iPhone4 or iPhonophore?

It was not Steve Jobs and Apple who invented the iPhone4 - they only gave birth to what Ernst Jünger had intellectually conceived in 1949 in the novel Heliopolis and continued into Eumeswil (1977). By a nice coincidence, Ernst Jünger's "universal communicator" has essentially the same name - the phonophore.

iPhone4 or iPhonophore?

Below is a rough translation of the most relevant passage from Heliopolis - only a brief commentary is useful, so obvious are the parallels. (See also my previous blog on the Phonophore.)

(Originaltext auf Deutsch ist unten ...)

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

Conferenze su Ernst Jünger in Italia per 2014

E' uscito il nuovo programma del ciclo di conferenze per 2014 dell'Associazione Eumeswil di Firenze! Tema per questo anno: IL CORAGGIO. (Tutto il programma da scaricare qui)

Tra le 24 interventi da Marzo a Novembre ci sono già 4 conferenze su Ernst Jünger:
-------------------------
Sabato 25 Ottobre
L’eroe anarchico
Relatore; Marcello Barison, ricercatore in filosofia, scrittore
Jünger e l’esperienza del sacro
Relatore: Gregorio Bardini, musicista, scrittore

-------------------------

Sabato 22 Novembre
La felicità nell’era della tecnica. Riflessioni sul messaggio di Ernst Jünger 

Relatore: Alberto Krali, docente di Lingua tedesca, Università Cattolica di Milano
Oltre la linea tra M. Heidegger e E. Jünger

Relatore: Pavel Rebernik, docente incaricato di Filosofia, Pontificia Università Gregoriana

-------------------------

Tutte le conferenze si terranno alle ore 17
L’Istituto dei Padri Scolopi - Scuole Pie Fiorentine -
Via Lamarmora n. 35 – Firenze, Italia.

Entrata a offerta libera. L’Associazione si riserva il diritto d’ ingresso

Jünger-Symposion 2014 - Programm und Einladung

Click on the image or here for the full program (Google Drive)

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."

Post-1945 Ernst Jünger: Call for Papers

A Call for Papers on post-1945 Ernst Jünger, which for obvious reasons I am happy to pass on here - far too infrequently does this vastly more significant period of his life get attention from academia!

Organized by/for the annual meeting of american Germanisten in Kansas City, Missouri, Sept 18 - 21.

For more information, click on the text or contact Thorsten Carstensen:  tcarsten(at)iupui.edu.

Ernst Jünger incontro a Varese. 1 Marzo 2014

What would seem to be quite an interesting meeting on Ernst Jünger in Varese, Italy. With Quirino Principe, major translator of Jünger in Italian. Click on the image to view original.

Un incontro su Ernst Jünger in Varese, tra l'altro con il traduttore maggiore in Italiano delle sue opere, Quirono Principe. Clickare sul immagine per vedere il depliant originale.

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.

The Forest Passage - coming soon in English!

I am thrilled to spread the news today from Telos Press that "Der Waldgang" will soon be available in English under the title "The Forest Passage"! Last year Telos also published "The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios" and are thus apparently intent on becoming the new publisher of Jünger's books in English. On behalf of all those who have been starving over the last decade for new English translations of Jünger - thank you, Telos!

I have also happily received permission to help support the publication of this critical work with a few previews over the next weeks, beginning with this excerpt contrasting the Forest Rebel with the Worker and the Unknown Soldier and beginning to explain why he is determined to fight for his freedom in a technically-imposed collective slavery.

(From Chapter 12)

"We previously referred to the Worker and the Unknown Soldier as two of the significant figures of our times. In the forest rebel we conceive a third figure, one that is emerging ever more clearly.  

In the Worker the active principle is deployed in an attempt to pervade and master the universe in a new manner, to reach places, near and far, which no eye has ever seen, to command forces that none have ever before unleashed. In the shadow of these actions stands the Unknown Soldier, as sacrificial victim, who shoulders the burden across vast wastelands of fire, and who, as good and unifying spirit, is invoked not only within a people but also between peoples. He is the immediate son of the earth.