Ernst Jünger Saw the History of Europe Through His Own Eyes
But He Also Saw Its Future Too.
Ernst Jünger lived a remarkable and almost unbelievable life. Born in Heidelberg to a middle-class family, he had an early passion for adventure. At the age of eighteen he joined the French Foreign Legion, training in Algeria. He quickly deserted, with the intention of getting to Morocco, but he was captured and sent home – punishment was light due to the intervention of the German Foreign Office. Within a year the First World War broke out and Jünger could satisfy his urge for action. War was a transformational experience for him. Wounded seven times he was awarded the highest German military decoration, only one of eleven infantry company leaders to ever receive it. In 1920 he published Storm of Steel, based on his war diaries. In it he describes the horrible reality of the First World War, but also the heroism and thirst-for battle. The book can be read as condemning war, like another bestseller of the period, All Quiet on the Western Front, but it can also be interpreted as a celebration of war – it explains why so many men were willing to go through hell for four years. As Jünger writes in his memoir, ‘We are not willing to strike this war from our thoughts; we are proud of it.’
Storm of Steel made Jünger a celebrity. He served in the army until 1923, but also studied widely, notably pursuing his passion for entomology – something he indulged in even during his off time on the Western Front. In the febrile atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, Jünger associated himself with the radical right, being identified post facto, along with Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler, as a member of the Conservative Revolution movement. Jünger was certainly no friend of democracy, treating it with an aristocratic disdain and disliking its egalitarian premise that every man is of equal worth. But neither was he an outright fascist, a nationalist yes, perhaps even a radical, but not a fascist or Nazi. The Nazis made repeated overtures to him, even promising to make him a member of the Reichstag. He refused. Twice. He was repulsed by NSDAP mass politics, which went against everything he stood for, and also rejected Nazi antisemitism.
Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Jünger published a thinly-veiled analogy about the evils of Nazi rule. Jünger had been drifting away from the Nazis for some time – much to their displeasure as they wanted to use his war hero status – and On Marble Cliffs completed his distancing. Goebbels was disappointed by Jünger’s shift from a writer of ‘war gospel’ to a ‘writer, closed off from life, just ink, literature’. The book was banned a few months after it was published. Jünger then returned to the army and served as a captain in the Wehrmacht during the occupation of Paris. It was a cushy job and he had plenty of time to indulge in his bibliophilic and entomological interests. He also partied with Paris intellectuals including Picasso and Celine, being absorbed into the local literary scene.
Jünger was a mystery, especially in his Paris days. Jean Cocteau said that ‘Some people, had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.’ Between the champagne and the antique-hunting Jünger had more unpleasant tasks such as executing a German deserter, an assignment that he had initially wanted to get out of, but one he acceded to, ‘in the spirit of higher curiosity’. He also pursued affairs with local women and helped Jews to flee France, ‘at an acceptable level of risk’. He was inordinately careful – the man who had expected to die in his twenties developed an eagerly attuned survival instinct. Perhaps most importantly he was peripherally involved in the Von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler. Peripherally, not because he disagreed with it – indeed many of his friends and colleagues were involved – but because it was not ‘at an acceptable level of risk,’ – he correctly predicted that it would fail. Protected, some say by Hitler himself, Jünger was only dismissed from the army after the plot’s failure and went back to Germany. Others were not so lucky, including his son who, serving in Italy, was killed in mysterious circumstances shortly after calling for Hitler to be hanged.
After the war Jünger was shunned and was banned from publishing by the British Occupation government as he refused to undergo denazification on the grounds that he had never been a Nazi. Slowly but surely though, he became respected once again, as he published several prophetic and philosophical works such as Eumeswil, The Glass Bees, and The Forest Passage. He gracefully moved from the vitality of youth to the wisdom of old age. His views shifted from aggressive nationalism to a more pacificist pan-Europeanism as he asked, ‘What does a nation mean when you can
fly over it in ten minutes?’. The double shock of World War One and World War Two had cooled his passions and forced him to turn further inward.
The latter half of his life was spent tackling modernity and investigating the impact of technology on our humanity. The First World War which he saw first-hand spawned the 20th century – the clash of men and metal that resulted in so much bloodshed and birthed much of the destruction and despair that came after it. Much of Jünger’s work was about dealing with it and its aftermath. From fascism and the great war that it caused, to the triumph of liberalism and communism that came after it. Jünger was always a reactionary, but a modernist one and he constantly grappled with how to adapt to the modern world with its revolutionary technology and changing social mores. But, as much as he fascinated in real-world technology he was also interested in exploring the political technology of the liberal democratic regime that he ended up living the majority of his life under.
In The Forest Passage Jünger describes how to walk what he called ‘the forest path’, being a sovereign individual in charge of his own destiny. He rejected fascism, and communism, but also liberal democracy, and advocated for an internal rebellion, a sort of Havelesque ‘living in truth’ before Havel. Jünger writes that, ‘asserting one’s freedom today has become especially difficult. Resistance demands great sacrifices, which explains why the majority prefer to accept the coercion,’ but that nevertheless resistance was a worthy cause. Jünger’s rebel had to act like Havel’s greengrocer, living as much integrity in a system designed to wipe it out. It was no wonder his later writings were published in Samizdat edition behind the iron curtain.
In West Germany, as under Nazism, Jünger was a ‘forest rebel’ and walked the ‘forest path’. He never apologised for anything he wrote, even his harder-edged writing during the inter-war period. In Eumeswil he developed the concept of the lone dissident further in the figure of the anarch. The anarch mirrored Jünger’s own life struggling quietly against oppressive societal systems that he opposes. ‘The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist,’ he cryptically wrote. But, in many ways the meaning of his post-war writing was clear. Germany (and the world) no longer suffered under the disastrous, murderous totalitarianism of the Nazis, but the soft totalitarianism of democracy which was just as hostile to the intentions of someone like Jünger as fascism was. Liberalism relentlessly undermined the traditions of the old order and ceaselessly sought an equality that could never come for it was an illusion. Liberalism also brought with it, in its post-war form, Americanism, ‘which will be further promoted by the obliteration of our old cities’. The McDonald’s that crowd our ancient European capitals prove him prophetic.
Jünger adapted to liberalism, just as it did to him, but he never bent the knee. In his later days, he experimented with LSD with its creator. He travelled across the world as his reputation slowly recovered and won the Goethe prize, a prestigious literary award. He befriended Francois Mitterrand. He converted to Catholicism and received the sacraments. Jünger died peacefully in 1998 at the age of 102.
An extraordinary man, he lived an extraordinary life, seeing the horrors of the 20th century through his own eyes. He lived in the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, West Germany and then the reunited Federal Republic. He fought in two World Wars, twice on the losing side. European history can be told through the story of Ernst Jünger. And Europe’s future can as well. His warnings about totalitarianism are just as relevant today was when they were written – it is no coincidence that his work is experiencing a contemporary revival. And his science-fiction, notably The Glass Bees is just as prophetic, sensing our future descent into a depersonalised technological abyss.
This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.