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  in a position of near casual authority. He was even permitted to stroll

  through the streets and markets in civilian clothing. His official job was

  to censor the mail, but he was also surreptitiously to write reports for his

  superiors about internal conflicts between the German Army and the

  Nazi Party, in particular the SS, the SD, the embassy, and the Gestapo, all

  of which operated their own surveillance systems in Paris. He found an

  admirer in the aristocratic General Otto von Stülpnagel, and then a dis-

  tant cousin of the general, Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who succeeded

  Otto in February 1942. Through the latter, Jünger came into contact with

  officers involved in a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, centered around the

  legendary General Erwin Rommel.14 After the failed Stauffenberg plot of

  July 20, 1944, the SS made a sweep of the military command in Paris,

  but Jünger had kept enough distance from the plotters to avoid arrest. As

  Jean Cocteau (who socialized with Jünger in Paris) once wittily observed,

  under the occupation “some people had dirty hands, some people had

  clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”15

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  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  Jünger’s eldest son, his namesake Ernst, was killed in November 1944

  in the marble cliffs of Cararra, Italy. Ernst Jr. had expressed sentiments

  hostile to the regime and was denounced and arrested in January 1944.

  Jünger Sr. received permission to leave Paris in February and met with

  the authorities in Berlin, displaying his Pour le Mérite insignia ostenta-

  tiously across his chest. His son was allowed to return to military serv-

  ice but given a dangerous assignment in the Italian mountains. Jünger

  was never sure if his son had been shot by the enemy or murdered by

  the SS.16 His war diaries of the Second World War are written with cold,

  emotionless precision, except for the entries about his son’s death, which

  reflected the deep and enduring pain he felt all his life at the loss of his

  eldest son.

  In France, Jünger secretly kept notes that formed the basis for his later

  published war memoirs Emanations ( Strahlungen). These war diaries offer

  a unique perspective from “inside the Belly of the Leviathan,” as Jünger

  described his role in the Third Reich. Some critics have accused the writer of

  posing as a flâneur and dandy while others suffered. In one infamous scene,

  Jünger climbed up to the roof of the Hotel Raphael and, holding a glass of

  burgundy, observed a night bombing raid on Paris, as “its red towers and

  spires lay in stupendous beauty, like petals blown over in an act of deadly

  fertilization.”17 Whatever moral judgment one wishes to make about these

  aesthetics of violence, the diaries are indispensable as first- hand accounts of

  Paris under the German occupation and provide sharply observed portraits

  of Jünger’s contemporaries as they struggled with the apocalyptic destruc-

  tion of Germany and during the first years of its own, later, occupation.

  The postwar period

  The Paris Diaries from 1941 to early 1944 read like entries in the log of a

  sinking ship. The sections written after the summer of 1944 project the

  stark mood of a shipwreck. Messages in a bottle washed up on his shore

  as he gradually received news about friends, acquaintances, and relatives.

  Some alive, others barely alive after brutal treatment by the Russians in

  the eastern zone, others dead by fate or their own hand.

  On July 21, 1945, Jünger wrote in his diary, “The Conservative mind

  aims to conserve, even conserve his enemy, that is part of his nat-

  ural inclination.”18 This observation, written with bitterness, sums

  up the attitude of a writer entering a kind of second inner emigra-

  tion. The British, he notes, share a fundamental misunderstanding of

  2

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  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  29

  the German situation since 1918. “Unconditional surrender is the flip

  side of total war,” he notes, by inference comparing Churchill, Stalin

  and Roosevelt to Goebbels.19 He compares anti- German sentiments to

  anti- Semitism.”20

  Jünger travels through different dream worlds in these pages, actual

  dreams, images, and ideas from books, and mental journeys into the past.

  The trauma of the immediate past preoccupied him. In a series of ar-

  resting reflections on Hitler, he observed that he himself, like many in

  Germany, underestimated the demonic power that lifted the little nation-

  alist drummer to the heights of power and then self- destruction. Hitler

  was a “moon character,” who could reflect back to the German people

  their fears and desires in a way that the other Weimar politicians were

  incapable of.21 It is striking that he goes to great lengths to dissect the

  personalities of some leading Nazis, in particular Heinrich Himmler

  and Josef Goebbels, but says relatively little about the Holocaust. When

  he does, relativizing comparisons are offered, for example between the

  treatment of German Sudeten refugees to the tragic fate of the Jews in

  Germany,22 or examples of persecution from the Old Testament.23 On the

  other hand, he develops, around a decade and half before Hannah Arendt

  made the idea famous, the notion that some leading Nazis were extraor-

  dinarily mundane. Himmler was characterized by “penetrating bourgeois

  characteristics,” he observes, and “evil in the modern world shows up in

  the ordinary actions of a bureaucrat behind a desk.”24

  Politics make up only a fraction of these postwar diaries. Jünger often

  describes long walks in the moorlands around Kirchhorst, noting the

  changing seasons, discussing philosophy, quoting passages from esoteric

  books. He dwells on the daily hardships of the Germans under occupa-

  tion, the cold winters, the scavenging for food and basic necessities. In the

  end these are the reflections of a solitary man living in a world from which

  he feels both alienated and simultaneously deeply attached.

  Jünger hoped to make a comeback in the postwar period, despite

  having been placed on a literary blacklist, and despite his physical remote-

  ness from German cultural life. He had to face a number of obstacles. The

  reading public, especially youth, hungered for authors who were banned

  under National Socialism, especially American authors like Hemingway

  and Thomas Wolfe. Sartre and the French Existentialists were starting

  their conquest of intellectual life across Western Europe. Jünger had

  kept another work in his secret vault during the war: a long essay which

  he hoped would provide a vision for a peaceful postwar Europe that

  30

  30

  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  would put him back on the cultural map. He titled it simply The Peace

  ( Der Friede).

  Jünger viewed his own nationalist writings from the 1920s as his “Old

  Testament,” and works like The Peace as part of his new evangelical spirit.25

  They fit together: The Total Mobilization was just the flip side of The Peace,

  he wrote to Armin Mohler in 1947.26 He argued that in the wak
e of the

  two disastrous world wars, Europe’s future lay in overcoming nationalism

  through organic unity and integration. These ideas were fairly common

  after 1945, but Jünger’s conservative contribution was first to appeal to

  a return to Christianity as a solution to Europe’s problems, and second,

  quite contentiously, to relativize the question of war guilt, a topic widely

  discussed in public in this period by eminent figures such as the philoso-

  pher Karl Jaspers, the theologian Martin Niemöller, and the psychologist

  Carl Jung. Jünger objected to laying blame on any one side or nation. This

  was an outlier position in the debates about German guilt, and The Peace

  did not play a major role in the public discourse. In the larger context,

  Jünger’s theological turn after 1945 was an outsider position as well, or it

  could have been viewed as part of the deradicalization of European con-

  servatism,27 since the radical Right in Europe after the war was trending

  in an anti- Christian direction.

  Jünger held high hopes for a major novel he had been working on in

  those years. Heliopolis is a dystopian work about a power struggle between

  plebeians and an old aristocracy. In many ways it was a roman à clef about

  the period of National Socialism as seen from occupied Paris by using

  obscure designations to refer to historical figures and events. The novel

  contains many theological diversions, a result of an intense reading of the

  Bible that Jünger had begun in occupied Paris. The reception of Heliopolis

  was disappointing. Even his friend Carl Schmitt, writing in his diary in

  1950, displayed irritation with Jünger’s apparent religiosity and his pro-

  clivity to mask history with “pseudo- mythological” descriptions.28

  In 1950 Jünger moved one last time. He was offered an eighteenth-

  century baroque villa by Freiherr Schenk zu Stauffenberg, a distant relative

  of the coup plotter against Hitler. The new home was in the small village

  of Wilflingen in Upper Swabia, a few kilometers from the nearest train

  station and post office. Jünger became the famous recluse of Wilflingen,

  where he would live out the many years left in his long life.

  In hindsight, Jünger’s turn to theology in the late 1940s misled his

  readers. He could best be described in religious terms as a neopagan,

  who considered Christianity just one interesting variant of Neoplatonism

  31

  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  31

  (though at the end of his life he did convert from Protestantism, his religion

  at birth, to Catholicism). A little- read novel from 1953, Visit to Godenholm

  ( Besuch auf Godenholm), signaled his interest in mind- expanding drugs,

  esoterica, and mystery religions, which would remained a lifelong pas-

  sion and made him a cult author in the psychedelic 1960s. The novel was

  written under the influence of LSD, which Jünger had imbibed under

  medical supervision with the drug’s inventor, Albert Hoffman, in a visit

  to Bottmingen, Switzerland, in February 1951.29 Jünger’s project was to re-

  cover the truths embedded in both past religions and metaphysics, which

  amounted to a rebuke of the positivist and materialist spirit of the postwar

  rebuilding period.

  The early 1950s saw a series of works from Jünger’s pen that ex-

  panded on this antimodernist tendency. In 1950 he published an essay

  called “Over the Line” (“Über die Linie”), dedicated to Martin Heidegger

  on his sixtieth birthday, in which he echoes Heidegger’s concerns

  about technology. As the economic boom was taking off in Germany,

  Jünger viewed feverish production by despiritualized workers and the

  increasing specialization of the human and natural sciences as signs

  of an ever- diminishing ability to grasp the totality of life as proof of the

  growing nihilism of the age.30 In 1951 he published The Forest Passage

  ( Der Waldgang), which amounts to instructions for passive resistance to

  the modern condition. The individual walks in a metaphorical forest,

  taking her own path, to escape domination by the forces of technology,

  the omnipresent Leviathan state, and the banality of modern culture.

  Religion, counter- Enlightenment thought, and myth are all put in

  the service of subverting the corrosive effects of instrumental ration-

  ality, which, he claims, undergirds all modern totalitarian forms of

  government.31

  Although Jünger could appear as a conservative defender of the West—

  for example in The Gordian Knot ( Der gordische Knoten) from 1953, which

  pits the freedom of the West against the despotism of the East,32 and even

  supporting a “World State” (the title of another essay from 1960)— his po-

  litical writing always contained a consistent strain of antidemocratic sus-

  picion. A good example is a little- known essay he wrote in 1956 about the

  eighteenth- century French writer Rivarol, a defender of the monarchy and

  a fervent critic of the French Revolution.33 Jünger identified with Rivarol’s

  rebellion against French society and viewed himself in a similar position

  of revolt against the imposed laws of the occupying posers in postwar

  Germany.

  32

  32

  C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S

  On March 29, 1965, Jünger turned seventy. He began a new set of

  diaries, which he maintained until the last days of his life. He observed

  the world from a distance, as a naturalist would view insects (he was a

  respected amateur entomologist). The day after the Berlin Wall fell he cas-

  ually remarks that he expected Germany to reunify, just not in his lifetime.

  Nothing more is said about European politics in his diary for the rest of

  the autumn of 1989, a revolutionary period during which the world held

  its breath as communism fell in state after state.34

  In his old age Jünger saw his time increasingly through a posthistorical

  lens. For the European Right after World War II, thinkers such as Martin

  Heidegger, Arnold Gehlen, Carl Schmitt, and others, in various versions

  of the same idea, postulated that the postwar world would be characterized

  by the decline of Europe as a world power and the rise to dominance of

  technological systems that would expand to the entire globe.35 The “end of

  history” implied that after the demise of European culture, intellectuals

  could only take stock of what had been handed down.

  Jünger captured this mood in his 1949 introduction to the war journals,

  in which he postulated that the Copernican quest for ordering the cosmos,

  and the diary as a modern literary form, fall together chronologically. They

  have in common “the bifurcation of mind from object, the author from

  the world.”36 The First World War marked the end of history, because it

  represented the demise of heroic action in a pretechnological sense. The

  end of history, he once said, can be equated with the end of the aristocratic

  order.37

  In his own science fiction novel, Eumeswil from 1977, posthistorical

  themes are omnipresent. The protagonist is a young historian, Michael

  Venator, who operates computers with databanks full of sources on the<
br />
  history of past civilizations, and through a kind of virtual reality can trans-

  port himself back in time. The protagonist projects medieval aristocratic

  values and Faustian personal perseverance in the face of defeat.

  Later reception

  In October 1982 the conservative Christian Democratic Party came to

  power under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The end of the social democratic

  era was viewed as a turn ( Wende) toward soft patriotism and an attempt to

  gradually emerge from the shadows of the Fascist past, thus replacing the

  politics of reparation and shame with a larger view of German history and

  of Germany’s place in the world that was not reducible to the twelve years

  3

  Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

  33

  of Nazi rule. Kohl famously said he had been born with the clemency of

  a late birth (he was born in 1930). Kohl turned to Jünger as an apposite

  symbol of this fundamental shift in Germany’s view of itself from a con-

  servative perspective.

  In that same month of 1982, Jünger was awarded the Goethe Prize, the

  most prestigious literary award in Germany, by the conservative city ad-

  ministration of Frankfurt am Main. The bestowal of the prize was greeted

  by howls of protest not just from hostile commentators across Germany

  but also by street demonstrations in the city of Frankfurt on the day of the

  ceremony. According to the critics, this award in the name of Germany’s

  most hallowed humanist should not be bestowed on a writer who had

  “paved the way” for the rise of Fascism in Germany.

  A decade later, as Jünger approached his hundredth birthday, this

  unsympathetic sentiment had shifted toward a more favorable appreci-

  ation of an Olympian figure in whom many Germans could take pride.

  He was also honored with a visit in Wilflingen by Chancellor Kohl and

  French president François Mitterand on July 20, 1993, the anniversary of

  the failed Stauffenberg plot against Hitler.38 Jünger still had many critics,

  but the German public was prepared, some grudgingly, others enthusias-

  tically, to accept that Ernst Jünger’s lifework was pan- European, a century

  long, and that his talents could be seen as on par, or at least approaching,

  the likes of the almost universally adored Goethe.

  Conclusion

  As Jünger’s lifework has become historicized, it is clear that his influence