Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945

300 Pages·1997·12.616 MB·English

by  Thomas Nevin

Ernst Jiinger and Germany
Into the Abyss, 1914-1945
Thomas Nevin
Constable • London
Thomas J. Bata Library
RENT UN rVERS I
First published in Great Britain 1997
by Constable and Company Limited
3 The Lanchesters, 162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
Published in the United States of America
by Duke University Press, 1996
© 1996 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ®
Typeset in Monotype Garamond by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
A cip catalogue record for this book
is available from The British Library
isbn o 09 474560 9
For Karl Zangerle
Der Irrniss und der Leiden
Pfade kam ich

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Why Jiinger? i
1 • The Years Before Chaos: 1895-1914 9
2 • The Quill of Ares: 1914-1925 39
3 • Weimar Polemics: 1925-1932 75
4 • Beehives in a Botany of Steel: The Worker, 1932 115
5 • The “Internal Emigration”: 1933-1939 141
6 • In the Golden Cage of Suffering: Paris, 1940-1944 173
Postlude: Hitler’s War, Jiinger’s Peace 229
Inconclusions: Jiinger and German Guilt 237
Notes 243
Selected Bibliography 269
Index 279

Acknowledgments
M
uch I owe many. Nigel Jones and Jean-Fran^is Valet were
wonderfully helpful in getting me started. For their advice
and references early in the writing I wish to thank James Albi-
setti, Gordon Craig, Bruce Gudmundsson, Konrad Jarausch, Gerhard
Loose, and Dennis Showalter; thanks, too, to Jost Hermand and Fritz
Stern later in this process. A very special debt I owe to the late Hermann
Broch de Rothermann, who kindly encouraged me from the first and
who was a model of equanimous judgment about Jtinger and his writing.
Klaus Jonas read and sent me criticisms of the first and second chap¬
ters. George Mosse took valuable time from his own work to provide
a very helpful reading of the third chapter. Karl Zangerle, a sharp-eyed
reader who is also exceptionally knowledgeable about Jiinger, read the
entire work in its initial draft, caught many errors, and afforded many in¬
sightful criticisms. My debt to him is inadequately recorded on another
page. I am immeasurably grateful to my keen-eyed readers for Duke
University Press, who combed the manuscript, saved me from countless
errors, and provided many valuable suggestions for revision. Whatever
the shortcomings of perspective in this book, all are mine alone.
I wish to thank the many librarians who gave me their help unstint-
ingly: Drs. Regina Mahlke and Jorg Jacoby of the Preussischer Kultur-
besitz, Berlin; Ulrich Ott and the staff of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv,
Marbach; Christa Sammons, curator of German books, the Beinecke
Library, Yale University; the staff of the Militargeschichtliches Forschung-
samt and Dr. Fleischer’s colleagues at the Militararchiv, Freiburg-im-
Breisgau; the staff of the photo documents and printed books depart¬
ments, especially Martin Taylor, at the Imperial War Museum, London;
Agnes Peterson at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace,
X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stanford; Donald Wright at the Library of Congress; and, for securing
me a rare edition of Feuer und Blut, Dorothy Christiansen, librarian at the
State University of New York, Albany. Caron Knapp was untiringly help¬
ful in filling innumerable interlibrary loan requests. Roger Woods gener¬
ously supplied me with rare copies of Ernst Jtinger’s essays for Arminius.
I wish to thank also the sponsors of papers I have given on Jiinger:
Alain Blayac at the Universite Paul Valery, Montpellier; Hugh Cecil and
Peter Liddle at Leeds University; Laszlo Gefin at Concordia University,
Montreal; and Terri Apter at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. On all
of these occasions I have been immeasurably stimulated by lively discus¬
sions about Ernst Jiinger. I am particularly indebted to my colleagues of
many disciplines at Clare Hall, where I composed much of this work, and
above all to Antony and Belle Low, who helped to make the academic
year of 1992-1993 so pleasurable and productive.
I have benefited from many conversations with a longtime and fair-
minded reader of Jiinger, my colleague Wilhelm Bartsch. For other talks
and insights I am grateful to Brian Bond, Hugh Cecil, the late Alister
Kershaw, Keith Simpson, Zara Steiner, and Jay Winter.
John Carroll University generously granted me a leave of absence for
1992-93 which allowed me to complete the first draft of this work. The
George F. Grauel Foundation I thank for its financial support during that
year. The Graduate School of John Carroll University kindly contributed
a subvention toward the publication of this book.
I wish to thank Klett-Cotta for permission to reproduce photos from
Ernst Jiinger: Sein Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten, ed. Heimo Schwilk
(1988). I am also grateful to Ian Carter and the Imperial War Museum for
permission to reproduce photos from the First and Second World War
archives.
I am profoundly indebted to the editorial staff of Duke University
Press and especially to Valerie Millholland and Pamela Morrison for the
highest professionalism, enthusiasm, and courage.
I can never adequately express to my wife, friend, and fellow scholar
Caroline Zilboorg my appreciation for all the support and invaluable
writing time she has given me over the past seven years. I owe a similar
debt to our four children, who have so understandingly put up with their
academic parents.
Finally, I wish to thank the subject of this book and his wife, Frau
Doktor Liselotte Jiinger, for admitting me to their home in July 1992.
Introduction: Why Jiinger?
E
rnst Jiinger’s life and writing span one hundred years and five
periods of modern German history: the late Wilhelmine era, the
Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, Germany divided, and the
new Germany. This book addresses the first three periods and Jtinger’s
first fifty years: his formation as a writer, his endurance in the two World
Wars, and the crystallization of his reputation.
Jiinger is one of this century’s foremost writers. His first memoir, In
Storms of Steel, was published seventy-five years ago. George Steiner has
said that “it remains the most remarkable piece of writing to come out
of the First World War.” Since then Jiinger has remained controversial:
extolled, despised, denounced, admired. Now in his one hundred and
first year and still writing, he holds Germany’s highest literary awards,
the Goethe Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize, yet he is regularly dis¬
paraged in Germany’s foremost weekly journal, Der Spiegel. His writings,
as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the
Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him.
He served in the military occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, but he
is an honorary citizen of Montpellier, has received the Medaille de la Paix
of Verdun, and has a street named after him in Cambrai. At the Franco-
German reconciliation ceremonies at Verdun in September 1984 he was
the guest speaker of the French president and the German chancellor.
Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand have visited him at his home in
the Black Forest; so have estimable fellow writers, Borges and Moravia
among them. Mitterrand has said that had Jiinger lived in the age of
Napoleon he would have been one of Bonaparte’s marshals. Pope John
Paul II has given him a citation, and to observe Jiinger’s centenary a left-
2 INTRODUCTION
ist director bitterly attacked him in an obscene musical, “Ernst Jiinger’s
Storm of Steel,” which played for weeks in East Berlin.
Neither celebration nor defamation has affected him. “I am immune
to praise,” he once said over German radio. “Like Till Eulenspiegel, no
sooner have I set one foot down in the valley than my other is leaping to
the next peak.” About the legion of haters he has said little, but his esti¬
mate of the “world improvers” among them is on record. “They like to
call themselves Marxists or humanitarians but they are just power wield-
ers.
If he has helped the cause of Franco-German reconciliation, he has
furthered political divisions in Germany itself. His detractors see him
as a fascist, an embarrassing offense to Germany in its generations-long
search for self-restoration. His apologists claim he is a Christian humanist
or an adventurer. They suppose that his violent writings of the 1920s were
not a prescription for Hitlerism but a seismograph of the tremors that
shook and finally destroyed the Weimar Republic. Jiinger’s friends and
foes can agree that Germany after fifty years in the wilderness of its search
for identity has yet to come to terms with the man who is its distant past
articulated in variously dark and luminous tones. As Heinrich Boll was
Germany’s postwar “conscience,” Jiinger is, by fate’s leave, its still living
pre-Hitler conscience, one that many Germans would rather not carry.
The militant mentality that makes the word teutonic so unsettling has
its primary representative in Jiinger because his writing is, with some
historical exceptions, so poised and detached that the tone seems imper¬
sonal and objective. He is a naturalist of war who sees in it both chaos
and order. He challenges us by his eerie equanimity and his refusal to
moralize, thus forcing us to consider or reconsider assumptions that may
in fact be only illusions or prejudices. What is one to say of a decorated
veteran who scorned Hitler but affirmed war? “Combat is one of the truly
great experiences, and I have yet to find someone for whom the moment
of victory was not one of devastating exhilaration.”
Fellow veterans have been radically divided in their estimate of Jiinger.
Edmund Blunden believed that “for the whole affair of trench and shell-
hole life, Lieutenant Jiinger is a spokesman of the highest order, fresh
and distinct in detail, balanced in judgment and reflection, eloquent and
richly allusive. He obtains our absolute trust.” Of this same man, Richard
Aldington observed that Jiinger was almost unrivaled in his idolatry of
destruction.