Reflections on War and Peace after 1940: Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt

The more recent emergence of Carl Schmitt in the United States as a major political theorist of the twentieth century and especially the increasing interest in his radical definition of the political has overshadowed the historical context in which his writings developed (Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics; Mouffe, Challenge of Carl Schmitt; Caldwell, “Controversies over Carl Schmitt”). Those who want to insert the ideas of Schmitt into contemporary international politics tend to isolate and dehistorize Schmitt’s work, since its origins in Weimar and Nazi Germany seem to compromise its use for the present. Part of this strategy consists of removing him from the context of the German conservative revolution of the 1920s and early 1930s and cut the ties to authors such as Spengler, Moeller von den Bruck, and Ernst Jünger (Krockow, Die Entscheidung; Schwarz, Der konservative Anarchist; Mohler, Die konservative Revolution). In this particular historical constellation where the emphasis is placed on the German radical Right as an intellectual formation, the link between Schmitt and Jünger takes on greater significance, not only because they were close personal friends but also, and more importantly, because they shared basic assumptions about the place and role of Germany in modern history, the nature of political order, and last but not least, the essence of modern warfare (Jünger and Schmitt, Briefe). As we will see, their solutions pointed in different directions, especially when they were forced to rethink and revise their ideas towards the end and after World War II. The fall of the Third Reich and the victory of the Allies were a major challenge for both of them because these events fundamentally contradicted their previous assumptions about the future of Germany and Europe. By looking at Jünger’s and Schmitt’s writings, it becomes apparent that this process of rethinking and revising started years before the defeat of Germany and extended into the early years of the Federal Republic. For both of them, the end of the German nation-state in 1945 was a catastrophe, although it did not come unexpectedly (Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 243–73; Nevin, Ernst Jünger; Neaman, Dubious Past, 139–60; Martus, Ernst Jünger, 145–66). The more they witnessed and examined World War II, the more they concluded that it undermined the very idea of the nation-state and its historical role in Europe. This meant, among other things, that new and different foundations had to be created to secure a stable post-war political order. In other words, Jünger and Schmitt understood the nature of the warfare between 1939 and 1945 as an index for a new era in which Germany, but also other European nations, could not resume her traditional place. The victory of the Allies only reinforced this outlook that began to emerge in the early 1940s.

While Jünger and Schmitt responded to the defeat of Germany in 1918 with a radical call for a reorganized and ultimately aggressive nation-state (Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt; Dyzenhaus, Legacy and Legitimacy; Martus, Ernst Jünger, 39–67), their political map of the 1940s and 1950s has a rather different contour. Schmitt’s concept of the Großraum and Jünger’s idea of the world-state indicate that the nation-state as the ultimate point of reference has been abandoned. It is my thesis that this transformation was codetermined by their assessment of the changes in the way wars were conducted. Put differently, the relationship between military and political conflicts is the crucial axis for Jünger’s and Schmitt’s assessment of the postwar configuration. As I will show, this assessment relies on and makes use of concepts that they had developed earlier, but it “refunctions” them so that they fit coherently into the postwar constellation, thereby establishing a comprehensive conservative reading of this new era (Neaman, Dubious Past, 212–67; Seferens, “Leute von ubermorgen und vorgestern”; Laak, Gespräche in der Sicherheit).

It is precisely the historical distance from the postwar period that enables us to re-examine Jünger’s and Schmitt’s thought. The end...