I've read his Paris journals and I must agree. Humor dry and subtle as a tannic wine.
I need to return to those books and pull examples to cite here, but he also had a sense of irony, which he often directed at the German High Command and their conduct of the war (and themselves).
I have read On the Marble Cliffs and I enjoyed it very much.
I would like to point out why I find especially the final claim convincing and thank the reviewer for stating it so clearly (I missed this when I read the book myself).
Twelve years after On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger published his essay The Forest Passage (Der Waldgang). The point of this essay is essentially, to use the reviewers own words, that "[...] he was publishing advice. Advice on how to survive the catastrophe of evil totalitarian dictatorship. And the beauty is the point." And as non-fiction essay, it is much more straightforward in doing so. It starts with the question "How do you resist (say in an autocracy)? What does it mean to rebel?". In answering this, he is not giving a technical manual of steps to follow. He still remains opaque, but nonetheless I found it very obvious that the same burning questions are occupying him.
Whether you enjoy the mythical-poetic language, which also On The Marble Cliff is soaked in, or not, is a matter of taste I guess. But The Forest Passage neatly continues the themes, the legacy of this novel, that were discussed in this review.
I would question the claim that "He was remarkably right, years before most could see it": a lot of Germans knew precisely what Hitler was long before 1935 (many of the Jews, but a lot of others, too). Perhaps the author meant that within the subset of "German nationalists who were not Nazis", most couldn't see it, and while that's doubtlessly true, I think that fact is far more a critique of German nationalists than anything positive about Jünger.
Also, pet peeve I suppose, but "fiction novel" is redundant. Notwithstanding the few efforts by Norman Mailer & one or two others, novels are fiction. (This is a common mistake among students, but it *is* a mistake, one that grates.)
agreed that this stood out to me, wasn't sure if the author was merely overenthusiastic in praising Junger or if he really meant Junger was the first to critique Hitler. It's easy to go overboard in this kind of praise when writing an article on someone, I think.
Yes. That's why I didn't say most *Germans*. I meant most people, and I meant to include people abroad who, like Churchill, thought this Hitler dude sure didn't seem like a nice person but did seem to be putting Germany, which had been a madhouse for two decades, into some order.
Well written review, convinced me to read the book! If anyone found the description of Weimar Germany interesting, I highly recommend the TV show Babylon Berlin, a fantastic crime/detective series with strong political overtones set in the era (it's on Netflix).
Not to detract from Junger's bravery in publishing these sentiments, but I think the author here went a little overboard claiming that Junger was the first to see or say these things on Hitler. It's my understanding that people had been declaiming Hitler from the start, but he still had enough of an appeal to enough people to get ahead.
> If you saturate the full bandwidth of your attention with observation, no space remains for looping thoughts, mourning and rumination. And the easiest way to fill your mind with observation is to find beauty in all the little details.
I can confirm this. I've been doing this for decades and it's great at dispersing intrusive thoughts as well. One avenue is to deliberately widen your perception to your entire visual field.
Great review. Irrelevant comment below, but one I've always wanted an answer to:
Is it possible that Junger was just a bullshit merchant? I've never read anything that stank of bullshit as much as Storm of Steel did. Alright, "read" would be an overstatement, I gave up, but a lot of it seemed in involve a distinct lack of survive eye witnesses, he was a weird military fetishist (and failure) even before the war, and again, the reek of bullshit. A very teenage kind of bullshit.
You've almost made me want to read something else he wrote, though, which I wouldn't have thought possible. Thank you
I mean, skepticism for any kind of outlandish claims is generally a good idea, but I'm not sure what in particular you thought was bullshit about Storm of Steel. If he hadn't done most of what he said he did, I expect he wouldn't have gotten that medal. If he hadn't had the scars he claimed he did, someone would likely have noticed. I don't think a simple 'this sounds implausible to me' is enough to warrant a dismissal.
You're absolutely right. Germany was a blasted wasteland in the latter stages of, and after, the first world war, but even so, it beggars belief that anyone could have got away with lies that absurd. I have no evidence at all for my theory. It's almost certainly wrong.
I think it's just that the book is so similar to the sort of thing that a weird bookish military fetishist would make up. Half wish fulfillment, half hero worship of an imaginary half wit. And completely different from the accounts that I've read by other writers who were themselves good at, and liked, fighting.
As with D'Annunzio, everything about it just feels fraudulent. And then there's the total disconnect between the man in the book, and the life he actually lived before and after the war. Not that the bravery portrayed in this review wasn't real, but still; it consisted of writing a book, and then doing nothing. It doesn't fit.
Still, I suppose anyone can be an insanely courageous, heroic, relentless warrior. Even someone who seems to so closely resemble the kind of person who you could least trust if they told you that that was who they were.
Do you recall which translation of Storm of Steel you attempted to read? The 1929 Creighton was heavily (and rightfully) criticized by Hofmann in the preface to his 2003 translation for completely messing up Juenger's tone - for making his descriptions of war sound dreamy and unreal, essentially.
You might look up Juenger's Paris Journals (excerpts from the diaries he kept during WWII). The core of the man who wrote Storm of Steel is still present in his writing there, you can sense the continuity, but the personality also shows a level of maturation and critical reflection that, in my reading, only attests to his authenticity.
I will also add that Juenger was intensely interested in what he called 'war as an inner experience'; he was essentially a private man and an introvert. These might contribute to the discrepancy you noted between his personality and that of most who fight with great success and then become famous for how they write about that fighting.
Now I'm curious whether the documentation attesting to Juenger's merit for the Pour le Mérite survived the war or whether it was destroyed along with the archive housed it.
I like the review overall, but I have an objection. If a soldier only kills the people he's supposed to kill, it's not right to call him a serial killer, even if he enjoys it.
One of those technicality things. The term has the implication of killing civilians, but the individual words 'serial' and 'killer' accurately describe a successful frontline soldier; they kill people in succession.
The civilian one could be 'serial murderer'. Yet that fails to exclude gangsters who murder each other; they also aren't what people intend by 'serial killer'.
Well, the term 'civilian' itself becomes questionable in regards to organized crime. I wouldn't call a known gangster a civilian outside technicalities.
But the main takeaway is you can stretch terms really far for book flavor descriptions. Do you like to fish? Have you caught more than one? Serial killer.
Yeah, the term is a bit misleading. I don't think we have a well-defined niche in our collective thought process for the soldier who enjoys killing people a bit too much in the line of duty but isn't violent otherwise.
The review mentions that some people think the Chief Ranger is Göring, but doesn't say why. I assume it's because he was the head of the Reich Forestry Office.
FWIW, Ernst Juenger and his brother both resigned their membership in their regiment's veterans' organization when that organization expelled its Jewish membership. He also refused to speak on German radio and refused to allow Nazi papers to reprint his works. That said, it would not do for the Nazis to crack down on their most famous non-Nazi nationalist in Germany. Something similar is also apparently what protected Wilhelm Furtwaengler.
Moreover, Wilhelmine Germany wasn't particularly antisemitic, by the standards of Europe at that time. That bogus prize probably went to Czarist Russia, although the Czarist government's antisemitism was based on religion and not race, per se. This is why a lot of German Jews worshiped Germany, why Arnold Schoenberg wrote without a touch of irony that he had secured the supremacy of German music. In 1932.
This is not to say that Juenger was a western-style liberal, but he also wasn't a caricature.
It seems like there's another piece of advice in the book for how to survive an evil totalitarian dictatorship that might be so obvious it goes without saying: once you realize what's going on, get the fuck out before it's too late.
But it may become so again, and that's going to depend on the people who stick around to rebuild. Would Germany be a better place today if Junger had moved to Switzerland in 1938?
I'm really not sure; I don't think many of the people who stayed while disagreeing actually made things better relative to a counterfactual where they fled and returned in 1946. I do agree that returning in '46 or not does make a difference.
In the modern US, putting policies in place that would reduce America's abnormally high violent crime rate (compared to other developed countries) would be called 'authoritarian'. But the reality is, predation by criminals is an enormous threat to human freedom, as much as many BLM supporters or other leftists would like to claim otherwise.
And no, the fact that violent crime has fallen in the past 50 years is not relevant. I have no idea why crime literally has to be at an all time high for a given country for it to be a problem. And in any case, crime fell through a combination of stronger policing and white flight, both of which are 'right wing' kind of things.
More police officers per capita, more police officers in high crime (i.e. black) neighborhoods, stop and frisk, reduced granting of bail, longer sentences, more enforcement of laws for minor crimes, criminalization of more forms of anti-social behavior etc. would likely all be considered more authoritarian than the alternative. (Not to say I necessarily support all these things).
The rate of violent crime has also fallen because it's mostly committed by young males, who are a declining proportion of the population in most Western countries over that time period. As for "white flight", that only changes who the victims are.
>The rate of violent crime has also fallen because it's mostly committed by young males, who are a declining proportion of the population in most Western countries over that time period.
Do you have evidence for this? I can't possibly imagine that this effect is large enough to explain a significant amount of the crime decrease.
>As for "white flight", that only changes who the victims are.
No, there's no reason to assume equal crime rates regardless of the people around you. White people make more attactive targets for black criminals than black people do for most categories of crime, especially theft.
As I understand it -- and perhaps someone else can explain this much better -- the German notion of freedom going back to the 18th century had a lot to do with independence from foreign influence. There was a great desire for intellectual freedom and freedom from religion. The modern university was invented in Germany, with its Humboldtian ideals of academic freedom and independent research, and with science and philosophy considered to be more important than divinity studies.
In the 18th and for most of the 19th century, Germany was a culture without a country. When the status quo was duchies, principalities and bishoprics (among other small political units), with foreign nations incessantly meddling in your affairs, to be a nationalist was to be a liberal. In the first half of the 20th century, Germany was still a young nation with existential worries, and militarism could be viewed reasonably as a continued path to freedom.
However, I've never entirely understood how German ideas of individual and national collective freedom cohere.
If you are German (or even if you are not), feel free to tell me how wrong and confused I am about what I wrote above.
I'd say you are correct, at least "mainstream", in your view. Winkler wrote a lot about it in his works about Germany's "long road west" (English version "Germany: The Long Road West" is VERY expensive ) - Now, 'the past is a foreign country' and as a German I am not really more qualified to speculate about how people thought then. I'd think, living in a powerless archduchy waiting to be swallowed by France/Prussia/XY did not make people feel empowered on an individual level, too. And then people became confused about how too much state-power and nationalism can be a bad thing. (As in "the Gates foundation is undemocratic, thus: bad".) I see this "we are special and must keep away from the west"-fallacy at work in Russia. I may be wrong and confused, of course.
Russia has been ambivalent about the West for its whole history, always wanting to be taken as (at least) an equal, never quite achieving it. Of course, whenever it had embraced Western influences, periods of improvement occurred, but those eventually exposed the galling insurmountable second-rate status even more acutely.
Little red devil on my left shoulder says that it's very classist freedom - freedom for (minor)nobility and bourgeois to live in accordance with their's tittles and to have "dirty mob" kept in check by some strong leader.
Or without Marxists connotation - it's something about positive/negative freedom, here - strong leader provides freedom to peacefully study plants and insects instead of necessity to fight with different sorts of robbers or spending will and time on some endless public politics (in exchange to the right of doing endless public politics)
"Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. "
It wasn't unusually undemocratic relative to its neighbors, Germany had universal suffrage at the national(not the state) level in 1871, Britain didn't get it until 1918.
Yeah, but how much real influence did elected members of parliament actually have during that time period? The Kaiser was, at least in theory, still a divine right monarch, although I think a lot of real political power lay in the hands of senior generals in the army and members of the aristocracy. France and Britain had long since done away with monarchs who were anything other than figureheads.
An extremely minor quibble to an otherwise interesting review: snakes are not "poisonous", they are "venomous". An animal is "poisonous" if it has a toxin that makes you ill if you consume it, e.g. a pufferfish or, surprisingly, any amphibian. An animal is "venomous" if it injects venom into you via bites or stingers or the like. (Technically there are I think a couple of species of poisonous snakes, that become poisonous because they consume highly poisonous newts.)
I don't know much 1930's German history, but I know snakes. Now back to the serious comments.
"I believe this book is his answer. And the answer is: look at beauty. Once you realize this, the entire book turns around. When the brothers see the extermination camp and distract themselves with botany, it isn't minimizing the horror, it is advice on how to remain functional in the face of catastrophe. Jünger says that quite explicitly:"
This reminds me of something Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Orsinian Tales:
"What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."
“Kaiserreich” means something like the “empire of the Kaiser” or the “realm of the Kaiser”. Hitler called his regime the “third Reich” because the “kaiserreich” was the second and the Holy Roman Empire was the first.
Hey there reviewer X. Have you read Mann’s Magic Mountain. I’ve only read it in English but the second time I read it I realized there are a _lott_ of English idioms in there. That translation seems very good but It would be interesting to hear how well they correspond to the original German.
I read some - not a whole lot - Russian and Russian idioms can pack a lot meaning into some phrases the don’t always work in English.
I’m thinking of a phrase from Dostoyevsky, “Let the stove and cottage dance!” A lazy translation might be “Party time!” but you would lose the Russian folk wisdom and humor with such a dry phrase.
I would like to deliberately invert Godwin's Law by invoking Trump in a discussion about Hitler. I wonder to what extent Jünger's criticism of Hitler was merely a mask for an antipathy towards a man and a movement that was -low class-.
"There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive."
I don't think that this is an accurate characterisation. While the WRV (see for example Art.48 WRV)/the institutional system certainly had its defincies, it was the lack of a political homogeneity that crippled parliament and led to the Reichspräsident governing by executive order. That said, I did enjoy "In Stahlgewittern" most of all the Jünger books I have read so far.
Braquemart and Smyrna are indeed based on acquaintances of Jünger, as noted in a New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, published a month ago.
"In 1938, Heinrich von Trott zu Solz, a young member of the anti-Nazi resistance, drove up to the house where Jünger and his brother were living, accompanied by two former members of the Communist Party, one of whom appears to have inspired the character of Sunmyra. The idea was to recruit Jünger, but he proved unwilling. Five years after “On the Marble Cliffs” was published, on July 20, 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, acting in league with Trott zu Solz’s brother Adam, attempted to assassinate Hitler. Both conspirators were executed."
"...a New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, published a month ago. "
Spoiler? These are supposed to be anonymous submissions. Of course, how many very polished writers are writing scholarly/popular explorations of Ernst Junger at *exactly the same time*?
An outstanding review among many great reviews. Congratulations to the author, this was one of the most interesting and captivating texts I’ve read in a while.
This ought to be read in tandem with another great, less allegorical, work about the Nazis: Victor Klemperer's _I Will Bear Witness_. I am tempted to write a companion review of Klemperer just to explore the comparison and contrast-- he was a liberal Jewish intellectual who I am sure would have disagreed with Junger about almost everything, and yet found some common ground in extolling the life of the mind as a coping technique in dark times.
Re the section on translations: I know waaaaay too little about German to know if Junger would have intended this allusion, but "Blumenkelche" reminds me of Heine's "Ich will meine Seele tauchen / In den Kelch der Lilie hinein" (which admittedly I only know because Schumann put it in the Dichterliebe) and if it is an allusion to Heine, I can only imagine what a fraught little bit of anti-anti-semitism that might have been at the time.
The way you put it, as “ the life of the mind as a coping technique in dark times” reminds me of Stefan Zweig’s “Schachnovelle”, where someone turns to chess (in his head, against himself) as a coping technique during his imprisonment (probably by the Nazis?) but then afterwards is led to breakdown by the sheer intensity of it when he returns to chess.
Oh indeed, Zweig is another excellent point of comparison. Think of "The Invisible Collection": if you have great beauty engraved, as it were, well enough in your mind, the pure recall of it can be enough to sustain you.
Somehow an early 20th C German literature reading seminar is going to come out of this. :)
The writing is interesting, I read it to the end. The author's enthusiasm was obvious.
On the other hand it had the stated goal of making me want to read the book, and it definitely failed at that goal, for me. Book reviews can have the desired end result of warning people off a bad book, but it's weird to read one that is highly enthusiastic about the greatness of a book, that everyone should read, that also sounds... Intolerably dull.
Your conclusion and slice of personal advice caught me off guard, I almost cried. This review is one of the most beautifully constructed story on the internet. Thanks so much.
> He knew enough about the military strength of the various European powers, and was distant enough from the Nazi enthusiasm for war, to know that the putrid state of Germany that surrounded him was headed for catastrophic defeat and collapse.
While I detest the Nazis as much as anyone, I do not think that their military enterprise was doomed to fail from the start. In fact, it went really well for a time. Various fascists controlled most of continental Europe in 1942, after all.
Of course, one can argue that the ideology of the Nazis made it impossible for them to keep the peace with Stalin (they considered the Slavs to be Untermenschen, after all), but that is not a purely military argument.
In a dystopian alternate world, a smarter revanchist Germany may have well conquered most of Europe without pissing of either the USSR or the US.
> Various fascists controlled most of continental Europe in 1942, after all.
For that claim to make any sense, you have to count Stalin as a fascist, and imply that fascists can't be each other's enemies. Both of these seem unlikely propositions.
I agree that my claim was wrong, probably because I badly misjudged the eastern border of Europe. Turns out that Kazakhstan is still partly Europe. (Also, to conquer Eastern Europe, Hitler had to enter into a land war with Russia, which kind of limits the probability of him holding onto his conquests.)
Fascists can totally be each others enemies, but I am not arguing that the defeat of the Nazis was impossible (which would be foolish, it happened, after all), just that it was not inevitable.
The reviewer made it sound like the defeat of the Nazis by European powers was a forgone conclusion, and I would argue that it was very much not. In the end, the Axis lost because they managed to piss of two superpowers (of which perhaps 0.5 qualify as European powers). From the way the reviewer phrased it, one would have expected that Germany would be inevitably and soundly defeated by a coalition of a few European powers (perhaps Britain and France) soon after starting a war of conquest. I just argued against
Again, I am more sympathetic to the argument that fascist ideology tends to drag more and more opponents into their wars of conquest until they are defeated.
It took far more time than I'd have liked to get through this review, but I am glad that I did. You've taken an admirable lesson from the book. One of my favorite reviews this year.
I've read his Paris journals and I must agree. Humor dry and subtle as a tannic wine.
I need to return to those books and pull examples to cite here, but he also had a sense of irony, which he often directed at the German High Command and their conduct of the war (and themselves).
Interesting review. I highly recommend On the Marble Cliffs as well.
This is an outstanding essay, everything a book review should be:
- A thorough review of the book itself? Check.
- A digressive essay that takes the book as a starting point and goes its own merry way? Check.
- Novel, thought-provoking ideas? Check.
- Conveys a sense of personal enthusiasm and fascination, while avoiding didacticism? Check.
IMO the best so far! Well done to the author.
There are some great reviews this year! Every week I think, well, this is the clear winner, and then every week a new stunner comes out.
It’s been a few weeks since I thought one was the best so far, but I agree that they’ve all been very good!
Yes! My cup runneth over.
I have read On the Marble Cliffs and I enjoyed it very much.
I would like to point out why I find especially the final claim convincing and thank the reviewer for stating it so clearly (I missed this when I read the book myself).
Twelve years after On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger published his essay The Forest Passage (Der Waldgang). The point of this essay is essentially, to use the reviewers own words, that "[...] he was publishing advice. Advice on how to survive the catastrophe of evil totalitarian dictatorship. And the beauty is the point." And as non-fiction essay, it is much more straightforward in doing so. It starts with the question "How do you resist (say in an autocracy)? What does it mean to rebel?". In answering this, he is not giving a technical manual of steps to follow. He still remains opaque, but nonetheless I found it very obvious that the same burning questions are occupying him.
Whether you enjoy the mythical-poetic language, which also On The Marble Cliff is soaked in, or not, is a matter of taste I guess. But The Forest Passage neatly continues the themes, the legacy of this novel, that were discussed in this review.
Worth noting that Hood was a Communist (although apparently of the Trotskyist variety).
Great review.
I would question the claim that "He was remarkably right, years before most could see it": a lot of Germans knew precisely what Hitler was long before 1935 (many of the Jews, but a lot of others, too). Perhaps the author meant that within the subset of "German nationalists who were not Nazis", most couldn't see it, and while that's doubtlessly true, I think that fact is far more a critique of German nationalists than anything positive about Jünger.
Also, pet peeve I suppose, but "fiction novel" is redundant. Notwithstanding the few efforts by Norman Mailer & one or two others, novels are fiction. (This is a common mistake among students, but it *is* a mistake, one that grates.)
agreed that this stood out to me, wasn't sure if the author was merely overenthusiastic in praising Junger or if he really meant Junger was the first to critique Hitler. It's easy to go overboard in this kind of praise when writing an article on someone, I think.
Years before most people of significance in Germany could see it.
Yes. That's why I didn't say most *Germans*. I meant most people, and I meant to include people abroad who, like Churchill, thought this Hitler dude sure didn't seem like a nice person but did seem to be putting Germany, which had been a madhouse for two decades, into some order.
Good point about "fiction novel", thank you.
A nicely done review.
I appreciated references to the nuances of translation.
Not sure about the ostensible suicide and your own personal gloss.
For another well done review. See https://voegelinview.com/between-order-and-disorder-ernst-junger-on-the-marble-cliffs/ by Portuguese fellow Francisco Carmo Garcia
Well written review, convinced me to read the book! If anyone found the description of Weimar Germany interesting, I highly recommend the TV show Babylon Berlin, a fantastic crime/detective series with strong political overtones set in the era (it's on Netflix).
Not to detract from Junger's bravery in publishing these sentiments, but I think the author here went a little overboard claiming that Junger was the first to see or say these things on Hitler. It's my understanding that people had been declaiming Hitler from the start, but he still had enough of an appeal to enough people to get ahead.
> If you saturate the full bandwidth of your attention with observation, no space remains for looping thoughts, mourning and rumination. And the easiest way to fill your mind with observation is to find beauty in all the little details.
I can confirm this. I've been doing this for decades and it's great at dispersing intrusive thoughts as well. One avenue is to deliberately widen your perception to your entire visual field.
Also that rhymes, doing the pride as petty thing just like Junger.
Great review. Irrelevant comment below, but one I've always wanted an answer to:
Is it possible that Junger was just a bullshit merchant? I've never read anything that stank of bullshit as much as Storm of Steel did. Alright, "read" would be an overstatement, I gave up, but a lot of it seemed in involve a distinct lack of survive eye witnesses, he was a weird military fetishist (and failure) even before the war, and again, the reek of bullshit. A very teenage kind of bullshit.
You've almost made me want to read something else he wrote, though, which I wouldn't have thought possible. Thank you
I mean, skepticism for any kind of outlandish claims is generally a good idea, but I'm not sure what in particular you thought was bullshit about Storm of Steel. If he hadn't done most of what he said he did, I expect he wouldn't have gotten that medal. If he hadn't had the scars he claimed he did, someone would likely have noticed. I don't think a simple 'this sounds implausible to me' is enough to warrant a dismissal.
You're absolutely right. Germany was a blasted wasteland in the latter stages of, and after, the first world war, but even so, it beggars belief that anyone could have got away with lies that absurd. I have no evidence at all for my theory. It's almost certainly wrong.
I think it's just that the book is so similar to the sort of thing that a weird bookish military fetishist would make up. Half wish fulfillment, half hero worship of an imaginary half wit. And completely different from the accounts that I've read by other writers who were themselves good at, and liked, fighting.
As with D'Annunzio, everything about it just feels fraudulent. And then there's the total disconnect between the man in the book, and the life he actually lived before and after the war. Not that the bravery portrayed in this review wasn't real, but still; it consisted of writing a book, and then doing nothing. It doesn't fit.
Still, I suppose anyone can be an insanely courageous, heroic, relentless warrior. Even someone who seems to so closely resemble the kind of person who you could least trust if they told you that that was who they were.
Do you recall which translation of Storm of Steel you attempted to read? The 1929 Creighton was heavily (and rightfully) criticized by Hofmann in the preface to his 2003 translation for completely messing up Juenger's tone - for making his descriptions of war sound dreamy and unreal, essentially.
You might look up Juenger's Paris Journals (excerpts from the diaries he kept during WWII). The core of the man who wrote Storm of Steel is still present in his writing there, you can sense the continuity, but the personality also shows a level of maturation and critical reflection that, in my reading, only attests to his authenticity.
I will also add that Juenger was intensely interested in what he called 'war as an inner experience'; he was essentially a private man and an introvert. These might contribute to the discrepancy you noted between his personality and that of most who fight with great success and then become famous for how they write about that fighting.
Now I'm curious whether the documentation attesting to Juenger's merit for the Pour le Mérite survived the war or whether it was destroyed along with the archive housed it.
I like the review overall, but I have an objection. If a soldier only kills the people he's supposed to kill, it's not right to call him a serial killer, even if he enjoys it.
One of those technicality things. The term has the implication of killing civilians, but the individual words 'serial' and 'killer' accurately describe a successful frontline soldier; they kill people in succession.
The civilian one could be 'serial murderer'. Yet that fails to exclude gangsters who murder each other; they also aren't what people intend by 'serial killer'.
Well, the term 'civilian' itself becomes questionable in regards to organized crime. I wouldn't call a known gangster a civilian outside technicalities.
But the main takeaway is you can stretch terms really far for book flavor descriptions. Do you like to fish? Have you caught more than one? Serial killer.
Plenty of vegans would approve of this framing, usually even more so when others do the killings for you.
I don't think that's an important social (or arguably moral) distinction (though I guess it is a legal one).
Yeah, the term is a bit misleading. I don't think we have a well-defined niche in our collective thought process for the soldier who enjoys killing people a bit too much in the line of duty but isn't violent otherwise.
The review mentions that some people think the Chief Ranger is Göring, but doesn't say why. I assume it's because he was the head of the Reich Forestry Office.
He also best embodied the traditional tyrant archetype among the top Nazis, with ostentatious flaunting of plundered wealth and such.
FWIW, Ernst Juenger and his brother both resigned their membership in their regiment's veterans' organization when that organization expelled its Jewish membership. He also refused to speak on German radio and refused to allow Nazi papers to reprint his works. That said, it would not do for the Nazis to crack down on their most famous non-Nazi nationalist in Germany. Something similar is also apparently what protected Wilhelm Furtwaengler.
Moreover, Wilhelmine Germany wasn't particularly antisemitic, by the standards of Europe at that time. That bogus prize probably went to Czarist Russia, although the Czarist government's antisemitism was based on religion and not race, per se. This is why a lot of German Jews worshiped Germany, why Arnold Schoenberg wrote without a touch of irony that he had secured the supremacy of German music. In 1932.
This is not to say that Juenger was a western-style liberal, but he also wasn't a caricature.
It seems like there's another piece of advice in the book for how to survive an evil totalitarian dictatorship that might be so obvious it goes without saying: once you realize what's going on, get the fuck out before it's too late.
The willingness to "get the fuck out," to abandon one's homeland, is not universal. One term for such willingness was "rootless cosmopolitanism."
If it's actively trying to kill you, it may be your mother/fatherland but it's no longer your homeland
But it may become so again, and that's going to depend on the people who stick around to rebuild. Would Germany be a better place today if Junger had moved to Switzerland in 1938?
I'm really not sure; I don't think many of the people who stayed while disagreeing actually made things better relative to a counterfactual where they fled and returned in 1946. I do agree that returning in '46 or not does make a difference.
I've often wondered how people like Jünger who support authoritarianism of some stripe or another can write peons to human freedom.
I suppose by freedom they don't necessarily mean the degree to which it is taken in the modern west?
Or perhaps you meant authoritarianism in contrast to democracy, as Scott used the word in the previous post, not in contrast to liberty?
In the modern US, putting policies in place that would reduce America's abnormally high violent crime rate (compared to other developed countries) would be called 'authoritarian'. But the reality is, predation by criminals is an enormous threat to human freedom, as much as many BLM supporters or other leftists would like to claim otherwise.
And no, the fact that violent crime has fallen in the past 50 years is not relevant. I have no idea why crime literally has to be at an all time high for a given country for it to be a problem. And in any case, crime fell through a combination of stronger policing and white flight, both of which are 'right wing' kind of things.
Is this a "freedom" vs. "liberty" distinction?
Also, they wouldn't be called "authoritarian." They'd be called "fascist," or "nazi," or "white supremacist."
Whether policies would be considered authoritarian depends on the policies in question.
More police officers per capita, more police officers in high crime (i.e. black) neighborhoods, stop and frisk, reduced granting of bail, longer sentences, more enforcement of laws for minor crimes, criminalization of more forms of anti-social behavior etc. would likely all be considered more authoritarian than the alternative. (Not to say I necessarily support all these things).
The rate of violent crime has also fallen because it's mostly committed by young males, who are a declining proportion of the population in most Western countries over that time period. As for "white flight", that only changes who the victims are.
>The rate of violent crime has also fallen because it's mostly committed by young males, who are a declining proportion of the population in most Western countries over that time period.
Do you have evidence for this? I can't possibly imagine that this effect is large enough to explain a significant amount of the crime decrease.
>As for "white flight", that only changes who the victims are.
No, there's no reason to assume equal crime rates regardless of the people around you. White people make more attactive targets for black criminals than black people do for most categories of crime, especially theft.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsgp.fas.org%2Fcrs%2Fmisc%2FR45236.pdf&psig=AOvVaw3DvLkKQhxyaU9B_rwytEeR&ust=1690766132344000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CA4QjRxqFwoTCOjL9O6gtYADFQAAAAAdAAAAABAP
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Flightcast.io%2Fresources%2Fblog%2Fthe-demographic-drought&psig=AOvVaw3_DQvu8xexJTlKcnIUTnC5&ust=1690766432561000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CA4QjRxqFwoTCNCA-o6itYADFQAAAAAdAAAAABAT
A more stark example is El Salvador in the past few years.
As I understand it -- and perhaps someone else can explain this much better -- the German notion of freedom going back to the 18th century had a lot to do with independence from foreign influence. There was a great desire for intellectual freedom and freedom from religion. The modern university was invented in Germany, with its Humboldtian ideals of academic freedom and independent research, and with science and philosophy considered to be more important than divinity studies.
In the 18th and for most of the 19th century, Germany was a culture without a country. When the status quo was duchies, principalities and bishoprics (among other small political units), with foreign nations incessantly meddling in your affairs, to be a nationalist was to be a liberal. In the first half of the 20th century, Germany was still a young nation with existential worries, and militarism could be viewed reasonably as a continued path to freedom.
However, I've never entirely understood how German ideas of individual and national collective freedom cohere.
If you are German (or even if you are not), feel free to tell me how wrong and confused I am about what I wrote above.
I'd say you are correct, at least "mainstream", in your view. Winkler wrote a lot about it in his works about Germany's "long road west" (English version "Germany: The Long Road West" is VERY expensive ) - Now, 'the past is a foreign country' and as a German I am not really more qualified to speculate about how people thought then. I'd think, living in a powerless archduchy waiting to be swallowed by France/Prussia/XY did not make people feel empowered on an individual level, too. And then people became confused about how too much state-power and nationalism can be a bad thing. (As in "the Gates foundation is undemocratic, thus: bad".) I see this "we are special and must keep away from the west"-fallacy at work in Russia. I may be wrong and confused, of course.
Russia has been ambivalent about the West for its whole history, always wanting to be taken as (at least) an equal, never quite achieving it. Of course, whenever it had embraced Western influences, periods of improvement occurred, but those eventually exposed the galling insurmountable second-rate status even more acutely.
You mean 'paean'.
I think it depends on what kind of freedom you value. Some kinds of freedom may be quite well preserved under certain otherwise authoritarian regimes.
Little red devil on my left shoulder says that it's very classist freedom - freedom for (minor)nobility and bourgeois to live in accordance with their's tittles and to have "dirty mob" kept in check by some strong leader.
Or without Marxists connotation - it's something about positive/negative freedom, here - strong leader provides freedom to peacefully study plants and insects instead of necessity to fight with different sorts of robbers or spending will and time on some endless public politics (in exchange to the right of doing endless public politics)
Great review. Many kudos to the author.
"Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. "
It wasn't unusually undemocratic relative to its neighbors, Germany had universal suffrage at the national(not the state) level in 1871, Britain didn't get it until 1918.
Yeah, but how much real influence did elected members of parliament actually have during that time period? The Kaiser was, at least in theory, still a divine right monarch, although I think a lot of real political power lay in the hands of senior generals in the army and members of the aristocracy. France and Britain had long since done away with monarchs who were anything other than figureheads.
Unusually
Fixed, thanks.
Wasn't it still using the 3-class system? Everyone may have voted, but each vote had a different value?
An extremely minor quibble to an otherwise interesting review: snakes are not "poisonous", they are "venomous". An animal is "poisonous" if it has a toxin that makes you ill if you consume it, e.g. a pufferfish or, surprisingly, any amphibian. An animal is "venomous" if it injects venom into you via bites or stingers or the like. (Technically there are I think a couple of species of poisonous snakes, that become poisonous because they consume highly poisonous newts.)
I don't know much 1930's German history, but I know snakes. Now back to the serious comments.
King's Quest disagrees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrFcWcRmjec
also love this
ha. love this
Fascinating review!
Re:
"I believe this book is his answer. And the answer is: look at beauty. Once you realize this, the entire book turns around. When the brothers see the extermination camp and distract themselves with botany, it isn't minimizing the horror, it is advice on how to remain functional in the face of catastrophe. Jünger says that quite explicitly:"
This reminds me of something Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Orsinian Tales:
"What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."
Absolutely beautiful, thank you. And the comments on translation are very apt.
Kaiserreich is an online game that does not mean "German Empire". That would be Deutsches Reich.
It's a common German term used in this context to talk about 1871-1918 period of the Deutsches Reich. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Kaiserreich
That's where the mod gets the name from.
“Kaiserreich” means something like the “empire of the Kaiser” or the “realm of the Kaiser”. Hitler called his regime the “third Reich” because the “kaiserreich” was the second and the Holy Roman Empire was the first.
Hey there reviewer X. Have you read Mann’s Magic Mountain. I’ve only read it in English but the second time I read it I realized there are a _lott_ of English idioms in there. That translation seems very good but It would be interesting to hear how well they correspond to the original German.
I read some - not a whole lot - Russian and Russian idioms can pack a lot meaning into some phrases the don’t always work in English.
I’m thinking of a phrase from Dostoyevsky, “Let the stove and cottage dance!” A lazy translation might be “Party time!” but you would lose the Russian folk wisdom and humor with such a dry phrase.
I would like to deliberately invert Godwin's Law by invoking Trump in a discussion about Hitler. I wonder to what extent Jünger's criticism of Hitler was merely a mask for an antipathy towards a man and a movement that was -low class-.
Amazing review btw.
Ok, I think we may need to complexify the voting this year. Too many fantastic reviews. Ranked choice? Quadratic voting? Condorcet?
Or simply approval would be fine... As compared to FPTP
What about allowing for tied ranks except 1st place? I'd love to hear three reviews ranked 2nd place and four others 3rd.
"There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive."
I don't think that this is an accurate characterisation. While the WRV (see for example Art.48 WRV)/the institutional system certainly had its defincies, it was the lack of a political homogeneity that crippled parliament and led to the Reichspräsident governing by executive order. That said, I did enjoy "In Stahlgewittern" most of all the Jünger books I have read so far.
Geez, not too many reactionaries like that anymore.
Braquemart and Smyrna are indeed based on acquaintances of Jünger, as noted in a New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, published a month ago.
"In 1938, Heinrich von Trott zu Solz, a young member of the anti-Nazi resistance, drove up to the house where Jünger and his brother were living, accompanied by two former members of the Communist Party, one of whom appears to have inspired the character of Sunmyra. The idea was to recruit Jünger, but he proved unwilling. Five years after “On the Marble Cliffs” was published, on July 20, 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, acting in league with Trott zu Solz’s brother Adam, attempted to assassinate Hitler. Both conspirators were executed."
"...a New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, published a month ago. "
Spoiler? These are supposed to be anonymous submissions. Of course, how many very polished writers are writing scholarly/popular explorations of Ernst Junger at *exactly the same time*?
Well, a new translation just appeared this year, so it's not ridiculously improbable.
An outstanding review among many great reviews. Congratulations to the author, this was one of the most interesting and captivating texts I’ve read in a while.
Excellent review. Well done to the author.
Previously, I wasn't going to vote for a review as so many were so comparably good
You're implying that has changed because this one is so different. Do you think it is unusually good, or unusually bad?
Very unusually good!
This ought to be read in tandem with another great, less allegorical, work about the Nazis: Victor Klemperer's _I Will Bear Witness_. I am tempted to write a companion review of Klemperer just to explore the comparison and contrast-- he was a liberal Jewish intellectual who I am sure would have disagreed with Junger about almost everything, and yet found some common ground in extolling the life of the mind as a coping technique in dark times.
Re the section on translations: I know waaaaay too little about German to know if Junger would have intended this allusion, but "Blumenkelche" reminds me of Heine's "Ich will meine Seele tauchen / In den Kelch der Lilie hinein" (which admittedly I only know because Schumann put it in the Dichterliebe) and if it is an allusion to Heine, I can only imagine what a fraught little bit of anti-anti-semitism that might have been at the time.
The way you put it, as “ the life of the mind as a coping technique in dark times” reminds me of Stefan Zweig’s “Schachnovelle”, where someone turns to chess (in his head, against himself) as a coping technique during his imprisonment (probably by the Nazis?) but then afterwards is led to breakdown by the sheer intensity of it when he returns to chess.
Oh indeed, Zweig is another excellent point of comparison. Think of "The Invisible Collection": if you have great beauty engraved, as it were, well enough in your mind, the pure recall of it can be enough to sustain you.
Somehow an early 20th C German literature reading seminar is going to come out of this. :)
Stefan Zweig might not be the best example of [successful] "coping" with horrible experiences, alas.
amazing stuff. probably the best written review this year yet
This is my favorite review of the current crop. I think there should be more fiction reviews in the contest.
Well this is an interesting one to evaluate.
The writing is interesting, I read it to the end. The author's enthusiasm was obvious.
On the other hand it had the stated goal of making me want to read the book, and it definitely failed at that goal, for me. Book reviews can have the desired end result of warning people off a bad book, but it's weird to read one that is highly enthusiastic about the greatness of a book, that everyone should read, that also sounds... Intolerably dull.
So. Not sure how to grade this one.
No, it never states that goal. It says "in case you actually read it" but it only wants you to agree "you should know at least know about it".
OK, color me *damned impressed* with this review as a piece of writing in its own right!
Your conclusion and slice of personal advice caught me off guard, I almost cried. This review is one of the most beautifully constructed story on the internet. Thanks so much.
https://archive.org/details/ErnstJungerOnTheMarbleCliffsbOk.xyz
The best review I’ve seen in all the book contests to date
> He knew enough about the military strength of the various European powers, and was distant enough from the Nazi enthusiasm for war, to know that the putrid state of Germany that surrounded him was headed for catastrophic defeat and collapse.
While I detest the Nazis as much as anyone, I do not think that their military enterprise was doomed to fail from the start. In fact, it went really well for a time. Various fascists controlled most of continental Europe in 1942, after all.
Of course, one can argue that the ideology of the Nazis made it impossible for them to keep the peace with Stalin (they considered the Slavs to be Untermenschen, after all), but that is not a purely military argument.
In a dystopian alternate world, a smarter revanchist Germany may have well conquered most of Europe without pissing of either the USSR or the US.
> Various fascists controlled most of continental Europe in 1942, after all.
For that claim to make any sense, you have to count Stalin as a fascist, and imply that fascists can't be each other's enemies. Both of these seem unlikely propositions.
I agree that my claim was wrong, probably because I badly misjudged the eastern border of Europe. Turns out that Kazakhstan is still partly Europe. (Also, to conquer Eastern Europe, Hitler had to enter into a land war with Russia, which kind of limits the probability of him holding onto his conquests.)
Fascists can totally be each others enemies, but I am not arguing that the defeat of the Nazis was impossible (which would be foolish, it happened, after all), just that it was not inevitable.
The reviewer made it sound like the defeat of the Nazis by European powers was a forgone conclusion, and I would argue that it was very much not. In the end, the Axis lost because they managed to piss of two superpowers (of which perhaps 0.5 qualify as European powers). From the way the reviewer phrased it, one would have expected that Germany would be inevitably and soundly defeated by a coalition of a few European powers (perhaps Britain and France) soon after starting a war of conquest. I just argued against
Again, I am more sympathetic to the argument that fascist ideology tends to drag more and more opponents into their wars of conquest until they are defeated.
Wow! Amazing review.
It took far more time than I'd have liked to get through this review, but I am glad that I did. You've taken an admirable lesson from the book. One of my favorite reviews this year.
Incredible review. Thank you so much. I had reread Storm of Steel multiple times and now look forward to reading this book.
Thank you!