[Juenger-list] LUMINAR 1 und 2 - Rezension in "German History"

[T. Wimbauer]

German History, The Journal of the German History Society, Volume 23, Number 1, 2005, pp. 127-129
ISSN 0266-3554 

THOMAS ROHKRÄMER, Lancaster University:

Personenregister der Tagebücher Ernst Jüngers. Überarbeitete, ergänzte und
erweiterte Neuausgabe .By Tobias Wimbauer.‘ Das Luminar. Schriften zu
Ernst und Friedrich Georg Jünger ’,1. Schnellroda: Antaios.2003.323 pp.
€ 30.00 (hardback).

‘Wann hat dieser Scheißkrieg ein Ende? ’Writing and Rewriting the First
World War. By John King. ‘Das Luminar:Schriften zu Ernst und Friedrich
Georg Jünger ’,2. Schnellroda: Antaios.2003. 318 pp. € 30.00 (hardback).

A new series on the brothers Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger was launched last year
with two very different publications. The first is a highly useful tool for every Ernst
Jünger scholar: an index of the persons mentioned or alluded to in all of Jünger ’s
published diaries. This work by Tobias Wimbauer is obviously of tremendous importance.
The dairy is one of Jünger ’s main forms of artistic expression,and he used it to comment
on his time from the 1930s right through to 1996. Even for those who do not appreciate
Ernst Jünger from a literary point of view, this massive work of many volumes is a valu-
able source for the cultural history of Germany. Where else do we have one voice which
commented continuously on more than half a century with special emphasis on the war
years, the years of occupation and the years after 1965? Of course, the diaries were writ-
ten and re-worked with publication in mind, but they still offer Jünger ’s perspectives at
many different times. They thus show the opinions and judgments of a conservative thin-
ker as they evolve over time.
With his index of names in Jünger ’s diaries, Wimbauer not only makes a massive
amount of text more easily accessible, he also helps understanding and interpretation.
Hundreds of quotations and allusions, which were frequently interpreted as Jünger ’s
own words, have been referenced, and from the many code names Jünger used, especially
in his earlier diaries, the index leads to the authentic names. A wide range of readers can
profit from this work: from those who simply seek a short cut to get at Jünger ’s perspec-
tive on one of his contemporaries through to those who want to engage with the text
deeply in a non-linear way.
Such an index can never be complete, but this one gets close to this aim. The first
edition of Wimbauer ’s book was impressive in its own right, but with the help of many
other Jünger experts the second edition reviewed here is much improved and even more
comprehensive. However, the author asks readers with detective talents for further ‘Cor-
rigenda et Addenda ’.We can thus hope for further editions!
The second volume in the series is the translation of an Oxford PhD, which has been
published here for the first time. It is on a much-researched topic, the early writings of
Ernst Jünger, but it offers two original angles. John King is the first to interpret Ernst
Jünger ’s original war diaries and he puts forward a new interpretation: the texts on
the First World War are regarded as a reaction to a crisis of classical modernity. King ’s
stress is on the openness of Jünger ’s early work. It cannot be reduced to one reading,
because the texts continuously deconstruct themselves. The modern assumption of an
autonomous subject which uses reason to understand and control the world breaks with
the experience of the First World War. In this situation, Ernst Jünger gets close to a post-
modernist attitude towards life, before he flees into a rigid right-wing political activism.
It seems that the PhD manuscript was not edited for publication. It starts with a long
summary of a good ten pages, which I recommend to simply skip, it is often quite
laboured in style, it unnecessarily over-plays its own originality, and it does not include
the most recent literature, presumably because a long time passed before it reached the
public. Nevertheless, the book is worth the struggle, especially because the original
war diaries, on which Ernst Jünger claims to base his personal war writings, contain
interesting surprises. Most importantly, they show that Ernst Jünger, like most of the
other war volunteers, is deeply disillusioned by the war. In October 1915 he recalls his
belief of August 1914 that the war would be an adventure, but qualifies this misplaced
anticipation with the words ‘sad, but true ’.He describes the chaos of battle, in which
he loses all control, and complains at times that the war does not correspond with his
expectations of heroism. He criticizes the hierarchy in the army, senseless commands
and injustices. He even asks in a moment of despair, when, as King quotes in the title,
this ‘Scheißkrieg’ (damn war) would end.
With the interpretation of the war diaries and a close reading of his published work until
1925 (including careful interpretations of his articles on military theory),King confirms with
unprecedented accuracy what others suspected before him: Jünger tries to portray himself
as an enthusiastic soldier and militarist, but this is just a surface image, which only partially
covers a much more complex and ambivalent attitude towards modern war and modernity
in general. Jünger is thoroughly shaken by the war experience, and his obsessive writing
about it only shows his continued failure to come to terms with it. While this point is con-
vincingly made, King ’s more general interpretation I find less plausible. Was Jünger really a
classical modernist, who, shaken by the war experience, adapted to a postmodernist atti-
tude towards life before he fell back into a dogmatic nationalist belief?
My problems with such a position are twofold. Firstly, I think that John King defines
classical modernity and prewar  Jünger too narrowly. Is nineteenth-century modernity
really just about an autonomous subject that has a clear understanding of a world which
it believes to control? And was this Jünger ’s self-understanding? I doubt it. This defini-
tion of classical modernity ignores modernist arts and culture in general, which emerge
much earlier than the First World War and continuously question the assumptions of a
rational being controlling a fathomable world. Modernity has never been that one-
dimensional, but has always included its own critics and dreamers. And from what we
know of the early Ernst Jünger, he is one of them. He never wholly accepted his father ’s
scientific world view, he tried to escape from a rigid grammar school to the wilderness of
Africa, he volunteered for the war, because he wanted to experience the non-rational
aspects of human existence, and he wanted to make these grand experiences to become
an artist. He fell into a crisis after the lost war, but his break with traditional values
was also motivated by the artistic desire for the new.
Secondly, can one really read Ernst Jünger as proto-postmodernist? John King offers
many very original and challenging interpretations, but this reading seems untenable. It
is true that the unfinished story ‘Sturm ’,on which King bases his judgment, is Jünger ’s
most negative work. Following Nietzsche ’s amor fati , Jünger generally expects from him-
self a positive attitude towards reality, but here his sense of crisis and disillusionment
breaks through with unchecked force. This work, which Jünger disowned by allegedly
forgetting it, clearly shows one facet of Jünger which he usually hides much better, but
is it therefore the true expression of his war experience? Is it an expression of his
proto-postmodernist phase, in which he preaches a relativistic carpe diem ?This is highly
unlikely. There is no real happiness in the story, only fantasies about a desperate dance
on the volcano. More importantly,the different aspects of Jünger are present in all his
early works: In ‘Sturm ’the sense of a nihilistic crisis dominates, but the characters still
try to find an over-arching meaning in history. Later, a clear nationalist worldview dom-
inates, but Jünger still acknowledges the horrors of war and the wilfulness of his decision
to find a positive meaning in the historical events of his time. And how can one talk of
chronologically divided phases, if Jünger published only .fie months after ‘Sturm ’his
most enthusiastic praise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, while his most avant-garde
work of the Weimar period, ‘Adventurous Heart ’,was published six years later?
The series ‘Luminar ’started with a useful and a thought-provoking book; one wishes for it
to continue in that vein. Hopefully, it will be true to its name in paying equal attention to the
much less well-known, but nevertheless important and interesting Friedrich Georg Jünger.

THOMAS ROHKRÄMER, Lancaster University

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