Written by Federico Campagna, 22.08.2014
“We were both Waldganger. We preferred the forest to the city.”
Albert Hofmann on Ernst Jünger
103 Years
In 1895, the year Ernst Jünger was born, Wilhelm II was holding the reins of the German Empire, while Wilhelm Rontgen experimented with the first X-rays machine. In 1998, when Jünger died at the age of 103, Pathfinder had already landed on Mars and Google was about to launch its campaign to conquer the digital world. In the course of his life, fit for a Biblical patriarch, Jünger survived two world wars, twice witnessed the passage of the Halley comet, and took part to the full unfolding of modernity. Yet, it would be fair to say that he was scarcely ever there. Whether fleeing to the Algerian desert, fighting in the mud in La Somme, or secluded in his hermitage in High Swabia, Jünger shared with monks and dandies the ability to be in the world, while remaining at an observant distance from it. He was a theoretician in the original meaning of the word: in a contemplative position even in the heat of battle.
It was as if sliding along an orbit around the present that Jünger managed to turn his perspective almost at 360 degrees, moving from the revolutionary conservatism of his youth, to the extreme existential anarchism of his old age. It was also for this reason that my first encounter with his work left me at once fascinated and skeptical. Jünger, the anarcho-nazi? How could anyone take this man seriously?
Yet, how could I remain indifferent to the flying architecture of his prose, the blade of his thinking, and the charm of his life? I learned to love Jünger against my ingrained ideological judgement, like a slowly acquired taste. Over the years I’ve kept returning to Jünger’s toolbox, and every time, without fail, I’ve found in it new weapons and methods to apply to my own existence.
Every good weapon has magic qualities; by merely looking at it we feel ourselves wonderfully strengthened” (1)
I deem myself lucky to be in the UK today, on the eve of a long overdue rediscovery of Jünger’s work in the English language. Seeing his books finally republished in English by Telos Press (2) reminds me of the pleasure of showing a friend one of my favourite films, which they had somehow missed until then. In the following pages I will attempt to compose something akin to subtitles to a trailer of Jünger’s life and works. It will be a strange, short film, full of action, horror and of metaphysical stillness.
I hope you will enjoy the vision.
Total Mobilisation
Despite his long career as a soldier, Jünger’s lifelong enemy was an entity that had no face, and wore no uniform. First identified by Nietzsche, the modern Linnaeus of the Western soul, Nihilism haunted Europe and Jünger’s life with the persistence of a persecutor. From the simple devaluation of all values, Nihilism took hold of the Modern world by inoculating its terrifying emptiness deep inside the social body. Infected by its virus, the social organism convulsed between phases of resigned decay, and outbursts of active nihilist fever. Still today, after the end of Modernity, the oscillation between catatonia and panic remains a pendulum swinging closely over our daily lives.
However, when 18 years-old Ernst run away from his father’s house to join the Foreign Legion in Sidi Bel Abbes, Nihilism wasn’t yet the ‘uncanniest of guests’ at the doorstep of his conscience. His life then was that of a romantic teenager, thirsty for chivalrous adventures in exotic lands. The following year, at the break of the First World War, it was still as a young romantic that Jünger volunteered to join the Fusilier Regiment and, shortly afterwards, the assault Shock Troops.
His perspective on life was to change irremediably. Sent to the Western front, Jünger landed on a lunar landscape, where tempests of fire swept craters overflowing with corpses, and a human life was lighter than a cloud of chlorine gas. Repugnance mixed with the sublime, while homicidal frenzy melted into suicidal catatonia.
Here, and really only here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country. In moments when I felt it, I experienced no fear as such but a kind of exalted, almost demoniacal lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress. […] The ability to think logically and the feeling of gravity, both seemed to have been removed. We had the sensation of the ineluctable and the unconditionally necessary, as if we were facing an elemental force.” (3)
The author barely survived the experience, having been wounded in combat fourteen times over five years of war.
Although his bravery as part of the Stoßtrupp gained him the highest military decoration, and the publication of his war memoir Storm of Steel (4) propelled him to immediate fame, the experience of WWI had on him a much more profound effect than a medal and a writing career. In the trenches he had not only witnessed the utter degradation of the human body and mind; he had also experienced first-hand the coming kingdom of Technic. In the first ‘war of materials’, humans had failed to keep up with their technological equipment, and had turned into faulty appendixes to their weapons. Over the ‘fields of wrath’ of the Western front, active Nihilism had offered the first taste of its ‘Total Mobilisation’ of the world.
In his 1932 book The Worker (5), Jünger described the dawning world of Technic using a combination of epic and horror, apocalypse and ecstasy. A new age of the Titans was arising, and the world was soon to yield to their dominion. Humans no longer reigned, and the rule of Technic demanded their innermost depths as a sacrifice to the Total Mobilisation – firstly, by transforming all human activity into Work. Even the feature of their faces had to change, turning metallic and mechanical, like cyborgs ante-litteram. Individuals – those relics of the bourgeois era – were to give way to a new ‘human type’, already emerging among the factory workers and the soldiers of trench warfare. The battlefield had become a factory, and the factory a battlefield: the metaphysics of Technic was soon to drown the world under a millenarian flood.
One of the features of a fundamental creative energy is the ability to petrify symbols into an infinite repetition which resembles the process of nature, as in the acanthus leave, the phallus, the lingam, the scarab, the cobra, the sun circle, the resting Buddha. In worlds so constituted a foreigner doesn’t feel awe but fear, and still today it is not possible to face the great pyramid at night, or the solitary temple of Segesta, sunk in the sunlight, without being scared. Evidently the human type which represents the form of the Worker is moving towards such a kind of world, clear and closed upon itself like a magic ring; and as it grows closer to it, the individual increasingly turns into the type.” (6)
Reading The Worker today, one feels the melancholia of those who have passed to the other side of science-fiction. The future described by Jünger has already taken place, and its grip is tightening around us by the day. However, there appears to be no trace of the shimmering gleam which Jünger imagined would accompany its triumph. The light of the late capitalist spectacle spreads an opaque film on all that it touches. The type of the Worker has indeed eradicated the bourgeois concept of the individual, but instead of bathing humans in a heroism which transcends fear, it has sunk them in an epidemic of depression and anxiety. Similarly, the age of drone warfare has brought to perfection the clash of Titans which had first taken place in WWI, but Jünger’s metaphysical revelations in the face of destruction have left their place to bored operators staring at long-distance murder though their terminals’ screen.
The apocalypse of the individual befell us, and it was as miserable as it was underwhelming.
On The Marble Cliffs
Jünger spent most of the 1920s writing political pamphlets for the Conservative Revolutionary Movement – which included authors such as Thomas Mann, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger – while also occasionally flirting with Ernst Niekisch’s National Bolsheviks. The publication of Storm of Steel had gained him a prominent position as a public intellectual, and it had also won him the admiration of a then minor political leader, Adolf Hitler, who repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to be introduced to him. Contrary to a common misconception, Jünger never took part to or supported the Nazi party. When in 1927 Goebbels offered him a parliamentary seat, he laconically replied that he would “rather write one good poem than represent sixty thousand idiots.” In 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, he refused again a seat in the Reichstag, and insisted that the Nazi Party would never publish any of his writing on their official newspaper Volkisher Beobachter. As Goebbels recalled in his diaries, “we laid bridges of gold before him, which he refused to cross”.
After the Nazis took power, Jünger abandoned Berlin and withdrew to an isolated life in the province, interrupted only by international travels. He developed his passion for botany, marine zoology and entomology to academic standards, and limited his publications to a minimum.
When he did finally publish again, in 1939, he put his life at stake. On The Marble Cliffs (7) described the assault of the barbaric Chief Ranger – a thinly disguised caricature of Hitler – and of his hoard of savages against the peaceful city of Marina. Their assault is successful, and Marina sinks in a nightmare of tyranny, violence and terror. In this novel it also made its first appearance the magnetic force of anarchy, which Jünger already identified, though somewhat hermetically, as the only possible alternative to Nihilism.
Between full-blown nihilism and unbridled anarchy there is a profound difference. Whether the abodes of men shall become desert or primeval forest depends upon the outcome of this struggle.” (8)
Within two weeks of its publication, the novel had sold over fourteen thousand copies, and its growing success was unnerving the highest hierarchies of the Nazi party. When Philipp Bouhler – who had made a name for himself as the promoter of the Aktion T4 ‘involuntary euthanasia’ program – requested that the book be banned, Hitler not only replied that his favourite author had to be “left alone”, but shortly afterwards decided to put Jünger in charge of censorship in occupied Paris.
Once again Jünger became a soldier – and again, perhaps surprisingly, a volunteer – though this time his lodgings were in the luxury Hotel Raphael, near the Arc de Triomphe. He used his military position to ease the grip of police control over the French Resistance, destroying the more compromising correspondence intercepted by his office to keep it away from the eyes of the Gestapo. In the evenings, he took part to the cultural life of the city, meeting with artists and authors such as Picasso, Cocteau, Celine and Brecht. Years later, after the end of the war, it was Brecht who raised his voice in Jünger’s defence, asking, in Hitler’s exact words, that he be “left alone” by the new censors.
As he got involved in the Parisian life, he also created a distance from it, as it was in his style. Watching the heavy allied bombings over the city from the terrace of his hotel, for example, he could only acknowledge how the spectacle of devastation “looked rather like stage-lighting in a shadow theatre”.
Jünger contributed to the opposition to the regime, producing and distributing a number of anonymous pamphlets – later collected in the volume The Peace (9) – in which he denounced the horrors of Nazism, demanded an immediate end to the war and proposed the creation of a European Union. The necessity to move beyond nation states will be a recurring theme in Jünger’s work from then on, from his essay The World State (10) to the political imagination of his later science-fiction works. As he abandoned the fatherland defined by national borders, Jünger sought a new homeland in the ‘wilderness’ that each individual carries inside themselves. It was the beginning of his ‘forest passage’, and of his anarchic turn.
Although his role in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler was only indirect, in the eve of the event he was removed from his office and ‘dishonourably discharged’ from the army. The revenge of the regime found crueler, more transversal ways to reach him. A few months later, his 18 years old son was imprisoned for ‘subversive discussions’ and sent to a penal battalion, headed for sure destruction. With tragic irony, he was killed in combat ‘on the marble cliffs’ near Carrara, in occupied Italy. The remains of his mauled body reached his father only seven years later.
Into The Forest
After the end of the war, Jünger withdrew completely from metropolitan life. He moved to a mansion in High Swabia, which was given to him by the relatives of one of the officers involved in the 1944 plot. As American capitalism covered the Western hemisphere with its festoons of bright and empty promises, Jünger furthered his exploration of the darkness lying under the surface of its age. His science-fiction novel Heliopolis (11), published in 1949, described with uncanny precision the outlines of a world already entirely dominated by Technic. The difference between The Worker and Jünger’s later production is staggering, but it can be understood within the perspective of Jünger’s endless orbit around the present. While in The Worker the age of Nihilism was observed at its dawn, when the rising light transfigures in magical forms all that it touches, Heliopolis described the nuclear midday of Nihilism, when all shadows vanish under the radiating sun of Technic. Nihilism was no longer an ‘uncanny guests’: it had become the norm.
The idea that the Western world had finally reached the zero meridian of Nihilism returned in his 1950 essay Beyond The Line (12), which he wrote for Heidegger’s 60th birthday, and to which the German philosopher – who had already dedicated two lecture courses to Jünger in the 1930s – replied a few years later with the essay Over The Line. Despite his bleak diagnosis, Jünger maintained a subtle vein of optimism. The worst had already come, and it could no longer haunt humans as an anxious dream. The time was ripe to look at the future with the eyes of a strategist rather than with those of a prophet of doom. The question was no longer ‘when will Nihilism envelop us entirely?’, but ‘how can we find an outside, now that Nihilism has surrounded us?’.
The necessity to create a strategy of existential autonomy will run as a common thread through the rest of his work, until his death. His occasional predictions – such as his description of smartphones and gps in Heliopolis in 1949, of spy-drones in The Glass Bees (13) in 1953 and of the internet and virtual reality in Eumeswil (14) in 1977 – can be considered as the mere byproduct of his strategic reconnaissance of the present and the future.
For the first step of his exploration, Jünger borrowed a word that had its prehistory in an old Icelandic custom: der Waldgang – The Forest Passage (15).
A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources. This was considered honourable, and it still is today, despite all platitudes. In those times, the banishment was usually the consequence of a homicide, whereas today it happens to a man almost automatically, like the turning of a roulette wheel. None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law.” (16)
The forest of the Waldganger (‘forest fleer’ or ‘forest rebel’), however, no longer lied on the physical edges of the city. The route outside contemporary civilisation, outside Technic and its terrors, lead to a person’s inner Wildnis (wilderness) – perhaps the only possible outside left to individuals. A Waldganger could be any person strolling on the pavement of a contemporary city, dressed not unlike any of his/her neighbours, and not recognisable as a ‘forest rebel’ by any of his/her outer features. Jünger’s figure partly resembled the ‘prudent man’ portrayed by the 17th century baroque author Baltasar Gracian (17), who strategically advised against eccentricity in one’s appearance, as it could hinder the development of one’s inner autonomy and the possibility of effective subversive action. Jünger compared the Waldganger to the ‘grand spy’, disguised in the enemy’s uniform only to be in a better position to strike his opponent.
Yet, the Waldganger was also a figure of resistance, and one of Jünger’s acknowledged sources of inspiration was a young German social democrat who shot down a dozen Nazi Storm Troopers at the entrance of his apartment.
If we assume that we could have counted on just one such person in every street in Berlin, the things would have turned out very differently than they did. Long periods of peace foster certain optical illusions: one is the conviction that the inviolability of the home is grounded in the constitution, which should guarantee it. In reality, it is grounded in the family father, who, sons at his side, fills the doorway with an axe in his hand.”(18)
As they fled towards their own inner wilderness, individuals accessed the source both of their existential autonomy, and of the possibility of emancipatory violence. Unsurprisingly, Jünger was never a pacifist, and his strategic advice against a direct, violent attack to the State was ground exclusively in his considerations over the overwhelming asymmetry of forces in the field. Even though Jünger repeatedly declared that he would never repudiate his early, heroic works such as Storm of Steel, his later production suggests a more subtle, prudent course of action. While in his war memoir the discovery of an inner depth occasioned in the mist of the near-apocalypse of the battlefield, in the actual apocalypse of accomplished Nihilism the individual only needs an act of will to turn their gaze inwards, and – to paraphrase Max Stirner (19) – to ‘set their affair’ on their own ‘creative nothing’.
Even simply by reading through the wealth of erudition and the stylistic beauty of Jünger’s writing, it is evident how his escape from contemporary civilisation was never a movement towards self-punishing poverty. Jünger rejected the empty promises of society not beacuse of their luxurious surfaces, but because he was aware of their inner poverty. As in all ancient mythology, the wealth that lies in the heart of the forest is the prize which awaits the hero who dares to enter its dark shadows. According to Jünger, wealth, not poverty, should be the aim and the foundation of any philosophy worthy of its name – and, especially, of any true emancipatory theology.
A true theologian is someone who understands the science of abundance, which transcends mere economy, and who knows the mystery of the eternal springs, which are inexhaustible and always at hand. By a theologian we mean someone who knows – and a knower in this sense is the prostitute Sonya, who discovers the treasure of being in Raskolnikov and knows hot to raise it to the light for him.”(20)
Jünger’s tension towards those ‘eternal springs’ and ‘forests’ which alone can provide a safe haven from Technic and Nihilism, also influenced his durable and active interest in drugs. In his 1970 book Approaches (21), Jünger recalled his numerous experiences with substances spanning from hashish and cocaine, to opium and mescaline. LSD – which he tried on several occasions with its inventor Albert Hofmann, himself a Jünger fan – made a profound impression on him, and he valued it above all other drugs as a powerful tool to access that ‘excess’ which shares the same dangers and tensions with the way to the forest.
I exceed, I go outside, I go further afield, both from my own boundaries and from the social corral. Excessus means trespassing – and it is connected with the threat, sooner or later, of being excluded.”(22)
The Anarch
The 1970s and 1980s were two wonderfully productive and radical decades for the already elderly author. While in The Forest Passage he had sketched the outlines of the transitional character of the Waldganger, in his 1977 science-fiction novel Eumeswil he developed this melancholy figure to the full ripeness of the Anarch.
Set in an imaginary city-state named after the ancient diadoch Eumenes, the events narrated in the book take place after the collapse of the World State, which had followed the last great war between nations. The protagonist, Manuel Venator, a young historian of ‘unobtrusive appearance’, serves as night steward at the private bar of the city’s dictator, the Condor. His proximity to the tyrant is invaluable to him as a historian, but it also encourages him to seek a deeper autonomy than the mere assertion of ideological independence. The closer he lies to the centre of control, and the more he adapts his camouflage to the formality of his assigned role, the higher a chance he creates for himself to effectively escape the grip of power.
If an enterprise is to be concealed from society, there is a proven method: you secrete it in some undertaking that society approves of, indeed regards as commendable.”(23)
They found no mischief in me. I remained normal, however deeply they probed. And also straight as an arrow. To be sure, normality seldom coincides with straightness. Normalcy is the human constitution; straightness is logical reasoning. With its help, I could answer satisfactorily. […] Thus they were unable to penetrate my fundamental structure, which is anarchic. […] For everyone is anarchic; this is precisely what is normal about us.”(24)
Paradoxically, argues Jünger, it is those proclaiming their autonomy with the loudest voice, who more easily fall prey to an illusion of freedom, and to the hold of tyrannical control. Throughout the book, Jünger uses the figure of the anarchist – as opposed to the Anarch – as an example of this strategic fallacy. Traditional anarchists, claims Jünger, through their conspicuous and ineffective opposition make themselves “serviceable in many ways and also useful for the police”.
The anarchist is dependent – both on his unclear desires and on the powers that be. He trails the powerful man as his shadow; the ruler is always on his guard against him. […] The anarchist is the antagonist of the monarch, whom he dreams of wiping out. He gets the man and consolidates the succession. The -ism suffix has a restrictive meaning; it emphasises the will at the expense of the substance. […] The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the Anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch but his antipode, untouched by him, though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant. After all, the monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the Anarch, only himself.”(25)
[The Anarch] is as sovereign as the monarch, and also freer since he does not have to rule.” (26)
The Anarch, as embodied by Venator, is a less idealistic development of the Waldganger. While the Waldganger can play a role on the eve of the triumph of Nihilism, the Anarch is best equipped to survive the endless afternoon of its established kingdom. Eumeswil, perhaps not dissimilarly from our contemporary world, exists in a state of perennial civil war, in which traditional authority has expanded into all-encompassing bio-power, while the emptying of all meaning and possible alternatives complements total-policing in ensuring absolute political stillness. At that stage, any attempt at open resistance would be suicidal, at best futile, and in any case immediately swallowed by its opponent – as it is so often the case in today’s late capitalism. In Eumeswil, the Waldganger appears as a remote possibility, which could arise only in the case of a sudden turn of events – an eventuality for which Venator prepares himself through the clandestine construction of a bunker/armoury, far from sight. Daily life, however, offers a different type of possibility for resistance. In the perfectly hedo-nihilistic emptiness of Eumeswil – which at times resembles the atmospheres of Italy under Berlusconi – rebels are not those who parade their anarchist garments, but those who are able to disappear completely. Through his vanishing, the Anarch reclaims the necessary space – mental, if not physical – to be able to retain the necessary autonomy to access the inner ‘wilderness’ of his own ‘creative nothing’ – as well as to violently strike back at power, whenever possible. It is not surprising that Max Stirner himself makes a lengthy appearance towards the end of the book, summoned by Venator through the internet-cum-virtual-reality technology of the Luminar.
Once again, Jünger’s judgement of technology avoids oversimplification. In Eumeswil, both the underground world of the ‘catacombs’ – where invisible scientists work relentlessly at the production of new, reality-changing technology – and the far and mysterious ‘forest’ – which embodies the ever-lasting primordial energy – coexist as symbols of eternal cosmic forces. While the Nihilism which engulfs the city has taken hold of the fearful, bourgeois soul of most of its inhabitants, the Anarch alone retains access to both the catacomb and the forest which perennially exist at his heart.
The importance of accessing the ever-existing cosmic wilderness, returns in connection to the figure of the Anarch in Jünger’s 1983 novella Aladdin’s Problem (27). The book begins with Friedrich Baroh, an Anarch serving as an officer in the Soviet Army, fleeing Eastern Germany to West Berlin. There, he starts a small funeral house, which thanks to his uncle’s capital he manages to develop into the multinational corporation Terrestra. His business idea is typically Jüngerian: in a relentlessly nihilist age, where even graves are temporary, humans long for the stability of an eternal burial. The protagonist buys a field of wild land in Cappadocia – large enough to house the mortal remains of the world’s population – and there sets up a huge, eternal graveyard for those who can afford it. “This is the answer to the motorised world” observes one of Friedrich’s friends. As his empire expands and the burial site progressively turns into a metropolis, his dissatisfaction also grows, and his mental balance starts to break. He is facing ‘Aladdin’s problem’: the empty thirst for power at the heart of the Faustian spirit, aimlessly dragging Modernity along its Nihilist route. Friedrich treated death and the depths of the Earth merely as a ‘standing reserve’ – to borrow Heidegger’s expression – rather than as the immediate symbol of Chtonian cosmic forces. He forgot the way to the forest, and remained wandering in the desert: away from the forest, even anarchy sinks down the circles of a nihilist hell.
Aristocracy
In the course of his long life, Jünger authored and published over fifty volumes. In these pages, I could only superficially present some of his works – those which I believe best express both his qualities as a writer and a thinker, and his intellectual progression through and beyond Modernity. I have also tried to provide the coordinates to the location of some of his fundamental ideas, which I believe might prove of greater relevance today than when they were first produced. I began by talking of Jünger’s work as a toolbox, and again I’d like to invite the reader not to stop at the beauty of Jünger’s style, but to test the usefulness of his concepts against his/her own daily existential struggles.
As well as his ideas, Jünger’s method also constitutes, in my opinion, an important contribution to contemporary existential strategies. As he once explained in an interview (28), his writing was almost the precise reflection of his observations of the world around him. Combining the attitudes of a botanist and of a philosopher, Jünger used to proceed from a particular observation of a social detail, to an analogy with a natural equivalent – often from botany or entomology – to the exploration of the metaphysical roots of its structure. In line with other great post-romantic German thinkers, Jünger reached back to Goethe as much as to Nietzsche. Despite his astonishing erudition, Jünger never aspired to become a scholar. Like his two predecessors, he was first of all a writer, a person, a true Anarch of knowledge. He dared exploring the world, both in its immediately visible appearance and in its supremely visible form, on the basis of an excessive idea of freedom, which surpassed the borders of academic specialism as well as of ideological allegiance. Like the very best anarchist thinkers, Jünger’s idea of anarchy can be summed up as a desire for an aristocracy of all – firstly, an anarcho-aristocracy of the gaze, and of the mind.
Reading Jünger today can be much more than a dry review of the curious works of a dead writer. Jünger remains one of the most accomplished craftsman to date of those magic lenses through which it is possible to examine in depth our experience of the world and our ever-shifting position within it. In his inexhaustible generosity, Jünger might even exceed the figure of the mere writer. As he offers us some of the things that we need to make better sense and actively deepen our enjoyment of our lives, his place can hardly be on our bookshelves. Upon consideration, we might decide that his place is rather on our side, as a friend.
NOTES
1 Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs, Penguin, 1970, p.68
2 Telos Press has published so far the English translations of On Pain (2008), The Adventurous Heart (2012), and The Forest Passage (2014)
3 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, Penguin, 2004, p.93, p.95
4 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, Penguin, 2004
5 Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, Hanseatische Verlagsansalt, 1932. This book has never been translated in English.
6 Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter – my translation from the Italian edition, L’Operaio, Guanda, 2010, p.207-208
7 Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs, Penguin, 1970. The English edition of this book has been out of print for decades.
8 Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs, Penguin, 1970, p.82
9 Ernst Jünger, The Peace, Henry Regnery Company, 1948. The English edition of this book has been out of print for over half a century.
10 Ernst Jünger, Der Weldstaat, Klett Verlag, 1960. This book has never been translated in English.
11 Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis, Heliopolis Verlag, 1949. This book has never been translated in English
12 Ernst Jünger, Uber Die Linie, first published in Anteile. Martin Heidegger zum 60 Geburstag, Vittorio Klostermann, 1951. This text and Heidegger’s response have never been translated in English.
13 Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees, New York Review Books, 2000
14 Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, Marsilio Publishers, 1994. The English edition of this book has been out of print for over a decade.
15 Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, Telos Press, 2014
16 Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, Telos Press, 2014, p.37
17 see Baltasar Gracian, The Pocket Oracle And Art Of Prudence, Penguin, 2001
18 Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, Telos Press, 2014, p.73
19 see Max Stirner, The Ego And His Own, Verso, 2014
20 Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, Telos Press, 2014, p.63
21 Ernst Jünger, Annäherungen. Drogen und Rausch, Klett Verlag, 1970. This book has never been translated in English.
22 Ernst Jünger, Annäherungen. Drogen und Rausch, Klett Verlag, 1970 – my translation from the Italian edition, Avvicinamenti, Guanda, 2006, p.188.
23 Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, Marsilio Publishers, 1994, p.132
24 Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, Marsilio Publishers, 1994, p.41
25 Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, Marsilio Publishers, 1994, p.42-43
26 Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, Marsilio Publishers, 1994, p.155
27 Ernst Jünger, Aladdin’s Problem, Marsilio Publishers, 1996. The English edition of this book has been out of print for over a decade.
28 as part of the German documentary for television, Neunzig Verweht – der Schriftsteller Ernst Jünger
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anarch Ernst Junger eumeswil forest passage nihilism
technic