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| Ernst Jünger: a great writer with an adventurous heart |
With the publishing in 1938 of Ernst Jünger’s then re-edited
Das Abenteuerliche Herz, the German author was peaking in a mountain range
filled with danger and troubles. Like an anthology of journal entries stemming
from different moods rather than outer experiences, the book at first seems all
over the place. But once one settles in to Jünger’s highly specific style and
reasoning, it all makes sense. The book is the first to truly assemble all of
Jünger’s varied skills as a writer, and as such it’s a pure joy to read.
After the initial success of his WWI blitz-novel In
Stahlgewittern (The Storm of Steel) in 1920, Jünger became quite a versatile
writer, swinging between personal reflections of nature’s beauty, over allegorical
mysteries, to more concrete political and philosophical treatises (and then
back again). In 1938, at age 43, he could look back at a successful career but
still in a threatening and volatile environment. Shunning both Communists and
Nazis and their attempts at creating a demagogic intellectual environment in
post WWI Germany, Jünger had been – and remained – a lone wolf with
sophisticated insights and outlooks.
It’s noticeable in the book, now wonderfully translated into
English by Thomas Friese and published by Telos Press, that this intellectual
aristocrat was also on his way somewhere else at this time. I’m not referring
to the second world war that was just around the corner, but rather to his
unique style of literary magical realism, ”stereoscopic” analysis and his
distanced but crystal clear conclusions. In The Adventurous Heart, many of the
sections are like sketches of his roman à clef to come, Auf den Marmorklippen
(On the Marble Cliffs, 1939). He was trying things out, both thematically and stylistically.
The new style was uniquely his own. Referencing nature
(always), paraphrasing a fairy tale esthetic, presenting psychological faits
accomplis and just being an allround brilliant stylist, Jünger concocted a
narrative that confounds because it’s neither ”bourgeois” (as in the French
heavyweights of the late 19th century) nor experimental/”stream of
consciousness” like Joyce et al.
The Adventurous Heart is a perfect title for the book. Once
inside, each page is like an adventure and it does indeed belong more in the
sphere of the heart than in the rational mind. Strolling through nature – both
the chlorophyllic and the human – Jünger ponders phenomena as well as his own
conclusions in an intuitive way. Aloof, yes, but always intriguing enough to
keep you hooked. It’s an unpredictable mystery, very subtly designed, and which
works over and over and over (try re-reading On the Marble Cliffs or this one
and see how much new stuff actually appears. A literary tricking of memory or
simply a living, sentient text?). The first edition of the book (1929) was
inspired in structure by Louis Aragon’s palimpsestic Le Paysan de Paris (1926).
The influx of elegant surrealism is clearly visible also in this, the re-edited
1938 edition.
The most interesting bits are, for me, the fictional
sections that are interspersed among these other more distinctly Jüngerian
reflections. This atmosphere deals with the horror of everyday German life,
exemplified by changing surroundings, acceptance of violence, a silent majority…
It’s a narrative always imbued with a dream-taint (a clever disguise) and
chilling horror. That the Nazis allowed this book to be published – to say
nothing of the critical On the Marble Cliffs the following year – is an utter
mystery. Because Hitler admired Jünger as a war hero and as the author of The
Storm of Steel, Jünger’s life was spared many times in the shadows of violent
despotism. Goebbels, in particular, envied Jünger, courted him and then, after
several rejections (for instance to the invitation to be a part of a new Nazi
author’s academy) found him arrogant and deserving of a brutal fate. Jünger was
indeed a lucky man. Or just plain intelligent and insightful. His aloof
neutrality (or ”désinvolture”, as he himself called it) became a trait for
which he was respected in many different environments – and criticized in
others.
Quite often, clear reproach leaks through sections of his
magical realism: ”Do you have any idea what goes on in this space that we will
perhaps someday plunge through, the space that extends between the recognition
of the downfall and the downfall itself?” The economy and balance of that
sentence is just brilliant. A little bit more, and it would be heads off for
sure, and a little bit less would be just a piece of gothic horror.
”I myself was the adept he wanted to destroy, I was the game
that had been lured in by the blue viper!” Allegory and metaphors abound, and
I’m certain that’s why Jünger is appreciated in so many quarters. You sense
there’s something there, something substantial and revealing. And yes, there
always is, but never in any expected fashion.
When Jünger writes, ”The dominion of the vulgar is most
oppressive when it exploits the forms of the just and equitable. When it
resorts to crime, the bitterness is mitigated”, is that really a review of
Dostojevski (Crime and Punishment in this case) or a ”désinvoltured” regard at
his contemporary German chaos?
”Thus it is said that a perfect calm prevails in the eye of
the cyclone. Things are supposedly seen more dispassionately, more lucidly and
distinctly than otherwise. At points like this, the eye is given access to
unauthorized insights, since the exaggerated reality resembles a mirror in
which the illusionary is also revealed.”
Hope lies for the dispassionate and lucid Jünger not in the
archetypes of the great men, because they simply come and go like the seasons,
but rather in the deeper miracles of nature herself. It’s not hard to see the eco-metaphorical messages he’s planting. ”When we behold a new flower, we understand the
sentiment of the despot who offered a prize for the invention of new pleasures.
We also gain a conception of the inexhaustible fertility of the world when we
consider that all this glory originated from a pinch of seeds contained in a
simple envelope. But soon its fresh colors are scattered over the earth, flung
out like a shower of sparks.”
This edition contains a great foreword by scholars Eliah
Bures and Elliott Neaman (whose Jünger biography A Dubious Past is worth
reading), which puts both Jünger and the book itself in contexts of chronology
and biography. In all, as with Telos’ 2008 edition of Jünger’s essay On Pain,
everything is top notch. I hope they carry on in the same fine tradition and
bring out more of this valuable writer in English.
I can here be a bit shameless in announcing that they’re not
alone in this noble pursuit. Edda Publishing will release an edition of
Jünger’s strange and superb Besuch auf Godenholm (1952), translated into English by Annabel
Moynihan-Lee and illustrated by Fredrik Söderberg, in the spring/summer of
2013. That, my friends, will be an edition to savour!
Ernst Jünger: The Adventurous Heart – Figures and Capriccios
Translated by Thomas Friese. Edited by Russell Berman. With
an Introduction by Eliah Bures and Elliott Neaman.
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