Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Read online

  eds., Der Fall Spengler: Eine kritische Bilanz (Köln: Böhlau, 1994); Karen

  Swassjan, Der Untergang eines Abendländers: Oswald Spengler und sein Requiem

  auf Europa (Berlin: Raphael Heinrich, 1998); Frits Boterman, Oswald Spengler

  und sein “Untergang des Abendlandes” (Cologne: SH-

  Verlag, 2000); John

  Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (Baton

  Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2001); Domenico Conte, Oswald Spengler—

  Eine Einführung (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2004); Maurizio

  Guerri and Markus Ophälders, eds., Oswald Spengler: Tramonto e metamorfosi

  dell’Occidente (Milan: Mimesis, 2004); Frank Lisson, Oswald Spengler: Philosoph

  des Schicksals (Schnellroda: Antaios, 2005); Samir Osmancevic, Oswald

  Spengler und das Ende der Geschichte (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2007); Manfred

  Gangl, Gilbert Merlio, and Markus Ophälders, eds., Spengler— Ein Denker

  der Zeitenwende (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2009); Dezsö Csejtei and Aniko

  Juhász, Oswald Spengler élete és filozófiája (Máriabesnyő: Gödöllő, 2009);

  Gasimov and Lemke Duque, eds., Oswald Spengler als europäisches Phänomen;

  Merlio and Meyer, eds., Spengler ohne Ende; Arne De Winde et al., eds.,

  Tektonik der Systeme: Neulektüren von Oswald Spengler (Heidelberg: Synchron,

  2016); Alexander Demandt, Untergänge des Abendlandes: Studien zu Oswald

  21

  Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West

  21

  Spengler (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017); Fink and Rollinger, eds., Oswald Spenglers

  Kulturmorphologie; David Engels, Max Otte, and Michael Thöndl, eds.,

  Der lange Schatten Oswald Spenglers: 100 Jahre Untergang des Abendlandes

  (Waltrop: Manuscriptum, 2018).

  52. For example, David Engels, Le Déclin: La crise de l’Union européenne et la chute

  de la république romaine— analogies historiques (Paris: Toucan, 2013); David

  Engels, “Spengler im 21. Jahrhundert: Überlegungen und Perspektiven zu einer

  Überarbeit der Spengler’schen Kulturmorphologie,” in Fink and Rollinger eds.,

  Oswald Spenglers Kulturmorphologie, 451– 486.

  53. See also David Engels, “Déterminisme et morphologie culturelle: Quelques

  observations méthodologiques autour du ‘Déclin de l’Occident’ d’Oswald

  Spengler,” forthcoming in La philosophie allemande de l’histoire, ed. Louis Carré

  and Quentin Landenne.

  2

  2

  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  Elliot Neaman

  H A L L E Y ’ S C O M E T I S the only known, short- period, naked- eye comet that

  humans can possibly observe twice in a lifetime. Ernst Jünger witnessed

  this celestial wonder in 1910 and then in 1986. He marched off to war

  in 1914 and lived long enough to see Germany reunified, passing on

  in 1998, a celebrated centenarian. In this chapter I outline the main

  turning points in Jünger’s long life and track his intellectual develop-

  ment. As a young man he was recognized as a leading figure of the

  nationalist Right in Germany on the basis of his war diaries and journal-

  istic efforts, but his authorial talents were broader and more profound.

  His importance lies in the evolution from young radical to an acute ob-

  server of Germany’s cataclysmic rise and fall under National Socialism,

  and then his role in the Federal Republic of Germany as a sophisticated

  voice of classical European conservatism, a sage, and critic of technolog-

  ical modernity.

  Early life

  Jünger was born 1895 in Heidelberg, the oldest of six children, two of

  whom did not survive infancy. Of his siblings, he was closest to his

  younger brother Friedrich- Georg, born in 1898. From his father, Ernst

  Georg, a chemist, he inherited the sharp analytical skills of a scientist, and

  from his mother, Karoline Lampl, artistic capacities and an eye for nat-

  ural beauty.1 He combined both these artistic and scientific capacities in

  his writing by developing a penchant for the stereoscopic gaze, whereby a

  23

  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  23

  third dimension is added to the normal vision of the left and right eye, a

  magical and synesthetic quality which he claims takes our understanding

  deeper into the observable phenomenon. A velvet carnation that emits the

  fragrance of cinnamon is stereoscopic, for example, because the nose both

  smells and tastes the qualities of spice simultaneously.2 One sense organ

  has to take over the function of another. Jünger may have physically expe-

  rienced synesthesia, or at least he was able to simulate the ability of having

  one sense organ take over the function of another in his literary opus.

  In his youth Jünger’s family moved from place to place, partly in

  search of a good school for Ernst, who daydreamed too much and got poor

  grades. In 1913, he struck out for his first genuine adventure. He diverted

  money given to him to pay for half a year’s food at school, boarded a train

  to Verdun, then to Marseilles, where he lied about his age and joined the

  French Foreign Legion. His father arranged for his release through the

  German Foreign Office, instructing the boy to have a photograph taken

  before leaving.

  The First World War

  On his return, the young man was promised a trip to Kilimanjaro if he

  finished school. This plan was interrupted the following year by the guns

  of August. He finished an emergency high- school degree, volunteered

  for service, and arrived at the Western Front by December. He quickly

  earned a reputation as a daring storm trooper. After suffering fourteen

  battle wounds, he received the Pour le Mérite on September 22, 1918, the

  highest honor awarded by the Prussian military, rarely given to soldiers of

  his tender age, or to the infantry, for that matter.

  The First World War was the single most defining experience of Jünger’s

  life. He carried a slim notebook with him at all times in battle, sixteen of

  which he filled with impressions and observations. At the urging of his fa-

  ther, he assembled these notes into a war memoir, titled In Stahlgewittern,

  literally In Storms of Steel but better known in English as Storm of Steel.

  This was first self- published in 1920, and then in several heavily revised

  new editions over the next decade (he even made revisions as late as 1961).

  The book was influenced by school books of that era, above all Homer

  and Dante, but also by Nietzsche. Educated German soldiers more often

  carried Thus Spake Zarathustra than the Bible into battle during World

  War I.3

  24

  24

  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  Storm of Steel provided a graphic yet accurate account of the experience

  of war, which Jünger presented in a heroic and masculine style. By con-

  trast, other war memoirs of that era were often romantic and internally

  homoerotic, such as The Wanderer in Two Worlds by Walter Flex, or pacifist

  and humanist, like Remarque’s best seller from the end of the 1920s, All

  Quiet on the Western Front. Jünger’s book and a series of postwar essays

  such as the “Battle as Inner Experience” (1922) and “Fire and Blood
”

  (1925) transformed the young soldier into a recognized leader of the “New

  Nationalists,” veterans who were intent on bringing their war experiences

  to bear on the heady politics of the fledgling Weimar Republic. These

  writers inflated war memories into mythic proportions to justify the enor-

  mous loss of life on the battlefields and to create a nationalist and collec-

  tively utopian narrative as an alternative to the unpopular republic, which

  was founded on liberal- democratic principles. Jünger described the expe-

  rience of battle with astounding clarity, but not without expressionist pa-

  thos. In his view, war brings men back into a natural, unchanging order,

  subject to elementary forces that reveal the primordial violent rhythms

  of life below the thin veneer of civilization. Some modern critics, such as

  Klaus Theweleit, have accused Jünger of thus legitimizing the embrace of

  death and destruction by means of a Fascist literary imagination.4

  The interwar period

  Jünger remained in the Reichswehr until 1923 when he left, disillusioned

  with the empty socializing and alcoholic excesses of his fraternizing

  officers. He enrolled in the natural sciences in Leipzig for the winter

  semester of 1923. There he joined the illegal paramilitary Freikorps and

  the legal Veterans’ group Stahlhelm and began writing for various na-

  tionalist newspapers. The years from 1923 to 1927 mark the high point

  of Jünger’s engagement with the young intellectuals whom Armin

  Mohler later identified as proponents of a “Conservative Revolution” in

  Germany.5

  In his 1950 book The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918– 1932,

  Mohler attempted to establish a common identity between many different

  kinds of writers and thinkers, from fairly obscure and now- forgotten

  journalists of the Weimar era to highly original thinkers who did not nec-

  essarily act or think in concert with one another, such as Carl Schmitt,

  Martin Heidegger, Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, and

  Hans Freyer. To add to the somewhat artificial nature of the “revolutionary”

  25

  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  25

  designation, Mohler included “father figures” from the nineteenth and

  early twentieth centuries.

  For Mohler, a common theme that characterized the Conservative

  Revolution was to pit the “ideas of 1914” against the “ideas of 1789.” For

  Jünger’s circle, the “ideas” of the 1914– 18 war meant an emancipation from

  liberal civilization and a return to the organic Volk (ethnic) community.

  The war had signaled the death knell for the nineteenth- century belief

  in progress. These young firebrands did not accept the old conservative

  desire to uphold the moral and judicial fundamentals of the state. They

  wanted instead to establish a charismatic base for politics outside demo-

  cratic institutions and looked for a figure like Louis Napoleon, whose ap-

  peal went beyond warring factions, classes, and parties. A social Darwinian

  influence allowed them to view world politics as a fight for existence in

  which a national collective either triumphed or was destroyed.6 Their cri-

  tique of parliamentary political systems follows in many ways the path laid

  out by Carl Schmitt in his seminal 1923 essay “The Crisis of Parliamentary

  Democracy.”7

  Jünger married Gretha von Jeinsen in 1925 and moved to Berlin with

  their infant son in 1927. He continued to engage in political journalism

  but moved increasingly away from the fixation on war and nationalism

  of his Leipzig years. In the new editions of Storm of Steel, for example,

  he removed the opening epigraph “Germany Lives and Germany shall

  not Perish.”8 His artistic eye shifted to the bustling metropolis whose vi-

  tality and energy were on display around the clock. In Berlin he wrote The

  Adventurous Heart, notes written down by “day and night.” The first edi-

  tion, published in 1928, and the second, very different version of 1938 has

  been called “surrealist,” but the approach was only loosely connected with

  André Breton’s famous movement of the same period. Karl- Heinz Bohrer

  has memorably labeled Jünger’s style an “aesthetics of shock,” since this

  book contained a phantasmagoria of scientific and poetic vignettes, a col-

  lage of wild associations and ghostly images that recalled the war- inspired

  art of surrealist and expressionist painters.9 The method was stereoscopic,

  a journey into magical sub- realms below everyday existence. A key term

  Jünger borrowed from the French was désinvolture, the casual and inno-

  cent observation of reality from a distance (as in Nietzsche’s Unschuld der

  Werdens).10

  As the National Socialists began their final ascent to power after win-

  ning 107 seats in the Reichstag in the elections of September 1930, Jünger

  distanced himself from the Nazi Party while advocating his own, in some

  2

  6

  26

  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  ways more radical, version of the nationalist revolution: authoritarian and

  ruthless, but not racist. He rejected the Nazi fixation with blood and soil.

  In 1927 he refused to accept an offer from Hitler of a seat in the Reichstag.

  When the Nazis published excerpts from Storm of Steel without permis-

  sion, he forbade any further use of his writings.11 The one expressly anti-

  Semitic tirade that came from his pen during this period was phrased in

  cultural terms: the Gestalt (form or contours) of Germans and Jews were

  as separate as “oil and water.”12

  During his last two years in Berlin he published two “proto- Fascist”

  works, The Total Mobilization ( Die totale Mobilmachung) and The Worker

  ( Der Arbeiter), both odd mixtures of social analysis, political polemic, and

  cultural pessimism. These books are often taken as evidence of Jünger’s

  role as a “pathbreaker” for National Socialism, but in fact, the Nazis used

  the title of the former solely as a powerful slogan, disregarding its contents,

  and rejected the esoteric metaphysics of the latter. Jünger’s vision of a

  brave new world, set forth in steel- cold prose in The Worker, was uncom-

  promising but also too global to be of use to the racially obsessed Nazi

  ideologues. Even worse, the Nazi ideologues took his ideas as heretical.

  Thilo von Trotha, a personal assistant to the Nazi chief ideologue Alfred

  Rosenberg, wrote in the party newspaper, just after The Worker appeared

  in print, that Jünger was “entering the zone of the head shot” since his

  work lacked any sense of racial biology and sacrificed the nationalist for a

  planetary perspective.13

  The Third Reich

  The threat from Trotha was not idle. The Gestapo searched Jünger’s apart-

  ment in early 1933, and Jünger began burning papers and letters from

  the previous decade. He now entered a period of “inner emigration,” re-

  maining in Germany and continuing to publish, but studiously avoiding

  the language that characterized writers who ingratiated themselves with

  the new regime. In November 1933 he rejected membership in the Nazi-
>
  aligned Prussian Academy of the Arts. In 1934 he published Leaves and

  Stones ( Blätter und Steine), a collection of his essays on language, travel,

  and philosophical topics that offered a stark contrast to the daily reality of

  the Third Reich as Hitler’s popularity soared to unprecedented heights.

  In 1939 he published The Marble Cliffs ( Die Marmorklippen), which has

  gone down in the history of the Third Reich as a subtle novel of oppo-

  sition, but the fact that it received the official imprimatur of the regime

  27

  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  27

  shows how successfully the writer was able to camouflage the tale,

  wrapped in an allegory. On the surface the fable tells of a peaceful agri-

  cultural people living contentedly on the shores of a large bay; they are

  increasingly threatened by primitive nomads from the hinterland and by

  the followers of an unscrupulous tyrant named the Head Ranger, whose

  thugs torture their enemies in a spooky camp called Köppelsbleek. The

  site is surrounded by the skulls and flayed skins of the victims. At the end

  of the novel, the Head Ranger conquers and destroys the entire lake area,

  while the two protagonists, modeled after Ernst himself and his father,

  Friedrich- Georg Jünger, are forced to flee. Jünger resisted the tendency

  to view the novel as an allegory about concentration camps and totalitar-

  ianism (the Head Ranger had similarities to Goering, who was in fact

  the “Imperial Forest Ranger” of Nazi Germany), since the fictional tyrant

  could have represented Stalin, Franco, Hitler, or any dictator of that era.

  Despite the framing of the story in the gothic horror style, many readers

  in the 1940s, both in and outside of Germany, interpreted the novel as an

  aristocratic and conservative critique of National Socialism.

  Soon after the war broke out in 1939, Jünger enlisted as a lieutenant

  and was promoted to captain. His troops were stationed first at the West

  Wall by the Maginot Line. Then came a lucky break— in April 1941 his reg-

  iment was ordered to occupied Paris. The Germans allowed the French

  to administer the metropolis, under supervision, so Jünger found him-

  self in the enviable position of enjoying the charms of the City of Light