Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945

by Thomas R. Nevin

For most of his life, Ernst Jünger, one of Europe's leading twentieth-century writers, has been controversial. Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War, he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jünger in English, Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writer’s first fifty years, from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jünger, a man who has been extolled, despised, denounced, and admired throughout his lifetime, Ernst Jünger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is, if uncomfortably, represented by him.
Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany’s conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler’s assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger’s untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger’s profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism.
Winner of Germany’s highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.

Genres: Biography, History, World War II, World War I, Germany, European History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 24, 1996

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nevin produces a perhaps overly generous but nevertheless useful account of one of the last century's most important European intellectuals, giving powerful insights into the 'German mind'.

Of course, Junger was an exceptional - a hysterical personality hidden behind an icy persona. His morbid and intense fanaticism presented in cool and refined terms, the aesthete of collectivised death.

The book only covers half his life. This would mean the story of a young man in most cases but here covers five decades at the heart of a terrible history. Junger's responses to them have things to tell us.

The master works are two-fold - immediate post-war and then polished memoirs of what a fanatic feels and does in mechanised trench warfare and diaries of Nazi occupation from a consummate aesthete.

The first, notably 'Storm of Steel', created an hysterical mythology that undoubtedly helped fuel the Radical Right capture of power in Germany in 1933.

The second, the 'Paris Diaries', should be reissued as an insight of immense value into what it means to occupy and what it means to resist.

But how to evaluate this important figure who represented the German haute bourgeoisie's adoption of faux-aristocratic elitism and its subsequent conversion, after trauma, into conservative revolutionism?

The writings in the interwar era bear all the hall marks of a form of literary post-traumatic stress response - the violence and morbidity packaged into grand schemes detached from all observable reality.

During that period, like many committed ideologues, Junger would find that national socialism was somehow not quite right, too demotic, too pragmatic, not cosmic enough perhaps.

He entered into what we now identify as National Bolshevik circles - the Left critics within the broad national socialist ideology associated with Niekisch and the Strassers.

Junger - a minor political figure as much as he was a major cultural figure - was by-passed by the Night of the Long Knives as he escaped the terror after the July bomb plot. He was both lucky and protected.

In the 1930s, his aestheticism dominates. He writes the spectacularly effective and misunderstood 'Auf den Marmorklippen' and sees through Hitler early but his politics remain fundamentally militarist.

Back in military service in the early 1940s, without changing his radical conservative views, merely adapting them, aesthetic distaste for the modern techno-brutality of demotic Hitlerism grows.

Does this redeem him? That case is hard to make. He is complicit. His aestheticism of elite domination, his disregard for the ordinary person, his sentiment - all these remain.

All he does is write beautifully and with acute observational skill (to the delight or horror of other highly educated intellectuals) about monstrosities and what the rich do on their holidays.

As a result of his brutal and cold honesty, there is far more to be learned about the human condition, however, than there is from the worthy whining and dishonesty of liberals.

The only place where this author's writings (which are not covered after 1945) filled me with an almost physical repulsion was at the very end when he discovers 'religion'.

Nevin tries his best to make this 'turn' interesting but the effect is part deadening and part visceral gut-wrenching disgust. In the midst of hell, with defeat on the horizon, he turns intellectual coward.

But the malign political influence does not stop with this intense new round of hogwash - it starts all over again.

We have written elsewhere of the attempt to whitewash the conservative nationalist hog in today's Europe. Here we see more of the origins of that whitewash in the 'programme' for post-war Europe.

Junger's interwar influence is still to be found reborn, alongside Evola's, in the rise of the political soldier and National Bolshevik activists' dabbling in Kiev and the undergrowth of European Rightism.

What is not so well appreciated is the influence of the wartime conservative nationalist idea of a united Europe based on 'Christian' values - little more than a ploy to win back the alienated occupied.

Junger's programme was not alone in this but it was part of the implicit strategy of the July plotters. Nevin's description of its main thesis is worth quoting at length.

... Junger seeks an authoritarian state that will unify Europe. He cites as visionaries of this union Richelieu, Cromwell [sic], and Bismarck, champions of statism but not certain friends of individual conscience. Suggesting that a democracy can be both authoritarian and liberal, he likens the state's security and the individual's prosperity to a mussel: hard outside so that the pearl may grow. .... He envisages an imperial state in tandem with a virtually established church, a tableau that conjures authoritarian Prussia.

We must always remember that Junger is rarely an original thinker on politics. What he does is take the general belief of his broader circle and the National Right and extend it into imaginative extremity.

He does this with the enthusiasm for war in 1914 and its ideology of the disciplined violence. And with the demand for integralist fascist order on the 1930s. And now with conservative survival.

The model for Europe, nurtured in the viper's nest of the German conservative elite and amongst complicit church-goers, the lesser evil to the satanic hatreds of national socialism, is that of today's Right.

The demand for peace - the leitmotif of the pro-European movement - is still cast on the Right in terms developed before 1914 by anti-Bolshevist conservatives under conditions of impending defeat.

This is the ultimate 'detournement' - turning defeat into ultimate victory. One wonders if the distaste of German liberal intellectuals for Junger is partly awareness of his partial victory.

The implication is that German violence can only be straight-jacketed by Europeanism and the Church (to the Right) and can never be a free liberal and democratic nation in its own right.

I want to praise Nevin for one minor innovation. When he cites an article or a book at the back he describes what is in it and whether he thinks it stands up to scrutiny or not.

I wish more academic authors would do this. It helps us get a better sense of controversy and the possible differences of opinion on how a work is to be interpreted. Junger must be seen in this way.

Finally, I think this book reminds us why books should never be banned or forgotten. Junger's work is very important and not as an 'object lesson' (as left-liberals might like it to be).

They are important because they are emotionally and intellectually 'true'. The blood-lust, grand schemes, detachment, controlled hysteria and fantastic essentialism are true to what we are as a species.

The paradox is that Junger is in good faith about laying out his limitations and bad faith. It is no accident that Celine and Bloy appear in the pages on occupation.

We need to know not only what we are but what we could be and therefore what others could be if we give them authority and power. Junger is what we all could be under certain conditions.

I find I cannot relate to some aspects of this conservative extremist but that he does speak to other aspects of me as possibly no other writer can.

Junger dances around the dark demonic without ever becoming quite satanic himself. His world visions are fusions of pessimism and dark hope, clear observation and the fantastic.

At one point, some passage or other triggers thoughts of the cosmic despair of a Ligotti. At another, he appears to get into the very heart of what it is to be compassionate, almost by accident.

But remember that the story ends in 1945. There is another 53 years of life to go - some may consider that long and full life mere proof of a godless universe but his work remains of inestimable value.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sometimes dense but fair and insightful examination of Jünger’s life and work (mostly his work) from his youth to the immediate aftermath of World War II. This is not precisely a biography—Jünger’s personal and family life is almost invisible for much of the book—but it does closely track his professional activities whether as a soldier or writer as well as the development, revision, and, occasionally, the abandonment of his ideas between and during the wars.

To my surprise, I was most taken with the chapter on World War II, especially Jünger’s turn toward Christianity through years of Bible reading during the war. At the time of Nevin’s writing, Jünger’s diaries from this time were not widely available, but have subsequently been published in English translation. I'm going to have to read those, soon.

I couldn’t quite rate this five stars because it was very, very heady in a few passages, with Nevin—a scholar of classical philosophy—getting lost in the technical minutiae of Ideas a few times too often. (Though, to be fair, his prose never descends into the polysyllabic word salad of a lot of contemporary philosophy.) Nevin is also, perhaps in an attempt to seem extra scrupulous given the way Jünger has been misrepresented, is a little obtuse in his readings of Jünger sometimes, especially imputing a lack of feeling to some passages of his diaries where it seems clear to me Jünger is expressing something deeper than mere sentimental language. But these places are few, and his concluding chapter is excellent.

Helpful for giving a coherent shape to Junger’s intellectual development and the first half of his extraordinarily long life. Recommended.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you know anything about Jünger, you'll see it again herein. This was a "best-of-the-year" recommendation by A.S. Byatt - which says more about her than about the competent Mr. Nevin.

[Brian Dougherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One might say his only company, his true ancestry by temperament, lies with the so-called pre-Socratics..."

Such an excellent and succinct summary of this complex man.