The Forest Passage - Translator’s Preface

 

“I would not encourage in your minds that delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims. I mean the delusion that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls. The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave-states are for us a means . . . ; the real end is the destruction of individual souls. For only individuals can be saved or damned . . . ”

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

These words from Screwtape’s toast to young devils graduating from Hell’s training college describe—more or less precisely, if the religious concepts are set aside—the subject of this key Jüngerian work: it is the timeless theme of the salvation of the individual in the world, here in the contemporary context of globalization, technically all-powerful and manipulative states, and disintegrating support institutions such as family and church.

The salvation that may be found “in the forest” is understood, above all, as the preservation, or recovery, of the individual’s freedom, psychological and concrete, in the face of materially superior forces intent on imprisoning him—by violence, intimidation, or propaganda—and exploiting or destroying him for their own gain. This individual return to a primal relation with freedom in the midst of collective slavery Jünger calls the forest passage. And, as the forces seeking to exploit man today are but the latest incarnations of forces that have threatened individual freedom throughout history, so the path he sets down for the forest rebel is his recasting of ways that philosophers, religions, and esoteric movements prepared for past historical and spiritual human predicaments. In Jünger’s version it is a self-empowered initiative, reliant on no external institutions, which in our present reality are non-existent or fundamentally bankrupt. It is a path that takes strength and guidance from more basic and indestructible human factors, such as friendship, love, or conscience, and it is to be discovered and blazed by the individual in the “here and now” of his worldly experience.

While a forest passage may bring collateral benefits for society, in particular for other individuals, it does not aim primarily at world-improvement: the collective, as a whole, is essentially beyond redemption, a priori a lost cause. It is only individuals, forest rebels within society, that can hope, as exceptions, to escape the coercion, to “save their own souls.” The forest rebel battles the Leviathan not in the hopes of defeating it—for it eventually collapses under its own enormous weight—though he may promote this inevitable demise by inflicting strategic damage on it, and he can already help define and introduce the seeds of new freedoms for a post-Leviathan world. Rather, the forest rebel has two other immediate motivations in the here and now: first, to save himself (before trying to help a neighbor in the catastrophe, as parents are told to put on their own oxygen masks in an airplane crash before those of their children); and second, and not unrelated, to obey his conscience, the directives of an intact and normal humanity, which feels natural concern for its fellow human beings.

Jünger and the forest rebel represent no specific political agenda here, for the oppression to be resisted at all costs may be openly manifested in tyrannies or cunningly disguised in democracies, and it may arrive from the east or the west. In a certain sense his vision is even democratic, for the forest passage is available always and to everyone, regardless of their political, social, geographic, or economic reality. However, it is also anything but egalitarian and it is not a realistic option for the masses, for it presupposes a great inner distancing from society, an extraordinary strength of will, and uncommon courage.

Since the publication of Eumeswil (1977), no discussion of the forest rebel can be complete without mention of its successor in that later work, the anarch, in my opinion Jünger’s crowning achievement. Indeed, all the qualities ascribed to the forest rebel in The Forest Passage are present in the anarch, and then some, for the anarch is his stronger twin, comprehending all that he is and taking the development further. The two figures may differ in degrees of personal power and freedom, but essentially, or existentially, they are almost identical, and a forest passage always remains for the anarch as one in a set of contingent tactics:

The forest flight confirms the independence of the anarch, who is basically a forest fleer anywhere, any time, whether in the thicket, in the metropolis, whether inside or outside society.1

The forest fleer and the partisan are not, as I have said, to be confused with each other; the partisan fights in society, the forest fleer alone. Nor, on the other hand, is the forest fleer to be confused with the anarch, although the two of them grow very similar for a while and are barely to be distinguished in existential terms. The difference is that the forest fleer has been expelled from society, while the anarch has expelled society from himself. . . . When he [the anarch] decides to flee to the forest, his decision is less an issue of justice and conscience for him than a traffic accident. He changes camouflage; of course, his alien status is more obvious in the forest flight, thereby making it the weaker form, though perhaps indispensable.2I will make no attempt here to present the subtle differences between the two figures—the interested reader does best to pick up a copy of Eumeswil and form his own conclusions. But I will suggest that the ultimate importance of the present book lies precisely here: as preparatory material for a study of the anarch in Eumeswil. It then also goes without saying that the existence of Eumeswil and the anarch should not be understood as a reason to skip the earlier phase of the development and jump to the final product: as we saw above, Jünger himself reaffirmed the validity of the forest rebel in Eumeswil. Speaking also from personal experience, I encountered Eumeswil years before The Forest Passage—in Florence, Italy, through the excellent salons of the Association Eumeswil—and although we studied Eumeswil in depth, I did not fully understand its comments on the forest rebel until doing this translation. More importantly, by understanding the forest rebel I have gained a deeper and more grounded understanding of the anarch. The two figures are indeed best studied and understood together.

A final note regarding the translation of the book’s title and protagonist, of the act and the actor. We saw above that the translator of Eumeswil, Joachim Neugroschel, translated “Waldgang” and “Waldgänger” as “forest flight” and “forest fleer.” To be sure, these English terms have a catchy ring, form a convenient pair, and do reflect the internal and, when necessary, external distancing from society. Nevertheless, I departed from them, primarily because the word “flight” has a connotation of running away from normal reality, the choice of a weaker, not a stronger, individual. Naturally, the forest rebel does seek to escape oppression, and, being comparatively weaker than the anarch, he must “flee” society to some extent, while the anarch can remain concealed and wholly within it. However, the terms of comparison at the time Jünger conceived the figure of the Waldgänger were not the as-yet unborn anarch and his qualities, but the masses, and political activists, anarchists, and partisans. In comparison with these, the inner and outer positions the Waldgänger occupies require a stronger will, courage, and inner force; in this context, I find “flight,” as reflecting a relative weakness, inappropriate.

Moreover, there is the dual sense of “Waldgang” in German: it can denote both a going to the forest and a walking or being in the forest, and both are implicit in Jünger’s metaphor, which concerns moving to the new position and the state of being there. “Passage” reflects this dual character somewhat better than “flight,” which focuses only on the going there, and, again, implies a weakness that is only such in relation to the even more exceptional figure of the anarch.

For the actor’s name, I chose a compromise between Neugroschel’s “forest fleer,” which retains “forest,” and the French and Italian translators who simply used “rebel,” which this figure certainly also is. In this manner, a new term, the forest rebel, has also been coined for this freshly conceived and yet timeless existential figure of Ernst Jünger’s.

Thomas Friese

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.

On the Marble Cliffs or security in the void

From Introduction:

 The book you are holding in your hands, the most famous of Jünger’s novels, was published in Nazi Germany in 1939 and censored by the Gestapo in 1942. It was thanks to Hitler’s admiration of Jünger’s earlier work that On the Marble Cliffs was published at all. When other party officials pushed for its immediate suppression (“He has gone too far!”), the Führer reportedly replied: “Leave Jünger be!”

It’s not hard to see why the novel attracted the attention of the censors: On the Marble Cliffs charts the slow infiltration and eventual destruction of a sophisticated, Elysian society by a barbaric forest tribe whose ruthless leader sows anarchy and terror. Set, like all fables, in a distant time of its own, the story centers on two battle-hardened brothers who’ve renounced war, politics, and worldly concerns for a monkish existence as botanists. They live apart from the simmering chaos, high up on the Marble Cliffs.

The novel was immediately received as an allegory for the rise of the Third Reich, but as Jünger points out in a postscript included here, “People understood, even in occupied France, that ‘this shoe fit several feet.’” In other words, what happened in Germany wasn’t historically unique. Echoes were soon to be found in Axis Italy, Vichy France, and the Soviet Union, not to mention in the nascent authoritarianism stirring within Western democracies today. As Jünger saw it, Hitler’s nihilism was part of a more general crisis threatening modern civilization.

Whatever the politics of the book—and they are nothing if not equivocal (Jünger claimed elsewhere that the novel was “above all that“)—there’s no denying its icy polish. The novel is defined by its fantastical Mediterranean landscape, and we spend much of our time admiring the view. To one side of the cliffs lies the Marina with its lush vineyards and islands that “float on the blue tides like bright flower petals”; to the other, the Campagna, populated by rough but noble cattle herders, and bordered by the “dark fringe” of the forest, where the forces of anarchy lie in wait. There is much to lose: jeweled lizards, red vipers slithering as if in a single “glowing web,” astonishing orchids, magical mirrors, abundant vineyards, rarified libraries. This symbology flickers throughout the novel like reflections on a lake, captivating yet shifting, and ultimately eluding fixed interpretation. The imaginary world is at once classical and modern; perhaps this ancient-seeming realm isn’t quite so distant as we thought. There are both automobiles and ballads dedicated to a “gluttonous Hercules,” shotguns as well as Roman stone.

The most striking quality of On the Marble Cliffs is to me its stillness. If fiction is the art of lending time to concepts and truths that seem to exist outside of time, On the Marble Cliffs aims for just the opposite. It is an exercise in “draining time,” to borrow the phrase the brothers use to describe the study of botany. Until the frenzy of the final battle scene, the book distills itself to a single, suspended moment. The narration hovers over the landscape like a charge in the air. It’s the quiet before the storm, or, in our botanists’ case, before they “fall into the abyss.”

Throughout his oeuvre, Jünger remained preoccupied with this idea of stopping time. One of the few hopeful symbols to appear in the novel is the mythical mirror of Nigromontanus, designed to concentrate sunlight into a magical flame that transforms all it devours into an “imperishable” state, a process of “pure distillation” that takes place beyond the reach of either the narrative or the historical durée. One can imagine that Jünger—who after the Second World War experimented with LSD—viewed On the Marble Cliffs as just such a temporal transcendence, a way of preserving those values that Nazism perverted: chivalry, dignity, knowledge, beauty. It is not a protest novel but, like the mirror of Nigromontanus, a kind of “security in the void.”

3.

This framing of On the Marble Cliffs—the author’s own—complicates the invitation by Jünger’s hagiographers to read it as political critique, thereby exonerating him of his own far-right leanings. I tend to agree with Jünger that On the Marble Cliffs is not merely an allegory for the rise of the Third Reich. In fact, it’s difficult to extract a sustained political allegory from any of his works. (...)

The tendency to view the world through the metaphysical lens of cycles of power as opposed to “right and left” certainly seems to have granted Jünger, then an influential conservative voice, a great deal of moral latitude in distancing himself from the horrors emerging around him. Ever aristocratic, his critiques of Hitler could appear to be as rooted in intellectual snobbery as in moral outrage. He once complained that the Nazis “lacked metaphysics.” They waged war like technicians.

Jünger spent the Second World War as a military censor in Nazi-occupied Paris, where he kept up his ironical circle of acquaintances. His closest companions during this time included the prominent legal scholar Carl Schmitt, a racist and an early supporter of the Nazi Party. Then again, his diaries reveal him to be just as close to the conspirators behind the von Stauffenberg plot on Hitler’s life in 1944. Jünger himself was investigated, but no concrete evidence could be found tying him to the attempted assassination; the main conspirators were executed. (...)

“I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much,” he confessed during a brief tour of the eastern front. There’s a reason a quip by Jean Cocteau (not exactly exemplary in his own wartime behavior) regarding Jünger’s conduct during these years endures: “Some people had dirty hands, some people had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”

What did it really mean to be hands-on at such a time, when protest often amounted to nothing more than self-sacrifice? It isn’t a question I like to ask. Jünger’s son, briefly imprisoned for dissent, was later declared killed in action in Italy, though the two bullet holes found at the base of his skull suggested an execution by the SS.

The veterans and botanists in On the Marble Cliffs—much like Jünger himself, who studied zoology and spent long afternoons in occupied Paris collecting beetles—also delay intervention until it is too late. They are elegists more than dissidents, hunting for rare orchids as the Head Forester’s campaign advances on the classical civilization below. Yet the novel contains enough recognizable allusions to the Third Reich that it no doubt took courage to publish it. A torture hut where the Head Forester’s enemies are flayed is modeled on Hitler’s concentration camps for political and social deviants, the first of which were established in 1933; Jünger is likely to have seen prisoners marched past his temporary residence in Lower Saxony. It has been noted that the Head Forester bears a resemblance to Hermann Göring, the notorious commander in chief of the Luftwaffe and himself an avid hunter. Nazism, furthermore, valorized forests and their connection to the German Romantic spirit. The novel’s highs come by way of Jünger’s gift for the chilling aphorism. Of the character Braquemart, modeled on the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “He was of that breed of men who dream concretely, a very dangerous sort.” Its lows follow slips into dour, elitist didacticism: “When the sense of justice and tradition wanes and when terror clouds the mind, then the strength of the man in the street soon runs dry…This is why noble blood is granted preeminence in all peoples.”

To my reading, On the Marble Cliffs is a daring but ultimately inward-looking achievement. It is as if Jünger built himself an ivory tower in which to wait out Germany’s darkest decades. He never left. Nor did he repent. Until his death, Jünger dismissed criticisms of his wartime behavior. As he aged, he appealed to the growing asymmetry between himself and his younger critics: You weren’t there.

On the Marble Cliffs serves as a key to the cosmology Jünger developed in these later years. All the major motifs of this novel—serpents, language, nihilism, chivalry, dreams, Spenglerian theories of history as cyclical—return throughout his major wartime and immediate postwar works, most notably The War Diaries and the techno-dystopia of The Glass Bees. In the most generous light, they present an argument for the preservation of beauty, refinement, and human dignity in the face of Armageddon; in the harshest, a justification for a retreat into aesthetics and abstraction in the face of all too real atrocities. I recommend reading On the Marble Cliffs at different times of day, with both approaches in mind.Tess Lewis’s new translation makes this double reading possible. This edition does the crucial work of reinstating the novel’s intended fabular atmosphere, muted in previous iterations and yet so essential for understanding a man who thought in images over concepts, and who warned against the enormous dangers of “dreaming concretely.” The rhythmic prose captures the nostalgia, the suspension, the “presentiment of doom.” For the first time in English, On the Marble Cliffs lets its eerie, “rich red lining” show.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

From Afterward:

It would be absurd, even on the level of intellectual fiction, to regard this first approximation of On the Marble Cliffs as an explanation that exhausts its themes. The movement that makes this book into the tragedy of the creative mind witnessing its ruin with a serene anguish endlessly deepens the vision. What rises up beneath our gaze is a world where everything that is precious seems already caught in destruction, where barbaric force necessarily breaks the forms of the finest thought, and where nonetheless this nothingness into which the mind sinks allows something to survive, like its truest emanation, that neither metamorphoses nor death can corrupt. The admirable myth of Nigromontanus participates in this proud hope for annihilation. Legacy of an old master versed in magic, this mirror has the property of concentrating rays of light on things of such a brightness that they are consumed in it by regaining the eternal, and are preserved in it in the domain of the invisible. “Things set alight by such heat became imperishable in a way Nigromontanus said could best be compared to pure distillation . . . [He] called it security in the void.” Similarly for Father Lampros there is nothing terrifying about destruction, for he is one of those natures born to penetrate into the exalted flames as one enters the gate into one’s ancestral home. And, adds the narrator, “Father Lampros, living like a dreamer behind the monastery walls, was perhaps the only one of us to live at the heart of reality.” Thus Jünger’s book reflects, in the anguish of general collapse, the temptation of fire where the spirit saves, by losing it, that which is essential to it, and is delivered by this very ruin from the oppressive hope for salvation.

Ernst Jünger’s style is very beautiful. Of a slow, almost formal allure, enclosing the lofty revelation of a message in phrases that never give way to vulgar ease, it offers words all the force that careful choice shaped to their inner and outer truth, to their reality and to their appearances, to the primordial sounds whose source they conserve. Language, in this calculated art, is an appeal to powers that knowledge cannot discover; and like a weapon forged in fire, it has the admirable coldness, the cruel dignity that makes the object richest in memories into the most effective instrument.

—Maurice Blanchot

1943

Concerning marionettes and automatons

Concerning marionettes and automatons—the decline in that direction is preceded by loss. Th is hardening is well depicted in the folktale about the glass heart.

The vice that has become commonplace leads to automatism, as it did so terribly in the case of the old prostitutes who became pure sex machines. Something similar is emanating from the stingy old men. They have sold their souls to material things and a life of metal. Sometimes a particular decision precedes the transition; man rejects his salvation. A widespread vice must be the basis for the general transition to automatism and its threat to us. It would be the task of the theologians to explain this to us, but they are silent.
*
During these past years, solipsism has emerged as a particularly difficult hurdle in the evolution of my thought. This is not only a product of isolation, it is also related to a temptation to embrace misanthropy, a trait that one cannot resist strongly enough in oneself. When surrounded by these crowds who have renounced free will, I feel more and more alienated, and sometimes it seems as if these people were not even there or that they were merely specious outlines constructed of half-demonic, half-mechanical materials.
*
The details included a passage about alcohol that I liked. Long quotations without sources are included claiming that the irresistible attraction of alcohol is not caused by physical enjoyment, but by its mystical power. It is thus not depravity that leads the unfortunate man to it, but rather hunger for spiritual power. Drink gives the poor and uneducated what others derive from music and libraries: it provides them with enhanced reality. It leads them from the edges of reality into its innermost workings. For many, this narrow zone in which they experience a breath of air is a place close to the realm of inebriation. Consequently, people make a considerable mistake in thinking they can combat drunkenness as a species of gluttony focused on liquid.
*
Concerning self-education. Even if we are born with infirmities, we can rise to remarkable levels of health. The same is true in the realm of knowledge. Through study you can liberate yourself from the influence of bad teachers and from the prejudices of your age. In a completely corrupted situation even the most modest progress in morality is much more difficult. Here is where things come down to fundamentals.
*
After 1918, Rozanov died in a monastery, where he is said to have starved to death. He remarked of the Revolution that it would fail because it offered nothing to men’s dreams. It is this that will destroy its structures. I find it so appealing that his hurried notations came to him as a sort of plasmatic motion of the spirit in moments of contemplation—when he was sorting his coin collection or sunning himself on the sand after his bath.
*
Just as the Trojan War has become the mythical model of every historical war, the tragedy of returning soldiers and the figure of Clytemnestra constantly recur. A woman who hears that her husband is to be released from prison camp sends him a little parcel of delicacies as a love token. In the meantime, the man returns earlier than expected and discovers not only his wife but also her lover and two children. In the prisoner of war camp in Germany, comrades divide the contents of the parcel and four of them die after consuming the butter she had laced with arsenic.

from the book A German Officer in Occupied Paris The War Journals, 1941-1945 (European Perspectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Ernst Jünger

Quintilian on Ernst Jünger's The Glass Bees

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was a prominent member of the German nationalist Conservative Revolutionary movement of the 1920s that was opposed to the feckless Weimar Republic. The son of a wealthy chemist, Jünger rejected the staid bourgeois world of his upbringing and instead sought adventure wherever he could find it. Running away from home and joining the French Foreign Legion while a minor, Jünger was sent to Algeria and Morocco. Through the intercession of his father, Jünger got out of the Legion in time to join the German Army at the outbreak of World War I.

It was the Great War that brought fame and glory to Jünger. As a young officer he was renowned for his bravery in the field, winning Iron Crosses 1st and 2nd Class as well as the Blue Max (Pour le Mérite). It was Jünger’s wartime memoir Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1920) that made his reputation as an author. In this book, Jünger describes war as an almost mystical experience, a transcendental transformation in which man becomes fully actualized. As such, Storm of Steel serves as a true antipode to the pacifism of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nicht Neues, 1929).

After leaving the German Army in 1923, Jünger continued his literary efforts and did advanced study in a variety of scientific fields, most notably entomology (a field in which his work was highly regarded). Although his glorification of war struck a chord with Hitler, several times Jünger turned down the Führer’s offer of a parliamentary seat among the Nazi rolls. Jünger never joined the Nazi Party and was highly critical of many Nazi policies. Re-entering the German Army after the outbreak of World War II, Jünger was assigned to an administrative position in occupied Paris. Tangentially associated with the Stauffenberg Plot, Jünger was allowed to resign from the army in 1944 rather than face execution. Untainted by Nazism, Jünger continued his literary career after WWII and became a lionized figure in German cultural affairs, although many leftists considered him suspect due to his promotion of German nationalism and martial virtues. Passing away at the age of 102, Jünger was both the youngest ever recipient of the Blue Max and the last surviving recipient of the award.

Jünger’s little-known novel The Glass Bees (Gläserne Bienen, 1957) is one of the most remarkably prescient literary works concerning the deracinated corporate-run globalist consumer dystopia in which we find ourselves currently imprisoned. The novel is set in an unspecified present in which one corporation headed by a man named Zapparoni controls all entertainment and information flow and produces miniaturized robots that perform most manual labor. When thinking of Zapparoni, think of a combination of Walt Disney, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs. Zapparoni’s corporation not only produces those machines that replace human labor, it also produces the entertainment that keeps the masses occupied while being displaced by those machines.

But there is a weakness in Zapparoni’s business model. While Zapparoni may be an entrepreneurial visionary, he is an organizer, not a creator, and is dependent on the engineers and developers that he employs. In order to maintain his monopoly, Zapparoni must continually cater to the whims of his engineers, who are paid lavishly, have no set working hours, and are indulged in every conceivable manner, not unlike the Silicon Valley corporate campuses of today that resemble entertainment complexes more than workplaces.

Into the story comes one Captain Richard, a superannuated army officer who began his career in the cavalry, switched to the tank corps when those mechanized monsters began to appear at the end of World War I, and who now finds himself out of a career now that war is in the hands of technocrats, or “super-philistines” as he calls them:

Even in peace they had brought about greater evils than any tyrant or warlord had ever imposed; they prepared poisons which no one before had ever imagined or even known by name. Each day their machines took a toll equal to the casualty list of a single battle, and the yearly toll equaled that of a war—and in what a ghastly manner.

Behind all this was a brutal and ruthless use of intellect which basically recognized only one tendency—that which at the same time shortened, mechanically increased production. But could they create an olive tree or a horse? With all their enormous potentialities they could, of course, build cities, but not the smallest dwelling of the kind once built by a simple mason or a carpenter. Certain naïve souls even commissioned them to build churches, though one would not want even a garden pavilion as a gift from them. The churches they got were built in a style suitable only for pillboxes, airplanes, and refrigerators; there they celebrated their religious rites before a congregation that considered penicillin more effective than any sacrifice of the Mass. [emphasis mine]

Captain Richard, however, is down on his luck and desperately needs a job, but the skill set of a retired cavalry officer is of little use in a world that has divorced itself from tradition, honor, and the natural world. An old army friend with connections arranges a job interview with Zapparoni who is in need of someone with the Captain’s tainted background. In what must be the most unusual job interview in literary history, a psychological tug-of-war begins between the Captain and Zapparoni, the results of which I will leave up to the reader to discover on his own.

So much of speculative fiction which tries to imagine the future ends up being risible only a few years after it is produced. The Glass Bees, however, is remarkable for how accurate a portrait of the future internet age could be that was written in 1957 by a 62-year-old man with roots in the Wilhelmine Era. Even more remarkable is that Ernst Jünger lived for forty more years and got to see most of his dystopian vision come to fruition.