A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism

WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM

Martin Jay and Anton Kaes, General Editors

1. Heritage of Our Times, by Ernst Bloch

2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, I89O—I99O, 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 Cohen

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—igyo, by Martin Jay

11. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture,

edited by Katharina von Ankum

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

19. A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism,

by Elliot Y. Neaman

A

DUBIOUS

PAST

Ernst Jünger and the

Politics of Literature after Nazism

Elliot Y. Neaman

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1999 by the Regents of the University of California

All illustrations courtesy of the German Literature Archive Marbach

(Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Neaman, Elliot Yale, 1957-.

A dubious past: Ernst Jünger and the politics of literature after Nazism / Elliot Yale Neaman.

p. cm. (Weimar and now;! 9)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-21628-8 (alk. paper).—

1. Jünger, Ernst, 1895-1998. 2. Authors, German—20th century— Biography. 3. Jünger, Ernst, 1895-1998—Political and social views.

4. Germany—Politics and government—20th century. 5. Criticism—

History—20th century. I. Series.

PT2619.0432719 1999

838’.91209—dc21 98-39210

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO

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. ERNST JÜNGER IN AN INTERVIEW WITH FRIEDRICH HANSEN-LÖVE

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE Ernst Jünger

CHAPTER TWO The Jünger Circle

CHAPTER THREE The Marble Cliffs

CHAPTER FOUR The Pen and the Sword

CHAPTER FIVE The View from Above

CHAPTER SIX Challenging the Victor’s Optic

CHAPTER SEVEN Right Turn

Afterword

ABBREVIATIONS

REFERENCES

INDEX

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 century.1 He died just six weeks before his hundred and third birthday, on February 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 Federal 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 relatively 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 general historical interest but also because the controversies that accompanied his long life touch on essential issues in modern German intellectual history, in particular on the key questions of German intellectuals and the Holocaust, the divided memory of West and East Germany after 1990, German identity, the politics of nature and the environment, left and right cri- 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 book should be read also as a contribution to the growing literature on two German thinkers who were allied with Jünger through intellectual affinities and personal friendship, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Heidegger 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 important for the legacy of right-wing thought from the Weimar period as the interaction between Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin has been for the left. The 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 reconceptualization 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 judgments about Jünger’s character, values, and politics. There will likely be some critics who 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 independent evaluations. I both condemn 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 argument is forcefully made that Jünger is so fascinating for the intellectual historian because he represents one of those very rare commodities—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 who imagines a daring, innovative, risky bridge that ultimately collapses upon construction. These reactionary ideas can be judged 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 struggles with reason and unreason in the twentieth century.

Ernst Jünger attracted my attention because of his unique representativeness for the postwar world and all the ambiguities and problems that correspond to figures whose work supposedly reflects major concerns and themes of an epoch. The writer’s ideas have an important value for the historian, the measure of which cannot be taken solely by counting readers or book editions. The 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 after their creation in order to understand the society in which they were produced. Without having to subscribe to the materialist realism theory of Georg Lukacs, which argues that the novel, the epic, or philosophy can mirror 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 deep chords in a culture’s selfunderstanding.

The frozen moments of meaning that one finds in the artist’s words might arguably be the equivalent of the fragments of edifices that the archaeologist 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 author and the public, the possibility of an aesthetics of reception becomes possible.4

This study encompasses three broad themes. The first involves tracing the Jünger reception as part of the process of the formation of collective memory of fascism in the Federal Republic after 1945. The debate revolved around Jünger’s putative role in the intellectual assault on Weimar that prepared 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 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 conservatism will be considered within the framework of what I call his phenomenology without a subject, and a related discourse with Heidegger that included 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 and posthistoire speculation. Since this latter term may seem unclear to readers, 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 radical 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 units—the 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. After 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 attempt to overcome nihilism; in fact, it had succumbed to the worst temptations of technological domination. He now understood the end 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 (usually of American provenance).

In the early stages of the Jünger postwar reception, most of Jünger’s interpreters 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 method and style. His personal political history was, for the most part, not a central concern. Erich Brock ‘s Das Weltbild Ernst Jüngers (1945), 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 neoPlatonism. Gerhard Nebel’s book, Ernst Jünger: Abenteuer des Geistes (1950), portrayed the author’s work in glowing terms as a comprehensive metaphysical experience, a spiritual adventure. The Christian reception, which mistook Jünger’s interest in biblical themes for an authentic theological conversion, was represented on the Catholic side by the Jesuit Hubert Becher’s Ernst Jünger: Mensch und Werk (1949), and from a Protestant perspective by Hans Rudolf Müller-Schweife’s Ernst Jünger (1951) and Walter Hilsbecher’s Ernst Jünger und die neue Theologie (1949).

The 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 models of a transition from Germany’s militant and shameful past to a more civilized future. In the humanist reception of Jünger the code word for Hitlerism and a shorthand explanation for its rise was nihilism. In Der heroische Nihilismus und seine Überwindung: Ernst Jüngers Weg durch die Krise (1948), Alfred von Martin interpreted German culture as having been pushed off course by idealism, which, taken to the extreme, destroyed all beliefs, values, 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 nihilist and one of the most eloquent opponents of civilization.

One 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 authors’ mannerist attachment to mythological and religious symbols. On the other hand, Bense deemed the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn an original voice of literary modernism because he held no illusions about the saving power of the word; his poems purportedly held up a clear mirror to the disintegration and chaos of the contemporary world. Bense’s book appropriately 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.

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 1960, and trailed off by 1970. A whiff of scandal and taboo always seemed to surround the mention of the writer’s name. The Case of Jünger 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 positioning 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 intellectuals: Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Knut Hamsun, and Jean Giono. His book dealt with the ethical responsibility of the intellectual in a totalitarian society. Although de Mendelssohn wrote with subtlety and fairness of the sometimes insurmountable pressure of conflicting loyalties and other moral dilemmas faced by these authors, his treatment of Jünger was undoubtedly the most harsh and uncompromising. De Mendelssohn’s most severe criticism asserted that Jünger’s early writings were evidently widely read as supporting fascist ideology, but when it came time to confront the responsibility 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 book—he also published many articles on the subject in the more widely circulated press—was a rhetorically effective, critical and enlightened contribution to the early debates on the German past. He was a clear exception to the majority of the intelligentsia in Germany at the time, who tended to be apologetic or very defensive 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 phrasing ofJünger’s texts, and he rehashed Gerhard Nebel’s idea of the intellectual adventurer without adding any significant sharpness to a hopelessly vague concept. But Loose’s research had the merit of incorporating the problematic aspects of Jünger’s early work into an analysis of the postwar writings. Loose deftly identified the dangers inherent in the total culte du moi of the author (Ichbezogenheit) and showed how the natural world, foreign lands, and war remained spectacles for the purely aesthetic manipulation of Jünger’s literary imagination.

By the end of the 1950s, historians were finally beginning to pick up the thread first stitched by Armin Mohler 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, andJünger using the political concept of decisionism as a common 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 (Überbau) interpretations of the right-wing Weimar intelligentsia. Some postwar existentialists, for example, saw Jünger as a latter-day Nietzschean and interpreted his early writings as an expressionist, youthful rebellion against the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie between the wars.7

The 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 modernism 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 freedom 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 exponent of an irrationalist and aggressively militant philosophy that reflected epiphenomenally the capitalist crises in German bourgeois society. The Jünger critique from these quarters did not stray, methodologically, far from Lukacs’ analysis of so-called prefascist and fascist forms of Lebensphilosophie in his 1954 book Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. A good 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 differentiation between the critique of capitalism on the left and the attack on bourgeois society on the right among prefascist thinkers. The aesthetic and political 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 Germany—Helmut Kaiser’s Mythos, Rausch, und Reaktion8 9 ¹⁰ and Joachim Petzold’s Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen Faschismus.10 A cogent and comprehensive Marxist treatment of Weimar’s right-wing intelligentsia can be found in Günter Hartung’s Literatur und Ästhetik des deutschen Faschismus, where Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (The worker)11 is analyzed as a military-fascist utopia.12

The intellectual confrontation with the purported exhaustion of modern art, literature, and architecture in 1960s America—a mind-set that gradually evolved into a sustained critique of culture beyond modernism— reached Germany only in the late 1970s.13 One of the targets of the postmodernist critique was the hallowed liberal attachment to Enlightenment rationality, to be replaced by pluralistic, non totalizing epistemologies.14 This denigration of the modernist legacy called for a reexamination of those thinkers who had criticized modernism from within the movement and could be recast as postmodernists avant la lettre. Karl Heinz Bohrer’s re markable study, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens,15 brought Jünger into the postmodernist 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 sophisticated than the literal realism of Western Marxism in the 1960s. The aesthetically autonomous moment 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.16 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 upon this thesis in Plötzlichkeit (Suddenness).17

Bohrer contended that Jünger was an aggressive-nationalist, right-revolutionary author, who developed so-called prefascist motifs in the core of his writings.18 But he believed thatJünger’s writings are not therefore to be denied or repressed, for they contain deep insights into our modern condition, psychologically, anthropologically, and socie tally.19 The 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. One of the reasons for laying such great stress on]ñngeCs posthistoire vision, a concept I will elaborate presently, is to show how Jünger’s dream of aesthetic and historical autonomy was intimately bound up with the experience of fascism. If Jünger’s work provides insights into the modern condition, then one might easily argue that fascism also provides solutions to the crises of modern society. This unexam- ined, questionable premise underlies much 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 German postmodern identity in art and politics. In particular, the iconoclastic works of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg offer a focal point for testing long-held assumptions about German assimilation of Western culture. For the majority of postwar intellectuals and artists in Germany, an unequivocal antifascist stance was demanded 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 assimilation 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 obscene.21 There 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 who wanted to reeducate Germans with their—in his view—inferior culture. Jünger also self-consciously cultivated a selective French-German classical taste in literature, claiming to have never read anything modern beyond Zola. Like Syberberg, Jünger also regarded the loss of the old Europe’s architecture, art, and way of life as a disastrous result of modern 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 recent death, but also by the difficulty of accessing his correspondence and other papers at the Federal German Literary Archive in Marbach. Researchers must obtain permission from the executors of Jünger’s will to look at any material, and access to politically sensitive documents is routinely denied. Another problem for future scholars will be the exponential growth of the secondary literature. A recent German dissertation notes there are already at least five different interpretive approaches to his life and work during the Weimar period alone, each with its own growing bibliographies: classic work-centered literary criticism as well as the psychoanalytic, ideology-critical, cultural, and poetological genres.22 One could add intellectual and reception histories to the list.

After Jünger’s death, the first biography to make a claim to comprehensiveness was Paul Noack’s Ernst Jünger: A Biography.23 Unfortunately the work is entirely unoriginal in its theoretical approach and depends to a large extent on secondary literature. Noack’s book resembles the apologetic heroworship of Jünger’s early postwar admirers, who will be treated below.

Some of the best treatments of Jünger can still be found in earlier works, before Jünger became a cultural celebrity. One of those was Wolfgang Kaempfer’s ErnstJunger, 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- rafie 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 between 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 Ernst Jünger26 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 tradition of Rilke, Benn, Thomas Mann, and profound thinkers like Walter Benjamin 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 twentiethcentury literature. Meyer assiduously avoids taking any seriously critical perspective on his subject with the result that the book appears fairly harmless and its author gullible.

Martin Könitzer 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 engagement 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 history. Ernst Jünger 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 misinformation or inattention to the historical context from which his writings emerged. Though Nevin tends to err on the side of supporting Jünger’s selfinterpretations, this treatment by a non-German scholar (not coincidentally) 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 monographs like the work of Gerhard Loose referred to above. Some discussion of Jünger’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 representatives of contemporary German literature.28

One major exception to this general neglect was an excellent thin volume 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 author is whether his own self-understanding as a great representative of his 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 present study. He emphasizes that Jünger is representative of an epoch, not because he gives voice to the inner world of his generation, but because his own contradictions and shortcomings best reflect the tortured path of Germany’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 powerful 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 ofJünger’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 concept of the resistance to transcendence in the Three Faces of Fascism.30

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 resonance in the United States at the start of the Cold War with the publication in 1948 of a translation of his seemingly conciliatory book, The Peace. The publisher, Henry Regnery, had been a New Deal Democrat, but converted 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 tradition among American conservatives challenging the American liberal anti-German bias through historical revisionism, in particular on the question of alleged war atrocities.32 In The Peace Jünger portrayed the Second

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 responsible for the catastrophe. This interpretation fit well into the philoGermanic attitude of many Anglo-Saxon conservatives.

Since 1989 interest in Jünger has begun to grow among American intellectuals. 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 context. Michael Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity (1990) and Mark Lilia’s piece on Schmitt in the New York Review of Books in 1997 are good examples of the new relevance accorded Jünger’s writings. The leftleaning New German Critique devoted an entire special issue to Jünger in the summer of 1993. With the resurgence of a strong intellectual right in Europe since the fall of communism, intellectuals here and abroad are curious and sometimes disturbed by the prodigious influence of the writings of Weimar’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 personal distance from the polemical debates about the German past, will likely have much to contribute to these contentious, ongoing debates.

JÜNGER IN FRANCE

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 public attention mostly by groups of supporters linked by common political and ideological persuasions on the political right. During the period of occupation, activists of the French National Revolution discussed his work favorably in the French press. Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) 33 was reviewed several times in La Nouvelle Revue Française, France’s most important cultural organ, the guidance of which the German ambassador Otto Abetz had assigned Pierre Drieu La Rochelle from 1941 to 1943.34 Jünger’s books were also reviewed by the Catholic pro-Vichy Thierry Maulnier and by the fascist sympathizer Paul de Man in Belgium.35 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 communism, Western secularism, and materialism.36 Julien Hervier, in an important, rigorous, but partisan book, Deux individus contre Thistoire, 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 VOccident, Eléments, and Nouvelle Ecole.38 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 The high regard in which President Mitterand held Jünger signaled the much more favorable climate for his work and reputation than the one he found at home 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 Richard Wolin calls the French Heidegger Wars, particularly in regard to the hotly contested debates between the French Heideggerian left and its critics over Heidegger’s purported attempts to shift the blame for his support of National Socialism from personal responsibility to the depersonalized

fate of Western metaphysics and the forgetting of being.41 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 technology, modern science, and the flight of the gods.42 In this debate, Jünger’s intellectual trajectory can help support such a vindication of Heidegger because 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 cliches. 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 resistance fighter.43 The problem here, aside from the fact that Jünger’s early support for National Socialism was much stronger than his defenders like to admit, is that, as Rabinbach and others have pointed out, the distinction between spirit and race erases the large gray zone where plenty of room remained to support alternative, equally problematic solutions to Germany’s Weimar dilemma. Jünger knew these alternatives were dangerous— he called them matchsticks, and on the day before Germany capitulated in 1945 he predicted they would be blamed for the explosion.44 National Socialism included a hodgepodge of intellectual currents so that nonracial variants within that range can hardly be turned into doctrines of resistance. One of my main tasks will be to illuminate the various nuances of that gray zone in which intellectuals like Jünger and Heidegger could find common

ground with National Socialism. Or to rephrase the question from Jünger’s perspective, as he once put it in an interview, to what percentage were the National Socialists also correct?45 46 47

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 Rezeptionsgeschichte46and Norbert Dietka’s Ernst Junger nach 194547 were both contributions to the wave of Rezeptionsgeschichte (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 polarized discourse on Jünger’s lifework. It is unimaginative and singularly unprovocative 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 debated, 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 unpublished 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 against the background of the major events in his long life. An understanding of the writings and actions of the pre-1945 Jünger is essential in order to comprehend 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, enunciated in strong terms by his detractors, that he seduced an entire generation by making fascism intellectually acceptable. His personal actions and his philosophical and political worldview must be judged by two very different sets of criteria. In regard to the former, I think his personal refusal to be coopted by the Nazi movement