In these years, Jünger worked to establish a Central Council that would unite workers and soldiers until a Führer could be found who could put the revolution into practice. This was a “National Bolshevik” strategy and explains his close friendship with Ernst Niekisch, a politician and writer from Saxony who founded the journal Widerstand, with the aim of grafting Soviet Bolshevism onto Prussian nationalism. In the War Journals, Niekisch is referred to twelve times under the pseudonym “Cellaris.” He was a key figure for understanding the ambiguous position Jünger held on the right-wing spectrum of pre-Nazi politics in Germany. Jünger was deeply concerned about Niekisch’s fate during World War II and received updates from military contacts who knew how he was being mistreated by the Nazis. (Niekisch was arrested in 1937 and spent the war years in a Gestapo jail, where he was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, a broken, nearly blind man).[6]
By 1927 Jünger became disillusioned with the various nationalist groups fighting one other as the Weimar government entered a relatively stable period, which lasted until the Great Depression doomed Germany’s first experiment with democracy. He decided to move to the bustling capital city.
In 1927 he took his wife and infant son to Berlin to settle down as a full-time writer. He had married Gretha von Jeinsen, ten years his junior, in 1925. With the Great War now almost a decade past, he became less focused on strident German nationalism and the battles of his youth. Residing in the humming metropolis, which began to eclipse Paris as the center of European cultural innovation, Jünger’s curiosity turned to more expansive themes of modernity, technology, and cultural disruption. As Marcus Bullock has noted, he was particularly fascinated by the pulsating sexuality of the city, the intoxication experienced by the breaking of taboos and bourgeois norms.[7] Here he wrote the first version of his surrealist work, The Adventurous Heart, “notes written down by day and night.”[8] The literary scholar Karl-Heinz Bohrer has strikingly labeled Jünger’s style an “aesthetics of shock” because this book contains a phantasmagoria of scientific and poetic vignettes, a collage of wild associations and ghostly images that recall the war-inspired art of painters of the era like René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst, as well as the expressionists Otto Dix and George Grosz.[9]
Jünger’s circle of friends and literary acquaintances expanded in Berlin as he moved beyond his ties to war veterans. On the left, he interacted with Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, and the anarchist Erich Mühsam. On the right, he associated with Gottfried Benn, Ernst von Salomon, and Arnolt Bronnen. Around this time, his intellectual infatuation with France and French culture began. He made frequent trips to Paris, making contact with French literary circles, facilitated by the well-connected German-French author Joseph Breitbach.
As the Nazis began their final ascent to power after winning 107 seats in the Reichstag in the elections of September 1930, Jünger distanced himself from the party. He simultaneously advocated his own political vision, which in some ways was a more radical version of the nationalist revolution: authoritarian and ruthless, but not racist. Despite Goebbels’s attempt to win him over to the Brown Revolution before and even after 1933, Jünger steadfastly declined any offers to become involved in Nazi politics and forbade the propaganda minister from using any of his works without permission. Although Goebbels transmitted the Führer’s avid wish to meet him, Jünger did not reciprocate.[10] Apart from one unfortunate essay on “Jews and the National Question,” in which he stressed the impossibility of Jews and Germans sharing the same national culture,[11] he resisted the Nazi “Blood and Soil” ideology.[12]
In 1932, the same year Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, Jünger’s The Worker appeared in print. As the war journals indicate, Huxley was one of the few modern authors Jünger prized. Huxley’s novel and Jünger’s social analysis shared a dystopian vision of the future resulting from economic and political breakdown. Whereas the former was read as a warning of the end of the liberal order in western societies, Jünger’s tract affirmed a Nietzschean reevaluation of and triumph over the liberal order. Nevertheless, the Nazis had little use for Jünger’s treatise because it lacked any connection to the German Volk community or racial hierarchies. The book heralded a collective new age of the laborer in epochal terms, while the Nazis concentrated on the specific situation of Germany’s supposed superior racial characteristics. National Socialism appeared to Jünger as a purely technical execution of the “total mobilization” (the title of another of his short treatises of this period). He later said that Nazism “lacked metaphysics.”[13] As a political platform The Worker was considered useless by the new regime. In fact, it was explicitly denounced in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party newspaper.[14]
Jünger was well aware of what could befall an opponent of the new regime, regardless of his war hero status. Around this time, he began burning many personal papers and letters. Because of his ties to the anarchist Erich Mühsam, the Gestapo searched Jünger’s apartment in early 1933. At the beginning of December 1933, Jünger’s family left Berlin for Goslar, in Lower Saxony on the slopes of the Harz Mountains. During the so-called Röhm Purge at the end of June 1934, in which the Schutzstaffel (SS) eradicated the leadership of the unruly Brown Shirts, as well as nearly one hundred political opponents of the regime, Jünger was vacationing on the island of Sylt but felt the threat palpably. The mood was ominous, wrote Jünger’s wife.[15]
Jünger now entered a period of “inner emigration,” a term possibly coined by Thomas Mann, but one Jünger never embraced.[16] He published a series of essays based on his travels, and revised The Adventurous Heart, removing large parts of the book that were political in nature. He rejected membership in the Nazified Prussian Academy of the Arts, which was “synchronized” (gleichgeschaltet) in the spring of 1933, forcing out many luminaries, including Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin. The Nazis filled the writing (Dichtung) section with party hacks, although the Academy was headed by Gottfried Benn, a major poet who was on friendly terms with Jünger.[17] In 1934 Jünger published a collection of his essays on philosophically esoteric topics, which stood in stark contrast to the “Blu-Bo” (a contraction for Blut und Boden, blood and soil) popular literature of the period. In 1936 he published the diversionary Afrikanische Spiele (African Games), a novel about his short adventure in the French Foreign Legion.
6
Ernst Niekisch,
7
See Marcus Paul Bullock,
8
Ernst Jünger,
9
See Karl Heinz Bohrer,
11
Ernst Jünger, “Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage,”
12
On recent debates about Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg’s complicated relationship to Jews and Judaism, see Thomas Bantle, Alexander Pschera, and Detlev Schöttker (Eds.),
14
Thilo von Throta, “Das endlose dialektische Gespräch,”
16
Elliot Yale Neaman,