Jünger, Ernst (1895–1998)

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JÜNGER, ERNST
(1895–1998)

Ernst Jünger was a German novelist and cultural critic who, by embracing total war as an exemplary pattern of life, helped to prepare the ideology of the National Socialist revolution of 1933. He was born in Heidelberg and educated in Hanover. In 1913 he joined the French Foreign Legion in north Africa in search of "the extraordinary beyond the social and moral sphere … a zone in which the war of the forces of nature found its pure and aimless expression." This quest for an exotic life in artificially heightened experience revealed Jünger's metaphysical attitudes and anticipated his later pattern of life. Jünger joined the German army at the outbreak of World War I. He fought on the western front and was commissioned, repeatedly wounded, and highly decorated. To him the war appeared "a means for self-realization, a wild upsurge of life … a splendid bloody play which makes the gods rejoice" that offered the key to all essential experience: "ecstasy, sleep and death." After the war Jünger developed his views in a series of brilliant war descriptions: In Stahlgewittern (1920); Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922); Das Wäldchen 125 (1925); Feuer und Blut (1925; Adolf Hitler annotated his gift copy); culminating in Totale Mobilmachung (1930) and Der Arbeiter (1932).

Jünger was also fascinated by modern technology, which had transformed the character of warfare and was creating a new form of industrial society. He envisioned the emergence of a new type of technical elite: the worker-soldier in the nationalized, socialist, militarist-imperialist, and dictatorial state of the future. He also discerned a "new consciousness of reality," nihilist in its relations to traditional values. But although he welcomed the rise of technology as a triumph of man, Jünger deplored its mechanization and dehumanization of life. In the Marxian solution of this problem, the common existential experience of the proletariat leads to class solidarity; its mastery of the tools of production leads to the liberation and human autonomy of the proletariat, which represents humankind. Similarly, Jünger's worker-soldier, simultaneously savior and saved, was to achieve the collective salvation of the rotting democratic-humanist society.

Technology, however, was inseparably bound up with war, "a fiery marriage between the spirit of chivalry and the severe coldness of our forms of work." The world of factories and calculated organization, of production, and of transport finds its true measure in battle. "The battle is a tremendous touchstone of industry, and victory marks the success of a competitive effort which knows how to work more quickly and ruthlessly." The individual worker-soldier finds his liberty in accepting the necessity to be part of "the greater force. Here one can only drift and be formed under the grip of the Weltgeist." The worker-soldier type thus replaced the individualist personality of the nineteenth century. Technology became both the means and the end of human endeavor—the means because it procured mastery over others, the end because the old values were dead, and collective power, the product of technology, was equated with value: "Technology and ethos have become synonymous."

Jünger's "national-Bolshevist" conception of technology provided a scintillating and heady approach to totalitarianism, an approach based also on his belief in inexorable historical trends and his romantic conviction that the individual finds fulfillment only by sacrificial immersion of himself in the whole. Jünger promised redemption for the sacrifice of the obedient soldier but showed scant sympathy for that of the Socratic nonconformist. His Der Arbeiter is thus less a sociological interpretation of his times than the revelation of a political myth, a clarion call that exerted a wide influence in Germany among the bewildered generation of the 1920s.

Jünger's misinterpretation and rejection of liberalism prevented his playing a constructive part as a citizen and caused him to be a destructive intellectual force. An anarchic pride in his own independence, however, saved him from effective collaboration with National Socialism. Jünger first parted ways with the Nazi Party in 1929, when he backed a terrorist peasant movement opposed by Hitler. Between the lines of his novel Auf den Marmorklippen (1939) he criticized the prevailing tyranny, but he took no part in active resistance to the regime. He again fought in the German army in 1940, although he suffered misgivings as a member of the army of occupation in France and Russia. These feelings found expression in Strahlungen (1949), Jünger's journals from 1939 to 1949, in which he corrected certain of his former tenets and, in a fashion, held out a hand to Western values and to the Christian religion. In his novel Heliopolis (1949) he took up once more the problems raised in Auf den Marmorklippen. Heliopolis contained an indictment of a closely knit totalitarian order but, at the same time, preserved Jünger's distance from Western rationalism and liberalism. The same theme recurred in Der Waldgang (1951); Gläserne Bienen (1957), which again expressed Jünger's fascination with technology; and Der Weltstaat (1960), which called for international political unity as a historically determined necessity.

Jünger conceived of the writer as a seer and pathfinder. His diagnosis of his times was, however, based on an untrained and intuitive sociological and economic knowledge, poetical and pretentious rather than scholarly. His widely acclaimed concept of the Gestalt, or Typus, of the worker offered no methodological advance and in substance was merely ideological. Jünger's significance was as a spokesman of the powerful romantic strand in the German intellectual tradition that unites elements of Naturphilosophie, Neoplatonic mysticism, and a Protagorean theory of knowledge with the negative aspects of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Edmund Burke's critiques of society and the Enlightenment. In its modern representatives, such as Jünger and Oswald Spengler, such thinking leads to a rejection of the rational, abstract, and mechanical achievements of civilization, the "high-treason of the intellect against life," and to the extolling of the instinctive, oceanic "night side" of life. Although not original, Jünger's philosophy was presented in a highly personal manner and in an evocative style, drawn from military language and a minute observation of nature. As a novelist, however, he did not succeed in creating concrete character.

Bibliography

The collected works of Ernst Jünger were published in a definitive and partly revised edition as Sämtliche Schriften, 10 vols. (Stuttgart, 1960–1964).

English translations of Jünger's writings include The Storm of Steel, translated by Basil Creighton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929); Copse 125, translated by Basil Creighton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930); On the Marble Cliffs, translated by Stuart Hood (Norwalk, CT: New Directions, 1947); Peace, translated by Stuart Hood (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1948); and African Diversions, translated by Stuart Hood (London, 1954).

For writings on Jünger, see G. Loose, Ernst Jünger, Gestalt und Werk (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1957), pp. 371–380; Karl O. Paetel, Ernst Jünger in Selbstzeugnissen, Vol. 72 in Rowohlt's Monographien (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1962), pp. 168–175; Hans Peter Schwarz, Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (Freiburg: Rombach, 1962), pp. 309–315; and J. P. Stern, Ernst Jünger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953).