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 WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM

Martin Jay and Anton Kaes, General Editors

l . Heritage of Our Times, by Ernst Bloch

2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890—1990, by Steven E. Aschheim
3. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and
Edward Dimendberg
4. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity,
by Christoph Asendorf
5. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution,
by Margaret C o h e n
6. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany,
by Thomas J. Saunders
7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, by Richard Wolin
8. The New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean
9. The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and
Otto Kirchheimer, edited by William E. Scheuerman
10. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute of Social Research, 1923—1950, by Martin Jay
11. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture,
edited by Katharina von A n k u m
12. Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900—1949, edited by
Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau
13. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture,
1910—1935, by Karl Toepfer
14 .In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse
and Enlightenment, by Anson Rabinbach
15. Walter Benjamin's Other History: of Stones, Animals, Human Beings,
and Angels, by Beatrice Hanssen
16. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the
1930s to the Present, by Anthony Heilbut
17. Cool Conduct, by Helmut Lethen, translated by Don Reneau
18. In A Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945—1948,
by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated by Kelly Barry
i g . A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism,
by Elliot Y. Neaman
 A
DUBIOUS
PAST
Ernst Jiinger and the
Politics of Literature after Nazism

Elliot Y. Neaman

UNIVERSITY O F CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London
 University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University o f California Press, Ltd.

L o n d o n , England

© 1999 by the Regents o f the University o f California

All illustrations courtesy of the G e r m a n Literature Archive Marbach

(Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Neaman, Elliot Yale, 1 9 5 7 - .

A dubious past : Ernst J ü n g e r and the politics o f literature after Nazism / Elliot
Yale Neaman.
p. cm. (Weimar and now; 19)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I S B N 0-520-21628-8 (alk. p a p e r ) . —

1. Jünger, Ernst, 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 9 8 . 2. Authors, G e r m a n — 2 0 t h c e n t u r y —

Biography. 3. Jünger, Ernst, 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 9 8 — P o l i t i c a l and social views.
4. G e r m a n y — P o l i t i c s and g o v e r n m e n t — 2 0 t h century. 5. C r i t i c i s m —
H i s t o r y — 2 0 t h century. I. Series.
PT2619.U43Z719 1999
838'.gi2og—dc2i 98-39210
CIP

Manufactured in the United States of A m e r i c a

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

T h e paper used in this publication meets the m i n i m u m requirements o f A N S I / N I S O

Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
 In memory of my grandfather
Ben Noah Shlain (1902—1984)
When you speak about the world of dreams, into which one reaches
down to capture something dubious, it has to be admitted that
something dubious exists in the author himself. That is why one
often has more success describing bad characters than good people.
E R N S T J Ü N G E R IN AN I N T E R V I E W W I T H F R I E D R I C H HANSEN-LÖVE
 CONTENTS

L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S / xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / xiii

Introduction / 1

l. Ernst Jünger: A German Life / 23

2. The Jünger Circle: Magnetic Repulsion and Attraction / 6g

3. The Marble Cliffs: An Allegory of Power and Death / 104

4. The Pen and the Sword: Last Knights of the Majestic / iss

5. The View from Above: Logs from a Sinking Ship / 13g

6. Challenging the Victor's Optic: Jünger as Oracle

in the Age of Adenauer / 161

7. Right Turn: Jünger Retrieved in the Age of Kohl / 21s

Afterword / 268

ABBREVIATIONS / 277
REFERENCES / 279
INDEX / 307
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Jünger cataloging his beetle collection

Following page 138

1. The French Legionnaire, 1913

2. Rear: Jünger (with medals) and his mother

Front: siblings from left to right: Wolfgang, Hanna, Friedrich Georg

3. Back of dust jacket of Storms of Steel (1920)

4. Jünger on lead horse, Paris, 1941

5. With Colonel Wildermuth on roof of Hotel Raphael, 1942

6. With Carl Schmitt by the Seine, 1942

7. In the library at home in Wilflingen, 1955

8. In Agadir with snake charmer, 1977

9. Receiving the Goethe-Prize, 1982

10. With Mitterand and Kohl at Verdun, September 1984

11. Kohl at Jünger's birthday celebration, 1985

12. Jünger with his wife, Liselotte

XI
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book was originally carried out when I was enrolled as
a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley between 1988
and 1990. It was a great privilege to attend one of this nation's best public
institutions. I will forever value the tremendous support I received from the
university, the professionalism and intellectual rigor of its faculty, and the
profound impact made upon me by my fellow students.
This book would not have been possible without the financial support of
a number of benefactors. My research in Berlin, Aachen, and Marbach was
supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada and the German Academic Exchange Program. I wish to thank the
efficient and courteous staff at the German Literature Archive in Marbach,
in particular Brigitte van Helt for her assistance with the photographs for
this book. I am also grateful to James Kettner and the Berkeley history de-
partment for a grant in 1991 to write the dissertation.
My deepest intellectual debt goes out to my teacher and friend Martin
Jay. He read the manuscript several times and offered his acute insights as
well as his famous long lists of books for further reading. I had the unbe-
lievable luck to learn intellectual history from the finest practitioner of the
craft in academia. My other history teachers were no less inspiring, Ed Hun-
dert, Gene Brucker, William Bouwsma, Gerald Feldman, and Martin Malia.
I am grateful to the following friends, colleagues and professionals who
read all or parts of the manuscript. They generously offered their time and
wisdom: Franziska Augstein, Albrecht Betz, Carolyn Brown, Warren Breck-
man, Marcus Bullock, Pam Burdman, Mathias Eidenbenz, Hajo Funke, Jef-
frey Herf, Richard Herzinger, Bruce Johnson, Lewis Klaussner, Ben Lapp,
Rich Krivcher, Eduardo Mendieta, Armin Mohler, Dirk Moses, Anson Ra-
binbach, Carola Schulz, and Lars Tragardh. I would also like to thank the

xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

following persons for intellectual and spiritual sustenance along the long
road to completing what turned out to be a ten-year project: Jeff Baile,
Ludger Biilt, Ben Binstock, Alon Confino, Susan Crane, Goran Dahl, Ross
Dickenson, Gudrun Egloff, Christoph Egloff, Jeffrey Friedman, J o h n Ely,
Peter Fritzsche, Richard Golsan, Markus Hattstein, Peter Hoffenburg, Gerd
Horten, Bob Holub, Renate Holub, J o n Hanifin, Dane Johnson, Anton
Kaes, Randy Kaufmann, Gordon Kopelow, Akiba Lerner, Michael Lerner,
Tom Lucas, Andy Markovits, Cassian Markworth, Sigi Miiller, Tom Noll,
Heath Pearson, Henri Plard, Horst Severens, Erhard Stolting, Dirk von
Laak, Jeff Verhey, Michael Werz, Richard Wolin, and Jonathan Zatlin.
The University of San Francisco, my home institution, has provided me
with a stimulating environment to teach and write since my arrival in 1993.
I value highly the warm and collegial atmosphere of the university and would
like to extend my appreciation to the administration, Stanley Nel, J o h n
Pinelli, Gerardo Marin, Jennifer Turpin, and Nancy Compagna, as well as to
my wonderful colleagues in the history department, Cornelius M. Buckley,
Martin Claussen, Cheryl Czekala, Tony Fels, Elisabeth Gleason, Andy Heinze,
Uldis Kruze, Kathy Nasstrom, Paul Murphy, Julio Moreno, Mike Stanfield,
and Vicky Siu.
My thanks to the editors at the University of California Press, who navi-
gated this book around all obstacles with dexterity and dedication, Ed Di-
mendberg, Laura Pasquale, Julie Brand, and Sabine Seiler.
Finally I want to thank my family for affection and support. My German
wife, Barbara, only occasionally tired of hearing stories about old fascists.
My brother Noah, with his genial h u m o r and funny imitations, always made
me laugh, no matter how bad my mood. My mother, Leah Neaman, was a
source of unfailing inspiration, love, and encouragement. Finally, this book
is dedicated to my maternal grandfather, who I wish had lived long enough
to see me live up to some of the high ideals he held dear and passed on to
his children and grandchildren.

San Francisco, December 1998

 Introduction

In 1995 the world commemorated half a century since the defeat of

Nazism. In March of the same year Ernst Jünger celebrated his hundredth
birthday, the second time a major European writer has lived beyond a cen-
tury.1 He died just six weeks before his hundred and third birthday, on Feb-
ruary 17, 1998. This book is about his life and the reception of his written
work over a period of more than eighty years, with the major emphasis on
the period after 1945 when he was embroiled in a series of highly emotional
controversies concerning his political and literary activities during the
Weimar Republic. Jünger is a widely read, very contested figure in the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany; he is followed closely by a substantial reading
public in France, but he is known to only few in England, Italy, Spain and
other smaller European countries. In North America he has been, until rel-
atively recently, read and discussed primarily in specialized academic circles
even though several of his novels have been translated into English.
Although in recent years Jünger has been the subject of several excellent
treatments by scholars in the United States, as yet no thorough reception
history of his entire work has been carried out. This book intends to fill that
scholarly lacuna. It is important to do so, not only because Jünger is of gen-
eral historical interest but also because the controversies that accompanied
his long life touch on essential issues in modern German intellectual his-
tory, in particular on the key questions of German intellectuals and the
Holocaust, the divided memory of West and East Germany after 1990, Ger-
man identity, the politics of nature and the environment, left and right cri-

1. The other, as far as I can ascertain, was Bernard de Fontenelle ( 1 6 5 6 - 1 7 5 7 ) .

I
2 INTRODUCTION

tiques of civilization, the fate of radical German conservatism after 1945,

the return of the "primacy of the political," and the future of the German
and European political right.
This b o o k should be read also as a contribution to the growing literature
on two German thinkers w h o were allied with Jünger through intellectual
affinities and personal friendship, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Hei-
degger was a professional philosopher and Schmitt was a professional jurist.
Jünger was trained in neither speciality, but as a writer he played a key role
in both thinkers' development by providing intellectual stimulation that
shaped their ideas in important ways and by fleshing out those ideas for
wider consumption. This intellectual collaboration was arguably as impor-
tant for the legacy of right-wing thought from the Weimar period as the in-
teraction between Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin has been for the
left. T h e continuing influence of their ideas is part of the history of postwar
German thought that will be traced in this book. Intellectual fascism has been
considered for too long either so mediocre as not worth taking seriously or
the product of a few misguided, politically naive minds. By focusing on
Ernst Jünger and his intellectual circle, this study argues for a reconceptu-
alization of intellectual fascism as a broad critique of liberal humanism and
Marxism that should be seen as coherent, challenging, and, for a surprising
number of contemporary intellectuals, all too attractive.
In this study I have followed Marcus Bullock's lead in steering away from
normative j u d g m e n t s about Jünger's character, values, and politics. There
will likely be some critics w h o will argue that I am too sympathetic to Jünger,
while others will say I am engaged in an intellectual witch-hunt. I reject both
claims. In this book the reader will find the evidence on which to make in-
d e p e n d e n t evaluations. I both c o n d e m n and praise Jünger and have not
hesitated to draw my own conclusions based on the same evidence. In The
Violent Eye, Marcus Bullock's superb study of Jünger's entire oeuvre, the ar-
g u m e n t is forcefully made that Jünger is so fascinating for the intellectual
historian because he represents one of those very rare c o m m o d i t i e s — a
right-winger whose range and depth one has to acknowledge, even when
one might find the politics and ideology offensive or distasteful. 2 Bullock
compares Jünger's ideas to the plans of an engineer w h o imagines a daring,
innovative, risky bridge that ultimately collapses upon construction. These
reactionary ideas can be j u d g e d as historical errors, but they nevertheless
constitute the history of unresolved issues of modernity, such as technology,
the nation state, the individual and the collective, and the apocalyptic strug-
gles with reason and unreason in the twentieth century.

2. Marcus Paul Bullock, The Violent Eye: Ernst Jünger's Visions and Revisions on the European
Right (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 1 2 - 2 1 .
 INTRODUCTION 3

Ernst Jünger attracted my attention because of his unique representative-

ness for the postwar world and all the ambiguities and problems that corre-
spond to figures whose work supposedly reflects major concerns and themes
of an epoch. T h e writer's ideas have an important value for the historian,
the measure of which cannot be taken solely by counting readers or book
editions. T h e writer captures concepts, moods, dispositions, and feelings
homologous to the manner with which the sculptor carves shapes into
stone, seemingly frozen in time. These shapes can then be studied long af-
ter their creation in order to understand the society in which they were pro-
duced. Without having to subscribe to the materialist "realism" theory of
Georg Lukács, which argues that the novel, the epic, or philosophy can mir-
ror the objective, external world independent of the author's intentions or
motives, 3 a written work can arguably become representative of a period
because, in some mysterious way, it touches d e e p chords in a culture's self-
understanding.
T h e frozen moments of meaning that one finds in the artist's words might
arguably be the equivalent of the fragments of edifices that the archaeolo-
gist uncovers. But whereas the archaeologist is forced to conjure up in the
imagination whole works of art and to speculate on how they constituted
meaning for a culture, written works, especially in modern times, elicit
written responses. In the dialectic of communication constituted by the au-
thor and the public, the possibility of an aesthetics of reception becomes
possible. 4

This study encompasses three broad themes. T h e first involves tracing the
Jünger reception as part of the process of the formation of collective mem-
ory of fascism in the Federal Republic after 1945. T h e debate revolved
around Jünger's putative role in the intellectual assault on Weimar that pre-
pared the way for National Socialism, his controversial turn against Nazism
(so-called inner emigration) and a murky role in the German resistance.
Further, he emerged in the early years of the Federal Republic as a public
intellectual offering a precarious mix of humanism, German nationalism,
and European cosmopolitanism that stirred angry denunciations as well as
vigorous affirmation.
Second, the politics of literary canonization will be addressed, including
the debate over Jünger's place in the pantheon of German writers, the

3. See Georg Lukács, Schriften zur Literatursoziologie (Berlin: Ullstein, 1977), esp. "Histo-
rischer Roman und historisches Drama," 1 7 5 - 1 9 8 .
4. See Hans RobertJauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in Jauss, To-
ward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982).
4 INTRODUCTION

changing nature of testimonials to his work against the background of the

maturation of the Federal Republic, the key shift in his reception history
with the conservative turn in German politics and the award of the Goethe
Prize in 1982, the comparison of the French and German reception, and
the celebrity of Jünger in his advanced old age.
Third, Jünger's contribution to the project of post-1945 radical conser-
vatism will be considered within the framework of what I call his p h e n o m e -
nology without a subject, and a related discourse with Heidegger that in-
cluded a theodicy of the Holocaust, linking up the persecution of the Jews
to the history of Western nihilism. Jünger's form of historical revisionism
shared with other postwar conservatives a renewal of interest in mythology
andposthistoire speculation. Since this latter term may seem unclear to read-
ers, it is worth offering a preliminary definition here. Although ideas about
the end of history can be traced back to Hegel, or even Augustine, 5 the radi-
cal conservative version in Germany emerged as an apocalyptic reaction to
the horrors of modern warfare and the German defeat in World War I.
Not only were the traditional elites doomed, but modern technology was
turning individuals into interchangeable, faceless u n i t s — t h e worker in the
factory, or the machine-soldier, reflected modern life, atomistic, nihilistic,
driven by an inexorable will to power. In the early 1930s Jünger, inverting
Spengler's pessimism, welcomed the destruction of bourgeois civilization
and heralded the creation of a German workers' state, which he thought
would be led and shaped by the heroic realism of veterans like himself. Af-
ter the Second World War, Jünger continued to believe that technological
modernity had erected an insurmountable obstacle to history, but like
other conservatives, he thought that National Socialism had failed in its at-
tempt to overcome nihilism; in fact, it had succumbed to the worst tempta-
tions of technological domination. He now understood the e n d of history
as an argument about European culture, an ontological declaration that
European civilization was terminally ill, the main symptom of the disease
being a vertiginous loss of creative spirit and the concomitant conquest of
European culture by routinization, standardization, and mass culture (usu-
ally of American provenance).
In the early stages of the Jünger postwar reception, most of Jünger's in-
terpreters contented themselves with an explication de texte, drawing out
hermeneutically the major themes and motifs of his work, pinpointing the
sources of literary and philosophical influences, and exploring Jünger's

5. As Hannah Arendt noted, the coming of Christ heralded a transmundane event, inter-
preted by Augustine as a departure from secular time and a timeless beginning (modo, or now-
time) that was indifferent to the cycles of antiquity. See On Revolution (London: Penguin,
199°). 27-
 INTRODUCTION 5

method and style. His personal political history was, for the most part, not
a central concern. Erich Brock's Das Weltbild Ernst Jüngers ( 1 9 4 5 ) , written in
exile in Switzerland during the Second World War, was typical of this genre,
situating Jünger's texts in European intellectual history as far back as neo-
Platonism. Gerhard Nebel's book, Ernst Jünger: Abenteuer des Geistes (1950),
portrayed the author's work in glowing terms as a comprehensive meta-
physical experience, a spiritual adventure. T h e Christian reception, which
mistookjünger's interest in biblical themes for an authentic theological con-
version, was represented on the Catholic side by the Jesuit Hubert B e c h e r s
Ernst Jünger: Mensch und Werk (1949), and from a Protestant perspective by
Hans Rudolf Müller-Schweife's ErnstJünger ( 1 9 5 1 ) and Walter Hilsbecher's
Ernst Jünger und die neue Theologie (1949).
T h e idea that Jünger's supposed turn away from extreme nationalism to
humanism and religion could be a model for all Germans was a constant
theme in all these books. Jünger's journal from the Second World War and
his treatise about reconciliation between the former enemies, Der Friede
(1946) (The peace) ,6 were represented by his supporters as exemplary mod-
els of a transition from Germany's militant and shameful past to a more civ-
ilized future. In the humanist reception ofJünger the code word for Hitler-
ism and a shorthand explanation for its rise was nihilism. In Der heroische
Nihilismus und seine Uberwindung: ErnstJüngers Weg durch die Krise (1948), Al-
fred von Martin interpreted German culture as having been pushed off
course by idealism, which, taken to the extreme, destroyed all beliefs, val-
ues, and civilized morality. Jünger was chosen as a Saul-turned-Paul figure
to lead the way out of the crisis because he himself had been a "heroic ni-
hilist" and one of the most eloquent opponents of civilization.
O n e of the few voices of dissent in the early Jünger reception came from
a philosopher and mathematician. Max Bense argued, in his very astute
Ptolemäer und Mauretanier oder die theologische Emigration der deutschen Literatur
(1950) that both Jünger and Thomas Mann belong, in terms of literary
classification, to nineteenth-century aestheticism, and he derided both au-
thors' mannerist attachment to mythological and religious symbols. O n the
other hand, Bense d e e m e d the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn an origi-
nal voice of literary modernism because he held n o illusions about the sav-
ing power of the word; his poems purportedly held u p a clear mirror to the
disintegration and chaos of the contemporary world. Bense's book appro-
priately captured the archaic tension in Jünger's style and the heavy reliance
on obscure and esoteric themes from German romanticism. But Bense failed
to recognize the other side of Jünger, his innovative essays on modern life,
particularly concerning the dialectic between technology and politics.

6. Hereafter cited as The Peace.

6 INTRODUCTION

These first postwar attempts to understand the apparent ideological shift

in Jünger's worldview toward humanism and Christianity led to a series of
heated discussions of his philosophy and politics. These began in the early
1950s, peaked around i960, and trailed off by 1970. A whiff of scandal and
taboo always seemed to surround the mention of the writer's name. The
"Case ofJünger" or the 'Jünger Controversy" {der FallJünger) was a concern
that went beyond academia and filled the pages of newspapers across the
country. These debates were fueled by a new series of books by the author,
in which he meditated on the Cold War and the two Germanys' relationship
to the superpowers. In the wake of these debates, scholars began to charge
that Jünger's self-imposed isolation was a clever pose, that he was position-
ing himself, just as in the Weimar period, as a powerful voice that remains
elusive in an attempt to influence politics by writing encoded but poignantly
worded political diagnoses (Zeitdiagnosen).
One of the most sharply worded polemical attacks against Jünger was
published by the exiled Jewish-German journalist Peter de Mendelssohn in
1953. In Der Geist in der Despotie, de Mendelssohn considered four intellec-
tuals: Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Knut Hamsun, and Jean Giono. His book
dealt with the ethical responsibility of the intellectual in a totalitarian soci-
ety. Although de Mendelssohn wrote with subtlety and fairness of the some-
times insurmountable pressure of conflicting loyalties and other moral
dilemmas faced by these authors, his treatment ofJünger was undoubtedly
the most harsh and uncompromising. De Mendelssohn's most severe criti-
cism asserted that Jünger's early writings were evidently widely read as sup-
porting fascist ideology, but when it came time to confront the responsibil-
ity for his past, Jünger hid himself behind a vast assemblage of metaphysical
justifications. The only weakness of de Mendelssohn's approach was that he
constructed a rigid liberal, humanistic set of guidelines, against which he
measured the words and behavior of radical conservative thinkers. This
structure made it easier to convict them of intellectual betrayal in his terms,
but the analytic framework was not suited to finding the reasons why many
intellectuals genuinely could have believed in the goals of fascism, at least
for a time. Nevertheless, de Mendelssohn's b o o k — h e also published many
articles on the subject in the more widely circulated press—was a rhetori-
cally effective, critical and enlightened contribution to the early debates on
the German past. He was a clear exception to the majority of the intelli-
gentsia in Germany at the time, who tended to be apologetic or very defen-
sive on the subject.
A pioneering effort to capture the manner in which Jünger's early and
postwar works fit together was undertaken by a German-born professor at
the University of Colorado, Gerhard Loose. His monograph Ernst Jünger:
Gestalt und Werk (1957) was burdened by long stretches of uncritical para-
 INTRODUCTION 7

phrasing ofJünger's texts, and he rehashed Gerhard Nebel's idea of the "in-
tellectual adventurer" without adding any significant sharpness to a hope-
lessly vague concept. But Loose's research had the merit of incorporating
the problematic aspects of Jünger's early work into an analysis of the post-
war writings. Loose deftly identified the dangers inherent in the total culte
du moi of the author (Ichbezogenheit) and showed how the natural world, for-
eign lands, and war remained spectacles for the purely aesthetic manipula-
tion of Jünger's literary imagination.
By the end of the 1950s, historians were finally beginning to pick up the
thread first stitched by Armin Möhler in his definitive study Die konservative
Revolution in Deutschland, 1918—1932 (1950). Christian Graf von Krockow's
Die Entscheidung (1958) succeeded in bringing together the Weimar careers
of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Jünger using the political concept of
decisionism as a c o m m o n denominator. Krockow's book flattened out the
differences between these three very different thinkers and forced them
into a conceptual straitjacket, but the investigation proved fruitful as part
of a series of nonorthodox, "superstructural" (Uberbau) interpretations of
the right-wing Weimar intelligentsia. Some postwar existentialists, for ex-
ample, saw Jünger as a latter-day Nietzschean and interpreted his early writ-
ings as an expressionist, youthful rebellion against the moral hypocrisy of
the bourgeoisie between the wars. 7
T h e first comprehensive scholarly work to integrate both biography and
a complete review of the sources then available, was Hans Peter Schwarz's
Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (1962). Schwarz
demonstrated how right-wing revolutionary politics and literary mod-
ernism blended together in Jünger's desire to subvert Weimar politics. This
insight led Schwarz to coin the phrase "conservative anarchist," indicating
that Jünger rebelled against all political systems in order to carve out a
niche for personal f r e e d o m in a new hierarchy. In the final analysis, Schwarz
undervalued Jünger's politics when he concluded that he was more of a
dreamy poet than a serious political theoretician.
In the Marxist literature, Jünger has been predictably vilified as an expo-
nent of an irrationalist and aggressively militant philosophy that reflected

7. Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1956),
iggff. Löwith includes Jünger with Gide and de Saint-Exupéry in France, D. H. Lawrence in
England, Stefan George, Rilke, Spengler, Musil, Benn, and Thomas Mann in Germany. Han-
nah Arendt also located Jünger in the Nietzsche lineage, but she correctly pointed out that the
Front Generation's passion to destroy society cannot be explained simply with recourse to
Nietzsche's sublime "transformation of all values." The experience of mass slaughter had a
unique and epochally significant influence. See Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich, 1973), 3 2 8 - 3 2 9 .
8 INTRODUCTION

epiphenomenally the capitalist crises in German bourgeois society. T h e

Jünger critique from these quarters did not stray, methodologically, far from
Lukäcs' analysis of so-called prefascist and fascist forms of Lebensphilosophie
in his 1954 book Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. A g o o d example of this research
strategy was Armin Steil's Die imaginäre Revolte (1984) .8 Steil analyzes Sorel,
Schmitt, and Jünger in an attempt to argue for a stark theoretical differen-
tiation between the critique of capitalism on the left and the attack on bour-
geois society on the right among "prefascist" thinkers. T h e aesthetic and po-
litical revolution envisaged by these thinkers purportedly offers purely
imaginary solutions to social conflict while in reality constructing a basis for
fascist politics. A causal relationship between texts and their reception is
implicitly taken for granted in Steil's work, as it is in two other significant
Marxist contributions from East G e r m a n y — H e l m u t Kaiser's Mythos, Rausch,
und Reaktion9 and Joachim Petzold's Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen
Faschismus.10 A cogent and comprehensive Marxist treatment of Weimar's
right-wing intelligentsia can be f o u n d in Günter Hartung's Literatur und Äs-
thetik des deutschen Faschismus, where Jünger's Der Arbeiter (The worker) 1 1 is
analyzed as a "military-fascist Utopia." 12
T h e intellectual confrontation with the purported exhaustion of modern
art, literature, and architecture in 1960s A m e r i c a — a mind-set that gradu-
ally evolved into a sustained critique of culture beyond m o d e r n i s m —
reached Germany only in the late 1970s. 1 3 O n e of the targets of the post-
modernist critique was the hallowed liberal attachment to Enlightenment
rationality, to be replaced by pluralistic, nontotalizing epistemologies. 1 4 This
denigration of the modernist legacy called for a reexamination of those
thinkers w h o had criticized modernism from within the movement and
could be recast as postmodernists avant la lettre. Karl Heinz Bohrer's re-

8. Armin Steil, Die imaginäre Revolte: Untersuchungen zur faschistischen Ideologie und ihrer theo-
retischen Vorbereitung bei Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, und Emst Jünger (Marburg: Verlag Arbeiter-
bewegung und Gesellschaftswissenschaft, 1984).
9. Helmut Kaiser, Mythos, Rausch, und Reaktion: Der Weg Gottfried Benns und Ernst Jüngers
(Berlin-Ost: Aufbau Verlag, 1962).
l o. Joachim Petzold, Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen Faschismus: Jungkonservative Ideolo-
gen in der Weimarer Republik als geistige Wegbereiter der faschistischen Diktatur (Berlin-Ost: Deutscher
Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1978), esp. 1 8 5 - 1 9 0 , 207-209.
11. Hereafter cited as The Worker.
12. Günter Härtung, Literatur und Ästhetik des deutschen Faschismus: Drei Studien (Berlin-Ost:
Akademie Verlag, 1983), 75.
13. See Andreas Huyssen, who notes that the Germans in the 1960s were still rediscover-
ing their own moderns, banished by the Nazis, or shifting from one set of moderns to another.
"Mapping the Postmodern," NGC 33 (fall 1984): 19.
14. See Elliot Neaman, "Liberalism and Post-Modern Hermeneutics," Critical Review, 2 - 3
(spring /summer 1988): 1 4 9 - 1 6 5 .
 INTRODUCTION

markable study, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens,15 brought Jünger into the post-
modernist discourse with exactly this purpose in mind.
Bohrer took the anti-Enlightenment motifs in Jünger's early work to be
representative or anticipatory not of a specific form of German fascism but
rather of a general European, aesthetic encounter with the darker side of
reason that must be seen in isolation from the rise of fascism across Europe.
Bohrer's aim was to valorize certain elements of Jünger's aesthetic critique
of the totalizing rationality of technological civilization as more sophisti-
cated than the literal realism of Western Marxism in the 1960s. T h e aes-
thetically autonomous m o m e n t and unique discovery by Jünger was the
modern experience of shock (Schrecken) described in the early war diaries.
Bohrer traces this mode of aesthetic experience back to romantic critiques
of civilization in Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, and to the aestheticism of
E. T. A. Hoffman, Poe, and Baudelaire. Finally he concludes that Walter
Benjamin's concept of Chok was partly dependent on material first worked
out by Jünger. 1 6 Bohrer's larger claim is that Jünger succeeded in working
out a poetical and phenomenological description of the individual subject's
helplessness and dread (Grauen) in the face of successive catastrophes in
modern experience that defy all rational means of order and prediction. In
1981 Bohrer expanded u p o n this thesis in Plötzlichkeit (Suddenness). 1 7
Bohrer contended that Jünger was an "aggressive-nationalist, right-revo-
lutionary author, w h o developed so-called prefascist motifs in the core of
his writings." 18 But he believed that Jünger's writings are not therefore to be
denied or repressed, for they contain "deep insights into our modern con-
dition, psychologically, anthropologically, and societally." 19 T h e argument
that we must take Jünger's thought seriously, in isolation from its possible
relationship to fascism and National Socialism, depends undoubtedly on
accepting Bohrer's contention that Jünger's critique of reason is unrelated
to his "prefascist" or "protofascist" disposition. In the chapters that follow, I
do not accept this line of reasoning. O n e of the reasons for laying such great
stress on Jünger's jfrosi/Msfoire vision, a concept I will elaborate presently, is to
show how Jünger's dream of aesthetic and historical autonomy was inti-
mately b o u n d u p with the experience of fascism. If Jünger's work provides
insights into the modern condition, then one might easily argue that fas-
cism also provides solutions to the crises of modern society. This unexam-

15. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens: Du pessimistische Romantik und ErnstJüngers
Frühwerk (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1978/1983).
16. Ibid., 190 ff.
17. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des ästhelishen Scheins (Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1981).
18. Karl Heinz Bohrer, "Wer hat Angst vor Jüngers Schrecken?" FAZ, March 29, 1980.
19. Ibid.
10 INTRODUCTION

ined, questionable premise underlies m u c h of Bohrer's treatment of Jünger;

nevertheless Die Ästhetik des Schreckens remains one of the most innovative
and challenging works on the subject.
In the wake of the demise of communism, a new debate has emerged
among West German intellectuals concerning German tradition and Ger-
man postmodern identity in art and politics. In particular, the iconoclastic
works of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg offer a focal point for testing long-held as-
sumptions about German assimilation of "Western culture." For the major-
ity of postwar intellectuals and artists in Germany, an unequivocal antifas-
cist stance was d e m a n d e d and supplied by the purveyors of culture in both
West and East Germany. In part this conformity to Western standards meant
denying or at least being extremely guarded about a large part of pre-Nazi
German culture, seen as contaminated and compromised by the Nazi as-
similation of the romantic-classicist German pantheon. Lately Syberberg
has attacked the shallowness of Germany's reflex antifascism and suggested
that the romantic tradition, in particular, should be cultivated as a defense
against the insipidity of Western (i.e., American) consumer-driven culture. 20
Syberberg's increasingly shrill anti-Western and anti-Semitic tones have
caused some observers to label him an archreactionary and his writings "ob-
scene." 2 1 T h e r e is, however, little in Syberberg's "new" position that has not
already been anticipated in Ernst Jünger's political writings. As we shall see,
Jünger also decried and belittled the influence of the Western occupiers
w h o wanted to reeducate Germans with t h e i r — i n his v i e w — i n f e r i o r cul-
ture. Jünger also self-consciously cultivated a selective French-German clas-
sical taste in literature, claiming to have never read anything modern be-
yond Zola. Like Syberberg, Jünger also regarded the loss of the old Europe's
architecture, art, and way of life as a disastrous result of m o d e r n nihilism.

A comprehensive biography of Jünger still waits for an author. This lacuna

in the Jünger literature is explained not only by the obvious fact of his re-
cent death, but also by the difficulty of accessing his correspondence and
other papers at the Federal German Literary Archive in Marbach. Re-
searchers must obtain permission from the executors of Jünger's will to look
at any material, and access to politically sensitive documents is routinely de-
nied. A n o t h e r problem for future scholars will be the exponential growth
of the secondary literature. A recent German dissertation notes there are al-
ready at least five different interpretive approaches to his life and work dur-

20. H. J. Syberberg, Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Krieg
(Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1990).
21. Eric L. Santner, "Postwar German Aesthetics," NGC 57 (fall 1992): 5 - 2 4 .
 INTRODUCTION Ii

ing the Weimar period alone, each with its own growing bibliographies:
classic work-centered literary criticism as well as the psychoanalytic, ideol-
ogy-critical, cultural, and "poetological" genres. 22 One could add intellec-
tual and reception histories to the list.
After Jünger's death, the first biography to make a claim to comprehen-
siveness was Paul Noack's ErnstJünger: A Biography,23 Unfortunately the work
is entirely unoriginal in its theoretical approach and depends to a large ex-
tent on secondary literature. Noack's book resembles the apologetic hero-
worship ofJünger's early postwar admirers, who will be treated below.
Some of the best treatments ofJünger can still be found in earlier works,
before Jünger became a cultural celebrity. One of those was Wolfgang
Kaempfer's ErnstJünger, which can be read as an anti-manifesto to Bohrer. 24
Kaempfer picks up the gauntlet and sets out to prove that Jünger does not
diagnose the modern condition of shock but rather flees from it into "au-
ratic" poetry that insulates the reader from the reconstruction of genuine
experiences. 25 Kaempfer's book is essential reading because he does not
hesitate to interpret Jünger as a challenging exponent of antibourgeois
modernism, and he remains committed to delineating the connections be-
tween Jünger's texts and the trivial, pathetic, and morally repulsive aspects
of Nazi culture. Kaempfer offers an unsurpassed synopsis of all of Jünger's
texts available at this time although the reader can become easily distracted
by the author's polemical assaults. The study is, of course, incomplete, since
some important Jünger texts have been published since 1981.
Martin Meyer's ErnstJünger26 is, in contrast to Kaempfer's book, quaintly
nostalgic. His is an impressive attempt to situate Jünger's entire oeuvre in
twentieth-century literature. But Meyer uses a reverse form of the guilt-by-
association method to make Jünger into a great German writer in the tradi-
tion of Rilke, Benn, Thomas Mann, and profound thinkers like Walter Ben-
jamin and Heidegger. The book is full of accounts of the important artists,
intellectuals, and academics with whom Jünger rubbed shoulders. But
Meyer's assertions tend to be rhetorical rather than convincing. Jünger's
works are compared to countless prominent creations of modern literature
as if, by contagion, Jünger's books could reach the pinnacle of twentieth-
century literature. Meyer assiduously avoids taking any seriously critical per-
spective on his subject with the result that the book appears fairly harmless
and its author gullible.

22. Klaus Gaugher, Krieger, Arbeiter, Waldgänger, Anarch: Das kriegerische Frühwerk Ernst
Jüngers (Frankfurt, 1997), 11.
23. Paul Noack, Ernst Jünger: Eine Biography (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 1998).
24. Wolfgang Kaempfer, Ernst Jünger (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981).
25. Ibid., 78 ff.
26. Martin Meyer, Ernst Jünger (Munich: Hanser, 1990).
12 INTRODUCTION

Martin Konitzer has noted that despite claiming to be a biography,

Meyer's book constructs very few bridges between the life of the author and
his literary production. 27 Konitzer offers more concrete connections in this
regard, showing how Jünger's early work fits into the tradition of German
war literature, and his later writings into the retreat from political engage-
ment evident in the desire for aesthetic and metaphysical redemption found
in much conservative German postwar philosophy. But Konitzer's book lacks
a sustained and compelling thesis, settling for the platitude that Jünger's
long "poetical existence" (Dichterexistenz) reflects in exemplary manner the
contradictions of the century.
A recent study by Thomas Nevin, a scholar of classical languages on this
side of the Atlantic, signals that Jünger is finally being taken seriously as a
figure important to any understanding of twentieth-century German his-
tory. ErnstJünger and Germany: Into the Abyss 1914 -1945 is a good treatment
ofJünger's writings read against the background of Weimar politics and the
National Socialist state. Nevin is not reluctant to point to Jünger's political
shortsightedness, his antidemocratic biases, and his groundless elitism and
egoism. On the other hand, he presents a very complex picture of Jünger's
writings and shows how many of the attacks on Jünger are based on misin-
formation or inattention to the historical context from which his writings
emerged. Though Nevin tends to err on the side of supportingjünger's self-
interpretations, this treatment by a non-German scholar (not coinciden-
tally) results in a balanced, if somewhat apologetic portrait of the author
that goes beyond polemics and partisanship.

JÜNGER IN AMERICA

In the first two decades after the war, Jünger remained relatively unknown
in the English-speaking academic world, in spite of some specialized mono-
graphs like the work of Gerhard Loose referred to above. Some discussion
ofJünger's work was carried out in the late 1940s in the Partisan Review, but
there was little follow-up. As late as 1976, Mircea Eliade complained that "in
the United States he is not even mentioned as being among the represen-
tatives of contemporary German literature." 28
One major exception to this general neglect was an excellent thin vol-
ume brought out in 1953 by the Czech exile J. P. Stern and simply titled,
Ernst Jünger. Stern argues that the essential question about the German au-
thor is whether his own self-understanding as a great representative of his

27. Martin Konitzer, Ernst Jünger (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1993), 13.
28. Mircea Eliade, Journal III, 1 yjo—igyH, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1989), 256.
 INTRODUCTION 13

generation is correct. Stern finds the quality of his writings to be overvalued

but makes a more important argument relevant to the concerns of the pres-
ent study. He emphasizes that Jünger is representative of an epoch, not be-
cause he gives voice to the inner world of his generation, but because his
own contradictions and shortcomings best reflect the tortured path of Ger-
many's youth between the wars: "In this very defection of his, which he
shares with a generation whose live and immediate experience of suffering,
pain and love is as it were endormie dans la terreur, Jünger is the most power-
ful and consistent spokesman of all." 29
It is not surprising that Stern was one of the earliest foreign observers to
see the epochal significance ofJünger's work. Stern was born in Prague, but
was educated in Cambridge, England. Retaining dual loyalty he served both
in the Czech army and the Royal Air Force. As a young man he had heard
Hitler speak at the beer gardens in Munich and had been present when the
Germans occupied Prague in 1939. Stern was one of the first to point out
how the camouflaged, even subliminal notes of resistance in some of Jünger's
writings of the 1930s both partook in and reacted to the metaphysical bathos
of the fascist era. He was also the first to see a parallel between Jünger's
postwar apologetic diagnosis of National Socialism and Ernst Nolte's con-
cept of the resistance to transcendence in the Three Faces of Fascism.50
Eliade also believed, erroneously, that none of Jünger's books had been
translated into English. In Storms of Steel and several novels had in fact been
translated, without much critical echo, but his work had found political res-
onance in the United States at the start of the Cold War with the publica-
tion in 1948 of a translation of his seemingly conciliatory book, The Peace.
T h e publisher, Henry Regnery, had been a New Deal Democrat, but con-
verted to conservatism in the 1950s and published many neoconservative
theoretical books, including William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at Yale and
Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind.31 Going back to Harry Elmer Barnes's
defense of Germany after the First World War, there remained a strong tra-
dition among American conservatives challenging the American liberal
anti-German bias through historical revisionism, in particular on the ques-
tion of alleged war atrocities. 32 In The Peace Jünger portrayed the Second

29. J. P. Stern, Ernst Jünger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 17.
30. J. P. Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People, 2nd. ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), 9 6 - 9 7 .
31. Regnery died in 1996; see his obituary in the New York Times, June 27, 1996.
32. Deborah Lipstadt shows how this way of thinking was just as prevalent after the Second
World War as it had been in the interwar period and how many of the apologies for the Ger-
man military later developed into denial of the Holocaust. See Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the
Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1993), 6 5 - 8 3 .
14 INTRODUCTION

World War as a European civil war, in which atrocities were committed on

both sides, and reconciliation would require that no one nation be held re-
sponsible for the catastrophe. This interpretation fit well into the philo-
Germanic attitude of many Anglo-Saxon conservatives.
Since 1989 interest in Jünger has begun to grow among American intel-
lectuals. Besides Bullock's noteworthy work of criticism and Nevin's political
biography, continuing questions about Schmitt and Heidegger have led to a
number of important studies incorporating Jünger's work in historical con-
text. Michael Zimmerman's Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity (1990)
and Mark Lilla's piece on Schmitt in the New York Review ofBooks in 1997 are
good examples of the new relevance accorded Jünger's writings. The left-
leaning New German Critique devoted an entire special issue to Jünger in the
summer of 1993. With the resurgence of a strong intellectual right in Eu-
rope since the fall of communism, intellectuals here and abroad are curious
and sometimes disturbed by the prodigious influence of the writings of Wei-
mar's right-wing intellectuals. These factors, along with the prospect of new
archival material (including substantial correspondence between Jünger,
Schmitt, and Heidegger), mean that American scholars, retaining more per-
sonal distance from the polemical debates about the German past, will likely
have much to contribute to these contentious, ongoing debates.

J Ü N G E R IN F R A N C E

In contrast to the deep divisions in the German reception from extreme left
to extreme right, in France Jünger's work was studied and brought to pub-
lic attention mostly by groups of supporters linked by common political and
ideological persuasions on the political right. During the period of occupa-
tion, activists of the French National Revolution discussed his work favor-
ably in the French press. Auf den Marmorklippen {On the Marble Cliffs)33 was
reviewed several times in La Nouvelle Revue Française, France's most impor-
tant cultural organ, the guidance of which the German ambassador Otto
Abetz had assigned Pierre Drieu La Rochelle from 1941 to 1943. 3 4 Jünger's

33. Hereafter cited as The Marble Cliffs.

34. See Christian Michelfelder, "La cosmologie d'Ernst Jûnger," NRF (Dec. 1942): 6 2 8 -
636. Typically these reviews were apolitical. Michelfelder writes cryptically that it is better not
to attempt to see any contemporary meaning in this book for "it is good that there remains
some obscure passages, which even the author himself couldn't explain." (635). On Drieu La
Rochelle see Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933—1939 (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 287-294. On Drieu La Rochelle's views o f j û n g e r and Nazi Germany see,
"L'Allemagne européenne," NRF (January 1942): 1 0 4 - 1 1 2 .
 INTRODUCTION 15

books were also reviewed by the Catholic pro-Vichy Thierry Maulnier and
by the fascist sympathizer Paul de Man in Belgium. 3 5 After the war a circle
of personal friends of Jünger, many associated with right-wing journals,
such as La Table Ronde, Rivarol, Figaro, La Patrie, Renaissance, and La nation
française, propagated an image of the German writer as the most vigorous
voice for a revival of European culture in opposition to godless commu-
nism, Western secularism, and materialism. 36 Julien Hervier, in an impor-
tant, rigorous, but partisan book, Deux individus contre l'histoire, followed
a similar approach, depicting Jünger and Drieu La Rochelle as swimming
against the tide of history in a heroic attempt to save occidental culture
from the modernist assault. 37
By the 1970s Jünger's books and ideas were propagated regularly by
Alain de Benoist and other thinkers of the so-called nouvelle droit in journals
like Défense de l'Occident, Eléments, and Nouvelle Ecole.36 By the late 1970s and
into the 1980s, mainstream conservative newspapers and journals, such as
Le Figaro littéraire and Le Magazin littéraire, regularly featured Jünger as "le
plus grand" living German writer. 39 T h e high regard in which President Mit-
terand held Jünger signaled the m u c h more favorable climate for his work
and reputation than the one he f o u n d at h o m e in Germany, though it has
been argued that Jünger's books never reached as wide an audience as his
French supporters liked to believe. 40
Jünger's works have also played the role of reserve troops in what Rich-
ard Wolin calls the "French Heidegger Wars," particularly in regard to the
hotly contested debates between the French Heideggerian left and its crit-
ics over Heidegger's purported attempts to shift the blame for his support
of National Socialism from personal responsibility to the depersonalized

35. Thierry Maulnier, 'Jardins et routes," Revue universelle (August 1942): 1 8 6 - 1 8 9 ; Paul
de Man, 'Jardins et routes, par Ernst Jünger," Le Soir, June 23, 1942; Marcel Jouhandeau, "Re-
connaisance a Ernst Jünger," Antaios 5 - 6 ( 1 9 6 4 - 6 5 ) : 4 3 8 - 4 4 0 .
36. See for example, Jules Roy, "Témoignage pour Ernst Jünger," La Table Ronde, (June
1948): 1079—1080; J. Schlumberger, "Le cas Jünger: Essai de mise au point," Terre des Hommes
November 10, 1945, 1, 5 - 6 ; Marcel Jouhandeau, "Reconnaisance a ErnstJûnger," Antaios 5 -
6 ( 1 9 6 4 - 6 5 ) : 4 3 8 - 4 4 0 ; Georges Laffly, 'Jünger: Un des mages de notre temps," La nation
française, Februray3, 1965, 1 3 - 1 5 .
37. Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre l'histoire (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978).
38. See for example Roberto de Moraes, "Rencontres avec Ernst Jünger: Un témoignage,"
Nouvelle Ecole 33 (fall 1979): 7 5 - 8 1 ; Alain de Benoist, "Ernst Jünger: La figure du travailleur
entre les dieux et les titans," Nouvelle Ecole 40 (fall 1983): 1 1 - 6 1 ; also Benoist, "La figure du
travailleur," Eléments 40 (August 1 9 8 1 - 8 2 ) : 1 3 - 1 9 ; Robert Poulet, "Ernst Jünger—Bernanos,"
Défense de l'occident (June-July 1981): 41—53.
39. See chapter 6, below.
40. See Albrecht Betz, "Qui lit J ü n g e r L e Monde dimanche, September 19, 1982.
i6 INTRODUCTION

"fate" of Western metaphysics and the "forgetting of being." 4 1 Derrida and

some of his followers have attempted to interpret Heidegger's attraction to
Nazism as a philosophical rather than a political mistake; he considered the
movement, so the argument goes, as a spiritual and cultural return to a pre-
Socratic, polis-based renewal of German and occidental culture that would
shift theory and praxis away from the subject/object legacy of Western
thinking and consequently away from the planetary domination of technol-
ogy, modern science, and the "flight of the gods." 4 2 In this debate, Jünger's
intellectual trajectory can help support such a vindication of Heidegger be-
cause Jünger had an important influence in the 1920s and 1930s, while he
put much greater distance between himself and National Socialism than did
Heidegger. Jünger also "spiritualized" his revolutionary battle against the
Weimar Republic in a way that was generally free of völkisch, nordic, and
racial clichés. As will be discussed more at length below, some French Hei-
deggerians (along with the general French reception) have overemphasized
Jünger's distance from National Socialism or even turned him into a resis-
tance fighter.43 T h e problem here, aside from the fact that Jünger's early
support for National Socialism was m u c h stronger than his defenders like to
admit, is that, as Rabinbach and others have pointed out, the distinction be-
tween "spirit" and "race" erases the large gray zone where plenty of room
remained to support alternative, equally problematic "solutions" to Ger-
many's Weimar dilemma. Jünger knew these alternatives were d a n g e r o u s —
he called them "matchsticks," and on the day before Germany capitulated
in 1945 he predicted they would be blamed for the explosion. 4 4 National
Socialism included a h o d g e p o d g e of intellectual currents so that nonracial
variants within that range can hardly be turned into doctrines of resistance.
O n e of my main tasks will be to illuminate the various nuances of that gray
zone in which intellectuals like Jünger and Heidegger could find c o m m o n

41. See Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas. (Amherst: Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 4 2 - 6 1 . O n the French Heideggerians see Anson Rabin-
bach, "Heidegger's Letter on Humanism as Text and Event," NGC 62 (spring/summer 1994): 3 -
38. Reprinted in Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse
and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 97—128. See also Tom Rock-
more, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being (London: Rout-
ledge, 1995).
42. For the most important statement of this position, see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Hei-
degger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989).
43. See below, chapter 7.
44. "Wenn ein Pulverturm in die Luft fliegt, überschätzt man die Bedeutung der Streich-
hölzer." Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen II (May 7, 1945), 430. On the oversimplified distinction be-
tween spirit and race see Rabinbach, "Heidegger's Letter on Humanism," 33. See also Richard J.
Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
 INTRODUCTION 77

ground with National Socialism. Or to rephrase the question from Jiinger's

perspective, as he once put it in an interview, "to what percentage were the
National Socialists also correct?" 45

The present study strives to offer a critical analysis of the postwar reception
of Jünger. In this venture, I have been preceded by two German studies.
Lianne Dornheim's Vergleichende Rezeptionsgeschichte46 and Norbert Dietka's
Ernst Jünger nach 1945*1 were both contributions to the wave of Rezeptions-
geschichte (reception history) in Germany that came in the wake of Hans
Robert Jauss's influential inaugural lecture in Konstanz in 1967. 48 Both
books display, however, the tiresome German habit of creating a polar-
ized discourse on Jünger's lifework. It is unimaginative and singularly un-
provocative to quantify and categorize vast numbers of literary references to
Jünger throughout the last forty years in Germany or, in Dornheim's case,
in England and France as well. One can be certain that Jünger is a much de-
bated, highly controversial author, about whom much has been written in
both strongly negative and positive terms. Since no one disputes this claim,
it is difficult to see why one should expend so much energy in proving the
assertion. Instead, my work orients itself to particular historical questions
that have been outlined above, the problems posed by the Historikerstreit
concerning the historical relativization of Nazi Germany and the issue of
what is traditional, modern, and postmodern in Jünger's production. It
seems to me, finally, not unimportant that a work on reception go beyond
printed newspapers, journals, and books. My work touches on radio essays
as well as film, and I have been able to include a large number of unpub-
lished letters as well as archived material not previously accessible.

The first chapter of this book examines Jünger's biography, revealing the
salient issues that justify the attempt to weld together reception theory and
the politics of memory. The author's most important writings are surveyed

4 5 . "Ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tod," Der Spiegel, August 16, 1 9 8 2 , 1 5 g .

46. Lianne Dornheim, Vergleichende Rezeptionsgeschichte: Das literarische Frühwerk in Deutsch-
land, England, und Frankreich (Frankfurt: Lang, 1 9 8 7 ) .
4 7 . Norbert Dietka, Ernst Jüngernach 1945: Das Jünger Bild der bundesdeutschen Kritik, 1945-
1985 (Frankfurt: Lang, 1 9 8 7 ) . Dietka is prone to superficial generalizations. In a recent
article, he even portrays me as a "Nolte A d e p t " and apologist of the German right because I
studied under Nolte and gave a talk in Berlin in the East German Brecht Archive in 1 9 9 4 on
Jünger. See his "Anmerkungen zur Ernstjünger-Rezeption in Deutschland,"Etudes Germaniques
(October/December 1 9 9 6 ) : 8 3 2 .
4 8 . Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (Konstanz:
Universitätsreden, 1 9 6 7 ) .
i8 INTRODUCTION

against the background of the major events in his long life. A n understand-
ing of the writings and actions of the pre-1945 Jünger is essential in order
to c o m p r e h e n d the bitter attacks leveled against him after the war. Well into
his old age, critics confronted Jünger with quotes from his early works, some
over half a century old, calling upon him to defend his actions before and
during the Third Reich. I will advance a hypothesis here to try to explain
the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Jünger's admirers' firm belief that
the author was a brave resister to Nazism and the opposite position, enun-
ciated in strong terms by his detractors, that he seduced an entire genera-
tion by making fascism intellectually acceptable. His personal actions and
his philosophical and political worldview must be j u d g e d by two very differ-
ent sets of criteria. In regard to the former, I think his personal refusal to be
coopted by the Nazi movement and the conscientious manner in which he
conducted himself as an officer of the occupation army in France were, for
the most part, unobjectionable and at times even laudable. 49 These charac-
ter traits—integrity, courage, and n o n c o n f o r m i t y — h a v e been the basis on
which Jünger's defenders both in Germany and in France have built their
case over the years. It is quite another matter, though, when one leaves out
of consideration the res gestae of Jünger's life and instead focuses on the
large body of writings that he has left to posterity. These writings are prob-
lematic in the extreme. Contrary to the author's contention that his words
only mirrored perceived reality, Jünger's ideas were intended to, and did,
give concrete form to totalitarian thought at several crucial moments in
German history. His phrase "total mobilization" is perhaps the most famous
example. Jünger's critics have long considered this aspect of the writer's
legacy to be the most damning. T h r o u g h o u t the book I will offer many
examples of how the application of differing criteria in j u d g i n g Jünger
has contributed to a confusing plethora of opinions about the author. Here,
as throughout the book, all translations from the German are mine unless
otherwise indicated.
T h e second chapter will offer some glimpses into the private life of Jünger.
I shall examine the people who were admitted into Jünger's inner circle as
best as can be reconstructed from published and unpublished letters, mem-
oirs, and interviews. T h e study of Jünger's personal friendships discloses
that the mechanism of attraction and repulsion, so evident in the public
sphere by the sharp division between the author's apologists and detractors,
was duplicated in the private sphere by a series of friendships ruptured by

49. As a military censor he spared people who incautiously wrote unfavorably of the re-
gime; he saved a library from destruction at Laon, and, as will be discussed at length below, he
was in close contact with Wehrmacht officers who were part of Rommel's failed conspiracy to
overthrow Hitler. O n the other hand, he also failed to take any personal responsibility for the
brutality of the occupying military government in non-Vichy France.
 INTRODUCTION zp

Jünger's ideological views. This chapter also explores Jünger's outer circle,
including his intellectual interaction with a number of writers on the left
such as Alfred Andersch, Eric Mühsam, Carl Zuckmayer, Bertolt Brecht,
Johannes Becher, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Scholars accustomed
to thinking of the German intellectual landscape as clearly demarcated
between opposing political camps will undoubtedly be surprised by the
respect accorded Jünger by these icons of the German left.
The third chapter begins the reception history with an examination of
Jünger's 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs, a publishing event that was consid-
ered a minor coup against the Nazi regime because of its coded attack on
the abuse of power. But the closing lines of the story mark a turn away from
politics and capture perfectly the ambiguity of Jünger's resistance to Na-
tional Socialism and his fascination with its power.
It is in the postwar confrontation with this work and the problem of
defining the parameters of resistance and collaboration that I locate the ori-
gins of the long-standing Jünger controversy. This chapter relates the im-
mediate postwar 'Jünger-debate" to the history and problematic style of the
novel. I will conclude with a discussion of how scholars have treated the
question of the appeal of fascism, particularly in relation to its aesthetic
components, and pose the question whether Jünger's supposedly anti-Nazi
novel contains elements of a "fascist style" that helped slip it past the cen-
sors and contributed to its tremendous fame in the early 1940s.
Chapter 4 contains a critical examination ofJünger's literary reflections
on the Second World War. Here I will explore Jünger's relations to the
officers surrounding the military commander in Paris at the Hotel Majestic.
In particular, I question Jünger's role in the military resistance to Hitler and
the so-called Rommel Plan to arrest the dictator in France. Close scrutiny of
Jünger's war diaries will reveal how he interpreted the German catastrophe
and, keeping in mind the questions posed above, how he dealt with German
culpability for the Holocaust.
Chapter 5 treats the Second World War diaries from the point of view of
the postwar reception, particularly in regard to the question of the aestheti-
cization of violence, Jünger's short-lived theological turn, and his place in the
postwar discourse among European conservatives on the "end of history."
In chapter 6 , 1 turn to an examination of the debates and controversies
that attended both Jünger's published works and his person in the 1950s
and 1960s. Jünger wrote about politics in this period through the eyes of
the defeated, resisting both what he conceived to be a threatening Ameri-
canization of European life and the seduction of Soviet-style collectivism. I
situate his writings on the state in the context of other conservative writers
of the period who contemplated the changed nature of power politics in an
age when Europe's stature on the world stage was decreasing. The much
contemplated issue of "nihilism" will show how indebted Heidegger was to
20 INTRODUCTION

Jünger in his post-Holocaust self-delusions, and how Jünger also contrib-

uted to Schmitt's thinking about national sovereignty and planetary poli-
tics. I argue that the notion of "deradicalized" postwar conservatism is only
half right, 50 since Jünger and other survivors of the Conservative Revolution
reradicalized their stance towards Western, liberal society under the guise of
coded terms, such as "nihilism," "planetary technology," and "sovereignty."
Using personal letters, radio, film, television broadcasts, and a broad se-
lection of articles and books dealing with Jünger's literary production, I at-
tempt to reconstruct the m o o d of the Adenauer era and show how the
figure of Jünger represented both a confirmation of and a challenge to the
status q u o of the so-called Restoration Years. Jünger's ascendancy as a liter-
ary personality coincided with the beginning of the establishment of the
Federal Republic and waned around the time of Adenauer's death in 1967.
Part of this chapter is structured around that peculiarly German p h e n o m e -
non, the quinquennial celebration of a writer's birthday in books, news-
papers, journals, television, and Festschriften, that academic homage by ini-
tiates and followers to an intellectual mentor. We will examine the Jünger
reception of his sixtieth, sixty-fifth, and seventieth birthdays ( 1 9 5 5 , i960,
and 1965), using these dates as markers to register the interaction between
the writer as a focus of cultural authority and the reading public as a recep-
tive vehicle of contradictory and competing ethical and political positions.
An author puts to the test the values a community shares or at least claims
to share. I take Jünger's texts and the critical responses to constitute a gen-
eral configuration of cultural meaning intersected b y j ü n g e r ' s provocations,
a stirring up of conscious and subconscious levels of traumatic and unre-
solved German guilt. 51
Beginning with Heliopolis, Jünger's first postwar novel, I will examine his
fictional writings as well as his contributions during the 1950s to an intense
debate a m o n g philosophers that engaged academics, journalists, and the
general reading public on the questions of nihilism, Nietzsche, decadence,
modernity, German politics, German conservatism, and the reconstruction
of German culture and civil society. This chapter ends with a look at the
Youth Revolt of the 1960s and at Jünger's role in that cultural event.
Chapter 7 brings the relationship between politics and literature into fo-
cus by taking into our sights the accolades and public recognition accorded
to Jünger in his mature years. In particular the stormy events surrounding
the bestowal of the Goethe Prize and the attention of important politicians

50. See Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of Ger-
man Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
51. O n the difficult question of texts and their assimilation by readers of a given cultural
community see Roger Chartier, "Texts, Printing, Readings," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cul-
tural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198g), 1 5 4 - 1 7 5 .
 INTRODUCTION 21

in b o t h France and G e r m a n y are o f central interest. By l o o k i n g at a n u m b e r

o f interesting a n d unusual aspects of the J ü n g e r controversy, such as the
French attraction to the G e r m a n right, a n d the J ü n g e r contribution to
posthistoire a n d p o s t m o d e r n aesthetics, I h o p e to g o b e y o n d the black-and-
white characterizations o f this cultural figure in o r d e r to provide a d e e p e r
understanding o f how varied a n d multifaceted is the continuing struggle
with the G e r m a n past.
T h e rest o f this chapter is devoted to the relationship between J ü n g e r
a n d the rejuvenated New Right after the fall o f the Berlin wall in 1989.
W i t h o u t r e d u c i n g all o fJünger's work to a political program, I p o i n t o u t that
his ideas a b o u t national identity, history, and culture since 1 9 4 5 were at
o d d s with the mainstream o f G e r m a n liberal t h o u g h t a n d thus constituted
a reservoir f r o m w h i c h the neo-conservative revolt against liberalism has re-
peatedly drawn. Moreover, h e took a m o r e than passive interest in the fate
o f E u r o p e a n radical conservatism, o f f e r i n g moral a n d even token financial
support to the y o u n g conservatives in Germany. T h e b o o k closes with the
a r g u m e n t that J ü n g e r is o n e of a small n u m b e r o f twentieth-century Ger-
m a n intellectuals whose ideas will play a decisive role in shaping the divided
perceptions o f the G e r m a n past a n d r e d e f i n i n g G e r m a n national identity in
a politically u n i f i e d future.
 CHAPTER ONE

Ernst Jünger
A German Life

Ernst Jünger was born into a fairly well-to-do middle-class family in 1895 in
Heidelberg. 1 He was the oldest of six children, two of whom died early. He
was closest to Friedrich Georg, two years younger, who later became a much
admired poet. In his memoirs, Friedrich Georg portrayed their father, a
chemist and pharmacist, after whom Ernst was named, as many would later
describe the oldest son: he possesses a mixture of "coldness and attentive in-
telligence . . . and biting irony."2 Though he kept a distance from his chil-
dren, the father was interested in their intellectual development. He was
trained in the sciences, ran a successful pharmacy, and retired early on the
money he accumulated to pursue his hobbies, chess, botany, and zoology.
Scientific journals and books on a wide range of topics flooded into the
house by mail order. The father bought butterfly nets and other insect-
catching paraphernalia for the boys, to the consternation of Frau Jünger,
who feared that school work would suffer. She was warm and loving, but

1. The only biography yet to appear in English is a thin and long outdated volume from
J. P. Stern, Ernst Jünger: A Writer of Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
In German, Karl O. Paetel's Ernst Jünger in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumentation (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1962) is dependable but, being officially commissioned and overseen by the author
himself, lacks a critical edge; see also Gerhard Loose, Ernst Jünger: Gestalt und Werk (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1957), which places Jünger within the European intellectual tradition but lacks
any other context. T h e best biography ofJünger's prewar activities can be found in Hans Peter
Schwarz's Der konservative Anarch ist: Politik und Zeitkritik ErnstJüngers (Freiburg: Rombach, 1962),
and more recently Thomas Ncvin, ErnstJünger and Germany; Into the Abyss, 1914—1945 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996). The most recent biography by Paul Noack, Ernst Jünger: Eine Bio-
graphie (Berlin: Fest, 1998), is unexceptional and based mainly on secondary sources.
2. F. G.Jünger, Spiegel derJahre: Erinnerungen (Munich: Hanser, 1958), 260.

2
3
24 ERNSTJÜNGER

Jünger's memoirs indicate she was overpowered by the domineering per-

sonality and charisma of the patriarch. 3
The family moved often, and Jünger studied at a number of schools, all
of which he loathed. A daydreamer, he left a poor scholastic record. He be-
longed to the generation of youth in Germany that rebelled against the
philistinism and suffocating Bürgerlichkeit of Wilhelmine Germany. Jünger
escaped early from the ennui of the classroom by creating a private world of
romantic adventure. Later he would write:
I invented a method of noninvolvement, which connected me to reality like a
spider through its untransparent web. In this way I managed to retreat into
strange landscapes that I had traversed on the way to school, and which I had-
n't left when night came and I closed my eyes; for fourteen days or more I re-
mained buried, as in a mussel, where the light from outside plays against the
inner walls of the shell.4

Although Friedrich Georg described the Jünger family as a hearth of

warmth and security, Ernst must have been traumatized in some way that
only a psychologist may someday reconstruct. 5 Hints of some kind of ele-
mentary neurosis can be found directly in the many autobiographical notes
about dreams that he published as part of novels and diaries throughout his
life. In The Slingshot/' for example, he recounted the alienation experienced
at a secondary school in Hanover—the protagonist is a child growing up in
a world where all objects and people are a source of fear and anxiety.
Friedrich Georg also described his brother as having "Indian eyes," which
meant for him that Ernst perceived visual details with uncanny accuracy.7
The combination of enhanced psychogenic consciousness and subconscious
activity would eventually lend his writings a surrealistic and hypersensitive
aura. The tendency toward flight into a dreamworld sustained him well into
adulthood.

ADVENTURER AND REBEL

In 1911 Jünger joined the Wandervogel, part of the German Youth move-
ment, out of which leapt forth, as Fritz Stern aptly summarizes, "defiance,
hate, yearning, love, and all the hopes and fears that for decades had been

3. Ernst Jünger, "Rehburger Reminiszensen," in Subtile Jagden, Sämtliche Werke 1 0 : 1 1 - 2 2

(hereafter cited as S\V).
4. Das Abenteuerliche Herz bei Tag und Nacht (Berlin: Frundschberg-Verlag, 1929), 21.
5. For example, Karl Prümm writes that Jünger's preoccupation with the question of war
between 1919 and 1934 is evidence of "traumatic-pathological" tendencies, see "Vom Natio-
nalisten zum Abdendländer: Die politische Entwicklung Ernst Jüngers," Basis: Jahrbuch für
deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur 6 (1976): 7 - 2 9 .
6. Ernst Jünger, Die Zwille (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983).
7. Spiegel derJahre, 11.
 A G E R M A N LIFE 25

repressed, denied, forcibly sublimated." 8 In the fall of 1 9 1 3 he ran off to Al-

geria to j o i n the French Foreign Legion. His romantic vision of Africa was
brutally shattered as the tender eighteen-year-old was nearly raped by a co-
terie of unsavory mercenaries in Sidi-el-Abbès. After a failed escape at-
tempt, he was successfully retrieved by his father, who had engaged the
g o o d offices of the German foreign ministry. 9 Before leaving Bel-Abbès, the
son was instructed by telegram from h o m e to have himself photographed.
T h e portrait shows a clean-shaven, slender boy in the unadorned uniform
of the foreign legion; the sheath and sword had been removed and osten-
tatiously slung into the foreground. U p o n returning h o m e in early 1 9 1 4 ,
the indulgent, slightly proud father made a pact: if Ernst finished high
school he would be sent back to Africa on a mountain-climbing expedition
to Kilimanjaro. When the First World War broke out, arrangements were
made for volunteers to take a special high school proficiency exam. Within
five weeks, Ernst was on a train to Hannover to enlist in the Fusilier Regi-
ment 73.
T h e nineteen-year-old schoolboy had no military training, and thus it
took over two months before he was sent to the front. By the time he got
there, in December 1 9 1 4 , the initial optimism and excitement had cooled
considerably, and machine g u n s — n e w weapons of mass d e s t r u c t i o n — h a d
forced both sides to hunker down in muddy trenches. But here Jünger
finally f o u n d the adventure that he had h o p e d for in Africa. He had taken
along a notebook to keep a record of the experience because "the things
waiting for us would never happen again, and I anticipated them with the
greatest curiosity." 10
T h e trenches marked a permanent and primary point of reference for
Jünger's spiritualization of the war experience. He was to agree with Maurice
Barrés, whose "nihilistic nationalism" 1 1 had a seminal influence on him,
that the "soil of the trenches is holy ground; it is saturated with blood, it is
saturated with spirituality." 12 As a storm trooper, Lieutenant Jünger soon
became famous for his unflappable bravery under fire. Like T. E. Lawrence,
to whom he was later often compared, 1 3 he was an outspoken individualist

8. Fritz Stem, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Presss,
1961), 176.
9. Jünger tells the story in a novel Afrikanische Spiele (Hamburg: Deutsche Hausbücherei,
1936).
10. Ernst Jünger, "Kriegsausbruch 1914," W i , 541.
11. T h e phrase belongs to Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1973), 94.
12. Maurice Barrés, "The Undying Spirit of France," address ofjuly 1 2 , 1 9 1 6 , inj. S. McClel-
land ed., The French Right from de Maistre to Maurras (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 204.
13. See for example Margret Boveri, "Der Arbeiter und der Prägestock: Über die Gleich-
zeitigkeit im Denken von E.Jünger und T. E. Lawrence," FAZ, March 25, 1955.
26 ERNST JÜNGER

w h o refused to fight by the conventional rules of warfare. W o u n d e d a total

of fourteen times, he escaped death in a series of miraculously close en-
counters. 1 4 During the L u d e n d o r f f Offensive, beginning in March 1918,
Jünger was one of the elite shock troops that tested a new strategy, initially
very successfully, of avoiding the mass frontal assault by breaking through
the lines in small formations. In one of these assaults, Jünger took a bullet
in the lung. O n September 22, 1918, the Kaiser personally presented him
with the highest order of the German army, the Pour le Mérite. 1 5 N o one so
young had ever received such high military honors.

SPIRITUALIZATION OF THE WAR EXPERIENCE

After the November Revolution and the imposition of the Versailles Treaty,
Jünger remained an officer in the 100,000-man army. Stationed in Han-
nover, he helped write a new infantry training manual designed to intro-
duce future soldiers to the technology and tactics of future battles. 16 In it
the daredevil Lieutenant outlined a new loose method of attack for break-
ing through enemy lines based on the individual initiative of the warrior.
T h e Reichswehr instituted a ten-day course to train infantrymen in the new
method. 1 7 During this time Jünger also worked up his wartime notes into a
diary, which he published privately in 1920. This text formed the founda-
tion for In Stahlgewittern (Storms of steel) , 18 Jünger's first and probably most
famous book. He reworked and refined the text in a series of revised edi-
tions, first in 1922, then in 1924, 1934, and 1935. He even made stylistic
changes as late as 1961. 1 9 Storms of Steel, the short novel Sturm20 and several

14. The reported number of times Jünger was wounded during the war varies from ten to
fourteen, depending on the source. In Jünger's Wehrpaß he is listed as having been wounded
only seven times, April 25, 1915, thigh; Jan. 9, 1916, lower leg; Nov. 12, 1916, lower leg;
Sept. 23, 1917, grenade splinter in hand; Dec. 1, 1917, graze to the head; Mar. 22, 1918, breast
and head; Aug. 8, 1918, poison gas.
15. Hans Möller, Die Geschichte der Ritter des Ordens Pour k Mérite im Weltkrieg, vol. 1 (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1935).
16. See Militär-Wochenblatt: Zeitschrift für die deutsche Wehrmacht, das Versorgungs- und Abwick-
lungswesen (Berlin: Mittler, 1 9 2 0 - 2 3 ) , 4 3 3 - 6 8 8 .
17. Walter Schmiele, "Das literarische Porträt: Ernst Jünger," Oct. 10, 1961, NDR, DLAM,
Sammlung des Coudres, box 22.
18. Hereafter cited as Storms of Steel.
1 g. Hans Peter des Coudres, Biobliographie der Werke Ernst Jüngers (Stuttgart: Klett, 1960).
See also Wilhelm Lukas Kristl, "Ernst Jünger in Selbstverlag," Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buch-
handel, Feb. 27, 1976.
20. The autobiographical novel, Sturm, about a young officer in battle was written in 1923
and published in installments in the Hannoversche Kurier. Jünger claims to have completely for-
gotten about it until Hans Peter des Coudres dug it up in a library in Hannover in 1960. It was
published by Klett in 1975; see Uwe Stamer, "Minenkrieg in Leder gebunden: Ernst Jüngers
wiederentdeckte Erzählung Sturm/' SZ, Sept. 15, 1975.
 A G E R M A N LIFE 27

essays, "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis" (War as an inner experience)

(1922), "Das Wäldchen 125" (Copse 125) (1924), and "Feuer und Blut"
(Fire and blood) (1925), brought the young author instant fame.
In his writings from the 1920s, the war experience was apotheosized into
mythic proportions to justify the enormous loss of life on the battlefields
and to give support to the nationalist Utopia as an alternative to the reality
of postwar Germany. 21 The ideological bridge to fascism was anticipated in
Jünger's early work, which used the myth of the war experience to issue a
broad appeal to society to break the fetters of civilization and return to the
"natural" condition of untamed man. All antinomies of life, in particular
that between culture and barbarism, were overcome in the blood and fire
initiations of the trenches. 22 The clearest expression ofJünger's privileging
the natural, unchanging order over the social can be found in War as an In-
ner Experience. Often misrepresented as a war memoir, this essay contains
philosophical echoes of Rousseau and Freud:
In the c o u r s e o f t h o u s a n d s o f years the wildness, brutality, a n d b r i g h t colors
o f desire have b e e n s m o o t h e d a n d d a m p e n e d by a civilization that erects a
f e n c e a r o u n d man's s h e e r lust. It is true that r e f i n e m e n t has e n l i g h t e n e d a n d
e n n o b l e d m a n , b u t an animal still lies in the substrate o f his b e i n g . . . . A n d
w h e n t h e c u r v e s o f life turn b a c k to the r e d line o f t h e primitive, the mask
falls, a n d h e e m e r g e s , n a k e d as ever b e f o r e , the O r i g i n a l M a n [Urmensch], t h e
c a v e m a n with all his u n b r i d l e d drives. 2 3

Unchanging brutal nature was a standard trope of the fascist literary

imagination, whether in the pulp fiction of blood-and-soil novels, or the
refined aesthetics of a Gottfried Benn, Jünger, or Knut Hamsun. One can
apply easily what Leo Lowenthal has written of Hamsun to Jünger's concept
of nature in the early war writings:
Nature's timetable r e p l a c e s the timetable o f history . . . the endless r e p r o d u c -
tion o f natural p h e n o m e n a , the cyclic o r d e r o f n a t u r e , as o p p o s e d to the ap-
p a r e n t d i s o r d e r a n d h a p p e n s t a n c e o f all individual a n d historical facts, testi-
fies to the powerlessness o f m a n . . . m a n m u s t e x p e c t a life w i t h o u t m e a n i n g
unless h e o b e d i e n t l y a c c e p t s as his own w h a t m a y b e called t h e law o f nature.
A n d t h e social c o u n t e r p a r t to the law o f natural r h y t h m is b l i n d discipline. 2 4

Drawing heavily on Nietzsche, this prose is eruptive, antirational, and

scornful of civilization. Modern society, understood as being formed by the

21. George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990).
22. See the excellent analysis of Jünger's mystical reading of the war experience in Jeffrey
Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 70-108.
23. "Der Kampf als Inneres Erlebnis," Werke, 5:17-18.
24. Leo Lowenthal, Literature and the Image of Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 202.
28 ERNSTJÜNGER

mediocrity of the masses is rejected in favor of nature's eruptive Rausch des

roten Blutes (ecstasy of red blood) ,25 Jünger's unique contribution was to
portray the powerlessness of man in the face of unchanging nature as a re-
sult of all-pervasive dread (Grauen) ,26 Whereas the books of contemporaries
like Walter Flex were preachy and moralizing, and the later books of Lud-
wig Renn and Erich Maria Remarque were satiric and humanistic, Jünger
depicted trench warfare as exposing natural, elementary forces at work, and
he seemed to revel in describing the explosive brutality that shattered sur-
face reality. Jünger affirmed the war as a test of manliness and saw battle
as a chance to overcome the "feminine" decadence of the prewar bour-
geois era. 27
In one of the most thought-provoking studies on this subject, Klaus
Theweleit has shown how Jünger's writings from this period fit neatly into a
larger context of war memorials and novels written by soldiers between
1 9 1 8 and 1923. 28 In these writings, the image of the feminine functions as
a metaphor for all the projected fears of socially displaced veterans who
would later j o i n fascist movements, in particular, the SA. Moreover, the
comradeship of men lent a homoerotic dimension to the battlefield and the
memory of the war; the hand-to-hand combat in Storms of Steel was described
by Jünger as orgasmic, as a "blood ecstasy," and the tearing up of earth as an
act of copulation with nature. 29
Theweleit is correct to point to the subconscious aspect of Jünger's battle-
field visions. His fabled coldness and aloofness in the face of horror stem
from an inability to distinguish between the subconscious energy Freud
called mortido, and violence in the real world. T h e twenty-one-year-old's de-
scription of an artillery attack may serve as an example. Here one is con-
fronted not with hardened realism, but with a gift for sublimating violence
in order to exploit its energy. T h e colors, sounds, and smells have a hallu-
cinatory quality and render Jünger's prose powerful and disturbing. T h e
Dantesque description of an artillery attack includes a milk-clouded crater-
like shell hole and twisted bodies creeping like amphibians into a boiling
sea surrounded by a strange pink glow. Characteristic for Jünger's ambiva-

25. Cited by Werner Kohlschmidt, "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis: Ernst Jüngers weltan-
schaulicher Ausgangspunkt in kritischer Betrachtung," Die Sammlung 7 (1952): 27.
26. See Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens, in which Jünger's war writings are characterized
as "prefascist nationalism and atavistic glorifications of war and the virtues of war" (78).
27. See George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 60 ff. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 78 ff.
28. Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1977), 57 ff.
29. See Johnannes Volmert, Ernst Jünger: In Stahlgewittern (Munich: Fink, 1985). Volmert
uses Theweleit's psychoanalytic model to explore the war writings. See also Bernd Weisbrod,
"Kriegerische Gewalt und männlicher Fundamentalismus," Geschichtswerkstatt 49 (Septem-
ber 1998): 5 4 4 - 5 5 6 .
 A G E R M A N LIFE 29

lent relationship to violence, the observer wishes to turn away, but "takes in
every detail just the same." 30
This sublimation of the war experience into an exploration of the fantas-
tic differed significantly from the blunt military narratives of the Front Gen-
eration, though some scholars, like Klaus Theweleit, regard Jünger's prose
as an exploration of the "fascist unconscious." 31 These essays cannot be con-
strued as patriotic diatribes, and they lacked any notions of race or biolog-
ical determinism. Besides the schoolroom Greek classics, the major influ-
ences on the adolescent Jünger were French Catholic writers such as Charles
Péguy, Maurice Barrés, and Charles Maurras.32 In 1916 Alfred Rubin's book
The Other Side serendipitously fell into Jünger's hands in an army book store
in Cambrai. The fantasy novel tells the story of an eerie voyage to the moun-
tains of central Asia into an imaginary kingdom, built by a wealthy eccentric
as a refuge from all forms of modern progress. The oft-noted macabre im-
ages in Jünger's war diaries can be traced, in no small part, to the strong
influence of Rubin's chimeric style.33
In the 1920s Jünger read Sorel and sympathized with the anarchists' ha-
tred of bourgeois society and Sorel's repeated exhortations to direct action.
This Catholic and revolutionary syndicalist influence on Jünger helped him
interpret the war as a struggle against bourgeois decadence and all that was
considered the reigning values of nineteenth-century politics: liberalism,
democracy, materialism, and mass society. Finally, in the first versions of the
war diaries it should be noted that the war's significance was limited and
personal, rather than collective. The 1920 version read like a clumsy Ho-
meric tale of heroes controlled by fate and destiny. In the subsequent and
much improved published versions, the noble, antiquated view of the sol-
dier, respecting his enemies and obeying unwritten laws of chivalry, is trans-
formed into a victim of the terrifying power of the war machine. The diarist-
soldier here is concerned with the erasure of the individual soldier in the
modern era of mass organization. 34 Nationalist motifs, modeled on Jünger's
reading of Barrés, were added in the 1925 version. 35 Significantly, in all of

30. "Feuer und Blut," S W 1 , 473.

31. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 2, ch. 3.
32. Barrés was the most important, see Albrecht Betz, "Benn, Jünger, et la France," in Gilbert
Merlio, ed., Ni Gauche, ni droit: Les chasés- croisés idéologiques des intellectuels françaises et allemands
dans l'Entre-guerres (Talence: Editions de Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine, 1995),
289-295.
33. See Jünger's essay "Rückblick" in Ernst Jünger and Alfred Kubin, Eine Begegnung
(Berlin: Propyläen, 1975), 9 3 - 1 0 8 .
34. See Wojciech Kunicki, Projektionen des Geschichtlichen (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993).
35. For example the last line of the 1925 edition. See Ulrich Böhme, Fassungen bei Ernst
Jünger (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1972). In an interview in the early 1960s, Jünger claimed
JO ERNST JÜNGER

the versions of Storms of Steel the b o o k ends, not with the defeat of Germany,
but rather with the bestowal of the Pour le Mérite, the highest war decora-
tion, and a personal encomium from the Kaiser to the twenty-two-year-old
Jünger. Hannah Arendt has pointed out that Mussolini's worldview was
based on romantic personality worship of the kind described by Carl Schmitt,
where the self becomes an "occasion" for limitless, free-floating expression.
Mussolini's self-description aptly applies to Jünger's idiosyncratic brand of
fascism: "everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology." 3 6 In the
1929 version, Jünger added a veiled reference to the twin threat to Ger-
many of continued allied interference in Germany's affairs and the related
rise of primitive nationalist movements from the inside: "Although force
without and barbarity within conglomerate in somber clouds, so long as the
blade of the sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany
lives and Germany shall never go under." 3 7
After the war and as a result of direct contact with the cultural avant-
garde of France and Italy, Jünger added surrealistic, expressivist, and futur-
ist elements to his nationalist outlook. T h e outcome can be traced in the
stylistic changes he made to Storms of Steel in the 1920s. He transformed the
schoolboy jottings modeled on the blood-saturated epics of H o m e r into a
modern manifesto of barbarism, resonating well with Marinetti's famous
call in the Futurist Manifesto to glorify " w a r — t h e world's only h y g i e n e — m i l -
itarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful
ideas worth dying for." 3 8 In the successive rewriting of his war memoirs,
Jünger gradually incorporated the essential ingredients of a "fascist style":
references to dynamism, youth, speed, machine power, intuition, instinct,
and the sublimation into a new aesthetic of violence. 3 9 Jünger's writing takes
on the form of what Andreas Huyssen calls the "armored text," correspond-
ing to "the fascist fantasy of the invincible armored body, whether it be that
of the male, the party, or the nation." 4 0 W h e n one considers the essentially
Latin roots of his fascist aesthetics, it is n o wonder, though, that Jünger re-

it was Barrés who "led him to nationalism." See F. K. Bastian, "Das Politische bei Ernst Jünger,"
(Ph.D. diss., University of Heidelberg, 1963), 280.
36. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 168.
37. Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 319. The passage was
removed from the final German edition of the collected works.
38. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Enquête international sur le vers libre et Manifeste du Futurisme
(Milan: Editions de "Poesie," 1909), 9 - 1 2 , 16. Quoted by Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist
Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994). 29-
39. Sternhell, 29 ff.
40. Andreas Huyssen, "Fortifying the Heart Totally: Ernst Jünger's Armored Texts," NGC 59
(spring/summer 1993): 14.
Another random document with
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selves, and that the Absolute is therefore a society of selves? Our
answer to this question must depend, I think, upon two
considerations,—(a) the amount of continuity we regard as essential
to a self, and (b) the kind of unity we attribute to a society.
(a) If we regard any and every degree of felt teleological continuity
as sufficient to constitute a self, it is clear that we shall be compelled
to say that selves, and selves only, are the material of which reality is
composed. For we have already agreed that Reality is exclusively
composed of psychical fact, and that all psychical facts are
satisfactions of some form of subjective interest or craving, and
consequently that every psychical fact comprised in the whole
system of existence must form part of the experience of a finite
individual subject. Hence, if every such subject, whatever its degree
of individuality, is to be called a self, there will be no facts which are
not included somewhere in the life of one or more selves. On the
other hand, if we prefer, as I have done myself, to regard some
degree of intellectual development, sufficient for the recognition of
certain permanent interests as those of the self, as essential to
selfhood, we shall probably conclude that the self is an individual of
a relatively high type, and that there are consequently experiences of
so imperfect a degree of teleological continuity as not to merit the
title of selves.
And this conclusion seems borne out by all the empirically
ascertained facts of, e.g., the life of the lower animals, of human
infants, and again of adults of abnormally defective intellectual and
moral development. Few persons, unless committed to the defence
of a theory through thick and thin, would be prepared to call a worm
a self, and most of us would probably feel some hesitation about a
new-born baby or a congenital idiot. Again, finite societies are clearly
components of Reality, yet, as we have seen, it is probably an error
to speak of a society as a self, though every true society is clearly an
individual with a community and continuity of purpose which enable
us rightly to regard it as a unity capable of development, and to
appreciate its ethical worth. Hence it is, perhaps, less likely to lead to
misunderstandings if we say simply that the constituents of reality
are finite individual experiences, than if we say that they are selves.
The self, as we have seen, is a psychological category which only
imperfectly represents the facts of experience it is employed to
correlate.
(b) Again, if we speak of the Absolute as a society of finite
individuals, we ought at least to be careful in guarding ourselves
against misunderstanding. Such an expression has certainly some
manifest advantages. It brings out both the spiritual character of the
system of existence and the fact that, though it contains a plurality of
finite selves and contains them without discord, it is not properly
thought of as a self, but as a community of many selves.
At the same time, such language is open to misconstructions,
some of which it may be well to enumerate. We must not, for
instance, assume that all the individuals in the Absolute are
necessarily in direct social interrelation. For social relation, properly
speaking, is only possible between beings who are ἴσοι καὶ ὅμοιοι at
least in the sense of having interests of a sufficiently identical kind to
permit of intercommunication and concerted cooperation for the
realisation of a common interest. And our own experience teaches
us that the range of existence with which we ourselves stand in this
kind of relation is limited. Even within the bounds of the human race
the social relations of each of us with the majority of our fellows are
of an indirect kind, and though with the advance of civilisation the
range of those relations is constantly being enlarged, it still remains
to be seen whether a “cosmopolitan” society is a realisable ideal or
not. With the non-human animal world our social relations, in
consequence of the greater divergence of subjective interest, are
only of a rudimentary kind, and with what appears to us as inanimate
nature, as we have already seen, direct social relation seems to be
all but absolutely precluded.
Among the non-human animals, again, we certainly find traces of
relations of a rudimentarily social kind, but once more only within
relatively narrow limits; the different species and groups seem in the
main to be indifferent to one another. And we have no means of
disproving the possibility that there may be in the universe an
indefinite plurality of social groups, of an organisation equal or
superior to that of our human communities, but of a type so alien to
our own that no direct communication, not even of the elementary
kind which would suffice to establish their existence, is possible. We
must be prepared to entertain the possibility, then, that the
individuals composing the Absolute fall into a number of groups,
each consisting of members which have direct social relations of
some kind with each other, but not with the members of other
groups.
And also, of course, we must remember that there may very well
be varieties of degree of structural complexity in the social groups
themselves. In some the amount of intelligent recognition on the part
of the individuals of their own and their fellows’ common scheme of
interests and purposes is probably less articulate, in others, again, it
may be more articulate than is the case in those groups of co-
operating human beings which form the only societies of which we
know anything by direct experience.
On the other hand, we must, if we speak of the Absolute as a
society, be careful to avoid the implication, which may readily arise
from a false conception of human societies, that the unity of the
Absolute is a mere conceptual fiction or “point of view” of our own,
from which to regard what is really a mere plurality of separate units.
In spite of the now fairly complete abandonment in words of the old
atomistic theories, which treated society as if it were a mere
collective name for a multitude of really independent “individuals,” it
may be doubted whether we always realise what the rejection of this
view implies. We still tend too much to treat the selves which
compose a society, at least in our Metaphysics, as if they were given
to us in direct experience as merely exclusive of one another, rather
than as complementary to one another. In other words, of the two
typical forms of experience from which the concept of self appears to
be derived, the experience of conflict between our subjective
interests and our environment, and that of the removal of the
discord, we too often pay attention in our Metaphysics to the former
to the neglect of the latter. But in actual life it is oftener the latter that
is prominent in our relations with our fellow-men. We—the category
of co-operation—is at least as fundamental in all human thought and
language as I and thou, the categories of mutual exclusion. That you
and I are mutually complementary factors in a wider whole of
common interests, is at least as early a discovery of mankind as that
our private interests and standpoints collide.
 If we speak of existence as a society, then we must be careful to
remember that the individual unity of a society is just as real a fact of
experience as the individual unity of the members which compose it,
and that, when we call the Absolute a society rather than a self, we
do not do so with any intention of casting doubt upon its complete
spiritual unity as an individual experience. With these restrictions, it
would, I think, be fair to say that if the Absolute cannot be called a
society without qualification, at any rate human society affords the
best analogy by which we can attempt to represent its systematic
unity in a concrete conceptual form. To put it otherwise, a genuine
human society is an individual of a higher type of structure than any
one of the selves which compose it, and therefore more adequately
represents the structure of the one ultimately complete system of the
Absolute.
We see this more particularly in the superior independence of
Society as compared with one of its own members. It is true, of
course, that no human society could exist apart from an external
environment, but it does not appear to be as necessary to the
existence of society as to that of a single self, that it should be
sensible of the contrast between itself and its rivals. As we have
already sufficiently seen, it is in the main from the experience of
contrast with other human selves that I come by the sense of my
own selfhood. Though the contents of my concept of self are not
purely social, it does at least seem clear that I could neither acquire
it, nor retain it long, except for the presence of other like selves
which form the complement to it. But though history teaches how
closely similar is the part played by war and other relations between
different societies in developing the sense of a common national
heritage and purpose, yet a society, once started on its course of
development, does appear to be able to a large extent to flourish
without the constant stimulus afforded by rivalry or co-operation with
other societies. One man on a desert land, if left long enough to
himself, would probably become insane or brutish; there seems no
sufficient reason to hold that a single civilised community, devoid of
relations with others, could not, if its internal organisation were
sufficiently rich, flourish in a purely “natural” environment. On the
strength of this higher self-sufficiency, itself a consequence of
superior internal wealth and harmony, a true society may reasonably
be held to be a finite individual of a higher type than a single human
self.
The general result of this discussion, then, seems to be, that
neither in the self nor in society—at any rate in the only forms of it
we know to exist—do we find the complete harmony of structure and
independence of external conditions which are characteristic of
ultimate reality. Both the self and society must therefore be
pronounced to be finite appearance, but of the two, society exhibits
the fuller and higher individuality, and is therefore the more truly real.
We found it quite impossible to regard the universe as a single self;
but, with certain important qualifications, we said that it might be
thought of as a society without very serious error.[194] It will, of
course, follow from what has been said, that we cannot frame any
finally adequate conception of the way in which all the finite
individual experiences form the unity of the infinite experiences. That
they must form such a perfect unity we have seen in our Second
Book; that the unity of a society is, perhaps, the nearest analogy by
which we can represent it, has been shown in the present
paragraph. That we have no higher categories which can adequately
indicate the precise way in which all existence ultimately forms an
even more perfect unity, is an inevitable consequence of the fact of
our own finitude. We cannot frame the categories, because we, as
finite beings, have not the corresponding experience. To this extent,
at least, it seems to me that any sound philosophy must end with a
modest confession of ignorance.
 “There is in God, men say,
A deep but dazzling darkness,”

is a truth which the metaphysician’s natural desire to know as much

as possible of the final truth, should not lead him to forget.
§ 5. This is probably the place to make some reference to the
question whether the self is a permanent or only a temporary form in
which Reality appears. In popular thought this question commonly
appears as that of the immortality (sometimes, too, of the pre-
existence) of the soul. The real issue is, however, a wider one, and
the problem of immortality only one of its subsidiary aspects. I
propose to say something briefly on the general question, and also
on the special one, though in this latter case rather with a view to
indicating the line along which discussion ought to proceed, than
with the aim of suggesting a result.
It would not, I think, be possible to deny the temporary character of
the self after the investigations of the earlier part of this chapter. A
self, we said, is one and the same only in virtue of teleological
continuity of interest and purpose. But exactly how much variation is
enough to destroy this continuity, and how much again may exist
without abolishing it, we found it impossible to determine by any
general principle. Yet the facts of individual development seemed to
make it clear that new selves—i.e. new unique forms of interest in
the world—come into being in the time-process, and that old ones
disappear.
And again, both from mental Pathology and from normal
Psychology, we found it easy to cite examples of the formation and
disappearance, within the life-history of a single man, of selves
which it seemed impossible to regard as connected by any felt
continuity of interest with the rest of life. In the case of multiple
personality, and alternating personality, we seemed to find evidence
that a plurality of such selves might alternate regularly, or even co-
exist in connection with the same body. The less striking, but more
familiar, cases of the passing selves of our dreams, and of temporary
periods in waking life where our interest and characters are modified,
but not in a permanent way by exceptional excitements, belong in
principle to the same category. In short, unless you are to be content
with a beggarly modicum of continuity of purpose too meagre to be
more than an empty name, you seem forced to conclude that the
origination and again the disappearance of selves in the course of
psychical events is a fact of constant occurrence. No doubt, the
higher the internal organisation of our interests and purposes, the
more fixed and the less liable to serious modification in the flux of
circumstance our self becomes; but a self absolutely fixed and
unalterable was, as we saw, an unrealised and, on the strength of
our metaphysical certainty that only the absolute whole is entirely
self-determined, we may add, an unrealisable ideal. We seem
driven, then, to conclude that the permanent identity of the self is a
matter of degree, and that we are not entitled to assert that the self
corresponding to a single organism need be either single or
persistent. It is possible for me, even in the period between birth and
death, to lose my old self and acquire a new one, and even to have
more selves than one, and those of different degrees of individual
structure, at the same time. Nor can we assign any certain criterion
by which to decide in all cases whether the self has been one and
identical through a series of psychical events. Beyond the general
assertion that the more completely occupied our various interests
and purposes are, the more permanent is our selfhood, we are
unable to go.[195]
These considerations have an important bearing on the vexed
question of a future life. If they are justified, we clearly cannot have
any positive demonstration from the nature of the self of its
indestructibility, and it would therefore be in vain to demand that
philosophy shall prove the permanence of all selves. On the other
hand, if the permanence of a self is ultimately a function of its inner
unity of aim and purpose, there is no a priori ground for holding that
the physical event of death must necessarily destroy this unity, and
so that the self must be perishable at death. For Metaphysics, the
problem thus seems to resolve itself into a balancing of probabilities,
and, as an illustration of the kind of consideration which has to be
taken into account, it may be worth while to inquire what probable
arguments may fairly be allowed to count on either side.
 On the negative side, if we dismiss, as we fairly may, the unproved
assertions of dogmatic Materialism, we have to take account of the
possibility that a body may, for all we know, be a necessary condition
for the existence of an individual experience continuous in interest
and purpose with that of our present life, and also of the alleged
absence of any positive empirical evidence for existence after death.
These considerations, however, scarcely seem decisive. As to the
first, I do not see how it can be shown that a body is indispensable,
at least in the sense of the term “body” required by the argument. It
is no doubt true that in the experience of any individual there must
be the two aspects of fresh teleological initiative and of already
systematised habitual and quasi-mechanical repetition of useful
reactions already established, and further, that intercourse between
different individuals is only possible through the medium of such a
system of established habits. As we have already seen, what we call
our body is simply a name for such a set of habitual reactions
through which intercommunication between members of human
societies is rendered possible. Hence, if we generalise the term
“body” to stand for any system of habitual reactions discharging this
function of serving as a medium of communication between
individuals forming a society, we may fairly say that a body is
indispensable to the existence of a self. But it seems impossible to
show that the possibility of such a medium of communication is
removed by the dissolution of the particular system of reactions
which constitutes our present medium of intercourse. The dissolution
of the present body might mean no more than the individual
acquisition of changed types of habitual reaction, types which no
longer serve the purpose of communication with the members of our
society, but yet may be an initial condition of communication with
other groups of intelligent beings.
As to the absence of empirical evidence, it is, of course, notorious
that some persons at least claim to possess such evidence of the
continued existence of the departed. Until the alleged facts have
been made the subject of serious and unbiassed collection and
examination, it is, I think, premature to pronounce an opinion as to
their evidential value. I will therefore make only one observation with
respect to some of the alleged evidence from “necromancy.” It is
manifest that the only kind of continuance which could fairly be
called a survival of the self, and certainly the only kind in which we
need feel any interest, would be the persistence after death of our
characteristic interests and purposes. Unless the “soul” continued to
live for aims and interests teleologically continuous with those of its
earthly life, there would be no genuine extension of our selfhood
beyond the grave. Hence any kind of evidence for continued
existence which is not at the same time evidence for continuity of
interests and purposes, is really worthless when offered as testimony
to “immortality.” The reader will be able to apply this reflection for
himself if he knows anything of the “phenomena” of the vulgar
Spiritualism.[196]
When we turn to the positive side of the question, it seems
necessary to remark that though the negative considerations we
have just referred to are not of themselves enough to disprove
“immortality,” provided there is any strong ground for taking it as a
fact, they would be quite sufficient to decide against it, unless there
is positive reason for accepting it. That we have no direct evidence
of such a state of things, and cannot see precisely how in detail it
could come about, would not be good logical ground for denying its
existence if it were demanded by sound philosophical principles. On
the other hand, if there were no reasons for believing in it, and good,
though not conclusive, probable reasons against it, we should be
bound to come provisionally to a negative conclusion.
Have we then any positive grounds at all to set against the
negative considerations just discussed? Pending the result of
inquiries which have recently been set on foot, it is hard to speak
with absolute confidence; still, the study of literature does, I think,
warrant us in provisionally saying that there seems to be a strong
and widely diffused feeling, at least in the Western world, that life
without any hope of continuance after death would be an
unsatisfactory thing. This feeling expresses itself in many forms, but I
think they can all be traced to one root. Normally, as we know, the
extinction of a particular teleological interest is effected by its
realisation; our purposes die out, and our self so far suffers change,
when their result has been achieved. (And incidentally this may help
us to see once more that dissatisfaction and imperfection are of the
essence of the finite self. The finite self lives on the division of idea
from reality, of intent from execution. If the two could become
identical, the self would have lost the atmosphere from which it
draws its life-breath.) Hence, if death, in our experience, always took
the form of the dissolution of a self which had already seen its
purposes fulfilled and its aims achieved, there would probably be no
incentive to desire or believe in future continuance. But it is a familiar
fact that death is constantly coming as a violent and irrational
interrupter of unrealised plans and inchoate work. The self seems to
disappear not because it has played its part and finished its work,
but as the victim of external accident. I think that analysis would
show, under the various special forms which the desire for
immortality takes, such as the yearning to renew interrupted
friendships or the longing to continue unfinished work, as their
common principle, the feeling of resentment against this apparent
defeat of intelligent purpose by brute external accident.[197]
Now, what is the logical value of this feeling as a basis for
argument? We may fairly say, on the one hand, that it rests on a
sound principle. For it embodies the conviction, of which all
Philosophy is the elaboration, that the real world is a harmonious
system in which irrational accident plays no part, and that, if we
could only see the whole truth, we should realise that there is no final
and irremediable defeat for any of our aspirations, but all are
somehow made good. On the other side, we must remember that the
argument from the desire for continuance to its reality also goes on
to assert not only that our aspirations are somehow fulfilled and our
unfinished work somehow perfected, but that this fulfilment takes
place in the particular way which we, with our present lights, would
wish. And in maintaining this, the argument goes beyond the
conclusion which philosophical first principles warrant.
For it might be that, if our insight into the scheme of the world were
less defective, we should cease to desire this special form of
fulfilment, just as in growing into manhood we cease to desire the
kind of life which appeared to us as children the ideal of happiness.
The man’s life-work may be the realisation of the child’s dreams, but
it does not realise them in the form imagined by childhood. And
conceivably it might be so with our desire for a future life. Further, of
course, the logical value of the argument from feeling must to some
extent depend upon the universality and persistence of the feeling
itself. We must not mistake for a fundamental aspiration of humanity
what may be largely the effect of special traditions and training.
Hence we cannot truly estimate the worth of the inference from
feeling until we know both how far the feeling itself is really
permanent in our own society, and how far, again, it exists in
societies with different beliefs and traditions. In itself the sentiment,
e.g., of Christian civilisation, cannot be taken as evidence of the
universal feeling of mankind, in the face of the apparently opposite
feelings, e.g., of Brahmins and Buddhists.
I should conclude, then, that the question of a future life must
remain an open one for Metaphysics. We seem unable to give any
valid metaphysical arguments for a future life, but then, on the other
hand, the negative presumptions seem to be equally devoid of
cogency. Philosophy, in this matter, to use the fine phrase of Dr.
McTaggart, “gives us hope,”[198] and I cannot, for my own part, see
that it can do more. Possibly, as Browning suggests in La Saisiaz, it
is not desirable, in the interests of practical life, that it should do
more. And here I must leave the question with the reader, only
throwing out one tentative suggestion for his approval or rejection as
he pleases. Since we have seen that the permanence of the self
depends upon its degree of internal harmony of structure, it is at
least conceivable that its continuance as a self, beyond the limits of
earthly life, may depend on the same condition. Conceivably the self
may survive death, as it survives lesser changes in the course of
physical events, if its unity and harmony of purpose are strong
enough, and not otherwise. If so, a future existence would not be a
heritage into which we are safe to step when the time comes, but a
conquest to be won by the strenuous devotion of life to the
acquisition of a rich, and at the same time orderly and harmonious,
moral selfhood. And thus the belief in a future life, in so far as it acts
in any given case as a spur to such strenuous living, might be itself a
factor in bringing about its own fulfilment. It is impossible to affirm
with certainty that this is so, but, again, we cannot deny that it may
be the case. And here, as I say, I must be content to leave the
problem.[199]
 Consult further:—B. Bosanquet, Psychology of the Moral Self, lect.
5; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps. 9 (The Meanings of
Self), 10 (The Reality of Self), 26 (The Absolute and its
Appearances,—especially the end of the chapter, pp. 499-511 of 1st
ed.), 27 (Ultimate Doubts); L. T. Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge,
part 3, chap. 5; S. Hodgson, Metaphysic of Experience, bk. iv. chap.
4; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i part 4, §§ 5, 6; W. James,
Principles of Psychology, vol. i. chap. 10; H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk.
iii chaps. 1 (especially § 245), 5; Microcosmus, bk. iii. c. 5; J. M. E.
McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, chap. 2 (for a detailed
hostile examination of Dr. McTaggart’s argument, which I would not
be understood to endorse except on special points, see G. E. Moore
in Proceedings of Aristotelian Society, N.S. vol. ii. pp. 188-211); J.
Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series, lects. 6, 7.

184. “Bodily identity” itself, of course, might give rise to difficult

problems if we had space to go into them. Here I can merely suggest
certain points for the reader’s reflection. (1) All identity appears in the
end to be teleological and therefore psychical. I believe this to be the
same human body which I have seen before, because I believe that
the interests expressed in its actions will be continuous, experience
having taught me that a certain amount of physical resemblance is a
rough-and-ready criterion of psychical continuity. (2) As to the ethical
problem of responsibility referred to in the text, it is obviously entirely
one of less and more. Our moral verdicts upon our own acts and
those of others are in practice habitually influenced by the conviction
that there are degrees of moral responsibility within what the
immediate necessities of administration compel us to treat as
absolute. We do not, e.g., think a man free from all moral blame for
what he does when drunk, or undeserving of all credit for what he
performs when “taken out of himself,” i.e. out of the rut of his habitual
interests by excitement, but we certainly do, when not under the
influence of a theory, regard him as deserving of less blame or
credit, as the case may be, for his behaviour than if he had
performed the acts when he was “more himself.” On all these topics
see Mr. Bradley’s article in Mind for July 1902.
 185. So “self-consciousness,” in the bad sense, always arises
from a sense of an incongruity between the self and some
contrasted object or environment.
186. Though, of course, it does appear in the process of framing
and initiating the scheme of concerted action; the other self is here
contrasted with my own, precisely because the removal of the
collision between my purpose and my environment is felt as coming
from without.
187. It might be said that it is not these features of the
environment themselves, but my “ideas” of them, which thus belong
to the self. This sounds plausible at first, but only because we are
habitually accustomed to the “introjectionist” substitution of
psychological symbols for the actualities of life. On the question of
fact, see Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 8, p. 88 ff. (1st
ed.).
188. A colleague of my own tells me that in his case movements of
the eyes appear to be inseparable from the consciousness of self,
and are incapable of being extruded into the not-self in the sense
above described. I do not doubt that there are, in each of us, bodily
feelings of this kind which refuse to be relegated to the not-self and
that it would be well worth while to institute systematic inquiries over
as wide an area as possible about their precise character in
individual cases. It appears to me, however, as I have stated above,
that in ordinary perception these bodily feelings often are
apprehended simply as qualifying the perceived content without any
opposition of self and not-self. At any rate, the problem is one of
those fundamental questions in the theory of cognition which are too
readily passed over in current Psychology.
189. Of course, you can frame the concept of a “self” from which
even these bodily feelings have been extruded, and which is thus a
mere “cognitive subject” without concrete psychical quality. But as
such a mere logical subject is certainly not the self of which we are
aware in any concrete experience, and still more emphatically not
the self in which the historical and ethical sciences are interested, I
have not thought it necessary to deal with it in the text.
190. That we cannot imagine it does not appear to be any ground
for denying its actuality. It is never a valid argument against a
conclusion required to bring our knowledge into harmony with itself,
that we do not happen to possess the means of envisaging it in
sensuous imagery.
191. I venture to think that some of the rather gratuitous
hypotheses as to the rational selfhood of animal species quà species
put forward by Professor Royce in the second volume of The World
and the Individual, are illustrations of this tendency to unnecessary
over-interpretation.
192. Is it necessary to refer in particular to the suggestion that for
the Absolute the contrast-effect in question may be between itself
and its component manifestations or appearances? This would only
be possible if the finite appearances were contained in the whole in
some way which allowed them to remain at discord with one another,
i.e. in some way incompatible with the systematic character which is
the fundamental quality of the Absolute. I am glad to find myself in
accord, on the general principle at least, with Dr. McTaggart. See the
Third Essay in his recent Studies in Hegelian Cosmology.
193. It would be fruitless to object that “societies” can, in fact, have
a legal corporate personality, and so can—to revert to the illustration
used above—be sued and taxed. What can be thus dealt with is
always a mere association of definite individual human beings, who
may or may not form a genuine spiritual unity. E.g., you might
proceed against the Commissioners of Income Tax, but this does not
prove that the Commissioners of Income Tax are a genuine society.
On the other hand, the Liberal-Unionist Party probably possesses
enough community of purpose to enable it to be regarded as a true
society, but has no legal personality, and consequently no legal
rights or obligations, as a party. Similarly, the corporation known as
the Simeon Trustees has a legal personality with corresponding
rights and duties, and it also stands in close relation with the
evangelical party in the Established Church. And this party is no
doubt a true ethical society. But the corporation is not the evangelical
party, and the latter, in the sense in which it is a true society, is not a
legal person.
I may just observe that the question whether the Absolute is a self
or a person must not be confounded with the question of the
“personality of God.” We must not assume off-hand that “God” and
the Absolute are identical. Only special examination of the
phenomena of the religious life can decide for us whether “God” is
necessarily the whole of Reality. If He is not, it would clearly be
possible to unite a belief in “God’s” personality with a denial of the
personality of the Absolute, as is done, e.g., by Mr. Rashdall in his
essay in Personal Idealism. For some further remarks on the
problem, see below, Chapter V.
194. I suppose that any doctrine which denies the ultimate reality
of the finite self must expect to be confronted by the appeal to the
alleged revelation of immediate experience. Cogito, ergo sum, is
often taken as an immediately certain truth in the sense that the
existence of myself is something of which I am directly aware in
every moment of consciousness. This is, however, an entire
perversion of the facts. Undoubtedly the fact of there being
experience is one which can be verified by the very experiment of
trying to deny it. Denial itself is a felt experience. But it is (a)
probably not true that we cannot have experience at all without an
accompanying perception of self, and (b) certainly not true that the
mere feeling of self as in contrast with a not-self, when we do get it,
is what is meant by the self of Ethics and History. The self of these
sciences always embraces more than can be given in any single
moment of experience, it is an ideal construction by which we
connect moments of experience according to a general scheme. The
value of that scheme for any science can only be tested by the
success with which it does its work, and its truth is certainly not
established by the mere consideration that the facts it aims at
connecting are actual. Metaphysics would be the easiest of sciences
if you could thus take it for granted that any construction which is
based upon some aspect of experienced fact must be valid.
195. This is why Plato seems justified in laying stress upon the
dreams of the wise man as evidence of his superiority (Republic, bk.
ix. p. 571). His ideal wise man is one whose inner life is so
completely unified that there is genuine continuity of purpose
between his waking and sleeping state. Plato might perhaps have
replied to Locke’s query, that Socrates waking and Socrates asleep
are the same person, and their identity is testimony to the
exceptional wisdom and virtue of Socrates.
 If it be thought that at least the simultaneous co-existence within
one of two selves is inconceivable, I would ask the reader to bear in
mind that the self always includes more than is at any moment given
as actual matter of psychical fact. At any moment the self must be
taken to consist for the most part of unrealised tendencies, and in so
far as such ultimately incompatible tendencies are part of my whole
nature, at the same time it seems reasonable to say that I have
simultaneously more than one self. Ultimately, no doubt, this line of
thought would lead to the conclusion that “my whole nature” itself is
only relatively a whole.
196. Compare the valuable essay by Mr. Bradley on the “Evidence
of Spiritualism” in Fortnightly Review for December 1885.
197. Death, however, though the most striking, is not the only
illustration of this apparently irrational interference of accident with
intelligent purpose. Mental and bodily disablement, or even adverse
external fortune, may have the same effect upon the self. This must
be taken into account in any attempt to deal with the general
problem.
198. Dr. McTaggart’s phrase is more exactly adequate to describe
my view than his own, according to which “immortality” is capable of
philosophical proof. (See the second chapter of his Studies in
Hegelian Cosmology.) I have already explained why I cannot accept
this position. I believe Dr. McTaggart’s satisfaction with it must be
partly due to failure to raise the question what it is that he declares to
be a “fundamental differentiation” of the Absolute.
199. I ought perhaps to say a word—more I do not think necessary
—upon the doctrine that immortality is a fundamental “moral
postulate.” If this statement means no more than that it would be
inconsistent with the rationality of the universe that our work as
moral agents should be simply wasted, and that therefore it must
somehow have its accomplishment whether we see it in our human
society or not, I should certainly agree with the general proposition.
But I cannot see that we know enough of the structure of the
universe to assert that this accomplishment is only possible in the
special form of immortality. To revert to the illustration of the text, (1)
our judgment that the world must be a worthless place without
immortality might be on a level with the child’s notion that “grown-up”
life, to be worth having, must be a life of continual play and no work.
(2) If it is meant, however, that it is not “worth while” to be virtuous
unless you can look forward to remuneration—what Hegel,
according to Heine, called a Trinkgeld—hereafter for not having lived
like a beast, the proposition appears to me a piece of immoral
nonsense which it would be waste of time to discuss.
 CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL FREEDOM

§ 1. The metaphysical problem of free will has been historically created by extra
ethical difficulties, especially by theological considerations in the early
Christian era, and by the influence of mechanical scientific conceptions in the
modern world. § 2-3. The analysis of our moral experience shows that true
“freedom” means teleological determination. Hence to be “free” and to “will”
are ultimately the same thing. Freedom or “self-determination” is genuine but
limited, and is capable of variations of degree. § 4. Determinism and
Indeterminism both arise from the false assumption that the mechanical
postulate of causal determination by antecedents is an ultimate fact. The
question then arises whether mental events are an exception to the supposed
principle. § 5. Determinism. The determinist arguments stated. § 6. They rest
partly upon the false assumption that mechanical determination is the one and
only principle of rational connection between facts. § 7. Partly upon fallacious
theories of the actual procedure of the mental sciences. Fallacious nature of
the argument that complete knowledge of character and circumstances would
enable us to predict human conduct. The assumed data are such as, from
their own nature, could not be known before the event. § 8. Indeterminism.
The psychical facts to which the indeterminist appeals do not warrant his
conclusion, which is, moreover, metaphysically absurd, as involving the denial
of rational connection. § 9. Both doctrines agree in the initial error of
confounding teleological unity with causal determination.

§ 1. The problem of the meaning and reality of moral freedom is

popularly supposed to be one of the principal issues, if not the
principal issue, of Metaphysics as applied to the facts of human life.
Kant, as the reader will no doubt know, included freedom with
immortality and the existence of God in his list of unprovable but
indispensable “postulates” of Ethics, and the conviction is still
widespread among students of moral philosophy that ethical science
cannot begin its work without some preliminary metaphysical
justification of freedom, as a postulate at least, if not as a proved
truth. For my own part, I own I cannot rate the practical importance
of the metaphysical inquiry into human freedom so high, and am
rather of Professor Sidgwick’s opinion as to its superfluousness in
strictly ethical investigations.[200] At the same time, it is impossible to
pass over the subject without discussion, if only for the excellent
illustrations it affords of the mischief which results from the forcing of
false metaphysical theories upon Ethics, and for the confirmation it
yields of our view as to the postulatory character of the mechanico-
causal scheme of the natural sciences. In discussing freedom from
this point of view as a metaphysical issue, I would have it clearly
understood that there are two important inquiries into which I do not
intend to enter, except perhaps incidentally.
One is the psychological question as to the precise elements into
which a voluntary act may be analysed for the purpose of
psychological description; the other the ethical and juridical problem
as to the limits of moral responsibility. For our present purpose both
these questions may be left on one side. We need neither ask how a
voluntary act is performed—in other words, by what set of symbols it
is best represented in Psychology—nor where in a complicated case
the conditions requisite for accountability, and therefore for freedom
of action, may be pronounced wanting. Our task is the simpler one of
deciding, in the first place, what we mean by the freedom which we
all regard as morally desirable, and next, what general view as to the
nature of existence is implied in the assertion or denial of its
actuality.
That the examination of the metaphysical implications of freedom
is not an indispensable preliminary to ethical study, is fortunately
sufficiently established by the actual history of the moral sciences.
The greatest achievements of Ethics, up to the present time, are
undoubtedly contained in the systems of the great Greek moralists,
Plato and Aristotle. It would not be too much to say that subsequent
ethical speculation has accomplished, in the department of Ethics
proper as distinguished from metaphysical reflection upon the
ontological problems suggested by ethical results, little more than
the development in detail of general principles already recognised
and formulated by these great observers and critics of human life.
Yet the metaphysical problem of freedom, as is well known, is
entirely absent from the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. With Plato,
as the reader of the Gorgias and the eighth and ninth books of the
Republic will be aware, freedom means just what it does to the
ordinary plain man, the power to “do what one wills,” and the only
speculative interest taken by the philosopher in the subject is that of
showing that the chief practical obstacle to the attainment of freedom
arises from infirmity and inconsistency in the will itself; that, in fact,
the unfree man is just the criminal or “tyrant” who wills the
incompatible, and, in a less degree, the “democratic” creature of
moods and impulses, who, in popular phrase, “doesn’t know what he
wants” of life.
Similarly, Aristotle, with less of spiritual insight but more attention
to matters of practical detail, discusses the ἑχούσιον, in the third
book of his Ethics, purely from the standpoint of an ideally perfect
jurisprudence. With him the problem is to know for what acts an
ideally perfect system of law could hold a man non-responsible, and
his answer may be said to be that a man is not responsible in case
of (1) physical compulsion, in the strict sense, where his limits are
actually set in motion by some external agent or cause; and (2) of
ignorance of the material circumstances. In both these cases there is
no responsibility, because there has been no real act, the outward
movements of the man’s limbs not corresponding to any purpose of
his own. An act which does translate into physical movement a
purpose of the agent, Aristotle, like practical morality and
jurisprudence, recognises as ipso facto free, without raising any
metaphysical question as to the ontological implications of the
recognition.
Historically, it appears that the metaphysical problem has been
created for us by purely non-ethical considerations. “Freedom of
indifference” was maintained in the ancient world by the Epicureans,
but not on ethical grounds. As readers of the second book of
Lucretius know, they denied the validity of the postulate of rigidly
mechanical causality simply to extricate themselves from the position
into which their arbitrary physical hypotheses had led them. If
mechanical causality were recognised as absolute in the physical
world, and if, again, as Epicurus held, the physical world was
composed of atoms all falling with constant velocities in the same
direction, the system of things, as we know it, could never have
arisen. Hence, rather than give up their initial hypothesis about the
atoms, the Epicureans credited the individual atom with a power of