u n n e r of the Nazis," 1 7 a n d an East Berlin newspaper implicated the Federal Republic by exclaiming that J ü n g e r h a d b e e n "delivering fascist ideas to the m a n o n the street since 1 9 4 7 . " 1 8 Several m i n o r h o n o r s were bestowed u p o n J ü n g e r in the years that followed his reception o f the B r e m e n literature prize. In i 9 6 0 he was m a d e an h o n o r a r y citizen o f the c o m m u n i t y o f Wilflingen. A t the same c e r e m o n y h e was h o n o r e d by the Federal Association of G e r m a n Industry with an undisclosed sum o f m o n e y for his "lifework." 1 9 H e b e c a m e an h o n o r a r y citizen of the city of R e h b u r g in 1 9 6 5 a n d was awarded 20,000 D M f o r the ultraconservative I m m e r m a n Prize by the city of Düsseldorf the same year. 20 As has b e e n p o i n t e d out above, Jünger's popularity h a d w a n e d considerably by the mid-1960s. N o cries o f protest e r u p t e d that were in any way c o m p a r a ble to those ten years earlier in Bremen. 2 1 This lack o f interest was reflected in his a c c e p t a n c e speech for the I m m e r m a n Prize, in which J ü n g e r s e e m e d grateful f o r the r e c o g n i t i o n b e i n g a c c o r d e d to him, hinting h e wasn't entirely indifferent to his increasing isolation as an artist: The echo that comes from the outside world gives the man of leisure the certainty of not standing alone, and not having exerted himself for nothing—it also gives one courage and confidence, and rids one of inner doubt about one's own work, one's own task.22 In 1 9 7 0 J ü n g e r was awarded the g o l d e n Freiherr v o m Stein m e d a l in B o n n . A c c o r d i n g to the Stein Foundation, the a u t h o r of The Peace proved that h e was a m a n o f "great c o u r a g e a n d farsightedness." 2 3 A p a r t f r o m s o m e letters to the editor here a n d there, the award elicited few protests. A d e m onstration was p l a n n e d by students at the B o n n university, a n d a r u m o r r e a c h e d Jünger's ears that a petition of protest h a d b e e n circulated. H e

16. Claus Caspar, "Mußte es ausgerechnet Jünger sein?" Bremer Stimme, Feb. 4, 1956. 17. "Literaturpreis für Wegbereiter der Nazis," Neue Volkszeitung, Feb. 1. 1956. 18. "Ernst Jünger ausgezeichnet," Der Morgen, Feb. 2, 1956. 19. "ErnstJünger Ehrenbürger von Wilflingen," Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung, March 29, i960. 20. "Wegweiser in unserer Zeit: Ernst Jünger," Schwarzwälder Bote, April 24/25, 1965. 21. The major newspapers, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and Frankfurter Rundschau carried nothing on the story. 22. "Zur Verleihung des Immerman-Preises der Stadt Düsseldorf," SW14, 171. 23. "Preis und Protest," SZ, Nov. 30, 1970. See "Ansprache von Ernst Jünger," SW 14, 181— 186.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E OF KOHL

2/7

wrote the rector asking for a copy of the petition and a list of n a m e s of professors who had signed it, but the d o c u m e n t was never found. 2 4 In 1973 J ü n g e r was short-listed by the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee for the literature prize. 25 In 1974 J ü n g e r was awarded the Schiller Memorial Prize f r o m the province of Baden-Württemberg. T h e award is considered the state's most prestigious literary prize and carries a stipend of 30,000 marks, of which 10,000 is allotted to support young literary talent. 26 T h e prize was established in 1 9 5 5 t o c o m m e m o r a t e the 100th anniversary of Schiller's death and is awarded every three years. It is designed to bring attention to a cultural figure who h o n o r s the m e m o r y of Schiller with outstanding literary accomplishment, especially in the areas of d r a m a a n d the humanities. 2 7 From the list of previous prize winners, it is difficult to establish an ideological or stylistic preference. Among the six, "conservative" thinkers dominate: the cultural philosopher Arthur Pannwitz, the writer Wilhelm L e h m a n n , the Catholic writer Werner Bergengruen, and the f o r m e r minister f o r culture in Baden-Württemberg, Gerhard Storz. O n the m o r e progressive side, the p r o m i n e n t poet of the G r u p p e 47 G ü n t h e r Eich a n d the Swiss writer Max Frisch were honored. 2 8 T h e news of the award was carried by short, factual notices in the press. T h o u g h the award did n o t arouse fierce passions, in hindsight it is easy to see that it was a preliminary step to the national and international recognition thatJ ü n g e r received when h e was awarded the Goethe Prize eight years later. Only the left voiced any significant protests. T h e "Democratic Cultural Association" {Demokratischer Kulturverband), an organization f u n d e d primarily by the East German government, 2 9 published an open letter of protest that called the Schiller Prize "Nazi nostalgia" a n d used phrases that would reappear in the debates on the Goethe Prize. According to the association, J ü n g e r h a d always belonged to the extreme right, glorified "offensive warfare," and should be viewed as an "ideological pathbreaker" of National Socialism. 30 An East German newspaper compared J ü n g e r to Minister Presid e n t Filbinger, who progressed f r o m "Nazi jurist to minister president," 24. Ernst Jünger to Prof. Dr. Wolf-Dietrich Kopelke, rector of the Pädagogische Hochschule Bonn, February 26, 1 9 7 1 , A: Jünger, des Coudres, box 145, DLAM. 25. "Ernst Jünger zwischen Krieg und Mythos," Bayernkurier, March 29, 1975. 26. "Auszeichnung für Ernst Jünger," SZ, July 10, 1974. 27. "Schiller-Preis an Jünger verliehen," FR, Nov. 1 1 , 1974. 28. "Schiller-Gedächtnis Preis für Ernst Jünger," Die Welt, Aug. 2, 1974. 29. Gerhard Schmidt's official history of the Kulturbund unwittingly reveals that the organization was entirely funded by the East Germans, Der Kulturbund zu Frieden und Demokratie, 1948/49 (Berlin: Kulturbund der DDR, 1984), 71 ff. 30. "Filbinger-Regierung: Schiller Preis an NS-Barden," Berliner Extra Dienst, Aug. 9, 1974.

218

RIGHT TURN

while Jünger evolved from "high-stylized glorifier of Hitler's and Kaiser Wilhelm's wars to the shady laurel poet of the Federal Republic." 31 Filbinger did in fact have a very checkered past as a military judge in the Nazi marine and as a reactionary politician in the Federal Republic. He had given a professorship to a controversial member of the German National Party (NPD) and had ousted communists from the teaching profession. 32 Filbinger's presentation of Jünger at the award ceremony as a "humanist who aims for the golden mean" underlined the ambiguous postwar "conversion" of many Weimar nationalists to "humanist" conservatives. The humanist label didn't appeal to Jünger in any case, since by his own selfinterpretation and that of his followers, his really engaging work involves cold observation beyond the sphere of human concerns. 33 Filbinger's attempt to read Jünger as a traditional conservative seemed to smack of BadenWürttemberg-style provincialism. Alfred Andersch, for example, thought bringing Jünger out of isolation was doing him a disservice, revealing more about the politics of contemporary culture than it did about Jünger's "epic" modernism. 34 At the award ceremony, the laudation was presented by Karl Korn, a man who seemed to turn up like a shadow whenever Jünger was in the limelight. His presence gave some credence to the charge of the critics that the spirit of the Conservative Revolution still lived on. 35 Korn's speech was peculiar in that he failed to mention Schiller, offering instead a political apology for Jünger's political writings. He began with The Worker as a correct prophecy of the coming catastrophe, in contrast to the later pacifist writings, which illuminated the postwar international situation. Korn also compared The Worker to Niekisch's Deutsche Daseinsverfehlung, a book that interpreted German history as a series of missed chances to establish a viable form of state socialism. The Worker also postulated the failure of Germans to work through the great questions pertaining to the fate of the nation. Korn's comparison left open the question as to how National Socialism was to be viewed in respect to the theory of The Worker. Since the author agitated in the book for a national revolution, one could not easily view the text as an elegy on

31. "Ernst Jünger: Ein konfiszierter Kerl," Sonntag, Dec. 15, 1974. 32. "Schiller-Preis für Ernst Jünger ist ein Skandal," Unsere Zeit, Nov. 12, 1974. 33. See for example Albert von Schirnding's comparison of Jünger's work to the French poststructuralists like Foucault who question the abstractness and self-serving quality of humanism, "Begegnung mit Ernst Jünger," SDZ, March 2 9 - 3 1 , 1975. 34. Alfred Andersch, "Achtzig und Jünger: Ein politischer Diskurs über den geschwundenen Publikumserfolg Ernst Jüngers," Merkur 29 (March 1975): 3 3 9 - 3 5 0 . 35. See Norbert Frei and Johannes Schmitz, Journalismus im dritten Reich (Munich: Beck, 1989), 1 1 1 fif.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

2/9

missed chances—its self-declared purpose was to establish a new society departing from the course of previous history.36 Korn viewed Jünger as a philosopher of nihilism, who had progressed to "cosmological spiritualism." In other words, Korn offered a conservative reading of Jünger's radical manifestos of the 1930s as descriptive rather than prescriptive: A r o u n d t h e y e a r 1 9 3 0 J ü n g e r w a n t e d to d e d i c a t e h i m s e l f to t h e r e d e e m i n g p o w e r o f a w o r l d r e v o l u t i o n , o u t o f w h i c h a p u r e r w o r l d , rid o f e c o n o m i c d e t e r m i n a n t s , w o u l d e m e r g e . B u t h e r e a l i z e d that t e c h n o l o g y a n d e l e m e n t a r y p o w e r s h a d t r a n s f o r m e d t h e e a r t h i n t o a w o r k station with mass graves. Frigid t h i n k i n g , f a l l e n away f r o m e x i s t e n c e [Das kalte, vom. Sein abgefallene

Denken],

w h i c h h a d i n v e n t e d i d e a s a b o u t e q u a l i t y a n d inequality, that is, racism, e n d e d in h o r r i b l e m e c h a n i z e d acts o f e x t e r m i n a t i o n . 3 7

To Jünger's credit he did not try to paper over the controversial nature of his writings. In his acceptance speech he remarked on the escalation of praise reflected in the growing number of literature prizes. He would rather be controversial than be praised.38 Two more pieces in the mosaic of public recognition were still to be added before Jünger could be canonized as an "exemplary" cultural symbol of the Federal Republic. In 1959 Jünger had already been honored by Theodor Heuss with the official Cross of Honor, the third highest public service order of the Federal Republic usually awarded to politicians, scientists, and artists.39 In April 1977 the star was added and in 1985 Jünger received the highest official recognition of the nation, the Order of Merit with Star and Epaulette. 40 In April 1981 Jünger's talents as an entomologist were recognized with the Golden Medal of the Humboldt Society in Konstanz. 41 The Humboldt Society was founded in 1962 by neoconservatives and adherents of the Conservative Revolution for the purpose of supporting intellectual activity "be-

36. Karl Korn, "Der Antinihilist: Rede zum Schillergedächtnispreis für Ernst Jünger," FAT., Nov. 16, 1974. 37. Ibid. 38. "Nimm einen Ton aus einer Harmonie: Aus einer Rede beim Empfang des SchillerPreises in Stuttgart," SDZ, Nov. 11, 1974. This part of the speech was edited out in the SW14, 188-193. 39. Amtsblatt der Stadt Stuttgart, January 29, 1959, 340. "Verdienstkreuz mit Stern für Jünger," Schwäbische Zeitung, April 22, 1977; "Bekanntgabe von Verleihungen des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 4. Juli, 1985," Bundesanzeiger, July 13, 1985. Jünger's response was characteristically dismissive: "I'm supposed to get another medal, in a time when medals have become completely illusionary" (Jünger to Plard, April 14, 1977, PAP). 41. "Humboldt-Medaille für Ernst Jünger," Die Weft, April 6, 1981, 17.

220

RIGHT TURN

yond the opposition between science and the arts." 42 T h e laudation for Jünger was presented by the Aachen philosophy professor Gerd Wolandt, a member of several radical conservative organizations. 43 In 1981 Jünger also received a prestigious literary prize in France, the Cino-del-Duca prix mondial. T h e 200,000 francs prize is awarded to authors whose "scientific or literary work exemplifies modern humanism." 4 4 THE GOETHE PRIZE It is no exaggeration to say that the figure of Goethe can be incorporated into almost anyone's worldview. Goethe fared just as well in the Weimar Republic as he did under the Nazis. Both the FRG and the GDR claimed him as one of their own. Radicals and philistines alike have "their" Goethe. Even after Auschwitz, Goethe's poetry was appealed to for redemption. In postwar Germany many historians and social scientists thought that the idea of the German nation-state, built by Bismarck, had been completely discredited by National Socialism, but that in its place the older depoliticized tradition of the Kulturnation (cultural nation) could be revived and fostered. 4 5 In this spirit, the 200th anniversary of Goethe's birth in 1949 prompted many German intellectuals to hope that an "inner Weimar" could become the healer of the German soul. But linking up to that past seamlessly would involve n o small measure of repression of the immediate past, as the Germanist Richard Alewyn reminded his colleagues at the time, observing, "between us and Weimar lies Buchenwald" (the SS had planned the camp by placing Goethe's favorite tree at the center) ,46 Arguably none of the literature prizes in Germany is so renowned or replete with political significance as the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt am Main. T h e Goethe Prize conferred by the city magistrate of Frankfurt every three years is meant for persons "whose work has already been recog42. Jürgen Lloyd et al. "Akademischer Faschismus: Mittelungen über die HumboldtGesellschaft," in Raimund Hethey and Peter Kratz, In Bester Gesellschaft: Antifa Recherche zwischen Konservativismus und Neo-Faschismus (Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt, 1991), 85. 43. Ibid., Wolandt writes for the journals Mut and Criticon. 44. "Le Prix Mondial Cino-del-Duca ä Ernst Jünger," Le Monde, Oct. 12, 1981. 45. A good example of this can be seen in the official "Guidelines for Reforming Teaching of History at the High School Level" (Entwurf von Richtlinien für die Neugestaltung des Geschichtsunterrichts an höheren Schulen), put together by a commission in Freiburg led by Gerhard Ritter. The plan begins with the exhortation to instruct youth in the spirit of freedom and democracy, because Germany will be resurrected (Wiederaufstieg) only when it becomes recognized as a Kulturnation, seeking peace instead of war. See Gerhard Ritter, "Der neue Geschichtsunterricht," Die Sammlung 2 (August, 1947), 4 4 2 - 4 6 2 , quote on 443. 46. Richard Alewyn, "Der Goethe Preis an Ernst Jünger," Die Zeit, July 13, 1990, 38. See Richard Grunberger, Hitler's SS (New York: Delacorte, 1970), 48.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

221

nized and whose creative influence is worthy of the honor of Goethe's memory." 47 It can be awarded to German writers and poets or to other representatives of cultural life. First awarded in 1927 to the poet Stefan George, the D M 50,000 prize was originally given annually. Such towering figures as Gerhard Hauptmann, Albert Schweitzer, and Sigmund Freud were among its first recipients during the Weimar period, chosen in order to h o n o r cosmopolitanism, literary experimentalism, and an openness to scientific pioneering. A n intersection of politics and literature was already evident when the prize was bestowed upon Freud in 1930. Mayor Landmann and the prize committee of that year feared that honoring Freud would play into the hands of the radical right, raising the specter of money being wasted on "Bolshevist" culture. 48 T h e plunge into primitivism accompanying Nazi cultural politics assured that the Goethe Prize went to now forgotten völkisch writers such as Guido Kolbenheyer, Agnes Miegel, and Hans Carossa. It was as a sign of repentance for and recognition of Germany's intellectual exiles that the city fathers h o n o r e d Hermann Hesse in 1946, Karl Jaspers in 1947, and Thomas Mann in 1949. Considering the controversial stature of the German exi l e s — one thinks of the ugly label of "traitor" given by the "inner emigrants" to Thomas Mann in the late 1 9 4 0 s — t h e s e awards were anything but politically neutral. Starting in 1952 Goethe Prize was awarded every three years and was conferred, for example, on the scientist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1958, on Walter Gropius in 1 9 6 1 , on G e o r g Lukäcs in 1970, and on Raymond A r o n in 1979. In these cases as well, the spirit of the times was reflected in the choices: a sixties e c h o in the choice of Lukäcs as much as the contrasting, intellectual turn against Western Marxism that had been captured symbolically by the award to Raymond A r o n nine years later. Whereas in the past the battles over Jünger had been contested primarily in the pages of dry academic journals or in momentary flare-ups in the press, the awarding of the Goethe Prize attracted wide public attention for several months, in the media, academia, and the public at large. 49 T h e fact that Jünger's lifework was virtually complete in two Werkausgaben and that an enormous secondary literature existed meant that the contestants in this debate were well equipped to start a battle of quotations.

47. Satzung zur Verleihung des Goethepreises, here taken from the "Presseinformation der SPD im Römer." T h e orginal text reads: "Der Goethepreis ist vorgesehen für Persönlichkeiten, die mit ihrem Schaffen bereits zur Geltung gelangt sind und deren schöpferisches Wirken einer dem Gedenken Goethes gewidmeten Ehrung würdig ist." 48. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Intellektuellendämmerung: Zur Lage der Frankfurter Intelligenz in den zwanziger Jahren (Frankfurt: Insel, 1982), 89. 49. See "Goethe Prize Protested," International Herald Tribune, Aug. 24, 1982.

222

RIGHT TURN

In the following sections, the history of the award decision as well as the arguments advanced for and against Jünger will be assessed. Finally, the question of the Jünger controversy's relevance in the context of broader issues of Germany's moral and political conflict with the memory of Nazism will be discussed. T h e award to Jünger must be seen in the context of West German politics. At the time, the social democratic/liberal alliance headed by Helmut Schmidt and Hans Dietrich Genscher was falling apart under the strain of unresolvable internal party conflicts over taxation and other matters. T h e altercations led the FDP to change allegiance to the CDU, a step taken in O c tober 1982. T h e cultural politics of the Federal Republic changed abruptly, particularly in respect to the public recognition of cultural figures. T h e political change of direction (die Wende) became quite apparent in the arena of public funding. Iconoclastic filmmakers like Herbert Achternbusch, Alexander Kluge, and Hans Jürgen Syberberg were denied the cultural stipends that had launched their careers in the 1970s, 50 library budgets were cut, and the government seriously considered prohibiting critical authors such as Heinrich Boll and Günther Grass from making public appearances at cultural forums of the Goethe Institute. 51 In Hesse there was also a political background to the Goethe Prize as Landtag elections were scheduled for that fall, and the C D U city government of Frankfurt f o u n d itself in a tight race against the combined strength of the SPD and the Greens. T h e controversy began on May 17 when an appointed committee publicly announced the decision to nominate Jünger for the prize. 52 This fivemember committee was responsible for choosing a candidate who would then be voted upon by the entire magistracy. T h e C D U held a majority of those seats. Mayor Wallman suggested bestowing the award on the chastened socialist writer Manes Sperber while the FAZ journalist Joachim Fest favored Golo Mann. T h e poet Gabriele Wohmann nominated a colleague from Darmstadt, Karl Krolow, and Hilmar Hoffman, the SPD cultural affairs officer, rallied for Graham Greene. 5 3 Ironically it was the Jewish publisher Rudolf Hirsch, formerly head of the Fischer publishing house, w h o pushed to have Jünger considered. Hirsch told the Spiegel magazine that while in Dutch exile in the 1930s, he watched as his idols Gottfried Benn and Gerhard Hauptmann succumbed to the Nazis while Jünger remained "immune" 50. Ralph Schnell, Die Literatur der Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 30g if. 51. Ibid. 52. T h e committee consisted of the mayor of Frankfurt, Walter Wallman, university president Hartwig Keim, the Social Democrat cultural senator Hilmar Hoffmann, the writer Gabriele Wohman, the FAZ journalist and controversial Hitler biographer Joachim Fest, and Rudolf Hirsch, ajewish publisher. 53. Wochendienst: Presse- und Informationsamt, Frankfurt am Main, Aug. 17, ig82.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

223

(gefeit) to their siren's call. 54 Although the committee voted unanimously for Hirsch's candidate, the accord might not have been the result of enthusiastic acclamation. Some speculated that the decision to choose Jünger was made by default, because the j u r y couldn't unify behind any of the other candidates. 55 Traditionally, the city council simply confirmed the decision of the j u r y without question. But on August 5 the Greens petitioned the city council to place the question of Jünger's nomination on the discussion agenda. T h e y also published a series of citations from Jünger's early works purporting to show that Jünger was an important "forerunner" (Wegbereiter) of the National Socialist movement. 5 6 T h e Social Democrats reacted a day later with their own version of Jünger citations, claiming it would be irresponsible to h o n o r a man who was a "pacemaker" (Schrittmacher) of the Third Reich. 5 7 In the ensuing debate, Walter Oswald, the speaker for the Greens, repeated charges that it was a "scandal" to h o n o r a man in the Paulskirche who was undoubtedly a "motor of National Socialism," whose glorification of war, contempt for life, hatred of democracy, and desire to destroy his "intellectual opponents" made him unworthy of the prize. 58 Frolinde Baiser of the SPD supported the position of the Greens, contending that Jünger still held to his long-standing rejection of democracy. T h e C D U representative Wolfram Brück responded that it bordered on slander to b u n c h random quotations together—anyway, the Green's selections could be countered with contradictory quotations. O n e shouldn't forget, he argued, to think of the spirit of the times in which Jünger's early books were written. Oswald fired back that Brück was arguing irresponsibly, guilty of trivializing fascism. Brück returned the accusation saying that the Greens would launch an endless witch-hunt if they started making every writer responsible for the misuse of his thoughts. 59 T h e debate deteriorated into a series of personal insults, so that the FAZ commented: 'Yesterday's debate . . . has laid aside, for the near future, any discussion of the literary quality of Jünger's oeuvre." 6 0 Despite the muckraking and posturing engaged in by all the Frankfurt representatives, hindsight supports the left's contention that granting of the

54. "Nichts gelesen: Der Frankfurter Krach um den Goethepreis-Kandidaten ErnstJünger," Der Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982. 55. Gertrud Waldecker, "Der allzu schnelle Stempel: Später Streit um Goethepreisträger Ernst Jünger," Badische Neueste Nachrichten, Aug. i g , 1982. 56. AlbrechtBechtold,'JüngerdasKainzeichenaufdrucken?"itteinjicAe/bji, Aug. 18,1982. 57. Presseinformation der SPD im Römer, 2. 58. "SPD und Grüne gegen Jünger, CDU für Goethe-Preisträger" FR, Aug. 6, 1982. 59. Ibid. 60. FAZ, Aug. 7, 1982, editorial page.

224

RIGHT TURN

Goethe Prize to Jünger was meant to symbolize the conservative Wende in Germany. As one journalist wrote: "The right man at the right moment: the end of some social-liberal illusions and the coming of the conservative rollback strategy."61 One legacy of the Kohl regime was in fact a concerted attempt to "normalize" Germany's relationship to its past, that is, to stop letting the Nazi crimes, and the guilt associated with those crimes, play a role in determining Germany's domestic and foreign policies. The far-right CDU politician Alfred Dregger summed up this attitude in a notorious phrase when he called for Germany to "come out of Hitler's shadow."62 The Social Democrats and the Greens were fully aware at the time of the political changes on the CDU agenda. They were even able to gain shortterm political capital in Hesse by attempting to portray the CDU as a party of dangerous reactionaries. It was reported that the prime minister of Hesse, Börner, had strongly criticized the prize committee for their choice and feared the political repercussions in the fall election. Börner was among the many prominent politicians who found excuses not to attend the award ceremony scheduled for August 28, 1982.63 During that August, the issue of the Goethe Prize for Jünger became a national concern. Every major newspaper and many small ones covered the unfolding of the controversy. It is characteristic of German journalism and of the weight of the issue that commentary and reporting were not clearly separated. Conservative newspapers defended not only Jünger but also Jünger's generation and the German national past, while the liberal and left-wing press took the occasion to decry Germany's "unmastered past." In the midst of these debates Der Spiegel published an interview in which Jünger made several startling positive statements concerning Hitler and fascism and also occupied an ambiguous stance on the treatment of the Jews in the Third Reich, all of which added much fuel to the fire. A comment on the concentration camps produced a furor. When asked about his opinion of Hitler's military capabilities, Jünger appeared to speak about the Holocaust in terms of its tactical dimension more than its moral ramifications: "When I think of the unbelievable amounts of cars, freight trains, troops, and so forth that were necessary—that was just crazy. The persecution of the Jews not only irreparably contributed to the moral loss of the war, but also economically and strategically."64 "The moral loss of the war" (der moralische Ver-

61. Bernd Hesslein "Alles geht seinen deutsch-nationalen Gang," Hamburger Rundschau, Aug. 19, 1982. 62. Kurt Ziesel, "Der Skandal um Ernst Jünger," Deutschland Magazin 10 (1982): 2 4 - 2 7 . 63. Claus Gellerson, "Politische Prominenz fehlt bei Goethepreis Verleihung," FR, August 25, 1982. Also missing were President Carstens, the chairman of the CDU, Alfred Dregger, and the president of the Frankfurt University, Hartwig Keim. 64. "Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod," Der Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982, 15g.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

225

lust des Krieges) was particularly damaging. By saying it, Jünger ranked the loss of morality (and the war) as more tragic than the extermination of the Jews. Meanwhile, after a tumultuous session in city hall, Mayor Wallman's majority C D U fraction approved the jury's decision and the date for the award ceremony was set for August 28. 65 Interestingly, Wallman's defense contained a blatant contradiction. As the Greens were leaving the hall in protest, he announced that the j u r y did not have the duty ofj u d g i n g Ernst Jünger's political opinions. Instead of remaining neutral, Wallman himself tried to prove with his own list of citations that Jünger had actually turned away from National Socialism early on. During the last two weeks of August, high-ranking C D U politicians bent over backward to avoid confronting the issue. Germany's President Karl Carstens, w h o had attended the previous ceremonies in 1979, was not alone in discovering he had previous commitments and could not attend. T h e actual award ceremony was anticlimactic. T h e historic Frankfurt parliament building was half empty and a huge police contingent f o u n d itself in front of the building in a circuslike atmosphere facing 200 protesters, who threw nothing more dangerous than pamphlets filled with militant Jünger citations. 66 A n ironic "Ernst Jünger Friendship Circle" from the Frankfurt Goethe University held a reading, and the drunken presence of members of the Frankfurt homeless scene added to the happeninglike atmosphere. W h e n the ceremony was over, Jünger was greeted by half-hearted catcalls and the singing of an old army tune "The Girl from Poland," a song that, ironically, had been c o n d e m n e d by the Nazis. 67 Volker Kühn, writing in Vorwärts, described the scene as Jünger left the church: As the farce was over, Jünger's opponents faced off with his admirers yelling "Sieg Heil," and "shame shame." It all had an air of Weimar about it on this summery autumn morning, but not because of Goethe. It is a comfort to know that the majority of the representatives of our republic stayed away. T h e y had the feeling: one can't trust these men in our state.68

Kühn's mocking parody of the occasion in Wilhelmine Berlinese: 'Joethes Jeburtstag. Kaiserwetter, Paulskirche jewesen," implied that the small circle 65. A l b r e c h t Rechtold, "Frankfurts Stadtväter streiten über Ernst Jüngers Dichten u n d D e n k e n S c h w ä b i s c h e Zeitung, Aug. 21, 1982. 66. "Sie warfen mit Zitaten: Szenen vor der Paulskirche bei der Goethepreis-Verleihung," FR, Aug. 30, 1982. 67. For a g o o d chronicle of these events see Vorwärts, Sept. 2, 1982, 25. 68. Volker Kühn, "Der Breker-Büste immer ähnlicher: Ernst Jünger in der Paulskirche: Jeschichte jeschnuppert, Brechreiz unterdrückt." Vorwärts, Sept. 2, 1982, 25. See also the critique of Kühn's alleged trivialization of the issue by Walter Nutz, "Der Skandal heißt nicht Ernst Jünger: Schließlich hat die Jury die Vergabe des Goethe-Preises zu verantworten," Vorwärts, Sept. 30, 1982.

22 6

RIGHT TURN

of participants in the ceremony were the "ewig gestrigen," the last Germans with memories of the German Empire. But it would be misleading to say that conservatives d e f e n d e d Jünger en masse and that the left correspondingly excoriated him. O n e ardent provincial assemblyman opposed Jünger's Goethe Prize because he feared that the author's writings on drug experimentation would seduce the youth into addiction. O n the other hand, several articles from the left-wing tageszeitung attacked the intolerance and heavy moralizing of the Frankfurt Greens. But in general lines were drawn according to traditional positions on the political spectrum. T h e left, broadly speaking, was most unhappy that awarding the prize to Jünger confirmed the "slide to the right" (Rechtsrutsch), rehabilitating certain elements of fascism, in Jünger's case the "fascist style." 69 With a certain bitterness the seduction of the left by right-wing radical slang was also noted, particularly in France. Jünger's professed role of the distanced observer, of the sensitive seismograph, was c o n d e m n e d as ideology, a reproduction of conservative philosophy lacking any objective, empirical background. 7 0 Borrowing Benjamin's by now well-worn phrase, Johannes SeifFert asserted that Jünger delivered indispensable ideological elements for fascism by "aestheticizing violence," making fascist ideology attractive to bourgeois intellectuals. 71 T h e left registered a g o o d measure of irritation over the apparent contradiction that a right-wing author such as Jünger could glorify violence and anarchy and still receive the highest honors of the Federal Republic, while left-wing authors could be convicted of treason for simply suggesting methods of terror. With tongue-in-cheek gravity, Til Schulz of the tageszeitung listed the charges that could be brought against Jünger: propagation of violence, inducement to terrorism (from the Treatise of the Rebel), animal torture (Subtile Jagden, Subtle hunts), and illegal possession of drugs (Annäherungen, Close encounters). 7 2 Dieter Krämer also pointed out that Jünger had once equated the then Chancellor Schmidt with Hitler without having damaged his reputation or having been upbraided. 7 3 Another leftist perspective detected in Jünger's prize a clear sign of the e n d of the age of dem-

69. Fassanbass quotes Armin Möhler from the Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, where Jünger is called a "Virtuose des faschistischen Stils" ('Jünger-Jünger und der Pflasterstrand," Allgemeine Kulturzeitung, Sept. 20, 1982). 70. Dieter Krämer, "Verwandlungen und Läuterungen: Wo denn, Wie denn?" Die Neue, Aug. 27, 1982, 26. 7 1 . Johannes Ernst Seiffert, "Grüne gegen den elitären Weggefährten des NS-Staats," tageszeitung, Aug. 23, 1982, 8. 72. Til Schulz, "Der Preisträger, das unbekannte Wesen," Tageszeitung, Aug. 27, 1982, 6. (Schulz has recently been revealed to have been a STASI agent for East Germany). 73. Krämer, "Verwandlungen und Läuterungen," 26.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

227

ocratic experiments in Germany and a return to elitist thinking as the new economic imperative. 74 For Helmut Heissenbüttel, Jünger remained a "national-German" writer, whose conservative elitism made him the perfect candidate to be the "CDU's Goethe" in a period of restorative politics. 75 It did not g o unnoticed that elitist solutions to social problems have often been put forward by the intellectual left. Jünger's thinking was complex, according to one observer, because his version of fascism, being inherently anticapitalist, presented a model of romantic, soldierlike asceticism dangerously attractive to the left. 76 Finally, three years before the Historians' Dispute broke out, the left was already pointing to the conservative equation of Hitler with Stalin as one way of diminishing the historical magnitude of the Third Reich's criminal regime. According to Karl Corino, Jünger subsumed Hitler and Stalin under an "Asiatic principle," in order to whitewash Western civilization—and thus German h i s t o r y — f r o m the "stain of fascism." 77 Only one commentator brought up the question of anti-Semitism. Jünger's famous "oil and water" metaphors of 1930 had been passed around in the form of a pamphlet by the Greens, and Wolfram Brück d e f e n d e d the anti-Semitic tone of Jünger's argument. He maintained that Jünger was referring to a cultural problem, solely posing the question of what was required for the "spiritual survival of both cultures." 78 August Eckstein compared Brück's way of thinking to the racist Heidelberger Manifesto against the "over-foreignization" {Überfremdung) of the German people and right-wing ethnopluralist arguments that claim for the German people the right to preserve its cultural identity against foreign cultures. 79 T h e liberal bourgeois press was less concerned about a possible rejuvenation of fascist ideas but questioned the wisdom of honoring a man who, even in the stodgy post-Nazi era of West German stability, refused to make an unequivocal statement of loyalty to democratic political institutions. Generational mentality also played a role in the evaluation of Jünger's politics, as illustrated by comparing the literary fragments collected by the Greens and the SPD. T h e younger radicals, for the most part products of the achtundsechziger (1968) generation that had rebelled, among other things, against the refusal of their parents to deal openly with the passivity and acquiescence of the older generation during the Nazi period, took all 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. gust C. 79.

Peter O. Chotewitz, "Eitle Elite," tageszeitung, Aug. 23, 1982. Helmut Heissenbüttel, "Goethe der CDU?" FR, Aug. 28, 1982, 2. Reinhart Behr, "Die Linke und Ernst Jünger, "Die Neue, Sept. io, 1982,8. Karl Corino, "Lob mit Widerspruch," SZ, Aug. 30, 1982. Cited from the protocol of the Cultural Committee of the Frankurt Stadtrat. See AuEckstein,'Jünger, die CDU, und die Ausländerfeindlichkeit,"Die Tat, Sept. 10, 1982, 10. Ibid.

228

RIGHT TURN

of their quotations from Jünger's Weimar radical nationalist phase.80 For the generation of post-"reeducated" Germans on the left, any thoughts with connotations of antiliberalism, racism, or militarism evoked an immediate emotional rejection that oversimplified the context in which such ideas were expressed. Andrei Markovits designates this phenomenon "the new uninvolvement" (neue Unbefangenheit), meaning that the younger generation, particularly the Greens, gave themselves the luxury of working through the past with a kind of universal moralizing. They were not involved, therefore it was really someone else's past, the past of the older generation, that was at issue.81 This tendency was even more marked for the orthodox left. Thus it was a jejune and ineffective strategy on the part of the Marxist Demokratischer Kulturbund to stamp Jünger as an anti-Semite and antidemocrat on the basis of a few isolated quotations passed out as a pamphlet on the day ofJünger's award ceremony. 82 In a series of editorials during the following weeks, intellectuals—not necessarily sympathetic to Jünger—contended that any author can be branded as a monster with the help of a few well-chosen quotations. 83 The same kind of primitive name-calling came, predictably, from East Germany, where the award to Jünger was commented upon gloatingly by the press. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler led the charge; he was notorious for his television magazine The Black Channel, which delighted in exposing economic and political scandals in West Germany (often based on reporting done by West German journalists). Schnitzler was an SED functionary who was later to feel the brunt of popular resentment in the revolutionary days in the fall of 1989. In attacking Jünger, he echoed the out-of-context quotations, called the Frankfurter jury Nazis, and repeated the legend that Jünger had broken up a Thomas Mann speech in October 1930 with the help of SA thugs (the disturbance was actually the work of Arnolt Bronnen, who boasted about it in his memoirs) ,84 In contrast to the Greens, the SPD politicians, often based on personal experience, had a much more nuanced appreciation of the historical specificity of radical politics during the Weimar period. The SPD had been a more 80. Jutta Ditfurth, "Die Grünen im Römer an die Presse," Green Party's press release of August 18, 1982. 81. Andrei S. Markovits, "Was ist "Deutsch" an den Grünen? Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung als Voraussetzung politischer Zukunftsbewältigung," quoted in Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocausts, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 167. 82. "Für die totale Mobilmachung, Warum Ernst Jünger?" Marxistischer Kulturbund, political pamphlet, August 28, 1982. 83. For example, Sepp Schelz, "Bekenntnis zu Ernst Jünger,"DAS, Aug. 29, 1982, 17. 84. RIAS Berlin Monitor, "Goethe Preis für Ernst Jünger," DDR T V 1, Aug. 30, 1982; on Bronnen see Arnolt Bronnen gibt zu Protokoll (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954), 247—254.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

229

radical party in its beginnings and had only gradually made peace with bourgeois society, perhaps as late as 1959 with the Godesberg Program. T h e position paper released by the SPD quoted exclusively from Jünger's post1945 works to show that the mature Jünger remained in a problematic relationship to democracy. Jünger's political ambivalence toward the Federal Republic made the SPD and Germany's educated elite nervous, indignant, and sometimes angry, as can be seen from Karl Corino's contribution to the August debates. Corino, an author of several books on the problem of the seduction of German intellectuals by fascism, noted that it would not bode well for democracy if a debate had not been stirred up by the awarding of a prize to a man who had openly declared "I hate democracy like the plague." 8 5 Corino pointed out that Jünger's political instincts had always been suspect and inconsistent: he sent Hitler copies of his books but resisted Goebbels' overtures to j o i n the party; he wrote The Peace for the officers of the German resistance but was away catching butterflies in the Bois de Boulogne on July 20, 1944; he excoriated the brutality of the Nazi regime in his secret diaries during the war but refused to allow his soldiers to put up white flags in May 1945. Corino concluded that despite Jünger's literary merits and his fascinating personality, this authoritarian figure, so full of contradictions, was ultimately not a worthy recipient of the Goethe Prize. 86 In the editorials that opposed the award to Jünger, this sort of contradiction weighed most heavily. Many of these articles mentioned the paradox that the symbol of German humanism, Goethe, was being brought into association with a writer w h o had openly glorified war, mobilized intellectuals to bring down the Weimar Republic, and welcomed the military buildup leading to the Second World War. 87 T h e ambivalence of intellectuals once attracted to Jünger was summed u p best by Bernt Engelmann, in 1982 president of the German Writers Union, w h o responded to the award by saying "I personally cannot excuse him for the role he played as seducer of my generation." 8 8 In a subtle and personal analysis along the same lines, Michael Rutschky wrote that he was both fascinated and nauseated by Jünger's prose. As he put it, Jünger's writing, like Wagner's music, was permeated by the ambivalence of ideology and style, mixed inextricably together without clear demarcations. For Rutschky

85. Jünger wrote this in the first edition of Wäldchen 125 (1922) and expunged it in the second edition of 1930. 86. Corino, "Lob mit Widerspruch." 87. Here many examples could be cited, for instance "Goethe und sein Jünger," Basler Zeitung, Aug. 27, 1982,46; or Arno Klonne, 'Jünger ist keiner," Die Tat, Aug. 27, 1982, 10. 88. Bernt Engelmann, Aug-

i9.'982-

"Hier wird ein Riese aufgeblasen," Hamburger Abendzeitung

250

RIGHT TURN

this suspicious combination explained why the reception of Jünger had been so full of contradictions and misunderstandings. Why, he asked rhetorically, did so few people protest that Adorno seduced the youth of 1968, while it was supposedly a scandal that Jünger did the same to the generation of the 1930s? Couldn't one recognize Jünger's "anarchs" in the anti-industrial spleen of the Greens who are leading the anti-Jünger protests?89 Many other commentators registered surprise that the Greens would attack a man who wrote so much about nature and resisted the technological world.90 The question of Jünger's style as distinct from his personality or politics was also controversial. Fritz J. Raddatz— like his predecessor Friedrich Sieburg called by some the "pope of the literary critics"—summed up Jünger's style with the words "distance and kitsch." The young Jünger, according to Raddatz, was responsible for giving the Weimar reactionaries artificial, glittery, but highly effective catchphrases and tropes to express their rejection of progress, of the Enlightenment, and of the individual in favor of the "type." If the Nazis opted for an even more primitive language it was because "they were too stupid to recognize the value of this gift." 91 For the presentation of the Goethe Prize on August 28, the conservative Berlin publisher, friend, and sometime coauthor with Jünger, 92 Wolf Jobst Siedler, wrote a laudatory essay en tided "Decoding the Signs," which dealt in an interesting way with many of the points already mentioned. 93 Siedler began by scolding the German people for their inability to relate properly to national poets and thinkers. He reminded his audience of the tumult occasioned by the celebration of Gerhart Hauptmann's birthday in 1922 because of the latter's putatively "un-German" character. In a similar vein, Thomas Mann's Goethe Prize in 1949 had been opposed because many Germans felt abandoned and betrayed by Mann in his BBC war broadcasts. Siedler argued that each generation is tempted to fault the illusions of those who came before, only to be judged by later generations in the same manner. Jünger had always been one step ahead of his times and of his critics. Siedler implied that the opposition to Jünger arose out of ignorance of the context in which the writer's transformations took place. One must, as the 89. Michael Rutschky, "Ehrung eines Radikalen: Ein Selbst-Gespräch über die Verleihung des Goethe Preises an Ernst Jünger," Süddeutsche Zeitung, Aug. 28, 1982, 84. 90. Wolfgang Schirmacher, "Der von der Zeit eingeholte Schriftsteller," Rheinische Post, Aug. 28, 1982. 91. Fritz J. Raddatz, "Kälte und Kitsch," Die Zeit, Aug. 27, 1982, 3 0 - 3 5 . 92. Jünger and Siedler coauthored the book Baüme, a collection of essays on the destruction of nature that has strong cultural-pessimistic overtones. (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1977); see also Nikolas Benckiser, "Sie spenden nicht nur Schatten," FAZ, May 4, 1977; and Golo Mann, "Baüme," Welt am Sonntag, June 25, 1977. 93. Wolf Jobst Siedler's speech was printed in full by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Aug. 30, 1982, 6.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

231

title implies, unravel a series of messages. Jünger abandoned his nationalist position already in 1929, Siedler argued, just as the nation was about to embark on its most militant nationalist phase. From The Peace to The World State, Jünger established a basis for internationalist politics that would find general acceptance only at the end of the Cold War. His metaphysical writings were already anticipating the postmodern "end of history" and the rehabilitation of the esoteric. Jünger and Goethe were compatible, he concluded, because of their shared transcendence of everyday politics and exploration of both organic and inorganic worlds. Both writers remained true to themselves and pursued their own interests despite all the external pressures of the world. Only future generations, he prophesied, would come to appreciate the lasting value of Jünger's work. In contrast to Siedler's sophisticated attempt to place Jünger's work beyond the polemics of the day, Mayor Walter Wallman's speech was embarrassingly ambivalent and weak, hardly comparable to his reportedly brilliant performance when presenting the A d o r n o Prize to Habermas. 9 4 Whereas Siedler had spoken of Jünger in the future, Wallman pleaded with the audience, in an allusion to Ranke, to understand Jünger as a product of his time. He gave the impression that Jünger was already a historical figure, hardly alive anymore. Finally Jünger himself spoke. In accepting his prize, he underscored the value of keeping distance from the contemporary world. Siedler and Wallmann were right to see a parallel here to Goethe, for "the man w h o belongs to n o party is suspected by everybody." 9 5 For Jünger the artist must sacrifice himself to his work alone; writing is not a moral, social, or hedonistic act. Paradoxically, the rest of Jünger's speech dealt with the world beyond the act of writing, consisting of aphorisms about the relationship between author and reader, the transformation of experience in the act of reading. T h e reader, he concluded, should find a h o m e (Heimat) in the work of the author, "when everything outside has run down." 9 6

T h e Goethe Prize controversy involved intellectuals w h o were not necessarily sympathetic to Jünger but worried about the Germans' fickle treatment of cultural figures. As one older commentator asked, had not the German left also g o n e through radical changes of position, "from blood-thirsty Stalinist Saul to pacific-ecological Paul" in a short period of time? 9 7 Peter Glotz, 94. W. F. Schöller, "Geisterstunde," SZ, Aug. 30, 1982. 95. Dezernat Kultur und Freizeit der Stadt Frankurt, ed., Reden zum Goethepreis 1982. (Frankfurt: Krämer, 1982). 96. Ibid. 97. Roland Schäffer, "Gefechte im Spiegelkabinett," tageszeitung, Aug. 9, ig82, 6.

2J2

RIGHT TURN

a high ranking executive of the SPD and no friend ofJünger's worldview, reminded his colleagues that the malignant practice of taking quotes out of context was often applied by conservatives against the left. The attempt by the Greens, he argued, to label Jünger an anti-Semite on the basis of a questionable utterance from 1930, is—after Auschwitz—no more upright than the current fashion of slandering Menachem Begin as anti-Semitic.98 Wallman had advanced a similar argument, noting that Habermas and Critical Theory had been held responsible by some for the escalation of violence in Germany in the 1970s. Wallman thought the false causality in this logic could jeopardize critical thinking. Despite this defense of free speech, the CDU had been uncompromisingly opposed to the bestowal of the Goethe Prize on Georg Lukäcs in 1970. The politicization of the Goethe Prize was also thematized in the debate. Peter Buchka argued that in contrast to other cultural nations, the Germans demanded from their artists a particular disposition to be cut into useful pieces and fit into a worldview: "We always need a few handy quotes with which we can beat our opponents on the head .. . instead of taking on contradictory ideas, we take apart, like barbarians, those that we don't like, that make us uncomfortable, that we don't understand." 99 Another editorial complained: "In Germany our poets and thinkers are always forced to confess to being good democrats, they must be left-leaning, but not too far left, in order to be worthy of prizes." 100 Several important writers' societies gave their unconditional support to the idea of honoring Jünger. The New Literary Society of Marburg sent Wallman a letter pointing to Jünger's status abroad, particularly in France, as a classical author. The German Union of Writers called the polemics against Jünger an "old German antivirtue" that Goethe himself already had to bear from ignorant critics.101 The Free German Writer's Union of Munich regretted the protests against Jünger, noting that he had retained his integrity, even in the face of totalitarian threats.102 High-ranking politicians, not only in the CDU, were effusive in their praise of the author. Helmut Kohl offered the non sequitur that Jünger suffered malice and hatred because of his "uncompromising humanity." 103 The Social Democratic prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, Ulrich Lang, 98. Peter Glotz, "Barometer und Taifune," RM, Aug. 20, 1982. gg. Peter Buchka, "Land der Barbaren: Eine Polemik aus gegebenem Anlaß," SZ, Aug. 28, 1982. 100. Aug- 29, 101. 102. 103.

"Immer im Streit: Frankfurter Goethe-Preis an Ernst Jünger überreicht," Tagesspiegel, 1982. "Rückendeckung für Ernst Jünger," SZ, Aug. 26, 1982. "FDA verurteilt Proteste gegen Jünger-Ehrung," SZ (197), Aug. 28-29, 1982. "Glückwünsche Kohls an Ernst Jünger," Schwäbische Zeitung (197), Aug. 28, 1982.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

255

congratulated Jünger, writing that Social-Democrats should beware of the danger of evaluating g o o d literature on the basis of personal convictions. 104 T h e conservative press argued consistently that Jünger had been made the victim of a malicious slander campaign. T h e FAZ called the criticism by the Greens "more a tribunal than a discussion," 105 andFAZ's cultivated readers fell over one another with indignation to prove that Jünger's critics had probably never read a page of his books. 1 0 6 For Sepp Schelz, Jünger stood in the firing line because "nothing angers the mediocre more than intellectual superiority." 107 A l o n g the same lines, Jörg Fauser argued that the decision of the jury was not in need of justification, rather "what needs to be defended is the f r e e d o m of people to take epistemological risks, even against the reasoning of the masses, the powerful, and the guardians of public virtue." 108 In this context, it is instructive to compare the reactions of the conservatives with those of the more liberal Die Zeit from the same period. Raddatz questioned the intersection between ideology and art by asking whether one might compare the anti-Semitic writings of Wagner or Pound to elements of literary fascism in Jünger. Raddatz argued it could not be denied that 'Jünger was a prefascist thinker, [who] outlined the contours of the Nazi state." 109 From the readers' responses, one can see that some felt Raddatz had finally set the record straight, while others argued that to call Jünger's style "fascist" would be banal. Jünger had analyzed the decline of bourgeois subjectivity at a time when the left, with its belief in the progress of history, was naively letting itself be led down the road to a communist paradise. 110 According to this reasoning, Jünger is dangerous because he challenges rationalist, Enlightenment ways of thinking. As Wolfgang Ignee put it, Jünger fascinates and shocks; he is the opposite of the heirs of Rousseau, going through the world moralizing and preaching. Jünger's legendary coldness and reticence are related to his phenomenological, rather than moralist, perspective, allowing him to see the world as an adventure and spectacle. From Ignee's point of view, Jünger did not "bury Weimar, for something has to be dead before it can be buried"; Jünger merely kept his distance while Weimar "stuck the knife into itself." 111

104. "Ulrich Lang gratuliert Ernst Jünger," SZ, Aug. 30, 1982. 105. "Falsches Bild,"FAZ, Aug. 5, 1982. 106. See, for example, Professor Gerd Teilenbach, "Beschämend," FAZ, Aug. 11, 1982, 6; Andre Ratti, "Von Außen betrachtet: Ernst Jünger und seine Gegner," FAZ, Aug. 16, 1982, 6; and Eva Uhlemann, "Ernst Jünger: Ein Vorläufer der Grünen," FAZ, 6. 107. Sepp Schelz, "Bekenntnis zu Ernst Jünger," DAS, Aug. 29, 1982, 17. 108. Jörg Fauser, "Das Risiko der Erkenntnis," Tip, Aug. 28, 1982, 5 4 - 5 5 . 109. Raddatz, "Kälte und Kitsch," Die Zeit, Aug. 27, 1982, 3 0 - 3 5 . 110. "Leserbriefe-Kritik an Ernst Jünger," Die Zeit, Oct. 15, 1982. 1 1 1 . Wolfgang Ignee, "Preisgericht," SZ, Aug. 28, 1982.

2J4

RIGHT TURN

PAST IMPERFECT: EVALUATING THE GOETHE PRIZE Jünger never really made peace with the Federal Republic, despite literary prizes, the Bundesverdienstkreuz, state dinners, and birthday visits from Kohl, Weizsäcker, Herzog, and other high-ranking politicians. He described himself as a "loyal, but hardly enthusiastic citizen of the country" and expressed contempt for the provincialism of the Bonn Republic, whose failing, as he saw it, was pusillanimity toward Germany's occupiers. Although happier with a reunified Germany, he still felt spiritually at home in the German Empire and, given the choice, would have even preferred eighteenth-century Venice, whose oligarchy, he opined, gave the masses more freedom than most democracies. 1 1 2 He was much more concerned about his literary reputation in France than at home and partook rarely in public life outside the festivities in Wilflingen. As a sign of his contempt for Germany's media, he generally avoided public interviews with German interlocutors, while French and other foreign admirers were often welcome. 1 1 3 Leaving politics aside, one can construct a plausible argument for awarding the Goethe Prize to Jünger. In 1982 no other contemporary author came near matching Goethe's accomplishments in both the natural sciences and literature. Like Goethe, who believed his anti-Newtonian theory of light would be remembered as his most important accomplishment, Jünger was particularly proud of his reputation among entomologists and of the six beetles that bear his name. 1 1 4 Like Goethe, he opposed the manipulation of the environment by scientists in the name of empirical testing and privileged instead a passive, but attentive listening to nature undisturbed. Critics had the most trouble with the uneven quality of his fiction, and as the obituaries noted, it was not clear how many of the novels would find a place on German bookshelves in the next century. T h e diaries, spanning over half a century, have a better prognosis for longevity. Certain of his essays exploring quite esoteric themes might count as masterpieces for 112. Ernst Jünger, "Wer hat nicht Fehler gemacht im Leben? Der Schriftssteller im Jahre 1982, 8yjährig zu immer wiederkehrenden Vorwürfen," SZ, Feb. 21/22, 1998, 11. 113. His preferred French interviewer was Julien Hervier, the author of a dissertation on Jünger and Drieu la Rochelle that portrays French fascist intellectuals in a positive light. See Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre Vhistoire (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978); see also his volume of interviews Entretiens avec Ernst Jünger (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Hervier has also recendy published Drieu la Rochelle's diaries, Journal, 1939—7945 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). T h e comparison is hardly a compliment for Jünger. Drieu la Rochelle was a misanthrope, rabid antiSemite, misogynist, and collaborationist. He committed suicide at the age of fifty-two in March 1945 before the mobs could get to him. 114. The "Ernst Jünger Preis fur Entomologie" (Ernst Jünger prize for entomology) was endowed in 1984 by the government of Baden-Württemberg. See "Insektenforscher geehrt," Badische Neueste Nachrichten, April 10, 1985.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

255

the initiated. His travel books offer unsurpassed descriptions of environments that may soon be lost to increasing destruction. Jünger's all-seeing eye, his love of nature's beauty and danger, and his general scientific acumen echoed, it could be argued, not only Goethe's but even Darwin's breadth of vision. His absolute individualism and disregard for quotidian reality, especially evident as he lived to a remarkably Olympian age, might remind one of Goethe's inclination to remove himself, spatially and temporally, from the immediate world's concerns. Looking back at the controversy over the Goethe Prize, the arguments made by those who dismissed Jünger on the basis of artistic or scientific achievement tended to be the least convincing. The most troubling aspect remained the specter of a resurrected warrior-philosopher displacing the symbolic distance of the republic from the Third Reich. But a good argument could be made for keeping politics out of the process altogether. As Carl Zuckmayer argued in 1970 when he unsuccessfully nominated Jünger for the prize, most Germans would have little difficulty recognizing Bertolt Brecht's achievements, even though he had advocated a dictatorship of the proletariat and attacked Western democracy. 115 The Goethe Prize affair seemed to indicate a troubling regression into the bitter partisan battles of the Weimar Republic, replete with accusations of cultural Bolshevism from conservatives and the call for a front against fascism from the left. The story also suggests that the molding of Jünger into an icon of legitimacy and respectability, an unlikely role for an "anarch," was never entirely successful and signaled the nervous search for cultural direction in the 1980s. FUTURE IMPERFECT: EUMESWIL The Goethe Prize brought Jünger back into the public spotlight, not only because of its "scandal-effect" but also because of a change and increase in his readership. The late phase in Jünger's work, encompassing the novels Eumeswil ( 1 9 7 7 ) , Aladins Problem (1983), Eine gefährliche Begegnung (1985), and Die Schere (iggo), brought him new readers. These works marked a literary turn away from the artificial mannerism of his science fiction period to a more realistic, if still introspective, style. Jünger's writing was in harmony with the postmodern valorization of contingency and redescription, utilizing aphorisms, autobiographical retrospectives, and an eclectic mixture of historical patina and fantastic leaps into the future. His influence on younger German writers, beyond the left-right spectrum, became evident, for example, in the self-consciously posthistoire novels of Botho Strauss, where 1 1 5 . Carl Zuckmayer to Willi Brundert, mayor of Frankfurt, April 12, 1970, Nachlass Zuckmayer, DLAM.

23 6

RIGHT TURN

the narrative was replaced by fragments of dream sequences, historical interludes, and philosophical meditations. 116 Jünger's Eumeswil marked a change in literary topography from the Panglossian prognoses characteristic of early postwar works like Over the Line and The World, State. In those works, Jünger expressed hope that the catastrophic experience of the two world wars would galvanize mankind into transcending national differences and creating a rational system of world organization. Eumeswil, in contrast, transports the reader into a post-catastrophic twenty-second century; the world-state has disintegrated and nuclear warlords have imposed static tyrannies on an emasculated mankind. Eumeswil is modeled on Eumenides, the Macedonian ruler of a desolate empire where culture has atrophied and history and the arts are left to dilettantes, lexicographers, and collectors. 117 Readers of Heliopolis will recognize the symbolic montage of Eumeswil. The state is governed by the tyrannical Condor, who has recently put down a mass uprising led by a demagogic Tribune of the People. The story takes place in the fortressed residence of the Condor, outside the city, on the "Kasbah." Throughout the novel, the Tribune is scheming to regain power, and the Condor responds by ruling with increasingly repressive measures. His police chief, the Domo, his Fouché, constructs an elaborate surveillance network, having no qualms about using terror to silence his opponents. Jünger's preference for coded and eclectic imagery is evident: the Condor's name resonates politically with a South American dictator, while the Kasbah is geographically in north Africa. 118 The protagonist of the novel is a young historian, Michál Venator, whose double life as a bartender at the private nightclub of the Condor's generals gives him insider access to the power games of the elite. Jünger obviously here again drew on his experiences at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where as a casual insider he observed the machinations of modern proconsuls wrestling with the absolute power of a tyrant. Venator is the prototype of the Anarch, an updated posthistoire version of the Waldgánger, a being who romantically retreats from the state and society 1 1 6 . See in particular Botho Strauss, Paare Passanten (Munich: Hanser, 1 9 8 1 ) , where Strauss describes the contemporary state of low-brow and high-brow culture as "not being two cultures, but a pool, the entire contemporaneity [das Gesamtheute] of the culture of consumption; whispers of Ernst Jünger and the Clash, of the fantasy novel and RAF, of Schwarzer Botin and Ozu-Retrospective; whispers that are layered on top of each other, that split and go into one another" ( 1 1 8 ) . 1 1 7 . Eumeswil, S W 1 7 , 86 if. 1 1 8 . Jünger conceived the novel on three successive journeys to Agadir. On November 14, 1976, he wrote to Plard "Eumeswil is situated on the Mauretanian coast, which I have wandered through near Agadir three times now. But at the same time Eumeswil is a dream-city and could, if it turns into a fable, be moved to the Mediterranean, such as ancient Syria."

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

237

and views politics and history only as an occasion for intellectual adventure. 119 As the author admits, the world of the Anarch borders on solipsism: The Anarch is not an individualist. He doesn't want to be a great man or a free spirit. His own measure is enough; freedom is not his goal; it is his property. He doesn't appear as an enemy or a world-reformer. . . . It is difficult to differentiate the anarch from the solipsist, who thinks the whole world is his creation. That position is still tenable, as dreams prove, even though philosophers have their problems with the idea. The world and all its structures is our perception [Vorstellung], the world as a garden full of flowers is our dream. 120

The spectacles of world history are represented as the private reserve of the historian. The Historical Institute at Eumeswil is equipped with computerlike machines called luminars, that contain not only data banks full of sources on the history of past civilizations, but also anticipate "virtual reality" by transporting the viewer back in time to a plethora of historical images. Venator is taught by Jünger's favorite political philosophers Vigo (Vico), Bruno (Giordano Bruno), and Boutefeu (Nietzsche). Using the luminar, Venator calls up Hippel's wine cellar, frequented by Berlin radicals and Bohemians in the 1830s, among them the Young Hegelians Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, and Karl Marx. Venator-cum-Jünger speculates on the relationship between anarchism and socialism: In the meeting [between Bauer and Marx] one thing becomes clear: the socialists do not see their enemy as the state, the church, or capital; all these things can be illuminated by science and remodeled, replaced by propaganda. The socialists' battle is not against but for power. The archenemy is anarchy, represented, on the one hand, by idealistic anarchists and, on the other hand, by the Lumpenproletariat, which in the midst of crisis throws off the last veils of law and order—indeed of its humanity—and closes off the debate. In order for this debate to begin under a new sign, both kinds of anarchists, indispensable at the beginning, are the first to be liquidated. 121

Jünger's pessimistic conservatism underlies the logic of this encounter. By means of the asserted intractable hostility between the needs of the individual and the demands of society all social utopias are condemned to

119. Jünger admitted to the Austrian journalist Friedrich Hansen-Löve that he got the idea of the Anarch after reading Max Stirner's Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum. See "Ernst Jünger's Waldgang oder Anarchen und Anarchisten," Die Presse (Vienna), March 25/26, 1978. See also Eumeswil, 325: "Stiner's arrow just about hit the mark where I suspected the Anarch to reside. The difference depends on a razor-sharp division . . . between the possessor [Eigner] and the egoist. This is the difference between the anarchist and the anarch." 120. Eumeswil, 278. 121. Eumeswil, 319.

238

RIGHT TURN

failure as m e r e seizures o f power. 1 2 2 A f t e r m u c h m e a n d e r i n g t h r o u g h o t h e r historical events a n d figures, the F r e n c h revolutionary wars, F r e n c h socialists, a n d Nietzsche, Eumeswil c o n c l u d e s with an explicit negation o f all possible cultural a n d political renewal, calling u p an apocalyptic vision o f selfimmolation: In our epigonal world of decaying world empires and declining city-states, only the basic, rawest needs are being met. History is dead; that makes a retrospective view easier . . . something cannot be dead if history fills it with content and gets it going again. We must take from the appearances and put them in our reserve banks, in preparation for night. We are living on fossils, which can suddenly erupt in fire. Probably everything is flammable, right down to the core. 123 L o o k i n g back at the history o f the twentieth-first century, Venator sees the realization o f the world state by m e a n s o f the penetration o f national b o u n d a r i e s by t e c h n o l o g y a n d markets. T h e disintegration o f this political condition t h r o u g h the centrifugal forces of tribalism and ethnic conflict b r o u g h t ecological disasters. T h e n i n e t e e n t h century had p u t its faith in growth a n d progress, a n d the technology o f the twentieth century tried to realize the d r e a m o f technical perfection. A t the e n d o f the twentieth century a new factor e m e r g e d , namely, an ecological crisis, locking p e o p l e into battle against each o t h e r a n d against the earth. T h e result was r e n e w e d visions o f Weltuntergangand the "concentration o f power, characteristic o f final times" (Endzeiten) ,124 Not a few o f Eumeswil's critics spoke o f the b o o k as a tour de force, a magn u m opus, a n d a brilliant new departure, all the m o r e surprising considering Junger's advanced age. 1 2 5 In Merkur, Rolf Schrors c o m p a r e d Eumeswil to Becket's Endgame because b o t h works took place in the wake o f an apocalyptic catastrophe, b o t h b i d d i n g a tearless farewell to mankind. 1 2 6 Walter H i n c k

122. Jünger held Stirner "to be the actual o p p o n e n t to Marx," Jünger to Plard, Jan. 20, 1975, PAP. 123. Eumeswil, 338. 124. Ibid., 375. 125. Curt H o h o f f ("Wenn Zeus und Aphrodite Abschied n e h m e n , Halb Traumstück, halb Staatsroman: Ernst Jünger's Eumeswil" Rheinischer Merkur, Sept. 23, 1977) compares the novel to Hesse's Glasperlenspiel in its intensity of vision; Gertrud Höhler ("Unter d e m Baum der Erkenntnis: Eumeswil, ein Roman zwischen Mystik und Utopie" Deutsche Zeitung, Feb. 1 7 , 1 9 7 8 ) views the book as a brilliant diagnosis of the times; Sepp Schelz "Sprachspiel: Nur die Figuren, die Regeln sind frei erfunden" (DAS, Dec. 4, 1977) regards the book as a "language event," and compares it to the nouveau roman in France. Albert von Schirnding ("Der Bestie Geschichte entronnen: Der neue Roman des 82jährigen Ernst Jünger" SZ, Nov. 10, 1977) regards the work as a sublime synthesis of all of Jünger's intellectual preoccupations over the last fifty years. 126. Ralf Schrörs, "ErnstJüngers Endspiel," Merkur (January 1978), 9 2 - 9 5 .

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

239

r e g a r d e d the Anarch's desire to save culture in the face o f progressive destruction as a worthy parallel to the negative aesthetic position o f A d o r n o . 1 2 7 T h e book's detractors discovered n o t h i n g new in Jünger's visions. Philipp W o l f f - W i n d e g g f o u n d the novel written with an exceedingly r e m o t e voice, "about a world that is n o l o n g e r ours, a world o f mythical powers . . . a n d symbols." 1 2 8 For Franz Schonauer, the scholastic g a m e with obscure n a m e s a n d inferences is "intellectual 1'art pour I'art," a n d Jünger's posthistoire prognostications "eschatological." 1 2 9 Several c o m m e n t a t o r s a p p r o a c h e d the question o f the c o n t e m p o r a r y significance o f Eumeswil. Michael Rutschky interpreted Jünger's idea of the anarch as a strong c o n d e m n a t i o n o f the wave o f terrorism in the 1970s. 1 3 0 T h o m a s Kielinger n o t e d an autobiographical relation between the anarch a n d the history o f G e r m a n resistance to Hitler: " T h e anarch exits society in o r d e r to declare his i n n o c e n c e , even if the crime is only b e i n g a c o n t e m p o rary amidst all the entanglements that c o m e with b e i n g in a society." 1 3 1 Kielinger's insight shows how the figure o f the a n a r c h lends justification to an existential revolt against history a n d society without requiring concrete action against the forces o f tyranny. But if successful violent revolt by the individual against the state and, o n a global scale, the prevention o f the planet's slow suicide are d e e m e d i m p o s s i b l e — a s J ü n g e r s e e m e d to bel i e v e — t h e posthistoire vocabulary b e c o m e s in some sense "realistic." T h u s at least two possible a n d conflicting motives can be attributed to the posthistoire vision. It is either an alibi for passivity in the face o f the actual C o n d o r s o f the world a n d their crimes, that is, a n o t h e r flight f r o m reality. O r it anticipates the m a n n e r in w h i c h some f u t u r e historian m i g h t view fascism a n d c o m m u n i s m , as the last "world-historical" movements. Francis Fukuyama o f f e r e d o n e rather c o m p l a c e n t version o f this thesis. B o t h o Strauss gives us a m u c h m o r e troubling variation: It would be amazing and yet not unthinkable if one distant day, looked at from another epoch, the German Third Reich wasn'tjudged according to its bloody sense of form, by which it overthrew the horror of diffusion in the first era of the masses. Rather it might be remembered as being the first earthquake to drive everything into confusion, as the first jolt before a gradually violent departure into an "unhistorical," static epoch. 132

127. 128. 129. 130. 65-67. 131. Versuch,

Water Hinck, "Der Denkspieler Ernst Jünger," FAZ, Dec. 13, 1977. Philipp Wolff-Windegg, "Der Anarch am Rand der Wirbel," SZ, Oct. 11, 1977. Franz Schonauer, 'Jenseits der Geschichte," Weltwoche, Feb. 15, 1978. Michael Rutschky, "Der alte Man und das Posthistoire," Frankfurter Hefte 33 (9) (1978): Thoraas Kielinger, "Immer wieder der Blick in den Spiegel: Jüngers anspruchsvoller seinen alten Kampf mit der Geschichte endgültig auszutragen, "Die Welt, Oct. 1 2 , 1 9 7 7 .

132. Botho Strauss, Paare Passanten, 1 8 2 - 3 .

240

RIGHT TURN

THE FRENCH RECEPTION It might seem surprising that Jünger became a kind of goodwill ambassador of the Federal Republic to its erstwhile Erbfeind, France, considering his distrust of the state and his suspicion of democracy. Jünger played the role with increasing satisfaction as his fame in France grew. Mitterand invited him to the Elysée on practically every trip Jünger took to Paris. 133 T h e war hero and last surviving bearer of the Pour le Mérite was always invited to openings of museum exhibitions and to military commemorations of World War I. Already in 1975 President Carstens invited Jünger to Bonn as an official expert on French culture to help him prepare for a state visit.134 In June 1979 the "old German fighter of the First World War" was invited by the mayor of Verdun to address the annual commemoration of the famous battle of 1916. 1 3 5 Five years later Jünger returned to the cemeteries at Fort Douaumont and Consenvoye, near Verdun, together with the French president and the German chancellor, to lay a wreath at the war memorials. Although French newspapers reported that hardly a spectator ventured out to observe Kohl and Mitterand clasping hands while the Marseillaise played, camera teams were omnipresent as "eye witnesses." 136 Le Figaro called the ceremony "clumsy" while some German commentators thought the event a consolation for the absence of an invitation to the fiftieth commemoration of the landing at Normandy in June. Nevertheless, it was an important gesture of reconciliation, which contributed to stronger Franco-German relations. This little-noticed event can be seen in hindsight as a prelude to the much more controversial reconciliation over the graves between Reagan and Kohl when they met amidst the clamor at Bitburg in the fall of 1985. 137 In May 1985 François Mitterand and Helmut Kohl met in Konstanz to iron out tensions emerging in the course of a recent economic summit in Bonn and to deal with divergent reactions to the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) of the United States. 138 Before the meeting started Mitterand insisted on flying by helicopter to Wilflingen to visit Jünger. For the second 133. Ulrich Raulff, "Sympathie g e g e n ü b e r d e m D e u t s c h e n , " FAZ, Nov. 9, 1996. 134. J ü n g e r to Plard, January 15, 1 9 7 5 , PAP. 135. See "Ansprache zu V e r d u n , " J u n e 24, 1 9 7 9 (Private Reprint: B i b e r b a c h an d e r Riss, 1 9 7 9 ) , PAP. 136. J o a c h i m Fritz-Vannahme, "Langer H ä n d e d r u c k zur Marsellaise: Die historische Geste von Verdun," Mannheimer M/rrgen, Sept. 24, 1984. 1 3 7 . See G e o f f r e y H a r t m a n , Bitburgin Moral and Political Perspective ( B l o o m i n g t o n : Indiana University Press, 1986); H a j o F u n k e , "Bitburg, Jews, and G e r m a n s , " New German Critique, 38 ( s p r i n g / s u m m e r 1986): 5 7 - 7 3 . 138. J o a c h i m Rogisch, "Der B e s u c h des französischen Präsidenten b e i m d e u t s c h e n Kanzler: Politik u n d A b s t e c h e r , " Schwäbische Zeitung, May 29, 1985.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

241

time in history a foreign head of state had made an official visit to a German writer (King Ludwig of Bavaria visited Goethe on his seventy-eighth birthday). 139 Kohl knew this visit would irritate the left in Germany, but with Mitterand in attendance, how much could one protest? 140 Kohl and Jünger had a hard time starting a conversation. Finally the chancellor asked "how did you start your beetle collection?" and Jünger had an opening. Kohl tried to talk about literature, but the conversation was halting. Finally he asked about the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose photograph from a recent visit was in view. In the end they talked about the First World War. As a farewell gift Jünger gave Kohl a copy of his just published novel, A Dangerous Encounter. In sharp, calligraphic letters, Jünger inscribed in the book "In memory of an undangerous encounter." The meeting between Mitterand and Kohl failed to erase French fears that Germany's support for SDI and its relative neglect of the European defense program (Eureka) represented "the first step toward a Germanized Europe" (as the headlines of the newspaper Liberation claimed) , 141 The Parisian newspapers commented somewhat unfavorably on Mitterand's visit with Jünger. 142 Jünger's Worker had not yet been translated into French, it was speculated, so few knew of the role Jünger played as part of the Conservative Revolution and the intellectual mobilization against the Weimar Republic. Would Jünger's popularity be diminished, it was asked, if The Worker were to be published in French? 143 Jünger's popularity in France, often bordering on adulation, is an intriguing phenomenon. His relationship to French culture and history was complex, but one can point to a number of historical reasons why Jünger's past was seen in an entirely different light west of the Rhine. First, Jünger's attachment to French literature distinguished him from most right-wing intellectuals of the Weimar period who generally disdained French civilization as inferior to Germanic Kultur.144 Jünger was an avid and admiring reader of French literature ever since he read the works of Maurice Barrés

139. Napoleon did not visit Goethe; he received him at a meeting of princes in Erfurt. See Rolf Hochhuth, "Wir Deutschen hatten einen wie Ernst Jünger noch nie," Welt am Sonntag, Nov. 8, 1987, excerpt from: Täter und Denker: Profile und Probleme von Caesar bis Jünger (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1987). 140. The following is based on Jürgen Busche, Helmut Kohl: Anatomie eines Erfolgs (1998), excerpt published in Die Zeit, Feb. i g , 1998. 141. Cited in "Enttäuschung in Paris über Kohl," NZZ, May 31, 1985. 142. Ibid. Jünger had also been invited on his ninetieth birthday in March to breakfast with Mitterand in the Elysée. 143. Ibid., see NZZ editorial. 144. See Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918—1933 (New York: Putnam, 1974), 79 ff.

242

RIGHT TURN

shortly after the end of the First World War. 145 French writers, especially Stendhal, Baudelaire, J. K. Huysmans, the Goncourts, and the Catholic intellectuals L e o n Bloy and Bernanos had a profound influence upon him. Jünger cultivated relationships to French writers in the internar period and in turn was regarded by them as an avant-garde artist of some stature. 146 W h e n the German writer Joseph Breitbach introduced Jünger to A n d r é Gide in 1938, Jünger obtained a crucial introduction to the inner world of French letters. 147 Second, the French have generally j u d g e d Jünger's role as a captain of the Wehrmacht in the eye of the storm in occupied France very positively. T h e first part of Strahlungen, Gardens and Streets, was published as Jardins et Routes during the war and achieved enormous popular success. After the war, Jünger was remembered as "the perfect type of occupier," charming, cultivated, and cosmopolitan. He gained recognition as a cultivator and protector of French culture. He was on a first name basis with luminaries like Jean Cocteau and Sacha Guitry. Even Le Temps Modernes called him a "dreamer of peace during the war" and a "critic of Kniébolo-Hitler." 1 4 8 H e was considered a mole in the system w h o worked to save what could be saved. In particular, the protection from plunder of valuable manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the refusal to carry out orders to dynamite a medieval church in Laon endeared the German to many a French patriot. 149 Even among former members of the French resistance Jünger's reputation was generally u n t a r n i s h e d — i n fact he was often revered. 1 5 0 Joseph Breitbach testified that the occupation officer passed on important inform a t i o n — t h e dates and times of deportations of Jews from P a r i s — t o the maquis. 151 Henri Plard pointed out that for the French Jünger represents a kind of stereotype that can be traced as far back as Madame de Staßl's search for the "good German" in contrast to the boche.152 Whereas Nazi propaganda had denigrated French culture as decadent, weak, feminine, or 'Judaicized," Jünger's books displayed a d e e p indebtedness to French traditions. 145. See the interview ofJünger by Olivier Aubertin "L'aventure ambigue d'Ernst Jünger," Le Nouvel Observateur, Jan. 2 4 - 3 0 , 1986, 54. 146. Albrecht Weber, "Ernst Jünger und der französische Geist," Ph.D. diss., Universität Erlangen, 1949, DLAM. 147. "Ernst Jünger in Frankreich," RM, Nov. 18, 1977. 148. Jean-Henry Roy, 'Journal," Le Temps Modernes 74 (December 1951): 1 1 4 7 - 1 1 4 8 . 149. Jünger was made an honorary citizen of the c i t y o f L a o n on March 17, i g 7 2 . S e e " B e i einem Empfang der Stadt Laon," S W 1 4 , 187. O n the story of the French national library see Angelo Rinaldi, 'Jünger: Le sphinx botaniste," L'Express Magazine, Jan. 26, 1980, 70—73. 150. See Maurice Nadeau, "Le combat d'Ernst Jünger," Combat, Sept. 20, 1951; Antoine Favre, "Le cas fünger," Libertés, Nov. 23, 1945. 151. Horst Mühleisen, "Im Segelboot über das Bermuda Dreieck," CW, Jan. 25, 1986. 152. Henri Plard, "Ernst Jünger in Frankreich: Versuch einer Erklärung," Text &1 Zeichen 105/106 (Jan. 1990): 1 4 2 - 4 3 .

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

243

Third, Jünger's circle of wartime admirers in France, including Julien Gracq, Antoine Blondin, Robert Poulet, Marcel Jouhandeau, and Denis de Rougemont, immediately after 1945 began to propagate the image of him as a "great" European writer of classical stature. In a by now famous statement, Gide called Jünger's war diaries the "most honest b o o k ever written about the war. " 1 5 3 W h e n André Malraux's oeuvres complètes were published in France in 1989, Le Figaro sought and won an exclusive interview with Jünger, "leplus grand écrivain allemand, " to solicit his opinion on matters concerning Malraux's life and works. 154 O n e of the questions posed to Jünger most likely would not have been phrased in the same way by a German intellectual: "Isn't the type of man that you represent, Malraux and yourself, a product of very exceptional epochs, and could such types still exist today?" Fourth, one cannot overestimate the contribution made by Henri Plard to Jünger's success in France. His translations are almost universally regarded as brilliant productions, and Jünger responded to his increasing popularity in France by devoting more attention to his French publishers. Eumeswil appeared in Plard's French translation before the original German version was published. 1 5 5 Finally, Jünger's reception in France falls under what Jeffrey Mehlman has called the "politics of literary adulation." 1 5 6 Aside from Mehlman's thorny argument about certain forms of contemporary literary criticism, relevant here is his interpretation of the writings ofJean Paulhan, an acquaintance of Jünger who had been an early recruit to Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français (PPF), worked with the Nazi occupying forces and collaborators, and at the same time f o u n d e d the first resistance journal, Les lettres françaises.157 Mehlman established a connection between Paulhan's linguistic research into homonymie antonyms and his criticism of the postwar purge of collaborationist writers by the National Committee of Writers. T h e meaning of the words "resistance" and "collaboration" tends to slide from one pole to another, a reversal of direction, like the translated pun Sauerkraut, which becomes choucroute in French. Paulhan's dream was that France might one day forget the bitter divisions caused by this unfortunate period in French history. Mehlman also controversially suggested that the "radical

153. Michael Klett, "Aristocrate, il rêvailt d'autre chose," Le Monde, Feb. 19, 1998,27. 154. André Brincourt, "Malraux: La legende du siècle," Le Figaro Littéraire, May 2, 1989. 155. Georges Walter, 'Jünger et son coléoptère," Les Nouvelles Littéraires, May 1 8 - 2 5 , 1978. 156. Jeffrey Mehlman "Writing and Deference: The Politics of Literary Adulation," Representations 15 (summer 1986): 1 - 1 4 . 157. Paulhan was managing editor at Gallimard after 1945. See Michael Syrotinski, "Some Wheat and Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan and the Post-War Literary Purge in France," Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 16 (2) (summer 1992): 249.

244

RIGHT TURN

forgetting" of the linguistic origins of deconstruction is proof of the success of Paulhan's call for amnesty (from: amnesia) of collaborationist writers.158 In this context Mehlman introduced the figure of Gerhard Heller, an "anti-Nazi Nazi occupant" like Jünger, who worked with the German Propaganda Service in Paris as a censor, allowing many good books, including Jardins et Routes, to be published. 159 After the war, Heller emerged as a strong proponent of Franco-German reconciliation and was awarded the Grand Prix by the French Academy. It is intriguing to ask whether the accolades offered Jünger are part of the complex process of repression of the memory of collaboration that Paulhan worked out linguistically and that is exemplified in Heller's superficial papering over of differences in his double role as occupier and French culture enthusiast. After all, beyond the factual basis for the French people's admiration for Jünger, there also existed a component of wish-fulfillment. A figure like Jünger could help erase the shame of defeat and collaboration while strengthening the illusion of shared suffering. The shock that greeted the publication of Victor Farias's book Heidegger et le Nazisme in 1986—an exposé of Heidegger's involvement in Nazi politics that created a scandal even though many of the facts about the case were already in the public realm—showed how extensive the radical forgetting of the Nazi era had become in France. How else can one explain the fact that the collaborationist past of writers like Ferdinand Celine, André Therive, Pierre Benoit, Jean Giono, and Abel Hermant has not been exposed to the same scrutiny as that of comparable German authors? The puzzled reaction of the French to Jünger's vilification in his homeland also provides some concrete evidence of the kind of indulgence accorded to artists and intellectuals in French cultural politics. To give one example, the journalist Léopold Sanchez, reporting on the uproar in Germany regarding Jünger's Goethe Prize in 1982, wrote that he was baffled by the vociferous reaction of the German left. Once again, he noted, we see "the psychological drama of the Germans' bad conscience." 160 The above five points summarize some important reasons for the success of Jünger's career in France. Beyond these verifiable contentions, many 158. In the wake of the De Man Affair in 1987, Mehlman's linking of deconstruction in toto to French collaboration in World War II and to amnesty attempts afterward has, of course, been met with indignation by many literary critics. See for example Ian Balfour, "Difficult Reading: De Man's Interaries"; see also Mehlman's contribution ( 3 2 4 - 3 3 3 ) and many other selections in Werner Hamacher et al., Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 7-20. 159. Mehlman, "Writing and Deferance," 10. See Gerhard Heller, Un allemand à Paris, 1940-44 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981). 160. Léopold Sanchez, 'Jünger, 87 ans: Tous ses cheveux et la dent dure," L 'Express, Sept. 4, 1982.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

245

people have speculated more loosely about Jünger's popularity. These theories might better be taken as a kind of barometer registering attitudes and inclinations, rather than as provable arguments. It is important to remember that the French lionization of Jünger as hero and "great" writer,161 has been propagated, on the whole, by the conservative press, Jünger's personal friends, and national-conservative circles in France. As in Germany,Jünger's reception in France has been marked by deep divisions between critics and apologists. 162 Still, in comparison to Germany, where his books are read by a relatively small number of devoted readers, Jünger is a household name for a substantial part of the French reading public. 163 An article on Jünger in the French press rarely appeared without the epithet "le plus grand écrivain allemand contemporain" or similar designations. 164 It seems just as self-evident to the French that Jünger was "anti-Nazi" 165 and "defiantly opposed to Hitler." 166 Jean Améry, a Holocaust survivor whose ambivalent relationship to Jünger has been addressed above, had to admit that "It was for me a very strange experience to see that the book The Marble Cliffs was in all the bookstores of occupied France and was obviously widely read. The French had recognized that the book was directed against Hitler." 167 161. Le Figaro went so far as to call Jünger "the greatest living writer of our century." "Ernst Jünger: Le Crépuscule d'un guerrier," Le Figaro, March 6, 1989, 23. 162. Lianne Dornheim, Vergleichende Rezeptionsgeschichte: Das literarische Frühwerk in Deutschland, England, und Frankreich (Frankfurt: Lang, 1987), 2 7 9 - 3 1 1 . 163. This is particularly true of readers who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. See Georges Schiocker, "Fernweh nach den Göttern: Was die Franzosen an Ernst Jünger fasziniert," SZ, July 4, 1978. But in both France and Germany a new generation of the counterculture, interested in esoteric subjects and unbothered by the disputes over Jünger's past, discovered Jünger's mysticism and celebration of drug experiences; see Jacques Le Rider, "Les nouveaux lecteurs d'Ernst Jünger," Le Monde, July 19, 1981. Currently forty-eight titles Jünger are available in French translation, twelve of them in paperback. Albrecht Betz contends that Jünger's popularity in France has been exaggerated and points to the small influence he has had on other French writers. But does the testimony of writers constitute the decisive criterion? How does one explain the many official kudos, the lavish praise of politicians and a wide range of intellectuals, or the planned Pléade edition? See A. Betz, "Qui lit Jünger?" Le Monde Dimanche, Sept. 19, 1982. 164. See "L'autre Goethe: Jünger, le viellard inspire," L'Express, May 19, 1989. Other examples could almost be quoted at random. Variations include "un très grand écrivain," Jean Louis de Rambures, "L' enigma Ernst Jünger, "L'Express, Feb. 1 1 - 1 7 , '974; "le plus Français des écrivains allemands," "ErnstJünger un veilleur solitaire," Telerama, May 22, 1978; "En France, c'est le plus populaire des auteurs d'outre-Rhin," Lèopold Sanchez, 'Jünger 87 ans: Tous ses cheveux et la dent dure," Le Monde, Sept. 4, 1982. 165. Michka Assayas, 'Jünger rebelle et anarque," Liberation, April 22, 1986. 166. "Ernst Jünger, écrivain allemand (alors en uniforme) raconte la vie littéraire à Paris sous l'occupation," France Dimanche, June 7, 1950. 167. "Der Dichter in Uniform," AZ Feuilleton, March 29, 1975. Améry's recollection is supported by a diary entry of Jean Cocteau in 1942. Cocteau asks "how did Jünger manage to

246

RIGHT TURN

Over the years German observers of French intellectual life have advanced several explanations for the "fascination" that draws readers to Jünger. Opinions differ as to whether the French have been seduced by a kind of evil genius or, on the contrary, whether the Germans have resisted a real genius. Rolf Hochhuth has argued for over twenty years that the confused discourse about the past has made Germans blind to a "great living author." 168 For the author of the famous 1962 play TheDeputy (condemning the Catholic Church's involvement in fascism), Jünger is an example of a world celebrity who has been recognized everywhere except in his own country and has been condemned as a "Nazi or even an anti-Semite" by people who have never read his books and know nothing about his personal history. For Hochhuth, Jünger was "by far the most interesting German author, and it is no coincidence that the French esteem him above all others." 169 Armin Möhler attributes Jünger's popularity in France to the fact that in contrast to other German writers, Jünger is viewed as an indigenous author (einheimischer Autor), one who even the normally anti-German right can embrace. 170 Georges Schlocker has pointed to Jünger's advocacy of anarchism as another plausible explanation for the French embrace. The French harbor special reverence for the nonconformist and iconoclast, one might argue, and Jünger's "anarch" can easily become enshrined in the pantheon of radical individualism: In the mind of the Parisian intellectual, Jünger's Icelandic mysticism suddenly becomes transformed into enlightened individualism. Someone who says no to the majority, like Montaigne and so many writers after him. . . . They see in Jünger the man who can grasp the big themes and locate the place where the individual stands. It is a contradictory attitude that says " T h e writer should not become a hostage to political parties," and "It makes no sense to revolt against the state." . . . Jünger's works seem to the French to represent a battle against logic and functionalism, an emancipatory goal that in the meantime has attracted even the left. 171

publish this book (The Marble Cliffs) without becoming suspect? He opposes the system with surprising haughtiness." See Jean Cocteau, Journal, 1942—1945, ed. Jean Touzot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 56. 168. Rolf Hochhuth, "Wir Deutschen hatten einen wie Ernst Jünger noch nie," Welt am Sonntag, Nov. 8, 1987. 16g. "Der Dichter in Uniform," AZ Feuilleton, March 2g, 1975. 170. Anton Madler (aka Armin Möhler), "Ernst Jünger ein Kennwort in Frankreich," Die Welt, Feb. 2, 1976. Madler also states that Jünger is a part of educated French people's intellectual property because of the "excellent translations by Henri Plard." 1 7 1 . Georges Schlocker, "Fernweh nach den Göttern," SZ, July 4, 1978.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

247

Schlocker clearly views the lionization of Jünger by some French intellectuals as a symptom of the yearning for a new radicalism, even if its origins are on the right. This question of the French attraction to German philosophy considered "tainted" in Germany (from Nietzsche to Heidegger) goes well beyond Jünger's reception. After Solzhenitsyn's disclosures on the Soviet gulags were published in the 1970s, not a few disillusioned French Marxists turned to German philosophy in search of a different language with which to speak about alienation and bourgeois politics. Jünger even encouraged the conversions. He reported to Plard in 1977 with satisfaction that he had been informed that a group of French philosophers—"metaMarxists" as he calls them—were giving seminars in Paris on The Worker. "Among them," he writes, "are a French philosophy professor and former radical Marxist, Jean-Michel Palmier and a Msr. Levy." 172 Pierre Bourdieu showed how important Jünger's work was to Heidegger and how the ambiguous ideological structure of The Worker could function as a surrogate revolutionary philosophy both for the conservative revolutionaries of the 1920s and for radical Heideggerians today.173 Whereas Bourdieu remains wary of the continuing appeal of the antitechnological metaphysics of the conservative revolutionaries, Jean-Michel Palmier argues against rejecting The Worker simply because of its intellectual affinities with the revolutionary right and applauds the "immense intelligence" of its analysis of modern life. 174 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe argues that Jünger approached politics as a social theorist rather an engaged intellectual. Jünger's intellectual association with National Bolshevism leads Lacoue-Labarthe to claim, incorrectly, that Jünger "refused from the outset to have any truck whatever" with National Socialism. 175 172. Lévy is presumably the philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy, who coined the phrase "New Philosophy" and, like André Glucksmann, was at this stage reevaluating student radicalism after reading Solzhenitsyn's memoirs (Jünger to Plard, Aug. 15, 1977). O n Lévy see Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: Norton, 1996). 278-279. 173. Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 28 ff. Bourdieu describes Jean-Palmier's reading of Der Arbeiter as "apologetic" (see 1 1 5 n.51 ). But in his earlier book, Les Ecrits Politiques de Heidegger, Palmier represents Jünger's Worker as a "caricatured" synthesis of nationalism and socialism that leads Heidegger to misunderstand the real nature of the movement. Palmier argues this thesis repeatedly, most explicitly on pp. 285-288. In the Aesthetic State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) Joseph Chytry follows Palmier in this line of argumentation. On the influence of The Worker see also Michel Kajman, "Ernst Jünger: Nuit et brouillard litteraires," Le Monde, July 27, 1978. 174. Jean-Michel Palmier, Ernst Jünger: Reveries sur un chasseur de cicindèles (Paris: Hachette, 1995).

46175. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 24.

248

RIGHT TURN

T w o f u r t h e r e x a m p l e s will serve h e r e to illuminate the divergent F r e n c h a n d G e r m a n reactions to Jünger. In 1 9 7 3 J ü n g e r gave an interview in Paris to Jean-Louis Rambures, a literary critic f o r Le Monde.176 J ü n g e r m a d e several c o m m e n t s causing an u p r o a r in the G e r m a n press w h e n the piece was translated a w e e k later. 1 7 7 W h e n asked why h e was m o r e esteemed in France than in Germany, J ü n g e r r e s p o n d e d : I think the French like it when a German presents himself the way he really is, and doesn't try, at any price, to put on another appearance. They have a sense for nuances. If my books are better understood in France than in Germany, where people ignore them, that speaks for the fact that the French are more cultivated than we are. The French possess a different intellectual soil. Their connection to the past and to history is much stronger. A s k e d about his attitude to H i d e r a n d the T h i r d Reich, J ü n g e r replied I had good reasons to become a Nazi. From the very beginning I was against the defamation of Germany by the Versailles Treaty (Hider was caused by Versailles). But I just didn't like these people. The Night of the Long Knives, the Kristallnacht, made that clear to me. And by the way, Hitler, like William II before him, misused that great instrument that was our army. How could the German army, led by incompetent and foolish leaders, take on the entire world? T h e phrase a b o u t the misused G e r m a n army spread like wildfire t h r o u g h the G e r m a n press. Did the G e r m a n army bear n o responsibility f o r the brutality a n d atrocities o f the war? H a n j o Resting wrote caustically that J ü n g e r was upset because Hitler h a d destroyed his favorite toy. 178 Karl K o r n regretted that J ü n g e r h a d an u n c a n n y ability to "stir u p resentments" with his offh a n d remarks. 1 7 9 T h e respected literary critic a n d Holocaust survivor Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote that in a c o u n t r y like France, "where f o r e i g n writers are not taken too seriously, it is easy to digest Jünger's elegiacal cynicism. But what over there has a taste o f the exotic or o f the rather bizarre, reminds o n e h e r e in G e r m a n y o f stuffy barracks, o f dusty exercise yards, a n d o f the b l o o d o f millions." 1 8 0

176. Jean-Louis Rambures, "Ernst Jünger s'explique," Le Monde, Feb. 22, 1973. 177. "Politik schädigt das Talent: Le Monde Interview mit dem deutschen Schriftsteller Ernst Jünger," CW, March 2, 1973, 11. 178. Hanjo Kesting, "Deutsche Misere mit Tiefendimension: Ernst Jünger redet wieder mit rechtem Jünglingspathos," Vorwärts, March 8, 1973. 179. Karl Korn, "Anstössiges," FAZ, March 9, 1973. 180. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Bei Nietzsche stehengeblieben," Die Zeit, March 2, 1973. Reich-Ranicki is a rather violent critic of Jünger, perhaps not only because of the concentration camps. Only two years after this article he wrote on the occasion of Jünger's eightieth birthday: "He had the audacity to describe war exactly as it was, and the impudence to praise and celebrate it nevertheless. Jünger was Germany's finest mercenary, sturdiest nihilist, and most subtle militant" (Reich-Ranicki, "Der Dichter in Uniform," AZ, March 29, 1975).

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

249

Observing the polemical battles from the other side of the Rhine, Rambures was dismayed that the Germans seemed to be projecting their own guilt onto the writer, erecting a "psychic wall against the past." 181 Rambures seemed to be invoking the idea of the "inability to mourn" or the call to work through the past. Authors such as Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich and Adorno suspected that a refusal to confront the past, or a merely ritualized "working through" the past, might constitute an unconscious defensive barrier to memory that allowed fascistic tendencies to reappear. 182 Rambures seemed to suggest that the Germans displaced or projected their guilt by turning Jünger into a scapegoat. Another incident showing how Jünger came to be seen as an object of projection of historical guilt occurred in the early 1980s when Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentinean filmmaker living in Paris, became interested in Jünger's work. He decided to make a film about the German occupation of France during World War II that would combine newsreel documentation and readings from Jünger's diary.183 Cozarinsky interpreted the diaries as a "chronicle of the collaboration" because ofJünger's association with a large number of intellectuals who kept working and producing under the aegis of the Nazi military administration. 184 Cozarinsky argued that he was not interested in making political judgments about the motives or the actions of the collaborationists. Jünger's texts were a perfect accompaniment to the film in his view because he thought they expressed the nuances and ambiguities of the period very well. 185 For the French critics the figure of Jünger was not problematic. One of them saw a gallant officer at the center of Parisian intellectual life who was "profoundly opposed to Nazism." 186 Jünger's cold, distant style was viewed as evidence of his refusal to conform to the ideology of the Nazis.187 181. Jean-Louis Rambures, "A propos d'Ernst Jünger: Une mise au point," Le Monde, March 22, 1973. 182. Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (München: Piper, 1977). Theodor W. Adorno, "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit," in Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963)183. La guerre d'un seul homme was made in 1982 and was shown in the French cinema and in a German version on television on April 17, 1982, entitled Krieg eines Einzelnen. T h e film was aired in an abridged form on French television in two parts on the evenings of May 7 and May 8, 1986, entitled Passé simple. 184. Edgardo Cozarinsky, "Ernst Jünger et des plaisirs de l'occupation: Un brave soldat au pays des collabos," Les Nouvelles Littéraires, Feb. 1 4 - 2 1 , 1980. 185. Marie-Nölle Tranchant, "Les ambiguités de l'histoire," Le Figaro, Nov. 17, 1 9 8 2 . F o r a critical view, see Marcus Bullock, "A German Voice over Paris," NGC 59 (spring/summer 1993): 77-103. 186. "A voir: Ecritures de la douleur," Le Monde, May 7, 1986. 187. See for example the critique by J. C. "Un autre regard sur l'occupation," Le Figaro, May 7, 1986.

250

RIGHT TURN

Although the reaction to the French film in Germany was not nearly as controversial as that to Jünger's Le Monde interview in 1973, one detects an uneasiness on the part of some commentators at the perceived failure of Cozarinsky to take a more nuanced political stand.188 One critic wrote that the French were being manipulated in the film because it contained only passages from the diaries that put Jünger in the best light and omitted those that had caused so many agonizing intellectual debates. 189

The French reception of Jünger points to the enormous difficulties involved in coming to any final judgments his literary and political legacy. Almost everything the man said or wrote becomes interpreted in the context of a complicated web of contested memory and historical associations. It seems that a core difficulty with Jünger's worldview lies in the suspicion that he attempted, in multifarious ways, to exonerate the msyority of perpetrators and bystanders alike from any responsibility for the rise of Nazism. Primo Levi has written of the concentration camps that "many knew little and few knew everything" about what happened, but that whatever the case, since one cannot suppose that the majority of Germans lightheartedly accepted the slaughter, it is certain that the failure to divulge the truth about the Lagers represents one of the major collective crimes of the German people and the most obvious demonstration of the cowardice to which the Hitlerian terror had reduced t h e m . . . . Without this cowardice the greatest excess would not have been carried out, and Europe and the world be different today.190

Jünger's message was just about the opposite. The original root of Hitlerism was to be found in an exaggerated Enlightenment faith in reason and domination of nature, culminating in a series of catastrophes and civil wars in the twentieth century. 191 The German people were victims of history and as much as anyone had a right to the claim: "all suffered and therefore all must share the fruits of peace." 192 Many Germans did in fact suffer under Hitler's tyranny, while just as many were intoxicated by Hitler's victories and the ideology of the superior race. Jünger conflates these two attitudes by lumping the German experience under Nazism together as heroic stoicism:

188. Klaus Weinert, "Im Spiel der Halbwahrheiten gefangen," SZ, April 16, 1982. 189. "Fernsehen kritisch," FR, April 17, 1982. 190. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 15. 191. O n the essential differences between the conservative critique of the Enlightenment and Adorno and Horkheimer's famous treatise, see Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 166 - 1 9 8 . 192. Jünger, The Peace, SWj,

207.

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

251

das Ausharren auf verlorenem Posten or holding out in a hopeless situation. 193 Like the two brothers in The Marble Cliffs, Lucien de Geer in Heliopolis, and Michäl Venator in Eumeswil (characters who share the same "spiritual" resistance to tyranny), Jünger's response to the rise of Nazism was to watch from a distance. As Jean Cocteau said, he didn't have dirty hands, he had "no hands." 1 9 4 Henri Plard aptly described the World War II diaries as a log of a sinking ship, the daily observations of the catastrophe by a sober mind. 1 9 5 Jünger's philosophy of male, aristocratic virtue valorizes the tragic heroism of facing u p to destruction and defeat with silence. 196 For Jünger to be a victim becomes a kind of test of strength and honor. O n e way of interpreting the very different reaction of the French to Jünger is to consider their own difficulties with coming to terms with the occupation and their initial acceptance of and at times even enthusiasm for Petain. 197 Jünger's impeccable posture and his adoration of French culture set him apart from the hated boche, the ugly Nazi. Even more than that, collaboration with an enemy like Jünger can be made to appear reasonable, even civilized. A n d Jünger did expressly justify it. H e wrote to Plard: Both the resistance and the collaboration have shades of light and darkness. The history of the resistance included a large number of murders, also of innocent people. I think of my friend Medan, whose friendship with me cost him his life. The youth movements in Germany and France found themselves in a circle called 'Jeune Europe" standing for ideas that even today have not yet been realized.... Goethe says there is hardly a crime that he couldn't have committed; that is true, more or less, I think for everybody. 198 Jünger's understanding of the history of the occupation was read by many in France as a story of shared suffering in a situation that offered few g o o d choices. W h e n all are victims, there remains n o moral basis for differentiating g o o d from evil, the murderers from the murdered. These are soothing nostrums, but as historians examine the epoch of fascism, it be-

193. Jünger borrowed the phrase from Oswald Spengler, see Der Mensch und die Technik (Hamburg: Beck, 1 9 3 1 / 1 9 6 1 ) , 88. 194. Quoted in Thomas Ne vin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914 —1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 169. 195. Henri Plard, "Ex ordine shandytorum," in Möhler, Freundschaftliche Begegnungen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1955), 110. 196. T h e philosopher Alfred von Martin therefore called Jünger's heroism "das schweigende Heldentum" and pointed out that Jünger was particularly fascinated by cities like Cathargo and Jerusalem that had experienced fateful destruction in war. See Der heroische Nihilismus und seine Überwindung (Krefeld: Scherpe, 1948), 1 6 9 - 7 0 . 197. See Henri Amouroux, "Quarante Milions de Pétainists," in La Grande histoire des Francais sous l'occupation, 1939-1945, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1978), 2 1 4 - 2 7 8 . 198. Jünger to Plard, Sept. 19, 1975, PAM.

252

RIGHT TURN

comes clear that there were far more choices than courageous people willing to make them. JÜNGER AND THE EUROPEAN NEW RIGHT As an absolute nonconformist and after years of political inactivity, Jünger refused, naturally, to lend his name publicly to the revival of right-wing politics in Germany after 1989. My argument below is that, first, the large body of his work available by the 1990s, as well his growing celebrity, provided welcome ammunition for the politics of resentment, revisionism, and xenophobia in unified Germany. Second, Jünger welcomed the intellectual reception of his work by the New Right, particularly by young conservatives. T h e evidence for the first argument is abundant; for the latter it is harder to find, but it exists. T h e so-called New Right that emerged in force after German unification in 1990 was arguably no less coherent in designs and aims than the diverse groups that made u p the original Conservative Revolution. 1 9 9 But the very fact that young, sometimes sophisticated right-wing intellectuals were challenging old assumptions, publishing manifestos, starting new journals, producing books, plays, and films, and filling the culture pages of mainstream newspapers signaled an important change in Germany's intellectual and cultural landscape. In 1993 the Junge Freiheit, a student newspaper launched in Freiburg/Breisgau in 1986, moved to Potsdam and expanded into a weekly newspaper aimed at young readers. T h e chauvinist tone, aggressive politics, and snappy language raised eyebrows and prompted antifascist campaigns. 200 Books like Gregor Schöllgen's Angst vor der Macht: Die Deutschen 199. T h e term New Right is a translation o f the term Nouvelle Droite, w h i c h is mainly associated with A l a i n d e Benoist's project o f a renewal o f conservatism in France (see "Ethnopluralism," below, 2 5 5 - 5 6 ) . T h e r e are at least three intellectual orientations in France: traditional legitimism, conservative revolutionism, and national liberalism (Pierre-André Tag u i e f f ) ; in G e r m a n y the phrase loosely describes a network o f newspapers, j o u r n a l s , think tanks, internet discussion g r o u p s , publishing h o u s e s and i n d e p e n d e n t thinkers, u n i t e d only in the ubiquity o f ideas and t h e m e s f r o m the intellectual tradition o f E u r o p e a n conservatism a n d G e r m a n radical conservatism. Richard H e r z i n g e r and H a n n e s Stein have a r g u e d , I think correctly, that since many o f the individuals now c o n s i d e r e d part o f the New Right b e g a n ideologically o n the Marxist left, a n d because s o m e o f the G e r m a n left shares certain aversions a n d d o g m a s with the New Right, the fault lines liberal/antiliberal, prowest/antiwest, p l u r a l i s t / f u n damentalist, and rational/apocalyptic better describe the c u r r e n t intellectual divisions in G e r many. T h e a r g u m e n t o f H a n n e s a n d Stein is convincing, t h o u g h the a m o u n t o f c o n v e r g e n c e between left a n d right is sometimes overstated. See R i c h a r d H e r z i n g e r a n d H a n n e s Stein. Endzeit-Propheten oder die Offensive der Antiwestler: Fundamentalismus,

Antiamerikanismus,

und Neue

Rechte ( H a m b u r g : Rowohlt, 1 9 9 5 ) . 200. See Elliot N e a m a n , "A New Conservative Revolution? Neo-Nationalism, Collective M e m o r y a n d the New Right in G e r m a n y since Unification," in H e r m a n n K u r t h e n et al., Anti-

J Ü N G E R IN T H E A G E O F K O H L

253

und Ihre Aussenpolitik (Fear of power: T h e Germans and their foreign policy) and Karlheinz Weißmann's Rückruf in die Geschichte: Die deutsche Herausforderung (Recalling history: T h e German challenge) exhorted Germans to prepare themselves for a new role as a regional superpower. In Westbindung, Weißmann and the historians Rainer Zitelmann and Michael Grossheim challenged Germany's continuation in the N A T O alliance. 201 Revisionist historians led by Zitelmann historicized the Third Reich and emphasized its modern and revolutionary aspects. 202 In 1994 Ulrich Schacht and Heimo Schwilk brought together a large sample of New Right authors in Die Selbstbewusste Nation (The self-confident nation), an anthology that represented the high-water mark of the right-wing movement. 2 0 3 Given the traumatic state of the p o s t - C o l d War world, one would have expected the peaceful and orderly reunification of Germany to be a cause for celebration by German conservatives and nationalists. O n e of the stranger aspects of the resurgence of radical conservatism was the bemoaning of Germany's lack of national self-consciousness first enunciated byJünger and his circle in the 1950s. O n a broad front, voices were suddenly being raised to "draw a line on the past" and return to a "normal," self-confident nation that does not engage in ritualistic penance for the crimes of National Socialism. Not since the heady days of the intellectual battles of the Weimar Republic had the West been so criticized for everything from contaminating German culture to incapacitating Germany's ability to conduct an independent and self-interested foreign policy. Fears were raised that Germany's embrace of multiculturalism was damaging the h o m o g e n e o u s cultural and ethnic character of the nation. Liberalism was portrayed as a foreign import, lacking respect for the cultural, political, and social uniqueness of the Germans. Finally, unification was seen as only a first step to "genuine" unification of all lands from which Germans had been exiled or where they still represented sizable minorities. Zitelmann argued that every European country has a "democratic right" and claimed that the left was hypocritical in its opposition to the cooperation between the conservative middle and parties or ideologies to the right of the middle, "For Willy Brandt it was legitimate and self-evident to look for a 'majority to the left of the (Christian-Democratic) Union.' But Helmut

semitism and Xenophobia in Germany after Unification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 190-210. 201. Rainer Zitelmann, Karlheinz Weißmann, and Michael Grossheim, Westbindung: Chancen and Risiken für Deutschland. (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1993). 202. Rainer Zitelmann and Michael Prinz, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991). 203. Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht, eds., Die Selbstbewusste Nation (Berlin: Ullstein, 1994)-

2$4

RIGHT TURN

Kohl would certainly never speak about a wish for a 'majority to the right of the Social Democracy.'" 2 0 4 Friedbert Pflüger, a former left-CDU member of parliament and prominent critic of the New Right, argued to the contrary that just as Spartacists and Maoists tried to "infiltrate" the student committees of German universities in the early 1970s, the same strategy was being carried out by the radical right to exert political gravitational pull on the conservative middle. 205 Pflüger viewed the tactics of the New Right as a reenactment of the old "front politics" of the left. T h e fact that Rainer Zitelmann was a Maoist in his student days and a member of the KPW, presents an example for the conservative middle that les extremes se touchent. From another perspective, the "newness" of the New Right consists in its differentiation both from postwar neo-Nazism and older forms of conservatism. It is a chic, updated version of conservatism transcending the socialdemocratic consensus of the major political parties. T h e New Right sees itself locked in a "cultural battle" with the liberal cultural elite of the old Federal Republic. 206 In its self-understanding the New Right is a generational revolt against the left of the Federal Republic, in particular against the generation of 1968, the aging "Apo-Opas" whose ideas are viewed as anachronistic, frozen in dogma, and who are allegedly ensconced comfortably in positions of power in the media, academia, and other cultural and political institutions. 207 But the "Generation of 1989" also sees itself as having transcended the politics of the "Generation of Yalta," the founders of the Federal Republic, in particular Konrad Adenauer, who "sacrificed" East Germany and the chance for unification in order to firmly place West Germany under the tutelage of the United States and its allies. T h e New Right questions the utility and wisdom of Germany's ties to the West in the changed international situation after unification. 208 T h e generation of 1989 sees itself as the Young Turks, energetic, radical young men with a mission to save Germany. Rejecting the image of stuffy conservatism, the New Right sees itself as an avant-garde for disillusioned leftists, whose "conversion" they actively propagate. As former private secretary to Jünger, H e i m o Schwilk asserted in an interview, "It will soon be 204. Schwilk and Schacht, Selbstbewusste Nation, 165. 205. Friedbert Pflüger, Deutschland Driftet: Du Konservative Revolution entdeckt ihre Kinder (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1993), 174. 206. See Mark Terkessidis, Kulturkampf: Volk, Nation, der Westen, und die neue Rechte (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995). 207. See Karlheinz Weißmann, Rückruf in die Geschichte: Die deutsche Herausforderung: Alte Gefahren—Neue Chancen (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1993), 4 2 - 5 0 . 208. Rainer Zitelmann, Karlheinz Weissman, and Michael Grossheim, Westbindung: Chancen and Risiken für Deutschland (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1993). In particular see Zitelmann's article "Neutralitätsbestrebungen und Westorientierung," 6

REFERENCES

Fischer, M. "Heute erscheinen Jüngers Gedanken über den Frieden." New Yorker Staatszeitung, June 22, 1948. Fort, F. "Therapie durch Urmythos." Die Neue Zeitung, Aug. 17, 1952. Forte, L. 'Jünger invecchia, ma e sepre ribelle." La Stampa, Sept. 13, 1986. Franken, H. P. "Das Ego in der Idee des Ganzen." Erlanger Tageblatt, Dec. 19, 1953. "Franzosen fanden das "Schloss der Verräter" leer." Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung, April 22, 1985. Freund, C. "Provokation auf Schritt und Tritt: Zum dritten Teil von Ernst Jünger's Tagebuchwerk." FR, Feb. 14, 1959. Frey, M. "Es fehlt ihm an Liebe: Ewiger Leutnant wird 60 Jahre alt." Neue Rheinische Zeitung, March 29, 1955. Fried, E. "Ein Feind, der leicht zu lieben ist: Unsere Geistesgeschichte ist ohne Ernst Jünger nicht zu verstehen." Die Welt, March 27, 1965. Friedrich, H. "Utopie und Wirklichkeit: Zu neuen Büchern von Ernst Jünger." Hessische Nachrichten, April 27, 1950. Fritz-Vannahme, J. "Langer Händedruck zur Marsellaise: Die historische Geste von Verdun." Mannheimer Morgen, Sept. 24, 1984. Fuld, W. "Kunst, du musst alles sein."FAZ, May 14, 1983. Gast, W. "Kaleisdoskopisches: Emstjüngers Sherlockiade."ßi'e Zeit, March 29, 1985. Gellerson, C. "Politische Prominenz fehlt bei Goethepreis Verleihung." Fi?, Aug. 25, 1982. "Geschliffene Dunkelheit: Ernst Jünger wird 65 Jahre." DPA Brief, March 26/27, i960. Gläser, E. "Utopische Realität: Zu Ernst Jüngers Heliopolis." Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Dec. 12, 1949Glotz, P. "Barometer und Taifune." RM, Aug. 20, 1982. "Glückwünsche Kohls an Ernst Jünger." Schwäbische Zeitung, Aug. 28, 1982. "Goethe Prize ProtestedInternational Herald Tribüne, Aug. 24, 1982. Goldschmidt, R. "Der Rittermeister und die Automaten." SZ, Nov. 30, 1957. . "Ernst Jünger's Rückzug aus dem Chaos." SZ, Oct. 11, 1958. . "Der Schriftsteller Ernst Jünger: Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag." SZ, March 27, 1965Günther, J. "Der Schriftsteller und seine Aufgabe." FAZ, March 2, 1965. Hansen-Löve, F. "Abschied von Nigromontan?".Dzi> Osterreichische Furche, 6, March 18, 1950Harich, W. "Abendland oder nationale Souveränität: Der Kosmopolitismus—eine tödliche Gefahr für das deutsche Volk." Neue Well, June 1947, 5 8 - 6 7 . Härtling, P. "Ernst jüngers Heliopolis." Welt der Literatur, April 16, 1964, 9. "Heimat und Nationalsozialismus: Zur Darstellung eines politischen Umfelds." NZZ, Oct. 25, 1984. Heissenbüttel, H. "Übermensch als Gymnasiast." CW, June 29, 1973. . "Der Goethe der CDU?" FR, Aug. 28, 1982, 2. Helwig, W. "Eher zart als stählern: Besuch bei dem 75jährigen Ernst Jünger." RM, April 3, 1975. . "Umsturz oder Umbruch: Die Zeit ist nah." Die Welt, Nov. 15, 1959. Herbert, U. "Als die Nazis wieder gesellschaftsfähig wurden." Die Zeit, 3, Jan. 17, 1997-

REFERENCES

297

Hesslein, B. "Alles geht seinen deutsch-nationalen Gang." Hamburger Rundschau, Aug. 19, 1982. Heyden, S. "Bilderwucht aus Biedersinn und Brutalität." Rheinische Post, May 18, 1995Hilberling, M. B. "Ernst Jüngers Heliopolis." Südkurier Koblenz, March 28, 1950. Hinck, W. "Der Denkspieler Ernst Jünger." FAZ, Dec. 1 3 , 1977. Hochhuth, R. "Ernst jünger." FAZ Magazin, Jan. 3 1 , 1986. . "Wir Deutschen hatten einen wie Ernst Jünger noch nie." Welt am Sonntag, Nov. 8, 1987. Höhler, G. "Unter dem Baum der Erkenntnis: Eumesuril, ein Roman zwischen Mystik und Utopie." Deutsche Zeitung, Feb. 1 7 , 1978. Hohoff, C. "Ernst Jünger, der politische Dichter: Uber den Weg eines Konservativen." Die Welt, Nov. 23, 1962. . "Der Revolutionär als Klassiker." CW, Oct. 16, i960. . "Wenn Zeus und Aphrodite Abschied nehmen, halb Traumstück, halb Staatsroman: Ernst Jünger's Eumeswil." Rheinischer Merkur, Sept. 23, 1 9 7 7 . "Geheimcode der Dämonen." RM, March 28, 1975. . "Tagebuch der Besatzungszeit." Die Welt, Oct. 25, 1958. . "Aladin wird Bestattungsunternehmer." RM, March 25, 1983. Hollman, R. "Philosophie der Kraft: Bemerkungen zum Fall Ernst Jünger." Hannoversche Allgemeine, Nov. 3, 1949. Holthusen, H. E. "Ernst Jünger und das deutsche Verhängnis." SZ, March 26, 1 9 5 5 . Horst,K.A. "Innerer Dialog: Friedrich Sieburgwäre achtzig geworden. "FAZ, May 19, 1

973Hühnerfeld, P. "Heliopolis oder die Stadt ohne Liebe: Zu Ernst Jüngers neuem Roman." Die 7j>it, Feb. 2, 1950. Ignee, W. "Preisgericht." SZ, Aug. 28, 1982. "Immer im Streit, Frankfurter Goethe-Preis an Ernst Jünger überreicht." Tagesspiegel, Aug. 29, 1982. Jonas, K. W. "Ernst Jünger 90 Jahre jung." DAS, March 3 1 , 1985. Jouhandeau, M. "Begegnungen mit Ernst Jünger." SZ 74, March 27/28, 1965. Kaempfer, W. "Eine Seele für zwei Personen." Die Zeit, J u n e 1, 1973. Kästner, E. "R. A. Schröder redet für Ernst Jünger." Schwäbische Landeszeitung, Feb. 1, 1956Kaiser, J. "Schreckliche und wunderbare Bilder: Zu Ernst Jüngers 75. Geburtstag." SZ, March 2 8 - 3 0 , 1970. . "Schweigen über Entscheidendes." SZ, March 30, 1983. Kajman, M. "Ernst Jünger: Nuit et brouillard litteraires." Le Monde, July 27, 1978. Kesting, H. "Deutsche Misere mit Tiefendimension: Ernst Jünger redet wieder mit rechtem Jünglingspathos." Vorwärts, March 8, 1 9 7 3 . Kielinger, T. "Immer wieder der Blick in den Spiegel: Jünger's anspruchsvoller Versuch, seinen alten Kampf mit der Geschichte endgültig auszutragen." Die Welt, Oct. 12, 1977. . "Autorenporträt: Ernst Jünger, Eremit von Welt." Die Welt, Feb. 24, 1972. and H. Kremp. "Das abenteuerliche Herz hält Titanenwelt auf Distanz." Sonderdruck der Geistigen Welt, March 23, 1985. Klonne, A. 'Jünger ist keiner." Die Tat, Aug. 27, 1982.

298

REFERENCES

Koch, T. "Was aber bleibt: Ernst Jünger wird 70 Jahre alt ."Die Zeit, March 26, 1965. . "Ein ganzes Gebäude von Allegorien: Ernst Jünger wurde am 29. März 60 Jahre alt." Die Zeit, March 31, 1955. Korn, K "Ist Jünger ein hoffnungsloser Fall?" Der Kurier, June 6, 1946. . "Der Sprung ins Wunderbare: Zu Ernst Jüngers neuem Buch Heliopolis." FAZ, December 25, 1949. . "Der Antinihilist: Rede zum Schillergedächtnispreis für Ernst Jünger." FAZ, Nov. 16, 1974. . "Anstössiges." FAZ, March 9, 1973. . "Im gläsernen Turm." FAZ, March 27, 1965. Kramberg, K. H. "Ernst Jünger über Ost und West." SZ, Oct. 17, 1953. Krämer, D. "Verwandlungen und Läuterungen: Wo denn, Wie Denn?" Die Neue, Aug. 27, 1982. Kraus, F. "Lebensreise eines Ungemütlichen: Ernst Jünger 60 Jahre: Der Wetterwart der Zeit und der Weg seiner geistigen Entwicklung." Südkurier (Konstanz), March 29, 1955. Kraus, F. "Dichtung als geistiges Planspiel." Neue Zeitung, April 29, 1950. Kristl, W. L. "Ernst Jünger im Selbstverlag." Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, 17, Feb. 27, 1976. Krüger, Michael. "Beichte eines Bestatters." Die Zeit, Oct. 5, 1984. , "Diagnostiker der Leere." NZZ, Feb. 18, 1998. Kühn, V "Der Breker-Büste immer ähnlicher: Ernst Jünger in der Paulskirche: Jeschichte jeschnuppert, Brechreiz unterdrückt." Vorwärts, September 2, 1982. Laffly, G. 'Jünger: Un des mages de notre temps." La nation française, Feb. 3, 1965Laue, E. "Lieber nach Auschwitz?" FAZ, March 5, 1973. "L'autre Goethe: Jünger, le viellard inspire." L'Express, May 19, 1989. Lehman, H. 'Jahre der Okkupation." Das Parlament, June 6, 1959. Lenz, S. "Der Schriftsteller und Philosoph Ernst Jünger: Versuch eines Beitrages zur sogennanten Bewältigung der Vergangenheit." Die Zeit, April 20, 1962. , Gepäckerleichterung mit 70. Der Spiegel, March 31, 1965. "Le Prix Mondial Cino-del-Duca à Ernst Jünger." Le Monde, Oct. 12, 1981. Le Rider, J. "Le réalisme magique d'Ernst Jünger." Le Monde, Aug. 29, 1982. . "Les nouveaux lecteurs d'Ernst Jünger." Le Monde, July 19, 1981. Lewalter, C. E. "Hochzeitsflug der Bienen."Die Zeit, June 12, 1952. Lüke, F. "Kein Demokrat—aber ein Herr von Phantasie und Charakter." CW, Sept. 2, 1963Madler, A. [Armin Möhler, pseud.]. "Ernst Jünger ein Kennwort in Frankreich." Die Welt, Feb. 2, 1976. "Malraux: La legende du siècle." Le Figaro Littéraire, May 2, 1989. Mann, G. Bäume. Welt am Sonntag, June 25, 1977. Marcic, R. "Ritter gegen den Nihilismus: ErnstJünger zum 60. Geburtstag." Salzburger Nachrichten, March 29, 1955. Marek, K. "Eine Utopie ohne Liebe." Wirtschaftszeitung, Nov. 26, 1949. Maulnier, Thierry. "Jardins et routes." Revue universelle, Aug. 1942. Mayer, E. "Zweideutig, ästhetisch, und vekannt." Vorwärts, March 27, 1975. Mayster, E. "Auf der Spur eines Monstrums." SZ, Dec. 6, 1986.

REFERENCES

299

Mendelssohn, P. de. "Höchst edeltrefflicher Rautenzauber: Zu Ernst Jüngers Zukunftsroman Heliopolis. " Die Neue Zeitung, Jan. 24, 1950. Meyer, M. "Der Roman des Lebens." NZZ, March 29, 1985. . "Im Dilemma." NZZ, April 23, 1983. "Mögen die Götter sich zeigen." Die Welt, July 8, 1978. Möhler, A. "Er war Ernst Jüngers sagenhafter Meister: Der Münchener Philosoph Hugo Fischer ist gestorben." Die Welt, May 13, 1975. . "Wie man Ernst Jünger liest." Hamburger Anzeiger, April 18, 1954. . "Ernstjüngers gesammelte Werke."DieLiterarische Tat (Zurich), Jan. 7, 1961. . "ErnstJünger und sein Kriegstagebuch." Die Tat, Aug. 6, 1949. Morel, R. "Ni pour, ni contre, mais avec: O u les quartre bonnes volontés de Robert Harcourt, Karl Barth, Ernst Jünger, Werner Bergengruen." Témoignage chrétien (December 27, 1946). Mueller, A. "Vorm dunklen Tor: Besuche bei Ernst Jünger." Die Zeit, Sept. 6, 1991. Mühlberger,J. "ErnstJünger: Heliopolis. " Neue Württembergische Zeitung, Jan. i g , 1950. Mühleisen, H. "Ernst Jüngers Gefährdungen: Ein neues Dokument der Nazi-Zeit." CW, Jan. 25, 1986. . "Im Segelboot über das Bermuda Dreieck." CW, Jan. 25, 1986. Nadeau, M. "Le combat d'Ernst Jünger." Combat, Sept. 20, 1951. Nebel, G. "ErnstJünger's große Rechenschaft." FAZ, Nov. 12, 1949. "Nichts gelesen: Der Frankfurter Krach um den Goethepreis-Kandidaten Ernst Jünger." Der Spiegel, Aug. 16, 1982. "Nimm einen Ton aus einer Harmonie: Aus einer Rede beim Empfang des SchillerPreises in Stuttgart." SDZ, Nov. 11, 1974. Nutz, W. "Der Skandal heisst nicht Ernst Jünger: Schliesslich hat die Jury die Vergabe des Goethe-Preises zu verantworten." Vorwärts, Sept. 30, 1982. Oliass, G. "Heroische Vokabeln." Deutsche Zeitung. Sept. 24, 1958. . "Gründe, Abgründe eines RuhmsDeutsche Zeitung. Nov. 26, i960, 18. . "Gefährdungen von Morgen." Deutsche Zeitung, Dec. 4, 1957. Opitz, H. G. "Ernst Jünger: Eine Deutsche Position." Der Fortschritt, May 24, 1947. Part,A. "Ernstjünger und dieJahre der Okkupation." Welt am Sonntag, Sept. 14,1958. Peters, J. "Das Abenteuer der Metaphysik." Wirtschaftszeitung, July 9, 1952. Picht, W. "Die Residenz Ernst Jünger." Badische Zeitung, March 11/12, 1950. Raddatz, F. J. "Kälte und Kitsch." Die Zeit, Aug. 27, 1982. Rausch, J. "Ernst Jünger auf neuen Wegen?" SZ, Sept. 25, 1949. . "Kosmische Lagebesprechung." SZ, Nov. 15, 1959. Rambures, J. L. "Les chambres secrètes d'Ernst Jünger." Le Monde, Sept. 27, 1985. . "Ernst Jünger s'explique." Le Monde, Feb. 22, 1973. . "A propos d'Ernst Jünger: Une mise au point." Le Monde, March 22, 1973. Ratti, A. "Von Außen betrachtet: Ernst Jünger und seine Gegner." FAZ, Aug. 16, 1982. Rechtold, A. "Frankfurts Stadtväter streiten über Ernst Jüngers Dichten und Denken." Schwäbische Zeitung, Aug. 21, 1982. Reding, (sometimes Reeding) J. 'Jüngers Brücke in die Zukunft." Die Kultur, Jan. 15, 1954. "Ernst Jüngers Pendant zum Arbeiter." Die Kultur, Nov. 15, 1957. . "Transzendentale Ansätze." Echo der Zeit, Nov. 8, 1959.

JJOO

REFERENCES

Regensburger, M. "Der Rittermeister u n d die gläsernen Bienen." Die Zeit, Dec. 26, 1

957-

Reich-Ranicki, M. "Der Dichter im Uniform." AZ, March 29, 1975. . "Gerechtigkeit für Friedrich Sieburg: N o c h einmal über den mächtigen Literaturkritiker von gestern." Die Zeit, Feb. 17, 1967. . "Bei Nietzsche stehengeblieben." Die Zeit, March 2, 1973. Richter, F. K. "Erneuter Streit u m Ernst Jünger." Das Sonntagsblatt des Deutschtums in Amerika, A u g . 8, 1947. Richterg, G. " M e n s c h — n i c h t m e h r U b e r m e n s c h : Ernst Jünger im B r e n n p u n k t seiner Strahlungen." Das Sonntagsblatt des Deutschtums in Amerika, Sept. 9, 1949. Rinaldi, A. 'Jünger, le sphinx botaniste." L'Express Magazine, Jan. 26, 1980. Rogisch, J. "Der Besuch des französischen Präsidenten beim deutschen Kanzler: Politik u n d Abstecher." Schwäbische Zeitung, May 29, 1985. R o n d e a u , D. "Ernst Jünger: Paris fin de siècle." Liberation, Sept. 17, 1985. Rousseaux, A. "Ernst Jünger à Paris." Le Figaro littéraire, Oct. 13, 1 9 5 1 . "Rückendeckung für Ernst Jünger." SZ, A u g . 26, 1982. Ruedel, W. "Der Fortschrittsfeind als Waldläufer: Eine Reise mit Ernst Jünger auf den Spuren seiner afrikanischen Spiele." RM, March 21, 1980. Rutschky, M. "Ehrung eines Radikalen: Ein Selbst-Gespräch über die Verleihung des G o e t h e Preises an Ernst Jünger." SZ, Aug. 28, 1982. Sanchez, L. 'Jünger 87 ans: Tous ses cheveux et la dent dure." LeMoncte, Sept. 4 , 1 9 8 2 . Saueressig, H. "Deutscher Geist im schweizerischen Amriswil." Schwäbische Zeitung, Aug. 28, 1965. Schäffer, R. "Gefechte im Spiegelkabinett." Tageszeitung, Aug. 9, 1982. Scheller, W. "Paris im Fin de siècle." TAG, May 26, 1985. Schelz, S. "Schlanke Prosa." DAS, March 3 1 , 1985. . "Bekenntnis zu Ernst Jünger." DAS, Aug. 29, 1982. . "Sprachspiel: N u r die Figuren sind, die Regeln sind frei e r f u n d e n . " DAS, Dec. 4, 1 9 7 7 . "Schiller-Preis für Ernst Jünger ist ein Skandal." Unsere Zeit, Nov. 12, 1974. Schirmacher, W. "Der von der Zeit eingeholte Schriftsteller." Rheinische Post, 199, Aug. 28, 1982. Schirrmacher, F. "Besuche in der D ä m m e r u n g . " FAZ, Feb. 23, 1998. Schiocker, G. "Fernweh nach den Göttern: Was die Franzosen an Ernst Jünger fasziniert." 5Z,July 4, 1978. Schlumberger, J. "Le cas Jünger: Essai de mise au point." Terre des Hommes, November 10, 1945, 1, 5 - 6 Schöller, W. F. "Geisterstunde." SZ, A u g . 30, 1982. Schonauer, F. "Jenseits der Geschichte." Weltwoche, Feb. 15, 1978. Schönfeld, H. M. "Vom Stahlgewitter zum Stundenglass: Für u n d wider Ernst J ü n g e r — Z u seinem 60. Geburtstag." Der Tag (Berlin), March 29, 1955. Schulz, T. "Der Preisträger, das unbekannte Wesen." Tageszeitung, A u g . 27, 1982. Schulz, S. "Der Unzeitgenosse." DAS, March 27, 1983. Schümann, K. "Leichter Reiter E r n s t j ü n g e r . " Mittag, Dec. 1 4 / 1 5 , 1 9 5 7 . Schütte, W. 'Jahrhundert Gestalt." FR, Feb. 18, 1998. Schwerbrock, W. "Ernst Jüngers Science Fiction." FAZ, Nov. 16, 1957. Schwilk, H. "Ernst Jünger's Glanzstück." Bayern Kurier, May 1 1 , 1985.

REFERENCES

301

Schwitter, E. "Deutschland Glückwünsch." Die Zeit, March 24, 1995. Seiffert, J. E. "Grüne gegen den elitären Weggefährten des NS- Staats." Tageszeitung, Aug- 23, 1982. "Sie warfen mit Zitaten: Szenen vor der Paulskirche bei der Goethepreis-Verleihung." FR, Aug. 30, 1982. Silens, P. "Zwischen Diagnose und Prognose." Die Kultur, Dec. 13, 1959. Sonntheimer, K. "Die wilde Politik eines Unpolitischen." TAG, March 22, 1963. Stamer, U. "Minenkrieg, in Leder gebunden: Ernst Jüngers wiederentdeckte Erzählung 'Sturm. SZ, Sept. 15, 1975. Stehle, H. "Ernst Jünger bei den Neofaschisten: Ein Ruch von Grün." Die Welt, June 1, 1972. Sternberger, D. "Frankfurter Hefte: Eine Muse konnte nicht schweigen." FAZ, June 6, 1980. Tank, K. L. "Der Moralist von Kirchhorst." Sonntagsblatt, Sept. 28, 1958. . "Rutengänger und Realist." Sonntagsblatt, June 5, 1955. Teilenbach, G. "Beschämend."FAZ, Aug. 11, 1982. Towarnicki, F. "A propos des falaises de marbre." Magazine Litteraire, Nov. 1977. Tranchant, M. "Les ambiguités de l'histoire." Le Figaro, Nov. 17, 1982. Traugott, E. "Das Land hinter der Wüste: Zum 60. Geburtstag Ernst Jüngers." CW, March 3 1 , 1955. Uhlemann, E. "Ernst Jünger ein Vorläufer der Grünen." FAZ, Aug. 10, 1982. "Ulrich Lang gratuliert Ernst Jünger." SZ, Aug. 30, 1982. "Un autre regard sur l'occupation." Le Figaro, May 7, 1986. "Verdienstkreuz mit Stern für Jünger." Schwäbische Zeitung Apr. 22, 1977. Von Cardinal, C. "Am Saum der Ewigkeit: Ernst Jünger's Tagebücher und die Überwindung des Nihilismus." Geistige Welt, Oct. 29, 1959. "Von der H ö h e herab: Helmut Heissenbüttel las bei Niedlich Texte von Ernst Jünger." Stuttgarter Nachrichten, April 15, 1975. Von Krockow, C. G. "Grübler, Deuter, Wegbereiter." Die Zeit, March 17, 1995. Von Salomon, E. "Ich besuchte Ernst Jünger." Die Welt, January 10, 1950. Von Schirnding, A. "Begegnung mit Ernst Jünger." SDZ, March 2 9 - 3 1 , 1975. . "Sternstunde der Freiheit: Erinnerungen an einen Besuch des Bundespräsidenten T h e o d o r Heuss bei Ernst Jünger." Die Tat (Zurich), Jan. 3 1 , 1964. . "Der Bestie Geschichte entronnen: Der neue Roman des 82jährigen Ernst Jünger." SZ, Nov. 10, 1977 Waldecker, G. "Der allzu schnelle Stempel: Später Streit um Goethepreisträger Ernst Jünger." Badische Neueste Nachrichten, Aug. 19, 1982. Wallman,J. "Der Erzähler Ernst j ü n g e r . " Kölner Rundschau, March 30, 1975. Walter, G. 'Jünger et son coléoptère." Les Nouvelles Littéraires, May 1 8 - 2 5 , 1 97&Weinert, K. "Im Spiel der Halbwahrheiten gefangen." SZ, April 16, 1982. Weniger, H. "Der Fall Jünger: Eine Diskussion." Rheinische Zeitung, Dec. 6, 1947. Wien, A. "Der ewig gestrige Ernst Jünger." Bremer Nachrichten, Jan. 26, 1956. Wilms, J. "Von Käfern, Unifomen, und Menschen." SZ, Feb. 23, 1998. Winkels, H. "Nichts über Zweifel und Abgründe." Zürich Tages-Anzeiger. March 28, 1995Wolf, U. "In der Hand ein Glas Burgunder mit Erdbeeren." SZ, Nov. 9, 1988. Wolff-Windegg, P. "Der Anarch am Rand der Wirbel." SZ, Oct. 11, 1977.

302

REFERENCES

Zahrnt, H. "Das ist nicht die Erneuerung." Sonntagsblatt, July 20, 1952. Ziesel, K. 'Jahre der Okkupation: Zu dem jüngsten Werk Ernstjüngers." Europäischer Kulturdienst, Jan. 22, 1958. Zoch.H.J. "Ernst Jünger als Wald-Emigrant." Der Mittag, Nov. 1 1 / 1 2 , 1958. C. Articles in Periodicals and Chapters in Books Abusch, A. "Die Begegnung: Die innere und die äussere Emigration in der deutschen Literatur." Aufbau 3, no. 10 (1947): 2 2 3 - 7 . Adorno, T. "Spengler nach dem Untergang." Frankfurter Hefte 2, no. 20 (May 1950): 115-128. . "Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit." In Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963. In English: Critical Models. Trans. Henry Pickford New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Andersch, A. "Achtzig und Jünger: Ein politischer Diskurs über den geschwundenen Publikumsrefolg Ernst Jüngers." Merkur 29, March, 1975, 3 3 9 - 3 5 0 . Ash. T. "Heimat." NYRB, March 26, 1986. Aschheim, S. E. "Reconceiving the Holocaust." Tikkun 1 1 , no. 4 (July/August 1996): 62-65. Baden, H. J. "Ernst Jünger's christliches Zwischenspiel." Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 3, no. 3 (1961): 3 2 8 - 3 4 5 . Basserman, D. "Ernst Jünger und der 73. Psalm." Berliner Hefte 1 (June 1946): 1 0 5 109. Beckman, H. "Ernst Jünger's Markierungen." Welt und Wort 13, no. 10 (1958): 8 0 9 811. Bein, S. "Gerhard Nebel unter den Propheten." Welt und Wort 28 (1973): 2 3 - 2 5 . Benjamin, W. "Theories of German Fascism." Trans. Jerolf Wikoff. NGC 17 (spring 1979): 1 2 0 - 1 2 8 . Benoist, A. "Ernst Jünger: La figure du travailleur entre les dieux et les titans." NouvelkEcole 40 (fall 1983): 1 3 - 1 9 . Berman, R. "Written Right Across Their Faces: Ernst Jünger's Fascist Modernism." In Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, eds., Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, 66-80. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Bingel, H. "Ernst Jünger: Fakten." Zeit-Streit-Schrift 6, no.2 (Sept. 1968): 3 - 6 . Blondin, A. "En juillet 42, Picasso proposait la paix au capitaine Jünger." Rivarol (Sept. 6, 1951): 4 - 5 . Bullock, M. "A German Voice over Paris: Ernst Jünger and Edgardo Cozarinsky's Film One Man's War." NGC 59 (spring/summer 1993): 7 7 - 1 0 3 . Buruma, I. "A Lethal Thing of Beauty: Leni Riefenstahl's Cloud of Unknowing." TLS (Oct. 9, 1992): 3 - 4 . Chamberlain, B. S. "Todesmühlen: Ein früher Versuch zur Massen-Umerziehung im besetzten Deutschland, 1945-1946." Vierteljahresheft für Zeitgeschichte 39 (July 1981): 4 1 - 8 2 . Chatwin, B. "An Aesthete at War." NYRB, March 5, 1981, 1 9 - 2 7 . Dietka, N. "Anmerkungen zur Ernst Jünger-Rezeption in Deutschland." Etudes Germaniques (October-December 1996): 8 2 1 - 8 3 3 .

REFERENCES

305

Dirks, W. "Der restaurative Charakter der Epoche." Frankfurter Hefte 5, no. 9 (1950): 942-954Franzel, E. "Versuch einer Deutung des Konservativen." Neues Abendland 1 1 , no. 2 (i953): i 5 3 - ! 9 8 Funke, H. "Bitburg, Jews, and Germans." NGC 38 (spring/summer 1986): 5 7 - 7 3 . Gellateley, R. "Situating the 'SS-State' in a Social-Historical Context: Recent Histories of the SS, the Police, and the Courts in the Third Reich." TheJournal of Modern History 64, no. 2 (June 1992): 3 3 8 - 3 6 6 . Geuss, R. "Kultur, Bildung, Geist." History & Theory 35, no. 2 (1996): 1 5 1 - 1 6 4 . Geyer, M. "The Place of the Second World War in German Memory and History" NGC 7 1 (spring/summer 1997): 5 - 4 0 . Gracq, J. "L'oeuvre d'Ernst Jünger en France." Antaios 6, no. 5 - 6 (March 1965): 469-472. Gross, E. "Die Schuld der Kirchen."Die Wandlung 2 (1947): 6 2 - 8 4 . Gruenter, R. "Formen des Dandyismus." Euphorion 46 (1952): 1 7 0 - 2 0 1 . . "Reflexions-Epik." Neue Deutsche Hefte 4 1 , no.4 (Dec. 1957): 8 4 0 - 8 4 3 . Guerster-Steinhausen, E. "ErnstJünger: Der Prophet des deutschen Nationalismus." Die Neue Rundschau 56/57, no. 2 (January 1946): 2 3 8 - 4 5 . Hafesbrink, H. "Ernst Jünger's Quest for a New Faith." Germanic Review 26 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 289-300. Hahn, K.J. "Wotan mit der Opiumpfeife." Deutsche Rundschau 79 (1953): 4 3 0 - 4 4 1 . Harich, W. "Ernst Jünger und der Frieden." Aufbau 1 (1946): 5 5 6 - 5 7 5 . Heissenbüttel, H. "General i.R. als Goethe." Text und Kritik 1 0 5 / 1 0 6 (January 1990): 119-125. Herzinger, R. "Werden wir alle Jünger?" Kursbuch 122 (December 1995): 9 3 - 1 1 7 Hoffman, S. "Collaboration in France duing World War II." Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (Sept. 1968): 3 7 5 - 3 9 5 . Höhl, E. "Das Orakel von Wilflingen: Zu Ernst Jüngers 70. Geburtstag." Blätter für deustche und internationale Politik 10 (1965): 3 5 2 - 3 5 5 . Höntzsch, A. "An der Zeitmauer "Eckart 29 (i960): 5 5 - 5 7 . Hüppauf, B. "Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation." NGC 59 (spring/summer 1993): 4 1 - 7 6 . Huyssen, A. "Mapping the Postmodern." NGC 33 (fall 1984): 7 6 - 9 4 . . "Fortifying the Heart—Totally: Ernst Jünger's Armored Texts." NGC 59 (spring/summer 1993): 3 - 2 3 . Jauss, H. R. "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory." In Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic ofReception. Trans. Timothy Bahti, 3 - 7 2 . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Jouhandeau, M. "Reconnaisance a Ernst Jünger." Antaios 5 - 6 ( 1 9 6 4 - 6 5 ) : 4 3 8 440. Jünger, E. "Vom Ende der geschichtlichen Zeitalters." In Günther Neske, ed., Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag: Festschrift, 3 0 9 - 3 4 1 . Neske: Tübingen, 1959. Kaempfer, W. "Das schöne Böse: Zum ästhetischen Verfahren Ernst Jüngers in den Schriften der 30er Jahre im Hinblick auf Nietzsche, Sade, und Lautremont." Recherches Germaniques 14 (1984): 1 0 3 - 1 1 7 . . "Ernst Jüngers romantisches Erbe: Bemerkungen zu einem vernachlässigten Aspekt seines Werkes." Recherches Germaniques 17 (1987): 8 5 - 9 2 .

304

REFERENCES

Kaes, A. "The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilization and Modernity." NGC 59 (spring/ summer 1993): 1 0 5 - 1 1 7 . Kamper, D. "Weltstaat im Kopf, Wildnis im Hezen." Text und Kritik 105 /106 (January 1990): 8 2 - 8 9 . Keisel, H. "Auf den Marmorklippen: Ein berühmt und problematisches Buch über den zwölfjährigen nationalsozialistischen Staat." Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 14 (1989): 1 2 6 - 1 6 4 . Klett, E. "Vom Ungesonderten." Merkur Sonderdruck 5, no. 29 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 4 9 0 - 5 0 2 . Kohlschmidt, W. "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis: Ernst Jüngers weltanschaulicher Ausgangspunkt in kritischer Betrachtung." Die Sammlung 7 (1952): 2 0 - 3 7 . Lepenies, W. "Gottfried Benn: Der Artist im Posthistoire." In Walter Hinderer, ed., Literarische Profile, 3 2 6 - 3 3 7 . Königstein/TS: Athenäum, 1982. Levi, N. "Judge for Yourselves!': the Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle." October 85 (summer 1998): 4 1 - 6 4 . Lloyd, J. et al. "Akademischer Faschismus: Mitteilungen über die HumboldtGesellschaft." In R. Hethey and P. Kratz, In Bester Gesellschaft: Antifa-Recherche zwischen Konservativismus und Neo-Faschismus, 7 1 - 9 3 . Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt, 1991Ludwig, H. "Ernst Jünger und der Konservative Mythos." Neues Abendland 1 1 , no. 2 (1956): 1 7 7 - 1 8 4 . Majut, R. "Der Dichtungsgeschichtliche Standort von Ernst Jünger's Heliopolis. " Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 38 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 1 - 4 6 . Marsyas, "Ernst Jünger als Erzieher." Aufbau, July 8, 1947, 1 3 3 - 1 3 5 Mehlman,J. "Writing and Deference: T h e Politics of Literary Adulation." Representations 15 (summer 1986): 1 - 1 4 . Michelfelder, C. "La cosmologie d'ErnstJünger." NRF (Dec. 1942): 6 2 8 - 6 3 6 . Moeller, R. G. "War Stories: T h e Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany." The American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (October 1996): 1008-1048. Montesi, G. "Mutationen der Menschheit." Wort und Wahrheit 7 (1952): 4 5 6 - 4 5 9 . Moraes, R. de. "Rencontres avec Ernst Jünger: Un témoignage." Nouvelle Ecole 33 (fall 1979): 7 5 - 8 1 . Mühlberger, J. "Heliopolis." Welt und Wort 5 (1950): 2 0 - 2 8 . Müller-Schweife, R. "Ernst Jünger." Dichtung und Deutung 4 : 1 9 5 . Neaman, E. "Liberalism and Post-Modern Hermeneutics." Critical Review 2 - 3 (spring/summer 1988): 1 4 9 - 1 6 5 . . Ernst Jüngers Wirkung auf die neue Rechte: Zur Aktualität der konservativen Revolte." In Hajor Funke and Richard Faber, ed., Rechtsextremismus: Ideologie und Gewalt, 2 5 9 - 2 6 9 . Berlin: Hentrich, 1994. . "Review of Nevin Thomas, Ernst Jünger, and Germany." International Review of Modernism 1 (fall/winter 1997): 33-34. "A New Conservative Revolution? Neo-Nationalism, Collective Memory, and the New Right in Germany since Unification." In Hermann Kurthen, et al., eds., Antisemitism and Xenophobia in Germany after Unification, 2 1 8 - 2 4 3 . Oxford: O x ford University Press, 1997. Niethammer, L. "Afterthoughts on Post-histoire." History & Memory 1 (fall 1989): 3-27-

REFERENCES

305

Ott, H. "Martin Heidegger und die Universität Freiburg nach 1945." Historisches Jahrbuch 1 0 5 (1985): 9 5 - 1 2 8 . Paetel, K. O. "Ernst Jünger und die Politik." Neues Abendland 1 3 (1958): 2 2 6 - 2 3 8 . . "ErnstJünger in angelsächsischer Sicht."Eckart 29 (i960): 1 1 1 - 1 3 0 . Petersen, J. "Mussolini: Wirklichkeit und Mythos eines Diktators." In K H. Bohrer, ed., Mythos und Moderne, 2 4 2 - 2 5 9 . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Pfäfflin, F. "Amery: Unterwegs nach Oudenaarde." Marbacher Magazin 24 (1982): 116-124. Plard, H. "Ernst Jünger in Frankreich: Versuch einer Erklärung." Text & Zeichen 1 0 5 / 1 0 6 (Jan. 1990): 1 4 1 - 1 5 4 . . "Ex ordine shandytorum." In A. Möhler, Freundschaftliche Begegnungen, 9 5 1 1 6 . Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1 9 5 5 . . "Le style fasciste: Ernst Jünger et Drieu La Rochelle." Etudes germaniques (July/September 1979): 2 9 2 - 3 0 0 . Poulet, Robert. "Ernst Jünger—Bernanos." Defense de l'occident (June-July 1 9 8 1 ) : 41-53Pranger, K "Vollendete Vergangenheit." Frankfurter Hefte 25, no. 9 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 6 6 8 - 6 7 2 . "Pressestimmen über Ernst Jünger." Hamburger Akademische Rundschau 1 (1946/47): 447-450. Prümm, K. "Vom Nationalisten zum Abdendländer: Die politische Entwicklung Ernst Jüngers." In Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, eds., Basis: Jahrbuch für deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur 6: 7 - 2 9 . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Rey, W. "Ernst Jünger's abendländische Wendung." Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache, und Literatur 42 (March/April 1950): 1 2 9 - 1 4 0 . Rilla, P. "Der Falljünger."Die Weltbühne 1 (1946): 5 7 - 6 2 . Ritter, G. "Der neueGeschichtsunterricht."DiiSammZimg-2 (August 1947): 4 4 2 - 4 6 2 . Roberts, D. "Individuum und Kollektiv: Jünger und Brecht zu Ausgang der Weimarer Republik." Orbis Litterarum 41 (June 1976): 1 5 7 - 1 7 5 . Roy, Jean-Henry. 'Journal par Ernst Jünger." Les Temps modernes (December 1 9 5 1 ) : 1147-1148. Roy, Jules. "Temoignage pour Ernst Jünger." La Table Ronde (June 1948): 1 0 7 g 1080. Rutschky, M. "Der alte Man und das Post-histoirc." Frankfurter Hefte 33, no. 9 (1978): 65-67. Sahlberg, O. "Die Wiedergeburt Benns aus dem Geiste des Faschismus." Freiburger literaturpsyhologische Gespräche (1984): 1 0 1 - 1 1 2 . Santner, E. L. "Postwar German Aesthetics," NGC 57 (fall 1992): 5 - 2 4 . Schmitt, C. "Der verplante Planet." Der Fortschritt, April 1 1 , 1 9 5 2 , 3 - 1 2 ; . "Die Einheit der Welt." Merkur 6, no. 1 ( 1 9 5 2 ) : 1 - 1 1 . . "Die geschichtliche Struktur des heutigen Welt-Gegensatzes von Ost und West: Bemerkungen zu Ernst Jüngers Schrift, 'Der Gordische Knoten.'" In Armin Möhler, ed., Freundschaftliche Begegnungen. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1 9 5 5 ) , 1 3 5 167. Schonauer, F. "Ressentiment ist ein schlechtes Denkprinzip." Frankfurter Hefte 14, no. 59 (1950): 4 4 8 - 4 5 1 . Schroers, R. "ErnstJünger's Endspiel." Merkur (January 1978): 9 2 - 9 5 .

joö

REFERENCES

Schünemann, P. "Das Entschwinden der Biographie: Beobachtungen zum Werk Ernst Jüngers." Text und Kritik 1 0 5 / 1 0 6 (Jan. 1990): 5 2 - 5 8 . Shattuck, R. "Art and Culture." Salmagundi (fall 1993): 19 if. Siegel, J. "Avoiding the Subject: A Foucaultian Itinerary. "'Journal of the History ofIdeas 51 (April/June 1990): 2 7 3 - 2 9 9 . Speck, R. "Gottfried Benns Doppelleben." Deutsches Arzteblatt 56, no. 17 (April 25, 1986): 1 2 2 1 . Staehlin, F. "Ernst Jünger und Novalis oder die Wirklichkeit der Träume." Muttersprache 2 (1949): 1 0 3 - 1 1 9 . Stein, G. "Enst Jünger." Frankfurter Hefte 3, no. 1 (January 1948): 4 4 8 - 4 5 2 . Sternberger, D. "Der Hüherne Siegfried." Gegenwart 1 3 (1958): 5 9 3 - 6 0 2 . Syrotinski, M. "Some Wheat and Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan and the Post-War Literary Purge in France." Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 16, no. 2 (summer 1992): 247-264. Tarchi, M., ed. Ernst Jünger et la Rivoluzione conservatrice. Special number of Diorama letterario, March-April, 1982. Weber, E. "Nationalism, Socialism, and National-Socialism in France." French HistoricalStudies 2, no. 3 (spring 1962): 2 8 0 - 2 9 7 . Wohl, R. "French Fascism, both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternhell Controversy. " Journal of Modern History 63, no. 1 (March 1991): 9 1 - 9 9 . Wolin, R. "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism." Telos 67 (spring 1986): 7 1 - 8 6 . . "The French Heidegger Debate." NGC 45 (fall 1988): 1 4 9 - 1 7 4 . Ziesel, K. "Der Skandal um Ernst JüngerDeutschland Magazin (1982): 2 4 - 2 7 .

INDEX

AbenteurlicheHerz, Das (Jünger), 3 8 - 3 9 , 140; film by Martin Weinhart based on, 65 Abetz, Otto, 14, 86, 143, 144 Abschied (Johannes Becher) , 1 6 5 Adenauer, Konrad, 210, 254 Adorno, Theodor, 2, 55, 183, 230, 239 Aesthetics, of war, 1 1 4 , 1 4 8 - 5 1 , 226 Ästhetik des Schreckens (Bohrer), 9, 28n, 38n, 57, i97n, 2 1 0 Afrikanische Spiele (Jünger), 45 Aladins Problem (Jünger), 5 8 - 6 0 , 235 America, 19, 33, 76, 189; Andersch on, 97; Jünger's reaction to, 42,96, 158, 1 6 1 - 6 2 , 1 8 5 - 8 8 , 203; Syberberg on, 10, 258 American Occupation of Germany, 140, 1 6 1 - 6 7 , 172, 187; May 8 controversy and, 2 6 2 - 6 4 Amery,Jean (born Hans Maier), 76, 196, 245 Amriswil, 5111, 98 Am Saranzenturm (Jünger), 190; Bremen Literature Prize for, 2 1 4 Anarchism, in Eumeswil, 236—38; Jünger's version of, 54, 96, 186, 246 Andersch, Alfred, 19, 170, 174, 2 1 8 ; relationship to Jünger, 9 6 - 9 9 An der Zeitmauer (Jünger), 5 1 , i7on, 2 0 0 203 Angst vor der Macht (Schöllgen), 252 "AnschwellenderBocksgesang" (Strauss), 258 Antaios, 189 Anteile (Heidegger), 1 7 7 - 8 2 Anti-Semitism: Botho Strauss and, 258;

Jünger and, 3 1 , 3 6 - 3 7 , 42, 6 1 , 9 4 - 9 5 , 2 2 4 - 2 5 , 227; Plard's accusation of, 7 8 79, i 4 6 n Anouilh, Jean, 86 Apocalypse: in Eumeswil 2 3 7 - 3 8 ; in Heliopolis, 170—71; post-1945 discourse on, 176, 2 0 1 - 2 Aragon, Louis, 38n Arbeiter; Der, (Jünger), 8, 4 1 , 84, 186; as a protofascist program, 4 3 - 4 5 , 26g, 274; Heideggeron, 178, 1 8 0 - 8 2 ; post-1945 reception of, 156, 197, 201, 218; reception of in France, 78, 2 4 1 , 247 Arendt, Hannah, 4n, 7n, 25n, 30, 146, 265 Aristotle, 205 Arminius, 3 3 Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, 62, 67, 7111, 205, 207 Aron, Raymond, 79, 2 2 1 , 265 Astrology, Jünger and, 202 Auf den Marmorklippen (Jünger), 1 9 , 4 5 - 4 6 , 49, 77n, l o i n , 1 0 7 - 1 2 ; as a resistance novel, 1 1 6 - 1 7 , 245, 271 Aufmarsch, 35 Augstein, Rudolf, 63, 1 i 3 n Augustine, 4 Auschwitz, l i g n , 261, 262, 275 Avant-Garde, 168, 176, 242 A Visit to Godenholm (Jünger), 190 Bauer, Bruno, 237 Baeck, Leo, 36

307

joS

INDEX

Baedeker, Karl, 8 0 - 8 1 , 126, 195 Banine, Umm-el, 77, 12311; relationship to Jünger, 78 Barbie, Klaus, 270 Bargatzsky, Walter, 124, 145n Barnes, Harry Elmer, 13 Barrés, Maurice, 24, 29, 186, 241 Barsch, Günter, 257 Bartov, Omer, 264 Bauernromantik, 185 Becher, Hubert, 5 Becher,Johannes, 19, 8 i n , 153, 165, 168; Radio Free Germany appeal to Jünger by, 99-100 Beck, Ludwig, 48, 124 Begin, Menachem, 232 Being, Heidegger and 1 8 1 - 8 2 , 275 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 9, 38n, 56, 122; on the aestheticization of politics, 1 1 4 - 1 5 , 226 Benn, Gottfried, 5, 6, 11, 27, 30, 35, ggn, 114, i 5 7 n ; as proponent of fascism, 9 0 92, 206, 270; post-1945 career of, 9 3 94, 138, 167; relationship to Jünger, 89, 15S Benoist-Mechin, Alain, 147 Bense, Max, 5, 152 Berlin, Isaiah, 275 Bernanos, Georges, 137 Best, Werner, 123, 143 Betz, Albrecht, i5n, 245n Bielefeld School, 261, 273 Biermann, Wolf, 259 Bingel, Horst, 209 Bitburg, 240 Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 209 Bloch, Ernst, 183 Bloy, Leon, 137, 242 Boll, Heinrich, 49, 5 1 , i 6 y n , 168, 222 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 8 - 9 , 28n, 38n, 5 6 - 5 7 , 197" Borges, Jorge Luis, 241 Bourdieu, Pierre, 247 Bourgeois, Christian, 79 Boveri, Margret, 153 Braques, Georges 143 Brasillach, Robert, 271 Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 37, 38n, 85, 168; relationship to Jünger, 99, 235, 259 Breitbach, Joseph, 79, 242 Breker, Arno, 37

Breuer, Stefan, 33, 67 Brock, Erich, 5, 195 Bronnen, Arnolt, 9911, 116, 228 Brückner, Peter, 170 Buchenwald, 220 Buckley, William F., Jr., 13 Bullock, Marcus, xiii, 2, 14 Bundesverdienstkreuz, award to Jünger, 210, 219 Carstens, Karl, 225, 240 Celine, Ferdinand, 244 Cino-del-Duca Literature Prize, awarded to Jünger, 220 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 2 2 2 25, 227, 2 5 3 - 5 4 Christianity, Jünger's relation to 1 3 1 - 3 2 , and theological response to Jünger, 1 5 5 - 5 7 . 174. 202 Clair, Louis (alias Lewis Coser), 74 Cocteau, Jean, 52, 86, 143, 251 Cold War, 187, 275; in Der Gordische Knoten, 190-92 Collected Works (Jünger), 38; controversy over, 2 0 5 - 7 , 2 ° 9 Collective Guilt Thesis, 146, 162 Communitarianism, 203 Concentration Camps, 1 6 2 - 6 5 , 191, 220, 224, 248; nihilism and, 179 Conservative Revolution, 3 2 - 3 3 , 41—44, 7 ° - 7 3 > 8 5 - 8 7 , 98, 218, 2 5 5 - 2 6 7 , 2 6 9 70, 2 7 5 - 7 6 ; Humboldt Society and, 2ig-20 "Copse j25" (Jünger), 43 Corino, Carl, 229 Cournot, Antoine Augustin, 157. See also Posthistoire Cozarinsky, Edgardo, 2 4 9 - 5 0 Crossman, Richard, 164 Dachau (Hornung), 165 Dali, Salvador, 39, 52, 82 Dandyism, Jünger accused of, 1 8 6 - 8 7 Deat, Marcel, 147 De Benoist, Alain, i5n, 72, 73, 252, 255-56 Decisionism, 7, 96 De Gaulle, Charles, 72, 271 Dejouvenal, Bernard, i 5 7 n De Man, Hendrik, 144, 157 De Man, Paul, 15, 46, 244n

INDEX De Mendelssohn, Peter, 6, 6gn, 77; critique ofJünger, 1 4 6 - 4 9 , 174 Democracy, Jünger's attitude toward, 62, 198, 202, 2 0 8 - 9 , 2 1 5 , 229 De Montherlant, Henri, 86, 143, 147, 148 Denazification, 1 6 1 - 6 4 , 228 Der Spiegel, 224, 258 De Ricamont, Jacques, 79 Der Nationale Sozialist, 42 Derrida, Jacques, on Heidegger, 16 Der Vormarsch, 34 Der Weltkampf, 37 Des Coudres, Hans Peter, 75, 185; as Jünger's gatekeeper, 7 9 - 8 1 De Towarnicki, Frederic de, 63 Deutsche Daseinsverfehlung (Niekisch), 88, 218 Deutsches Volkstum, 37 Deutschland und der kalte Krieg (Nolte), 266 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 183 Didier, Edouard and Lucienne, 144 Die Kommenden, 35,36 Die Schuldfrage, (Jaspers), 1 6 3 - 6 4 Dietka, Norbert, 17 Die Welt, 263 Die Zeit, 2 0 4 - 5 , 209, 233 Dirks, Walter, 167 Ditfurth, Jutta, 66 DoktorFaustus (Mann), 183 Dornheim, Lianne, 17, i38n Driesch, Hans, 33, 83 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 14, 86, 143, 147 Drugs, in Visit to Godenholm, 190; Jünger's encounters with, 5 1 , 53, 226 Ecology, Jünger's attitude toward, 57, 203, 230 Eichberg, Henning, 257 Eine Gefährliche Begegnung (Jünger), 6 0 - 6 1 , 235 Elemente, 2 5 5 - 5 6 Eliade, Mircea, 12, 189 Eisholz, Fritz, 42 End of History. See Posthistoire Engelmann, Bernt, 229 Enlightenment, Holocaust and, 2 5 0 - 5 1 ; Jünger's critique of, 45, 53, 68, 1 8 7 - 8 8 , 1 9 7 - 9 9 . 233. 259 Entomology, as a secret code, 273; Goethe Prize and, 234; Jünger's passion for, 63

509

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 19, 5 1 , 100, i7on Epting, Karl, 86 Erhardt, Hermann, 3 3 Ethnopluralism, 2 5 5 - 5 6 Eumeswil (Jünger), 2 3 5 - 2 3 8 ; critical reception of, 239 Evola, Julius, 56 Existentialism, 163 Expressionism, 8 9 - 9 0 , 168, 172; and postexpressionism, 141 Eysenck, Hans, 256 Fabre,J. Henri, 1 5 1 Fabre-Luce, Alfred, 143 Farias, Victor, i82n, 244 Fascism: end of history and, 191—94, 239; Goethe Prize and, 224—30, 233; intellectuals and, 15, 43, 86, 92, 9 4 - 9 6 , 147, 269-70 Fascist Style, 19, 107; as version of aesthetic modernism, 114—15, 1 5 1 ; in Auf den Marmorklippen, 117-21 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 1 1 8 Federal Republic of Germany: Jünger and, 229, 234, 240; New Right and, 260-67 Fest,Joachim, 222, 266 Filbinger, Hans, 2 1 7 - 1 8 Fischer, Fritz, 261 Fischer, Hugo, 33, 8 3 - 8 5 Fischer, Max, 137 Flex, Walter, 27 Foucault, Michel 259; compared to Jünger, 274 France, reception of Jünger in, 2 4 0 - 5 0 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 233, 266 Freiherr vom Stein Medal, controversy over award to Jünger, 216—17 Freikorps Rossbach, 33 Freisler, Roland, 55, 1 2 5 French Collaboration, 48, 86, 134, 1 4 3 - 4 8 , 2 4 3 - 4 4 , 251 French Fascism, 1 1 5 , 147—48, 270—71 French Foreign Legion, 25 French Poststructuralism, New Right and, 258-60 French Resistance, 76; Jünger's role in, 1 2 3 , i30n French Revolution, Bivarol and, 1 9 7 - 9 9 Freund/Feind (Schmitt), 165, i87n, 257

3io

INDEX

Freundschaftliche Begegnungen (Möhler), 180-82 Freud, Sigmund, 27-28, 221 Frey, Max, 197 Freyer, Hans, 83, i 5 7 n , 169, 191 Fried, Erich, 101, 168 Friede, Der (Jünger), 13—14, 47, 74, 107, 262; disputed chronology of, 1 2 6 - 2 8 ; postwar reconstruction and, 1 2 8 - 3 2 , 1 5 8 - 5 9 ; Rommel and, 1 2 2 - 2 6 Friedlander, Saul, 1 1 7 Frisch, Max, 152, 217 From Luther to Hitler (McGovern), 261 Fukuyama, Francis, 157, i58n, 239 Funke, Hajo, xiii, 240n Gadamer, Hans Georg, 67 Gärten und Strassen (Jünger), 139, 189 Gehlen, Hans, 83, i 5 7 n , 158, 1 6 9 - 7 0 , 199 Generation of 1968, 227, 254, 258, 259 Generation of 1989, 2 5 4 - 5 5 , 2 6 0 - 6 7 Geopolitics, 44, 257, 260 George, Stefan, 73, 133, 205, 221 German Conservatism, 58, 7 9 - 8 0 , 1 5 4 - 5 5 , 184, 218, 272 German Democratic Republic (GDR), Jünger's reception in, 64, 66, 100, l 3 3 - 3 4 > •öä- a l 6 > 2 1 7 - 1 8 , 228 German National Party (NPD), 2 0 6 - 7 German Occupation of France, 1 4 2 - 4 8 ; persecution ofJews and, 242 German Resistance to Nazism, 2, 19, 4 7 - 4 8 , 5 5 , 7 4 - 7 5 , 100, 110, 1 A u f den Marmorklippen as resistance novel, 1 1 3 - 1 7 ; Der Friede and, 122-28; in Der Waldgang, 186 German Romanticism, 1 1 7 , 137 German State Party (DSP), 214 Gestapo, 47, 123, 145 Gide, André, 78 Giono, Jean, 6, 244 Gläserne Bienen (Jünger), 199—200 Glotz, Peter, 72n, 2 3 1 - 3 2 Goebbels, Josef, 32, 39, 46, 113, 143; Jünger and, 118, 206 Goering, Hermann, 86 Goethe, 43, 5 1 , 64, 67, 153, 229; compared to Jünger, 2 3 4 - 3 5 , 2 7 1 Goethe Prize, 4, 20; awarded to Jünger, 2 2 2 - 3 5 ; history of, 2 2 0 - 2 1 Goldschmitt, Rudolf, 209

González, Felipe, 67 Gordische Knoten, Der (Jünger), 50, i g o - 9 2 Gould, Florence, 143 Gracq, Julien, 79, 81, 143 Grass, Günter, 51, 222, 276 Gray,J. Glenn, 150 Green, Julien, 79 Green Party, 66, 2 1 1 , 222-23, 226, 227, 232 Grossheim, Michael, 253 Gruenter, Rainer, 186 Günther, Albrecht Erich, 37 Guitry, Sacha, 86, 143 Hafesbrink, Hanna, 1 5 4 - 5 5 Habermas, Jürgen, 54n, 232, 261, 2 7 5 - 7 6 Haffner, Sebastian, 266 Hamann, 5 1 , 137 Hamsun, Knut, 6, 27, 206 Harich, Wolfgang, 81; chequered past of, 1 3 2 - 3 3 ; critique of Der Friede, 133, 135 Härtung, Günter, 8 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, io8n, n g n Hauptmann, Gerhard, 205, 221, 230 Haushofer, Karl, 44. See also geopolitics Heidegger et le Nazisme (Farias), 244 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 7, 19—20, 32—33, 49, 50, 5 m , 73, 88, 90, i 5 7 n , 158, 176, 269, 272; critique o f j ü n g e r , 1 8 0 - 8 2 ; French intellectuals and, 1 4 - 1 7 , 54, 64, 182; Holocaust and, 1 9 2 - 9 4 ; left and, i84n Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 158, 268 Heissenbüttel, Helmut, 58n, íoon, 101, 227 Heliopolis (Jünger), 20,49, 53, 1 7 0 - 7 3 ; critical reception of, 1 7 3 - 7 6 ; Eumeswil compared to, 236 Heller, Gerhard, 244

Herf, Jeffrey, xiii, 27n, 32, 44, io8n, 2 i 3 n , 26111 Hervier, Julien, l^n, 61, 63 Herzinger, Richard, xiii, 65, 252n Hesse, Hermann, 221 Heuss, Theodor, 195, 2 1 3 - 1 4 , 2 1 9 Hielscher, Friedrich, 32, 83, 100 Hillgruber, Andreas, 260, 273 Hilsbecher, Walter, 5 Himmler, Heinrich, 32, 46, 143, 185, 191 Hirsch, Rudolf, 2 2 2 - 2 3 Historikerstreit ("Historian's Dispute"), 17, 260-67, 272-73 Hitler, Adolf: "Kniébolo" and, 77n, 145, 242; Jünger and, 3 1 - 3 2 , 40, 45, 77, 84,

311

INDEX

95, 112, 116, 224, 227, 248; Oberförster and, 1 0 9 - 1 0 , 120; 113; Rommel's plan to assassinate, 1 2 4 - 2 5 Hochhuth, Rolf, 55, 66, 246 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 64, i04n Hoffman, Albert, 51 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 71 Hohoff, Kurt, 154 Holocaust: denial of, i3n; French intellectuals and, 2 7 0 - 7 i ; J ü n g e r ' s interpretation of, 1 4 5 - 4 6 , 1 9 1 - 9 4 , 2 4 8 ; 1 6 1 - 6 5 ; New Right and, 2 6 0 - 6 7 Holthusen, Hans Egon, 196 Hood, Stuart, l o 1 Horkheimer, Max, 2, 183 Hotel George V, 47, 73, 124; circle of officers at, 145 Hotel Majestic, 19, 46, 123; Jünger as part of Military Command, 1 4 2 - 4 5 , 236 Hotel Raphael, 46, 63, 123, 126; view of bombing of Paris from, 1 4 8 - 5 1 Humanism, 154, 157, 183, 229; French critique of, 2 5 9 - 6 0 Humboldt Society, Golden Medal awarded to Jünger, 2 1 9 - 2 0 Huyssen, Andreas, 30, 151 Immerman Prize, 2 1 2 - 1 3 ; awarded to Jünger, 216 Inner Emigration, genesis of term, 104 In Stahlgewittern (Jünger), 26, 29—30, 40, 64, 78, 136, 140 Intellectual Emigration, 105, 146, 230 Insects. See Entomology Jardins el Routes (Jünger), 46, 242, 244 Jaspers, Karl, 70, 1 6 3 - 6 4 , 221, 276 Jauss, Hans Robert, 3n, 17 Jay, Martin, xiii, 15111 Jens, Walter, 171 Je Suit Partout, 271 Jews. See Anti-Semitism Jodl, Alfred, 127 Jouhandeau, Marcel, 74n, 79, 143 Judt, Tony, 266 Jüdische Rundschau, 37 Jünger, Alexander, 81, 94 Jünger, Ernstel, 47 Jünger, Friedrich Georg, 23, 49, 50, 81, i04n, 112, 184, 198, 213 Jünger, Liselotte, 66, ggn

INDEX

jjì

Jung, Carl, 92 Jung, Edgar, 3 2 , 4 1 Junge Freiheit, 64, 73, 252, 26711 Kaempfer, Wolfgang, 11, 58n, i o g n , n 8 n , 141 Kästner, Erich, 105, 166 Kahlschlagliteratur, 8 i n , 167 Kaiser, Helmut, 8 Kaiser,Joachim, iÖ2n Kaplan, Alice Yaeger, 118 Kielinger, Thomas, 208, 23g Kirk, Russell, 13 Klages, Ludwig, g 1 Kleist, Heinrich von, 70 Klett, Ernst, 4g, 8gn, 208 Klett, Michael, 63 Klostermann, Vittorio, 195 Kniebolo. See Hitler, Adolf Koch, Thilo, 196, 20g Köppelsbleek: as metaphor for Holocaust, 1 1 0 - 1 1 ; as gothic horror, 117; as fascist spectacle, 120 Koestler, Arthur, 144 Kogon, Eugen, 80, 164 Kohl, Helmut, 6 1 , 66, 232, 240, 254, 263; visit with Jünger, 241 Kojeve, Alexandre, 158 Konitzer, Martin, 12 Kopflohn Der (Anna Segher), 164 Korn, Karl, 136, 174, 208-9, 2 1 8 - 1 9 , 248 Kracauer, Siegfried, 1 1 g Krebs, Pierre, 256 Krockow, Christian Graf von, 7, 63 Kubin, Alfred, 29, 38 LaCapra, Dominick, 264 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 1 1 g , 247 Lagarde, Paul de, 37 Landvolkbewegung, 40 Lass, Werner, 34 Laval, Pierre, 78, i4Ön Lawrence, T. E., 25 Leautaud, Paul, 143 Le Figaro, 243 Le Monde, 248, 250 Lenz, Siegfried, 51, 204, 207, 20g Lepenies, Wolf, 67 Les Temps Modernes, 242 "Letter on Humanism" (Heidegger), 1 7 8 - 7 9 Levi, Primo, i45n, 17g, 250

JJ2

INDEX

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 256 Lévy, Bernhard Henri, 247 Lichtung, 185 Lilla, Mark, 14, g5n Lipstadt, Deborah, i3n Literature Prizes, in Germany history of, 212-13 Löwith, Karl, 711 Loose, Gerhard, 6 , 1 2 Lorenz, Konrad, 256 Lowenthal, Leo, 27 Lucien de Geer (Heliopolis), 1 7 1 , 1 7 3 Ludendorff, Erich, 95, 1 1 0 Lukàcs, Georg, 3n, 8, 183, 2 2 1 , 232 Luther, Martin, 64 Lyotard, Jean-François, 258 Major, Jean René, 79 Mann, Erika, 105 Mann, Heinrich, 92 Mann, Klaus, 92, 99 Mann, Thomas, 5, 1 1 , 7 1 , 9 3 1 1 , 146, 168, 183, 205, 2 2 1 , 230; disagreement with Jünger, 1 0 5 - 6 Marcel, Gabriel, 79, i3on Marcie, René, 196 Marinetti, Fillipo Tommaso, 30, 1 5 1 Markovits, Andrei, xiii, 228 Malraux, André, 243 Martin, Alfred von, 5 Marx, Karl, 43, 237 Marxism, 8, 44; in France, 247, 261, 275; as an exhausted worldview, 275—76 Maschke, Günter, 84n, ig2n, 257 Maulnier, Thierry, 14 Mauretanier, in Auf den Marmorklippen, 1 1 0 ; in Heliopolis, 1 7 1 , i75n Maurras, Charles, 29 McGovern, William M., 261 McLuhan, Marshall, g8 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 2 4 3 - 4 4 Meinecke, Friedrich, 129, 1 3 1 , 260 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 31 Metaphysics, Jünger and, 152—53, 208 Meyer, Martin, 1 1 , 5gn Millennium, 2 6 8 - 6 9 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, 88, 249 Mitterand, François, 15, 66; visit with Jünger, 241 Möhler, Armin, xiii, 7, 33, 38n, 42n, 47,

6gn, 77, 84, 1 3 1 - 3 2 , 14g, i54n, 246; as Jünger's secretary, 7 0 - 7 3 , 74n, 1 6 1 , 170, 187; fascist style and, 114—15; Jünger as fascist and, 1 1 5 n ; 27on; Jünger's break with, 206 Mommsen, Hans, 67 Moorsoldaten, Die (Langhoff), 165 Morand, Paul, 147 Mosse, George, 27n Mussolini, Benito, 30, 269 Mühsam, Eric, 19, 37 Müller, Heiner, 63, ggn, i32n, 25g Myth, i 8 g - g o , 203, 256 National Bolshevism, 3 4 - 3 5 , 4 1 - 4 2 , 74, 84, 247 National Socialism, g, 13, 1 6 - 1 8 , 3 1 - 3 4 , 3 9 - 5 ° . 67> 7 ° - 7 1 > 74. 79. 84, 86, 98; amnesty campaign and, 187; Der Arbeiter and, 4 1 - 4 6 , 218; Historian's Dispute and, 260—67; intellectuals and, 2 6 g 70; Italian Fascism and, 1 1 5 ; language and, 168—6g Nebel, Gerhard, 5, 7, 7 3 - 7 4 , 124, 1 5 3 Nein, Welt der Angeklagten (Jens), 1 7 1 Neofascism, 2 0 6 - 7 , 258, 26g; New Right and, 254 Neske, Günther, i g 5 Neue Sachlichkeit, 35 Nevin, Thomas, 12, 36, I42n, 25111 New Right, 14, 20, 7 2 - 7 3 ; Jünger and, 2 5 2 - 6 7 , 269. See also NouvelleDroit Niekisch, Ernst, 32, 35, 38, 4 1 , 50, 82, 83, 88, 95, i04n, 106, 1 1 2 , 13111; critique ofjünger, i 8 8 - 8 g Niethammer, Lutz, i57n, 158, i62n, 207n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 27, 54, 56, 64, 65, go; Jünger and Heidegger on, 177, 182-85 Nihilism, i g - 2 0 , 25, 50, 152, 155, 274; in Uber die Linie, 1 7 6 - 8 2 Noack, Paul, 1 1 , 23n, i28n Nobel Prize for Literature, Jünger shortlisted for, 2 1 7 Nolte, Ernst, 13, 67, 260, 273 Nomos der Erde (Schmitt), 201 Nouvelle Droit, 15, 2 5 5 - 5 6 Novalis, 1 4 1 Oberförster, (Auf den Marmorklippen), gothic figure and, 1 1 7 ; Hitler and, 1 1 0 - 1 1

313

INDEX

Off Limits: Roman der Besetzung Deutschlands (Hans Habe), 165 "Ortner's Tale" (Jünger), 1 7 3 Ott, Hugo, 182 Paetel, Karl Otto, 32n, 74, 104a, 1 3 7 , 164; Jünger's biographer as, 7 5 - 7 6 Palmier, Jean-Michel, 63, 247 Pannwitz, Rudolf, 184, 2 1 7 Paulhan,Jean, 144, 2 4 3 - 4 4 Péguy, Charles, 29 Perception, stereoscopic, 24, 1 4 1 - 4 2 , 273 Pflüger, Friedbert, 254 Phenomenology, Jünger's method as, 4, 233, 272, 274; Nolte and, 264 Photography, Jünger's theoretical contribution to, 58 Picasso, Pablo, 143; visit by Jünger, 144 Plard, Henri, xiii, 32n, 58, 72n, 242, 2 5 1 ; relationship to Jünger, 7 6 - 7 9 , 243 Podewils, Clemens Graf, 85, 1 2 4 Popitz, Johannes, 128 Posthistoire, g, 19, 93, 107, 2 6 8 - 6 9 , 274; in Der Arbeiter, 1 5 7 - 5 9 ; in Der Friede 1 3 1 32; in Der Weltstaat, 203—4; in Eumeswil, fascism and, 1 9 1 - 9 4 ; left and right versions of, 1 6 9 - 7 0 Pound, Ezra, 206, 233 Pour le Mérite (military honor), 26, 30, 65, 85, 109, 1 2 3 , 2 1 5 , 240 Prüfung, Die (Bredel), 165 Psalm 73, 156 Rabinbach, Anson, xiii, 16, iÔ4n, 276 Racism, 182, 256; Jünger accused of, 227 Raddatz, Fritz, 230 Raddatz, Karl, 1 3 3 - 3 4 , 233 Rambures, Jean Louis, 106, 248—49 Rausch, Jürgen, 154, 200 Rauschning, Hermann, 7 1 , 183 Reagan, Ronald, 240, 2Ô3n Reception Aesthetics, 2 1 2 - 1 3 Regnery, Henry, 1 3 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 8gn, 248 Reifenberg, Benno, 87 Reitz, Edgar, 264 Remarque, Erich Maria, 27, 165 René, Jean, 79 Renn, Ludwig, 27 Rentsch, Thomas, 185 Republikaner, 72

INDEX

573

Rey, William, 1 5 5 Riefenstahl, Leni, 1 1 9 Rilla, Paul, 1 3 6 Ritter, Gerhard, 260 Rivarol (Jünger), 1 9 7 - 9 9 , 2 1 4 , 274 Rockmore, Tom, i6n, i77n, i94n Romanticism, 5, 74; forests and, 185; politics and, 1 9 7 - 9 9 ; stereoscopic effect and, 141-42 Rommel, Erwin, 47, 1 1 0 ; Der Friede and, 122-26 Rosenberg, Alfred, 37; struggle with Goebbels over expressionism, 1 1 4 , 269 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 2 7 , 6 7 , 140, 189, 202, 233 Rowohlt, Ernst, 75, 99n, 195 Rutschky, Michael, 2 2 9 - 3 0 , 239 Sanchez, Leopold, 244 Sander, Hans-Dietrich, 257 Sanduhrbuch, Das (Jünger), 190 Santner, Eric, 264 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 78, 98, 261, 271 Schacht, Ulrich, 253 Schauwecker, Franz, 32, 33, 83, 100 Schelsky, Helmut, 157n Schere, Die (Jünger), 235 Schiller, Friedrich, 5 1 Schiller Literature Prize, awarded to Jünger, 217-19 Schirrmacher, Frank, 63, 67 Schlichter, Rudolf, 38, ggn, 1 i6n Schlocker, Georges, 246 Schlumberger, Jean, 79 Schmid, Carlo, 195, 2 1 3 Schmidt, Helmut, 222, 226 Schmiele, Walter, 206 Schmitt, Carl, 2, 7, 14, 30, 32, 35n, 56 1 i8n, 1 l8 57 n > 7 - !99. 2 5 6 " 5 7 > 270, 274, 275; anti-Semitism and, 94-96; critique of Der Gordische Knoten, 192; Der Weltstaat and, 2 0 3 - 4 ; Jünger a r | d, g4 Schnitzler, Karl-Eduard, 228 Schöllgen, Gregor, 252 Schoenbaum, David, 265 Schoenhuber, Franz, 72 Schonauer, Franz, 1 5 3 , 239 Schröder, Rudolf Alexander, 2 1 3 , 2 1 4 , 2 1 5 , 261 Schutzarmee (SA), 74; Mauretanier and, i75n; social revolution and, 1 1 5

j 14

INDEX

Schutzstaffel (SS), 70, 7 9 - 8 0 , 93, 125, 164, 185, 220 Schwarz, Hans Peter, 7, 3111, 10211, 208 Schwarzer Spiegel (Schmidt) , 1 7 1 Schwarzschild, Leopold, 34 Schwilk, Heimo, 6511, 7111, 253, 254 Science Fiction, 159, 172 Selbstbewusste Nation, Die (Schwilk and Schacht), 253, 262 Shirer, William, 261 Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 1 2 3 Sieburg, Friedrich, 8 5 - 8 8 , 124, 169 Siebzig Verweht, (Jünger), 52, 208 Siedler, Wolf Jobst, 47, 2 3 0 - 3 1 Sintflut (Andres) , 1 7 1 Situationist International, 199 Sloterdijk, Peter, i7on, 268 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 210, 2 2 2 24, 2 2 7 - 2 8 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 247, 266 Sombart, Nicholas, 54, 62, 2 1 0 Sorel, Georges, 29, 35n Soviet Union, 84, 264, 2 6 5 - 6 ; Cold War and, 1 9 0 - 9 1 ; Der Friede and, 1 2 6 - 2 8 ; Jünger's understanding of, 42, 50, 158, 203 Speer, Albert, 1 1 9 Speidel, Hans, 46, 85, i22n, 124, 142 Spender, Stephen, 161 Spengler, Oswald, 4, 44, 84, 129, 176, 269 Spiritual Reactionaries, 2 5 7 - 6 0 Stahlhelm, 33 Stalin,Josef, 1 9 1 , 227, 2 6 5 ^ 266 Standarte, 33 Stauffenberg Conspiracy, 125, 127 Stahlhelm, 3 1 , 3 3 Steil, Armin, 8, 35n Steiner, George, io6n, 176, 270 Stern, Fritz, 24, 26n, 37n, 67 Stern, J. P., 1 2 - 1 3 , 77 Sternberger, Dolf, 124, 152 Sternhell, Zeev, 3on, 43 Stirner, Max, 189, 237 Strahlungen (Jünger), 46, 53; and magical realism, 1 3 9 - 4 2 ; reception of, 1 4 6 - 5 7 Strauss, Botho, 235, 239, 258 Strauss, Wolfgang, 257 Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 36 Süddeutsche Zeitung 209 Surrealism, 53 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 10, n g n , 222, 258, 263, 264

Tacitus, 185 Tageszeitung, 226 Technology, 16, 5 7 - 5 8 , 96, 158, i7on, 230, 274; Heidegger influenced by Jünger on, 1 7 7 - 7 9 ; Holocaust and, 146; in Ander Zeitmauer, 2 0 2 - 3 ; in Der Weltstaat, 2 0 3 4; in Eumeswil, 2 3 7 - 3 8 ; in Gläserne Bienen, 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 ; in Heliopolis, 1 7 1 , 1 7 5 Teufel, Erwin, 62, 66 Theorie des Partisanen (Schmitt), 187 Thiess, Frank, i04n, 105 Time, Jünger's notion of, 159, 170, 188, 268-69; in Das Sanduhrbuch, 190; as "ungesondert," 1 9 3 - 9 4 Toepfer, Alfred, 1 2 9 Toller, Ernst, 37 Theweleit, Klaus, 2 8 - 2 9 , 66, 84n, 1 i8n Todesmüllen, Die (Hans Burger), 162 Totale Mobilmachung, Die, (Jünger), 4 1 , 206 Tournier, Michel, 67 Travel, Jünger's books on, 104, 235 Trümmerliteratur, 167 Uber die Linie (Jünger), 78, 1 7 6 - 8 2 Venator, Michäl (Eumeswil), 2 3 6 - 3 7 , 251 Verdun, Battle of, 240 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 165, 2 6 1 - 6 2 Völkischer Beobachter, 3 1 , 34, 40, 272 Völkisch movements, 44 Van den Bruck, Moeller, 1 3 3 , 176 Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Krieg (Syberberg), 258 Von Von Von Von Von Von Von Von

Grote, Nicky, 124 Hofacker, Caesar von, 124, 1 2 5 Molo, Walter, i04n, 105 Papen, Franz, 86, 1 3 4 Salomon, Ernst, 32, 34, 39, 83 Schirnding, Albert, 7 m , 2 1 4 Schulenberg, Fritz Dietlof Graf, 124 Stülpnagel, Karl Heinrich, 47, 122, 124, 125, 136, 142 Von Stülpnagel, Otto, 46, 73, 136, 142 Von Weizsäcker, Richard von, 263 Waffen-SS. See SchützstaflFel Wagner, Richard, 183, 22g, 233 Waldgang, Der (Jünger), 54, 1 8 5 - 8 9 Wallman, Walter, 222, 225, 2 3 1 Weber, Alfred, 1 8 3 - 8 4

315

INDEX

INDEX

5/5

Weiss, Peter, 168 Weissmann, Karlheinz, 253, 260

Zehrer, Hans, 32n Zeit-Streit-Schrift, 2 0 9 - 1 0 Ziegler, B e n n o , 1 1 3 , 125 Ziesel, Kurt, 154, 224n Zionism, 42

Weltstaat, dir (Jünger), 16g, 2 0 3 - 4

Zimmerman, Michael, 14

Weyrauch, Wolfgang, 8 i n , 136

Zitelmann, Rainer, 253, 254, 260, 262, 265,

Weber, Eugen, 1 1 5 Weber, Max, 44 Wehrwolf, J ü n g e r and, 126

Widerstand, 35 Willms, Bernard, 257

2

73n

Zuckmayer, Carl, i g , 235; O S S (Office of

Wirsing, Giselher, 1 6 g

Strategie Services) report o n Jünger,

Wolandt, Gerd, 220

100; on Oberförster, 1 1 0

Wolin, Richard, 1 5 - 1 6 , 259, 274n W o m e n , J ü n g e r and, 63

Compositor: G&S, Inc. Text: i o/i 2 Baskerville Display: Baskerville Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore