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Ernst Junger thread:
After Storm of Steel was published in 1920, Junger's writings would take an extremely different turn from his initial praise of war as a transcendental experience and hope that technology would allow for a new type of man to a anti-tech naturalist.
After Storm of Steel was published in 1920, Junger's writings would take an extremely different turn from his initial praise of war as a transcendental experience and hope that technology would allow for a new type of man to a anti-tech naturalist.
In 1932, on the eve of the rise of the NSDAP and the fall of Weimar, Junger published The Worker, an essay that called for the destruction of the bourgeois world of abstract freedom, reason, and individuality in favor of a society focused on "warrior-worker-scholars" that, would
use technology to master the world and obtain ultimate power in a combined imperial project that would result in total war. The worker was to find their freedom and joy in the total mobilization needed for modern war - a war of workers. The new man would use tech to master the
world and be mastered by technology himself, resulting in a sort of mysticism and higher calling of pain and sacrifice that was to find its complete expression in total war and domination. There is no need of bourgeois values - morality, reason, religion, or even nationalism.
Junger further developed his critique of liberalism in his 1934 essay On Pain in which he rejects all liberal values: liberty, security, ease, and comfort. He writes that man finds meaning through pain and sacrifice which tests the limits of and stimulates the human senses
Again, these later works cannot be understood properly without Storm of Steel, in which Junger sees war as a mystical experience that reveals the true nature of existence and gives fulfillment to the individual. Junger propagated these ideas in Germany's Conservative Revolution
but unlike many other nationalists of the time he did not get along with the NSDAP. He rejected an offer for a seat in the Reichstag and openly denounced Hitler's rejection of the Rural People's Movement. He would also publish a novel in 1939, On the Marble Cliffs, critiquing...
the political situation in Nazi Germany. In WWII he was clearly disillusioned with Nazi Germany and the war, instead spending most of his time as an intelligence officer mingling around Paris and writing. During this time in 1943 he wrote "The Peace", a 30-page essay in which he
denounced the war as having destroyed Europe and Christendom, erupting naked bestiality, animalizing soldiers into bloodthirsty “lost souls”, and desacralizaing men into vermin. War and work had lost their previous aristocratic and mystical values for Junger. He now instead
called for a spirtual revolution and the rechristianizing of Europe, which would only be saved by placing the Church in the center of its existence like in the medieval era. Man could only be saved if his soul was saved first. After the war his writing changed from praising
technology to becoming more anti-tech - viewing it as more dehumanizing and liberal than he once believed. This can be seen in his later novels The Forest Wanderer and The Glass Bees, which were precursors to magical realism and reflected on the preference of nature to technology
One of Junger's last works, Eumeswil, focuses on his conception of the anarch, the truly sovereign individual, who is aloof to society and all forms of government, who prefers nature and history to technology and progress. It's a very odd book - sci-fi and philosophy, but good
Towards the end of his life, Junger converted to Catholicism, a development which was influenced by his meetings with Catholic writers like Leon Bloy and George Bernanos in Paris during WWII over fifty years earlier.
