long thesis abstract

[John King <john.king@st-johns.oxford.ac.uk>]

More details of my thesis - shameless self-promotion, I know ;-)

JK

Writing and Rewriting the First World War: Ernst Jünger and
the Crisis of the conservative Imagination, 1914-25

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

John King, St. John's College, Trinity Term 1999.


This thesis represents a substantial re-assessment of Ernst Jünger's
earliest work. It presents the first scholarly analysis of his manuscript
war diary (1914-18) which became available as part of his then Vorlaß in
1996. Furthermore, it offers a reading of his texts on the First World War
from a theoretical perspective that has never before been attempted in
Jünger research and shows how they can be read as exemplary documents of
what I shall term the crisis of the 'conservative imagination' of
'classical modernity'.  Jünger has been one of the most controversial
German authors of this century.

After some introductory comments in Chapter 1, I examine the secondary
literature relating to the First World War and the issues of
(post)-modernity in Chapter 2. Here I show that there are three
significant gaps in the research despite its volume: first, there has been
no substantial research on Jünger's manuscript war diary (1914-18);
second, most research has tended to create a coherent account of Jünger
and to overlook the persistent contradictions, breaks and lacunae in his
early war books; third, the research which does look at Jünger in the
context of modernity and modernism either neglects the war texts, or takes
insufficient account of more general theoretical debates, or ignores the
specific historical circumstances under which the texts were written, or
does both of the latter.

Consequently, in Chapter 3 I address these theoretical debates and
historical contexts in an interdisciplinary attempt to establish the axes
of my argument. I begin by defining classical modernity as a cultural
phenomenon consisting of three main elements: first, the privileging of
the monadic, autonomous subject; second, the assumption that science and
instrumental rationality could known, represent and control the wolrd; and
third, the construction of universalising meta-narratives. I then examine
the historical experience of socio-economic modernisation in Germany and
show how in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, modernity was
beginning to enter a period of crisis as the dynamics of social and
cultural change subverted its foundational assumptions. As a result of
urbanisation and rationalisation the individual subject increasingly
experienced the world as fragmented anomie (Durkheim), or was subjected to
a 'stählernes Gehäuse' (Weber). Furthermore, contemporary philosophy,
physics, psychology, linguistics and historiography undermined the
assumptions of classical modernity even more, especially for those
intellectuals who were responsive to them. Their wide variety of responses
to the resultant sense of cultural crisis is known as modernism. One
aspect of this response, and it was shared with substantial sections of
the German population, was a yearning for war and I draw on Georg Heym,
Ernst Wilhelm Lotz and Ernst Stadler as pre-War examples before showing
how Otto Dix, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann welcomed the outbreak of
war as a rejuvenating force that would restore an allegedly lost
authenticity. Nevertheless, as I show with reference to military
histories, such a hope was profoundly misplaced since the experience of
the War actually intensified the sense that the values of classical
modernity were in a state of crisis. Assumptions about the autonomous self
and the knowability of the world together with a faith in totalising
meta-narratives were destroyed by the extremity of trench-warfare on the
Western Front. The dislocation felt everywhere by veterans was experienced
in an even more extreme way by subalterns in a defeated and revolutionary
Germany. In order to provide points of comparison with my subsequent
analysis of Jünger, I examine the responses to the War of a number of
representative German artists and intellectuals. Lotz's letters trace
enthusiasm, disillusion and then a stoic doggedness. Stramm's poetry and
letters reveal the deconstructive effect of his attempts to retain control
of his language and a celebration of the Frontsoldat. Franz Marc's letters
home reveal a mind struggling to re-formulate interpretory
meta-narratives. Fritz von Unruh's novel Opfergang reveals an astonishing
affinity with 'soldatischer Nationalismus' despite its pacifist surface
text. Hugo Ball's conversion to Catholicism and Johannes R. Becher's to
Marxism illustrate the tendency of some intellectuals to chose extreme
solutions, whilst Freud's reassessment of human nature involves an attempt
to re-theorise modernity in the light of the War. I conclude by looking
again at Dix. I end the chapter by arguing that although the war
experience had destroyed the assumptions of classical modernity, it
nevertheless generated attempts on the part of artists and intellectuals
to rebuild this modernity. It is this persistent desire to reinstate
classical modernity that I term the 'conservative imagination'. But
because the horror of the trench experience had produced a deconstructive
impulse that resisted such attempts and many responses to the War involved
ambivalence, contradiction and fissures that continued to deconstruct the
assumptiosn of classical modernity.

I then use this context in Chapter 4 to evolve a new analysis of the
available biographical material. I begin by showing how Jünger
internalised classical modern assumptions through family and schooling and
how he attempted to reassert his individual autonomy through literature,
the Wandervögel, the Foreign Legion and finally the German Army. Using
published letters from the early 1920s I then show how Jünger, having seen
service as a junior officer in the major battles of the Western Front,
suffered from a sense of fragmentation and disorientation with which he
attempted to come to terms by pursuing conflicting strategies in an
attempt to recentre his ego and regain a sense of certainty. I argue that
the biographical sources give the impression of a fragmented conservative
imagination struggling to re-establish the assumptions of classical
modernity but which, under the pressure of the war experience, was unable
to do so satisfactorily. Consequently, I conclude, we should expect to
find evidence of exactly the same sense of fragmentation and
deconstructive energy in the war texts which I examine in chronological
order over the remainder of the thesis.

It is within this same frame of reference that I analyse Jünger's
manuscript war diary in Chapter 5. I begin by arguing that the project of
diary writing in general and Jünger's attempts to produce a closed
narrative of his war experience in particular are embedded in the cultural
assumptions of classical modernity inasmuch as they seek to confirm the
autonomous subject and the recordability of the world around him. Given
its form, however, I argue that the diary is also eminently placed to
trace the fragmentation of the subject — particularly given the
circumstances under which it was written. My analysis proper begins with
an account of Jünger's precarious attempts to maintain his position as
heroic subject in an understandable and knowable environment. We see him
attempting to compensate for the passivity of positional warfare by
searching out dangerous patrols or applying to the Air Force, obsessed
with becoming a heroic subject even as he realises the enormity of the
changes wrought by industrialised war-making. We see him attempting to
construct a hermetically sealed text which diligently records the present
and the contamination of this space by his personal past. We see his
clashes with his superiors and growing cynicism with regard to official
ideology. We see further disruptions of his closed text through increasing
intertextuality and the excitement he feels when his troops inflict a
decisive tactical defeat on a British patrol in 1917. The instability
generated by these elements is, however, relatively minor for the war
diary contains elements which disrupt the text more seriously. I examine a
number of entries where Jünger rails explicitly against the destruction
and absurdity wrought by the War and his own lack of freedom. I show how
his attitude towards conventional society oscillated wildly. I read his
depictions of the natural world as a further disruption of his classical
modern assumptions. Finally, I focus on a number of gaps in the text —
where pages have been removed, entries deleted or narration refused —
which I read as indices of a critical instability where the project of his
conservative imagination has broken down completely. Thus, I conclude that
the war diary involves powerful deconstructive energies that were
generated by the war experience. Over the remaining chapters I trace the
effects of these energies on Jünger's published texts dealing with the
War.

In Chapter 6, I examine In Stahlgewittern1 (1920) and begin by drawing on
a number of remarks in the manuscript war diary to shed some new light on
the genesis of the book. On my reading, Jünger was attempting to produce a
textual war memorial, or in other words, that his text was intended to be
what Nietzsche described as 'monumentale Historie'. According to
Nietzsche, such writing must repress its knowledge of the complexities and
ambivalence of the past which then operates as dangerous, potentially
deconstructive element below the heroic surface content. I then explore
the extent of Jünger's redactional work on his original diary which, I
argue, he undertook according to his monumental agenda and I also show how
this agenda is consistently undermined by a whole series of contradictory
elements with the result that the book continually deconstructs itself.

In Chapter 7, I undertake the first substantial analysis of two articles
Jünger wrote for the Militärwochenblatt (1920 and 1921) and show how these
are trapped in two conflicting strategies used by the conservative
imagination to reinstate its cultural assumptions. Thus, Jünger both
privileges the human and heroic in an attempt to recentre the subject —
which was no longer appropriate given his recognition of the changed
nature of battle — and imagines a flawless machine utopia of battle in
which the world is once more orderable but with the subject reduced to an
intelligent part of an information machine. I conclude that these articles
show how radical Jünger could be in his move away from classical modern
assumptions and, simultaneously, just how tenaciously such assumptions
reasserted themselves. Consequently, I conclude that his attempt at
synthesis is ultimately a failure.

A similar failure characterises Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922),
which, proceeding from Jünger's question about the War — 'Was ging am
Grunde vor?' — I read in Chapter 8 as an attempt to theorise his
experience. I begin by exploring the various strategies that Jünger uses
in order to embed the War within a coherent meta-narrative and show how he
does this by citing such a disparate range of thinkers and positions that
his approach actually produces a cacophony of contradictory statements.
More interestingly, I draw attention to those parts of the book where
Jünger goes so far as to articulate a critique of his own assumptions.
Finally, I show how the pervasive experience of absurdity completes
infiltrates the text through various metaphors and an obsession with time
and so, once again, deconstructs the surface project of the book.

By contrast, I argue in Chapter 9 that Sturm (1923) almost succeeds in
breaking free from the constraints of the conservative imagination. The
result is what I term 'proto-post-modernism' inasmuch as the story
prefigures various key aspects of post-modernism which I describe at the
beginning of the chapter. I then show how Sturm involves a subtle critique
of the assumptions of classical modernity — through heteroglossia, its
dialogic form, acceptance of the impossibility of mimetic representation,
parody of the Romantic notion of the Artist genius and décadent
literature, exploration of the collapse of the absolute claims of
scientific epistemology — contrasting as it does different forms of
knowledge, scientific and epiphanic, and encyclopaedic and eclectic. Sturm
also explores quite consciously the crisis of the modern intellectual
subject, the unworkability of the modern meta-narrative project, and the
failure of modernist art to reground the conservative imagination.
Finally, I show how close Jünger comes to accepting this
proto-post-modernism by identifying the prevalence of metaphors of flow
and thus of uncertainty and difference in the text. That said, Sturm
remains only proto-post-modern because the narrator's conservative
imagination shies away from the full implications of the positions with
which he has dallied and has the fictional protagonist die.

Chapter 10 offers the first analysis of Jünger's next text, his final
article for the Militärwochenblatt (1923), which can be read as a renewed
attempt to reground the classical modern view of the ability of language
to represent and order the world. Despite an extremely technicist
approach, Jünger finally admits that there are vast realms of experience
that are uncontainable and unrepresentable by language and in my view it
is this recognition which leads him to repudiate literature for political
action. I explore the results of this move in the final chapter of the
thesis.

After a brief review of some of the relevant secondary literature at the
start of Chapter 11, I examine the debates surrounding the so-called
Conservative Revolution and conclude that it was a recuperative attempt by
the conservative imagination to re-ground in that it sought to produce a
totalising meta-narrative, accept the results of modernisation, postulate
a unified, if collective subject — the Nation — and achieve its goals by a
revolutionary transformation. Turning to Jünger again, I show how his
article 'Revolution und Idee' (1923) can be read as a rejection of
literature in favour of action. I then show how his work producing In
Stahlgewittern3 (1924) appears to conform to this project, only to be
undermined by a re-assertion of his own individuality. I then look at the
first edition of Das Wäldchen 125 (1925) and begin by exploring the way in
which it significantly changes the events of summer 1918 compared to the
narrative in the war diary. I then examine Jünger's attempts to accept the
effects of modernisation and produce an allegedly authentic meta-narrative
and argue that the results are completely self-contradictory even in the
figure of the Frontkämpfer who is set up as the new monadic subject.
Finally, I examine Jünger's last war text, Feuer und Blut (1925) and
conclude that it very nearly succeeds in systematically placing this new
subject into a coherent system, thereby resolving the crisis of the
conservative imagination. Howevever, Jünger's otherwise repressed desire
for individual autonomy returns via an intertextual reference to Rimbaud's
'Le bateau ivre' which, I argue, once more deconstructs this attempt to
resolve the crisis of classical modernity on its own ground.

In Chapter 12, I conclude that reductionist readings of his war texts have
become even more untenable in the light of my analysis of the manuscript
war diary and that Jünger has generally succeeded in blinding critics with
his (often outrageous) rhetoric which attempts to conceal the ambivalence
and contradictions, that are, in my view, so central to his early work.
Finally, I conclude that given the terms of reference I established in
Chapter 3 and the similarities in his work to other modernist artists and
intellectuals, Jünger is very much a modernist writer whose complex early
work requires an appropriately sophisticated hermeneutics.



==============================================================================
John King
St. John's College	
GB - Oxford OX1 3JP
==============================================================================