Spuren und Schneisen. Ernst Jünger: Lesarten im 20. Jahrhundert (review)

This extensive study of the critical work on Ernst Jünger illustrates, once again, just what a difficult problem he presents for literary and historical scholarship. The usefulness of Spuren und Schneisen lies in a somewhat different direction from that suggested by its title. Those terms seem to hint at a more subtly independent approach, tracking down hitherto overlooked objects of inquiry by following hitherto neglected lines of investigation into the denser wildernesses of Jünger's landscape. That is, however, not the volume's strength. Its principal substance consists in its having gathered together assessments of a substantially complete list of books, and a good though of course not complete list of articles, on Jünger that reflect on his writing and its influence from all angles. It would be difficult to say that Ernst Keller has offered anything original in direct commentary of his own on the primary material. The volume examines the secondary texts, but undertakes to analyze them under a series of headings that identify distinct themes through which all those contrasting critical angles can be brought together into some kind of systematic order.

The problem, however, emerges in the disparities and contradictions at work among all these views. The rather brief and compressed assessments of different positions allowed by the project of covering so many of them leave the reader a little uncertain about the degree to which the readings can be treated as definitive. Clearly, the work to produce good accounts of these different critical positions has been embarked on with intelligence and a responsible, sober commitment to accuracy. And yet almost everything about the body of writing that emerges from Jünger's century of lifetime, and the multiple Germanies to whose lifetimes he responds, whirls in overwhelming currents of controversy. Keller does engage with the scholarship by drawing the various critical projects together into dialogue with one another as far as he can, but it is clear that another perspective than his would read them in quite different ways and project the relations between them differently too.

The book sets up thirteen chapters under headings like "Literatur," "Moderne," and "Technik." Any one of these, if treated fully in all its ramifications, would be best pursued through the totality of the oeuvre, and it could be argued that the difference in emphasis that each of the terms Keller has selected establishes would slowly melt away as the concept in Jünger's own usage expands and branches out into the ultimate demands of definition that Jünger's reflections impose. That is part of the difficulty presented by Jünger's way of thinking. His terminology, his imagery, his themes, and especially the way he bends every genre towards his own idiosyncratic way of speculating, always lead into an essentially continuous realm of experiences and oppositions. The separation of domains under those headings would serve to demonstrate how Jünger's thinking works if the project had been to take on the task of interpreting Jünger's work itself. As a way of ordering the secondary literature it is probably less effective than simply following basic chronology, though one can also see why that would seem flat and unappealing.

The way each of the thirteen chapters is subdivided under further headings and subheadings, however, does at least separate and isolate particular bodies of material. This has the advantage that one can find matter referring to a particular topic, but the disadvantage that it is hard to gauge from this how Jünger himself incorporated the concepts or texts named into his total project and his serious commitments to confront them. For example, one could be misled by the way Keller reports on the debate concerning Jünger's supposed anti-Semitism. The positions are often motivated by ideological or political interests rather than responsible attention to the texts, whereas Keller inclines to treat them all as legitimate interpretations. On this matter, one really does need...