In Storms of Steel
Jünger’s keeping of his wartime diaries paid off quite well in the long run. They were to become the basis of his first and most famous book, In Storms of Steel, published in 1920. The title was given to the book by Jünger himself, having found the phrase in an old Icelandic saga.It was at the suggestion of his father that Jünger first sought to have his wartime memoirs published. Initially, he found no takers, antiwar sentiment being extremely high in Germany at the time, until his father at last arranged to have the work published privately. In Storms of Steel differs considerably from similar works published by war veterans during the same era, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers. Jünger’s book reflects none of the disillusionment with war by those experienced in its horrors of the kind found in these other works. Instead, Jünger depicted warfare as an adventure in which the soldier faced the highest possible challenge, a battle to the death with a mortal enemy. Though Jünger certainly regarded himself as a patriot and, under the influence of Maurice Barrès,[22] eventually became a strident German nationalist, his depiction of military combat as an idyllic setting where human wills face the supreme test rose far above ordinary nationalist sentiments. Jünger’s warrior ideal was not merely the patriot with a profound sense of loyalty to his country, nor the stereotype of the dutiful soldier whose sense of honor and obedience compels him to follow the orders of his superiors in a headlong march towards death. Nor was the warrior prototype exalted by Jünger necessarily an idealist fighting for some alleged greater good such as a political ideal or religious devotion. Instead, war itself is the ideal for Jünger. On this question, he was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, whose dictum “a good war justifies any cause,” provides an apt characterization of Jünger’s depiction of the life (and death) of the combat soldier.[23]
This aspect of Jünger’s outlook is illustrated quite well by the ending he chose to give to the first edition of In Storms of Steel.
Although the second edition (published in 1926) ends with the nationalist rallying cry, “Germany lives and shall never go under!,” a sentiment that was deleted for the third edition published in 1934 at the onset of the Nazi era, the original edition ends simply with Jünger in the hospital after being wounded for the final time and receiving word that he has received yet another commendation for his valor as a combat soldier. There is no mention of Germany’s defeat a few months later. Nationalism aside, the book is clearly about Jünger and not about Germany. Jünger’s depiction of the war displays an extraordinary level of detachment for someone who lived in the face of death for four years. It is a highly personalized account of the war where battle is first and foremost about the assertion of one’s own “will to power.” Clichéd patriotic pieties are, at most, a secondary concern.
Indeed, Jünger goes so far as to say there were winners and losers on both sides of the war. The true winners were not those who fought in a particular army or for a particular country, but who rose to the challenge placed before them and essentially achieved what Jünger regarded as a higher state of enlightenment. He believed the war had revealed certain fundamental truths about the human condition. First, the illusions of the old bourgeois order concerning peace, progress, and prosperity had been irrevocably shattered. This was not an uncommon sentiment during that time, but it is a revelation that Jünger seems to revel in while others found it to be overwhelmingly devastating. Indeed, the lifelong champion of Enlightenment liberalism, Bertrand Russell, whose life was almost as long as Jünger’s and who observed many of the same events from a very different philosophical perspective, once remarked that no one who had been born before 1914 knew what it was like to be truly happy.[24]
A second observation advanced by Jünger had to do with the role of technology in transforming the nature of war, not only in a purely mechanical sense, but on a much deeper existential level. Before, man had commanded weaponry in the course of combat. Now weaponry of the kind made possible by modern technology and industrial civilization essentially commanded man. The machines did the fighting. Man simply resisted this external domination. Lastly, the supremacy of might and the ruthless nature of human existence had been demonstrated. Nietzsche was right. The tragic, Darwinian nature of the human condition had been revealed as an irrevocable law.
In Storms of Steel was only the first of several works based on his experiences as a combat officer that were produced by Jünger
during the 1920s. Copse 125 described a battle between two small groups of combatants. In this work, Jünger continued to explore
the philosophical themes present in his first work. The type of technologically driven warfare that emerged during the Great War is characterized as reducing men to automatons driven by airplanes, tanks, and machine guns. Once again, jingoistic nationalism is downplayed as a contributing factor to the essence of combat soldier’s spirit.
Another work of Jünger’s from the early 1920s, Battle as Inner Experience, explored the psychology of war. Jünger suggested that civilization itself was but a mere mask for the “primordial” nature of humanity that once again reveals itself during war. Indeed, war had the effect of elevating humanity to a higher level. The warrior becomes a kind of godlike animal, divine in his superhuman qualities, but animalistic in his bloodlust. The constant threat of imminent death is a kind of intoxicant. Life is at its finest when death is closest. Jünger described war as a struggle for a cause that overshadows the respective political or cultural ideals of the combatants. This overarching cause is courage. The fighter is honor bound to respect the courage of his mortal enemy. Drawing on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Jünger argued that the war had produced a “new race” that had replaced the old pieties, such as those drawn from religion, with a new recognition of the primacy of the “will to power.”[25]
Conservative Revolutionary
Jünger’s writings about the war quickly earned him the status of a celebrity during the Weimar period. Battle as Inner Experience contained the prescient suggestion that the young men who had experienced the greatest war the world had yet to see at that point could never be successfully reintegrated into the old bourgeois order from which they came. For these fighters, the war had been a spiritual experience. Having endured so much only to see their side lose on humiliating terms, the veterans of the war were hostile to the rationalistic, anti-militarist, liberal republic that emerged in 1918 at the close of the war. Jünger was at his parents’ home recovering from war wounds during the time of the attempted coup by the leftist workers’ and soldiers’ councils and its subsequent suppression by the Freikorps. He experimented with psychoactive drugs such as cocaine and opium during this time, something that he would continue to do much later in life. Upon recovery, he went back into active duty in the much diminished Germany army. Jünger’s earliest works, such as In Storms of Steel, were published during this time and he also wrote for military journals on the more technical and specialized aspects of combat and military technology. Interestingly, Jünger attributed Germany’s defeat in the war simply to poor military and civilian leadership, and rejected the “stab in the back” legend that consoled other veterans.
After leaving the army in 1923, Jünger continued to write, producing a novella about a soldier during the war titled Sturm, and also began to study the philosophy of Oswald Spengler.
His first work as a philosopher of nationalism appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter, a Nazi newspaper, in September 1923. Critiquing the failed Marxist revolution of 1918, Jünger argued that the leftist coup failed because of its lack of fresh ideas. It was simply a regurgitation of the egalitarian outlook of the French Revolution. In Jünger’s view, the revolutionary left appealed only to the material wants of the German people. A successful revolution would have to do much more than that. It would have to appeal to their spiritual or “folkish” instincts as well. Over the next few years Jünger studied the natural sciences at the University of Leipzig and i
n 1925, at age thirty, he married nineteen-year-old Gretha von Jeinsen. Around this time, he also became a full-time political writer. Jünger was hostile to Weimar democracy and its commercially oriented society. His emerging political ideal was one of an elite warrior caste that stood above petty partisan politics and the middle class obsession with material acquisition. Jünger became involved with the Stahlhelm, a right-wing veterans group, and was a contributor to its newspaper, Die Standarte. He associated himself with the younger, more militant members of the organization who favored an uncompromising nationalist revolution and rejected the parliamentary system. Jünger’s weekly column in Die Standarte disseminated his nationalist ideology to his less educated readers. Jünger’s views at this point were a mixture of Spengler, social Darwinism, the traditionalist philosophy of the French rightist Maurice Barrès, opposition to the internationalism of the left that had seemingly been discredited by the events of 1914, anti-rationalism, and anti-parliamentarianism. He took a favorable view of the working class and praised the Nazis’ efforts to win proletarian support. Jünger also argued that a nationalist outlook need not be attached to one particular form of government, even suggesting that a liberal monarchy would be inferior to a nationalist republic.[26]
In an essay for Die Standarte titled “The Machine,” Jünger argued that the principal struggle was not between social classes or political parties but between man and technology. He was not anti-technological in a Luddite sense, but regarded the technological apparatus of modernity to have achieved a position of superiority over mankind which needed to be reversed. He was concerned that the mechanized efficiency of modern life produced a corrosive effect on the human spirit. Jünger considered the Nazis’ glorification of peasant life to be antiquated. Ever the realist, he believed the rural world to be in a state of irreversible decline. Instead, Jünger espoused a “metropolitan nationalism” centered on the urban working class. Nationalism was the antidote to the anti-particular materialism of the Marxists who, in Jünger’s views, simply mirrored the liberals in their efforts to reduce the individual to a component of a mechanized mass society. Jünger dismissed the humanitarian rhetoric of the left as the hypocritical cant of power-seekers feigning benevolence. He began to pin his hopes for a nationalist revolution on the younger veterans who comprised much of the urban working class.
In 1926, Jünger became the editor of Arminius, which also featured the writings of Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels. In 1927, he contributed his final article to the Völkischer Beobachter, calling for a new definition of the “worker,” one not rooted in Marxist ideology but the idea of the worker as a civilian counterpart to the soldier who struggles fervently for the nationalist ideal. Jünger and Hitler had exchanged copies of their respective writings and a scheduled meeting between the two was canceled due to a change in Hitler’s itinerary. Jünger respected Hitler’s abilities as an orator, but came to feel he lacked the ability to become a true leader. He also regarded Nazi ideology as intellectually shallow and many Nazi leaders as talentless, and was displeased by the vulgarity, crassly opportunistic, and overly theatrical aspects of Nazi public rallies. Always an elitist, Jünger considered the Nazis’ pandering to the common people to be debased. As he became more skeptical of the Nazis, Jünger began writing for a wider circle of readers beyond that of the militant nationalist right wing. His works began to appear in the Jewish liberal Leopold Schwarzschild’s Das Tagebuch and the “national-bolshevik” Ernst Niekisch’s Widerstand.
Jünger began to assemble around himself an elite corps of bohemian, eccentric intellectuals who would meet regularly on Friday evenings. This group included some of the most interesting personalities of the Weimar period. Among them were the Freikorps veteran Ernst von Salomon, the anti-Hitler Nazi Otto Strasser, the national-bolshevik Niekisch, the Jewish anarchist Erich Mühsam, who had figured prominently in the early phase of the failed leftist revolution of 1918, the American writer Thomas Wolfe, and the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen. Many among this group espoused a type of revolutionary socialism based on nationalism rather than class, disdaining the Nazis’opportunistic outreach efforts to the middle class. Some, like Niekisch, favored an alliance between Germany and Soviet Russia against the liberal-capitalist powers of the West. Occasionally, Joseph Goebbels would turn up at these meetings hoping to convert members of the group, particularly Jünger himself, whose war writings he had admired, to the Nazi cause. These efforts by the Nazi propaganda master proved unsuccessful. Jünger regarded Goebbels as a shallow ideologue who spoke in platitudes even in private conversation.[27]
The final break between Ernst Jünger and the NSDAP occurred in September 1929. Jünger published an article in Schwarzschild’s Tagebuch attacking and ridiculing the Nazis as sell-outs for having reinvented themselves as a parliamentary
party. He also ridiculed their racism and anti-Semitism, stating that according to the Nazis a nationalist is simply someone who “eats three Jews for breakfast.” He condemned the Nazis for pandering to the liberal middle class and reactionary traditional conservatives “with lengthy tirades against the decline in morals, against abortion, strikes, lockouts, and the reduction of police and military forces.” Goebbels responded by attacking Jünger in the Nazi press, accusing him of being motivated by personal literary ambition, and insisting this had caused him “to vilify the national socialist movement, probably so as to make himself popular in his new kosher surroundings” and dismissing Jünger’s attacks by proclaiming the Nazis did not “debate with renegades who abuse us in the smutty press of Jewish traitors.”[28]
Jünger on the Jewish Question
Jünger held complicated views on the question of German Jews. He considered anti-Semitism of the type espoused by Hitler to be crude and reactionary. Yet his own version of nationalism required a level of homogeneity that was difficult to reconcile with the sub-national status of Germany Jewry. Jünger suggested that Jews should assimilate and pledge their loyalty to Germany once and for all.Yet he expressed admiration for Orthodox Judaism and indifference to Zionism. Jünger maintained personal friendships with Jews and wrote for a Jewish-owned publication. During this time his Jewish publisher Schwarzschild published an article examining Jünger’s views on the Jews of Germany. Schwarzschild insisted that Jünger was nothing like his Nazi rivals on the far right. Jünger’s nationalism was based on an aristocratic warrior ethos, while Hitler’s movement was more comparable to the criminal underworld. Hitler’s men were “plebeian alley scum.” However, Schwarzschild also characterized Jünger’s rendition of nationalism as motivated by little more than a fervent rejection of bourgeois society and lacking in attention to political realities and serious economic questions.[29]
The Worker
Other than In Storms of Steel, Jünger’s The Worker: Mastery and Form was his most significant work from the Weimar era. Jünger would later distance himself from this work, which was first published in 1932 and reprinted in 1963 only after Jünger was prompted to do so by Martin Heidegger. In The Worker, Jünger outlines his vision of a future state ordered as a technocracy based on workers and soldiers led by a warrior elite. Workers are no longer simply components of an industrial machine, either capitalist or communist, but have become a kind of civilian-soldier operating as an economic warrior. Just as the soldier glories in his accomplishments in battle, so does the worker glory in the achievements expressed through his work. Jünger predicted that continued technological advancements would render the worker/capitalist dichotomy obsolete. He also incorporated the political philosophy of his friend Carl Schmitt into his world view. As Schmitt saw international relations as a Hobbesian battle between rival powers, Jünger believed each state would eventually adopt a system not unlike what he described in The Worker. Each state would maintain its own technocratic order with the workers and soldiers of each country playing essentially the same role on behalf of their respective nations. International affairs would be a crucible where the will to po
wer of the different nations would be tested. Jünger’s vision contains certain amounts of prescience. The general trend in politics at the time was a movement towards the kind of technocratic state Jünger described. These took on many varied forms, including German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism, the emerging welfare states of Western Europe, and America’s New Deal. Coming on the eve of the Second World War, Jünger’s prediction of a global Hobbesian struggle between national collectivities possessing previously unimagined levels of technological sophistication also seems rather prophetic. Jünger once again attacked the bourgeoisie as anachronistic, regarding its values of luxury and safety as unfit for the violent world of the future.[30]
The National Socialist Era
By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, Jünger’s war writings had become commonly used in high schools and universities as examples of wartime literature, and Jünger enjoyed success within the context of German popular culture as well. Excerpts of Jünger’s works were featured in military journals. The Nazis tried to co-opt his semi-celebrity status, but he was uncooperative. Jünger was nominated for the Nazified German Academy of
Poetry, but declined the position. When the Völkischer Beobachter published some of his work in 1934, Jünger wrote a letter of protest. The Nazi regime, despite its best efforts to capitalize on his reputation, viewed Jünger with suspicion. His past association with the national-bolshevik Ernst Niekisch, the Jewish anarchist Erich Mühsam, and the anti-Hitler Nazi Otto Strasser, all of whom were either eventually imprisoned, killed, or exiled by the Third Reich, led the Nazis to regard Jünger as a potential subversive. On several occasions, Jünger received visits from the Gestapo in search of some of his former friends. During the early years of the Nazi regime, Jünger was in the fortunate position of being able to afford travel outside of Germany. He journeyed to Norway, Brazil, Greece, and Morocco during this time, and published several works based on his travels.[31]
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