The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger - a podcast reading of the whole book

I discovered this podcast reading of The Forest Passage on a website new to me: "Immediatism: Essays provocative and incendiary." The site offers almost 500 podcasts on a variety of topics from Anarchism to Post-Left to Technology and many other categories of alternative world views.

The original reading was divided up into nine podcasts, including the translator's introduction and a formal introduction by Russell Berman. I've spliced them all into one long video with a title bar below indicating the chapters for reference.

Each podcast of a few chapters is preceded by a short introduction and summary of what has been read so far. I find the narrator's voice and manner of reading quite pleasant and her comments intelligent and to the point.

Many thanks to Immediatism.com for going to all this work with such a critical work of Ernst Jünger's - enjoy!

Eumeswil Türkçe çeviri yayınlandı!

Prospero • 7: Eumeswil

Ulus Baker'in "Çağdaş Alman edebiyatının en güçlü yazarı" dediği Ernst Jünger'in Eumeswil'i 5 Nisan'dan itibaren kitapçılardaki yerini alacak.

Jünger’in 82 yaşındayken yayımladığı ve “Aşırılıklar Çağı” olarak da adlandırılan 20. yüzyıl başta olmak üzere bütün bir uygarlık tarihinin nitelik ve içeriğini historiyografik, ansiklopedik, felsefi öğelerle harmanlayarak irdelediği distopik romanı Eumeswil’i Süheyla Kaya Almanca aslından çevirdi.

http://jaguarkitap.com/books-siradakiler/eumeswil/

The Essential Anarch - quotes on the anarch from Eumeswil

As an aid to anyone aspiring to live as an anarch in the sense developed in Ernst Jünger's novel, Eumeswil, through the character of its protagonist, Manuel, I have compiled a complete collection of all quotations from the book that elaborate on this critical Jüngerian theme. 

However impossible such a choice may seem given all the unique ideas Jünger has given us, I do find the concept of the anarch the single most important contribution he has provided the world. Personally, It helps me understand and maintain my distance from the affairs of our world and thus, where they affect me, manage them better in my own interests. I firmly believe that only individuals have any chance of eluding the powerful forces of control in our world and realizing their destiny despite the efforts of these powers.

The quotations are given with hopefully enough surrounding text to provide context, but without comment so that each reader may - must - come to their own personal understanding. Precisely the ability to differentiate one's own personal, yet objective understanding of reality is a fundamental task of an anarch. 

The quotations are listed in order of appearance in the book, and descriptive titles are provided along with a selection of keywords. The quote titles are compiled into a table of contents and the key words into an index. For anyone new to the book, a short list of key characters and terms should provide enough context to understand each quote on its own.

Naturally these titles and key words are subjective and non-exhaustive, but they should make the document more navigable. Seriously-minded anarchs will in any case have their own copy of  Eumeswil on hand for reference, in which case this document can serve as a handy reference tool. 

The pdf below may be viewed as embedded here, but it is best downloaded and viewed since the convenient links in the table of contents will then function. 

An epub version is also available for download here.

Between Order and Disorder: Ernst Jünger on the Marble Cliffs - by Francisco Carmo Garcia

(From VoegelinView, 16 Feb 2021)

There are several examples that help us grasping that particular zeitgeist lived in the first half of the 20th century. A book such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain gives us a description of the moral and spiritual decomposition of the then bourgeois society. At this time, in the bashed and defeated post-war Germany, nihilism had turned to be a dominant moral disposition. Oswald Spengler announced the decline of the West amidst the hubris of the Great War; Nietzsche’s will to power was convincing posthumously a younger generation of German intellectuals; and Heidegger was caught exasperating at the end of philosophy. This aura of decadence marked the period, and to that faith in the inevitable progress of humanity so specific and characteristic of the 19^th century there followed an intellectual and existential despair. Ever since the moment when the idea of progress was contested by the destruction caused by the war, that a sense of moral disorientation had necessarily to follow.

It is this crisis of the idea of progress that we can feel all over Ernst Jünger’s oeuvre, from his famous diaries of his experience in the Great War (In Stahlgewittern), to his “prophetic” work Der Arbeiter and his late novels. But one book of his in particular allows us to penetrate in the nihilistic zeitgeist of the inter-war period: his Auf den Marmorklippen, published at the zenith of Hitler’s power, in 1939. This little book – On the Marble Cliffs, in English –, forgotten in the same way which its author is neglected by the intelligentsia, tells us more about our own times – which are also times of crisis – than several of the “scientific” works that are widespread today, and which denounce a supposedly evident return of fascism. In this jüngerian tale, the despotic figure of the tyrant appears in its most violent essence, as the result of a cosmological disorder that hits society in all of its foundations. On the Marble Cliffs is a book that needs to be remembered, the meaning of which seems today almost as intelligible – and appropriate – as when it was first published.

Eumeswil and Ernst Jünger's Anarch - with Russell Berman - excellent listen!!

Ernst Jünger's 'Forest Passage' | The American Conservative

Ernst Jünger’s ‘Forest Passage’

(Photo by: Bildagentur-online/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

FEBRUARY 11, 2020

|

6:23 PM

ROD DREHER

After I gave my speech last week in Rome, someone came up to me and said, “You have to read The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger.” I wish I could remember who told me that, but I do remember that they were emphatic. So I ordered it on my Kindle that night from my hotel room, and read it on the flight home.

It’s pretty great. Jünger is one of those writers I’ve heard a lot about, but never read. He died in 1998, at the age of 102. The German fought for the Kaiser in World War I, wrote a celebrated memoir about it, and was wooed by Hitler, though he kept his distance, and even wrote a novel that was widely interpreted as anti-Nazi. Yet he fought for his country in World War II. He was a conservative, but not a Nazi. He wrote a number of books, and became well-loved throughout Europe, especially in France. He came from an unbelieving family, but converted to Catholicism two years before his death.

The Forest Passage, first published in 1951, is a book about resistance to the material age, and authoritarian government. It’s kind of mystical, in a very German Romantic way, which is a bit too much Schlag on the strudel, but this is a minor criticism. This passage by Russell Berman from the introduction to the 2013 Telos Press edition gives you a good idea of where Jünger is coming from:

Religion is important for Jünger because it taps into dimensions of irrationality and myth, the deep wisdom at home in the forest. It is not that Jünger proselytizes or engages in theological speculation, but he recognizes how irrational contents nourish the capacity for independence. No wonder the regimes of power celebrate the cult of reason instead. “How is man to be prepared for paths that lead into darkness and the unknown? The fulfillment of this task belongs chiefly to the churches, and in many known, and many more unknown, cases, it has effectively been accomplished. It has been confirmed that greater force can be preserved in churches and sects than in what are today called worldviews—which usually means natural science raised to the level of philosophical conviction. It is for this reason that we see tyrannical regimes so rabidly persecuting such harmless creatures as the Jehovah’s Witnesses—the same tyrannies that reserve seats of honor for their nuclear physicists.” It is worth noting how the two twin totalitarianisms of the twentieth century each posed as the carrier of a scientific mission: the biological racism of Nazism and the economic “science of Marxism- Leninism” in Communism. From our contemporary point of view, of course, neither is a science, but Jünger’s point is that modes of scientistic thinking are fully compatible with reigns of terror, while the integrity of faith may preserve a space of freedom, a leap of faith into the forest passage.

Various/verschiedene Ernst Jünger Videos

After creating the English subtitles for the new ARTE/rbb documentary on Jünger I spent some time reuploading some of the older documentaries and discussions already on my channel, but in unified and not split form.

Nachdem ich die englischen Untertitel für die neue ARTE / rbb-Dokumentation auf Jünger erstellt hatte, habe ich einige Zeit damit verbracht, die älteren Dokumentarfilme und Gespräche, die sich bereits auf meinem Kanal befanden, erneut hochzuladen, jedoch in einheitlicher und nicht aufgeteilter Form.

ENGLISH
"Ninety flown by: the author Ernst Jünger" - NDR/ORF 1985


DEUTSCH
"Neunzig Verweht - der Schriftsteller Ernst Jünger" - NDR/ORF 1985


"Ich widerspreche mir nicht - Ernst Jünger" - ZDF/3SAT, 1977
 
"Baden Badener Dichterclub über Ernst Jünger" - mit Rolf Hochhut, Ernst Herhaus, Jürgen Lodermann, und Klaus Theweleit. (Jahr?)

"In the Trenches of History: the author Ernst Jünger" - 2019 documentary with English subtitles!

Here's a decent documentary film on the German Goethe Prize author Ernst Jünger, produced by rbb/ARTE. i went to considerable trouble to create good English subtitles - hope they'll allow more non-German speakers to learn something of this remarkable thinker.

Source: ARTE.DE (2019) https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/082773-...

One of the better documentaries on Ernst Jünger, this relatively more balanced production is unfortunately only a partial picture - and not in the sense of being skewed by the usual ignorance level and prejudices - but because it barely covers until 1960, until his move to Wilflingen.

It thus entirely leaves out the critical mature works and themes of Jünger: Eumeswil and the anarch, the Forest Flight (Der Waldgang), The Wall of Time (An der Zeitmauer), Aladdin's Problem, Approaches: Drugs and Inebriation, and much more. In this respect, we optimisticslly view it as Part One, and hope for at least a Part Two to come.

The film presents contrasting views on Jünger from Germanistic professors and other experts. The fairest and most informed contributions come - quite logically - from the two real experts, his recent biographers Heimo Schwilk and Helmuth Kiesel. Some of the other "experts" voice the usual cliched complaints but then almost visibly reluctantly admit his literary greatness. Naturally, it is a simplification of a highly complex person, but perhaps more should not be expected in one hour, given the length and eventfulness of Jünger's life and the complexity of his thought.

Tagung der Ernst und FG Jünger Gesellschaft 3 -5 April, 2020

Thema: Ernst Jünger und Frankreich - Aspekte einer gefährlichen Begegnung

UNA DOMANDA SU JÜNGER - Luca Siniscalco e Andrea Scarabelli

CONVERSAZIONI 2019 - GLI GRANDI INTERROGATIVI  dell'Associazione Eumeswil Firenze:

Ernst Jünger: Gespräche im Weltstaat - Podcast mit Jörg Magenau

Dialoge über die Substanz der Zeit

Von Jörg Magenau

 

Podcast hier hören

15 August 2019 - Zu Gast bei Ernst Jünger"Konservativer zu sein ist keine politische Idee"

Ein Jahrhundert in Gesprächen mit Ernst Jünger.

Von Jörg Magenau

Jede Ordnung wird von der Anarchie korrigiert. Denn "alles, was entsteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht". Der hundertjährige Ernst Jünger schrieb diese Maxime aus dem "Faust", die er oft zitierte, Schopenhauer zu. Seine Frau Liselotte korrigierte ihn, "das war Goethe". Und er: "Aber Schopenhauer hat es zitiert. Na gut." Was kümmerten ihn, der die planetarischen Ereignisse mit der Abgeklärtheit eines unbeteiligten Beobachters zu kommentieren pflegte, solche Kleinigkeiten. Längst hätte es ihm gereicht, sich auf seine Käfersammlung zu konzentrieren, um sich - erneut zitierte er Goethe - ansonsten "aus der Welt der Erscheinungen zurückzuziehen." Im hohen Alter darf man sich selbst historisch werden. "Manchmal trinkt man morgens Kaffee. Das ist eine gewisse Epoche. Dann wieder Tee oder einfach Mineralwasser. Das sind Lebensabschnitte."

Es sind solche kleinen Irritationen, Belustigungen, manchmal auch Verärgerungen, die die gesammelten Gespräche mit Ernst Jünger so lebendig machen. Da bricht das Gravitätische, Erhabene, das er kultivierte, momentweise auf. So rief ihn 1982 Horst Tomayer im Auftrag der Zeitschrift Konkret an, indem er sich für Luis Trenker ausgab. Im Gespräch mit dem "Alpenfreund" entwickelt Jünger eine tiefenhumoristische Grandezza. Das Ansinnen des falschen Trenkers, endlich einmal zusammen etwas im Fernsehen zu machen, lässt Jünger in formvollendeter Höflichkeit ins Leere laufen. Seine Gesprächspartner pflegte er selber auszusuchen.

Review of Jünger's WWII diaries in English translation - by Michael Lewis

A Dandy Goes to War

Review of 'A German Officer in Occupied Paris' By Ernst Jünger

• SEP, 2019 
 
• BY MICHAEL LEWIS

Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.

One might ask why it has taken 70 years for Jünger’s diary to appear in English translation, for there is no more detailed account of the occupation from the German point of view. But Jünger was always controversial, up to his death in 1998 at the age of 102. In Germany, polite opinion has never forgiven him for Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I that saw in the experience of combat an ultimate test of manhood. “The finest, most visceral account of battle since the Iliad,” according to the New Statesman, his book made him a hero among German nationalists and ensured his privileged status in Nazi Germany. As it happens, Jünger was anything but a Nazi.

Storms of Steel - audio review of 2003 Hofmann translation

A quick and simple yet insightful introduction to Michael Hofmann's 2003 English translation of Storms of Steel, for anyone who hasn't read it. The reviewer also hadn't read anything of Jünger's prior to this review, so he has a pleasantly unbiased and uncomplicated perspective.

Review of EUMESWIL - with comparisons to FOREST PASSAGE

From The Worthy House on January 21, 2019

Eumeswil (by Ernst Jünger)

written by Charles

Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil, one of the famous German’s last works, published when he was eighty-two years old, is often regarded as an exposition of libertarian thought. This is understandable, but completely wrong. Such a reading attempts to shoehorn concepts in which Jünger had little interest, or toward which he was actively hostile, into an exploration of unrelated themes. Moreover, it ignores that in this book, though somewhat masked, Jünger has more contempt for so-called liberal democracy than dislike for what some call tyranny. Thus, this book is not a call to rework society, or individual thought, along libertarian lines. It is instead a call for human excellence, and a criticism of the modern West for failure to achieve it, or to even try.

One cannot really understand Eumeswil without reading, preferably first reading, Jünger’s earlier The Forest Passage, which was published in 1951, twenty-six years before Eumeswil. On the surface, they are very different—this book is cast as dystopian science fiction, and The Forest Passage is a work of philosophical exposition. But Jünger himself explicitly ties the two books together, linking the earlier book’s concept of the “forest rebel” with this book’s concept of the “anarch.” In both books, the author’s focus on freedom, specific to each individual, is easily misinterpreted, because what freedom means to most people today is not what Jünger means by the term. Jünger means an internal, spiritual freedom, an elitist freedom, not the freedom of license and consequent ennui. This confusion drives all the misunderstandings of Eumeswil.

Review of THE FOREST PASSAGE by Ernst Juenger

From The Worthy House on October 13, 2018

The Forest Passage (by Ernst Jünger)

written by Charles

Ernst Jünger was one of the more fascinating men of the twentieth century. Remembered in the English-speaking world primarily for his World War I memoir, The Storm of Steel, he was famous in Europe for a range of right-leaning thought spanning nearly eighty years (he lived from 1896 to 1998). His output was prodigious, more than fifty books along with voluminous correspondence, and not meant or useful as a seamless ideology, although certain themes apparently recur. This book, The Forest Passage, was published in 1951, and is a compelling examination of how life should be conducted under modern ideological tyranny.

Jünger’s answer is jarring, both in its originality, and in its flat rejection of any relevancy of those modern (though failing) totems, liberal democracy and egalitarianism. Jünger was no Nazi; he contemptuously rejected their efforts to profit off his reputation, and was tangentially involved in the Stauffenberg plot. But he had just as little use for modern democracy or liberalism; much of his thought seems to have revolved around a type of social and political elitism with a spiritual core. It appears that The Forest Passage was his first exploration of the specific topic of resistance to tyranny; he developed the thought in this book further with a novel published in 1977, Eumeswil, which I have not read.

Ernst Jünger's "ON PAIN" and progressive hysteria in liberal democracies

Some excellent insights in this video on certain dangerously seductive illusions of liberal democracies - presented as and clearly stimulated by reflections on Ernst Jünger's long essay "ON PAIN".

The Path to a Higher Freedom: The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger

The Path to a Higher Freedom

Tobias J. Lanz

This review appears in the Summer 2014 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

Download PDF version here.

---

The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger, trans. Thomas Friese
(Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2013)

This is a book about freedom. It was first published in 1951 as a response to the Nazi experience and the perceived threat of Soviet expansion. Its explicit focus was resistance to the totalitarian state. Yet its implicit focus is resistance to all forms of social control, including the soft totalitarianism of present-day mass democracy. And this why Ernst Jünger’s classic remains relevant today, and that is why Telos Press has reissued it.

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was twentieth-century Germany’s most prolific author. He was also the most controversial. He was a highly decorated soldier in World War 1 who first gained literary fame writing about his war experiences. Jünger aligned himself with the political Right during the 1920s and 1930s and wrote scathing attacks against the Weimar regime and the decadence of liberal democracy and communism. He championed a German nationalism based on aristocratic and martial values.

His early writings gained him a reputation as a fascist and militarist, an image that haunted him for the rest of his long literary career. But Jünger distanced himself from Hitler and the Nazis early on, realizing that the political Right and Left differed little; both led to totalitarianism. The war and Germany’s defeat changed Jünger’s perspective even more. His militarist leanings changed to an existential quest—a way to find freedom in the modern world, in which the mechanisms of total social control continued to multiply.

Video review of "ON PAIN" (Über den Schmerz) by Ernst Jünger

A light and amusing but insightful and accurate review of On Pain, the English translation by Telos Press of Ernst Jünger's Über den Schmerz.

Conversazioni 2019 - Programma dell'Associazione Eumeswil

Invito da ASSOCIAZIONE EUMESWIL al programma delle conversazioni e corsi 2019 a Firenze:

I GRANDI INTERROGATIVI

Cosa sono: 12 conversazioni. Ciascun incontro è tenuto almeno da due interlocutori.

• 6 domande a carattere esistenziale-metafisico
• 6 domande a carattere sociale

Da chi sono tenute: docenti universitari, studiosi, scrittori, giornalisti
Dove: in un salotto informale, un salotto letterario come in epoche passate. Centro studi Eumeswil, Via S. Ammirato, 43
Quando: da marzo a dicembre 2019 
Orario: 18.00
Ingresso: ad offerta libera cartacea

Per saperne di più:
www.eumeswil.cc

Cordialmente,
Segreteria, Associazione Eumeswil

MARZO

Mercoledì 20
Abbiamo avuto una vita precedente?
Relatori: Giuliano Boccali e Premakumar Das (Pierpaolo Marras)

Giovedì 28
Che cos’è l’Io?
Relatori: Massimo Bacigalupo e Fausto Malcovati

APRILE

Sabato 6
Che cos’è l’autorealizzazione?
Relatori: Giovanni Sessa e Massimo Jevolella