Bibliographie der Werke Ernst Jungers

Abstract

Muhleisen, Horst. Bibliographie der Werke Ernst Jungers, Veroffentlichungen der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft Band 47, Stuttgart: Cotta, 1996. 350pp. Nevin, Thomas. Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45, Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 284pp. These two books, both to be commended and recommended, signify very different things about their common topic. Thomas Nevin's study, a finely detailed account of Junger and Junger's Germany in his first fifty years, addresses an English-speaking readership in whose world that author has remained quite neglected. The Bibliographie der Werke Ernst Jungers records the weight of an established presence in Germany. Even those who resent Junger, and who would like to see his legitimacy as a German voice denied, will have to acknowledge this evidence of the mass that has accreted in the geology of German culture under his name. Covering materials up to the celebrations of Junger's hundredth year (1995), the Bibliographie will provide an excellent resource for scholarly research, though clearly it will have to make way for a radically expanded edition when the time comes for posthumous papers to reach the light, if that day ever does come. The name of the long-established publishing house, Cotta, the imprimatur of the Schillergesellschaft, even the sober tones of the book-design, all emphasize the implicit statement of this volume, quietly and definitely reaffirming Junger's image as an unshakably matured German oak rooted deeply in the immemorial stone of European literature. That one should feel the effect of the presentation so vividly attests to another truth about Junger's position. Substantial though the record of his own expression may be, it still stands in the shadow of all the protests against his enthralled appreciation of violence as a cosmic spectacle. One can hardly object to the form of this assemblage on the grounds that it permits so little of the controversy to show through. In this, the book merely reflects the writing that it documents. Junger himself seldom fails in his gracious capacity to belittle those who do not like him by confining them to the shadow of his disregard. Nonetheless, the sober dignity that emerges from Horst Muhleisen's work as gatekeeper to Junger's legacy also reminds one that this oeuvre, despite its relentless invocation of explosive disruptions and grand scenes of destruction, has an equally relentless affinity for fastidiousness and good order. Junger's writing springs from an age in which the bourgeoisie blossomed with negative reflections on its own condition. The hostility toward him does not proceed so much from the heart of that solid domain as from alternative negations. The world of well-organized comfort recognizes his voice as an extreme articulation of a fantasy into which it dreams itself with ease, that of the hero-artist who makes no compromise with comfort. Though Nevin regards Junger's posture of negation as aristocratic distance, the last choice this study recounts shows a significant distance from aristocratic sensibilities and obligations. Junger found it quite outside his nature to join with the heirs of the German military noblesse in their plot against Hitler. His reasons were eminently bourgeois. …