Ernst Jünger’s War-Forged Man

 

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998)

Kasey James Elliott’s recently published English translation of Ernst Jünger’s 1922 book War as an Inner Experience is so lacking in grace that it is tempting to suspect that Elliott does not even know any German, so much of the text reading like it was vomited out of Google Translate. Having said that, though, enough of the author’s communicative prowess shines through the often unsatisfactory words on the page to make this frustrating little book worth a look.

Certain passages retain the power of Jünger’s expression, and particularly interesting are those portions that are impossible to read except as forecasts of National Socialism’s transformation of Germany. “The war, father of all things,” he sets out in his introduction, “has hammered, chiseled and hardened us to what we are. And always, as long as the swinging wheel of life still circles within us, this war will be the axis around which it whirls.” The Great War “has educated us to fight, and we will remain fighters as long as we are able.” [1] It has, furthermore, created an entirely new type of man:

When I watch them silently cutting alleys in the wire enclosure, digging storm steps, comparing luminous clocks, determining the north direction according to the stars, I am overcome by the realization: This is the new man, the storm pioneer, the selection of Central Europe. A completely new race, clever, strong and full of will. What is revealed here in battle as an apparition will tomorrow be the axis around which life whirls faster and faster. It will not always be possible to clear the way through craters, fire and steel, as here, but the stormy pace with which the events here are presented, the iron-used tempo, will remain the same. The glowing sunset of a sinking time is at the same time a dawn in which one prepares for new, harder battles. Far behind, the gigantic cities, the armies of machines, the empires whose inner bonds are torn in the storm, await the new man, the bolder, the one accustomed to battle, the ruthless against himself and others. This war is not the end, but the prelude of violence. It is the hammer mill in which the world is shattered into new borders and new communities. New forms want to be filled with blood, and power wants to be grabbed with a hard fist. The war is a great school, and the new man will be of our make. [2]

“What is preparing itself here is already a battle in the sense of a completely new time”, he concludes:

Just now […] it seemed to me that the day after tomorrow ancient and sacred symbols were to be carried toward new goals. But here the silk sheen of the flags seems to fade, here speaks a bitter and dry earnestness, a marching beat that awakens the imagination of vast industrial districts, armies of machines, battalions of workers, and cool, modern men of power. Here the material speaks its iron-hard language and the superior intellect that uses the material. And this language is more decisive and cutting than any before. [3]

“But what kind of people are they who do not feel up to their time?” he demands [4]. Indeed, even as European civilization rots in front of our eyes and fills our nostrils with still more contemptible foulness with every hateful day that passes, it is possible, like Jünger, to find in this “sunset of a sinking time” also an opportunity for struggle and greatness in the “dawn in which one prepares for new, harder battles” in which our ancient, sacred symbols finally will be carried forward.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Jünger, Ernst. War as an Inner Experience. Trans. Kasey James Elliott. [no place of publication given]: Anarch Books, 2021, pp. 1-2.

[2] Ibid., pp. 68-69.

[3] Ibid., pp. 101-102.

[4] Ibid., p. 102.


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