Flight Forward: The World of Ernst Jünger's Worker

The Weimar period in Germany produced speculative forms of political discourse that need to be read in their full radicalism rather than as alternatives to the forms of government to which we, living in a different history, restrict the meaning of politics. Walter Benjamin provides a model for this expansion of our ideas—there is no parliamentary version of the revolutionary work he imagines. Even though Benjamin himself wrote in exceedingly hostile terms about Ernst Jünger, unexpected similarities in their writing, and in their common opposition to bourgeois stasis in human development, may help to sharpen our understanding of both.