Time is out of joint in the novels of Ernst Jünger. It is not just the timeless settings he uses – both The Glass Bees (1957) and On The Marble Cliffs (1939) take place an era ill-defined - Jünger’s writings are full of contractions and expansions of time. Storm of Steel (1920), Jünger’s WWI memoirs and his first book, is a classic example. The strange nature of temporality is well known to soldiers; time expands and contracts before, after and during battle. Moments of boredom are punctuated by sudden rushes, going over the top lasts but an instant, waiting out a bombardment an eternity. Given his fascination with the experience of war it is perhaps no surprise that Jünger distorts time so consistently. Yet his untimeliness expands beyond just the descriptive element of his oeuvre. His work is often seen as prophetic. The Glass Bees, Jünger’s clairvoyant tale of technology gone wrong, was so far ahead of its time that Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the New York Review of Books edition describes it as “anachronistic”. This term is often used to invoke the past – as in “anachronistic values” – but it actually means any displacement with regards to time. Thus, Sterling wants to indicate that Jünger, like his hero Friedreich Nietzsche, is untimely. For Nietzsche believed that he had been born too soon, that his audience was a future man, and his philosophy a future philosophy. The futurity of Jünger is often seen in his marvelously prescient critique of technology. And then we must account for temporality of Jünger’s life itself. He lived to be 102, and survived four iterations of the German nation-state: Weimar, Third Reich, East and West and Reunification. A century of upheaval and a century of Jünger both.
How strange then to say that Jünger’s time has come. In 2017 the first complete English translation of his 1932 essay The Worker: Dominion and Form came out and 2019 saw the publication of his journals from the second World War, A German Officer in Occupied Paris, which received wide coverage in the press. The New York Review of Books classics imprint has recently issued a new translation by Tess Lewis of On the Marble Cliffs and, somewhat closer to my antipodean home, an edited collection by Index Journal entitled Ernst Jünger: Philosophy Under Occupation appeared in 2021. The impetus for this revival is obvious. The recent publications and translations of his work date from after 2016, and in Jessi Jezewska Stevens introduction to On the Marble Cliffs she draws the obvious analogy; “the murmurs from the wings of 2022 tell us the democracy hasn’t been this weak since the Weimar years.” In their introduction to Philosophy Under Occupation, editors Justin Clemens and Nicholas Hausdorf write of Jünger that he was “a witness to the rise of total mobilization, global war, and unprecedented technologies of mass extermination. Given that these remain our inheritances today – if now banalized and integrated into the highly-managed biopolitical fabric of everyday life in a neoliberal world at the limits of ecological viability – it also presents a kind of model of compromised survival under unprecedented conditions.” The cycles of history are getting shorter.
Before the renewed interest in discourses of fascism however, Jünger spoke to us of a world of technological nightmares, an impossible climate for the human soul. This concern is at the heart of The Glass Bees. Giles Fielke, in his contribution to Philosophy Under Occupation points out that tiny glass machines of Giamaco Zapparoni, the titular glass bees, mirror a push toward an entomic dystopia of swarms of delivery drones and the ecological language of networks and mass behaviors. In our age we are not only seen to be connected in the way a great hive or ants’ nest is, but we are also insect like in our behaviors, predictable, instinctual and irritable. Fielke’s imagination is set off by the reports of Amazon hoping to build a drone fulfillment center, whose uncanny resemblance to a beehive force his entomic analogy. Somehow here too Jünger is ahead of us, already knowing of our fates. No surprise then that Jünger liked to describe himself as a human seismograph, registering the underlying tectonic shifts that prefigured the tremors of the age.
The republication of On The Marble Cliffs offers us a chance to reconsider this romantic picture of Jünger. The book is, as a work of literature, utterly mesmerizing. Jünger is an excellent stylist, and his books often combine an intoxicating combination of frictionless prose and narrative foreshadowing. It is only after turning the final page of the book that one realizes how little happens in its slim 100 pages, so lost are we in Jünger’s pyrotechnics. The story is easily summarized. Two brothers – one of whom is the narrator - live in a monastic refuge high on the marble cliffs where they collect and categorize plant species. Their world is lush, and Jünger gives much focus to descriptions of the environment, to painting his idyll. The brother’s refuge high upon the cliffs allows the descriptions of the lay of the land - of the great lake, the Marina, and the grassy meadows of the Campagna beyond which lies the imposing and sinister forest - to have an organic nature; there is no clash between the narrator and what is narrated. This bird’s eye view, this sense of being above it all both physically and mentally is the first clue to what On the Marble Cliffs truly tells us about Jünger, who reveals in his parable the limits of detachment.
Tranquility is what the first several chapters set to establish, a tranquility that Jünger will slowly and horrifyingly unwind in the novel’s second half. This latter half follows the decline of this peaceful world into destruction and chaos. In the forest lies the Head Forester and his army of Mauretanians who will eventually destroy this idyllic world. The brothers, after a brief but all too late attempt at joining the fray, will retreat across the Marina as their former home and its surrounding landscape is torched.
The book was seen as an attack on the Nazi regime upon its release in 1939. It is hard to dispute this. Jünger was able to avoid the displeasure of the party due to the personal intervention of Adolf Hitler, but it is well known that Jünger despised National Socialism. They Nazis possessed the right sense of Prussian militarism, but their obsessed with technology concerned Jünger, and he steadfastly rejected attempts by the Nazis to propagandize him in anyway, including instructing the Völkischer Beobachter – the Nazi daily paper – to not publish any of his writing and walking out of a speech given by Joseph Goebbels. For him they possessed “no metaphysics” and ceded too much ground to the liberal bourgeois order. His diaries from the second world war find him at odds with much of the Nazi party leadership, and although he was not involved, he was sympathetic to the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler.
Jünger was, however, no progressive. “I hate democracy as I do the plague” he wrote in 1922. His treatise The Worker begins with his distain for liberal bourgeois democracy, suggesting instead a militaristic model in which freedom and obedience coincide in “the structure of an army and not the social contract.” He belongs to a class of European intellectuals best described as possessing an aristocratic spirit, readers of Nietzsche whose idyll was a naturalistic morality, – Darwin’s categorical imperative, not Kant’s - ironic distance and the untrammeled wanderings of the free soul.
Jünger’s Storm of Steel is filled with this kind of ridiculous battle hardened nobility of the spirit that stems from this strange moment in European history. In the chapter entitled “The Double Battle of Cambrai” Jünger recounts his reaction to the news of a fallen comrade, Teppe, with pathos:
The news floored me. A friend of mine with noble qualities, with whom I had shared joy, sorrow and danger for my years now and who only a few moments ago had called out some pleasantry to me, taken from life by a tiny piece of lead! I could not grasp the fact; unfortunately, it was all too true.
This is almost immediately followed by:
Of all the stimulating moments in a war, there is none to compare with the encounter of two storm troop commanders in the narrow clay walls of a line. There is no going back, and no pity. And so everyone knows who has seen one or other of them in their kingdom, the aristocrat of the trench, with hard, determined visage, brave to the point of folly, leaping agilely forward and back, with keen bloodthirsty eyes, men who answered the demands of the hour, and whose names go down in no chronicle.
There is much talk of the nobility of his opponent, of the bravery of his opponents, but nonetheless Jünger takes pride in killing them, and kill them he must. The only time his enemies appear in any human light is when they almost kill him. The distance between this and Wilfred Owen, say, is unbridgeable.
Jünger’s fascination for us, I contend, is not that of the predictive seismograph, but that of the relic. He represents a form of life that has collapsed; the aristocratic spirit from which he draws is now gone. The mud of the Somme from which Jünger the surveyor and war hero grew was sowed by the very forces that unraveled the old world from which Jünger drew so much. This unravelling is there in the very evolution of warfare that the First World War represented. Much of Storm of Steel features Jünger waiting for bombardments to pass, never seeing his enemy. There are a handful of intense close battles. Jünger is at the dawn of massive technological overhaul in warfare, where the distance between enemy combatants has grown ever further. It was Walter Benjamin who keenly pointed this out, in his essay ‘Theories of German Fascism’ - a review of War and Warrior, a collection of essays about the First World War edited by Jünger – where he writes:
These authors nowhere observe that the new warfare of technology and material [Materialschlacht] which appears to some of them as the highest revelation of existence, dispenses with all the wretched emblems of heroism that here and there have survived the World War. Gas warfare, in which the contributors to this book show conspicuously little interest, promises to give the war of the future a face which permanently displaces soldierly qualities by those of sports; all action will lose its military character and war will assume the countenance of record setting.
A drone cannot win glory, and it does not experience honor. The values that produce such an object began, too, in the trenches of the Somme. These are the mud and blood soaked fields which inspired Paul Valéry to quip in 1919 that “the world, which calls by the name of ‘progress’ it tendency toward a fatal precision, marches on from Talyorization to Taylorization.” Despite Benjamin’s comments, Jünger seemed at times aware of this, yet always recoiled from fully accepting this. A passage from War as Inner Experience highlights this:
The battle of the machines is so colossal that man almost completely disappears before it. Often already, caught in the force fields of the modern battlefield, it seemed to me strange and scarcely believable that I was witnessing world-historical events. Combat took on the form of a gigantic, lifeless mechanism and swept an icy, impersonal wave across the ground. It was like the cratered landscape of a dead star, lifeless and radiating heat. And yet: behind all this is man. Only he gives the machines their direction and meaning. It is he that spits from their mouths bullets, explosives and poison. He that elevates himself in them like birds of prey above the enemy. He that sits in their stomach as they stalk the battlefield spewing fire. It is he, the most dangerous, bloodthirsty, and purposeful being that the Earth has to carry.
Man, or a certain man of a certain caliber, stands over and above machines. Note here this is no dialectical relationship, no uses and abuses of technology. There is simply the unconquerable will of noble souls over machines. Such a heroic vision, however, is belied by the facts of Jünger’s post war years.
To return to Sterling’s term “anachronistic”, what may have precisely let Jünger see so far was his distance from his present reality. The detachment of the man out of time. In his war diaries there is a famous passage wherein he watches bombs drop on Paris with a bemused indifference:
Air-raid sirens, planes overhead. From the roof of the Raphael, I watched two enormous detonation clouds billow upward in the region of Saint-Germain while the high-altitude formations cleared off. They were targeting the river bridges. The method and sequence of the tactics aimed atour supply lines imply a subtle mind. When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theater—pure power affirmed and magnified by suffering.
The passage is controversial for all the reasons Jünger is controversial: the aestheticization of war, the conflating of destruction and beauty, the strange detachment in the face of horror. It is also controversial because there was no air raid at sunset on that day. Jünger could have been confused about the date, or he could be blurring the line between fact and fiction. Yet, as Marilyn Stendera notes in her excellent essay on Jünger and time in Philosophy Under Occupation, it also belongs to the temporality of the witness: “the alternative temporal imaginary of the witness that the journals construct can also be characterized by a tension between fact and fiction, between a claim to historical objectivity – to temporal authority – and the absolute refusal thereof.” Yet if Stendera is right to identify Jünger’s strange temporalities – at least in his war journals – as that of the witness, then his infamous detachment is naturally a part of that, as she further explains: “perhaps the very attempt to remain untouched must ultimately render this kind of witness complicit – sometimes resisting, sometimes serving, mostly surviving, but never escaping the totalizing temporalities that it navigates.” There is an implicit impotence here, a great irony for Jünger the man of action.
Stendera ends her essay with a Jean Cocteau quote which, to the best of my knowledge, has appeared in almost every recent essay on Jünger: “some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” The logic of this witticism plays out on its own terms, but it is more suggestive than first appears. The hand is the instrument of touch. For most it is through this appendage that they affect the world. The suggestion that Jünger has no hands is not just a bon mot. It implies an incorporeality, an ineffectualness. Jünger may see this world and prophesize about it but he is not of this world, he cannot affect it. Left behind his fate becomes that of the ghost, a relic of the past that cannot move on, a sprite left to remind us of past transgressions.
After WWII, Jünger remained a popular writer but drew more and more into the life of the private individual. His was an inward emmigration, captured well by his late description of himself as an “loyal but unenthusiastic citizen” of postwar Germany. His 1977 novel Eumeswil introduces the figure of the Anarch, one who lives in a world they despise. This figure may be seen perhaps as one of romantic resistance, a man who knows he cannot act against the world but that he can resist the world’s encroachment into his soul. Jünger elaborates on this concept in contradistinction to the anarchist:
the anarchist is a man with plans, for example to kill the tsar or something to that effect, while this is less so with the anarch. The anarch is more established within himself, and the condition of the anarch is in reality the condition which every man carries within himself. [...] An anarch can for example work calmly in an office, but when he leaves in the evening, he plays quite another role. And aware of his own superiority, he is able to take a complaisant view of the political system currently in power.
This figure is described in romantic terms by Jünger, but it is hard to see the difference here between the Anarch and the good liberal citizen Immanuel Kant describes in What is Enlightenment? Kant infamously argues that one may exercise total freedom in their public use of reason – what they say and write to various publics - but their private reason, perhaps best thought of as vocational reason, can be narrowly restricted. All of which is summed up the dictum “argue all you want but obey.” This model seems to march the Anarch perfectly, who even goes so far as to not argue at all and simply obey.
Hausdorf, in his essay in Philosophy Under Occupation, seeks to waylay such an interpretation of Jünger. He writes:
It [the Anarch] marks an attempt of non-communication or, better yet, of a separation of communicative strategies between outward social promiscuity and inner reserve. The latter doubles as a military code of honour, renouncement and asceticism. The state form suggested by the Anarch is thus also the reign of the well-behaved, innocuous, disciplined and educated – but potentially dangerous and free…the Anarch thus contrasts drastically with bourgeois individualism which is interested in the principle of safety and the maximization of lifespan.
It is worth noting the idea of the passive and whimpering bourgeois liberal – an image Jünger himself presents in The Worker – is at odds with the historical origins of liberalism, which concerns the question of when it is right to rebel and the very conditions of obedience. This is the animating principle in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and it is there too in Thomas Hobbes, who concedes at the very least that one can defend themselves from the Levithan, and quite possibly that it is just to resist a Levithan who cannot keep the peace. There is more room for dangerous militant individuals in liberal doctrine than in Jünger’s militarism. It is lost on Hausdorf that a sentence like “Venator [the protagonist of Eumeswil] can ponder tyrannicide while choosing not to act on it” describes the truth of just about every subject living under tyranny, and if we replace tyrannicide with the simple assassination of a head of state, it now covers literally every political subject.
On the Marble Cliffs’ message belonged to a world of aristocratic action, the tragedy of the story one about the great cost of retreating from the world. From the bird’s eye view and knowing distance – it is important to note that On the Marble Cliffs is told in the past tense, it is a retelling - the principle of action which dominates Storm of Steel slowly fades away. The inner turn that culminates in the Anarch begins here and there could be no clearer sign of capitulation than this turn inwards. The singularity of heroism becomes the egoism of the isolationist. Yet there can be no other fate for a man so detached from the world, a man who despite his perspicacity consistently failed to grasp the whole and to understand the dilemmas of his time.
It is interesting how English language interest in Junger has gone up so much in recent years, I think it's mostly driven by the new right. There seems to be quite a strong little community of anglophone Junger-studies now. The uncertainty with technology, along with the need to keep one's true self buried in a regime you find distasteful or corrupt are very modern feelings.
His works have such vastly different levels of accessibility too - Eumeswil is a dense battle to get through, but his earlier works are much more direct and readable.
I find some of the interviews conducted in the last couple of decades of Junger's life particularly interesting. The interviewers always seem to take any political statements that Junger makes at face value, suggesting they're unfamiliar with his personal history and concept of the anarch.
On a parallel track, I found a recent book, Last Days in Old Europe, an excellent read. It involved a writer travelling in the former AH empire and seeing the remaining places and people of the Empire and first world war before they passed away.
Very good short essay, somehow comes right at a time when I was about to read Junger.
I would like to say though, I feel like there is something positive to be said about the Anarch in this day and age: the need to preserve oneself in spite of an overwhelming informational onslaught and its addictions, the need to be an Anarch against those techno-standardizing forces that so easily flatten minds nowadays much like war did for Junger's generation.