in a position of near casual authority. He was even permitted to stroll
through the streets and markets in civilian clothing. His official job was
to censor the mail, but he was also surreptitiously to write reports for his
superiors about internal conflicts between the German Army and the
Nazi Party, in particular the SS, the SD, the embassy, and the Gestapo, all
of which operated their own surveillance systems in Paris. He found an
admirer in the aristocratic General Otto von Stülpnagel, and then a dis-
tant cousin of the general, Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who succeeded
Otto in February 1942. Through the latter, Jünger came into contact with
officers involved in a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, centered around the
legendary General Erwin Rommel.14 After the failed Stauffenberg plot of
July 20, 1944, the SS made a sweep of the military command in Paris,
but Jünger had kept enough distance from the plotters to avoid arrest. As
Jean Cocteau (who socialized with Jünger in Paris) once wittily observed,
under the occupation “some people had dirty hands, some people had
clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”15
28
28
C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
Jünger’s eldest son, his namesake Ernst, was killed in November 1944
in the marble cliffs of Cararra, Italy. Ernst Jr. had expressed sentiments
hostile to the regime and was denounced and arrested in January 1944.
Jünger Sr. received permission to leave Paris in February and met with
the authorities in Berlin, displaying his Pour le Mérite insignia ostenta-
tiously across his chest. His son was allowed to return to military serv-
ice but given a dangerous assignment in the Italian mountains. Jünger
was never sure if his son had been shot by the enemy or murdered by
the SS.16 His war diaries of the Second World War are written with cold,
emotionless precision, except for the entries about his son’s death, which
reflected the deep and enduring pain he felt all his life at the loss of his
eldest son.
In France, Jünger secretly kept notes that formed the basis for his later
published war memoirs Emanations ( Strahlungen). These war diaries offer
a unique perspective from “inside the Belly of the Leviathan,” as Jünger
described his role in the Third Reich. Some critics have accused the writer of
posing as a flâneur and dandy while others suffered. In one infamous scene,
Jünger climbed up to the roof of the Hotel Raphael and, holding a glass of
burgundy, observed a night bombing raid on Paris, as “its red towers and
spires lay in stupendous beauty, like petals blown over in an act of deadly
fertilization.”17 Whatever moral judgment one wishes to make about these
aesthetics of violence, the diaries are indispensable as first- hand accounts of
Paris under the German occupation and provide sharply observed portraits
of Jünger’s contemporaries as they struggled with the apocalyptic destruc-
tion of Germany and during the first years of its own, later, occupation.
The postwar period
The Paris Diaries from 1941 to early 1944 read like entries in the log of a
sinking ship. The sections written after the summer of 1944 project the
stark mood of a shipwreck. Messages in a bottle washed up on his shore
as he gradually received news about friends, acquaintances, and relatives.
Some alive, others barely alive after brutal treatment by the Russians in
the eastern zone, others dead by fate or their own hand.
On July 21, 1945, Jünger wrote in his diary, “The Conservative mind
aims to conserve, even conserve his enemy, that is part of his nat-
ural inclination.”18 This observation, written with bitterness, sums
up the attitude of a writer entering a kind of second inner emigra-
tion. The British, he notes, share a fundamental misunderstanding of
2
9
Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel
29
the German situation since 1918. “Unconditional surrender is the flip
side of total war,” he notes, by inference comparing Churchill, Stalin
and Roosevelt to Goebbels.19 He compares anti- German sentiments to
Jünger travels through different dream worlds in these pages, actual
dreams, images, and ideas from books, and mental journeys into the past.
The trauma of the immediate past preoccupied him. In a series of ar-
resting reflections on Hitler, he observed that he himself, like many in
Germany, underestimated the demonic power that lifted the little nation-
alist drummer to the heights of power and then self- destruction. Hitler
was a “moon character,” who could reflect back to the German people
their fears and desires in a way that the other Weimar politicians were
incapable of.21 It is striking that he goes to great lengths to dissect the
personalities of some leading Nazis, in particular Heinrich Himmler
and Josef Goebbels, but says relatively little about the Holocaust. When
he does, relativizing comparisons are offered, for example between the
treatment of German Sudeten refugees to the tragic fate of the Jews in
Germany,22 or examples of persecution from the Old Testament.23 On the
other hand, he develops, around a decade and half before Hannah Arendt
made the idea famous, the notion that some leading Nazis were extraor-
dinarily mundane. Himmler was characterized by “penetrating bourgeois
characteristics,” he observes, and “evil in the modern world shows up in
the ordinary actions of a bureaucrat behind a desk.”24
Politics make up only a fraction of these postwar diaries. Jünger often
describes long walks in the moorlands around Kirchhorst, noting the
changing seasons, discussing philosophy, quoting passages from esoteric
books. He dwells on the daily hardships of the Germans under occupa-
tion, the cold winters, the scavenging for food and basic necessities. In the
end these are the reflections of a solitary man living in a world from which
he feels both alienated and simultaneously deeply attached.
Jünger hoped to make a comeback in the postwar period, despite
having been placed on a literary blacklist, and despite his physical remote-
ness from German cultural life. He had to face a number of obstacles. The
reading public, especially youth, hungered for authors who were banned
under National Socialism, especially American authors like Hemingway
and Thomas Wolfe. Sartre and the French Existentialists were starting
their conquest of intellectual life across Western Europe. Jünger had
kept another work in his secret vault during the war: a long essay which
he hoped would provide a vision for a peaceful postwar Europe that
30
30
C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
would put him back on the cultural map. He titled it simply The Peace
( Der Friede).
Jünger viewed his own nationalist writings from the 1920s as his “Old
Testament,” and works like The Peace as part of his new evangelical spirit.25
They fit together: The Total Mobilization was just the flip side of The Peace,
he wrote to Armin Mohler in 1947.26 He argued that in the wak
e of the
two disastrous world wars, Europe’s future lay in overcoming nationalism
through organic unity and integration. These ideas were fairly common
after 1945, but Jünger’s conservative contribution was first to appeal to
a return to Christianity as a solution to Europe’s problems, and second,
quite contentiously, to relativize the question of war guilt, a topic widely
discussed in public in this period by eminent figures such as the philoso-
pher Karl Jaspers, the theologian Martin Niemöller, and the psychologist
Carl Jung. Jünger objected to laying blame on any one side or nation. This
was an outlier position in the debates about German guilt, and The Peace
did not play a major role in the public discourse. In the larger context,
Jünger’s theological turn after 1945 was an outsider position as well, or it
could have been viewed as part of the deradicalization of European con-
servatism,27 since the radical Right in Europe after the war was trending
in an anti- Christian direction.
Jünger held high hopes for a major novel he had been working on in
those years. Heliopolis is a dystopian work about a power struggle between
plebeians and an old aristocracy. In many ways it was a roman à clef about
the period of National Socialism as seen from occupied Paris by using
obscure designations to refer to historical figures and events. The novel
contains many theological diversions, a result of an intense reading of the
Bible that Jünger had begun in occupied Paris. The reception of Heliopolis
was disappointing. Even his friend Carl Schmitt, writing in his diary in
1950, displayed irritation with Jünger’s apparent religiosity and his pro-
clivity to mask history with “pseudo- mythological” descriptions.28
In 1950 Jünger moved one last time. He was offered an eighteenth-
century baroque villa by Freiherr Schenk zu Stauffenberg, a distant relative
of the coup plotter against Hitler. The new home was in the small village
of Wilflingen in Upper Swabia, a few kilometers from the nearest train
station and post office. Jünger became the famous recluse of Wilflingen,
where he would live out the many years left in his long life.
In hindsight, Jünger’s turn to theology in the late 1940s misled his
readers. He could best be described in religious terms as a neopagan,
who considered Christianity just one interesting variant of Neoplatonism
31
Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel
31
(though at the end of his life he did convert from Protestantism, his religion
at birth, to Catholicism). A little- read novel from 1953, Visit to Godenholm
( Besuch auf Godenholm), signaled his interest in mind- expanding drugs,
esoterica, and mystery religions, which would remained a lifelong pas-
sion and made him a cult author in the psychedelic 1960s. The novel was
written under the influence of LSD, which Jünger had imbibed under
medical supervision with the drug’s inventor, Albert Hoffman, in a visit
to Bottmingen, Switzerland, in February 1951.29 Jünger’s project was to re-
cover the truths embedded in both past religions and metaphysics, which
amounted to a rebuke of the positivist and materialist spirit of the postwar
rebuilding period.
The early 1950s saw a series of works from Jünger’s pen that ex-
panded on this antimodernist tendency. In 1950 he published an essay
called “Over the Line” (“Über die Linie”), dedicated to Martin Heidegger
on his sixtieth birthday, in which he echoes Heidegger’s concerns
about technology. As the economic boom was taking off in Germany,
Jünger viewed feverish production by despiritualized workers and the
increasing specialization of the human and natural sciences as signs
of an ever- diminishing ability to grasp the totality of life as proof of the
growing nihilism of the age.30 In 1951 he published The Forest Passage
( Der Waldgang), which amounts to instructions for passive resistance to
the modern condition. The individual walks in a metaphorical forest,
taking her own path, to escape domination by the forces of technology,
the omnipresent Leviathan state, and the banality of modern culture.
Religion, counter- Enlightenment thought, and myth are all put in
the service of subverting the corrosive effects of instrumental ration-
ality, which, he claims, undergirds all modern totalitarian forms of
government.31
Although Jünger could appear as a conservative defender of the West—
for example in The Gordian Knot ( Der gordische Knoten) from 1953, which
pits the freedom of the West against the despotism of the East,32 and even
supporting a “World State” (the title of another essay from 1960)— his po-
litical writing always contained a consistent strain of antidemocratic sus-
picion. A good example is a little- known essay he wrote in 1956 about the
eighteenth- century French writer Rivarol, a defender of the monarchy and
a fervent critic of the French Revolution.33 Jünger identified with Rivarol’s
rebellion against French society and viewed himself in a similar position
of revolt against the imposed laws of the occupying posers in postwar
Germany.
32
32
C L A S S I C T H I N K E R S
On March 29, 1965, Jünger turned seventy. He began a new set of
diaries, which he maintained until the last days of his life. He observed
the world from a distance, as a naturalist would view insects (he was a
respected amateur entomologist). The day after the Berlin Wall fell he cas-
ually remarks that he expected Germany to reunify, just not in his lifetime.
Nothing more is said about European politics in his diary for the rest of
the autumn of 1989, a revolutionary period during which the world held
its breath as communism fell in state after state.34
In his old age Jünger saw his time increasingly through a posthistorical
lens. For the European Right after World War II, thinkers such as Martin
Heidegger, Arnold Gehlen, Carl Schmitt, and others, in various versions
of the same idea, postulated that the postwar world would be characterized
by the decline of Europe as a world power and the rise to dominance of
technological systems that would expand to the entire globe.35 The “end of
history” implied that after the demise of European culture, intellectuals
could only take stock of what had been handed down.
Jünger captured this mood in his 1949 introduction to the war journals,
in which he postulated that the Copernican quest for ordering the cosmos,
and the diary as a modern literary form, fall together chronologically. They
have in common “the bifurcation of mind from object, the author from
the world.”36 The First World War marked the end of history, because it
represented the demise of heroic action in a pretechnological sense. The
end of history, he once said, can be equated with the end of the aristocratic
order.37
In his own science fiction novel, Eumeswil from 1977, posthistorical
themes are omnipresent. The protagonist is a young historian, Michael
Venator, who operates computers with databanks full of sources on the
history of past civilizations, and through a kind of virtual reality can trans-
port himself back in time. The protagonist projects medieval aristocratic
values and Faustian personal perseverance in the face of defeat.
Later reception
In October 1982 the conservative Christian Democratic Party came to
power under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The end of the social democratic
era was viewed as a turn ( Wende) toward soft patriotism and an attempt to
gradually emerge from the shadows of the Fascist past, thus replacing the
politics of reparation and shame with a larger view of German history and
of Germany’s place in the world that was not reducible to the twelve years
3
Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel
33
of Nazi rule. Kohl famously said he had been born with the clemency of
a late birth (he was born in 1930). Kohl turned to Jünger as an apposite
symbol of this fundamental shift in Germany’s view of itself from a con-
servative perspective.
In that same month of 1982, Jünger was awarded the Goethe Prize, the
most prestigious literary award in Germany, by the conservative city ad-
ministration of Frankfurt am Main. The bestowal of the prize was greeted
by howls of protest not just from hostile commentators across Germany
but also by street demonstrations in the city of Frankfurt on the day of the
ceremony. According to the critics, this award in the name of Germany’s
most hallowed humanist should not be bestowed on a writer who had
“paved the way” for the rise of Fascism in Germany.
A decade later, as Jünger approached his hundredth birthday, this
unsympathetic sentiment had shifted toward a more favorable appreci-
ation of an Olympian figure in whom many Germans could take pride.
He was also honored with a visit in Wilflingen by Chancellor Kohl and
French president François Mitterand on July 20, 1993, the anniversary of
the failed Stauffenberg plot against Hitler.38 Jünger still had many critics,
but the German public was prepared, some grudgingly, others enthusias-
tically, to accept that Ernst Jünger’s lifework was pan- European, a century
long, and that his talents could be seen as on par, or at least approaching,
the likes of the almost universally adored Goethe.
Conclusion
As Jünger’s lifework has become historicized, it is clear that his influence