Ernst Jünger’s narratives of complicity | Hacker News Reader

Ernst Jünger’s narratives of complicity

newyorker.com

30 pointsCaiero24 comments

> ...passages like this set the tone: “In these men there lived an element that underscored the savagery of war while also spiritualizing it: the matter-of-fact joy in danger, the chivalrous urge to fight. Over the course of four years the fire forged an ever purer, ever bolder warriorhood.” Such dire blather proliferated through the German right after the defeat of 1918.

The article's author might regard this as "dire blather", and it is indeed true that such sentiments were amplified throughout the interwar German right, but it's still a pretty good description of what regular exposure to shared hardship and danger will do to men grouped together in infantry units.

Why go to war when instead, you can go to WINE BAR with "gf" and enjoy tasteful banter?

On a more serious note, this sentiment: "Virtue and sacrifice are anachronisms, wars mere catastrophic conflicts to be prevented by skilful management" seems very relevant to the disconnect between Jünger and a contemporary NY journalist.

I'll copy the eugyppius thread [0] on a text by Rolf Peter Sieferle, it is succinct and beautiful.

From Sieferle, Finis Germania p. 40f.: "Politics belongs to an older stratum of existence, ordered in terms of state & history, crystallised in statesmen, leaders & ideologues. It has programmes, values & goals. It demands virtues & commitment directed to a superordinate whole...

The ultimate purpose of politics is war: the willingness of the individual to sacrifice himself for a higher cause, for his society.

'System' characterises newly emerging orders of higher complexity, which have gradually displaced politics. Systems organize themselves without focus, without values, goals & programmes. Their only maxim is freedom and emancipation for the individuals.

Virtue and sacrifice are anachronisms, wars mere catastrophic conflicts to be prevented by skilful management. 'System' creates order via self-generated constraints of objectivity, but not by normative orientation.

The structures of systems are as inescapable for individuals as a magnetic field is for iron filings. They do not 'know' anything about it, but they align themselves with the preset paths. The most important processes are not controlled and beyond theoretic grasp.

In advanced 'western' countries, it is 'System' that has prevailed. The rest of the world, in contrast, still thinks for the most part in terms of politics, and this appears to Western eyes as anachronistic fundamentalism."

[0] https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1673780970481422336

If politics is all about warfare, and warfare is all about individual willingness to self-sacrifice, why has the history of warfare largely consisted of drafting peasants at sword-and-gunpoint, usually for the benefit of settling a pissing contest one despot has with another?

Is that your gut feeling about how it was, or is it backed up by historical research? Because I find this scenario not at all likely.

What do you find not at all likely? That conflicts are mostly fought for the benefit of the rulers? That being in the infantry really, really, really sucks, and when we do a show of hands, almost nobody wants to serve in it, and incredibly involved systems of violence and/or coercion/brainwashing/straight up dishonesty are necessary to make muster?

So politics is not about manipulating people into wars to benefit the rulers but it is? You're all over the place.

Were American GI peasants pressed into service? Were SS stormtroopers? Were the 300 of Thermopylae? Were the french cavalry massacred at Anjou or the long-bowmen who dealt them defeat? Were the jihad armies that swept away the oldest empires known to Earth, or the Cossacks, or the Keshik? You seem to be projecting a caricature of history based on some idealized medieval European society over all of History.

I think this is a common delusion of contemporary people. They think that the mass mobilization of the modern nation state that started with Napoleon was how it has always been, ignoring that there used to be a high prestige warrior class which was above the peasant class. They can’t imagine a world where people choose to be warriors.

Average knowledge of History is sadly quite low, as intended by elites keen to keep our imagination very tame in terms of political possibilities. I try to fight it in the home front of my mind and I try to help anyone who seeks to learn more.

> it's still a pretty good description of what regular exposure to shared hardship and danger will do to men grouped together in infantry units.

Forging an "ever purer, ever bolder warriorhood"?

I would have to say I agree with the author on that one, that is blather. WW1 was horrific. Different people, of course, responded to the trauma in different ways, but there was nothing "pure" or "chivalrous" about the militarism fostered during and after the war.

I don't disagree, but I think the experience of a man who fought in WWI for four years, was wounded seven times, and saw dozens of his friends die is probably more interesting and insightful on the subject than a New Yorker music critic.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, what you say is certainly true from my perspective, but I also appreciate that I am totally ignorant of what the experience of being in WWI was like, and Junger was not. It's easy to moralize from 2023.

I appreciate that gleaning anything meaningful from secondary sources is difficult at best. I don't think they're valuable for more than piquing interest in something - definitely not for learning about it. I'd recommend just reading the man himself. I particularly enjoyed The Marble Cliffs.

One of my favorite authors, and I have read many things. Do you think you could do better in the midst of history?

He was born in the German Empire, fought in both world wars, lived through Weimar, rise of the Soviet Union, rise of the Third Reich, saw his country split in two, saw the Berlin wall fall and the collapse of the USSR. That's a very high bar for me to reach, and I don't know what the modern equivalent would be.

I've not yet read anything by Ernst Jünger. Which would you recommend?

I'd strongly recommend his war memoir "Storm of Steel", essentially the war viewed through the eyes of an Imperial German officer.

It provides a stark contrast to "All Quiet on the Western Front" - a more well-known novel on WW1 from a German perspective.

I always think it’s worth mentioning that All Quiet on the Western Front is a work of fiction, written by a guy who was on the front for about a month, at which time he was wounded and unable to return until a few weeks before the end of the war.

Junger is writing a memoir based on the four years he was in the war, much of it at the front.

I suspect Remarque gets more attention not because of greater literary merit, but because his sensibilities are easier for us to understand and better accord with that of our teachers. Junger is a much more alien read, and for that reason much more worthwhile.

The Storm of Steel is his most popular book and his WWI memoir, but I think his best fiction work is The Marble Cliffs. It’s one of the few books I immediately reread.

In general I recommend totally discounting articles like this until you’ve read enough to have your own feel. Secondary sources are only to pique interest. They are almost always wrong.

I quite like Junger. The Glass Bees is a really interesting parable about technology. It predicts parts of the modern tech industry quite accurately.

Most of the potshots in the article are cheap. I like this quote from Jean Cocteau about Junger and World War II: "Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Junger had no hands".

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626103526/https://www.newyo...

Not sure why anyone would bother with newyorker these days. Just go read Jünger and ignore the forgettable tripe presented in this article.

This just reads like a hit piece written by an intellectually uncurious and fragile person. It's not even an interesting hit piece.

> "élitist libertarians"

Why the e acute? "élitist" (used twice in TFA) is not a word in french. The word "élitiste", with an 'e' at the end, exists though. The english word is "elitist" if you ask me.

One of many frank embarrassments to be found in the New Yorker's house style, which is a mishmash of usages obsolete for varying spans of decades and others like this which were never current at all, apparently assembled in the misguided belief that such behavior connotes arch playfulness rather than leaden pretense.

It is a thing in academic writing. E.g the randomly chosen article "The Populist Challenge to Élitist Democracy in Europe" in Oxford Academic.

At least he does not mix in French and German.

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