As important as historical context is for a full appreciation of these war journals, it is necessary before concluding to pay some attention to Jünger’s idiosyncratic style. Nothing derogatory is meant by the term “idiosyncratic,” deriving from the Greek words “idio” and “sunkratikos,” or mixed together in a way particular to an individual. An “idiot” in Greek was someone who did not participate in the public sphere, but by inference was someone who took a singular path. Jünger was certainly no idiot, but he did very much march to the beat of his own drum. His depth of experience and knowledge was astounding, especially considering that he was still in his late forties when he wrote these journals. Furthermore, he was an autodidact who, despite some university study, lacked specialized academic training. Very few observers could have predicted at the time that by the 1980s he would be compared to Goethe.[51] The journals give many indications of why that judgment was not off the mark, not only because of the bountiful evidence of polymathy but also because of Jünger’s unique style and form. The following sections briefly address three key aspects of his writing that are essential for revealing the inimitable fabric, the texture that links words to reality in these pages.
Jünger’s thirst for adventure was played out in his short stint in the French Foreign Legion and his four-year, life-changing service in the Great War. It was also imaginary, as in his reflections on books, dreams, plants, and animals. These offer a key that can unlock many of Ernst Jünger’s writings. In these war journals, for example, Jünger returns repeatedly to adventure books about shipwrecks, a metaphor for the situation in which he finds himself, logging the events leading to the inevitable downfall of Germany.
Adventure is perhaps the oldest of all literary genres. Gerhard Nebel, who worked as a translator in Paris in 1941 and is mentioned in the war journals, explored the concept in his early post–World War II book, describing Jünger’s spiritual and metaphysical thirst for adventure as the glue that holds together such disparate endeavors as militant nationalism and Christian spiritualism.[52] Gerhard Loose also picked up the adventure theme in his Jünger biography, emphasizing the pitfalls inherent in the cult of self (Ichbezogenheit), which reduces the natural world, foreign lands, war, or just about any phenomenon to objects of speculation for Jünger’s aesthetic imagination.
In one of the most insightful essays ever written on the topic, the sociologist Georg Simmel defined the adventure as a self-contained experience, without reference to all the neighboring parts of life: “it is like an island in life, which determines its beginning and its end according to its own visionary powers (Bildungskräfte), and is not at the same time determined, as in the case of a part of a continent, by the one side or the other.”[53] Both world wars were (by Simmel’s definition) islands in Jünger’s life, and both provided ample material for his visionary imagination.
In the mid and late 1930s, Jünger’s adventures continued, but in a different key. In 1934 he published a collection of essays, Leaves and Stones, which marked a turn away from militant politics. The collection contained a travel diary, an essay on pain, a surrealist take on the “Man on the Moon,” and a piece on language, “In Praise of Vowels.” The volume also contained theoretical tracts on military subjects, in particular a reprint of “The Total Mobilization.” He revised The Adventurous Heart, which in tone and substance was so distant from the kind of literature published in Germany at the time that it might as well have been penned by a foreign author. In 1938 Jünger cut most of the autobiographical details of the first edition and replaced them with metaphysical reflections and dream sequences that would avoid the censor’s blue pencil in Hitler’s Germany. The method was “stereoscopic,” a journey into dreamlike realms below quotidian existence.[54]
“Stereoscopic perception” has a technical meaning for Jünger. In The Adventurous Heart, he noted that it involved “extracting two sensual qualities from one and the same object, through—and this is essential—the same sense organ.”[55] One sense organ has to take over a function of another. Thus, a red, fragrant carnation is not stereoscopic as it involves merely sight and smell separately. But a velvet carnation that emits the fragrance of cinnamon is stereoscopic because the nose both smells and tastes the qualities of spice simultaneously. The device has roots in French decadence and symbolism, as evidenced by repeated occurrences in the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. Jünger may have possessed synesthesia, or at least was able to create it poetically, by separating and mixing different sensory qualities in an object. “I thought I was seeing sounds that no painter had ever observed,” he wrote in an entry on 9 April 1942.
In the Paris Diaries, Jünger’s recollection of his dreams, as well as his zoological observations and recurrent descriptions of long walks and visits to cemeteries, parks, libraries, bookstores, antiquarian shops, galleries, and museums of Paris, partake of some of the same magical-realist method.[56] The diaries, one must add, are meant to be actual descriptions of events, not phantasmagoria. Jünger’s analogies are imaginative, but in these pages usually not technically “stereoscopic,” such as when he compares receiving a typhus vaccination to Holy Communion.[57] The method is stereoscopic in a broader sense, the way Jünger described, in an essay from the 1930s, the magical effect of perceiving a man’s face on a brightly lit moon.[58] As Jünger explains, “the real is just as magical as the magical is real”[59]—or to put it another way, the enchanted and the mundane are stereoscopically equal and present in Jünger’s optics.
A key term Jünger borrowed from the French was “désinvolture,” the casual and innocent observation of actuality from a distance, which embraces the Heraclitian flux, the “innocence of becoming” of all things that come in and out of existence, beyond good and evil.[60] In the harsh environment of the two wars, the applied method enabled Jünger to keep an emotional distance from the horrors he experienced and translate them into objective descriptions.
For Jünger there is no single mode of consciousness but rather multiple layers of experience, which must be uncovered below the Veil of Maya, the surface illusions of reality. For that reason, he was fascinated by hallucinatory substances. In the war journals, he refers to the effects of ether in an essay by de Maupassant on 17 September 1942 and to the Veil of Maya on 2 October 1942. In the 1920s, Jünger had an intense interest in hallucinogenic drugs, magic, and the supernatural.[61] In the early 1950s, Jünger would experiment under medical supervision with LSD with Albert Hoffman, its inventor. He dedicated an entire book, Annäherungen: Drogen und Rausch (Encounters: Drugs and Intoxication) to the subject, which was published in 1970.
52
See Gerhard Nebel,
53
See Georg Simmel,
54
See the introduction by Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman in Jünger,
56
See, for example, his descriptions from the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a park on the northern edge of the Bois de Boulogne, which until 1931 exhibited foreign peoples, mainly Africans, in a kind of “human zoo,” but by the time Jünger visited only animals were on display (Jünger,
58
See Ernst Jünger, “Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon,” in Jünger,
60
I borrow here the term “