Making a long story longer

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A delightful biography of an English artist written by an English author. GK Chesterton lives up to his billing as a wonderful English author and a wonderful thinker to spend time with. I can’t say that I really learned much about Blake so much as I learned about Chesterton’s thinking where his views of the world and Blake’s life intertwine. I thoroughly enjoyed Chesterton’s rambling though. Getting to spend some amount of time with Chesterton felt like a treat. The man’s extreme command of the English Language is a wonder to read.

How I Discovered It

It was a very on target Amazon kindle suggestion

Who Should Read It?

True Blake fans, thorough Chesterton fans, and rationalists who want to see why he is the favorite author, artist and poet of that time period for the rationalist community.

Highlights

His manners and morals were trained in the old obvious way; nobody ever thought of training his imagination, which perhaps was all the better for the neglect.

It is probably true that Ireland, if she were free from oppression, would produce more pure mystics than England. And for the same reason she would still produce fewer poets. A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. Broadly the English type is he who sees the elves entangled in the forests of Arcady, like Shakespeare and Keats: the Irish type is he who sees the fairies quite distinct from the forest, like Blake and Mr. W. B. Yeats.

No one can understand Blake’s pictures, no one can understand a hundred allusions in his epigrams, satires, and art criticism who does not first of all realise that William Blake was a fanatic on the subject of the firm line. The thing he loved most in art was that lucidity and decision of outline which can be seen best in the cartoons of Raphael, in the Elgin Marbles, and in the simpler designs of Michael Angelo. The thing he hated most in art was the thing which we now call Impressionism—the substitution of atmosphere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint, the cloudland of the mere colourist.

The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster. The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmistakable mistake.

In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment.

He did not see any particular reason why he should not be fond of a man merely because he had called the man a murderer a few days before. And he was innocently surprised if the man was not fond of him. In this he was perhaps rather feminine than masculine.

It was a time of tyranny, and tyranny is always full of small intrigues.

A BROTHER artist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity, “He is a good man to steal from.” The remark is as philosophical as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was literally packed with ideas—with ideas which required unpacking. In him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond and turn it into twenty farms, so the plagiarist of Blake might steal a sentence and turn it into twenty volumes.

The idea obviously is this;—that we still for some reason admit the tools of destruction to be nobler than the tools of production, because decorative art is expended on the one and not on the other. The sword has a golden hilt; but no plough has golden handles. There is such a thing as a sword of state; there is no such thing as a scythe of state. Men come to court wearing imitation swords; few men come to court wearing imitation flails.

Blake knew as little about the Middle Ages as Stothard did; but Blake knew about eternity and about man; he saw the image of God under all garments.

People talk about something pedantic in the knowledge of the expert; but what ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert.

The fuller and fairer way is this: that Blake was one of those few painters who understood his subject as well as his picture.

Nowhere else has he so well expressed his primary theistic ideas—that God, though infinitely gigantic, should be as solid as a giant.

Some people will be quite satisfied with saying that the mere solemn attestation of such miracles marks a man as a madman or a liar. But that is a short cut of sceptical dogmatism which is not far removed from impudence. Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history. To call a man mad because he has seen ghosts is in a literal sense religious persecution. It is denying him his full dignity as a citizen because he cannot be fitted into your theory of the cosmos. It is disfranchising him because of his religion. It is just as intolerant to tell an old woman that she cannot be a witch as to tell her that she must be a witch. In both cases you are setting your own theory of things inexorably against the sincerity or sanity of human testimony. Such dogmatism at least must be quite as impossible to anyone calling himself an agnostic as to anyone calling himself a spiritualist. You cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. You cannot say, “This island is not discovered yet; but I am sure that it has a wall of cliffs all round it and no harbour.” That was the whole fallacy of Herbert Spencer and Huxley when they talked about the unknowable instead of about the unknown. An agnostic like Huxley must concede the possibility of a gnostic like Blake. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

Like every great mystic he was also a great rationalist.

If a ploughman says that he saw a ghost, it is not quite sufficient to answer merely that he is a madman. It may have been seeing the ghost that drove him mad. His lunacy may not prove the falsehood of his tale, but rather its terrible truth.

I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water, an excellent thing, if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water—which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw’s philosophy is exactly like black coffee—it awakens but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in stronger terms than that. Sometimes, very rarely, one may come across something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy—the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out.

The pagan gods had become pure fables when Christianity gave them a new lease of life as devils.

The old pagan commonwealths were democratic, but they were not in the least humanitarian. They had no tears to spare for a man at the mercy of the community; they reserved all their anger and sympathy for the community at the mercy of a man. That individual compassion for an individual case was a pure product of Christianity; and when Voltaire flung himself with fury into the special case of Calas, he was drawing all his energies from the religion that he denied.

It is amusing to remark that in the eighteenth century for the first time start up a number of societies which calmly announce that they have existed almost from the beginning of the world. Of these, of course, the best known instance is the Freemasons; according to their own account they began with the Pyramids; but according to everyone else’s account that can be effectively collected, they began with the eighteenth century.

Nevertheless, if a mesmerist really had the powers which some mesmerists have claimed, and which most novels give to him, there is (I hope) no doubt at all that any decent mob would drown him like a witch.

But Blake really had to begin at the beginning, because it was a different beginning. This explains the extraordinary air of digression and irrelevancy which can be observed in some of the most direct and sincere minds. It explains the bewildering allusiveness of Dante; the galloping parentheses of Rabelais; the gigantic prefaces of Mr. Bernard Shaw. The brilliant man seems more lumbering and elaborate than anyone else, because he has something to say about everything. The very quickness of his mind makes the slowness of his narrative. For he finds sermons in stones, in all the paving-stones of the street he plods along. Every fact or phrase that occurs in the immediate question carries back his mind to the ages and the initial power. Because he is original he is always going back to the origins.

The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible—by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. The man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic: and Blake, as we shall see, did, for certain peculiar reasons of his own, often fail in this way.

Impressionism is scepticism. It means believing one’s immediate impressions at the expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations. It puts what one notices above what one knows. It means the monstrous heresy that seeing is believing. A white cow at one particular instant of the evening light may be gold on one side and violet on the other. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that she really is a gold and violet cow. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that there is no white cow at all. What can we tell, it cries, beyond what we can see? But the essence of Mysticism is to insist that there is a white cow, however veiled with shadow or painted with sunset gold. Blessed are they who have seen the violet cow and who yet believe in the white one.

The personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal; rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of God.

Naturally his divinities are definite, because he thought that the more they were definite, the more they were divine. Naturally God was not to him a hazy light breaking through the tangle of the evolutionary undergrowth, nor a blinding brilliancy in the highest place of the heavens. God was to him the magnificent old man depicted in his dark and extraordinary illustrations of “Job,” the old man with the monstrous muscles, the mild stern eyebrows, the long smooth silver hair and beard. In the dialogues between Jehovah and Job there is little difference between the two ponderous and palpable old men, except that the vision of Deity is a little more solid than the human being. But then Blake held that Deity is more solid than humanity.

No man had harder dogmas; no one insisted more that religion must have theology. The Everlasting Gospel was far from being a simple gospel. Blake had succeeded in inventing in the course of about ten years as tangled and interdependent a system of theology as the Catholic Church has accumulated in two thousand.

Any mere tuft or twig can curve with a curve that is incalculable. Any scrap of moss can contain in itself an irregularity that is infinite. The sea is the one thing that is really exciting because the sea is the one thing that is flat.

Some of his views were really what the old mediaeval world called heresies and what the modern world (with an equally healthy instinct but with less scientific clarity) calls fads. In either case the definition of the fad or heresy is not so very difficult. A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind. For instance: it is a mood, a beautiful and lawful mood, to wonder how oysters really feel. But it is a fad, an ugly and unlawful fad, to starve human beings because you will not let them eat oysters. It

There is nothing at all poetical in this revolt. William Blake was a great and real poet; but in this point he was simply unpoetical. Walt Whitman was a great and real poet; but on this point he was prosaic and priggish. Two extraordinary men are not poets because they tear away the veil from sex. On the contrary it is because all men are poets that they all hang a veil over sex. The ploughman does not plough by night, because he does not feel specially romantic about ploughing. He does love by night, because he does feel specially romantic about sex. In this matter Blake was not only unpoetical, but far less poetical than the mass of ordinary men. Decorum is not an over-civilised convention.

The chief difference between Christianity and the thousand transcendental schools of to-day is substantially the same as the difference nearly two thousand years ago between Christianity and the thousand sacred rites and secret societies of the Pagan Empire. The deepest difference is this: that all the heathen mysteries are so far aristocratic, that they are understood by some, and not understood by others. The Christian mysteries are so far democratic that nobody understands them at all.

They thought that one might entirely alter a man’s head without in the least altering his hat.

It is broadly a characteristic of all valuable new-fashioned opinions that they are brought in by old-fashioned men. For the sincerity of such men is proved by both facts—the fact that they do care about their new truth and the fact that they do not care about their old clothes.

The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens; but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable.

A peculiar book by a peculiar author about a peculiar man. I’ve been fascinated by Junger since I read Storm of Steel, and then his various sci fi books.

The author of the book was a certifiable, and apparently jailable, odious nutcase. Feel free to google him for more info.

It succeeds fairly well as a biography in that, after reading the book I don’t have anywhere near as many questions about the subject as I had before reading the book. His post WW2 experiences did not interest the author that much so that period is not covered as closely. The between the wars era is covered quite thoroughly.

Junger seemed to settle somewhere in the very small far right pro Jewish anti Hitler slice of German political opinion. Junger’s primary motivations were the thought of German people living under non German rule. I guess this book was a good reminder that politics, and political leaders are differing things to differing people in differing places, certainly initially.

Things of particular interest

• He edited things into and out of Storm of Steel with each version – mostly to take away any propaganda value to the Nazis.
• Despite being vocally and publicly anti-Hitler he had his fans as a writer in the 3rd Reich, and got some protection from them, including Hitler (life is strange)
• The range of opinion in the Weimar Republic was quite large
• The Weimar era was probably the only time in history where one could just summon thousands of people for street fighting in some sort of organized fashion
• The notion of a European identity, distinct from both race and America comes into form, mostly from the author of the book and not the subject. As an American I felt a sense of smug superiority after reading over the European complaints.

Reading a book by a foreign author aimed at a foreign readership was an interesting thing – there were numerous comparisons and examples that would be obvious were I raised in France

Not a perfect book but to fill in some of the missing gaps, particularly the sci fi era, but it’s worth reading if you’re a Junger fan (there’s not much else out there on him).

Quotes

An essayist, a poet, and the author of numerous works, Friedrich Georg (1898–1977) would, to the end of his days, maintain a close relationship with his elder brother, thanks to their intimate intellectual complicity.

Though, at their mother’s request, the children were indeed baptised, they would not receive any religious education, thus fulfilling the wishes of their father, who was unwaveringly rationalistic.

Just like Goethe, his father felt sympathy for the French and made certain that Ernst learned their language. He even organised for him a language stay with a French family, at a time when Ernst was still very young.

Indeed, Ernst seemed to be the very embodiment of those imaginative and talented duffers who, ever impervious to mathematics yet passionate about literature, prove to be full-blooded authors.

After three weeks, he felt smothered by despair. With an older comrade, he proceeded to desert the Legion so as to reach the Africa that the walls of the barracks had kept hidden from him. The two fugitives would be promptly brought back by the natives, who received a bounty for this type of work. Ernst thus found himself locked up in the regimental prison of Bel-Abbès.

Patriotic passions set Germany and all other European countries ablaze. Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg rushed to be enlisted. On the third day of the war, they were incorporated into the 73rd Hanoverian Rifle Regiment,

Nearly a century later, a century that seems to have flown by in the blink of an eye, the stories told by those who witnessed the Great War are now many. None, however, could ever compare to the accounts given by Lieutenant Jünger. Beyond the obvious stylistic qualities, what is most striking about this young man is that although war did not spare him in any way, his descriptions are characterised by a staggering absence of complaints, compassion or moral judgement. In his accounts, life and death, laughter and suffering are intermingled. One thus draws from them a deep feeling of serenity and peace, despite all the fury of action.

Convalescing in the family home in Hanover, Lieutenant Jünger begins to carry out the formatting of the sixteen notebooks in which he had, on a daily basis, noted his memories of the great ordeal. Casting his eye over those notes, his father displays great enthusiasm. Convinced of the exceptional quality of his son’s testimony, he offers to publish it all himself. As regards the publisher’s name, it would be that of the gardener, Robert Meier.26 With Stendhal’s The Red and the Black in mind, Ernst, for his part, initially considers titling his book The Red and the Grey, the latter being the colour of the German field uniform. Soon, however, his recollections of ancient Icelandic sagas would inspire him to opt for the highly evocative title of In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel).

There is no doubt that Jünger was a born writer or almost, but it was the war that offered him the opportunity to open his mind to things and reveal the gifts he bore within.

Written, for the most part, in chronological order, it does not mention any dates, and the reader is often at a loss to put a date, even an approximate one, to the events and circumstances reported by the author. Jünger himself would not withhold the fact that, to him, the literary concern of the artist prevails over the memoirist’s concern for accuracy. As much out of modesty as for the sake of keeping a certain distance, the author deliberately redacted from his journals all exceedingly personal notes that were present in his original notebooks.27 For instance, he erased any mention of his relationships with women almost completely.

Such comments would be deleted in Storm of Steel, where the author takes on the appearance of a model officer, an officer who, in the truthfulness of the original notebooks, wondered at times when ‘this shitty war’ would end.

In the eyes of certain commentators, this rewriting of Jünger’s journals would raise the question of their authenticity. I consider this to be a fake issue, since the author is not a high-ranking actor in the war whose decisions or thoughts have a historical impact, but merely an insignificant witness to an immense tragedy.

Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jünger would delete all political comments so as to prevent any exploitation at the hands of the new regime’s propaganda. As pointed out by Hervier, the editions that came out after 1934 are thus paradoxically closer to the 1920 and 1922 editions than to the one published in 1924.30

Unlike so many other Germans of his generation, Ernst Jünger was not demobilised after the defeat of November 1918. Nor did he participate in the turbulent adventures of the Free Corps. What was left of the old army did not want to let go of such a promising young officer. In the defeated and chaotic Germany of the 1920s, infantry Lieutenant Jünger would punctually take up his service every morning at the Reichswehr barracks in Hanover.

What Ernst Jünger would retain from Hölderlin’s poetry is the impression that the human adventure takes place in a world whose meaning remains hidden. Thanks to art, however, it is indeed possible to decipher it. Art, in fact, allows us to sense the mysterious universal order that embraces men instead of rejecting them;

At the time, the author was no longer part of the Reichswehr, having been discharged on 31 August 1923.

On the contrary, what we encounter is evident esteem and even sympathy for those whom Jünger had fought against with unbridled fury. The reason is not that he could ever doubt his own rights, even for a single moment– that is not the issue here. Indeed, going back thirty centuries to reconnect with the ethos of the Iliad, he is willing to acknowledge the fact that his adversary is also within his rights. The actions of a Frenchman who kills a German in the name of his French fatherland are as justified as those of a German who kills a Frenchman in the name of the German fatherland. Each of the two armies is within its right. When one understands this, ‘one honours heroism; one honours it everywhere and above all among the ranks of one’s enemy.’

There is no eternal rest. There is only eternal movement that presses every smallest particle into its service.

In both Moscow and Rome, in Warsaw as well as in Berlin, the war had indeed given rise to a new type of man that supplanted the futile phrasemongers of the previous era: men who, in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, are inclined ‘to transpose military methods to the very structure of life, practicing methodical coercion — a type of human that is fond of power and mindful of force and that manifested himself in both communism and fascism.’

On the evening of 9 November 1918, at a time when Wilhelm II had made the decision to seek refuge in the Netherlands, Berlin and the other major cities fell prey to the outbreak of Spartacist riots, that is, to the German version of Bolshevism, which had triumphed in Russia a year earlier. In Moscow, Lenin was convinced that the red revolution would extend to Germany. And it would indeed prove to be a very close call. The ultimate failure of this revolutionary project was due to the agreement sealed by socialist minister Noske with the Freikorps, an unforeseen phenomenon that had arisen from the chaos and rubble of the former imperial army. Against all expectations, the latter would reap success in Germany, while their equivalent counterparts, the ‘White Guards’, failed in Russia.

On two occasions, in December 1918 and January 1919, they would reclaim Berlin before intervening throughout the Reich to crush the red uprisings. This would be achieved by means of cannon fire and machine guns, with hundreds of deaths and quite a few atrocities perpetrated by each side. For a long time, Germany thus found itself in an endemic state of civil war. The final act of this era of armed unrest would be the Munich Putsch on 9 November 1923, which would throw a spotlight on Adolf Hitler’s name.

The myth of the eternal return reinforces a cyclical vision of history that is in radical opposition to the linear and finalistic viewpoint that results from Christianity and which the Enlightenment proceeded to secularise.

As for conservatism, and contrary to its French meaning, it suggests neither immobility nor attachment to deciduous forms. In the mindset of German romanticism, it represents, in fact, man’s awareness of the permanent and the essential, of all that resists time and that a revolutionary impulse will be able to free from any and all outdated forms. This notion of a revolution that would ensure the resurgence of a fundamental kind of order is a bearer of great dynamism. It rests upon the metaphysical conviction that the epoch in question is that of an interregnum that lies between an already dead order and another yet to come, a sort of ‘zero point’, as Jünger would say, starting from which everything becomes possible.

Owing to his temperament, furthermore, he was a doctrinarian, which Jünger was not in any way.

Within their own generation, the men that were thus moulded constitute an active minority that was not overwhelmed by the ordeal. In this generation, the fundamental bourgeois aspiration for comfort, hedonism and security simply crumbled.

Between 1914 and 1923, tens of thousands of young men acquired a taste for a type of existence wherein one’s indulging in risk led them to despise individualism and well-being both as values and as ultimate ends. To borrow some of Jünger’s words, these youths belonged to a race whose members ‘can gladly be blown up and still perceive the event as a confirmation of order’.

In Germany, the borders that delineate people’s feelings towards Russia coincide with the very ancient, cultural and historical border of the Limes and the Main. It divides Germany in two: a predominantly Catholic Germany, that of the South-West, which was subjected to Roman and Catholic influence; and another, that of the North-East, which evaded it. The former is associated with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and was often at odds with Russia, with the latter acting as heir to the Prussian and Lutheran tradition and frequently seeking an alliance with Russia.

Unlike Napoleon or Hitler, who were both from the south of Europe and had fed upon imperialist traditions originating from Rome or Habsburg, no Prussian statesman ever fell into the trap of attempting to conquer Russia’s vast expanses.

Indeed, positions were rarely immutable. Socialists would rally around nationalism, and nationalists would sometimes join communism without betraying any of their profound convictions.

To those close to the National Bolshevik movement, Russian communism was only superficially Marxist in nature. It seemed to be, above all, a Russian phenomenon,

The appeal exerted by the ‘romanticism of the abyss’ is, as a rule, very foreign to Prussian coldness.

However, what would ultimately turn him into the most prominent author of the revolutionary Right was his rather fiery collaboration with Die Standarte (The Banner), a newspaper launched in June 1925.

In 1929, as part of the first version of his Adventurous Heart, he had already clearly distanced himself from all collective action.

In accordance with a phrase used within certain officer circles, nationalism would be experienced as one’s ‘altruistic duty towards the Reich’ and socialism as one’s ‘altruistic duty towards the people’. The only clearly designated adversary is the ‘bourgeois’, the focus of the author’s condemnation in The Worker (1932).

After 1927, however, one would notice a significant evolution in some of Jünger’s writings, a detachment that would have been unthinkable a year earlier. His artistic temperament would thus visibly take priority over political polemics, which was in contrast with his very nature.

Ernst von Salomon’s testimony highlights all that sets Jünger apart from the other authors of the nationalist movement. Jünger’s 1923 novella entitled Sturm had already heralded this distancing, which would be even more palpable in his political-literary work The Adventurous Heart, published in 1929. What one notices in it is a deliberate contrast between the passages dedicated to the martial fury of combat and others that display cold artistic distancing. He thus visibly cultivates a tendency towards egotism that one could never imagine in a political actor.

The French suddenly discovered that they were no longer the ‘Great Nation’ of yesteryear. They thus became resentful and surrendered to an inexpiable hatred for the Germans, revealing their own decline. Thus was modern nationalism born, the offspring of Jacobin passions, Boulangism and ‘revenge’. Through a reciprocal sort of movement, the demons of Pan-Germanism would awake in Germany.

the Germans saw themselves, by contrast, as the defenders of art against intellectualism and of authentic culture against the cosmopolitanism and artificiality that they deemed characteristic of France.

And it wasn’t a mere speech he was giving, for he embodied a manifestation of the elemental, and I had just been swept away by it.

From the very outset, a connection seemed to have been established between the still little-known young leader and the young combatant made famous by the publication of Storm of Steel. Hitler had also been a valiant WWI soldier, albeit a less prestigious one. He would thus send Jünger the first edition of Mein Kampf, dedication included. By return of post, Jünger would thank him by sending him his own war books. On the cover page of Fire and Blood, he inscribed the following tribute dated 9 January 1926: ‘To Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Nation! Ernst Jünger.’

The following year, in 1927, Hitler offers Jünger a mandate to become a member of the Reichstag. The offer is turned down, for as Jünger would later state, to him, ‘the writing of a single verse was of more interest than the representation of 60,000 imbeciles in the Parliament’. Much later, on the eve of his hundredth birthday, he would respond to a journalist by adding with an ironic smile: ‘Later on, however, I would have equally rejected a similar offer from our highly esteemed Federal Republic had I been made one.’

despite the article published in Die Kommenden, the former officer had already distanced himself from political action by and large. There are multiple reasons for this. During the year of 1929, he published the first version of his work entitled The Adventurous Heart. This marks a certain break with his previous writings and a clear withdrawal into the inner sphere of reflection, that of more or less fantastical dreams and a writer’s formal concerns.

A careful reading reveals, however, that the writer did not sever his ties to the combative spirit of the previous years: he had only stopped believing in the resources of collective action: Nowadays, one cannot labour for Germany as a society; indeed, this must be done in solitude, just like a man who opens a breach in a virgin forest, sustained by the only hope that, somewhere, among the thickets, others are engaged in the same task.

One of the little-known reasons behind the success of the National Socialist Party lay in the unexpected support it had received from the female electorate, whose members had apparently been seduced by its promises of security and family policies.

Meeting Ernst von Salomon in 1929, he says to him: ‘I have chosen a high observation post from where I can watch the bedbugs devour each other’.

In other words, freedom is not a metaphysical idea. Jünger and the Germans do not believe in freedom per se, but in freedom as a function, such as the freedom of a given force. This idea is the very opposite of the notion of ‘cunning vote collectors’ and ‘freedom merchants’. The latter are ‘prisoners of the moral scheme of a corrupt Christianity that transposes the biblical curse to the worldly relationship between the exploiters and the exploited […]. They thus prove themselves incapable of envisioning freedom under any other terms than one’s deliverance from a certain evil.’ (pp. 99–100).

So what is Prussia? ‘Prussia is not a nation; it is the unadulterated and serious face of life.’

A State conceived of as being a chivalric order; to be free and to serve: the Prussian notion of State cannot be summarised more accurately than this. According to Spengler, it was the Prussian army itself, that of Frederick the Great; of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, of Moltke the Elder and the old Marshal von Hindenburg that had embodied this very notion.

This idea is in sharp contrast to the specifically Hitlerian conception of race.

His racism owes nothing to the writings of someone like Gobineau.119 His true master was the author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, albeit in the latter’s simplified formulation spread by popularisers at the time of Hitler’s youth.

Ernst Jünger had sensed that, just like Marxism, Hitlerism was a distortion of Enlightenment rationalism, a sort of madness-afflicted reasoning. Hitler believed himself to have discovered the secret of the ideal City based on science and reason. What had once been experienced as immemorial, accommodating and flexible wisdom would be imposed with geometric rigour by a dictatorial law that would enact thorough and tyrannical rules to be enforced by legions of obedient and narrow-minded officials. This distortion of reason, it must be said, is not specific to ‘totalitarianism’. Indeed, most modern societies have fallen prey to it, under the pretext of hyper-rationality and submission to the judgements passed by ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’.

Very present in The Worker as part of the author’s response to the challenges of technological domination, the attitude of ‘heroic realism’ would subsequently disappear from Jünger’s mental universe, once his mind had undergone the great ‘humanist’ reversal heralded by the publication of On the Marble Cliffs in 1939.

The ‘elemental’ is to be understood as the instinctive forces of life, which are stifled by rationalism and the bourgeois rule.

In it, von Trotha criticised Jünger for his ‘fundamentally individualistic attitude’ and concluded by stating that by authoring such a book, Jünger was getting dangerously close to ‘being shot in the back of the neck’. One wonders what could have justified such a threat. The explanation would soon be given. Jünger, continues Trotha, ‘disregards the fundamental question of blood and soil’. Indeed, nowhere in Jünger’s work does one find a single trace of the racial Darwinism that characterises Hitlerian National Socialism. Additionally, nowhere in this cryptic book of his are the party and its leader mentioned or even hinted at, although they were already marching towards power.

Although basically retired from politics, Jünger chooses his side: that of Prussia and the Reichswehr, against National Socialism.

And yet, those of us who study history in a desire to elucidate its mysteries can readily interpret the writer’s motivations. Indeed, everything points to the fact that what he favoured was a revolution from above, in accordance with the Bismarckian model. A total revolution, as heralded by his writings, but a controlled and regulated one, a new and enlightened sort of despotism.

he is targeted with a first raid in April 1933, initiated by the subordinates of the local police amidst the climate of general suspicion and latent civil war that characterised the first months of the new regime.

Over the following years, Jünger would never relinquish his increasingly greater reservations, while still refusing to emigrate and sever his ties to his own homeland. Opting for inner exile, he devotes himself to his entomological work and to penning texts that are truly timeless, until the publication, in September 1939, of his novel On the Marble Cliffs. The work is immediately perceived as a coded condemnation of the regime. He is denounced accordingly to Hitler himself by Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler (1899–1945), the head of the ‘Party’s Control Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Writings’. Harbouring respect for the heroic soldier of the Great War that authored Storm of Steel, Hitler would, however, prohibit all persecution: ‘No one touches Jünger!’

In response to the pleas made to him, he would dryly reply, ‘There is no room for me in an army where Göring is a general.’

Indirectly involved in the plot of 20 July 1944, he evades the fate of a great many other officers. During a long life in which he would also experience other, less dramatic developments, he had overcome many a mortal peril while enjoying a strange privilege of invulnerability.

To put it very simply, the purge, which also targeted right-wing opponents, was the result of a manipulative plan hatched by the leaders of the Reichswehr, who wanted to neutralise the now troublesome SA.141 For once, they had enjoyed the complicity of some of the highest-standing party leaders, namely Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, who also wanted to bring the all too independent SA back in line by eliminating its leaders.

As soon as Hitler took power in 1933, Jünger, Spengler, von Salomon and many other major authors of the Conservative Revolution became his virtual opponents. The new regime seemed to them a mere travesty of the authentic ‘national socialism’ they wished for. In accordance with the excellent thought expressed by the historian Ernst Nolte, ‘“national socialism” was not, until 1934, a protected trademark’.

One had better be wary, therefore, of placing their entire trust in all that has been written in the aftermath of 1945, as memories do tend to undergo the occasional obscuration. It is not that the actual honesty of the witnesses should necessarily be called into question, but what was clear before 1945 might no longer be so afterwards. This is because the unconscious part of one’s memory will always engage in a selective sifting process, especially among intellectuals, who are naturally tempted to add coherence to their past conduct in light of newly acquired principles.

No one could thus have foreseen a future that had no precedent.

In 1933, and over the next five years, Hitler appeared to a large majority of Germans as a providential statesman who channelled all his efforts towards the sole objective of curbing the crisis while simultaneously striving to avoid a communist takeover.

Among the celebrities of the intellectual world, the historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was one of the rare minds to distance themselves early from the new regime. He thus joined Ernst Jünger in this respect, although his reasons were actually quite different.

It is no time or occasion for transports of triumph. Woe betide those who mistake mobilisation for victory!

This would become obvious during the plebiscite of 12 November 1933, when Pastor Niemöller, the physicist Max Planck, the poet Gerhart Hauptmann, most bishops and even the Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith urged people to vote for the Führer. The same choice would also be made by the young Claus von Stauffenberg, the future initiator of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt.

Indeed, unlike Moeller van den Bruck and his friend Niekisch, Jünger was not a doctrinaire. He was, instead, an extraordinary writer, a writer who actually had ideas; and these ideas were subject to variation, without any concern for ideological coherence.

We nationalists do not believe in general ideas. We do not believe in general morality. We do not believe in mankind, in a collective being endowed with central consciousness and uniform rights. On the contrary, we believe that the truth, rights and morality are all conditioned to the extreme by time, space and blood. We believe in the value of the individual.168   Such a nominalistic speech was undoubtedly a little too subtle for the less than crystalline minds characterising the ideological functionaries of the NSDAP.

This is also the downside of all political parties that long to subjugate the independence of intellectuals to the requirements of their propagandas. They judge writers according to the latter’s conformity to the simplifications of the prevalent dogma. Concerning Jünger, it was his rejection of anti-Semitism, his individualism, and his literary frivolity that were regarded as suspicious.

Having observed the leaders of the NSDAP rather closely, he quickly fell into a state of disgust. Indeed, he saw them as nothing more than callous plebeians that had transformed into status seekers and social climbers as soon as they had seized power, as was the case with Göring.

is indeed a well-known process where strong opposition to a political-religious power such as the Third Reich drives ‘heretics’ to move further and further away from what they once had in common, to the point of denying what they had previously professed.

Without any doubt, I had underestimated the man’s talents: his passion-arousing dynamism, his instinctive manner of using simplifying concepts, which summarised the trend of the era of masses and machines. All of it was extraordinary, especially when one considers his origins. In this regard, his adversaries had a lot to learn from him. Traditionalist, aesthetic and moral scruples rendered one easily blind to these gifts, as did pure intellectuality. His ruin was, incidentally, far less the result of his gifts than that of his temperament and insatiable greed. […] Scarcely has a single human being, in all of modern history, attracted such amounts of enthusiasm but also hatred.

What is to blame here, therefore, is not politics as such, but the delusions brought about by utopias that were, particularly in the 20th century, responsible for burdening politics with eschatological and moral expectations pertaining to religiousness.

In other words, certain eras are simply not conducive to action, as they require one to withdraw into the background.

German readers did indeed interpret the content as a veiled condemnation of the regime. And it was the author’s notoriety that accounted for the book’s best-selling success, with more than 30,000 copies sold during the first few months.

After 1945, one would find out what Jünger himself had been unaware of at the time: that Hitler’s protection had shielded him.

However, Jünger did realise that several former members of the various circles of the Conservative Revolution who had started their career within the Party itself, the SS and even the Gestapo were watching over him.

Following closely behind the front line troops, he briefly captures Laon, whose mediaeval library he protects against all threats of pillaging and depredation.

Indeed, Speidel was one of Jünger’s admirers, as well as the very soul of a small circle of officers united by the same veiled hostility towards Hitler’s policies — this was the ‘George Circle’, alluding to the George V Hotel, where the colonel had set up his quarters. On 22 June, Jünger is transferred to the Parisian headquarters at Speidel’s request, who places him under his own protection.

Outside the administrative or strictly military tasks entrusted to him, Jünger enjoys great freedom. With the support of his superiors, he spends a lot of time exploring the Parisian artistic and literary environment.

At the beginning of 1942, the first part of Jünger’s Journal is published by a Berlin-based house under the bucolic title of Gardens and Streets.

One thus finds extensive traces of this aversion in the description that Jünger gives of the man in his Journal: He speaks with a manic, inward-directed gaze, which seems to shine from deep within a cave. […] He spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews — astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it. […] It was informative to listen to him rant this way for two hours, because he radiated the amazing power of nihilism.

As part of a continuation of his diligent reading of the Bible during the years of war, Jünger now perceived the Church as an institutional and theological recourse capable of warding off nihilism.

After the failure of the 20 July 1944 assassination plot, at a time when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and many officers were arrested before being executed,205 Jünger would miraculously escape the repression. It would seem that he was still under Hitler’s protection.

Shortly after leaving Paris on 15 August 1944, Jünger is demobilised.

Despite having faced his own trials and tribulations, Jünger had, until then, enjoyed a state of grace resulting from his Parisian position, but also from a mental hygiene that had kept him sheltered from psychological destruction. He remained protected against horrors thanks to his apparent detachment, calculated coldness, and nurtured insensitivity.

At the beginning of 1944, the then seventeen-year-old teenager is at a naval cadet school in Wilhelmshaven. Soon, Jünger learns that his son had been thrown into prison for saying that he would gladly pull the rope that would be used to hang Hitler — a very serious situation considering the context of the time.

He would ultimately manage to have his son shown leniency by the military judges in exchange for the boy’s immediate recruitment into the army. This would prove to be a fatal mistake, as Ernstel would be killed in Italy on 29 November 1944,

Jünger would thus experience the suffering that had stricken so many men and women all across Europe. Nothing of what characterised the lives of 20th-century Europeans would therefore be foreign to him. He would remain inconsolable. Every day, for the rest of his life, he would lose himself in contemplations at his child’s grave.

And this is what Jünger wrote about it in his Journal: Such a good lad. Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father. Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.207   Was he thinking of the audacity displayed by the boy when proclaiming his opposition to Hitler, as he himself had never openly done? Perhaps so, but he might also have been thinking of Ernstel’s death in battle, one which he, the famous Ernst Jünger, had unintentionally escaped.

Several times already, we have attempted to understand the reasons that had led the former heroic soldier of 1914–1918 (who then became the most famous intellectual of the radical Right during the 1925–1930 period) to embrace dissidence. Additionally, we have listed the ideas that resulted in his being opposed to Hitler: his rejection of anti-Semitism and racial Darwinism, and his objection to Russophobia, as he himself wished for an alliance between Germany and Russia, even if the latter were Bolshevik. We have also spoken of Jünger’s ever-growing aversion to the leaders of the brutal National Socialist Party, which he considered unworthy of embodying the new Germany.

Around 1925, and until around 1930, Jünger had been a passionate yet utterly sincere intellectual. To use Ernst von Salomon’s terminology, he lived for an idea and not through it. And although the idea in question gave him a reason to live, it ultimately caused him nothing but trouble, as he was both an idealistic and a profound thinker, and never a practical politician, although he did devote himself to political romanticism more than he would have been willing to concede.

Among other things, he lacked what was necessary to achieve success in politics: the charismatic magnetism of a leader; ambition and opportunism; bad faith; an argumentative temperament; a penchant for demagogy; and both cunning and ruthlessness towards adversaries and competitors alike. Instead, what he had was a surplus of intellectual integrity, righteousness and poetic lyricism.

It is within this new mindset that he spends the four years of the Occupation in rather pleasant conditions, protected by a few high-ranking officers and aware of the 20 July 1944 scheme, without, however, participating in it.

On 3 April 1945, realising that any and all opposition had been rendered useless, he orders his men not to resist the American troops upon arrival.

We see the will to destroy, even at the cost of one’s own destruction. This is a demonic trait.

Throughout the Journal, the days of pain begin to stack up. Indeed, Kirchhorst was pillaged by the first American troops and Jünger himself was almost shot dead by a Colt-wielding looter. Practical and determined, Perpetua sends her husband to the attic once again, where he would be shut in among his books, so as to avoid a fatal manifestation of his fearlessness.

“We cannot, however, strip ourselves of our belonging to our people. The nature of things dictates that the misfortune of our family, the suffering of our brother, affects us more deeply — and also that we are more closely bound to his guilt.”

From this sinister spectacle sprouts a new reflection: The theory of collective guilt has two parallel threads. For the vanquished, it signifies: I must declare myself to be in solidarity with my brother and his guilt. For the victor, it acts, in practice, as a driving force for indiscriminate pillaging. This is a good summary of the predicament, and Jünger expands further: If the bow is drawn too tightly, a dangerous question may arise: was the brother truly so unjust?

The authorities of the area would thus make him pay the price of his mental independence by banning him from publishing any works, and the ban would not be lifted until 1949. This change would not, however, be the result of unexpected and sudden benevolence. Simply put, Jünger and his family had chosen to emigrate to the French occupation zone, which was less fault-finding and censorious.

The word Waldgänger takes its name from an ancient mediaeval Scandinavian custom. According to the latter, any outlaws guilty of murder could be legally slain by anyone who met them. The outcast, however, also had the right to ‘take the forest path’ and take refuge in the woods, living freely there at his own risk.

Any mindset that remains disconnected from real history runs the risk of plummeting into abstractions and confused or unrealistic thoughts. Conversely, any attempt at strict historicisation can make one lose all sense of long-lastingness and permanence.

Turning his back on Nietzschean thought, he believed, at the time, that certain Christian themes would enable him to find the political foundations of resistance to nihilism, which he equated with Nazism. In The Peace, he would thus write the following, for example: The true conquest of nihilism and the attainment of peace will be possible only with the help of the churches.

Jünger had always had the desire to live in accordance with the rites of his own country. He therefore thought it necessary to adopt the religion of his own community. Swabia, however, where he had lived for a long time, was Catholic. Furthermore, German legislation requires one to declare the religion according to which burial ceremony is to be held. This was one of the primary motivations for his late conversion, so that his funeral could be conducted in harmony with the rites of his village and its people.

Jünger was not a doctrinaire, and his thoughts and work were not guided by a concern for logical coherence.

Indeed, the anarch is not the monarch’s adversary. He observes the world around with both interest and detachment, standing ever aloof. He is an attentive observer that has renounced combat, but despite having relinquished all weapons, he has not been vanquished. What he is concerned about is, in fact, his integrity. Unable to be the king of the world, he is the king of his own self.

These intrepid travellers would never be rivalled by anyone in Asia. Although the latter did, admittedly, sometimes encroach into the West, it always took on the shape of conquering swarms charging behind Xerxes, Attila, Tamerlane or Genghis Khan. And all of the latter owed their greatness not to their discoveries, but to the terror of the massacres that they perpetrated.

Jünger apprehends the word freedom in its two main meanings and touches upon each of them successively. Spiritual freedom is the first. It is the freedom of the ‘free will’, an innovation that Ulysses had already embodied: ‘one of the types of Western man, an explorer and an inventor of the highest rank whose spiritual freedom never shrinks from anything and defies the gods themselves.’244 Next comes political freedom, and the rejection of arbitrariness, whose limits and necessity Jünger clearly perceives:

Immersed, since 1918, in an era of perpetual and dangerous upheavals, Jünger was no political theorist, but a superior mind that reflected on things based on his particularly rich historical experience. He never theorised about any specific forms of government. What he did instead was reflect on the demands of a European world made for freedom, while the Asian world flourished in despotism.

Showering in cold water every morning, he would go for a walk through the countryside on a daily basis and indulge in the daily practice of contemplative reading, transcribing his thoughts into his diary and never neglecting the beneficial effects of good wine and sleep. Such was the life of the very active hermit of Wilflingen, until the very end.

[Epistemic Status: Ramble]
As I’m wrapping up the historical part of my folk music obsession – here are random thoughts relevant to group interest

1. The red scare is misnamed and started much earlier and went much longer than I previously thought.
2. The blacklist and all that went with it was much better organized and not designed to be effective
3. Being on an FBI watchlist is a great gift to a future biographer
4. In many ways the range of acceptable behavior was much broader in times past and some degree of social repression is desirable and represents progress
5. The use of the term communist and socialist carries over throughout time, and their theoretical meanings have stayed relatively stable over time, but their practical usage has changed dramatically enought as to make historical comparisons largely meaningless
6. Midwestern Left populism is curious by its absence in cultural prominence, as are the Wobblies
7. The zeitgeist is difficult to summarize in modern forms of media consumption, i.e. 10-minute youtube videos and 5-minute wikipedia reads, there really is no substitute for books for conveying zeitgeist
8. Types of information and metis have different bandwidth and transmission methods – that is probably an area where rationalism can contribute greatly