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.

"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.

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.

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

STURM by Ernst Jünger now available in English from Telos Press

from the Telos Press website...:

Sturm by Ernst Jünger

Translated by Alexis P. Walker

With an Introduction by David Pan

Set in 1916 in the days before the Somme offensive, Ernst Jünger's Sturm provides a vivid portrait of the front-line experiences of four German infantry officers and their company. A highly cultivated man and an acute observer of his era, the eponymous Lieutenant Sturm entertains his friends during lulls in the action with readings from his literary sketches. The text's forays into philosophical and social commentary address many of the themes of Jünger's early work, such as the nature of war, death, heroism, the phenomenon of Rausch, and mass society. 

Originally published in installments in the Hannoverscher Kurier in 1923, Sturm fell into obscurity until 1960, when it was re-discovered and subsequently re-published by Hans Peter des Coudres, a scholar of Jünger's work.

Gli Annali di Eumeswil: Il Coraggio

Gli Annali di Eumeswil è una rivista pubblicata dal Associazione Eumeswil (Firenze), scritti di narrativa e di saggistica con periodicità annuale. Il tema di ogni fascicolo riprende il tema del ciclo di conferenze del Associazione Eumeswil di quel anno.


Adesso è possibile richiedere direttamente dal Associazione Eumeswil il nuovo fascicolo "IL CORAGGIO" (dal ciclo di conferenze 2014 "Il Coraggio").

Anche gli arretrati sono ancora disponibile:
– TEMPO E DESTINO (2012)
– ORIENTE E OCCIDENTE (2011)
– NOSTALGIA DEL PARADISO (2010)
– IL CRIMINE (2004)
– LA MENZOGNA (2003)
– NATURA E CULTURA (2002)
– IL BOSCO (2001)

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."

Intellectual prejudice - quantified and visualised

"What we do here is to judge a 100 year old man based only on what he did between his 19th and, let’s say, 29th year, and everything that he wrote in the next 70 years is not even mentioned."
Rolf Hochhuth, Baden Badener Dichterclub, 1995

"Was wir machen hier ist einen hundert jährigen allein zu betrachten, nachdem was er zwischen seinen 19sten und, sagen wir, 29sten Jahr geschrieben hat, und die ganze Sachen, die er in den letzten 70 Jahren geschrieben hat, die werden hier gar nicht genannt."
Rolf Hochhuth, Baden Badener Dichterclub, 1995.

Filmessay über Jünger: Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1993)

Und ich habe auch einen deutschen Filmessay über Ernst Jünger auf Youtube gefunden - sehr unterhaltsam! Und auch ziemlich aufschlussreich.

 

Der kosmische Ernst Jünger

Hier ein Text über "Auf der Marmorklippen" - ich finde ihn sehr lesenswert, auch für seine Betrachtungen über unsere eigenen Lage. Und ich bedanke mich für den Hinweis bei dem Verfasser, Philippe Guichard....

Der kosmische Ernst Jünger.

  

In "Auf den Marmorklippen" erinnert die Prosa von Ernst Jünger an die "Illuminationen" des Arthur Rimbaud. Es sind Sätze eines "Sehers", die eine wohl geordnete Traumlandschaft schöpfen. Das Buch stammt aus dem Jahr 1939. Die Tagebücher zwischen 1941 bis 1945 veröffentlichte Jünger unter dem Titel "Strahlungen", ein technisches Wort, das sein kosmisches Wesen aufs Schärfste trifft. 

"Auf den Marmorklippen" beschreibt eine Idylle, die Zeiten an der "großen Marina", einer Weingegend, in der die Seele im Herbst die Frucht der Körperarbeit erntet: "wenn in den kleinen Städten und Dörfern die Torkel zu knarren begannen und der Geruch der frischen Trester um die Höfe seine gärenden Schleier zog, stiegen wir zu den Wirten, den Küfern und Weinbauern hinab und tranken mit ihnen aus dem bauchigen Krug." Im Frühling findet sich die Harmonie auf dem Marktplatz im Fackelschein beim Maskenaufzug wieder: "die Männer gingen als Vögel und die Frauen waren in Prachtgewänder vergangener Jahrhunderte vermummt. Sie riefen uns mit hoher, verstellter Spieluhrstimme Scherzworte zu, und wir erwiderten mit schrillem Vogelschrei."   

Ernst Jünger - "The Devil's Captain"?

UPDATE 10.04.2012: eine neue Rezension zum Buch "The Devil's Captain - Ernst Jünger in Paris, 1941 - 1944), diese auf Deutsch von Helmuth Kiesel...

Autor(en):	Mitchell, Allan
Titel:	The Devil's Captain. Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944
Ort:	New York
Verlag:	Berghahn Books
Jahr:	2011
ISBN:	978-0-85745-114-9
Umfang/Preis:	vii, 119 S.; € 35,34

Rezensiert für den Arbeitskreis Historische Friedensforschung bei H-Soz-u-Kult von: 
Hellmuth Kiesel, Germanistisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg
E-Mail: <helmuth.kiesel@gs.uni-heidelberg.de>

Mitchells Studie „The Devil’s Captain: Ernst Jünger in the Nazi Paris, 1941–1944“ ist ein Addendum zu seinem großen, 2008 erschienenen Buch „Nazi Paris“.[1] Der Titel der Studie verdankt sich, wie leicht erkennbar ist und wie der Verfasser zu Beginn des Vorworts bestätigt, Carl Zuckmayers Drama „Des Teufels General“, das bekanntlich einen Teufelskerl von Fliegeroffizier zwischen den Versuchungen des Nazismus und den Forderungen des Widerstands zappeln lässt. Mitchell las es während seiner Studienzeit am Middlebury College in Vermont, wo Zuckmayer von 1941 bis 1946 lebte und „Des Teufels General“ schrieb. Die Figur des Zuckmayerschen Generals muss sich Mitchell so tief eingeprägt haben, dass er während seiner Beschäftigung mit Jüngers Pariser Tagebüchern begann, den Autor vor dem Hintergrund dieser Gestalt zu sehen. Mit dem ersten Abschnitt des Vorworts räumt Mitchell dann aber auch gleich ein, dass die Differenzen größer als die Ähnlichkeiten sind. Jünger erreichte nie einen höheren Rang als den eines Hauptmanns, und sein Verhalten unterschied sich deutlich von der Rolle des Zuckmayerschen Generals in der deutschen Widerstandsbewegung. Damit ist aber auch gleich gesagt, dass der Titel der Jünger-Studie allenfalls berechtigt wäre, wenn er mit einem Fragezeichen versehen und solchermaßen als Ausdruck einer Fragestellung gekennzeichnet wäre. In der jetzigen Form, die man als Feststellung versteht, ist er unangemessen und irreführend, freilich auch dazu angetan, der Studie Aufmerksamkeit zu verschaffen.

"Ich hätte wie Jünger gehandelt" - Volker Schlöndorff

Interview aus "Die Welt", 15.02.2012. Autor: Heimo Schwilk | 06:39

"Ich hätte wie Jünger gehandelt"

Volker Schlöndorff über seinen Film "Das Meer am Morgen", der die Geschichte einer Geiselerschießung zur Zeit der deutschen Besatzung in Frankreich erzählt.

Als Volker Schlöndorffs Film "Das Meer am Morgen" erstmals beim Filmfestival in Biarritz gezeigt wurde, löste er beim Publikum Erschütterungen aus, es gab Tränen und danach stehenden Applaus. Der Film erzählt die Geschichte des jungen Kommunisten Guy Môquet, der 1941, zur Zeit der deutschen Besatzung in Frankreich, zu den 50 Geiseln gehörte, die nach einem Attentat auf einen deutschen Offizier zur Vergeltung erschossen wurden. Die Filmhandlung erhält eine pikante Note dadurch, dass Schlöndorff den Schriftsteller Ernst Jünger, von 1941 bis 1944 als Offizier im deutschen Militärhauptquartier in Paris tätig, auftreten lässt (gespielt von Ulrich Matthes). Jünger hatte auf Anordnung des Militärbefehlshabers von Stülpnagel eine Dokumentation der Geiselerschießungen verfasst und die Abschiedsbriefe der Hingerichteten übersetzt. "Das Meer am Morgen" wird bei der Berlinale außerhalb des Wettbewerbs gezeigt.

Aus "One Man's War" (La guerre d'un seul homme, 1983)  - von Edgardo Cozarinsky.

Die Welt: Herr Schlöndorff, was halten die Franzosen davon, dass ausgerechnet ein deutscher Filmregisseur die Geschichte der Geiselerschießungen erzählt?

Volker Schlöndorff: Es war ja ein französischer Journalist, der mir ein Buch zu diesem Thema gegeben hat mit der Bitte, ich soll etwas darüber machen. Ich war sofort emotional gepackt und habe entschieden, den Film zu drehen. Ich wollte die Geschichte allerdings erst einmal den Deutschen erzählen. So wie Marc Rothemund den Fall Sophie Scholl den Ausländern nahebringen wollte, so möchte ich, gerade als Partner des deutsch-französischen Senders Arte, den Fall des jungen Kommunisten Guy Môquet den Deutschen erzählen. Es gibt eine psychische Energie, die von starken Emotionen ausgeht, die sich dann im Film wiederfindet. Diese Energie hat die Lektüre des Buches bei mir ausgelöst.

One Man's War - Ernst Jünger in Paris

I just found this excellent documentary (in 8 parts)  juxtaposing Ernst Jünger´s life in Paris (via citations from his WWII Paris diaries "Strahlungen") with Vichy propaganda shorts and other film footage from the same years. On the one hand, the typical illusions of mass propaganda, with its simplistic facade of normality, its one-sided righteousness, its certainty in the evilness of the enemy and in the march to victory despite everything; all this spiced with a trite wit completely of out touch with the awful reality. On the other hand, Jünger's impartiality, his honest concise depictions of the real horrors, of the futility of it all, but also of the small moments of true humanity that emerge in wartime. At moments, his words also reflect his superior vision of the metahistorical significance of what was really coming to pass, above and behind not only the propagandistic illusions but also the material "reality of the day".

Incidentally, Jünger himself knew of this film, as a short passage from The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Jünger reveals. In those conversations with Julian Hervier, he only indicates that he had given the director Cozarinsky permission to make the film and in retrospect had no reason to regret the decision. Indeed - it is well done and provides excellent context for Jünger's difficult and yet enriching experience in occupied Paris. A big bonus: it has English subtitles with mostly decent translations of the Strahlungen citations.

Die F.A.Z über das Jünger-Symposion 2011

Piloten im Auslegungsgeschwader.
Eine Tagung über Ernst Jünger korrigiert das Bild vom Autor als Kriegstreiber

Wer schreibt, verfasst stets ein Stück innerer Autobiographie. Besonders deutlich wird dies bei Autoren, die Tagebuch schreiben. Ernst Jünger führte nahezu achtzig Jahre lang ein Diarium, das ihm teils nur als zu bearbeitende Grundlage weiterer Aufzeichnungen diente, wie beispielsweise sein mehrfach revidiertes Erster-Weltkriegs-Epos "In Stahlgewittern" oder seine explizit als Tagebuch erschienenen Werke wie die "Strahlungen". Entsprechend ging es beim diesjährigen Symposion des "Freundeskreises der Brüder Ernst und Friedrich Georg Jünger" im oberschwäbischen Heiligkreuztal nahe bei Jüngers Wohnort Wilflingen um Krieg und Frieden im Werk des ehern Umstrittenen.

Der Historiker Alexander Demandt (Lindheim) verwies auf die Bedeutung des Krieges im Leben Ernst Jüngers, als er im Sinne seines Gewährsmannes, des antiken griechischen Geschichtsschreibers Thukydides, den Krieg einen gewalttätigen Lehrer nannte. Indem Demandt nachwies, wie gründlich Thukydides schon über den Gegensatz Recht und Macht und damit auch über die ethische Fragwürdigkeit der Herrschaft des Stärkeren nachgedacht hatte, bezeugte er nicht nur die Aktualität griechischen Rechtsdenkens, sondern warf auch einen Blick auf Jüngers Denkweg, der auch ein Leidensweg werden sollte.

Kriegstagebuch 1914 - 1918 - Deutschlandfunk book review

I am generally not very interested in the early Jünger works - whatever others may say, I find the mature works infinitely more useful for my own enlightenment. I also find they can be studied sufficiently well without much background in the early life and thought of Jünger. Life is short, too short to focus on the unessential, which is what these early works are in comparison with the mature masterpieces like Eumeswil and Co.

Nevertheless, when there is time, these immature works do add some interesting depth to the author. I still have to read the recently published Kriegstagerbuch from the trenches of WWI. This review on Deutschlandfunk is a good one, that just might make me buy the book.

If you find some extra time, listen....(auf Deutsch natürlich).

http://www.esnips.com/doc/728fd8b1-13ea-4a19-a1fc-08e7bfd3ddf1/Deutschlandradio-Juenger-Kriegstagebuch-review

Jüngers Kriegstagebücher - a higher perspective

The press has recently been been full of discussion about the publication of Ernst Jünger's War Diaries (Kriegstagebücher), his original notes from the trenches of WWI. Above all this has provided new opportunities for the usual misuse of his works by left-wing opponents and right-wing "friends", respectively expressing their knee-jerk critique and misguided hero worship.

The disproportion of this attention is apparent when one remembers that it is directed at a single teenage work of an author who lived to 102, wrote dozens of far more interesting and profound works, and was awarded Germany's highest literary prize.

(One wonders if these respected critics, Feuilleton editors and academics are in fact incapable in their 50's or 60's of anything more challenging than analyzing to death Jünger´s teenage works? The reflection of a difference in intellectual level of development? Would they know where to begin with later works like Eumeswil or An der Zeitmauer, works that have not been classified once and for all times in the public mind by these "authorities"? I challenge these venerable gentlemen to "explain" Eumeswil and the anarch to their readers with their tired old politicized cliches!)