The adventurous heart : figures and capriccios by Ernst Jünger

From Introduction by 

Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman

Regarding the Figures and Capriccios, I would like to say the following. As far as the closeness of observation is concerned, I prefer a piece like “In the Shops” . . . . It gives the reader a model of how to use his eye and sets him to thinking, since he has to see that here a wide field has been left for his own observations. The pleasure in such a piece also derives from the recognition it provides that the world, for the spiritual person, always remains terra incognita. Such acts of exploration increase one’s feeling of freedom.

Friedrich Georg Jünger1

I believe myself here to be taking that leveling through which the world appears at once simpler and more miraculous a decisive step further. It’s a question of the complete presence and unity of the spirit by day and night, in waking and in dreaming, in all borders and boundlessness, in all states of matter and illusion. I have managed, I think, to find a model for this; no doubt it was only possible in this abbreviated fashion, since otherwise whole libraries would not have sufficed. I want to wield prose with a new potency and push it to the edge of enchantment. In this last year . . . I believe to have penetrated into domains that no one before me has seen.

Ernst Jünger2

I

What kinds of human beings have adventurous hearts? Persons led more by intuition or instinct than by reason? Persons for whom to avoid danger is to accept boredom? Adventure, perhaps the oldest of all literary genres, is a key that can unlock many of Ernst Jünger’s writings. Gerhard Nebel, who worked as a translator in Paris in 1941, and was a lifelong friend, latched on to the concept in an early post–World War II reception, describing Jünger’s spiritual and metaphysical thirst for adventure as the glue that holds together such disparate endeavors as militant nationalism and Christian spiritualism.3 Gerhard Loose picked up the adventure theme in his Jünger biography, emphasizing the pitfalls inherent in the culte de moi of the author (ichbezogenheit), which reduces the natural world, foreign lands, war, just about any phenomenon, to objects of speculation for Jünger’s aesthetic imagination.4In Jünger’s novels, the hero frequently trades the familiarity of the known for the strangeness and risks of the unknown. This impulse was the driving force of the young Ernst Jünger’s escape fantasies, which were finally satisfied by the biggest adventure of them all, the Great War. The Adventurous Heart, which appeared in 1929 with the subtitle “Sketches by Day and Night,” and then in a heavily edited new version in 1938 with the subtitle “Figures and Capriccios,” was his only work to explicitly use the term in the title. In the latter version, Jünger presents the reader with sixty-three short, apparently arbitrary and unrelated un-dated diary entries. Both books seemed insignificant at the time of publication and did not sell well. In hindsight, though, we see that already in its first version, this small volume marked the point at which the developing writer expanded his horizon from being a chronicler of the First World War to an author and thinker with a much wider range and deeper grasp. He lived to the biblical age of one hundred and two, publishing diaries to the end that retain the style and method first worked out in this book and in a short, imaginative piece from 1930, here also translated as “Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon.”

The second edition of TheAdventurous Heart marks another important turning point. Though Jünger would remain a world traveler throughout his life, by 1938 he had given up on the external adventurous experience in favor of an internal exploration of consciousness. The split resulted from a gradual evolutionary process. In 1922 he edited out the psychological observations on war from his famous first book, Storm of Steel, and put them into a separately published essay, Battle as Inner Experience. But years of explicit political activity followed. He was regarded as one of the leaders of a “new nationalism,” composed of young, battle-tested veterans fighting an even larger global battle of ideas in the 1920s. National Socialism was obviously one of those big ideas, but not the only one.

Jünger believed that Hitler was only one leader of this new nationalism, a good drummer perhaps, who pointed the way to the future, but not the inevitable redeemer of Germany. In 1926 he sent Hitler a copy of his Fire and Blood with the revealingly ambiguous inscription, “To the Nationalist Führer, Adolf Hitler.”5 Jünger seemed to believe that he could leave it to the National Socialists to organize the masses while he and other intellectuals of the new generation would band together to form an elite ideological corps, modeled on the Jesuits or medieval knights, who would shape a New Germany. It didn’t take long after Hitler seized power for him to see that these ideas were dangerously romantic and illusory. He was offered a seat in the Reichstag and in the newly Nazified Prussian Academy of the Arts. He declined both. The 1938 version of The Adventurous Heart marks a clear and final break with this nationalist phase, from the style of writing alone.

He had been a hero for the Nazis. He was left alone by the Gestapo (except for one house search) because Hitler regarded him as one of the war’s greatest heroes. Goebbels called Storm of Steela “war gospel, truly great,” but he was utterly disappointed by the first version of The Adventurous Heart; it was “just ink, literature,” he scoffed.6 When the Völkischer Beobachter nevertheless published some excerpts from the book, Jünger wrote a scathing letter to the editors, scolding them for having published his work without permission.

What Goebbels and many others on the right didn’t understand was that for Jünger politics was only one form of adventure. Etymologically the word derives from the Latin advenire, to happen or to have something happen. The adventurer puts herself in a situation where the unexpected, the dangerous can occur. The adventurer steps out of the known order, out of the traditional rules and travels without insurance or protection. Jünger was by disposition unable to follow the standard rules. As a boy he was very curious and intelligent, but he did poorly in school. He daydreamed and chafed at the strict methods of the Wilhelmine schoolmasters. He joined the Wandervögel, a youth organization that rebelled against the dull routine of bourgeois life by escaping into the woods, camping out, singing newly discovered folk songs to an accompanying guitar. Even that was too tame for the restless teenager. He had read everything he could get his hands on about equatorial Africa. In order to get there, he ran away from his last year of high school. In November 1913, at age eighteen, he made his way to Verdun, told recruiters he was twenty (the minimum age for enlistment), joined the Foreign Legion, and was shipped off to Algeria from Marseilles, with the intention of deserting and exploring the dark continent of his fantasies.

The boy’s African plan never succeeded. He did escape from camp with a few co-adventurers, but they were caught, rounded up, and shipped back to the base. Meanwhile, his father had secured his release through the German embassy. The whole adventure lasted two months. The father treated the affair as a boyish prank. He made sure Ernstel had a photo taken in a studio in Sidi Bel-Abbès. The portrait shows him with an impish grin, holding cap and belt in his Foreign Legion uniform.

The father was not only lenient; he offered to take his son on a return trip to Africa once he finished his high school exams. Then fate intervened, as the guns of August beckoned. For Jünger’s generation, the First World War started off, of course, as a welcome relief from the stultifying atmosphere of an overly complacent and joyless world. Trainloads of excited youngsters headed off to the front on packed trains, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts throwing flowers after them. Most expected to return by Christmas, victorious.

Even when two years later the last of these illusions died in the rat-infested trenches of Verdun and the Somme, Jünger, though susceptible to bouts of frustration and despair, never stopped viewing the war as a great adventure.7 He made copious notes and published them in diary form as Storm of Steel in 1920. The book went through numerous revisions, evolving from schoolboy jottings in the style of a Homeric tale of war to sophisticated observations about the nature of war itself. In hindsight, we see already developing Jünger’s tendency to separate the surface events, we might say the phenomena, from the underlying noumena, or significance of the events in a cosmic sense. Where other writers wrote against the war (Barbusse) or about the lost generation that experienced and survived the war (Remarque), Jünger believed that he was witnessing a shift in the entire global culture, the end of heroic individuals replaced by their subjugation to the machine. The battles he describes are written from a phenomenologically neutral perspective, as if he were witnessing a natural catastrophe, like an earthquake or a fire, but each example has a larger significance for culture and history.

This morphological view, derived from deep reading of Nietzsche and especially Spengler, translated into his taking sides in the ideological battles of the 1920s and early 1930s. Jünger felt called upon to read and translate for his generation the deeper meaning of the crisis of his time. That crisis, he was convinced, came from the fact that the war had washed away the last remnants of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism, but the new era was still up for grabs. One needed to face the fact with hardened, “heroic realism” but also as a participant in the “total mobilization” of a new soldier/worker society.

The 1929 version of The Adventurous Heart is a more pessimistic, culturally despairing work, in line with Jünger’s politics and activities of the period. The inspiration for the title and, to a certain extent, the style of the book can be attributed to the publication of LePaysan de Paris (translated by Frederick Brown as Nightwalker), a popular book published in 1926 by the twenty-six-year-old Louis Aragon.8 The book, dedicated to the surrealist André Masson, is a whirlwind tour through the streets of the city of light, often at night, focusing on the magical sights and sounds and odd figures who populate the demimonde. Walter Benjamin, who was inspired by the volume to begin work on his Arcades Project, claimed to have been unable to “read more than two or three pages at a time, for my heartbeat became so strong that I was forced to lay the book down.”9 Aragon filled these pages with rambling thoughts and collage-like observations, poetic, philosophical, and literary.