Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945 (review)

Calling Ernst Jünger “the politically incorrect writer par excellence,” Thomas Nevin aims to write the kind of book that could not have been written in Germany. As he points out, Jünger was honored by West Germany’s most prestigious literary prizes at the same time as his pretensions to having been a member of the resistance were regularly disparaged in the German press. His longevity made him a national institution, his birthday the occasion for a ritual confrontation of issues of collaboration and resistance that go to the heart of the (incomplete) de-Nazification on which the Federal Republic was founded. He is, in fact, such a profoundly West German phenomenon because he became a symbol of the nation’s process of postwar legitimation at least as much as he remained out of step with the times. If the postwar assessments of him are marked by a strength of feeling that seems to betray ambivalence, Nevin’s book tries to emulate Jünger’s aesthetic distance by approaching his career more dispassionately.

Unfortunately, Nevin does not master the tensions he points to in the postwar reception of Jünger. His primary points of reference are conservative humanists such as George Steiner and J. P. Stern, who accuse Jünger of translating a fetishization of violence into “linguistic barbarism,” an argument that does not differ in essence when made, for example, by Karl Heinz Bohrer. This suggests a humanistic consensus cutting across party lines. Far from challenging that consensus, Nevin attempts to rescue both Jünger’s humanism and his humanity, reducing the latter’s elevation of style into myth to an inability to form “deep emotional relationships with anyone” (3). In the process, Nevin only compromises himself.

Nevin does recognize Jünger’s role in constructing Weimar antiparliamentary discourse, confronting the fascistic undercurrent of his most ambitious polemical work, Der Arbeiter (The worker). At the same time, Jünger the soldier is for Nevin “not the glorifier of war he is so often labeled” (6). In the Third Reich, he becomes a hero of the inner emigration (a concept Nevin accepts uncritically), escaping the “suffocating conformism of the time” (6) by remaining “at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis” (1). The controversial diaries Jünger wrote during the occupation of Paris are described as “an unequivocal recognition of Germany’s responsibility for Hitler and the ruin he brought.” His is “a monitory voice” that “knew what guilt was and said so” (7). Turning the tables on Jünger’s critics, Nevin declares this “perhaps the most forceful reason so many hate him” (7). What this does not explain is why German neo-Nazis should have embraced Jünger so enthusiastically.

Given this all-but-complete acceptance of Jünger’s much publicized account of his own career, it is difficult to accept Nevin’s claim that this study “is [neither] a book of praises . . . nor . . . a blackwash” (4). He seems more genuine when he declares Jünger “one of this century’s foremost writers” (1). In order to emphasize the prescience of Jünger’s concern with technology while exploring his roots in Wilhelmine Germany, “[the] study’s framework is historical” at the same time as “the issues it examines are . . . to a lively degree . . . current” (7). Even this assessment of Jünger’s central position in the zeitgeist fails, however, to escape some nagging contradictions. Jünger’s is “a nineteenth century mind . . . [that] points at twentieth-first century problems” (3). Jünger would not have approved of this evasion of the present.

So determined is Nevin to exonerate Jünger from charges of fascism that he sometimes falls victim to a kind of Freudian “kettle logic,” making what are not always compatible claims in the interest of a psychology of disavowal. At times, Nevin seems seduced by the pathos of National Bolshevism, suggesting that it provided Jünger a protection against Nazism. A “historico...