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 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.

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.

Vortrag: "Detlev Schöttker: Ernst Jünger und Joseph Wulf. Ein Briefwechsel"

Vortrag und Lesung von Detlev Schöttker und Armand Presser in München

23 November, 2017 @19.00 Uhr

NS-Dokumentationszentrum - Auditorium
Brienner Str. 34
80333 München

Unter den Historikern, die sich mit der Verfolgung und Vernichtung der europäischen Juden im Nationalsozialismus beschäftigt haben, nimmt Joseph Wulf als Auschwitz-Überlebender und erster Chronist des Holocaust eine besondere Stellung ein. 1962 nahm er Kontakt zu Ernst Jünger auf, mit dem er bis zu seinem Tod im Oktober 1974 korrespondierte. Der Briefwechsel, der durch Treffen in Wilflingen und Berlin ergänzt wurde, umfasst etwa 150 Schreiben, in denen beide ihre Auffassungen zur NS-Zeit, zum Holocaust und deren Aufarbeitung dargelegt haben. In vielen Fällen stimmen ihre Bewertungen überein, doch gab es auch Divergenzen. Die Themen und ihre Diskussion lassen die Korrespondenz zu einem bedeutenden Zeugnis über die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus in der Bundesrepublik werden.

Im ersten Band der neuen Reihe Jünger Debatte, der im Oktober 2017 erschienen ist, wird erstmals ein längerer Vorabdruck aus dem bisher unbekannten Briefwechsel zwischen Ernst Jünger und Joseph Wulf publiziert.

Programm des Jünger-Symposions 2017 "AUF DEN MARMORKLIPPEN"

Ernst Jüngers „Auf den Marmorklippen“ – eine literarische Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime. Ernst und Friedrich Jünger Gesellschaft

Kloster Heiligkreuztal, 7. – 9. April 2017

Freitag, 7. April

20.00     Eröffnung des Symposiums, Alexander Pschera und Thomas Bantle

20.15     Hans-Dieter Schäfer, Ernst Jünger und die literarische Moderne im Nationalsozialismus

21.30     Umtrunk

Samstag, 8. April

09.00     Sigfried Lokatis, Ernst Jüngers „Marmorklippen“ und die Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt

10.00     Detlev Schöttker, Wer ist Otho? Zur Rolle Brasiliens in den Marmorklippen

11.00     Kaffeepause

Cultura e Censura nell'Età della Tecnica - Ciclo Conferenze Associazione Eumeswil 2016

Ecco gli incontri dell'anno 2016 dell'Associazione Eumeswil (English translation below):

CULTURA E CENSURA NELL' ETA' DELLA TECNICA

Dal punto di vista della filosofia del diritto, la censura è quella attività repressiva esercitata dallo Stato mediante preventivo controllo per impedire il diffondersi di notizie o di opere letterarie che potrebbero risultare lesive del buon costume oppure dell' ordine pubblico. In un' epoca in cui si assiste alla scomparsa del buon costume e alla parodia sempre più marcata dell' ordine pubblico, si potrebbe credere che la censura non abbia più motivo di esistere. Invece nel corso del ventesimo secolo la sua forza si è enormemente accresciuta. Se prima si sopprimevano alcune righe di un testo, ora si sopprime un intero libro e talvolta il suo stesso autore.

Il ciclo di incontri promosso dall' Associazione Eumeswil si propone di indagare quali sono i motivi e le modalità di questo fenomeno apparentemente contradditorio, il cui risultato è l' impoverimento della cultura e l' affermazione del blablà o "pensiero unico" per mezzo della tecnica. Download programma

Con la speranza di averVi fatto cosa gradita, inviamo cordiali saluti,
Segreteria, Associazione Eumeswil

Conference series 2016 of the Association Eumeswil in Florence:

CULTURE AND CENSURE IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

Sat 19 March 

The case of Guido Morselli and the responsibility of publishers

Speakers: Valentina Fortichiari and Mario Baudino

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.” *

Ernst Jünger's "On the Marble Cliffs" as a parable of staying true to yourself

From Politosophia, a Russian website I stumbled upon, a nice English summary of "On the Marble Cliffs", with an original and excellent take on one important message of the book in its title - how to stay true to yourself. Thank you, Olena!


15 квітня 2012 15:03

Olena Semenyaka

National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”

"There are periods of decline when the pattern fades to which our inmost life must conform. When we enter upon them we sway and lose our balance. From hollow joy we sink to leaden sorrow, and past and future acquire a new charm from our sense of loss. So we wander aimlessly in the irretrievable past or in distant Utopias; but the fleeting moment we cannot grasp."

"So I swear to myself in the future to fall alone in freedom rather than to accompany the servants on the path to triumph."

- Ernst Jünger "Auf den Marmorklippen" ("On the Marble Cliffs," 1939)

In the "Afterword" (notes) to his novel written in 1972 Ernst Jünger remarked that the book was noticed far beyond Germany and was re-published in Riga and Paris at Army's expense (the German publishers, naturally, had problems with Goebbels' censorship). He also mentioned rumors about pirate editions in Ukraine and Latvia, which spread soon after the end of war, although the first official translation beyond the Iron Curtain appeared in 1971 in Bucharest.