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!

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 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.

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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.

"Technikutopie und Technikkritik bei den Brüdern Jünger": Tagungsprogramm 2018, Ernst und F.G. Jünger Gesellschaft

Kloster Heiligkreuztal, 23–25 März 2018

** Information und Anmeldung: Ernst und Friedrich Georg Jünger-Gesellschaft. Oder direkt per E-Mail an Hans-Peter Oberle

Freitag, 23 März 2018

• 20:00 - Eröffnung des Symposiums - Alexander Pschera und Thomas Bantle

• 20:15 - Die Philosophie der Technik in den 20er und 30er Jahren und Jüngers Arbeiter - Alexander Michailowski

• 21:30 - Umtrunk

Samstag, 24 März 2018

• 9:00 - Ernst Jüngers medientheoretische Überlegungen - Detlev Schöttker

• 10:00 - Jüngers Philosophie der Technik und Heidegger - Vincent Blok

• 11:00 - Kaffeepause

• 11:30 - F. G. Jüngers Perfektion der Technik im europäischen Denkkontext - Alexander Pschera

12:30 - Mittagessen

• 14:00 - Vom Verlust des Raumes in Zeiten der Beschleunigung: Ernst Jüngers Reiseprosa und die technische Moderne

• 15:00 - Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Zur Technikkritik im Myrdun und Der Waldgang - Niels Penke

• 16:00 - Kaffeepause

• 17:00 - Mitgliederversammlung der Ernst und Friedrich Georg Jünger-Gesellschaft e.V.

• 18:30 - Abendbrot

• 20:00 - Abendveranstaltung: Michael König (Burgtheater Wien) liest aus Ernst Jüngers Waldgang

Sonntag, 25 März 2018

• 9:30 - Ernst Jüngers Gläserne Bienen - Niels Werber

• 10:30 - Eumeswil und die Posthistoire - Helmuth Kiesel

• 12:00 - Besuch Jünger-Haus

• 13:00 - Mittagessen im Löwen, Wilflingen

• Ausklang - Mokka in Stauffenberg´schen Schloß, Wilflingen

CONFERENZA: Ernst Jünger tra censura e tecnica

Cari soci e simpatizzanti, siamo lieti di invitarVi ad un incontro dal titolo generale:

ERNST JÜNGER - TRA CENSURA E TECNICA

Sabato 21 maggio, ore 17

Hotel Croce di Malta

Via della Scala 7, Firenze

www.eumeswil.cc

RelatorI: Valentina Menesatti e Pietro Piro.

Pierluigi Moressa al termine ci leggerà pagine tratte da Sulle scogliere di marmo di Ernst Jünger. Nel corso dell' incontro si esaminerà la possibilità di raggiungere zone sottratte al potere del Leviatano tecno-logico, dove l'uomo può incontrare se stesso e la propria divina potenza, lontano dal deserto del nichilismo. Che ne sarà dell' uomo? Se il destino della tecnica è quello di accrescere sempre di più la

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

The Forest Passage - old freedom in new clothes

Another short excerpt from the forthcoming publication of "The Forest Passage" by Ernst Jünger, naturally with the permission of the publisher Telos Press. It will be available from Telos sometime in December - stay tuned!

(... from Chapter 31)

"As we see, predicaments arise which demand an immediate moral decision, and this is most true where the vortex is deepest and most turbulent. 

This has not been, and will not always be the case. Generally speaking, the institutions and the rules associated with them provide navigable terrain; what is legal and moral lies in the wind. Naturally, abuses occur, but there are also courts and police. 

This changes when morality is substituted by a subspecies of technology, that is, by propaganda, and the institutions are transformed into weapons of civil war. The decision then falls to the individual, as an either-or, since a third position, neutrality, is excluded. From this point forward, a particular form of infamy lies in non-participation, but also in making judgments from a non-participating position. 

The ruling powers, in their changing incarnations, also confront the individual with an either-or. This is the curtain of time, which rises perpetually on the same, ever-recurring spectacle. The figures appearing on the curtain are not the most important point - the either-or facing the individual has a quite different aspect. He is led to the point where a choice must be made between his directly bestowed human nature and the nature of a criminal.

How will the individual stand up to this interrogation? Our future hangs in the balance on just this point. Perhaps it will be decided just where the darkness appears blackest. Alongside the autonomous moral decision, crime forms the other option for preserving sovereignty in the midst of the loss, in the midst of the nihilistic undermining of being. The French existentialists recognized this much correctly. Crime has nothing to do with nihilism; on the contrary, it offers a refuge from nihilism’s destructive erosion of self-awareness, a way out of the wastelands to which it leads. Chamfort already said: “L'homme, dans l'état actuel de la société, me paraît plus corrompu par sa raison que par ses passions.” *

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.

Zum 100 Geburtstag von Ernst Jünger - ZDF 1995.

Noch ein Video über Ernst Jünger, diesmal von ZDF zu seinem 100. Geburtstag in 1995. Zweile Teile, je 45 Minuten.

Ernst Jünger. Kämpfer - Psychonaut - Anarch

(Aus Science.ORF.at, 13.04.2012)


Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) polarisierte wie kaum ein anderer Intellektueller des 20. Jahrhunderts. Man nannte ihn einen Propagandisten des Krieges und bezeichnete seine Dichtungen als "Herrenreiter-Prosa". Dennoch hatte der deutsche Dichter-Philosoph auch für manche Vertreter der 68er-Bewegung seinen Reiz. 

Er war "eine Art Geheimtipp, umgeben von der Aura des intellektuell Obszönen", wie etwa der ehemalige deutsche Außenminister Joschka Fischer einmal bemerkte. Ein Bericht über drogeninduzierte "Paradiese" und "menschliche Lurche" im Werk des Ernst Jünger.

Jünger neu lesen 

Um die weit verbreiteten Klischees über Jünger ad acta zu legen, hat der Philosoph Gerd B. Achenbach Anfang April ein mehrtägiges Seminar im schwäbischen Kloster Heiligkreuztal veranstaltet. Die Intention von Achenbach, der eine Philosophische Praxis in Bergisch Gladbach betreibt, war es, einige Erkundungen in das facettenreiche, subtile Werk des umstrittenen Künstler-Philosophen zu unternehmen. 

Sie sollten zeigen, dass Jünger durchaus als Philosoph betrachtet werden kann, wenn man – so Achenbach - voraussetzt, dass Philosophie nicht mit Fußnotenphilologie und akademischer Seminararbeit verwechselt wird. Im Gespräch mit science.ORF.at verwies Achenbach auf Jüngers "Strategie", nämlich die Phänomene und Tätigkeiten des Alltagslebens, die kaum beachtet werden, als Ausgangspunktpunkt für theoretische Exkursionen anzusehen. Sie führen Jünger "vom scheinbar Trivialen in das unwegsame Dunkel des Geheimnisvollen".

Der Waldgang als Hörbuch

UPDATE 18 AUG/11
Zwei neue Rezension zum Hörbuch "Der Waldgang" sind letztlich erschienen (danke Tobias Wimbauer!):

"Fränkischen Nachrichten" 15. August 2011, S. 23:
Hörbuch

1951 veröffentlichte Ernst Jünger den kulturpessimistischen Essay „Der Waldgang“. Jünger entwarf darin das Bild eines übermächtigen Staates – das kann sowohl ein diktatorischer Staat als auch die moderne Massendemokratie sein –, der seine Bürger gängelt und bevormundet. Gegen diesen omnipotenten Staat setzt Jünger den „Waldgänger“, den Einzelnen, der sich nicht von den Strukturen des Massenstaates vereinnahmen lässt, sondern Widerstand leistet. Der Waldgänger ist für Jünger eine Art Werte-Guerillero, der sich nicht von den Lockungen des Staates einfangen lässt. Und gerade dadurch wird er zum Totengräber des autoritären Staates, der auf die Nichtbeachtung seiner Werte mit einem Aufwand reagieren muss, der ihn auf Dauer zugrunde richtet. „Er kann selbst Heere lähmen, wie man es an der Napoleonischen Armee in Spanien gesehen hat“, schreibt Jünger. In Jüngers Waldgänger wird eine tiefe Abneigung gegen die Diktatur, aber auch die sich auf Medien stützenden Politik in der Demokratie erkennbar. Man muss Jüngers Analyse nicht teilen, muss aber seinem Scharfsinn in der Argumentation Achtung zollen. Jüngers Essay ist nun in einer Hörbuch-Edition, gelesen von dem Schauspieler Thomas Arnold, erschienen.

str

Junge Freiheit, Nr. 34, 19. August 2011, S. 16 

Ein Akt des Widerstands Hörbuch: „Der Waldgang“ von Ernst Jünger 

THORSTEN THALER 

Ein gutes Buch ist wie ein guter Whisky: Sie reifen mit den Jahren. So ist es mit Ernst Jüngers Essay „Der Waldgang“, erschienen vor sechzig Jahren, 1951, und heute in der 13. Aufl age lieferbar. Wer die Schrift öfter zur Hand nimmt, wird feststellen, daß sie mit den Jahren an Aktualität und Bedeutung gewinnt. „Zur Eigenart unserer Zeit gehört die Verknüpfung bedeutender Auftritte mit unbedeutenden Darstellern. (…) Das Ärgerliche an diesem Schauspiel ist die Verbindung von so geringer Höhe mit ungeheurer funktionaler Macht. Das sind die Männer, vor denen Millionen zittern, von deren Entschlüssen Millionen abhängen. Und doch sind es dieselben, von denen man zugeben muß, daß der Zeitgeist sie mit unfehlbarem Griff auswählte, wenn man ihn unter einem seiner möglichen Aspekte, nämlich dem eines gewaltigen Abbruchunternehmens, betrachten will.“ Wer denkt bei diesen Sätzen Jüngers nicht sofort an die immer gleichen Bilder von immer neuen EU-Konferenzen und „Gipfeltreffen“, an Sarkozy und Berlusconi, von dem deutschen Politpersonal ganz zu schweigen? Als Akt des Widerstands gegen totalitaristische Tendenzen und Anpassung bleibe dem Einzelnen und kleinen Eliten nur der Waldgang, durch den der Wille zur Souveränität und Behauptung aus eigener Kraft bekundet werden könne. Diesem Jüngerschen Typus kann man sich jetzt nicht nur lesend, sondern auch hörend nähern. In der sehr umtriebigen Edition Apollon ist „Der Waldgang“ komplett als zudem noch prächtig gestaltetes Hörbuch erschienen, vorgelesen von dem Schauspieler und Sprecher Th omas Arnold. Einziges kleines Manko dieses sonst so verdienstvollen Unternehmens: Wer einmal zum Beispiel Ben Becker gehört hat, wie er aus Jüngers Werk liest, wird sich mit Th omas Arnolds Stimme nicht anfreunden können. 

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Ernst Jüngers "Der Waldgang" ist ein unausweichlicher Trittstein zum Roman Eumeswil und zur Figur des Anarchs - deshalb möchte ich hier etwas Reklame für das neue Hörbuch zum Roman (Edition Apollon) machen. (Nun auch bei Tobias Wimbauer Buchversand erhältlich: €23.99 versandkostenfrei Lieferung in Deutschland).

 

Das erste Jünger Hörbuch - Der Waldgang

The anarch - a wolf, a master spy?

It occurs to me that one could explain and differentiate the Anarch and the Waldgänger with at least a couple of analogies ....

One could bring the old English expression "a wolf in sheep's clothing" to bear on the Anarch, who appears to be like the masses around him but underneath is not at all. He can be social but he is not socialized. Unlike the socialized beings around him, he remains fundamentally a free loner, even with his sheep's clothing on. He has strong, sharp teeth, which he hides, so they are not pulled "for the common good of the herd" - he may need them in an emergency.

But the analogy only goes so far and the differences are equally revealing. The anarch's relationship to the sheep around him is not predatory - this wolf's enemy is the shepherd and his dogs, not the sheep. When he is smelled out, he is forced to throw off his disguise, run for the cover of the woods, use his teeth if necessary in defense - in short, become a Waldgänger.

Another analogy - this time not mine but Jünger's - is the master spy, who disguises his true nature and loyalties and lives smoothly integrated into a world that is essentially foreign to him. Like the Anarch, his true mission remains his secret and it is entirely different from those around him. Like the Anarch, he puts on a false mask, a foreign uniform and he must resist identifying with those around him and their causes - when the mission is a very long one, this difficulty is not to be taken for granted - spies are turned, as free souls are lost to the world. Lastly, the ordinary people around the spy are not his enemies but rather their master and his watchdogs. An Anarch with philanthropic tendencies, may even, like certain spies, come to empathize with the ordinary innocents around him, secretly feel that in his small way he may be helping to free them from a bad master.

As with the wolf analogy, the differences are also important to note here. The master spy knows from the start who he is and what his mission is; the Anarch has first to lose himself to society and then laboriously to rediscover his true identity, his true heimat, his mission in life. The Anarch has no aspirations to contribute, however indirectly, to the defeat of the society he is embedded in - he is not an anarchist. Though he may go to great lengths to serve an external cause, if his own integrity or the challenge appeals to him, he will not ultimately martyr himself to it. And finally, the Anarch works for no other master, he is his own.

Anarch and Waldgänger (1)

Comments I made on differences and commonalities in Ernst Jünger´s figures of the Anarch and the Waldgänger (the Forest Goer) went over well on a Jünger mailing list (http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/juenger_org/ ), so I have reworked and copied them below.

(For clarification, the Waldgänger was first developed in Jünger´s study "Der Waldgang" (The Forest Flight). Although it precedes "Eumeswil" and the Anarch chronologically (1951 vs 1977), in metaphysical terms much in the concept of the Anarch is already contained in that of the Waldgänger. The two do not exclude each other, but rather the former further develops the latter. In terms of level of being, they are more or less identical - differences only concern existential situations and the specific strategies that result.

Thus, although Jünger had not yet coined the word Anarch when writing "Der Waldgang", he said then that one could be a Waldgänger in the heart of the city, a clear foreshadowing of an Anarch. Later, when he explicitly refined the Waldgänger into an Anarch in "Eumeswil", he specified that the Anarch is the free man living in private autonomy within society; he becomes a Waldgänger when he is uncovered as a spiritual outsider and forced to flee society to preserve this autonomy. An Anarch thus comprehends a Waldgänger as a weaker form to be resorted to in an emergency. Just as an undiscovered Waldgänger living peacefully in the city was already in essence an Anarch. But on to the copied discussion ...)

From "Der Waldgang":

Man sleeps in the forest. When he awakens and realizes his power, then order is reconstituted.

Man does not become a Waldgänger (and by extension an Anarch) only then when he enters or flees to the literal forest: at the deepest level of being, each single man is already in the forest, is already a forest-goer, the forest being the original untamed core of his being. But in his sleep he has lost sight of this, forgotten where he is, hypnotized by dreams which are not even his. In sleep, he dreams the dreams that society has implanted in him and he is controlled by them, their slave, without having the slightest sensation of the chains. He (merely!) needs to awaken from the illusion to see that he (and not the protagonist of his dreams) is really in his own forest, and he has always been there. With this awakening, the Anarch/Waldgänger discovers the metaphysical separation of that forest from the tamed world, its absolute autonomy from civilization that wants to trap him, hypnotize him, seduce him, control him in its various ways for its own selfish purposes. Now he can make a realistic attempt to become his own master, to restore his own order to his life. Whatever it may have promised, in the dream there was never a real possibility of that, it was always another´s order.

If existential difficulties require it, the Anarch is forced to flee to the literal forest and transform into the Waldgänger form. But in his inner wilderness nothing changes - there he remains master where ever external life may take him.