In 1995 on Jünger’s hundredth birthday, his friends contributed to a collection of essays under the title The Magic of Serenity.[62] For the editors, Jünger’s work was so valuable because it demonstrated that “one can only understand one’s own time when one is not captivated by it” (wenn man sich ihr nicht ausliefert).[63] Both Jünger’s many admirers and his equally numerous critics recognize this attribute. For the former, Jünger’s distance to the events of his time and his familiarity with the occult traditions of occidental culture are an admirable antidote to the sicknesses of modernity, resisting ecological destruction, the loss of the sacred, unfettered consumerism, and the triumph of instrumental reason. For the latter, Jünger’s ambivalence about modern culture, his cold gaze, renders his Olympian stance suspicious, or worse, reactionary. Both sides in this long simmering feud fail to grasp that Jünger’s optics are informed much more by epistemology than politics. Although fully alert to the scientific and technological revolutions around him, Jünger’s aesthetic sensitivities were self-consciously old-fashioned—with the one exception of modern art, which fascinated him and led to friendships with avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Alfred Kubin.[64] One notices immediately when reading the war journals that the predominant books Jünger collected and read were published before his own era. He sought to rehabilitate an older version of science, organic and holistic, without jettisoning the value of scientific rigor.
In sum, Jünger was concerned with reversing Max Weber’s diagnosis of modernity as an iron cage, and he attempted to open doors for a reenchantment of the world, seeing, writing, and relating to reality in a way that supersedes the “modern.” Not unlike Heidegger and Nietzsche, who pined for the pre-Socratics, Jünger sought to recover the supposed epistemological primordial relationship to being as “awe,” which was closed off with the advent of abstract-rational thinking. Like another Nietzschean, Michel Foucault, who foresaw the eclipse of the modern episteme and the consequent “death of man,” Jünger conceived of modernity as a passing epoch, a cognitive horizon bound, one day, to yield to a return of new mythologies. The word “antimodern” fails to describe his fundamental project. An “alternate” or transcended modernity, in contrast to the flabby phrase “postmodernity,” better hits the mark.[65]
After 1945, Jünger would explore the posthistorical mood of a dissolved occident, that old Enlightened Europe that reached a zenith of development just as it destroyed itself in the process. If every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin famously observed, then the World War II chronicles of Ernst Jünger are surely one of the brightest and most enduring testaments to that Janus-faced history.
TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
English-speaking readers who seek access to Ernst Jünger’s works have a long tradition of translations to explore. Over a dozen of his titles have appeared in English since 1929. In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), his World War I memoir and probably his most famous book, has been translated twice into English and received serious attention from readers and critics alike. Four of Jünger’s six World War II journals, on the other hand, are presented here in English in their entirety for the first time. These texts first appeared in German in 1949 collected under the title Strahlungen, which is roughly equivalent to the English for “rays, “beams,” (of light), “radiations,” or “emanations.”
In his original preface Jünger explains the concept behind this title as the combination of themes that radiate across historical events to illuminate the mind of the observer like waves of light and dark patterns fluctuating with the extremes of existence. To the dark sphere belong the horrors of war and destruction; the realm of light encompasses moments of love, family, nature, and art to uplift and guide us. Jünger imagined his journals capturing such emanations and reflecting them back to the reader. He conceived of this interplay as a decidedly moral—not to say metaphysical—dynamic that epitomizes the function of art, which conveys a lesson couched in words and parables that challenge the reader to fathom through careful, disciplined reading. Indeed, for Jünger this reading process represents an almost sacred duty. In the tradition of the romantic poet, he endows his texts with spiritual value and his literary mission with the promise of salvation: whosoever shall read these words and experience excitement of the will or of the emotions, shall be granted insight into the core of the message.
The personal reflections in these four journals are based on the definitive German edition of Jünger’s works and cover the period when he joins the staff at military headquarters in Paris in February 1941 at the rank of captain, and continue through the events when he and his family endure Allied bombing raids on their village beginning in 1944. Finally, he records the effect of witnessing American tank divisions roll through his damaged town on their eastward course in the spring of 1945.
Ernst Jünger’s journals are remarkable for several reasons, but chiefly because he was an articulate observer of life and nature whose diaries record three historical areas of experience. The first of these is at the personal and cultural core of the two separate Paris journals, which detail his interaction with the French people, particularly writers, artists, and other figures who attached themselves to the German cause during the occupation. Those entries document his genuine Francophile excitement at the beauties and secrets of the city as well as his lightly disguised romantic affairs during this tour of duty. We also watch him interacting with his comrades, other officers who are carrying out their administrative duties and frequently discussing political opinions with him. Such material is, in fact, most revealing when it places him on the fringe of the group of Wehrmacht conspirators plotting to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, a group he may have inspired but declined to join.
The second area of historical importance comprises first-hand experiences from Jünger’s interlude on the eastern front. His brief tour of duty covered in Notes from the Caucasus describes a risky posting in hostile, mountainous territory at the moment when German forces are beginning their retreat in the face of the Russian victory at Stalingrad. Here he witnesses the chaos and horror of a routed army and the suffering of its soldiers, though he is also always completely candid about the torment perpetrated by his own compatriots.
The third area of historical and human interest covered in these journals records what it was like to experience the allied bombings of German cities, particularly of Hannover and its outlying villages. He had spent his childhood in Hannover and in 1939 moved back to the region, settling in the village of Kirchhorst, fifteen kilometers to the northeast of the city. He had witnessed aerial bombing raids on Paris from the spring of 1943 onwards, but always from a safe distance. After the German retreat from Paris, he reaches Kirchhorst in September 1944 where he is no longer the detached observer enjoying a position of power and capable of finding appealing traces of grandeur in carnage. Rather, he is a reduced to the role of threatened civilian struggling to protect his family and several refugees as they prepare for the inevitable capitulation.
62
Günter Figal and Heimo Schwilk,
65
Richard Herzinger in this context coined the phrase “