Heller on Jünger

[Gary Kern <gkern@ucr.campus.mci.net>]

Thanks to Abdalbarr

for sending the complete article on Ernst Jünger by Erich Heller from
ENCOUNTER vol. 29, Feb. 1956.  I had missed this article in my scan of
English-language articles and would now like to respond to it.

In its way it is brilliant, rich in productive metaphors and insightful
historical associations.  Its merit, I think, is to relate Jünger to
Hegel and Nietzsche, to make him "a member of that German 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."  Heller rightly sees him as a synthesis
of the irreconcialable two, a writer who finds individual freedom and
authenticity in the act of looking historical inescapability straight in
the eye with a steely gaze.  But I think Heller makes a mistake when he
assumes that Jünger wants to reverse evil, to make it neutral and admire
it.  And I regret that this great cultural critic, whose writings on
Kafka I have admired, wants to diminish Jünger and make him a fraud and
a farce.

Heller wrote before the appearance of Jünger's novels, THE GLASS BEES
appearing in 1957. And so he is missing the more humanistic strain in
Jünger's writings.  But he also seems to be unaware of Jünger's diaries
and notebooks, so that he assumes that the writings about WWI are
composed entirely after the event as some sort of esthetic project.  He
does not divine Jünger's project of transferring a shattering and
transformative reality onto the page in a highly accurate, yet carefully
shaped account.  His attempt to make Jünger a contradiction, a writer
who believes that there can be no literature, is misinformed. His
surmise that Jünger lives for the ecstacy of the moment is also off the
mark.

In one long paragraph Heller takes Jünger to task for failing to "to
grasp the true worth of that tradition which he believed was doomed, and
whose doom he made ready to accept."  He thinks that Jünger lacks
intellectual honesty, because "the measure of intellectual honesty lies
in the writer's realization that this sphere [i.e., literature, which is
'surrounded by the echo of many voices'] is not his private
possession."  Had Heller applied the same standard to Nietzsche, he
would find him wanting in recognizing and acknowledging his debt to the
past.  Possibly the early Jünger lacked a certain modesty or
demonstrated a certain hubris; I have not read enough of those works to
know.  But I do not know that if he did it would not necessarily betoken
a lack of intellectual honesty so much as youthfulness; further, I know
that he has been quite forthright in acknowledging his debt to many
writers and thinkers in his later works and interviews.

Above all, I am sorry that Heller wants to belittle Jünger.  He writes
that "If the Superman, as one of Nietzsche's posthumous notes suggests,
was to be 'Caesar, with the heart of Christ,' then the collective of
Jünger's Workers is made up of little Caesars with little hearts of
steel."  The key word here is "little."  How are Jünger's disciples--or
simply readers--any worse than Nietzsche's?  And what kind of heroic
concept is "Caesar with the heart of Christ?"  Nietzsche has always
struck me as more than faintly ridiculous, a puny little guy with
delusions of grandeur who went completely mad, whose works were first
magnified by the fascists and then confiscated and sanctified by the
leftists.  It would be worthwhile to debunk Nietzsche as infantile,
hysterical and self-contradictory, but the intellectual establishment
would never allow it.  Jünger has been kept outside the door by
intellectual attitudes that, if they were honest, would throw Nietzsche
out on the street.

In much of the criticism I have read about Jünger I notice again and
again the tendency to fault him for not being perfect.  The same thing
was done ad nauseum with Solzhenitsyn; the latter tried to account for
virtually everything in the Soviet experience, yet critics would point
out that he failed to work out a consistent approach to this or that
topic, as if he should have answered all questions.  So with Jünger:  he
has made a great effort to interpret his time, the century, the age.  In
this effort he has remained unflinching, original and individualistic. 
Critics can't really accept him, can't categorize him, can't admit him
to the pantheon of greats.  Without knowing it, they are giving him
their strongest recommendation.

GK