Ernst Jünger, the stylish supervillain of twentieth-century German literature, fit the profile of a war hero, however dubious the title may seem in retrospect. While serving in a Prussian infantry regiment during the First World War, he suffered seven major wounds, the last one almost fatal. At the Second Battle of Bapaume, in August, 1918, he was shot through his right lung and was on the verge of bleeding to death when a medic swaddled him in a tarpaulin. Moments later, the medic was killed by a bullet to the head. Another soldier hoisted Jünger onto his shoulders; that man, too, was shot dead. Finally, the company succeeded in hauling Jünger to a field hospital, where he was given a glass of lemonade and a dose of morphine. The next day, according to Jünger’s war memoir “In Storms of Steel,” he was “in the hands of the nurses and reading ‘Tristram Shandy’ from the point where I had been interrupted by the order to attack.”
This indestructible youth lived another eighty years, outlasting both the Weimar Republic, which he loudly opposed, and the Nazi regime, which he quietly disdained. Germany was split in two, then reunified; Jünger was still there. By the time he died, in 1998, at the age of a hundred and two, he had found a tenuous, solitary place in the German canon. He published more than a dozen volumes of empirically acute but emotionally distant diaries, starting in 1920 with “In Storms of Steel.” He wrote sci-fi-inflected novels, fashioning allegories of the terror state and spinning out prophecies of future technology. And he produced far-right political tracts that have inspired several generations of fascist rhapsodists, antimodern elegists, and élitist libertarians. (Peter Thiel is a fan.) All of this was filtered through a terse, chiselled literary voice—coolly handsome, like the man himself.
The four-year orgy of violence from which Jünger emerged mysteriously intact grants him unimpeachable authority on the subject of war; when he inserts scenes of stomach-churning gore into his fiction, he is not relying on fantasy. Recent reporting on the desperate mind-set of soldiers in Ukraine gives his diaries a haunting currency. At the same time, his mask of insouciance—he was indeed reading “Tristram Shandy” just before a bullet tore through him—makes him an infuriatingly detached witness to the suffering of others. One notorious passage in his journals evokes an Allied air raid on German-occupied Paris, in May, 1944: “I held in my hand a glass of burgundy in which strawberries were floating. The city, with its red towers and domes, was laid out in stupendous beauty, like a calyx overflown by deadly pollination.”
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Despite his faintly nauseating aura, or perhaps because of it, Jünger is still finding readers. New York Review Books has brought out a fine new translation, by Tess Lewis, of Jünger’s 1939 novel, “On the Marble Cliffs,” a parable of ascendant barbarism that contains an oblique protest against Nazism. Telos Press, which is associated with the formerly radical, now rightward-tending journal Telos, has issued six other Jünger titles, on topics ranging from pain to drugs. In Germany, Jünger’s chief publisher, Klett-Cotta, is releasing scrupulous scholarly editions of his works, which are rigorously debated in the mainstream press, with some critics wondering why anyone of a sane political orientation should still bother with him.
It’s a valid question. Jünger’s writing gives off an odor of hypermasculine onanism; there are almost no women, and there is almost no sex. Among his more grating qualities is an inability to admit his mistakes: the steely aesthete is also a chameleon, adjusting his positions to the latest political circumstances. But that shiftiness exposes a weaker, more vulnerable figure—and also a more interesting one. His stories generally do not tell of war heroes; rather, they dwell on ambivalent functionaries and complicit observers. We like to think that novelists possess a special ethical strength, yet the morally compromised writer can project a strange kind of honesty—especially when his society is compromised to the same degree.
Like many an archenemy of the bourgeoisie, Jünger came from a thoroughly bourgeois background. He was born in 1895, in the university town of Heidelberg; his father was a rational-minded chemist and pharmacist, his mother an enthusiast of suffragist causes. In school, Jünger proved a rebellious, flailing student. He recalled his formative years in the late-period novel “Die Zwille,” or “The Slingshot,” which has as its lead characters a sensitive-artist type named Clamor and a proto-fascist bully named Teo. Jünger invested himself in both personalities, but Clamor’s bashful, nature-attuned perspective holds sway; the name is derived from one of Jünger’s grandfathers. This author’s greatest passion, aside from war, was collecting insects.
The need to evolve from a Clamor into a Teo impelled a series of self-consciously virile escapades. First, Jünger revelled in the outdoor ramblings of a Wandervogel youth group. Then, at the age of eighteen, he ran away to join the French Foreign Legion, in North Africa. After various mishaps, he was bailed out by his indulgent father, who, as if with an eye to future publicity, sent him a telegram: “Have yourself photographed.” (A picture of Jünger as a baby legionnaire shows him adopting the arrogant half smile of his later years.) There followed a humiliating return to school, in early 1914. War freed him from his youthful messes.
The German scholar Helmuth Kiesel, in his 2007 biography of Jünger, observes that the nineteen-year-old soldier exhibited few signs of gung-ho patriotism. His original war diaries, which Kiesel has edited for Klett-Cotta, give a clinical picture of the chaos of battle and the omnipresence of death. When Jünger arrives at the front, at the beginning of 1915, he takes in the destroyed houses, the wasted fields, the rusted harvesting machines, and writes that they add up to a “sad sight.” Later, he asks, “When will this Scheisskrieg”—“shit war”—“have an end?”
Jünger could have gathered these entries into a blistering denunciation of war, preëmpting Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” But he had convinced himself that the Scheisskrieg had a higher meaning. As he prepared “In Storms of Steel” for publication, he threw in all manner of sub-Nietzschean soliloquizing and militarist posturing. Senseless brutality was recast as a salutary hardening of the soul. The Scheisskrieg remark was cut, and passages like this set the tone: “In these men there lived an element that underscored the savagery of war while also spiritualizing it: the matter-of-fact joy in danger, the chivalrous urge to fight. Over the course of four years the fire forged an ever purer, ever bolder warriorhood.”
Such dire blather proliferated through the German right after the defeat of 1918. Hitler, a bohemian who had found purpose in war, was one of many ex-soldiers who devoured “In Storms of Steel.” Jünger fed the marketplace of grievance with more diaries and essays: “Battle as Inner Experience,” “Fire and Blood,” and the like. In 1923, in an article for the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, he urged the overthrow of the Weimar Republic and the institution of a dictatorship. Although he avoided taking part in coup attempts, his rhetoric was sufficiently feral that he could qualify as the “intellectual exponent of Nazi youth,” as the historian Erich Kahler later called him. In 1930, Jünger attended a pro-democratic lecture by Thomas Mann, who had defected from the conservatives, and joined the playwright Arnolt Bronnen and a squad of Brown Shirts in disrupting the proceedings—one of the more repulsive moments in literary history.
Nevertheless, Jünger stopped short of direct involvement with the Hitler movement. In his eyes, the Nazis were idiot vulgarians, useful mainly as cannon fodder in the wider assault on democracy. Antisemitism surfaces in his writings, yet Nazi race theory held no interest for him. As Kiesel points out, Jünger rejected the stab-in-the-back legend that blamed Germany’s collapse in 1918 on the skullduggery of leftist, Jewish politicians; he readily admitted that his country had lost to superior forces. You could classify him as a cosmopolitan fascist, one who saw war as essential to the development of any national culture. All the bloodshed served no real political purpose; its ultimate virtue lay in making men into supermen. During the First World War, Jünger had enjoyed occasional courtly chats with English officers, whom he considered equals.
In the mid-twenties, intermediaries sought to arrange a meeting between Jünger and Hitler. Autographed books were exchanged, but no personal encounter took place, apparently for scheduling reasons. Jünger proceeded to browse among extremist alternatives, taking particular interest in Ernst Niekisch’s National Bolshevism. In the essay “Total Mobilization” (1930) and in the treatise “The Worker” (1932), Jünger envisions a fully mechanized totalitarian state in which workers serve as soldierly machines. Spurning the bourgeois ideal of individual liberty, he proposes that “freedom and obedience are identical.” The concept aligns with the anti-liberal thought of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, both of whom were devoted Jünger readers.
Impeccably fascistic as all this was, the Nazis could not accept any hint of Bolshevism. Furthermore, Jünger had begun ridiculing the Party for its hypocritical participation in the democratic process and for its reliance on gutter antisemitism. Goebbels, who had praised “In Storms of Steel” as the “gospel of war,” now labelled Jünger’s writing “literature”—in his mind, a grave insult. When the Nazis came to power, in 1933, Jünger backed away from public life, refused all official invitations, and buried himself in, yes, literature. In the late twenties, he had published a volume of short prose pieces, titled “The Adventurous Heart,” in which bellicosity still prevailed. In 1938, he issued a drastically revised version of that book, now offering a curious mixture of nature sketches, literary meditations, and dream narratives.
Jünger was a lifelong Francophile, and the revised “Adventurous Heart” is drenched in the decadent visions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and Mirbeau. A section titled “Violet Endives” embodies the aesthetic:
Such exquisite grisliness may seem like an extreme swerve from the bravado of “In Storms of Steel,” yet Jünger had chronicled the carnage of battle in the same crisp, fastidious fashion. For many readers, his primary appeal lay in the sleekness of his prose, which, if not quite Hemingwayesque, largely banished the ornate sentence structures of classical German.
“Violet Endives” is manifestly ironic—but toward what end? It depicts a society that accepts ghastly events without comment, or with only the twitch of an eyebrow. The narrator himself makes no protest, even if he conveys to us his private unease. His closing remark carries a tinge of arch critique, yet the salesman is free to ignore it. We see the emergence of the mature Jüngerian hero: outwardly bemused, inwardly fearful, terminally uninvolved. This macabre little tale captures in miniature the strategies of rationalization and normalization that make up the banality of evil. As it happens, Hannah Arendt read Jünger closely, and credited him with helping to inspire her most celebrated concept.
With his next book, “On the Marble Cliffs,” Jünger attempted something riskier: a dark fable with unmistakable modern overtones. The titular walls of rock, partly suggested by the topography of Rio de Janeiro, rise above the Marina, an ancient, decadent coastal city. The novel’s narrator, a botanist, lives there in a hermitage, working with his brother to catalogue the flora of the region. (Jünger’s own brother, Friedrich Georg, was a poet of minor fame; in the late thirties, the two lived together in seclusion on Lake Constance.) The brothers once belonged to a mercenary order called the Mauretanians, who control the plains and woods beyond the Marble Cliffs. Their chief, known as the Head Forester, has decided to seize the Marina.
The Head Forester is a raw, domineering strongman—less a Hitler than a Göring or a Mussolini. Still, his methods for seeding chaos in the Marina follow Hitler’s playbook:
On an orchid-hunting expedition into the Head Forester’s territory, the brothers stumble upon Köppels-Bleek, a place of organized slaughter. Adorning a barn is a skull, which “bared its teeth in the ashen light and seemed to invite entry with its grin. Like a jewel on a necklace, the skull was the culmination of a narrow gable frieze that appeared to be made of brown spiders. But we immediately realized these were human hands fastened to the wall.” Inside, a man is stretching skin on a flaying bench, and the stench of death is overwhelming. It’s a shiver-inducing passage, evocative of Nazi atrocities. At the same time, as Elliott Neaman notes in his 1999 study, “A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature After Nazism,” the sequence has the “trivial trappings of a second-rate horror movie.”
One scene, though, rises to the level of the uncanny. The narrator is at home, studying a rare Japanese lily, when a car pulls up, “humming softly like the almost imperceptible whirring of an insect.” It’s an unnerving apparition, since twentieth-century technology has largely been absent from the book. The two men who emerge—a gruff, disgruntled Mauretanian named Braquemart and a noble-minded young prince named Sunmyra—are organizing a plot against the Head Forester. The narrator observes of Sunmyra: “It was astonishing that this languid dreamer felt called to offer protection to others.” When the uprising fails, the Forester has the rebels executed and their heads mounted on spikes. The serene smile on Sunmyra’s face leads the narrator to an epiphany: “I swore before this head that for all future I would cast my lot with the solitary and free rather than with the triumphant and servile.” As the Marina burns, he takes refuge among a free mountain people, carrying Sunmyra’s head with him.
The episode is based on an actual event. In 1938, Heinrich von Trott zu Solz, a young member of the anti-Nazi resistance, drove up to the house where Jünger and his brother were living, accompanied by two former members of the Communist Party, one of whom appears to have inspired the character of Sunmyra. The idea was to recruit Jünger, but he proved unwilling. Five years after “On the Marble Cliffs” was published, on July 20, 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, acting in league with Trott zu Solz’s brother Adam, attempted to assassinate Hitler. Both conspirators were executed. Jünger, like the narrator of his novel, realized that the plotters had nonetheless achieved something of symbolic value: their sacrifices had “prevented the nation as a whole, as a block, from falling into the terrible depths of fate.”
“On the Marble Cliffs” appeared in bookstores shortly after Germany invaded Poland. Critics abroad expressed astonishment that Nazi censors had permitted such a book to see the light of day. Partisan Review interpreted the novel as a “bitter satire on Nazism in thinly veiled allegorical terms.” Even Thomas Mann was impressed, despite his understandable aversion to Jünger. Inside the Third Reich, however, no one seemed especially concerned. Perhaps the allegory was overlooked; perhaps it was deemed harmless. Goebbels, whom some readers saw encoded in the name Köppels-Bleek, no longer mentioned Jünger in his diary.
When the Second World War began, Jünger did not exactly disavow the company of the “triumphant and servile.” Resuming military service at the rank of captain, he went to Paris and joined the staff of Otto von Stülpnagel, the general in command of Occupied France. One of Jünger’s duties was to censor mail, although he proved ineffectual at the task, quietly disposing of letters that contained negative remarks about the regime. He also monitored local artists and intellectuals. Picasso inquired about the “real landscape” of “On the Marble Cliffs.” Cocteau, who called Jünger a “silver fox,” gave him a book about opium. Louis-Ferdinand Céline wanted to know why Germans weren’t killing more Jews. Jünger spent his off hours visiting museums, browsing bookstalls, and romancing a Jewish pediatrician named Sophie Ravoux. His wife, Gretha, was back in Germany with their two sons.
Jünger’s Second World War journals were published in 1949, under the peculiar title “Strahlungen,” or “Emanations.” (Thomas and Abby Hansen have translated them into English as “A German Officer in Occupied Paris,” for Columbia University Press.) These diaries are the most stupefying documents in a stupefying œuvre. The episode in which Jünger watches a bombing raid while sipping burgundy has been so widely cited that German critics have given it a name: die Burgunderszene. No less dumbfounding is a passage that recounts, in obscene detail, the execution of a Wehrmacht deserter. Jünger was assigned to lead the proceedings, and, he tells us, he thought of calling in sick. He then rationalizes his participation as a way of insuring that the deed is done humanely. Finally, he admits to feeling morbid curiosity: “I have seen many people die, but never at a predetermined moment.”
A new three-volume edition of “Emanations,” which Kiesel and Joana van de Löcht have edited for Klett-Cotta, is printed in multiple colors, to show how Jünger changed the text at various stages. In the execution scene, the emendations almost seem designed to make an already dismaying narrative intolerable. The calling-in-sick remark is inserted when he copies out the original entry; the confession about curiosity is added before publication. The text is larded with metaphor, which keeps reducing human beings to natural phenomena. When the deserter’s face goes white, it is “as if a bucket full of limewater had been emptied over it.” In the case of the Burgunderszene, Jünger can’t help tacking on one more smug aphorism: “The whole thing was theater, pure power affirmed and magnified by suffering.” Although Jünger never wore a monocle, he had in him a streak of Erich von Stroheim—the man you love to hate.
“Emanations” is not all heartless stylization. The book records Jünger’s dawning realization that a new kind of evil had permeated Nazi Germany. (He refers to Hitler by the code word Kniébolo—apparently, a play on “Diabolo.”) When he sees a Jew wearing a yellow star, he is “embarrassed to be in uniform.” When he hears of deportations of Jews, he writes, “Never for a moment may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering.” And, when precise reports of mass killings in the East reach him, he is “overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much.” Even if none of this is remotely adequate to the reality of the Holocaust—stop everything, Ernst Jünger is embarrassed!—it does show traces of remorse. The émigré writer Joseph Breitbach reported that Jünger had warned Jews of imminent deportations.
Jünger’s façade of disinterest eventually collapsed. In early 1944, his older son, Ernstel, was arrested for saying that Hitler should be hanged. Jünger pulled strings to have him released. Later that year, Ernstel turned eighteen and joined the Army. He died in action in November, 1944, in Italy. For years, Jünger was haunted by the thought that the S.S. had punished him by having his son killed. (There is no evidence that this was so, but the idea was not irrational.) The entries that follow Ernstel’s death are wrenching, although anyone waiting for a grand moral epiphany will be disappointed. It takes a certain kind of grieving father to write, “We stand like cliffs in the silent surf of eternity.”
The second half of Jünger’s immense life was calmer than the first. In West Germany, the ultra-militarist reinvented himself as an almost respectable, and avowedly apolitical, figure. From 1950 on, he lived in Wilflingen, in southern Germany, occupying houses that were lent to him by a distant cousin of Claus von Stauffenberg’s. He kept up his entomological pursuits, building a museum-worthy library of specimens. He dabbled in astrology, explored the occult, and took LSD under the tutelage of Albert Hofmann, who discovered the drug. Telos Press recently published Thomas Friese’s translation of “Approaches,” Jünger’s 1970 drug memoir. His stories of getting high are just as tedious as everyone else’s, but they include unexpected touches, such as quotations from “Soul on Ice,” the autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver.
For many critics, this elder-hipster pose made Jünger all the more dangerous. Although he had retreated from his high-fascist phase, he had not renounced it, and his skepticism toward democracy never wavered. When, in 1982, he received the Goethe Prize, one of Germany’s highest literary honors, left-wing politicians staged furious protests. Helmut Kohl, a Jünger admirer, had just become chancellor, and the veneration of a martial icon was seen as a sign of political regression. Indeed, a stealthily resurgent far-right faction hailed Jünger as a forebear—attention that he did not always welcome. Armin Mohler, a founder of the so-called New Right, served for several years as Jünger’s secretary, but when Mohler criticized his mentor for concealing his archconservative roots Jünger broke off contact for many years.
There is no such thing as an apolitical artist, Thomas Mann once said. The postwar Jünger adhered to a philosophy of radical individualism, which ostensibly bars ideological commitments. In his novel “Eumeswil” (1977), he theorizes a figure called the Anarch, who rejects the state yet also takes no action against it. The book’s narrator, a crafty fixer in service to a tyrant, articulates the ethos: “I am in need of authority, even if I am not a believer in authority.” This is a feeble form of opposition, bordering on the nonexistent, and it is pitted against a generalized conception of the state that elides the huge systemic differences between, say, a republic and a dictatorship. Social-democratic programs are equated with totalitarian control. You can understand Jünger’s appeal to the modern right when you read him complaining, in the 1951 treatise “The Forest Passage,” about liberal health policy: “Is there any real gain in the world of insurance, vaccinations, scrupulous hygiene, and a high average age?” Somehow, Jünger’s fiction avoids being trapped by the poverty of his political thinking. So profound is this writer’s detachment that he manages to remain aloof from his own beliefs.
Most of Jünger’s novels take the form of popular genres: fantasy, science fiction, even a Belle Époque whodunit (“A Dangerous Encounter,” from 1985). The typical protagonist is a wayward cog in a fraught system. In the 1949 sci-fi epic “Heliopolis,” aristocrats confront another Hitlerian demagogue, this one persecuting a group of outsiders called the Parsen. The plotting is haphazard, but Jünger excels at imagining future gadgetry. The Heliopolis world, which is further developed in “Eumeswil,” includes a surveillance office that runs statistical analyses against a vast library of data; a holographic archive called the Luminar, which replays scenes from all of history; and handheld devices known as phonophores, which can be used for phone calls, financial transactions, voting, and the like. When Lucius, the hero of “Heliopolis,” demonstrates the phonophore to his Parsen girlfriend, Budur Peri, she sagely replies, “It must be some lower spirit that has invented this machine for the destruction of solitude.”
The most formidable of Jünger’s later novels is “The Glass Bees” (1957), which is also available from New York Review Books, in a translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan. Captain Richard, a downtrodden soldier in search of employment, goes for an interview with a corporate visionary named Zapparoni, who has built a multimedia empire from the manufacture of automatons. Some of his creations resemble small animals and can perform everything from household chores to military operations. Others, human in appearance, are cast in movies and in productions of Shakespeare. Zapparoni’s headquarters are embedded in a natural wonderland from which all vestiges of industry have been removed. In this magic kingdom, you lose the “capacity of distinguishing between the natural and the artificial.” Walt Disney may have been the original model, but these days Zapparoni’s affectless will to power brings to mind the overlords of Big Tech.
After Richard has his initial interview, he ambles around the Zapparoni campus and lingers at a meadow populated by mechanical bees. In a sequence comparable to the Köppels-Bleek scene in “On the Marble Cliffs,” he makes a hideous discovery: strewn through the rushes are dozens of severed ears. A charnel house lies at the heart of the late-capitalist phantasmagoria. One expects the old soldier to strike out at Zapparoni, as Lucius does in “Heliopolis,” or at least to steal away with evidence of the crime, like the narrator of “On the Marble Cliffs.” But Richard begins to rationalize: Are these robot ears? Is it a test? Zapparoni, when he reappears, answers yes to both questions, sincerely or not. Richard is offered a job, and he accepts. His money problems solved, he buys his wife a summer dress.
This pitch-black ending shows that Jünger offers more to the modern reader than perverse echoes of German history. “The Glass Bees” captures with uncommon precision the psychology of acquiescence and abjection on which the sickening miracles of technology depend. The Venus flytraps of social media are a case in point; so is the heedless embrace of artificial intelligence. Richard spells out the moral: “Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other.” In the end, the technical almost inevitably wins out over the human.
Underneath the carapace of Jünger’s writing was an obscurely damaged man. Even before he entered into the torture chamber of the First World War, he had undergone a kind of psychic dissociation, perhaps related to bullying he had suffered as a boy. He wrote of his childhood, “I had invented a mode of indifference that connected me, like a spider, to reality only by an invisible thread.” According to the literary scholar Andreas Huyssen, Jünger was always trying to compensate for the fragility of his own body—to “equip it with an impenetrable armor protecting it against the memory of the traumatic experience of the trenches.”
The Second World War inflicted a different wound, one that cut deeper. The leaders of the plot against Hitler were nationalist conservatives, often fanatically so. The author of “In Storms of Steel” was a hero to them. Jünger’s inability to support their cause, and thereby live up to his own legend, troubled him for the remainder of his life. In “Heliopolis,” Lucius leads a commando raid against a murderous medical institute that recalls Josef Mengele’s laboratory at Auschwitz. The scene reads like a fantasy of what Jünger might have done if he had joined Stauffenberg, Trott zu Solz, and company. Lucius presses a button and the facility goes up in flames: “Dr. Mertens’s highbrow flaying-hut had exploded into atoms and dissolved like a bad dream.”
In “The Glass Bees,” that self-serving fantasy is revoked. As a soldier, Captain Richard witnessed Nazi-like abominations, including a human butcher shop—a nod to the gourmet cannibalism of “Violet Endives.” Yet, when Zapparoni lures him back into the zone of horror, he capitulates. Not only does he need authority; he makes himself believe in it. Zapparoni, he claims, “had captivated the children: they dreamed of him. Behind the fireworks of propaganda, the eulogies of paid scribes, something else existed. Even as a charlatan he was great.”
Jünger described Hitler in similar terms, as a “dreamcatcher,” a malign magician. What might have happened if the two men had come face to face? In a 1946 diary entry, Jünger assures himself that a meeting with Hitler “would presumably have had no particular result.” But he has second thoughts: “Surely it would have brought misfortune.” The ending of “The Glass Bees” may be an imagining of that disaster. As such, it would be Jünger’s most honest confession of failure. When the great test of his life arrived, the warrior-aesthete proved gutless. ♦
