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ERNST JÜNGER 1895-1998
Essayist and novelist Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg in 1895. He served with distinction in the Great War as an officer of Stormtroops, and wrote of his experiences in In Stahlgewittern, 1920 (first published in English as Storm of Steel, 1929). Translating this formative experience into the politics of peacetime, Jünger became the advocate of an extreme, authoritarian and militaristic nationalism. Although he flirted with the Nazis for a time, Jünger did not accept their racial reductivism and was more typically associated with the Conservative Revolutionaries, editing the Stahlhelm publication, Die Standarte. Although Jünger was a radical nationalist who shared the Nazi aim of a nationalist-workerist synthesis, he was also an elitist who disdained the sordid vulgarity of political allegiance and organisation, in favour of the dilettante politics of the salon, and, ultimately, internal exile. Another factor which distinguished Jünger from the Nazis - and the rest of the Völkisch romantics - was his ideological embrace of technology. In Storm of Steel and other early works, he had examined, but failed to resolve, the dichotomy between the importance of human will and the power of mechanised warfare. In Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (The Worker: Mastery and Form),1932, he combined these elements as 'the will to utilise technology'. Metaphysical in tone, Der Arbeiter recognised the worker as the Gestalt (figure, pattern, destiny) of the coming age, and posited a universal society of worker-soldier technocrats in which technology has rendered anachronistic both ideological conflict and nationalism. The 'heroic realism' that would form the ethos of this society appears to parallel T E Hulme's mystification of the technocratic. Technology, particularly through the medium of film, would reduce the human significance of the masses. Although totalitarian in concept, the "otherness" offered by what we would now call 'virtual reality' would render dictatorship unnecessary. The technocratic elite, however, would even operate with some degree of autonomy, self-regulating units in a beehive society. In all this, Jünger's concept seems more suggestive of the postmodern era than of the command economies of industrial/second wave society. The book was welcomed by Ernst Niekisch's National Bolsheviks but generally regarded as Fascistic by the Left and Communistic by the Right, Jünger's aristocratic elitism could never really mesh with the mob ideologies of the Twentieth Century, and Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939 (translated as On the Marble Cliffs, 1947) reflected his disillusion with totalitarianism. I have only read this book in translation, but I was immediately struck by its rich baroque tapestry, its poetry, its detail, and its references to flora and fauna which were a major interest of Jünger's life. A Göring-Stalin figure (the Chief Ranger) and a Goebbels figure (Braquemart) are hinted at, but there is no direct political concordance. Rather, Jünger presents types and thus a critique of all totalitarianisms. Although remarkable for its anti-Nazi stance, it also shares the very passive fatalism that Jünger condemned. Jünger served in the German army again during the Second World War but spent most of his time in Paris where his acquaintances included Jean Cocteau, Céline, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri de Montherlant, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and François Mauriac. Jünger's critics castigate him for his detachment - particularly at that time - but Jünger had always made a virtue of this désinvolture as an assertion of his individual freedom. The wartime descent into barbarism and the Nazi determination to drag Germany down with them, eventually pushed the old German officer corps into revolt. Jünger was a party to that revolt and wrote and circulated an essay, Der Friede (The Peace, 1941-44), in which he recognised the failure of Nazi Germany to unite Europe by force, and called on the youth of Europe to rally to what John King describes as a "European renewal on the basis of a new post-nihilist theology". Despite his tactical adoption of Christian tradition as a unifying and stabilising counterweight to the Nazi intoxication, Jünger's ethos does not seem to have been anything other than neo-pagan. Jünger was on the fringe of the bomb-plotters but escaped retribution, possibly because of Hitler's respect for his war writings. Jünger's son, however, was killed in Italy whilst serving in a penal unit for having criticised the régime. In the postwar period Jünger refused to participate in the de-Nazification process, and the Nazi ban on Jünger was succeeded by a four-year ban from publishing in the British Occupied Zone. In his postwar writings Jünger turned against the ‘Titans’ of technology. Some of his work foreshadowed postmodernist theory, most notably his novel about simulacra and the hyper-real, Gläserne Bienen, 1957 (Translated as The Glass Bees, 1961), and Eumeswil (1977) which apparently rejects a metanarrative in favour of a complex intertextuality. Jünger was received better in France than in Germany and became something of a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation, appearing at the Verdun ceremony in 1984 alongside President François Mitterand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, both of whom greatly admired him. The experience of the trenches, which had fueled his aggressive nationalism of the 20s and 30s, had come full circle. Ernst Jünger died on 17 February 1998. Rik - 13 March 1998 INTERNAL LINKS
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The death last month of Ernst Jünger at the age of 102 precipitated
the publication of this page ahead of schedule. I began to study
his work only a few months ago, and have been hampered by the difficulty
of obtaining his books in English translation. Accordingly, this
premature and brief resumé relies almost entirely on secondary sources.
The best Jünger resource on the Web is 
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