#ernst junger

[nousrose]

Only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.

The Glass Bees

Ernst Junger

[the-framed-maelstrom]

The true leaders of the world are at home in their graves.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 November 1941

[crimesfromthefuture]

Myth is not prehistory; it is timeless reality, which repeats itself in history. We may consider our own century’s rediscovery of meaning in myth as a favorable sign. - Ernst Jünger

[castilestateofmind]

[nicklloydnow]

"Myth is not prehistory: it is timeless reality, that repeats itself in history. It is a good sign that our century is finding meaning again in the myths.” - Ernst Jünger, ‘The Forest Passage’ (1951) [p. 39]

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Une civilisation peut-être aussi  supérieure qu'elle veut - si le nerf viril se détend, ce n'est plus  qu'un colosse aux pieds d'argile. Plus imposant l'édifice, plus  effroyable sera la chute.**

Ernst Jünger, La guerre comme expérience intérieure.

**A  civilisation perhaps as superior as it strives to be - if the virile nerve relaxes, it is nothing more than a colossus with feet of clay. The  more imposing the edifice, the more terrible will be the fall.

[jloisse]

« Certes, j'ai un faible pour les systèmes d'ordre, pour l'Ordre des Jésuites, pour l'armée prussienne, pour la Cour de Louis XIV… Une telle rigueur m'en impose toujours ».

— Ernst Jünger, Der Spiegel n°33 (1982)

[mayor-of-losertown]

[exhaled-spirals]

Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.

Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

[nousrose]

The heroic and cultic world presents an entirely different relation to pain than does the world of sensitivity. While in the latter, as we saw, it is a matter of marginalizing pain and sheltering life from it, in the former the point is to integrate pain and organize life in such a way that one is always armed against it. Here, too, pain plays a significant, but no doubt opposite, role. This is because life strives incessantly to stay in contact with pain. Indeed, discipline means nothing other than this, whether it is of the priestly ascetic kind directed toward abnegation or of the warlike heroic kind directed toward hardening oneself like steel. In both cases, it is a matter of maintaining complete control over life, so that at any hour of the day it can serve a higher calling. The secret of modern sensitivity is that it corresponds to a world in which the body is itself the highest value. This observation explains why modern sensitivity relates to pain as a power to be avoided at all cost, because here pain confronts the body not as an outpost but as the main force and essential core of life.

On Pain

Ernst Jünger

[the-framed-maelstrom]

Life strives incessantly to stay in contact with pain. Indeed, discipline means nothing other than this, whether it is of the priestly-ascetic kind directed toward abnegation or of the warlike-heroic kind directed toward hardening oneself like steel. In both cases, it is a matter of maintaining complete control over life, so that at any hour of the day it can serve a higher calling. The central question concerning the rank of present values can be answered by determining to what extent the body can be treated as an object.

Ernst Jünger, On Pain

[crazy-so-na-sega]

"Noi nazionalisti non crediamo nelle idee generali. Non crediamo nella moralità generale. Non crediamo nell'umanità, in un essere collettivo dotato di coscienza centrale e diritti uniformi. Al contrario, crediamo che la verità, i diritti e la moralità siano tutti condizionati all'estremo dal tempo, dallo spazio e dal sangue. Crediamo nel valore dell'individuo."

---

[castilestateofmind]

"The entire world is becoming torrentially conservative, out of self-protection, to protect its heritage, from a duty to capture once again the elements that have been shaken together, each in a different way, us ourselves - in the most difficult of all: the re-overthrow of the overthrow, the negated and negating negation, the revolution against the revolution".

- Rudolf Borchardt.

[rendingrocks]

"Myth is not prehistory; it is timeless reality, which repeats itself in history."

Ernst Jünger

[chaoticflames]

Ernst Junger

[nicklloydnow]

“The life of an army is always active. And one cannot imagine "Contemplative" soldiers. Most often, if the games of war are "contemplated," it is to denounce their extreme absurdity. This was done from 1914 to 1918. To live up to the values of battle courage, the gift of the self - it is a bad idea to reflect on them. You must let yourself be swept up by them. But there is an exception.

No one has described the battlefield and its horrors more acutely than Jünger. I want to show that there is an equivalence between war, ritual sacrifice, and mystic life: they involve the same play of "ecstasies" and "terrors" through which man links himself up with the games of the heavens. But more often than not, war is distorted: we cover up its glories and its horrors. This is why I cite Jünger, who does not avoid anything.

"The horror of this spectacle outstripped all predictions; peoples' strength evaporated in the presence of this sad, gray figure, sprawled out on the side of the road, around whom fat flies were already making their rounds. His face and all those that came after it reappeared again and again in many different poses: shredded bodies, cleaved skulls, pale phantoms that harrowed the memory . . . During the long nighttime marches in this agonizing desert, the heart felt as isolated and stranded as if it were far above the mortal reflections of a sea of ice. The inevitable ambush that surrounded us extinguished the flame of our zeal. How many times did someone's dying cries expire without an echo in the course of their slow agony! . . . Although we had spent many years wandering these abandoned wastelands, we would always return to them with our bodies trembling profoundly, as when one wakes after a fit of madness . . . Where were we? On some outcrop on the craterous surface of the moon? Cast off into the depths of hell? This land, surrounded by yellowish flames, where the infernal dance of death would rage, could not have been any place on earth." This is how Jünger described the front.

Jünger goes on: "The smell of rotting bodies is unendurable, heavy, sickly-sweet, repulsive, penetrating like a viscous paste. It would waft so intensely over the plains after great battles that starving men would forget to eat. We often saw groups of heroic fighters, isolated in the mists of battle, clinging to part of a trench or a line of ditches for days on end the way that shipwrecked people cling to sundered masts in a storm. In their midst, all-powerful Death had planted its flag. Fields littered with men, mowed down by their bullets, unfurled before peoples' eyes. The corpses of their comrades lay beside them, mingled with them, with the seal of death on their eyelids. Their harrowed faces recalled the frightful realism of old images of the crucifixion. The heroic fighters, almost collapsing with starvation, would stay crouched down, enveloped in a stench that became unbearable every time the storm of steel set the tragic dance of death in motion once more, launching rotting corpses into the air. What good would it have done to cover the tatters of their flesh with sand and quicklime? What good would it have done to hide them under tent canvases to shroud their black and bloated faces from sight? Their number was truly too great! Our pickaxes collided with human flesh at every strike. All the mysteries of the tomb revealed themselves, so atrocious that the most hellish nightmares seemed as nothing in comparison to them. Tufts of hair came flying off their heads like autumn leaves from trees. Their putrefied bodies took on that greenish hue of fish skin and shone, at night, from between the gaps in their ragged uniforms. Our feet, squashing them, would leave phosphorescent footprints. Others dried out like chalky mummies that were slowly falling away to dust. The skin of others sloughed off their bones in a reddish-brown jelly. During the heavy summer nights, these swollen corpses seemed to wake like phantoms and, from their wounds, eructations of gas escaped with a whistling sound. But the most horrible spectacle of all was the wriggling of the worms . . . Is it not true that we stayed on the road four days, among the corpses of our comrades? Were we not all, the living and the dead, covered with the same whirlwind of bluish flies? Is there anything more terrifying in all of Horror's kingdom? Among those who were sleeping forever, more than one had shared our nights of vigil, our canteen of wine, our scrap of bread! . . . When, after days such as these, the bent, ragged soldiers trooped off toward the rear for some rest in long, gray, silent columns, their march would freeze even the warmest heart. ‘They look like they just stepped out the grave,’ murmured one passerby to his daughter."

This is the language of mysticism. The great care taken over horror is neither a vice nor an effect of depression. It is the threshold to a church.

"Blood,” writes Jünger, "gushes through the arteries in divine incandescence when a man advances on the battlefield fully aware of his valor . . . Whoever arrives at this highest point of his personality has respect for himself. Is there anything more sacred than a warrior? A God??? . . .”

He adds: "Courage is the total wager of one's own person. . . . If one . . . understands the true reason for combat, one cannot fail to honor heroism, to honor it everywhere and particularly in one's enemy. . . . The warrior defends his cause as bitterly as he can and we have shown this to be true on both sides of the barricade - we, warriors the world over . . . we have broken the stone vessel of the world . . . we have chiseled a new face onto the earth . . . the vast swathes of sacrifice that we have agreed to form part of a single holocaust that unites us all!”

Only the horrible "slowdown" of the war of 1914 could have permitted this kind of "contemplation" of horror and oneself - as well as this mysticism. Mysticism, paradoxical contemplation, occurs when the contemplative person acts, when he contemplates action! The overly rapid rhythm of classical wars prevented anyone from probing their depths: people would travel across the kind of landscape Jünger describes at breakneck speed (instead of haunting it over four years). The feat of having overcome the impossible - and having communicated such mastery - is a moment of decision and of [rupture?]. But nothing can alter the natural law of things: war does not want to have its hidden depths revealed, and the lyricism of horror is poorly suited to it. The lightning war brings about well-known conditions: conditions wherein "the rest is silence."

If not for the acute crisis that has stricken us since 1914, Jünger's reactions would be unintelligible, out of place: to proclaim them would be unacceptable. The army acts without making proclamations. When it comes down to it, its showy aspects and the fanfare of its parades go alongside its modesty. The macabre horror and the grimace of Christ on the cross belong in a church, not a barracks. Soldiers want action, not ecstasy. Jünger's lyricism profited from the momentary impotence of a will entirely dedicated to deci-sion. It fed itself on failure and sluggishness. But just as a slow-motion film breaks down the gallop of a horse and allows one to understand how it works, a slow war and the form of expression it inspired revealed the underlying game. We look for "terrors" and "ecstasies" in combat as much as we do in a church. The bugles deny it on parade, but that ostentatious denial is nothing but a hurried impulse and a systematic easing of the game. Jünger's testimony, weighty as it is, is more legible: "A remark on ecstasy: this state that is particular to saints, great poets, and great lovers is precisely analogous with true courage. In both cases, fervor raises one's energy to such a height that the blood boils through one's veins and foams as it flows through the heart. It is an intoxication that surpasses all intoxication, an unleashing of forces that sunders all ties.”” (pages 95 - 100)