j in the 20s, antisemitism

[John King <fs6y097@public.uni-hamburg.de>]

Now, onto Günter's contribution...

I think we are lucky that we have a relatively low noise ratio on the list.
Probably because you have to join it to make a contribution, which is not
the case with USENET or perl-script based bulletin board systems. 

>Internet public. It is not only hormonal malfunctions but also current 
>ideological disorders (in February we encountered, I guess, the leftist,
now we 
>seem to have the feminist variety among us) that makes people flock to EJ to 

Ideological disorder strikes to me as a bit strong. Much more a case of
juvenilia - I would have no problem with left-wing/feminist critiques of
Jünger on the list. It would brighten things up a bit :-) Just wait for my
post-modernist reading of "Sturm"!

>time, but when EJ published ÜBER NATIONALISMUS UND JUDENFRAGE (Süddeutsche 
>Monatshefte, September 1930) he added, as I see it, respectability to that 
>attitude. Even if its content was not very different from the mainstream
>thinking 

Just to clarify for those who don't know this article, frequently cited by
J's opponents, it ends with the infamous lines:

"Im gleichen Maße jedoch, in dem der deutsche Wille an Schärfe und Gestalt
gewinnt, wird für den Juden auch der leiseste Wahn, in Deutschland Deutscher
sein zu können, unvollziehbarer werden, und er wird sich vor seiner letzten
Alternative sehen, die lautet: in Deutschland entweder Jude zu sein oder
nicht zu sein."

rough translation:

"To the same degree that German will grows in focus and form it will become
ever harder for the Jew to realise even the slightest delusion of being a
German in Germany. He will find himself faced with his last choice - either
to be a Jew in Germany or not to be."

>of that time our post-Auschwitz sensibility makes that text painful reading 
>today. 

Indeed. The text is more complex. For instance J specifically rejects the
metaphors of (e.g.) bacterial infection that characterised so much of Nazi
and völkisch antisemitism. His rhetoric is against what he calls the
"Zivilisationsjude" who is said to be little more than the product of
"liberalism". He argues that the liberalism attempts to deny the existence
of the Jews by erasing human difference. A strong German state with
accompanying sense of patria is said to automatically mean the existence of
Jews, who deny that Germany is their Fatherland. J goes on to argue (or,
rather state) that:

"In dem Augenblick, jedoch, in dem der Jude als eine eigentümliche und
eigenen Gesetzen unterworfene Macht unverkennbar wird, hört er auf, am
Deutschen virulent und damit gefährlich zu sein."

="At precisely that moment, however, in which the Jew becomes unmistakable
as a particular force subject to his own laws he ceases to infest [bessere
Übersetzung für am D. virulent sein?] the German and thus ceases to be
dangerous."

in other words, a (Zionist?) recognition of difference would diffuse the
situation. 

Although the article is, like most of J's journalism, full of contradictions
amongst it big words, and is bathed in anti-semitic sentiment it would be
foolish to read it as a manifesto for Auschwitz. But it remains explosive.

>arrogant claim to explain the world, world history and the world of the
future in 
>one fell swoop. 

A bit like Marx and Lenin :-) Such meta-narratives are characteristic of
modernity's thinking on history. That they no longer hold is one of the
manifold dimensions of the debate on postmodernism.

I see the Jünger of the 20s desperately trying to reconstruct centered and
coherent accounts of the world, the pinnacle of which was probably "Der
Arbeiter" as he cooled down from his nationalistic rhetoric. But contrast to
"Das abenteuerliche Herz".

>SCHERE project, a close reading and ideological discussion of DER ARBEITER. 
>Anyone on the List interested?

Yes. Me. In just over a couple of months I'll be trying to get a
dissertation chapter on it together and any exchanges on it would be most
welcome.

Best wishes,

John
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John King
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