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Overview
Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany’s conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler’s assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger’s untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger’s profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism.
Winner of Germany’s highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822399186 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Thomas R. Nevin is Professor of Classical Studies at John Carroll University. He is the author of Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew and Irving Babbitt: An Intellectual Study.
Read an Excerpt
Ernst Jünger and Germany
Into the Abyss, 1914-1945
By Thomas Nevin
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9918-6
CHAPTER 1
The Years Before Chaos: 1895-1914
Yearly, the chess masters arrived at his father's house, and they stayed for six weeks. They played according to tournament rules: recorded moves and clocks in stern tempo as the phalanxes of pawns and their noble overseers moved about the close-patterned world. From early morning until evening the contestants, champions and amateurs alike, hovered.
The chessboard offered no mere occasion of leisure for the elder Jünger. Far more than a pastime for this chemical engineer, so affluent that he was able to retire from his business while in his forties, chess served as an analogue to the world at large, which he knew, robustly engaged, and confidently overcame. It was a world of successive challenges, of problems that lured by hiding well their solutions. Here, a never flagging acuity of observation and calculation would be certain of reward. In a sense, this kind of chess had no losers; it could only vouchsafe the triumph of reason's advance upon apparent chaos. So, too, did the world, as it seemed.
When Ernst Jünger was born (March 29, 1895), Germany had been for over a generation one of the most advanced industrial communities of Europe. Yet, during that time the national economy had failed to grow or even to recover from a depression precipitated by a financial crash in 1873. The Social Democratic Party, blessed by the First International and threatening revolution, seemed to Bismarck all but a traitor to the Wilhelmine imperial state. There were unemployed even among the graduates of the elitist Gymnasia. Bismarck feared that these young men, clever and restive—they were known as the Abiturproletariat—were or would become nihilists. However, neither political rumbling nor economic stagnation had reached a crisis, in part because Bismarck, a relentless foe of the socialists, co-opted some of their program by enacting legislation for workers' health and disability insurance. He satisfied industry and agriculture by protective tariffs, and he promoted nonpartisan commercial leagues. While forestalling revolution, if not its rhetoric, he began to tame the Social Democrats themselves into a reformist party. In the fin de siècle the newly arrived petite bourgeoisie of white-collared urban employees joined the older petite bourgeoisie of shopkeepers, artisans, and small businessmen as an emergent political force which the established political parties, Conservative and Socialist, and new nationalistic pressure groups attempted to secure.
The last twenty years of Wilhelmine peace, from 1895 to 1914, were generally prosperous. The advent of new technologies on a massive scale—electrification, the wireless, automobiles—begot parvenus among the bourgeoisie and raised the expectations of workers. They, too, became consumers. This expansive, progressive world seemed reliably to vouchsafe the confidence and elan of the father.
Jünger was born in Heidelberg but grew up in and around Hanover, where the family had lived for two generations. His paternal grandfather had come to Hanover as a teacher. He had two sons, one of whom died in early maturity. The other, Ernst, shrugged off everything that did not suit him. At the municipal lyceum, renowned for its humanistic tradition, he studied Greek, excelled in physics, and was most inclined to natural sciences, especially chemistry and pharmacy. Upon graduation he served as an apothecary's assistant in Pyrmont, southwest of Hanover. When he came home after three years, he was dismayed to find that his former friends had drifted away and created new bonds of which he had no part. The experience stung him and left in him a permanent residue of mistrust and coldness.
He went to work at a pharmaceutical laboratory in Munich, and considered study toward a university degree. But, finding he could not bear the subordinate position of an assistant lectureship, he returned to Hanover and set up his own laboratory in the nearby town of Schwarzenberg. He bought it with money sent by a distant relative after his wife insisted he ask for help.
The family's first home, at Schwarzenberg, had been a cloister before the Reformation. Its many deep passageways, cellars, and wells prompted the Jünger children (after Ernst came a sister and three brothers) to believe that spirits, dwarfs, and marvelous animals had lived there. Perhaps they had. Schwarzenberg, an ancient walled city, impressed upon Jünger's childhood (he lived there from 1902 to 1904) the image of an ever receding and irrecoverable past. In counterpoint to that stable but vanishing world, schooling was erratic: between his sixth and eleventh year, young Ernst was obliged to change school residence several times, as his parents moved or as poor grades required.
Schwarzenberg offered Jünger a flood of sensuous memorabilia that enforced in him a melancholic sense not of loss but of losing: "It is the feeling of being very near to the spirit of a time the reality of which has forever disappeared." Whatever of the past seems apprehensible assumes a dream image: if we attempt to grasp it, it passes. This yearning in Jünger—every child who has lost a home has some sense of it—served as a powerful companion to the exuberant urge of his adolescence to seek faraway places. It also opens a window upon his lifelong inclination to esteem the past at the expense of the present. Recalling the inhabitants of Schwarzenberg, his "ancient little town," he once wrote:
There were no individuals such as the whirlpool of the masses pushes fleeting upon us, with faces so masked that out of many thousands not one is grafted to our memory. They were personalities, each singular, people of character, and even of the curious little barber, who ran from his shop into the street, shining razor in hand, whenever he heard a clamor, it was said that even if he hadn't a good character, even so he had a character.
In 1907, Jünger's father sold his pharmacy and moved the family back toward Hanover, settling in a house on a high meadow, near Rehburg. The Jüngers' home, at Brunnenstrasse 9, overlooked the moors that border the Steinhuder Meer, the site of nearly all the wonder and danger of Jünger's early adolescence.
Young Ernst was proud of this boggy terrain. It seemed to have defeated history. Indeed, the Romans had been unable to penetrate it, and not far distant was the Teutoburg Forest, where in the year 9 C.E. the survivors of three legions of Caesar Augustus had been roasted alive in cages. When Germanicus entered that wood a generation after, he found moss-covered skulls of men and horses on the trees, a tableau of terror Jünger's pen would match in his forest by marble cliffs on the eve of Hitler's war. The moor near Rehburg was "more being than becoming, a grey and brown web of the Norns." Thus hallowed in Jünger's mnemonic preserve, this land became through his writing a domain that furnished him an occult source of power, as though he had become a genie summoning childhood's lone illimitability.
The family's life was dominated by its authoritarian center. The father held forth regularly at table on various topics, usually historical or biographical. The children could have written a life of Bismarck based upon his table talk. More than forty years after he was gone, his son paid him this tribute:
I consider what my father related at table more important than all my scholastic education: my taste for history and my judgments of value came in a sense from him. He was typical of the nineteenth century in that he appreciated great personalities, beginning with Achilles, then Alexander the Great, and going up to the conquistadores and Napoleon.... He never had breakfast or dinner without speaking in detail on these subjects.
Despite (or because of) an evangelical Protestant upbringing, his father did not believe in eternal life; he felt that one lives on through one's children. His calculated distance from people included a talent for looking through them as though they were made of glass. Yet he was an exuberant man, and he loved to whistle and sing. His light baritone's repertoire was primarily Mozart, and it was not unusual for his children to hear Papageno on the stairs as their father descended in the morning.
This eccentric cultivated in his children a rugged independence. He prided himself on being enlightened, which meant that he proceeded in a rigorously scientific fashion to tackle any problem, scorning along the way all predecessors who might have made it easier. Jünger has suggested that his father "was in effect an anarchist. One example among a hundred: one day my grandfather took my grandmother into a café outside of town so that she couldn't make a scene, and told her, 'I have something disagreeable to tell you, Hermine. Our Ernst—my father—is married, and already has a four-year-old boy.'"
To the fact that his father was an Aries in the zodiac Jünger ascribed his eager, rapacious response to something once he became interested in it. His enthusiasms were neither caprices nor dilettantisms but passions that would involve him for as long as a decade, day and night. Once mastery of the passion's subject had been attained, he tended to lose interest: when, for example, moneymaking became easy, or when driving an automobile became safe and the roads smooth. During the 1920s he became engaged in telescopies and astronomy: the house gained a new roof.
Chess, unlike money and cars, is inexhaustible, but it is also exclusive: "The force of irrational elements and ideas discomforted him," says Jünger of his father, "as did excesses, especially incalculable ones. He would take a great store of facts and extract mathematical details from them." Like other pharmacists, the elder Jünger had made some experiments with morphine, but they were so unpleasant his son did not feel free to inquire about them. Transports of this sort were not to his father's liking, the effect of chemicals upon one's sensibility being, after all, unpredictable. Chess, an infinity of challenges within a narrow space, remained a passion to life's end. (Jünger never dared to play chess with his father. It would have been a totemic disaster had he ever beaten him.)
The family made regular outings into the woods, and would bathe in cold forest streams. These wanderings and the visits to the zoo in Hanover cultivated in young Ernst a fascination for plant and animal life that never left him. He shared this enthusiasm with only one of his brothers, Friedrich-Georg, who was also fated to share with Ernst service in war and a career in writing.
Their father encouraged the boys' interest in gathering insects (plants and stones, being inert, were less challenging but nothing was overlooked) and often at Christmas the necessary equipment for this adventure was provided with all attention to thoroughness: "net, needle, flask, a box whose bottom was lined with peat and covered with glazed paper." Ernst also carried a child's book on coleoptera, Der Käferfreund (The Beetle's Friend), its pictures suggesting the bait. The boy was captured before the beetle. Recalling the first of his "subtle hunts," Jünger once compared insect hunting to his father's chess playing, noting that the enticement was greater for the son because he spent as much time (or more) in the field as his father over the board. Besides, the hunter and the elusive hunted were quite other: "The partners did not exhaust themselves in pure combinations, rather an inexhaustible field of vision was open." Because the assaults of this "beetle's friend" came to success only gradually, "the little objects took on a magical glow. I never lacked time for them; the strange thing was rather that I had time for anything else." Within a few weeks, the box of magic would be filled with a booty of specimens (snail shells, insects, some fossils), the nomenclature of Linnaeus would be steadily absorbed, and Ernst would have to ask his father for another box.
Jünger's boyish attraction to the teeming, furtive animal life of the moors gained impetus, perhaps inspiration, from his father's informed and precisely trained eye. He very early apprehended "the intellectual charm of zoology in the study of its prismatic deviation, which undergoes an invisible life in the unending variety of the community." And he recalled, "What enchantment I felt as a child when my father opened such a secret to me." He learned, too, that exceptions not only prove the rule, they enlighten it. For Jünger this realization entailed a poetic lesson, that in every species observed, intricate figural lines are drawn which contribute to the grand arabesques of nature's mystery. The point merits emphasis. Thanks to the moors and his father, Jünger became an aesthete in his earliest years, and remained one, but he was never the cringing, hypersensitive sort usually connoted in the term. He was a perceiver of the sensible world. That is not all, but that is already much.
In the last weeks of the Second World War, when Germany lay in nearly total dissolution, Jünger mused on his childhood's longing for the natural world as a seeking out of anarchy, because then "the horrible burden, the atmospheric pressure of civilization vanished. Things became more dangerous but also more simple. Thoughts lost their embroidery. Life became more sumptuous." The pathway to this luxuriant danger lay directly before the family doorstep. The house stood only a few minutes' walk from marshes where men had been known to disappear. En route lay a Jewish cemetery populated with the families of tanners and butchers (young Ernst was enthralled by the indecipherable script on the slabs) and beyond, a row of old barns where he and brother Fritz would scale ladders and lie hidden in the hay of irascible farmers.
The Steinhuder Meer flowed into the countryside west of Hanover in dark-water streams. Beyond the villages, the landscape was desolate; there were only bulrushes, marsh, pinewood, peat bogs. Uninhibited, Ernst and brother Fritz made the moor their own. Playing Adam's game in Eden, they named everything they discovered. The boys would go naked through the marsh, covering themselves with mud to keep off the summer's flies. Friedrich-Georg recalled that this sporting was exhilarated by its dangers:
It was no innocuous pastime. Often our feet would break through and we sank to our thighs in the black slime that lay under the turf. Many a shudder ran down our backs. Here we bathed, sunned ourselves, and chatted for hours.... We never met a soul here, for the place was so shunned that not once did the herdsmen search in it. So this midland, half secure, half flowing, was left to us alone, and we crossed it on a hundred paths which were known only to us.
While the flora and fauna of the Steinhuder Meer initiated Ernst into his father's world of adventurously pursued precision, an adventure at home furnished him no less abundantly and exclusively. This was literature. It armed him, so he later reckoned, against what he regarded as life's greatest danger, ordinariness. Sherlock Holmes, "the thin nervous hero with the short pipe between his teeth," the Count of Monte Cristo, "this friend of cottages and enemy of palaces," Karl May's Old Shatter-hand, Captain Morgan, who carried a death's head on a black pennant—"all these adventurers, fairy tale princes, sea pirates, and magnanimous criminals, I don't complain that they have passed on but I would wish that they might find with every new orbit that life affords us successors on whom the whole sum of love and belief dedicated to them might be carried on."
The devotion to literature Ernst owed to his mother, Karoline. Her family's name was Lampl, from Westphalia. In her youth she had become a free spirit. Because as a child she had been forced to attend church, she revolted. She read Ibsen (once met him) and socialist literature. She was delighted when a suffragette assaulted a masterwork in the British Museum, and the incident in which Lady Pankhurst was borne under police constraint through a London street (as known through the famous photograph) offered more delight.
She read Goethe and Schiller passionately, and made annual pilgrimages to Weimar, at times taking her children with her. One of Ernst's fondest childhood memories came from Goethe's enormous home and his Gartenhaus which sits splendid and solitary across the river. Before the Jünger children were able to read, their mother read to them, in a high voice. When delivering Schiller's ballad "Das Lied von der Glocke" (The Song of the Clock), she would break down at the lines telling of the dear mother carried off by the black prince of shadows from her spouse's arms and those of her tender babes. We are left to speculate on what manner of anxieties this histrionic performance and its inspirational text caused the young listeners.
It may be too easy to oppose to the rigorously scientific and rational father the image of an irrational mother brooding over belles lettres. In his memoirs, Friedrich-Georg tells an illuminating story of how his father acquired the pharmacy at Schwarzenberg:
He didn't have the amount of money needed for the purchase, and he saw no way of getting it. He was firmly convinced that no one on earth would advance it to him. My mother, once involved in this matter, reminded him that an older well-off relative might help. Although he considered it unthinkable, she wrote to the woman and immediately received a willing and friendly assurance of help. To my father's great astonishment, everything went smoothly: a letter sufficed, the money came, and the business was bought. My mother told this story many times, and took it as proof that nothing is difficult if we don't make it so, and that difficulties lie in the views we import into things.
This mother was doing something more: she was asserting again and again her central role in starting her husband's successful career, and she was instructing her children in her variety of willfulness. A one-time free spirit submerged in domesticity—the familiar story tells itself.
Jünger credited to her not only a love of literature that he made his own, but also the ability to speak "a remarkable German."
It is always important, no matter to what country one may belong, to have parents who speak their language well. Language is virtually the most precious good which parents can leave their children. However far the spirit of egalitarianism may go, on the first words someone utters you know whom you are dealing with. And when one has a literary culture, with the mention of two or three writers, it's clear whether a dialogue is worth pursuing and may be fecund.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ernst Jünger and Germany by Thomas Nevin. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction: Why Jünger?,
1 · The Years Before Chaos: 1895-1914,
2 · The Quill of Ares: 1914-1925,
3 · Weimar Polemics: 1925-1932,
4 · Beehives in a Botany of Steel: The Worker, 1932,
5 · The "Internal Emigration": 1933-1939,
6 · In the Golden Cage of Suffering: Paris, 1940-1944,
Postlude: Hitler's War, Jünger's Peace,
Inconclusions: Jünger and German Guilt,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,