heller - ernst junger

8/13/2019 Heller - Ernst Junger

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Men and Ideas

Erich Heller ERNST JONGERT H A a the time is out of joint is by nowcommon uropean knowledge; the ideathat the damage might be cured throughcursed spite is a German ariation on theHamlet theme. From ime to time some Ger-man omantics whistled this tune to frightentheir fright awayon their lone wanderingsthrough the dark forest. In Nietzsche thetheme gained depth and clarity. Spenglerscored it for all civilisations the earth hasknown,and joined their voices in a finalethat sounded jubilant although it meantdeath. Ernst Jiinger discovered t for himselfin the First WorldWar; t spoke to him witha loud, large voice through the storm ofsteel, as he called his war book. He broughtthe music homeand became ts intellectualpied piper, followed by many who wouldhave followed Hitler, had Hitler been moreliterate and less vulgar; and often did followhim n spite of it.What, hen, is this Germaniceit-moti] andperversity of the spirit? Theologically peak-ing, the doctrine that Beelzebubs the devilsonly serious adversary: sin can only be re-deemed y sin; morally, that wrongcan beput right only by conquering the prejudicethat it is wrong; nd a~sthetically, that if thehabitual exposure to the loathsome horrorsof the age has robbed us of the power offeeling and left us with nothing to admire,we must learn to admire this Nothing, dis-cover the hidden beauty in that which isloathsome, and raise unfeeling itself to adizzy pitch of ecstasy.Yet Ernst Finger s a serious writer, or atleast a writer who, with some ustification,has been taken very seriously by his numer-

ous Germaneaders over the last thirty years.His place in literature cannot be defined inthe conventional erms of literary history. Hehas written no poems, no dramas, and--al-though someof his books tell a story--nonovels. Nor is he simply a man f letters.He is, or until recently was, one of the fewgenuine examplesof what in the dim past ofa decade ago someFrench intellectuals usedto call litt3rature engag~e.The early ErnstJfinger did not just write; he took up the pen.He did not describe, invent, or makepoems;he sounded, diagnosed, and performedopera-tions. He did not discuss, he committed im-self, arranged for breakthroughsand decidedissues. His main contribution to literatureproper is a paradoxical literary experiment:to forge a style of writing which wouldauthentically convey he fact that this is notime for style, writing, or literature. It maywell be that, in attempting his, Ernst Fingermerely joined in a not uncommonursuit ofmodern rtists. Wedo have sculpture whichexpresses he conviction that there is nothingleft to give form and shape to, except formand shape; paintings which suggest that allthings have lost their outlines and colours,except outlines and colours; music andpoetry whose heme is the impossibility ofthemes, the intractability of meaning insounds and words.H O w E v E R, J~ingers is an experimentwith a difference. He s not preoccu-pied with the possibilities of exhaustion f hismedium, hichs literature. It is not literaturewhich s his professedconcern,but the thingshe writes about. This seems simple enough.6z

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Men and IdeasIt is not. For whathe writes about is some-thing that is necessarily betrayed, distorted,and falsified in the very act of writing, andstill more etrayed,distorted, and falsified inthe act of writing well. For Jfinger, the earlyJiinger, is a German omantic minus some-thing. To the German omantic, life meansabove all ecstasy, death, and the makingofliterature. With iinger we have to subtractthe makingof literature. What emains isecstasy and death; ecstasy and death freed ofall literary or poetic ingredients or tempta-tions, simply the existential moment fecstasy and death. This subtraction seems obe the reductio ad absurdumf literature andall its prerequisites: a desk and a chair in aquiet room, paper, peace of mind, and time--much ime, all the time needed or findingan adjective and crossing it out again. Forwriting s, if not emotion ecollected n tran-quillity, at least recollection n tranquillity.The existential moment, on the otherhand, is by definition the momentwhich simpatient of either recollection or tranquil-lity. Tranquillity is conquestand transcen-dence of the moment; xistential ecstasy isthe moments bsolute consummation.Thereis, literally, nothingeft to write about.But this is by no meansall there is toJfingers difficult literary enterprise. Jfingeris of course an individualist, if only in thesense that he wants to be left alone for re-collection, tranquillity, and writing. Aseveryoneknows,even those simple pains aremore and more difficult to come by, andwhen hey do come, more and moredifficultto endure. There is always somevery largemenaceknocking at the window,or an everso slight disorder n the soul. Jiingers solu-tion is to bid the menace ome n and stay,and to accept the notice of dismissal that theage has served on the soul. Whereothershave protested in the name f the individual,he gives his consent--in a style individualis-tically distinguished y the trouble he took tomake t impersonal.History, he seems o say,has robbed the individual of the power ofsignificant speech, and has called upon hemachine o deliver its message. f we cannotobey History completely and just be silent,the least we can do is to talk henceforwardin a steely idiom. History has mobilisedallhuman esources for enormouswars. There-fore, let the soul seek its illuminationsn theengineered ires of catastrophe.

63This, then, is the early Jiinger: a Germanromantic in search of meaning hrough theintense affirmation of meaninglessness,ryingto gather in a soul by throwing it to thewindsand electrical storms, and groping to-wardsecstasy in the valley of unfeeling. Intimes like these, he maintains, life is onlyto be found in the catastrophic explosionsofdead matter, and individual existence only inthe voluptuous merging with that soullesscollectivity decreed by Historys own. will.This man, whowas undoubtedly one of Ger-manysbravest soldiers in the First WorldWar, afterwards spent years in his study inorder to work out the appropriate style forsaying, implicitly, that spendingyears in astudy is, in this hour of History, no life atall. But as such an absurdsituation is diffi-cult to maintain, the study itself wassoon

conscripted by History and, desk, paper, pen,and all, called up to do service in the greatventure of war and total mobilisation. War,work, writing--everything goes into a newsynthesis, forged together by the joint forgeand forgery of world-spirit and metaphor.Enemyines are written off and lines ofwordscomeunder fire. Language igs itselfin and guns begin to speak. While sentencesare hammered ut and intellectual convic-tions exploded, flames and splinters frombursting shells form themselves nto lyricalpatterns. Thebattlefield has epics to teli andthe writers writing is an act of sacrifice. Infact, again and again, Ernst Jfinger uses thethoughtlessmetaphors f journalistic diction,not always successfully cleansed of theirvulgarity, within a context of consideredseriousness. J. P. Stern has devoteda largepart of his recent study of Ernst J~ngersworks o an illuminating examination f thisaspect of the writers language.W H T I have aid so fa,r is largely basedon those of Jfingers works whichwere published before ~939. Amonghese,it was above all The Storm o/Steel (r92o),Combat s Inner Experience(r92~), The Ad-venturous Heart (~929), and The Worker(~932) that have madeJfinger famous n hisown country, and assembled around hisworka large section of that hybrid class ofreaders who, ever since the Bible becamemere literature, go to bookshops andlibraries in order to find somethingnew obelieve in. At least three of these books orm




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64 Erich Heller:a logical sequence.The Stormo/Steel is theaccount of the First WorldWar. The wars inner meaning, he formative effect it hadupon he person, is the subject of Combat sInner Experience. This leads to J/ingersvision and practical prophecyof the manandsociety of the future, The Worker.

Much hat Jtinger wrote about the war ishonest, sincere, and rue. Indeed, it would epossible to say that sometimes e approachesthe outskirts of great writing, ~vere t not forthe fact that time and again something up-sets the very faculty of the reader to appreci-ate writing as writing. This something s thefelt presence of the destructive paradox, theperverse intention of writing in such a man-ner that any mannerof writing is shown obe false to the experience, and the elaboratestylistic scheme o convey with successfulwords he fact that all wordsmust fail. Butis this not, it maywell be asked, the veryparadox of the extreme reaches of all greatliterature ? At he heights of ecstasy or tragedyin literature, does there not alwayscome hemomentwhen the word which is said hasonly just managed o becomearticulate;when he language is nothing but a minuteinroadmaden a last effort into silence ? Yes,but this is the moment hen he soul is over-powered by feeling and, with extremeeconomy f speech, says that it cannot sayany more. Jiinger, on the other hand, alwayssays more.Withall his cultivated abruptness,he is loquacious. He is not overpowered yfeelings, but is merelyat the mercyof acutesensations, and of insights whichmoreoftenthan not are spurious.Yet I said he washonest. In so far as ir~-tellectual honesty s relevant to literature, itis of course not merely a question of thewriter saying what he really thinks or be-lieves. Onecan really think or believe themost fraudulent things, one can be sincerelybogus. The iterary standard of sincerity isnot so narrowly private. For every fact,thought, or beIief expressed n literature issurroundedby the echo of many oices. Everynewvoice makes tself heard within a sphereof experience articulated by the past andvibrating with its memories.The measureofintellectual honestyies in the writers realisa-tion that this sphere s not his private posses-sion. He may ontribute to its definition orredefinition, to its explorationor the pushingoutward f its frontiers. Yet n substance t is

Ernst Jiingerinherited land. It is an area built up by thethought and feeling of a great society ofminds nd souls. Nowriter can be intellectu-ally honest in any relevant sense if he lacksthe knowledge,understanding, or intuitionof the width and profundity of this commonenterprise. This sense of a tradition ofthought and feeling will support the in-dividual writer, lure himfurther, or set hislimits. Intellectual honesty s, above ll, wisehusbandry, he ability to deal honestly withinherited means; to knowwhat resources ofthought are required to meet the demand fcertain questions, and whatwealth of feelingto brave certain adventures; and then toleave these questions and adventuresalone ifone has nothing to add except ones poverty.But the early Ernst Jiinger constantly over-draws his account. His enormous eneralisa-tions about modernman and modernsocietyreflect at everypoint his failure to grasp thetrue worth of that tradition which he be-lieved was doomed, and whose doom hemade eady to accept. This is whyhis highseriousness is so often warpedby a kind ofmetaphysical flippancy. His heart, howeveradventurous, s at times a mereonlooker, andthe detachedsobriety of his vision causedbya chill in the soul.j i5 y o ~ R s heroic nihilism has, however,tradition of its own. ts name s Nietzsche.It was Nietzsche whoconquered and markedout the area on which iinger built, Nietzschewhoquarried the stone which lfinger used.Yet the building turns out to be flatter thanthe design. It lacks the very dimensionwhichconstitutes Nietzsches epth: morality, or, tocall it differently, love. Nietzsche aw n thecollapse of religion, in the death of God,andin the approach of nihilism the greatestspiritual and moral challenge to man; forJiinger it is, in the widest sense, a politicalproblem, a problem of intellectual andpsychologicalstrategy. Nietzsches Supermanis a creature whohas struggled his waybe-yondgoodand evil. For Jiingers Workerhemoral problem is not as muchout-struggledas out-moded.Theworld-spirit, not the soulof man, has left it behind. This is the mostinsidious brand of Germanicconcoctions:surface-Nietzscheplus surface-Hegel, an in-toxicant which, while it lasts, has the powerof makingcerebral acrobatics look like ad-ventures of the heart, and an assortment of




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Men and Ideastrivialities from the refrigerator like a glaciallandscape of the mind. If the Superman, asone of Nietzsches posthumous notes sug-gests, was to be Ca:sar, with the heart ofChrist, then the collective of JfingersWorkers is made up of titde Ca:sars withlittle hearts of steel.But let us not underrate the importance ofJfinger. His work issues from an experienceand a situation in which we are all involved,and perhaps the more involved the less weare prepared to acknowledge it. The leastviolent way of describing this potentiallyviolent situation is perhaps to say that theaccustomed methods of making sense of ourworld no longer fit our actual experience.This could be shown to be the case almosteverywhere where intellectual endeavour as-sumes ts more definite forms: in the arts, inliterature, in philosophy, in physics, and evenin the kind of humour in which we findrelief and relaxation. On ever.y, level ofseriousness or fun, the suspicion rulessupreme that this is an absurd world. It ex-presses itself now tragically and now withlaughter and now again with mathematicalexactitude. Somepeople call it, rather simple-mindedly, the menace of irrationalism. Itmay be wiser to see in it the somersault ofrationalism and humanism. The noble de-cision, made at the beginning of the historyof the modern mind, to reach an ever higherdegree of certainty through doubt has led tounforeseen dangers: the refinery of truth iscluttered up with slag. The dark regions, thatseemed hopefully reduced by making manthe measure of all things, have become im-measurably darker. In the end, absurditymaybe the only certainty of the ever-doubt-ing mind.The early Ernst J/fingers intellectualstrategy was based on the full acceptance ofthis situation. Thus he became the spokesmanof a generation in Germanywho felt that theexperience of the First World War gave thelie to all beliefs and ideals in which they hadbeen brought up. That which is unknown,extraordinary, and dangerous has become helasting norm .... Catastrophe emerges as thea priori of a changed mode of thinking.This is Ernst J/fingers diagnosis. And histherapy is to educate a race of menwho livein danger as in their proper element, who gain security not through the diminutionof danger but through the increase of their

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65strength, and who triumphantly exist,salamander-like, in the fire, asking for noalleviation of their fate. For this war hascome to young men ruly sick to death of apeace that so obviously was not the realthing, made up as it was of doubtful cer-tainties, uncertain doubts, and boring in-decision. We onged for something presentand real, wrote Ernst Jfinger, and wouldhave invaded the ice, the fire, and the ethermerely to rid ourselves of boredom. Only hewill understand this, he added, who hasreached the point at which nothingness itselfappears more desirable than anything that isassailable by doubt. And doubt can do noharm to the one certainty: to have existed,be it only for a momentof dizzy awareness, at the deepest well-spring of the age. Andwhat is this well-spring of the age? Hightreason to counter high treason. Mind, withits cultivation of doubt and anti-vitalisticrationality, has betrayed life, and nowmindmust propitiate life by betraying itself. It isone of the cruel delights of the age to be anaccomplice o this blasting operation. Clearly,to be a salamander nd able to live in the fire,is one thing: another, to mobilise the sala-manders o defeat the fire-brigade. Jfingerssalamanders were guilty of preparing arson.Bur when in x939 Hitler, outside thefence of metaphor, lit the fire, Jiingerpublished his On the Marble Cliffs. It wassuppressed by Hitlers censors. This bookshows remarkable courage, a courage worthyof the soldier of the First World War whohad been decorated with the Pour le mdrit.It describes a community of peaceful book-readers, ex-combatants turned disputants, andlovers of the traditional noble virtues,threatened with extinction by a totallymobilised underworld under the directionof a madly sadistic and power-drunk ChiefForester. There could be no doubt about themeaning of the allegory, and certainly theGermancensorship had none.From then onwards Ernst J/finger has beenworking on an intellectual and literary pro-ject, still vaster and perhaps still morehope-less than his earlier one. to reconcile his oldinsights into the nature of the modernworldwith that tentative belief in the eternalverities that had been awakened in him bythe rule of the Chief Forester. His volumin-ous diary of the Second World War, Strah-




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66 Erich Heller:lungen(~949), bears witness to the inceptionand first fumblingexecution of this hazard-ous enterprise; fumbling,although the book,abounding with memorable escriptions andstriking aphorisms, hardly ever betrays anylack of self-assurance. n fact, the peculiarun-balance of Jfingers mental make-up eemsunshaken.His mind has been formed not only in theclash between romantic expectation and theexperience of mechanised war and peace;three other forces, at work n our more e-cent intellectual tradition, have had heir saytoo: realism, symbolism, and Hegelianhistoricism. Jiinger has the realists appetitefor detail, the symbolists virtuosity in ex-tracting zsthetic significancefrom t, and thehistoricists passion or big historical general-isations. But he is also an existentialist whoseeks commitment. And when all is saidand done, he seems committed,at bottom, tosomething that allows for no commitment:to a historical abstraction. This is whyhisworld s still withoutmoralmeaning.His in-tellectual generalisations bypass he concretemoral encounter. Hence they are spurious.Again and again he comesclose to being apedantic dandy of the Apocalypse.Thereforehe rightly claims that he has notbeen converted. It is not from a humbledheart that he has abandonedis formerheroicnihilism. Indeed, his very descent into thosedepths where he nowdivines the springs ofnature, language, tradition, peace, and re-ligion, is performed with an air of con-descension. When e believed the time wasripe for the exclusive rule of the Soldier andthe Worker, he greeted their arrival withthat great German esture of intellectualwelcomeof which one can never be quitesure whether it means oy, malice, heroicprophecy, or simply bowing to historicalnecessity. AndErnst lfinger does not thinknow hat he was wrong hen; he merely addsa newcomero his little party of authenticambassadorsof the world-spirit: the Wald-gdnger, the solitary explorer in the woods,who shuns the Soldiers camp and theWorkers ollective, crying to recapture moreancient meanings beyond the din of themodern ity. If Ernst Jfinger now eels in-clined to dedicate himself to the virtues ofthe contemplative ife, he must ustify it bythe fact that History has once more madeavailable a little sanctuarywhere he hour is

Ernst Jiingerno longer sounded by mechanical bells andbuzzers linked to the mechanical otation ofmechanicalhands, but gendy flows like sandthrough the hour-glass. Yes, it is Der Wald-gang that matters now in 195t and DasSanduhrbuch,he bookof the sand-glass, thatmakes sense in i954. What has happened?Has JiJnger withdrawn from the storms ofsteel into the tower of ivory? Perhaps, butnot without charging the cost of the move othe account of History. He wrote Ueber dieLinie in ~95o, a treatise with whichhe turnedover a new leaf in the book of historicalfever-charts, announcing he world-spiritsdecision to manoeuvre s successfully overthe zero-point of nihilism. By he dispensa-tion of History, Eros may ove once more,the Muses may smile again, and evencathedrals maycautiously lift their spiresabove the horizon.IVr H s is not just to Jiinger the man, t isan injustice which finger the writer doesto himself. His very language makes ourcase. Speakingnowof peace, tradition, theglory of the word, and the future ofchurches, his diction has hardly changedfrom those remote days that, aglow andmany-coloured, ran through the soldiershands like the beads of a red-hot rosary bywhich they had to count their prayers inorder to realise themselves. This language,recently often a little tired and dishevelled,has always carried an echo of that soundingbrass and tinkling cymbal that would beheard even from the tongues of angels ifthere werea wantof charity.Conversion? No, History. But Historymeans, amongother things, the free con-vertibility of intellectual currencies. ErnstJfing.er has remained a member f that Ger-mamc midnight community which ishauntedby the irreconcilable ghosts of Hegeland Nietzsche, the one luring the soul withthe promise of authentic existence and un-limited freedom, he other tying the mind othe concept of historical inescapability. IfHistory were a god with a claim to manssoul, instead of being a doubtful science withthe power o corrupt mansconsciousness, heoutcomemight be high tragedy; as it is, eventhe most serious intentions exert themselvesin vain amid the uproar of a catastrophicfarce,




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Comment

U and Non UFrom he Duchess of Devonshire:As the co-founder, with my sister Jessica, ofthe Hons Club I would like to point out thatit was no more necessary to be born an honour-able to be a memberof that club than it isnecessary to be white to be a member f Whitesor to be French o live in France.The word Hon meant Hen in Honnish, andtherefore to say that someonewas a Honmeantthat they were a Hen, implying worthiness tobe a member f our Club.Wewere very fond of chickens and on thewhole preferred their companyo that of humanbeings, so to be likened to a hen was he highestcomplimentwe could pay.For the sake of accuracy I would like Mr.Evelyn Waugh o know that my sister Nancy,far from being Queen of the Hons, was thedreaded leader of the rival organisation, theHorrible Counter-Hons. DEBORAHEVO~SrURELondon, W.IPROV~SSORoss, on p. 2o of his article U andnon-U in your Novemberssue, says: In Ger-man here may well have been something com-prable (to the linguistic class-distinctions heas observed in English). Not only has therebeen, but there is. I cannot help feeling, how-ever, that his example Kfiss die Hand (onintroduction to a female) is ill-chosen. The ex-pression has, I feel, always been frowned upon~n true German ircles, because it is a charac-teristically Austrian form. Since the Germans,especially in the North, and even more so inPrussian circles, have always tended to regardthe Austrians as an amusingbut slightly irri-tating race who hould never be allowed off theoperetta stage, they were certain to frown on Kiiss die Hand or no other reason than thatit was Austrian, irrespective of whether it wasU or not. Kfiss die Hand maystill be heardin Vienna, and (under the influence of theAustro-Hungarianonarchy.~)s still used inJugoslavia (at least in U circles in Zagreb)the Croatian form Ljubim ruku. FRAr~KHAWMiinster, Germany

(This correspondence s now closed.--Ed.)

Fei Hsiao tungMR.Wtrr~ocEL E~cou~r~R, August t955) saysI have not contested his statement that, prior tox949, Fei Hsiao-tungs views differed funda-mentally from those of the Chinese Commu-nists and that he is now supporting, orpretending to support, policies that formerly~vere alien to his wayof thinking. On he con-trary, my etter definitely indicated that, evenbe-fore the war, Fei was sympathetically nterestedin the policies of the Chinese Communistartyand enthusiastic about its success. For the rest,Dr. Fei Hsiao-tungs letter (which I have sentyou on his behalf) only leaves mewith the needto insist that politically urged s,p, eculations,especially in a book review, about the inner-most thoughts o~ men far removed bygeography, culture, and ideology are never en-titled to respect.The difference in tone between Robert Red-fields letter and that of Mr.Wittfogel llustratesthe difference between he approaches and per-sonal qualities of a distinguishedscientist and acritic who s merely anti; and I am happy thatDr. Fei Hsiao-tungs etter also gives the feelingthat some day Dr. Redfield and himself maycollaborate again, and with closer understand-ing, in the service of Chinese and humanwel-fare. Meanwhile,we can all benefit from theunfortunate situation between hem f we ealisethat it is another cold war casualty in goodPwerSonalelations~and our perspectives on Mr.ittfogel and his spiritual kinsfolk shouldwiden accordingly. Cz~R~cDovtRLondon, W.6

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The following is the text oJ Dr. Fei s letter,which Mr. Doverhas sent to us:Sir,Er~cour~re~ ecently published Wittfogels re-view of China s Gentry, then Cedric Doverscastigation of the review, William Empsonsviews, Wittfogels reply, and Robert Redfieldsstatement (January and August numbers).have read themall.Perhaps now I can say something about thismatter.This is a typical example of how certain



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