The Great War

Abstract

ERNST JUNGER'S THE STORM OF STEEL Throughout the completed parts of The Man Without Qualities , the mystical ‘other state’ is designated as a state beyond good and evil; though in trying to imagine it as ‘a possible way of life’, Ulrich and Agathe speak of it as a desirable, supremely good state. Conversely, war is seen in the narrative parts of the book predominantly as evil; but, hidden under a debris of variora and unfinished sketches, we find remarks in which Musil experiments with a very different evaluation. By the time the Parallel Action collapses, Ulrich is ready to rejoin the army; active service now appears as the decent and honourable alternative to the life from which he took a year's vacation – the year that took him nowhere. One of the most revealing of the fragmentary notes of the Nachlaβ reads like a variation on W. B. Yeats's lines on ‘the passionate intensity’ of the worst: ‘War is the same as “the other state”, only (as a possible way of life) mixed with evil.’ That, as a matter of history, is what the quest leads to. No account of the events of August 1914 is complete without an understanding for the reckless solemnity, the ‘otherness’ of the mood with which large sections of the populations of Europe went to war; and what must also be understood is their disaffection with peacetime as the dispiriting, boring norm of ‘ordinary’ life.