Ernst Jünger by Erich Heller

[abdulbar@execpc.com]

Hello everyone:

The following is an article from the Encounter, a magazine for literature
and current affairs. This is volume 29 which appeared in Feb. of 1956,
although I don't agree with much that he has written, I thought, it was
interesting to see what was being written about EJ so shortly after the
war.
Does anyone know the author by other works?
If so what?

Abdalbarr.

Erich Heller: ERNST JÜNGER

Men and Ideas

That the time is out of joint is by now common European knowledge; the idea
that the damage might be cured through cursed spite is a German variation
on the Hamlet theme. From time to time some German romantics whistled this
tune to frighten their fright away on their lone wanderings through the
dark forest. In Nietzsche the theme gained depth and clarity. Spengler
scored it for all civilisations the earth has known, and joined their
voices in a finale that sounded jubilant although it meant death. Ernst
Junger discovered it for himself in the First World War; it spoke to him
with a loud, large voice through the "storm of steel," as he called his war
book. He brought the music home and became its intellectual pied piper,
followed by many who would have followed Hitler, had Hitler been more
literate and less vulgar; and often did follow him in spite of it.

What, then, is this Germanic leit-motif and perversity of the spirit?
Theologically speaking, the doctrine that Beelzebub is the devil's only
serious adversary: sin can only be redeemed by sin; morally, that wrong can
be put right only by conquering the prejudice that it is wrong; and a
sthetically, that if the habitual exposure to the loathsome horrors of the
age has robbed us of the power of feeling and left us with nothing to
admire, we must learn to admire this Nothing, discover the hidden beauty in
that which is loathsome, and raise unfeeling itself to a dizzy pitch of
ecstasy.

Yet Ernst Junger is a serious writer, or at least a writer who, with some
justification, has been taken very seriously bv his numerous German readers
over the last thirty years. His place in literature cannot be defined in
the conventional terms of literary history. He has written no poems, no
dramas, and-although some of his books tell a story-no novels. Nor is he
simply a "man of letters." He is, or until recently was, one of the few
genuine examples of what in the dim past of a decade ago some French
intellectuals used to call litterature engagee. The early Ernst Junger did
not just write; he took up the pen. He did not describe, invent, or make
poems; he sounded, diagnosed, and performed operations. He did not discuss,
he committed himself, arranged for breakthroughs and decided issues. His
main contribution to literature proper is a paradoxical literary
experiment: to forge a style of writing which would authentically convey
the fact that this is no time for style, writing, or literature. It may
well be that, in attempting this, Ernst Junger merely Joined in a not
uncommon pursuit of modern artists. We do have sculpture which expresses
the conviction that there is nothing left to give form and shape to, except
form and shape; paintings which suggest that all things have lost their
outlines and colours, except outlines and colours; music and poetry whose
theme is the impossibility of themes, the intractability of meaning in
sounds and words.

However, Junger's is an experiment with a difference. He is not preoccupied
with the possibilities of exhaustion of his medium, which is literature. It
is not literature which is his professed concern, but the things he writes
about. This seems simple enough.
It is not. For what he writes about is something that is necessarily
betrayed, distorted, and falsified in the very act of writing, and still
more betrayed, distorted, and falsified in the act of writing well. For
Junger, the early Junger, is a German romantic minus something. To the
German romantic, life means above all ecstasy, death, and the making of
literature. With Junger we have to subtract the making of literature. What
remains is ecstasy and death; ecstasy and death freed of all literary or
poetic ingredients or temptations, simply the "existential moment" of
ecstasy and death. This subtraction seems to be the reductio ad absurdum of
literature and all its prerequisites: a desk and a chair in a quiet room,
paper, peace of mind, and time -much time, all the time needed for finding
an adjective and crossing it out again. For writing is, if not emotion
recollected in tranquillity, at least recollection in tranquillity. The
"existential moment," on the other hand, is by definition the moment which
is impatient of either recollection or tranquillity. Tranquillity is
conquest and transcendence of the moment; existential ecstasy is the
moment's absolute consummation. There is, literally, nothing left to write
about.

But this is by no means all there is to Junger's difficult literary
enterprise. Junger is of course an individualist, if only in the sense that
he wants to be left alone for recollection, tranquillity, and writing. As
everyone knows, even those simple pains are more and more difi;cult to come
by, and when they do come, more and more difficult to endure. There is
always some very large menace knocking at the window, or an ever so slight
disorder in the soul. Junger's solution is to bid the menace come in and
stay, and to accept the notice of dismissal that the age has served on the
soul. Where others have protested in the name of the individual, he gives
his consent-in a style individualistically distinguished by the trouble he
took to make it impersonal. History, he seems to say, has robbed the
individual of the power of significant speech, and has called upon the
machine to deliver its message. If we cannot obey History completely and
just be silent, the least we can do is to talk henceforward in a steely
idiom. History has mobilised all human resources for enormous wars.
Therefore, let the soul seek its illuminations in the engineered fires of
catastrophe.

This, then, is the early Junger: a German romantic in search of meaning
through the intense affirmation of meaninglessness, trying to gather in a
soul by throwing it to the winds and electrical storms, and groping towards
ecstasy in the valley of unfeeling. In times like these, he maintains, life
is only to be found in the catastrophic explosions of dead matter, and
individual existence only in the voluptuous merging with that soulless
collectivity decreed by History's own will. This man, who was undoubtedly
one of Germany's bravest soldiers in the First World War, afterwards spent
years in his study in order to work out the appropriate style for saying,
implicitly, that spending years in a study is, in this hour of History, no
life at all. But as such an absurd situation is difficult to maintain, the
study itself was soon conscripted by History and, desk, paper, pen, and
all, called up to do service in the great venture of war and total
mobilisation. War, work, writing-everything goes into a new synthesis,
forged together by the joint forge and forgery of world-spirit and
metaphor. Enemy lines are written off and lines of words come under fire.
Language digs itself in and guns begin to speak. While sentences are
hammered out and intellectual convictions exploded, flames and splinters
from bursting shells form themselves into Iyrical patterns. The battlefield
has epics to tell and the writer's writing is an act of sacrifice. In fact,
again and again, Ernst Junger uses the thoughtless metaphors of
journalistic diction, not always successfully cleansed of their vulgarity,
within a context of considered seriousness. J. P. Stern has devoted a large
part of his recent study of Ernst Junger's works to an illuminating
examination of this aspect of the writer's language.

What I have said so far is largely based on those of Junger's works which
were published before I939. Among these, it was above all The Storm of
Steel (1920), Combat as Inner Experience (I922), The A!d2venturous Heart
(I929), and The Worker (1932) that have made Junger famous in his own
country, and assembled around his work a large section of that hybrid class
of readers who, ever since the Bible became mere literature, go to
bookshops and libraries in order to find something new to believe in. At
least three of these books form a logical sequence. The Storm of Steel is
the account of the First World War. The war's "inner meaning," the
formative effect it had upon the person, is the subject of Combat as Inner
Experience. This leads to Junger's vision and practical prophecy of the man
and society of the future, The Worker.

Much that Junger wrote about the war is honest, sincere, and true. Indeed,
it would be possible to say that sometimes he approaches the outskirts of
great writing, were it not for the fact that time and again something
upsets the very faculty of the reader to appreciate writing as writing.
This something is the felt presence of the destructive paradox, the
perverse intention of writing in such a manner that any manner of writing
is shown to be false to the experience, and the elaborate stylistic scheme
to convey with successful words the fact that all words must fail. But is
this not, it may well be asked, the very paradox of the extreme reaches of
all great literature? At the heights of ecstasy or tragedy in literature,
does there not always come the moment when the word which is said has only
just managed to become articulate; when the language is nothing but a
minute inroad made in a last effort into silence? Yes, but this is the
moment when the soul is overpowered by feeling and, with extreme economy of
speech, says that it cannot say any more. Junger, on the other hand, always
says more. With all his cultivated abruptness, he is loquacious. He is not
overpowered by feelings, but is merely at the mercy of acute sensations,
and of insights which more often than not are spurious.

Yet I said he was honest. In so far as intellectual honesty is relevant to
literature, it is of course not merely a question of the writer saying what
he "really" thinks or believes. One can "really" think or believe the most
fraudulent things, one can be sincerely bogus. The literary standard of
sincerity is not so narrowly private. For every fact, thought, or belief
expressed in literature is surrounded by the echo of many voices. Every new
voice makes itself heard within a sphere of experience articulated by the
past and vibrating with its memories. The measure of intellectual honesty
lies in the writer's realisation that this sphere is not his private
possession. He may contribute to its definition or redefinition, to its
exploration or the pushing outward of its frontiers. Yet in substance it is
inherited land. It is an area built up by the thought and feeling of a
great society of minds and souls. Na writer can be intellectually honest in
any relevant sense if he lacks the knowledge, understanding, or intuition
of the width and profundity of this common enterprise. This sense of a
tradition of thought and feeling will support the individual writer, lure
him further, or set his limits. Intellectual honesty is, above all, wise
husbandry, the ability to deal honestly with inherited means; to know what
resources of thought are required to meet the demand of certain questions,
and what wealth of feeling to brave certain adventures; and then to leave
these questions and adventures alone if one has nothing to add except one's
poverty. But the early Ernst Junger constantly overdraws his account. His
enormous generalisations about modern man and modern society reflect at
every point his failure to grasp the true worth of that tradition which he
believed was doomed, and whose doom he made ready to accept. This is why
his high seriousness is so often warped by a kind of metaphysical
flippancy. His heart, however adventurous, is at times a mere onlooker, and
the detached sobriety of his vision caused by a chill in the soul.

Jünger's heroic nihilism has, however, a tradition of its own. Its name is
Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who conquered and marked out the area on which
Junger built, Nietzsche who quarried the stone which Junger used. Yet the
building turns out to be flatter than the design. It lacks the very
dimension which constitutes Nietzsche's depth: morality, or, to call it
differently, love. Nietzsche saw in the collapse of religion, in the death
of God, and in the approach of nihilism the greatest spiritual and moral
challenge to man; for Junger it is, in the widest sense, a political
problem, a prohlem of intellectual and psychological strategy. Nietzsche's
Superman is a creature who has struggled his way beyond good and evil. For
Junger's Worker the moral problem is not as much out-struggled as
out-moded. The world-spirit, not the soul of man, has left it behind. This
is the most insidious hrand of Germanic concoctions: surface-Nietzsche plus
surface-Hegel, an intoxicant which, while it lasts, has the power of making
cerebral acrobatics look like adventures of the heart, and an assortment of
trivialities from the refrigerator like a glacial landscape of the mind. If
the Superman, as one of Nietzsche's posthumous notes suggests, was to be
"Casar, with the heart of Christ," then the collective of Junger's Workers
is made up of little Casars with little hearts of steel.

But let us not underrate the importance of Junger. His work issues from an
experience and a situation in which we are all involved, and perhaps the
more involved the less we are prepared to acknowledge it. The least violent
way of describing this potentially violent situation is perhaps to say that
the accustomed methods of making sense of our world no longer fit our
actual experience. This could be shown to be the case almost everywhere
where intellectual endeavour assumes its more definite forms: in the arts,
in literature, in philosophy, in physics, and even in the kind of humour in
which we find relief and relaxation. On every level of seriousness or fun,
the suspicion rules supreme that this is an absurd world. It expresses
itself now tragically and now with laughter and now again with mathematical
exactitude. Some people call it, rather simplemindedly, the menace of
irrationalism. It may be wiser to see in it the somersault of rationalism
and humanism. The noble decision, made at the beginning of the history of
the modern mind, to reach an ever higher degree of certainty through doubt
has led to unforeseen dangers: the refinery of truth is cluttered up with
slag. The dark regions, that seemed hopefully reduced by making man the
measure of all things, have become immeasurably darker. In the end,
absurdity may be the only certainty of the ever-doubting mind.

The early Ernst Junger's intellectual strategy was based on the full
acceptance of this situation. Thus he became the spokesman of a generation
in Germany who felt that the experience of the First World War gave the lie
to all beliefs and ideals in which they had been brought up. "That which is
unknown, extraordinary, and dangerous has become the lasting norm....
Catastrophe emerges as the a priori of a changed mode of thinking." This is
Ernst Junger's diagnosis. And his therapy is to educate a race of men who
"live in danger as in their proper element," who "gain security not through
the diminution of danger but through the increase of their strength," and
who "triumphantly exist, salamander-like, in the fire, asking for no
alleviation of their fate." For this war has come to young men truly "sick
to death" of a peace that so obviously was not "the real thing," made up as
it was of doubtful certainties, uncertain doubts, and boring indecision.
"We longed for something present and real," wrote Ernst Junger, "and would
have invaded the ice, the fire, and the ether merely to rid ourselves of
boredom." Only he will understand this, he added, who "has reached the
point at which nothingness itself appears more desirable than anything that
is assailable by doubt." And doubt can do no harm to the one certainty: to
have existed, be it only for a moment of dizzy awareness, "at the deepest
well-spring of the age." And what is this well-spring of the age? High
treason to counter high treason. Mind, with its cultivation of doubt and
anti-vitalistic rationality, has betrayed life, and now mind must
propitiate life by betraying itself. "It is one of the cruel delights of
the age to be an accomplice to this blasting operation." Clearly, to be a
salamander and able to live in the fire, is one thing: another, to mobilise
the salamanders to defeat the fire-brigade. Junger's salamanders were
guilty of preparing arson.

But when in I939 Hitler, outside the fence of metaphor, lit the fire,
Junger published his On the Marble Cliffs. It was suppressed by Hitler's
censors. This book shows remarkable courage, a courage worthy of the
soldier of the First World War who had been decorated with the Pour le
merit. It describes a community of peaceful bookreaders, ex-combatants
turned disputants, and lovers of the traditional noble virtues, threatened
with extinction by a "totally mobilised" underworld under the direction of
a madly sadistic and power-drunk Chief Forester. There could be no doubt
about the meaning of the allegory, and certainly the German censorship had
none.

From then onwards Ernst Junger has been working on an intellectual and
literary project, still vaster and perhaps still more hopeless than his
earlier one: to reconcile his old insights into the nature of the modern
world with that tentative belief in the eternal verities that had been
awakened in him bv the rule of the Chief Forester. His voluminous diary of
the Second World War, Strahlungen (I949), bears witncss to the inception
and first fumbling execution of this hazardous enterprise; fumbling,
although the book, abounding with memorable descriptions and striking
aphorisms, hardly ever betrays any lack of self-assurance. In fact, the
peculiar unbalance of Junger's mental make-up seems unshaken.

His mind has been formed not only in the clash between romantic expectation
and the experience of mechanised war and peace; three other forces, at work
in our more recent intellectual tradition, have had their say too: realism,
symbolism, and Hegelian historicism. Junger has the realist's appetite for
detail, the symbolist's virtuosity in extracting aesthetic significance
from it, and the historicist's passion for big historical generalisations.
But he is also an "existentialist" who seeks "commitment." And when all is
said and done, he seems committed, at bottom, to something that allows for
no commitment: to a historical abstraction. This is why his world is still
without moral meaning. His intellectual generalisations bypass the concrete
moral encounter. Hence they are spurious. Again and again he comes close to
being a pedantic dandy of the Apocalypse.

Therefore he rightly claims that he has not been converted. It is not from
a humbled heart that he has abandoned his former heroic nihilism. Indeed,
his very descent into those depths where he now divines the springs of
nature, language, tradition, peace, and rellglOIl, IS performed with an air
of condescension. When he believed the time was ripe for the exclusive rule
of the Soldier and the Worker, he greeted their arrival with that great
German gesture of intellectual welcome of which one can never be quite sure
whether it means joy, malice, heroic prophecy, or simply bowing to
historical necessity. And Ernst Junger does not think now that he was wrong
then; he merely adds a newcomer to his little party of authentic
ambassadors of the world-spirit: the Waldganger, the solitary explorer in
the woods, who shuns the Soldier's camp and the Worker's collective, trying
to recapture more ancient meanings beyond the din of the modern city. If
Ernst Junger now feels inclined to dedicate himself to the virtues of the
contemplative life, he must justify it by the fact that History has once
more made available a little sanctuarv where the hour is no longer sounded
by mechanical bells and buzzers linked to the mechanical rotation of
mechanical hands, but gently flows like sand through the hour-glass. Yes,
it is Der Waldgang that matters now in I95I and Das Sanduhrbuch, the book
of the sand-glass, that makes sense in I954. What has happened? Has Junger
withdrawn from the storms of steel into the tower of ivory? Perhaps, but
not without charging the cost of the move to the account of History. He
wrote Ueber die Linie in I950, a treatise with which he turned over a new
leaf in the book of historical fever-charts, announcing the world-spirit's
decision to mancruvre us successfully over the zero-point of nihilism. By
the dispensation of History, Eros may love once more, the Muses may smile
again, and even cathedrals may cautiously lift their spires above the
horizon.

If this is not just to Junger the man, it is an injustice which Junger the
writer does to himself. His very language makes our case. Speaking now of
peace, tradition, the glory of the word, and the future of churches, his
diction has hardly changed from those remote days that, "aglow and
many-coloured, ran through the soldiers' hands like the beads of a red-hot
rosary by which they had to count their prayers in order to realise
themselves." This language, recently often a little tired and dishevelled,
has always carried an echo of that sounding brass and tinkling cymbal that
would be heard even from the tongues of angels if there were a want of
charity.

Conversion ? No, History. But History means, among other things, the free
convertibility of intellectual currencies. Ernst Junger has remained a
member of that Germanic midnight community which is haunted by the
irreconcilable ghosts of Hegel and Nietzsche, the one luring the soul with
the promise of authentic existence and unlimited freedom, the other tying
the mind to the concept of historical inescapability. If History were a god
with a claim to man's soul, instead of being a doubtful science with the
power to corrupt man's consciousness, the outcome might be high tragedy; as
it is, even the most serious intentions exert themselves in vain amid the
uproar of a catastrophic farce.