Are There Painful Images? Ernst Jünger and Beholding Pain in Photography

Abstract

In his essay “Uber den Schmerz” (On Pain, 1934), Ernst Junger attempted to use pain as a vehicle for characterizing both modern life and the medium of photography as a means for detaching from pain. Junger was one of the most divisive writers of the twentieth century, and his essay has been deemed puzzling and “idiosyncratic” (Meyer 226). “Uber den Schmerz” shares many concerns with writers associated with the “Conservative Revolution” in Germany during the Weimar Republic, such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Niekisch, and Ernst von Salomon (Bendersky; Mohler). In his writings on pain, Junger derided bourgeois values such as security, certainty, progress, and self-development, values central to the society and culture of the republic. Junger argued instead for what he considered to be the dazzling, revelatory experience of danger, the spiritual and existential purposes of violence, and the higher truth of pain. Junger’s damning characterization of images of pain during the Weimar Republic often seems to get at a feeling from our moment, albeit now experienced in digital form: a “synchronicity of events, where images of luxurious comfort are interrupted by photos of a catastrophe simultaneously wreaking havoc on the other end of the globe” (On Pain 41). Due to the technology through which contemporaries viewed events, modern visual media, he claimed, are “sealed off in a unique way from the grip of pain” (31). Junger’s reflections on pain, suffering, and danger raised a question in the 1930s, one that has lost nothing of its urgency in our own digital landscape: if technology brings with it the objectification of life and, hence, a near complete detachment from pain, is the photographic gaze nothing but a weaponized eye shielding beholders from the being of what could be glimpsed? Is it possible for a photograph to show pain? Or for the beholder of a photograph to experience pain? Or must a photograph (by virtue of the conditions of its production, presentation, and exhibition) always serve to distance the beholder? While technology increases our distance to pain, nothing can eradicate it from our midst, a claim reiterated in Junger. Always in our proximity, pain has long defined life yet in different ways, because of our variable attitudes towards it. In Junger’s view of 1934, the most recent and stirring shift in the history of pain manifests itself in the figure of the “worker,” as theorized in Junger’s book Der Arbeiter (1932). In a remarkable essay, Marcus Paul Bullock contends that