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.

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 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.

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.

Review: A German Officer in Occupied France. Ernst Jünger's War Journals 1941-1945

I enjoyed this review by Michael Dirda in the Washingon Post of the recent publication of Jünger's War Journals 1941-1945 (Strahlungen) into English. One more not-insignificant work to chip away at the mountain that has not yet been translated! A collection of further reviews here.

As a teenager hungering for adventure, Ernst Jünger ran away from school in 1913 and joined the French Foreign Legion. His father eventually retrieved his delinquent child from North Africa, just in time for the 19-year-old to enlist in World War I. Over the next four years, Jünger would be wounded in action 14 times and, in 1918, be awarded the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s equivalent to our Medal of Honor. He remains the youngest man ever so honored.

In 1920, Jünger published “Storm of Steel,” an extraordinary memoir of his battle experiences. (I recommend Michael Hofmann’s translation for Penguin.) Like T.E. Lawrence’s near-contemporary “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” the book views war from an almost Homeric perspective, celebrating the martial virtues of courage, comradeship and steadfastness; it is dedicated, apolitically, “For the fallen.” In the years following its publication, Jünger completed an astonishing self-transformation into an exceptionally well-read and cosmopolitan intellectual, one particularly passionate about French culture, entomology, mysticism and philosophy. While his political bent was distinctly right-wing, he resisted the era’s virulent anti-Semitism and never joined the Nazi Party. His allegorical 1939 novel, “On the Marble Cliffs,” is frequently read as a critique of Hitler.

Conversazione su Ernst Jünger e la Fedeltà a Firenze

Vi invitamo al dialogo tra Luca Crescenzi e Alessio Mulas su:

"Ernst Jünger e la fedeltà come traduzione, tradizione, tradimento."

Come è concepita e praticata la fedeltà nell’opera e nella vita di Ernst Jünger? È una prassi di cieca servitù a un’idea oppure un’esperienza che discende alle fonti dell’esistenza? Attraverso la figurazione letteraria e la riflessione filosofica, Jünger insegna all’uomo del nostro tempo la difficile via per coniugare lealtà, rettitudine e autonomia, attraverso la pratica di una fedeltà che è interpretazione, conservazione, rinnovamento.

Giovedì 22 novembre
Ore 18
Via Scipione Ammirato, 43
Firenze

Informazioni:
www.eumeswil.cc

On the trail of Ernst Jünger - Sicily November 2017

I was just informed about this interesting and apparently unique initiative from the Association Eumeswil in Florence: a small-group tour to Sicily in November this year, retracing Ernst Jünger's own visits there. The dates are November 1 - 7, starting in Palermo and finishing in Catania. 

English Itinerary >>>

Itinerario in Italiano >>>

Apart from the evident pleasure and intellectual stimulation of traveling for a week in the company of other Jünger enthusiasts and experts, the group will also be meeting local Jünger experts and translators.

I understand that the English translator of Adventurous Heart II and The Forest Passage will be part of the group, as well as directing members of the Association Eumeswil itself.

They have engaged a world-leading travel expert to plan and execute the trip, and they're offering the tour with a very comfortable level of hotels and dining.

It sounds like a very interesting opportunity, I wish I had known about it earlier: the sign up deadline is in just 3 weeks, October 16th.

Working on going myself. But I don't manage it this year, they'll hopefully be offering more trips in the future.

EUMESWIL again available! From Sept 1, 2015

Telos Press has just announced their newest Ernst Jünger publication: a republication of Eumeswil in the superb original Neugroschel translation!!

This is, in my opinion, their most important contribution yet to the dissemination of an author so under- and misread in the Anglo-Saxon world. For years now the original Marsilio publication (Eridanos Library, 1993) has been unavailable, or at least unavailable at normal prices, since single copies occasionally appeared on Amazon for $300 or more. Apparently there is demand, which underlines the importance of Telos making this "bible" of mature Jüngerian thought available to the normal reader at only $26.95.

But most importantly, this new Eumeswil makes the author's critical concept of the anarch again accessible for study and discussion through the life and reflections of its protagonist and proto-anarch, Martin Venator.

(For a taste of the anarch's worldview and life-strategy, see my partial compilation of anarch quotes from Eumeswil.)

I encourage you to buy directly from Telos Press - so giving them, the worthy beneficiaries, Amazon's cut,

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

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."

The Forest Passage - into the concrete jungle

Looking forward to the publication of this first translation of Ernst Jünger's Der Waldgang from Telos Press in December! Until then the cover image also provides food for thought. 

Visually, I find it original and eye-catching. More importantly, it communicates in a nicely condensed form much of what Jünger has to say in the text; any reader ripe for the author's message should understand to pick it off the bookshelf. 

The image makes it clear that a forest passage is not an historic Icelandic phenomenon (the origin of the term), but rather a live-saving possibility in the concrete jungle too. It suggests that the grey facade of technological civilization can be torn aside by a resolute individual, and that behind it will he will find an eternally intact wilderness, a forest of primal freedom, and of dangers that are worth the risk. When his hunger for a personal destiny, his hatred of being a number, a statistic in the machine of Leviathan is strong enough, or when he is simply driven to the adventure by desperate circumstances, he will discover that the apparent omnipotence of society and state is only an intimidating bluff, a veneer that avails itself of showy technology. He will discover that a lone brave heart can stand up to this Goliath too.

The tear that he makes in the fabric of society, openly or secretly, lets new light shine into his world, light from an infinitely greater and older source than the artificial power "illuminating" and impelling modern civilization on its brief, fiery trajectory. This light reveals to him for the first time the possibility of his own true path, of a destiny that he was uniquely born to fulfill, of which the state and even Google can know nothing at all.

Jünger Translation Competition!

Ernst Jünger Translation Competition Launched

The German Department at the University of Bristol is holding a translation competition and invites translations from German into English of extracts from some of Ernst Jünger’s travel writings. Prize money will be given to four entries, with one category limited to entries from current undergraduate students, and numerous book prizes will also be awarded. The deadline for submission of entries is 1 July 2013. Entries will be judged by Julian Evans (London), Christophe Fricker (Bristol), Thomas Friese (Vienna), Petra Rau (Norwich), and Robert Vilain (Bristol).

More information as well as an entry form is available at www.ernst-juenger-translation.info.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was one of the most significant writers and thinkers of 20th-century Europe, and is one of the most controversial. He became famous with the publication in 1920 of In Stahl­gewittern [Storm of Steel], an account of his experiences in the trenches in the First World War. In the following eight decades, Jünger published more than fifty works, including diaries, novels, stories and essays. His novella Auf den Marmorklippen [On the Marble Cliffs, 1939] is a thinly veiled critique of the Nazi regime. Tributes by writers of international stature (including Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin, and Heiner Müller), as well as visits from European heads of state and government (such as François Mitterrand, Roman Herzog, Helmut Kohl, and Felipe González) have helped secure Jünger a prominent place in intellectual debates across Europe.

In recent years, Jünger is emerging as a hidden ancestor of contemporary theoretical and societal discus­sions. Expert and popular audiences across Europe have become part of this development. This translation competition aims to promote the study of Ernst Jünger’s works in English.

EUMESWIL in English - reprint!

I have always maintained that Eumeswil is Ernst Jünger's defining and far and away most important  work. At home I even have three copies of the hardcover English edition (Marsilio Publishers, New York: 1994) - which I picked up for $10 each on the bargain table at a Chapters in Vancouver 10 years ago!

A pity I did not buy everything on the table - as you see below:

If "the market is never wrong", this seems to be a confirmation of my highest opinion of this book.

It should also be an incentive for Marsilio to reprint - or for some other publisher, since the English translation rights in this case seem to have remained with the translator.

In the meantime the impatient reader always has the option to take matters into his own hands and look online for downloadable versions. At these high prices, I cannot imagine that a cult book like this is not available somewhere on the internet for free.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon only seems to be growing. I would pay this much for this book, but I am an exception - I already love the book, and, if need be, I could afford the sacrifice. But many cannot, however much they want to have the book. Such people go online and find free versions - and one can understand their position.

From all perspectives, it would really be time for a reprint!

"The Adventurous Heart": Solitary Sentinels

ON SALE FROM SEPT 1

One last appetizer has been conceded by the publishers before this new Jünger translation goes on sale Sept 1....

Solitary Sentinels - Berlin 

Swedenborg condemned the “spiritual stinginess” that locked away his dreams and insights.

But what of the spirit’s contempt for minting and issuing itself into general circulation, what of its aristocratic self-sufficiency in Ariosto’s magical castles? The inexpressible is degraded when it expresses and makes itself communicable; it is like gold that must be mixed with copper to make it useful as currency. A dreamer, attempting to catch his dreams in the light of dawn, watches them slip away through the mesh of his thoughts, like a Neapolitan fishermen watching the fleeing silver shoals that occasionally stray up into the surface waters of the bay.

In the collections of the Leipzig Mineralogical Institute, I once observed a foot-high rock crystal won from the inner depths of the Sankt Gotthard during tunneling work – a most solitary and exclusive dream of matter. Among the things that Nigromontanus taught me was the certain existence among us of a select group of men who have long withdrawn from the libraries and from the dust of the public arena, who are at work in the innermost spaces, in the obscurest of Tibets. He spoke of men who sit alone in nocturnal rooms, immobile as the rock through whose hollows that current flashes, which keeps all the mill-wheels and hordes of machines running in the outside world - but here it is liberated from all purpose and captured by hearts, which, as the hot, trembling cradles of all forces and powers, have withdrawn forever from the outer light.

From "The Adventurous Heart": The Combinatorial Inference

One more appetiser from the forthcoming Jünger translation "The Adventurous Heart. Figures and Capriccios". I might be permitted to add one or two more, then it will in any case be September and you can order the book yourselves from Telos Press!

The Combinatorial Inference - Berlin

Higher insight does not live in the separate compartments but in the structure of the world. It corresponds to a mode of thinking that does not move around in isolated and parceled-off truths but rather in meaningful connections, whose power to order lies in its combinatorial faculty.

The tremendous pleasure that comes from engaging with such minds resembles a walk through a landscape distinguished as much by the span of its boundaries as by the richness of its particulars. The viewpoints alternate in a whirl of multiplicity, yet all the while the glance takes them in with an even serenity, never losing itself in abstrusity and malformations or in pettiness and eccentricity. Despite the plethora of variations that the mind is able to generate and the ease with which it can switch fields, it perseveres with effortless rigor in making its connections. Its powers appear to grow as much when it turns from the motif to the execution, as when it returns from execution to motif. Using a variation on Clausewitz’s fine image, we can compare this mode of movement with a walk through a convoluted garden in which we are able from every point to see the high obelisk erected at its center.