On Nationalism and the Jewish Question

By Ernst Jünger
“Süddeutsche Monatshefte”, September 1930.

If one considers the two tendencies of the national will of our time, on the one hand the
traditionally coloured one, in which bourgeois, legitimist, reactionary, and economic
tones are mixed or distinguished in different ways, and on the other hand the
revolutionary, we find here also anti-Semitism as the basis of a context which carries a
more or less repulsive ornamentation, an openly militant ornamentation. This may not
be pleasant for the Jew, but another question is to what extent it is dangerous for him.
Anti-Semitism of the forces of tradition is inherently the late and feeble child of the
feudal world. Just as people usually like to maintain a façade in front of burnt-out rooms
from which the creative elements have long since disappeared, it is considered a vice to
have a Jew in representative positions. However, this does not prevent him from being
employed and frequently encountered in real-world tasks. In the nineteenth century he
increasingly occupied these positions and early on, for example, in the person of Professor
Stahl, had his influence in the public foundations of legal authority – or rather,
importantly, in the repair of those foundations, and conservative thought. In the
Wilhelmian Empire, where even though it is difficult or impossible for him to gain access
to the hierarchy, he can be found everywhere, even in the highest and most important
spheres, if one pokes around the surface a little. As we all know, little has changed in this
respect, even after the revolutions.
Wherever one examines today the forces operating in the direction of a moderate
legitimising reaction or a largely national bourgeois restoration, one can soon encounter
the inevitable type of Jewish lawyer, a lawyer who speaks, writes, advises or acts, who
serves people and power, regardless of their orientation, with the freedom from bias that
is part of his racial characteristics. It is all the more obvious that indignation is even more
necessary today than it was a hundred years ago in order to oppose liberalism in this
sense, that is, to fight it with its own means, its own vocabulary. A keyboard containing
all the notes from idealistic indignation to the anguished cries of a threatened culture, i.e.
above all reflected tones, requires players who have undergone a long training in
indignation. The connoisseur will therefore not be surprised by the strange blossoms of a
well-cultivated conservative prose, as they are increasingly flowing from Jewish pens
these days. Bitter speeches in defence of culture, witty ironies about the workings of
civilisation, aristocratic snobbery, Catholic farce, pseudo-morphological interest in
historical processes, subtly underlined solidity – to name names would be malicious. For
this is too polite to be upset about it – isn’t it also nice to see good publicity for the
respectable cigarette merchant Overstoltz, who does his bookkeeping with dignified
rigour in his little Biedermeier office? Here business reaches such a level of ‘as if’ that it
becomes almost impolite to see it again. The Jew, who really has talent, who really has
feeling, reasons conservatively today – there are hidden positions here, challenging
opportunities for an intellectual position that is already being fought for with great
acumen. The Jew cannot complain about the attention he receives from forces that today
consider themselves defenders of conservative ideas, and it is questionable how much the
anti-Semitic policies of these forces do not benefit him. For his rhetoric, which always has
an ethical structure, if only because it cannot have a heroic structure, needs a basic mood
which can be described as the inverse pathos of distance. It therefore depends on
persecution, as anti-Semitism, just as the ghetto, according to a fair assessment, is a
Jewish invention. But the conservative attitude, decomposed to its originality, the muted
conservative attitude, offers this cheapest, most painless, most invisible space, insofar as
it can melt it down into a thin conventional line, which moreover has great elasticity in
terms of ‘competence’, ‘spirit’ and, of course, money. This is why neither the English
Empire nor the Habsburg Monarchy ever lacked Jewish paladins in the modern era.
Indeed, there is only one word in political language today that is used as often and as
unconvincingly as the word conservative, and that is the word revolutionary. But what
our so-called conservatives lack, as much as our so-called revolutionaries, is originality.
The originality of a conservative person is characterised by the fact that he is very old, and
that of a revolutionary person by the fact that he must be very young. Today’s
conservatives are almost all a hundred years old, and the revolutionaries, after a spent
youth, are also over a hundred years old. In other words, the scope of liberalism is wider
than is commonly believed, and almost all conflicts take place within its boundaries. The
vocabulary of our great-grandfathers is revived in a spectral manner, and from all the
tribunes of public opinion comes the rechristening of political concepts which people
hardly care to rename and which revel in the naïve joy of contemporary discoveries.
This is the reason for the lack of consistency in the anti-Semitism of national movements
that claim to be revolutionary. Even leaving aside the sects that make denial a worldview,
what is surprising is the instinctive insecurity with which the blow against the Jew is
struck, often at great cost but always too flat to be effective. But this is due to the attempt
to establish and destroy Jewish influence in German life in accordance with the methods
of truly individualistic thinking. Popular are the ideas of folk medicine, in which
neutralising swarms of bacteria and splitting fungi attacking atoms play a major role.
From a purely demagogical point of view - and demagogy is no mere feat - there would be
nothing wrong with this if one could suspect that there is a higher priesthood behind it
than its profane doctrine. But then the praise of honesty is the highest that criticism can
give.
But the Jew is not the father of liberalism, he is the son of liberalism, because he cannot
in general play a creative role in everything that concerns German life, whether good or
bad. In order for it to become dangerous - this life, contagious and destructive - it first
needed a state to make it possible in its new form, that of the Jew of civilisation. This state
was created by liberalism, the great declaration of the independence of reason, and it
cannot be ended in any other way than by the total bankruptcy of liberalism. But any
attack on the Jew of civilisation from within libertarian space is a mistake, because even
if it succeeds, its value will be nothing more than external disinfection. And libertarian
space, as we have already said, extends much further than is commonly believed. It is
therefore no accident that Italian Fascism is on good terms with the Jew-civiliser, for
Fascism is certainly nothing more than a late stage of liberalism, a simplified and
shortened process, so to speak, a crude reduction of the liberal constitution of the state,
which has become too hypocritical, too phraseological, and, above, all too cumbersome
for modern taste. But for Germany, fascism is no more perfect than Bolshevism; it excites
without satisfying, and one can already hope that this country is capable of its own unique
and disciplined solution.
What gives the Germans hope here is the desire to create a form, a still isolated but
strong beginning of morphological thought that confronts liberalism as fire confronts
water. It is a new view of the most intimate form, of the nature of things, hesitantly trying
to see and trying to penetrate deeply, not through abstraction, but through dominion.
Although this attitude, the new German attitude par excellence, need not necessarily deal
with the civilised Jew at all, it will meet him at every turn as an adversary who sees in him
a direct threat to himself. For at the end of this will lie the shape of the German Empire
as a power based on its special roots. Where the borders of Germany really lie, what
German literature, German history, German science, German psychology, what war,
work, dreams, art mean to us: all this and much more we see and realise, and therefore
this is the only danger that threatens civilised Jews. For all this confirms the first German
principle which the Jew will always try to deny, namely that there is a homeland called
Germany. And one obvious consequence of this proposition is that there are Jews. But
that is precisely the most skilful efficiency of the civilised Jew, that he constantly shows
that the Jew does not exist – in every worthwhile Jewish theory one can find this
proposition. The knowledge and realisation of the peculiar German form distinguishes
the form of the Jew as visibly and clearly as pure, still water makes visible oil as a peculiar
layer. But as soon as the Jew becomes a recognised individual force and obeys his own
laws, he ceases to be virulent and therefore dangerous to the German. The most effective
weapon against him, who is the master of all masks, is: to see him.
The Jew of civilisation in his mass still clings to the liberalism to which he owes
everything. Of course, its dialectics, the endless supplements of civilisation, have become
so dilapidated that they are beginning to make even harmless people nauseous. Jewish
participation in the attempt to restore legitimacy can be safely predicted as one of the
penultimate attempts to maintain the old position. But as the German will asserts itself
and takes shape, the slightest illusion of being a German in Germany becomes less and
less possible for the Jew, and he finds himself faced with a final choice: to be or not to be
a Jew in Germany.
This translation was made available by The Jünger Translation Project
https://juengertranslationproject.substack.com/