>Markus Schopmeyer reminds us that Ernst Jünger wrote passionate >words hailing the Nazi "revolution," glorifying the Swastika and >welcoming the "concentration of will" in the Dictator. Shameful What is really interesting (for the somewhat dispassionate literary/cultural scholar, such as myself ;-) is not so much that formulation, but the words around it, to whit: "Die echte Revolution hat nocht gar nicht stattgefunden, sie marschiert unaufhaltsam heran. Sie ist keine Reaktion, sonder eine wirkliche Revolution mit all ihren Kennzeichen und Äußerungen, ihre Idee ist die völkische, zu bisher nicht gekannter Schärfe geschliffen, ihr Banner das Hakenkreuz, ihre Ausdrucksform die Konzentration des Willens in eine einzige Punkt - die Diktatur! *** [meine Sternchen - JK] Sie wird ersetzen das Wort durch die Tat, die Tinte durch das Blut, die Phrase durch das Opfer, die Feder durch das Schwert. ***" [Völkischer Beobachter, Unterhaltungsbeilage, 23/24 September 1923] = "The genuine revolution has not even taken place yet - it is marching onwards unstoppably. It is not reaction, rather a real revolution with all its characteristics and manifestations - its Idea is the [racialist-populist], ground to unprecedented sharpness, its banner is the swastika, its expressive form the concentration of the will in a single point - dicatorship. It will replace the word with the deed, ink with blood, phrases with sacrifice, the pen with the sword." [maybe not the best translation, but ok for a five minute effort!] What is most interesting here is not the opportunity to go and point the finger at Jünger - we all know, hopefully, that he was a leading extreme-right publicist. Rather, it is the ***explicit rejection of literary writing*** And that some seven months after "Sturm" was published in the "Hannoverscher Kurier". "Sturm" was a literarily advanced, multi-layered, multi-perspectival novel about a writer, about writing, about literature in modernity and about the impossibility of adopting fixed positions. What I want to know is why J turned from such proto-post-modernism to such an outrageously fascist position in such a short space of time? I think he just wasn't ready for dealing with uncertainty and took the decionistic/actionistic way out by consciously trying to eliminate that part of him which constantly relativised and problematised certainties. And this he did more radically than he had attempted in "Stahlgewittern" or "Kampf". That he turned to the Right rather than the Left is probably due to his military and bourgeois conservative background. I do not believe that is was pre-programmed. [as a point of comparison, the Expressionist poet J. R. Becher and later first Minister of Culture of the DDR went through a similar phase of total disorientation and spent a good deal of time reading Spengler before suddenly discovering Soviet Marxism which clicked better with him.] >The time was 1923. Jünger was 28, a much wounded and much >decorated hero of World War I, possessed of a militarist spirit, I do not believe Jünger was "possessed of a militarist spirit" - rather he was constantly trying to construct himself as though he were. Read even "Kampf" slightly askance and the thing falls apart in the face of the absurdity J experienced on the Western Front. Ok, enough on that front for today, John =================================================================== John King Peterstraße 39b D-20355 Hamburg Tel: +49 (040) 35 11 78 ===================================================================
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.