Эрнст Юнгер - A German Officer in Occupied Paris - The War Journals, 1941-1945

The Treaty of Versailles forced the German government to reduce its standing army to one hundred thousand troops. Although now under a republican government, it retained the imperial adjective to designate the Reichswehr and was filled with antidemocratic aristocrats. Jünger enthusiastically wrote treatises on storm trooper tactics, but he was put off by the empty socializing and boozing of the fraternizing officers. While studying the natural sciences in Leipzig, he joined the illegal paramilitary Freikorps and the legal veterans’ group Stahlhelm and began a career in journalism, writing for a score of right-wing newspapers, including the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter . He became a leading exponent of the young German intellectual right, which advocated for an authoritarian alternative to the Weimar democracy. These “Ideas of 1914” had been foreshadowed by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 bestseller, The Decline of the West and Moller van den Bruck’s The Third Reich , published in 1923. The young nationalist critique of parliamentary political systems followed in many ways the path laid out by Carl Schmitt in his seminal 1923 treatise, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy . [4] Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy , trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). They advocated a form of “Prussian Socialism,” as a new dictatorship, not monarchical, which would replace the nineteenth-century ideologies of liberalism, socialism, democracy, and anarchism. The new state would be run by steely-eyed workers and soldiers in full mobilization to restore Germany to its status as a world power. Jünger embraced these ideas in various forms, albeit often in a meta-historical and epochal rather than parochial German context, as one of three editors of the weekly Die Standarte (later Arminius ), which included the writers Friedrich Hielscher, Franz Schauwecker, Hans Friedrich Blunck, and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger, all intellectuals who his secretary Armin Mohler would identify as proponents of a “Conservative Revolution” in Germany. [5] See the latest edition: Armin Mohler and Karlheinz Weissmann, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932 (Graz: Ares Verlag, 2005). Jünger’s journalistic writings of the period have been collected and annotated by Sven Olaf Berggötz, ed. Ernst Jünger: Politische Publizistik 1919 bis 1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001).

In these years, Jünger worked to establish a Central Council that would unite workers and soldiers until a Führer could be found who could put the revolution into practice. This was a “National Bolshevik” strategy and explains his close friendship with Ernst Niekisch, a politician and writer from Saxony who founded the journal Widerstand , with the aim of grafting Soviet Bolshevism onto Prussian nationalism. In the War Journals , Niekisch is referred to twelve times under the pseudonym “Cellaris.” He was a key figure for understanding the ambiguous position Jünger held on the right-wing spectrum of pre-Nazi politics in Germany. Jünger was deeply concerned about Niekisch’s fate during World War II and received updates from military contacts who knew how he was being mistreated by the Nazis. (Niekisch was arrested in 1937 and spent the war years in a Gestapo jail, where he was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, a broken, nearly blind man). [6] Ernst Niekisch, Gewagtes Leben, 1889–1945 , 2nd ed. (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1980).

By 1927 Jünger became disillusioned with the various nationalist groups fighting one other as the Weimar government entered a relatively stable period, which lasted until the Great Depression doomed Germany’s first experiment with democracy. He decided to move to the bustling capital city.

In 1927 he took his wife and infant son to Berlin to settle down as a full-time writer. He had married Gretha von Jeinsen, ten years his junior, in 1925. With the Great War now almost a decade past, he became less focused on strident German nationalism and the battles of his youth. Residing in the humming metropolis, which began to eclipse Paris as the center of European cultural innovation, Jünger’s curiosity turned to more expansive themes of modernity, technology, and cultural disruption. As Marcus Bullock has noted, he was particularly fascinated by the pulsating sexuality of the city, the intoxication experienced by the breaking of taboos and bourgeois norms. [7] See Marcus Paul Bullock, The Violent Eye: Ernst Jünger’s Visions and Revisions on the European Righ t (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 180–84. Here he wrote the first version of his surrealist work, The Adventurous Heart , “notes written down by day and night.” [8] Ernst Jünger, The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capricios , trans. Thomas Friese (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2012). The literary scholar Karl-Heinz Bohrer has strikingly labeled Jünger’s style an “aesthetics of shock” because this book contains a phantasmagoria of scientific and poetic vignettes, a collage of wild associations and ghostly images that recall the war-inspired art of painters of the era like René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst, as well as the expressionists Otto Dix and George Grosz. [9] See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Ästhetik des Schreckens: die pessimistische Romantik und Ernst Jüngers Frühwerk (Hamburg: Ullstein, 1983).

Jünger’s circle of friends and literary acquaintances expanded in Berlin as he moved beyond his ties to war veterans. On the left, he interacted with Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, and the anarchist Erich Mühsam. On the right, he associated with Gottfried Benn, Ernst von Salomon, and Arnolt Bronnen. Around this time, his intellectual infatuation with France and French culture began. He made frequent trips to Paris, making contact with French literary circles, facilitated by the well-connected German-French author Joseph Breitbach.

As the Nazis began their final ascent to power after winning 107 seats in the Reichstag in the elections of September 1930, Jünger distanced himself from the party. He simultaneously advocated his own political vision, which in some ways was a more radical version of the nationalist revolution: authoritarian and ruthless, but not racist. Despite Goebbels’s attempt to win him over to the Brown Revolution before and even after 1933, Jünger steadfastly declined any offers to become involved in Nazi politics and forbade the propaganda minister from using any of his works without permission. Although Goebbels transmitted the Führer’s avid wish to meet him, Jünger did not reciprocate. [10] Schwilk, Ernst Jünger: Ein Jarhundertleben , 320–21. Apart from one unfortunate essay on “Jews and the National Question,” in which he stressed the impossibility of Jews and Germans sharing the same national culture, [11] Ernst Jünger, “Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 12 (September 1930): 843–45. he resisted the Nazi “Blood and Soil” ideology. [12] On recent debates about Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg’s complicated relationship to Jews and Judaism, see Thomas Bantle, Alexander Pschera, and Detlev Schöttker (Eds.), Jünger Debatte Band 1: Ernst Jünger and das Judetum (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2017).

In 1932, the same year Aldous Huxley published Brave New World , Jünger’s The Worker appeared in print. As the war journals indicate, Huxley was one of the few modern authors Jünger prized. Huxley’s novel and Jünger’s social analysis shared a dystopian vision of the future resulting from economic and political breakdown. Whereas the former was read as a warning of the end of the liberal order in western societies, Jünger’s tract affirmed a Nietzschean reevaluation of and triumph over the liberal order. Nevertheless, the Nazis had little use for Jünger’s treatise because it lacked any connection to the German Volk community or racial hierarchies. The book heralded a collective new age of the laborer in epochal terms, while the Nazis concentrated on the specific situation of Germany’s supposed superior racial characteristics. National Socialism appeared to Jünger as a purely technical execution of the “total mobilization” (the title of another of his short treatises of this period). He later said that Nazism “lacked metaphysics.” [13] Interview with Ernst Jünger in L’Express , 11–17 January 1971, 105. As a political platform The Worker was considered useless by the new regime. In fact, it was explicitly denounced in the Völkischer Beobachter , the Nazi party newspaper. [14] Thilo von Throta, “Das endlose dialektische Gespräch,” Völkischer Beobachter , 22 October 1932.