Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 7
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”
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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