A German Voice over Paris: Ernst Junger and Edgardo Cozarinsky's Film One Man's War

Abstract

Ernst Jiinger emerged from World War I as one of the most highly decorated young officers of the German infantry. Although wounded several times, in his first book, In Stahlgewittern Storm of Steel (1920)], he described his participation in battle as the peak of human experience, as an ecstasy of dangers withstood amid the sublime spectacle of unrestrained destruction. His literary aesthetics and erotics of militarism placed him on the extreme right in the ideological battle waged during the Weimar Republic over the meaning of the war. By the beginning of 1933, however, after a period of activity as a publicist sympathetic to conspiratorial reactionary movements, he had clearly withdrawn from any political involvement. One might have expected him to decide quite difterently at this point, and indeed his reputation as a representative of fascist thinking gave him some protection during the Nazi period. After a series of accounts developing the idea of an elemental being reached by the true soldier through the enraptured adventure of warfare in the trenches, Jiinger turned to speculations on how this essential life of violence could be transferred to new forms of state organization which might replace the flaccid relations of bourgeois modernity. His book Der Arbeiter Worker], published in 1932, and the essay Die totale Mobilmachung [The Total Mobilization], which appeared two years earlier, proclaim an emerging age of heroic collective commitment to a new technological order. Although his response in 1933 to