ZEIT interview with Ernst Jünger in 1989

The following is my unofficial translation of an interview with Ernst Jünger which appeared in the ZEIT magazine in 1989. The interviewer is André Müller.

I leave it to the reader without comment - in any case, even the most objective translation contains something of the translator.

A friendship developed from my original working contact with Ernst Jünger, who I interviewed for ZEIT on November 8, 1989. We corresponded and he called me at regular intervals, initially to let me know about favorable critiques or newspaper articles, but later also to ask my opinions or share something personal. I visited him five times, twice at his house in Wilflingen and three times at his nephew´s,* where he stayed when he came to Munich for the annual meeting of recipients of the Bavarian Order of Maximilian. According to Jünger, I owed this interview to the second wife of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the journalist Charlotte Kerr, who had requested a television interview with him. He said she had warned him about me. I was a dangerous chap with whom he should be on guard. He responded to her that he understood that as a compliment and decided to accept my request. After some hesitation, he even agreed to a recording.

Personal happiness and the anarch

"It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now - in time.

The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. "Make thyself happy" is his basic law. It is his response to the "Know thyself" at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure.” Eumeswil, page 192.

COMMENTARY

In this quote, Jünger discusses one of the anarch’s basic goals in life, personal happiness. He begins with an observation that illustrates where most people, in contrast to the anarch, look for happiness. When religions still breathed real life, when gods still had credible forms, man looked for his final happiness through their means and methods. As belief in the gods declined, so man began to look for happiness in the mundane world, through the non-transcendent means of politics. Politics, with the aid of technological progress, began promising personal happiness in the material here and now. In a similar manner to his ineradicable illusion that social progress is about to outlaw war forever, so is man reassured and continues to believe, despite ever-repeating disappointment, that his personal happiness is also around, if not this, then the next corner. Politics thus capitalises on one of man’s chronic ailments, the all-pervasive disease of “tomorrow”.

But on this point, we should not conclude that the anarch is necessarily on the side of the gods, for as Jünger says, they, or at least their cultic representatives in religions, also promised man happiness in the hereafter, while treating him unfairly in the present. The anarch is not automatically on anyone’s side, but decides for himself when and to whom he gives his allegiance. “No god above me”, as Manuel states elsewhere in Eumeswil. (Touching on the anarch’s relationship to art, Jünger comments that at least the gods brought more attractive forms along with them, art instead of machines, temples instead of termite mounds.)

The anarch, in contrast, keeps thing simple – he looks to no external providers or guarantors of happiness but makes himself responsible for it. He is thus untouched by the promises and failures of religions and regimes; he neither hopes in nor is disappointed by what worldly powers or gods offer him. “Make thyself happy” - and to the degree that he also knows himself, understands his own measure, he knows how to make that happen.

Again, the self-reliance of the anarch is emphasised. He does not look outside himself - to religions, regimes, or insurance companies - for his happiness and security, but finds them within and creates them for himself without.