Flowers from Rousseau’s herbarium

A wonderful passage from Ernst Jünger‘s magnum opus Eumeswil:

My genitor strikes me—to maintain Vigo’s image—as someone who delights in dried bouquets, in flowers from Rousseau’s herbarium. I can even sympathize with this as an academic. On the tribune, my old man’s self-deception becomes a deception of the populace.

On the other hand, my interest in the Domo’s squabbles with the tribunes is metahistorical; I am absorbed in the model, not the urgent issue. At the luminar, I studied the particulars of Rousseau’s visit with Hume, plus the misunderstandings that led to Hume’s invitation. Jean-Jacques’s life leads from disappointment to disappointment to solitude. This is reflected in his successors, down to the present day. It hints that something human was touched at the core. The great ideas spring up in the heart, says an old Frenchman. One could add: and are thwarted by the world.

I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.

I therefore would not resent my genitor for merely believing in a fallacy; no one can help that. What disturbs me is not error but triteness, the rehashing of bromides that once moved the world as grand utterances.

Errors can shake the political world to its very core; yet they are like diseases: in a crisis, they can accomplish a great deal, and even effect a cure—as hearts are tested in a fever. An acute illness: that is the waterfall with new energies. A chronic illness: sickliness, morass. Such is Eumeswil: we are wasting away—of course, only for lack of ideas; otherwise, infamy has been worthwhile.

The lack of ideas or—put more simply—of gods causes an inexplicable moroseness, almost like a fog that the sun fails to penetrate. The world turns colorless; words lose substance, especially when they are to transcend sheer communication.

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Source:

Ernst Jünger, Joachim Neugroschel (translator), Eumeswil, Marsilio Publishers, New York, 1993.

Life pledged for an ideal

[ Ernst Jünger's famous M1916 Stahlhelm (source) ]

Here is a delirious (and slightly disturbing) passage from the last pages of Basil Creighton’s 1929 translation [1] of Ernst Jünger‘s gut-wrenching masterpiece, In Stahlgewittern [2], perhaps the most beautiful war book ever written:

Now I looked back: four years of development in the midst of a generation predestined to death, spent in caves, smoke-filled trenches, and shell-illumined wastes; years enlivened only by the pleasures of a mercenary, and nights of guard after guard in an endless perspective; in short, a monotonous calendar full of hardships and privation, divided by the red-letter days of battles. And almost without any thought of mine, the idea of the Fatherland had been distilled from all these afflictions in a clearer and brighter essence. That was the final winnings in a game on which so often all had been staked: the nation was no longer for me an empty thought veiled in symbols; and how could it have been otherwise when I had seen so many die for its sake, and been schooled myself to stake my life for its credit every minute, day and night, without a thought? And so, strange as it may sound, I learned from this very four years’ schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of material warfare that life has no depth of meaning except when it is pledged for an ideal, and that there are ideals in comparison with which the life of an individual and even of a people has no weight. And though the aim for which I fought as an individual, as an atom in the whole body of the army, was not to be achieved, though material force cast us, apparently, to the earth, yet we learned once and for all to stand for a cause and if necessary to fall as befitted men.

Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favoured.

And if it be objected that we belong to a time of crude force our answer is: We stood with our feet in mud and blood, yet our faces were turned to things of exalted worth. And not one of that countless number who fell in our attacks fell for nothing. Each one fulfilled his own resolve.

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Quite a powerful and passionate celebration of the old Preußische Tugenden! I would dare to claim that such extreme self-denial will appear somewhat suicidal and deranged to anyone who is deeply immersed in today’s Zeitgeist.

Interestingly, I can find the text corresponding to the passage above neither in the 1922 German edition [2], nor in Michael Hofmann’s translation [3]. Did Basil Creighton manufacture prose out of thin air? Or is Creighton’s 1929 translation based on a cruder, more brutal, and more nationalistic German edition of In Stahlgewittern? I guess the latter is the case. In any case, if any of you can find the original German text on which Creighton based his 1929 translation, I would be most thankful.

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References

[1] Ernst Jünger, Basil Creighton (translator), The storm of steel: from the diary of a German storm-troop officer on the western front, H. Fertig, 1975 (Reprint of the Chatto & Windus, 1929 edition).

[2] Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern, Berlin 1922.

[3] Ernst Jünger, Michael Hofmann (translator), Storm of Steel, Penguin Books, 2004.

Grabenkampf

Ernst Jünger on the brutality of trench warfare:

Auch das moderne Gefecht hat seine großen Augenblicke. Man hört so oft die irrige Ansicht, daß der Infanteriekampf zu einer uninteressanten Massenschlächterei herabgesunken ist. Im Gegenteil, heute mehr denn je entscheidet der einzelne. Das weiß jeder, der sie in ihrem Reich gesehen hat, die Fürsten des Grabens mit den harten, entschlossenen Gesichtern, tollkühn, so sehnig, geschmeidig vor- und zurückspringend, mit scharfen, blutdürstigen Augen, Helden, die kein Bericht nennt. Der Grabenkampf ist der blutigste, wildeste, brutalste von allen, doch auch er hat seine Männer gehabt, Männer, die ihrer Stunde gewachsen waren, unbekannte, verwegene Kämpfer. Unter allen nervenerregenden Momenten des Krieges ist keiner so stark, wie die Begegnung zweier Stoßtruppführer zwischen den engen Lehmwänden des Grabens. Da gibt es kein Zurück und kein Erbarmen. Blut klingt aus dem schrillen Erkennungsschrei, der sich wie Alpdruck von der Brust ringt.

[ source ]

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Here is Basil Creighton‘s 1929 translation:

Even modern battle has its great moments. One hears it said very often and very mistakenly that the infantry battle has degenerated to an uninteresting butchery. On the contrary, to-day more than ever it is the individual that counts. Every one knows that who has seen them in their own realm, these princes of the trenches, with their hard, set faces, brave to madness, tough and agile to leap forward or back, with keen bloodthirsty nerves, whom no despatch ever mentions. Trench warfare is the bloodiest, wildest, and most brutal of all warfare, yet it too has had its men, men whom the call of the hour has raised up, unknown foolhardy fighters. Of all the nerve-racking moments of war none is so formidable as the meeting of two storm-troop leaders between the narrow walls of the trench. There is no retreat and no mercy then. Blood sounds in the shrill cry that is wrung like a nightmare from the breast.

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Source:

Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern, Berlin 1922.

Ein blutiger Schleier vor den Augen

A passage from Ernst Jünger‘s brutal In Stahlgewittern:

Andererseits muß ein Verteidiger, der dem Angreifer bis auf fünf Schritt seine Geschosse durch den Leib jagt, die Konsequenzen tragen. Der Kämpfer, dem während des Anlaufs ein blutiger Schleier vor den Augen wallte, kann seine Gefühle nicht mehr umstellen. Er will nicht gefangennehmen; er will töten. Er hat jedes Ziel aus den Augen verloren und steht im Banne gewaltiger Urtriebe. Erst, wenn Blut geflossen ist, weichen die Nebel aus seinem Hirn; er sieht sich um wie aus schwerem Traum erwachend. Erst dann ist er wieder moderner Soldat, imstande, eine neue taktische Aufgabe zu lösen.

A possible translation:

The defending force, after driving their bullets into the attacking one at five paces’ distance, must take the consequences. A man cannot change his feelings with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill. He has no scruples left; only the spell of primeval instinct remains. It is not till blood has flowed that the mist gives way to his soul. Only then is he once again a modern soldier able to solve a new tactical task.

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Source:

Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern, Berlin 1922.