Ecological Apocalypse Research Articles

Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse

Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse

Fortifying the Heart-Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts

The catalogue of the 1993 Venice Biennale kicked off with a prognosis for the 21st century. It was entitled Gestaltwandel. Its author: Ernst Janger, who, as title and text amply demonstrate, is still and stubbornly waiting for his planetarian machine prophecies of the new age of the worker to come true.' Except that what was unambiguously fascist in texts like Totale Mobilmachung [Total Mobilization (1930)] or Der Arbeiter [The Worker (1932)] is now couched in a jumble of mythic images about nature and technology, Titans and Gods, that appeals to a certain kind of contemporary Germanic mindset which thrives on a frenzy of ecological apocalypse and immerses itself in a melancholy rehash of romantic nature philosophy and depraved philosophies of history.2 All of it, of course, in the spirit of posthistoire and the postmodern. Janger has always been more chamaeleon than seismograph of the times. The fact that political and metaphysical mush such as JiAnger's musings about the world-state, the increasing spiritualization of the