68 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

Indeed, even in a post-Second World War publication such as The Peace, we find Jünger still insisting on the centrality and importance of this notion to any under-standing of that particular period in the world’s history:

Behind the bloody battle lines, which for the first time welded the earth’s ball with glowing bands, stretched the grey lightless depths of the army of workers. In them the greatest sum of human endeavor was produced that men have ever harnessed to one end.62

Heidegger himself describes how, under the ordinances of revealing issued through Gestell, everything everywhere is ordered to stand by, everything is revealed as resource to be used, on call and ready for use. In the passage above we read of a ‘conversion of life into energy’ and the way in which everything is reduced to its capacity to be ‘mobilized’. However, Jünger looks to offer an historical and socio-political account for this situation where Heidegger sees all of this as the result of the unfolding of the history of Western Metaphysics. Granted, Jünger’s descriptions and chronicling of the ‘symptoms’ bear a clear resemblance to both Heidegger and Spengler – what is called for under total mobilization is ‘extension to the deepest marrow’; nevertheless, in his later essay (The Peace), Jünger proposes a causal account which Heidegger would again clearly oppose:

In the course of these fateful years engagements were to take place which were far more terrible than the battles of materiel and fire of the first world war. For the man who believes he fights for ideas and ideals is possessed by greater ruthlessness than he who merely defends his country’s frontiers.63

For Jünger, this explains some of the most obscene catastrophes of the Second World War in a way which Heidegger approaches rather from the standpoint of the growing dominion of Gestell:

Over wide plains and fields the terrors of the elements vied with a technology of murder and unshakeable cruelty. There were areas where men destroyed each other like vermin and broad woods in which to hunt men like wolves. And one saw, cut off from all hope as if on a dead star, great armies go to their death in the horror chambers of pocket battles … Even more somber becomes the picture of suffering in those places where the world turned into a mere slaughterhouse, to a flayinghouse whose stench poisoned the air far and wide.64

Indeed, Jünger’s powers of description are chilling as he characterizes what we might describe as the symptoms of Gestell in the context of persecution and oppression:

the way to the peaks had many stations. Particularly terrifying were the cold mechanics of persecution, the considered technique of decimation, the tracking and surveillance of the victims by means of lists and files of a police force which swelled into armies. It seemed as if every method, every discovery of the human mind had been transformed into an instrument of oppression.65

If we recall our discussion of Heidegger’s essay on technology and his ‘agriculture remark’ we can see that Heidegger could easily be taken to be implying something