iPhone4 or iPhonophore?

It was not Steve Jobs and Apple who invented the iPhone4 - they only gave birth to what Ernst Jünger had intellectually conceived in 1949 in the novel Heliopolis and continued into Eumeswil (1977). By a nice coincidence, Ernst Jünger's "universal communicator" has essentially the same name - the phonophore.

iPhone4 or iPhonophore?

Below is a rough translation of the most relevant passage from Heliopolis - only a brief commentary is useful, so obvious are the parallels. (See also my previous blog on the Phonophore.)

(Originaltext auf Deutsch ist unten ...)

Praise for the new English translation of Jünger's Der Waldgang

The Forest Passage is available from Telos (and other major booksellers) as of today. Some comments from the Telos site on the book:

Ernst Jünger's The Forest Passage explores the possibility of resistance: how the independent thinker can withstand and oppose the power of the omnipresent state. No matter how extensive the technologies of surveillance become, the forest can shelter the rebel, and the rebel can strike back against tyranny. Jünger's manifesto is a defense of freedom against the pressure to conform to political manipulation and artificial consensus. A response to the European experience under Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, The Forest Passage has lessons equally relevant for today, wherever an imposed uniformity threatens to stifle liberty.

Praise for The Forest Passage

"In a strikingly poetic political statement written soon after the Second World War, Ernst Jünger rejects the two reigning ideologies, democracy and communism, in favor of an individualistic stance anticipating what we now call libertarianism. The ideal that Jünger projects for us is a metaphorical 'passage through the forest' in which we remain constantly put to the test, with the result that we emerge self-sufficient, rebellious, heroic."
—Herbert Lindenberger, Stanford University

Conferenze su Ernst Jünger in Italia per 2014

E' uscito il nuovo programma del ciclo di conferenze per 2014 dell'Associazione Eumeswil di Firenze! Tema per questo anno: IL CORAGGIO. (Tutto il programma da scaricare qui)

Tra le 24 interventi da Marzo a Novembre ci sono già 4 conferenze su Ernst Jünger:
-------------------------
Sabato 25 Ottobre
L’eroe anarchico
Relatore; Marcello Barison, ricercatore in filosofia, scrittore
Jünger e l’esperienza del sacro
Relatore: Gregorio Bardini, musicista, scrittore

-------------------------

Sabato 22 Novembre
La felicità nell’era della tecnica. Riflessioni sul messaggio di Ernst Jünger 

Relatore: Alberto Krali, docente di Lingua tedesca, Università Cattolica di Milano
Oltre la linea tra M. Heidegger e E. Jünger

Relatore: Pavel Rebernik, docente incaricato di Filosofia, Pontificia Università Gregoriana

-------------------------

Tutte le conferenze si terranno alle ore 17
L’Istituto dei Padri Scolopi - Scuole Pie Fiorentine -
Via Lamarmora n. 35 – Firenze, Italia.

Entrata a offerta libera. L’Associazione si riserva il diritto d’ ingresso

Jünger-Symposion 2014 - Programm und Einladung

Click on the image or here for the full program (Google Drive)

Ernst Jünger and the living memory of World War I

Thanks to Eliah Bures for this excellent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books on the importance and best use of living memories of war in general and World War I in particular: Rest in Peace: World War I and Living Memory. Eliah focuses especially on Ernst Jünger's war diary, the Kriegstagebuch 1914-1918, which appeared in print in 2010. 

A short excerpt follows, full text here.

"One of the most revealing before-and-after comparisons has only recently become available. In 2010, Ernst Jünger’s Kriegstagebuch, 1914-1918 appeared in print, some 12 years after its author’s death at the age of 102. This “War Diary,” which records in meticulous detail Jünger’s 44 months on the Western Front, formed the basis for a host of memoirs, of which Storm of Steel is undoubtedly the most famous. First published in 1920, Storm of Steel underwent numerous revisions, evolving throughout that decade into a manifesto of a “new nationalism” that recast Germany’s battlefield defeat as a spiritual victory, the fiery birth of a new and hardened warrior-elite who would redeem the nation. Even in the amended 1961 edition on which the recent English translation is based, Storm of Steel remains an arresting counterpoint to the received wisdom about the war. 

What is striking, however, is how this classic statement of the pro-war myth differs from the war Jünger recorded in his diaries. Indeed, the Kriegstagebuch reveals a soldier who, though clearly the narrator in embryo of works like Storm of Steel, was more susceptible to the war’s grim absurdities than hitherto suspected. If the Kriegstagebuch never gives up on the war as a heroic adventure, it also records moments of clear disillusionment. As Jünger wrote in May 1917, in a meditation on the war’s devastated landscape: “When will this shitty war come to an end? What might one have seen and enjoyed during this time… But still no end in sight.” 

There is, in fact, hardly a trope, image, or barb familiar to students of the anti-war myth that fails to find its way into the Kriegstagebuch. Jünger resents the orders of staff officers and begrudges ideas about the conduct of the war from those “rear-area pigs” less acquainted than he with conditions in the front lines. The gulf between the truth of actions Jünger has taken part in and the sanitized accounts that appear in official communiqués calls forth responses ranging from bemusement to disgruntled annoyance. Time and again he catalogs the miseries of rain, mud, cold, lice, boredom, shabby quarters, meager rations, interrupted sleep, and sheer exhaustion. And above all there is the ubiquitous presence of corpses: the soft feel of bodies beneath one’s feet; the unmistakable smell of decomposing flesh, particularly unwelcome at mealtime; the sight and sound of maggots; bodies bloated and covered in flies; the discovery of corpses — or, more often, a mélange of their component parts — while digging in; and the relentless effects of artillery, disturbing and dismembering bodies long dead like a plow turning and breaking the soil. (“Not even the dead,” Jünger dryly notes, “are permitted to rest in peace.”) Death, when it comes, strikes randomly and from points unknown. That the liberal consumption of alcohol figures so prominently in Jünger’s diaries is hardly a surprise."

Post-1945 Ernst Jünger: Call for Papers

A Call for Papers on post-1945 Ernst Jünger, which for obvious reasons I am happy to pass on here - far too infrequently does this vastly more significant period of his life get attention from academia!

Organized by/for the annual meeting of american Germanisten in Kansas City, Missouri, Sept 18 - 21.

For more information, click on the text or contact Thorsten Carstensen:  tcarsten(at)iupui.edu.

Ernst Jünger incontro a Varese. 1 Marzo 2014

What would seem to be quite an interesting meeting on Ernst Jünger in Varese, Italy. With Quirino Principe, major translator of Jünger in Italian. Click on the image to view original.

Un incontro su Ernst Jünger in Varese, tra l'altro con il traduttore maggiore in Italiano delle sue opere, Quirono Principe. Clickare sul immagine per vedere il depliant originale.