Ernst Junger Research Articles

Rojsty 1957/2010. Kilka uwag o piętnie sprawczym cenzury

In 2013, an impressive critical edition of In Stahlgewittern by Ernst Junger, bringing seven further authorial versions from the years 1920–1978, was published in Germany. The author of the article correlates that undertaking with the publication of Konwicki’s Ksiązki wybrane under the auspices of Agora. Some parts of the text removed by censors became restored but not marked. The thread of editorial considerations is followed by the author’s demand to prepare editions of at least ten works from universally acclaimed canon determined in the Polish People’s Republic, which would be critically annotated and make both integral versions of the text available under one cover. Considering the interpretation of both versions of Rojsty : published in 1956 and the one issued in 2010, which is identical to the original work published in 1948, the author meticulously juxtaposes the most crucial differences between the editions. She states that censorship removed all references to Operation “Ostra Brama” from the novel. In the author’s version these references give the novel a deeper historical breath. After removing Operation “Ostra Brama”, the guerrilla presented in the novel lost its climax: the fateful coming out from the forest, and it fell apart into a number of grotesque episodes. Due to Operation “Ostra Brama” present in the novel it is possible to see in various narrative techniques, which depreciate military effort, the tribute repaid by the writer to the authorities in return for the opportunity to inject into public circulation an issue doomed to oblivion.

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

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

Fjodor Stepun and Ernst Jünger: intellectuals at war

The article provides a comparison of two intellectual accounts of experiences in the First World War—From the Letters of an Artillery Ensign (1918) by the Russian philosopher and writer Fjodor Stepun and The Storm of Steel by the German essayist Ernst Junger. The aim of this article is to reveal similarities and differences between the “optics” of Junger and Stepun who are reporting one and the same event but deal with two different images of the Great War.

Ernst Junger's Literature of Pain, or the Troubles Of Detaching Mind from Feeling

Ernst Junger’s treatment of pain, emotion, and the body in the 1930s (“On Pain”) mark a shift from his earlier treatment. Whereas the early works ( Waldchen 125, Feuer und Blut ) featured more complex models of emotion, body, and mind in terms of unity and extension, the later work reveals a model of neat separation so as to allow for sacrifice and greater control of pain, affect, and technology. The early work explored the material world as an extension of the body, while “On Pain” imagines the body as a vessel. This puts it starkly at odds with embodied descriptions to be found in work of the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner as well as contemporary views in the sciences. Junger’s attempt in “On Pain” to disembody consciousness and negate feeling is contradicted not only by the mind’s reliance on the body but also on his reliance on tropes of emotion. (DH)

Céline, une exception sinistre

Following the publication of his first two pamphlets, Louis-Ferdinand Celine became active both ideologically and politically under the Nazi occupation as never before. He was busy with preparing the new edition of School for Corpses to which he added an introduction and propaganda photographs, and he also published A Nice Mess in February 1941. In addition, he sent out approximately thirty letters to the most extreme militant, anti-Semitic and ultra national-socialist collaborationist newspapers. In November 1941 he openly supported Jacques Doriot and in March 1942 he signed the French Intellectuals’ Manifesto against British Crimes. He also participated in major anti-Semitic propaganda demonstrations in Paris, and in December 1941 he organized a meeting of the leading collaborationists which resulted in a creation of a mutual platform together with Deloncle.In addition to the above activities, we know of other denunciations Celine made which are acknowledged today as actual although his biographers prefer to ignore them. Among them is an oral denunciation made before a crowd of Doriot supporters, and written denunciations published in the press or included in letters sent to political or administrative authorities. In the final analysis, after examining the testimonies given by Ernst Junger (on December 7th, 1941) and Gerhard Heller, and a letter addressed to Marie Canavaggia (dated October 1937), one comes to the conclusion that the usual invalidations of Celine’s denunciations cannot be accepted and establishes with near certainty the validity of Junger’s powerful testimony.

Un tandem de pouvoir dans Paris occupé

After a consideration of the dangers with which an analysis of cultural anti-Semitism is fraught (manicheaism, moral exhibitionism), an effort is made to sketch the structure of one of the most charged sites of cultural interaction in occupied Paris, the salon of Florence Gould on Avenue Malakoff. Specifically, four figures and the quartet they together formed are examined: Florence Gould, Ernst Junger, Gerhard Heller, and Marcel Jouhandeau. The structure is quite tight: Junger was the lover of Gould during much of the war (whence the title of the essay); Heller, Sonderfuhrer in charge of censorship in France, was a disciple and something of an aide-de-camp of Junger during the same period; Jouhandeau was cohost of Gould’s salon and would-be lover of Heller. The entire configuration expands the argument of an earlier speculative text by the author, “Writing and Deference: The Politics of Literary Adulation,” in which the roots of what has flourished under the misnomer of “literary theory” in the United States are traced back to the period of the Occupation in France.

Contraposición entre imagen y naturaleza a través del mundo del trabajador y el mundo del burgués en el pensamiento de Ernst Jünger

La conciencia de que el ser humano no es sino mero representante de una voluntad absoluta, el Espíritu de los tiempos, empujó a Ernst Jünger a la realización de una serie de reflexiones en torno a la imagen donde trataría de ofrecer una mirada reveladora del papel del hombre en la historia. De acuerdo con Jünger, sólo convirtiéndose en sujeto creador el individuo sería capaz de escapar del devenir trágico. Con este fin el autor elaborará un conjunto de escritos guiado por la pretensión de capturar al hombre ataviado con su traje de representación. De este modo, el logrado desenmascaramiento de una falsa realidad invierte el rol usual de la técnica, haciendo de ella instrumento liberador de destinos.A lo largo de estas páginas estudiaremos esta doble faz de la técnica tomando como guía los presupuestos expuestos por Jünger desde su experiencia como hombre de acción y de observación a un mismo tiempo.

Changing Affective Economies of Masculine Machineries and Military Masculinities? From Ernst Jünger to Shannen Rossmiller

This article discusses the affective economy and changing representations of military masculinities with regard to transforming gendered, machinic and digital bodies of integrated (wo)man-machine systems. The self-mechanised ideal of the soldier body that the German writer Ernst Jünger came to formulate has been configurative for generations of military masculinities. Jünger’s work speaks directly to an affective understanding and embodied history of masculinity in the military. However, in the current times of virtual warfare, military masculinities are perhaps changing? As war is going cyber and technical wizardry is as valued as the brute strength of self-mechanised bodies, the body of the soldier is being destabilised. The case of Shannen Rossmiller is here working as a contrastive case. Rossmiller is FBI’s most regarded cyber counter-terrorist. She seems to inhabit and perform certain forms of masculinities better than her male colleagues.

Portals and Pulps: Orwell, Hoggart, “America,” and the Uses of Gangster Fiction

Part One Introductory I In Ernst Junger’s On the Marble Cliffs, which appeared in the same year as No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), the narrator and his brother find themselves gazing down upon a barn in a clearing. Over the dark door on the gable-end a skull was nailed fast, showing its teeth and seeming to invite entry with its grin. Like a jewel in its chain, it was the central link of a narrow gable frieze which appeared to be formed of brown spiders. Suddenly we guessed that it was...

Socialism from the Right? Aesthetics, Politics and the Counter-Revolution in Weimar Germany

Abstract The early years of the Weimar period in Germany (1918-33) saw radical right paramilitaries and other activists engage in a violent struggle to roll back the post-war advances of the revolutionary left. This article examines the writings of Ernst Junger and a number other writers from the period, arguing that their work elaborated a violently misogynist pedagogy of the body and subjectivity designed to engineer these counter-revolutionary fighters. What is frequently missed in commentary on these writers, however, is the extent to which their work was not simply about the repression of the left, but involved the production of a radical right 'socialism' whose powerful dynamic was crucial in breaking down the left socialist project over the course of the Weimar years; this dynamic was recognized at the time by critics like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. Drawing on the work of these theorists, this paper traces the logic of fascist mobilization, arguing that the appropriation of the revolutionary energies of a left in crisis shaped the trajectory of the radical right, and drove their production of a masculinist, aestheticized 'state of total mobilization' (Junger). Keywords Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Ernst Junger, Ernst von Salomon, Oswald Spengler, Socialism, Fascism, Gender, Freikorps Thus the enemy is not content with torturing and killing workers. He not only wants to smash the red front but also strips the jewellery off die supposed corpse. The deceiver and murderer cannot show his face other than with would-be revolutionary speeches and forms of combat.1 Ernst Junger's novels on the First World War take the form, at least in part, of diaries. Ostensibly culled from his writings during die war, Junger's retention of the diary form expressed a commitment to a documentary aesthetic evident in his famous Storm of Steel, with its original and unwieldy subtitle from the Diary of a Stock Troop Commander, Ernst Junger, War Volunteer, and subsequently Lieutenant in the Rifle Regiment of Prince Albrecht of Prussia (73rd Hanoverian Regiment), and even more so in his novel Copse 125. Junger's documentary realism was of a particular kind, however, combining the immediacy of the diary form with an obsessive rewriting that saw the appearance of multiple versions of his novels. Ideologically, though, his work depended upon a documentary immediacy emerging out of the experience of the front. As he describes it early in Copse 125, his writing there emerged 'illegible, like the wavelines of a seismograph [wie die Wellenlinie eines NadeUtifies] recording an earthquake, with the ends of the words whipped out into long strokes by the rapidity of the writing - these must have been flung on paper after the attack, in shell-holes or fragments of trench swept by machine-gun bullets like a swarm of deadly hornets'.2 An interesting and telling contradiction emerges here. The diary, ostensibly a most personal and interior form of writing, becomes instead an entirely depersonalised and external text. Junger the writer disappears, reconstituted as a recording device, a seismograph whose output precisely mirrors the experience of the front. The writing itself (the strokes of the pen, the words) is identified directly with the front and the machine-gun bullets sweeping over the landscape. Both the writer and the text disappear into the cauldron of what the Germans called uve Materialschlacht, the industrialised mass warfare and technologically mediated violence epitomised by the First World War. Jiinger's own rewriting of his texts of course belies this claim of an unmediated relationship between experience and writing, but the erasure of his own writing, I will argue, is at the heart of the metaphor of the seismograph. Jiinger's aesthetic strategies, his writing practices, were bound up with his politics; his self-constitution as a militarised writing-machine involved a purging of individuality and interiority that was placed in die service of a radical right counter-revolutionary practice. …

Angst in der verwalteten Welt Emotive Kulturkritik bei Jünger, Gehlen und Adorno

The essay attempts to reconstruct the emotional coding of certain patterns of interpretation, that were for instance used by Ernst Junger, Arnold Gehlen, and Theodor W. Adorno, some of the major cultural critics after 1945 in Germany. All three tried to conceptualize fear as an essential moment of modern world disclosure.

An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger

In the thirties, Martin Heidegger was heavily involved with the work of Ernst Junger (1895-1998). Junger, who had returned from the First World War as a hero and gone on to become famous as a result of his raw descriptions of the Great War in his novel, In Stahlgewittern, subsequently wrote two essays which had a great influence on Heidegger: Die totale Mobilmachung from 1930 and Der Arbeiter from 1932. Heidegger remarks that because of his reading of Junger, he had, very early, already seen what was much later to be confirmed by the dreadful events of the Second World War: “The universal dominion of the will to power within planetary history”.1 Moreover, he says that Junger’s description of the technical era in Der Arbeiter had a great influence on his line of thought in “Die Frage nach der Technik”, which Heidegger acknowledged “is indebted to the enduring stimulus provided by the descriptions of The Worker”.2 The question arises: what exactly could this enduring stimulus (nachhaltige Forderung) in the work of Junger be? In Uber die Linie, which was first published in a liber amicorum occasioned by the sixtieth birthday of Heidegger in 1949, Junger discusses the question whether we live in the age of fulfilled nihilism and, if so, whether we can overcome such nihilism. Junger wants to cross the line of nihilism into a new era where “eine neue Zuwendung des Seins”3 takes place and puts an end to the age of fulfilled nihilism (for further details, see §1). Six years later, in 1955, in a liber amicorum occasioned on Junger’s own sixtieth birthday, Heidegger responded with an ‘open letter’: Uber ‘Uber die Linie’, later published as Zur Seinsfrage. In this essay, Heidegger insists on the prior question about the essence of nihilism. Contrary to Junger’s crossing the line, Heidegger’s main concern is the line itself: “In the title of your essay Uber die Linie, the uber means as much as: across, trans, meta. By contrast, the following remarks understand the uber only in the sense of de, peri. They deal ‘with’ the line itself, with the zone of self-consummating nihilism” (WM 386). In the end, Heidegger argues against Junger that nihilism cannot be overcome at all and that the question of nihilism must be brought back to the question of Being. What could the enduring stimulus of Junger be, considering that according to Heidegger he asked the wrong question? Does Heidegger in Zur Seinsfrage merely speak kindly of a colleague, when he speaks of a nachhaltige Forderung? The recent publication of Volume 90 of the Gesamtausgabe – Zu Ernst Junger – and other lectures and annotations from the thirties allow us to

Book review: Ernst Jünger On Pain, trans. and introduced by Durst DC; preface by Berman RA, Telos: New York, NY, 2008; 96 pp.: 9780914386407, £14.99 (pbk)

Book review: Ernst Jünger On Pain, trans. and introduced by Durst DC; preface by Berman RA, Telos: New York, NY, 2008; 96 pp.: 9780914386407, £14.99 (pbk)

An Interview with Eric Kandel

An Interview with Eric Kandel

Sprachbilder des Krieges: Zur ersten Fassung von Ernst Jüngers in Stahlgewittern

In his controversial first book In Stahlgewittern (1920) Ernst Junger ascribes meaning to World War I not explicitly in ideological terms, as much as indirectly by using a highly metaphorical language. Junger codes war in 32 image sequences in the fields of nature, human practice, culture, and anthropomorphism. Junger's metaphors can be differentiated into various categories and characterized by their density, their relation, their interference and their variation. When two warring fractions, then, are described by the same iconic motifs, their oppositions seem to vanish. And when metaphors are confronted with their real referents, with signifying names and stereotyped jargons, their artificial character and epistemological function come to light. The implicit meanings these metaphors generate should not be simplified as celebratory aestheticising, nor refuted as fascist ideology. The individual codes are unequally subtle, they generate different semantics and they connote deviating political positions; they intersect and conflict. In Stahlgewittern they are both an expression of an ideological attitude as well as a symptom of profound unsettlement.

Taming the Technological Shrew: Woman as Machine in Weimar Culture

European culture in the early twentieth century experienced two significant sites of transformation: newly emerging forms of technology and a new role for the emancipated woman. Amidst the social upheaval following WWI, these two sources of transformation were often met with cultural backlash that came in the form of conflating woman and machine. This article will study this conflation—the feminized machine and the mechanized woman—by drawing on various cultural works from Weimar Germany including writings from the Sex Reform movement, Siegfried Kracauer, and Ernst Junger. Analysis of these works will inform a reading of Maria the robot in Lang’s film, Metropolis (1927) as a representative of the popular anxiety over new technologies and the “New Woman.”

El lugar de la libertad en las sociedades nihilistas

El nihilismo es considerado por algunos filósofos contemporáneos como el problema fundamental del siglo XX. Pensadores como Ortega y Gasset, Heidegger o Ernst Jünger ensayan diferentes propuestas filosóficas para definir la naturaleza del nihilismo contemporáneo y orientar al ser humano en las sociedades nihilistas. En este artículo se descubren algunas claves para comprender la naturaleza del problema y la responsabilidad del hombre singular en la superación de las formas nihilistas de poder. No se equivoca Heidegger cuando afirma que el aspecto inquietante del mundo contemporáneo no es tanto que éste se convierta en un mundo completamente técnico, regido exclusivamente por la razón instrumental, como que el hombre no esté preparado para esta transformación del mundo.

Ernst Junger's Dangerous Encounter--the Detective Closes the Case on the Adventurer

Ernst Junger's detective novel Eine gefahrliche Begegnung (1985) dramatizes a clash between the concept of adventure and the principles of order and modern scientific inquiry. Set in Paris, in 1888, the text tells the story of a murder investigation. Two adventurers embody, respectively, adventure's origins in medieval chivalry and adventure's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form of colonial exploration; the detective embodies nineteenth-century advances in applied science as well as modern anthropological and psychological theories. Junger's narrative engages with defining nineteenth-century texts, such as Bertillon's writings on anthropometric identification, Cesare Lombroso's theories on the nature of the criminal, and Gustave Le Bon's analysis of mass psychology. These texts articulate a rationalist ethos, advocated in Junger's novel by the detective. The opposing principles of unregulated individual freedom and a fanciful code of honor, embodied by the adventurers, are depicted as relics of a bygone age, whose passing can only be lamented, not remedied.

Heroes and Merchants: Stalin's Understanding of National Character

his Handler und Helden (1915), German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart interpreted Great War as an existential battle not just between nations but between cultures and worldviews. According to Sombart, West European civilization was based on ideas of and on commercial values, which he identified with Jewish spirit. The typical West European was a merchant, exclusively interested in what life could offer him in terms of goods and comfort. contrast, Germany was a nation of heroes, who were prepared to sacrifice themselves for higher ideals. (1) With his book, Sombart contributed to radical right-wing tendency of so-called Conservative Revolution in Germany, leading ideologists of which were Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Ernst Junger. Surprisingly, though he matured and operated within a very different political tradition, Iosif Stalin's views about mentality of nations of Europe were very similar. This is not to say that Soviet dictator was of one mind with Conservative Revolutionaries in all respects. He would certainly never have classified the ideas of 1789 as decadent. For him, they were precisely higher values for which one should sacrifice oneself. It was greedy capitalists with their commercial mentality who had betrayed revolutionary ideals. The Communists had inherited mantle of French Revolution. his own way, Stalin might even be called pro-Western--in sense that he was an ardent modernizer and a jealous admirer of Western progress. Typically, in February 1947 he remarked to Sergei Eisenstein that it was impossible to deny progressive role of Christianization of Russia. It marked Russian state's shift toward joining up with West, instead of an orientation toward East. (3) Until his death, it remained Stalin's fond goal to overtake West in terms of civilization and technology. Russia's backwardness deeply troubled him, as is evident in his well-known speech of February 1931 about causes of Russian historical defeats. (4) The Soviet leader betrayed his insecurity with remarks such as those made to a Polish delegation in April 1945: the Polish workers are good workers. They are more cultured than ours. The proximity of West makes itself felt. (5) Stalin did his best to convince himself that East Europeans were no less developed than their Western counterparts. At a meeting of economic leaders and Stakhanovites in Kremlin in October 1937, he admitted that Russians remained culturally behind, but in terms of political culture they were ahead. In West people don't throw cigarette stubs on floor, but working people over there are slaves of capital. (6) He once told Andrei Gromyko that the Bulgarian people are not at all at a lower level of general development than Germans. times long ago, when ancestors of Germans still lived in woods, Bulgarians already had a high culture. (7) But Stalin did not really believe this himself. During hysterical anti-cosmopolitan campaigns of his last years, dictator insisted that Russians had always been world's greatest pioneers. But very fact that he reiterated Russian superiority so emphatically confirmed that he realized that this priority had not yet been achieved. That said, parallels between Stalin's views and Sombart's are indeed striking. Like Sombart, Soviet leader celebrated heroic spirit of sacrifice, and he acknowledged that Western culture overvalued comfort compared to struggle. Like Sombart, he abhorred commercial spirit. For a Communist, Stalin put a remarkable emphasis on cultural, as opposed to socio-economic, downside of capitalism. He criticized Europe as a capitalist culture, condemning it as a morally defective system. Capitalism denied people possibility of becoming heroes and thereby sapped its own vital strength. …

Romans à contraintes

Roman à contraintes is essentially an anthology of critical pieces of varying length published originally between 1991 and 2002. The range of coverage is wide: eleven mostly late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century writers discussed in a 190-page volume. Part 1 comprises an introduction to Jean-Benoît Puech's work situating it briefly in relation to that of his literary and theoretical mentors, Louis-René des Forêts and Gérard Genette, and three subsections considering the relationship between text and peritext, the paradoxical play between narrative voice and pronominal use, and the topos of the found manuscript. Part 2 examines the use of analogy as constraining principle: in Jean Paulhan's Le Guerrier appliqué the banality of the analogies expresses the astonishment of the protagonist and the comparatist reflex that his disorientation triggers; in Claude Ollier's La Mise en scène, analogy is a stage on the way to the ‘mot juste’; close reading of an extract from José Lezama Lima's Paradiso reveals the dynamic interaction between intergenerational conflict and the structural exploitation of metaphor. Part 3 investigates the tension between subject and ‘constraint’, focusing on the presence of a ‘narrateur maniaquement anonyme’ in Robert Pinget's Le Libéra (p. 119), the play between overstated pastiche and literary hoax in Jean Lahougue's Comptine des Height and La Doublure de Magrite, and grammatextuality and typography in Raymond Federman's Amer Eldorado. Part 4 claims that what Baetens calls the ‘prose prosaïque’ of Bernard Colin and Ernst Junger (p. 147) calls into question the distinction between constraint and non-constraint. Part 5 explores the compatibility of the ‘hors-sujet’ (here, digression and citation) and constraint in Jacques Roubaud's Poésie and Renaud Camus's Vaisseaux brûlés, and examines the impact of electronic media on writing practice. Among the volume's qualities, I would cite the following: the analysis of Puech brings into focus a body of work that has been overshadowed by the author's relationship with des Forêts; the sections on Paulhan, Ollier and Lezama Lima complement each other and offer suggestive insights into their work; Baetens revives usefully the question of the heritage of the nouveau roman; the topic of the ‘roman à contrainte’ is potentially very rich. However, despite the efforts to establish overarching thematic links, the essays remain autonomous units within an anthology and the principles underlying the inclusion of authors are not always clear: in particular, the presence of Colin's Perpétuel voyez Physique and Junger's Jardins et Routes is surprising. The introduction is brief and, though it promises ‘de nouveaux éléments à une théorie générale de la contrainte’ (p. 12), I would have welcomed fuller argument to support some of the book's assertions. Ricardou, Magné, Lejeune, Barthes and Genette are mentioned, but the implications of this contextualization are not pursued. This is especially regrettable in the case of Genette, given Puech's collaboration with him and Baetens's — fully justified — insistence on the latter's status as an author who is theoretically ‘averti’. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Baetens can be commended for tackling a difficult subject and a number of under-researched authors.