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The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jünger in His Proto-Fascist Stage

Author(s): Walter H. Sokel


Source: New German Critique, No. 59, Special Issue on Ernst Junger (Spring - Summer,
1993), pp. 33-40
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488222
Accessed: 19-01-2018 00:13 UTC

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New German Critique

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The 'Postmodernism' ofErnst Jiinger
in his Proto-Fascist Stage

Walter H. Sokel

Ernst Jiinger's Der Arbeiter (1932) describes socio-cultural tendencies


which he sees emerging from the ending of the bourgeois age. Jtinger's
concept of the bourgeois age roughly coincides with what Jurgen
Habermas has called modernity. Jiinger sees the bourgeois age begin-
ning to be superseded by another age, the age of the Worker. The age of
the Worker is presented by him as something radically new, something
more modern than modernity. The age of the Worker, as I shall try to
show, corresponds in some important respects with what we have come
to call postmodernism or postmodernity.
Underlying my paper is the view that texts often combine more than
one discourse, and that the several discourses which go into the making
of such texts frequently undermine and contradict one another. By
"discourse" I understand a vocabulary and a concept formation which
assign a text its place in a historical context or contexts. It is what a text
shares with other texts of its own time or other times, which together
form a discourse characterizing a period or a tradition. Given that un-
derstanding of discourse, I claim thatJiinger's Der Arbeiter roughly con-
sists of three different discourses: (1) It participates in the discourse of
cultural nostalgia and political-social reaction, prevalent at the time,
and particularly prevslent in the year of its publication, 1932 (the year
immediately preceding Hider's accession to power); (2) Der Arbeiter very
prominently partakes of the discourse of high modernism; and (3) it
anticipates a discourse which began in the post-World War II period
and has been variously described by such terms as postindustrialism,

33

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34 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger

poststructuralism, postmodernism, postmodernity. Because of the


limits to the time at our disposal, I shall restrict myself to the
postmodern aspect ofJiinger's work.
The term postmodern is rich, vague, and even self-contradictory, yet
we have evolved some rather definite notions of what it is we are talk-
ing about when we use the term "postmodern." It is a catchword that
encapsulates, quite usefully, essential aspects of the historical period
which began with the fitties and in which we still live. In the given time
frame, the attempt to define "postmodern" would be quixotic. Rather
than taking on such a futile task, I shall let the examination of certain
passages of Jiinger's text explain the semantics involved.
What binds together the postmodern aspect ofJtinger's essay is the
assumption that the death of God, or rather of Christianity, is the deci-
sive and irrevocable event determining not only modernity, but also,
and especially, what follows it. Insofar as the age of the bourgeois is, in
many respects, still a secularized form of Christianity or Jiinger, what
ends with this age is not only what Habermas was to call modernity,
namely the narrative of enlightenment and human emancipation, but
also something much older - the age of Christianity.
As is typical of the genre of projecting historical-cultural periods,
Junger appears in the dual role of prophetic advocate and dispassionate
observer, scholarly chronicler, whose task it is to describe the "tre-
mendous process of dying that we are witnessing - the dying of the
bourgeois era and all its values."' With a term that strikingly antici-
pates Michel Foucault, Juanger exhorts his reader "to regard his time
with the eyes of an archaeologist" (71). In the metaphor "archaeolo-
gist" one can easily recognize the signature of Nietzsche who, in many
ways, is the connecting link, the common intellectual ancestor, of both
Jiunger and postmodernism.
The implications of the metaphor "archaeologist," when applied to
a student of history, are threetold. First, it describes an attitude of scien-
tific detachment. Second, it implies a view of history not as a continuous
narrative, but as something discontinuous, consisting of contiguous, yet
totally different layers. It consists of discrete historical periods, each
with a strong coherence and uniformity, each radically different from
preceding and subsequent layers. This view echoes Nietzsche's analogy

1. EmstJiinger, Werke, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1960) 216. All subsequent references
are to this text. This and all following translations are my own.

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Walter H. Sokel 35

of the history of morality with a palimpsest. It has its par


Oswald Spengler's and Arnold Toynbee's ideas of history as
sion of vastly differing cultures and Michel Foucault's idea of hi
a sequence of epistemes. Third, JUinger's metaphor implies
oughgoing historicism and cultural relativism for which no
truths and supra-historical values exist. Truths and values d
and change with the historical layer in which they are found.
What is interesting and very distinctive about Jiinger's appro
history is the linguistic nature of the principle governing h
change. History for him is a succession of struggles of lang
which the idiom of the victors displaces the idiom of the loser
Workers' language," says Juinger, "arose in the struggle ag
bourgeois" (21). Even as the idiom of the bourgeois had sh
age that is now drawing to its close, the worker's language form
new age. For Jinger, historical periods distinguish themselves b
signifying systems. Thus he takes an approach to historical
zation which differs quite radically from Oswald Spengler's bio
mystical idea of cultures as superorganisms, each endowed with
J nger's periodization of history also distinguishes itselft from M
view of history as successive changes of the means of productio
phasis on language brings Jiinger close to the linguistic turn that
cal of postmodern discourse and is inspired as much by Saussur
Nietzsche. By making language the criterion of historical
Junger opens new ground. To be sure, language for him is n
planatory, but only a descriptive principle of historical change; i
terizes a period. Janger conceives of an historical period as text
as a group of interrelated texts. For instance, the political a
programs of the now dawning era of the Worker, Jianger
merely commentaries on an "Urtext" which is yet unwritten (3
uninfluenced by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Jiinger su
the linguistic criterion of discourse or conversation - his
Unterhaltung - tor the philosophical notion of Weltanschauung
was favored by the school of Geistesgeschichte as the term descri
character of an age. For example, Juinger claims that Marx
takes part in the bourgeois conversation (34), still speaks the id
capitalism; and participation in a conversation implies historical c
ity. The discourse of the bourgeois age, or modernity, has been
nated by the vocabulary of economics. Its language expresses a
torship of economic thinking." Only when an entirely new voc

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36 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger

a discourse belonging exclusively to the emergent type of the Worker,


displaces the bourgeois discourse of economics will the truly post-
bourgeois age have arrived.
This new discourse, the post-Marxist discourse of the Worker, is not
economics, but technology. "Technology is the language that everyone
understands today. Technology is the command of a language that is le-
gal tender in the kingdom of labor" (165). The bourgeois cannot master
the language that is technology, while post-bourgeois man, the Worker,
was born and has grown up with this new language. Technology is his na-
tive tongue. It is the language in which he thinks, by which he expresses
himself, which comes naturally to him. Technology is his nature.
This language - and here is another way in which Jiunger antici-
pates postmodernism - is tundamentally non-referential. Its signs
do not signify anything except their own pertormance and capacities;
sign coincides with thing. No trace - to use Jacques Derrida's
quintessentially postmodern term - of any metaphysical presence is
left over. This language, whose words are its machines, is physicality it-
self. "This language [technology] is a primitive language; its signs and
symbols convince by their mere existence. Nothing seems more effec-
tive, more purposeful, more convenient than the use of such clearly
comprehensible, such logical signs" (177). That is, technology is a lan-
guage that eliminates the hermeneutic dimension. There is no meaning
concealed in it that has to be teased out by interpretation. In place of
understanding, the language of technology aims to produce action.
To be sure, there is a content concealed in this language also, but
this content is not a message; it is power. In that sense, technology
differs from all preceding languages, and constitutes a totally novel
speech. That is, "it renounces all results other than those always
already achieved simply in and by its use - the way, in a mathemati-
cal calculation, the result is implied in the calculation" (178). One can
also put it another way: in the language that is technology, speech coin-
cides with the exercise of effective power. It does not have to rely on
the uncertain media that are other human beings whom the speaker's
verbal language can never with certainty compel to cooperate. By con-
trast, between the user's desire and the machine's obedience lies nothing
but keeping the machine in good repair. It it tuitills the functions it was
designed to perform, it automatically expresses the user's - read:
speaker's - power. The use of this language does not merely refer to, it
is the power it represents.

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Walter H. Sokel 37

Abolishing representation and equating language with pow


dominant characteristic of post-bourgeois man as projected
Arbeiter. In this regard, Jiinger's essay partakes of two differen
courses simultaneously. By doing away with the hermeneutic d
sion and the last "trace" of a metaphysical presence in and behind
guage, it points ahead to the discourse of poststructuralism. That
eliminates the distinction between being and performing, between
and execution. On the other hand, however, by its emphasis on im
acy, on smooth functioning, and on domination, it forms part of
Charles Jencks has criticized as high modernism, a discourse prev
at the time whenJiinger composed his text. It examined from that
Jiinger's text could make clear how shared ambitions such as the
hilation of misunderstanding would make such disparate phen
as logical positivism, tunctionalist architecture, and totalitari
seem linked in a single historical discourse for which efficiency
Let us return, however, to the topic of the postmodern.
Anticipating Lyotard's argument in The Postmodern Condition, J
sees the power conferred by technology as historically unique ina
as it is power not derived from narrative, from myth. The techno
age has no room for metanarratives. In place of them, it has metap
Metapower is a language that is non-narrative. It is the "most dec
anti-Christian power that has ever come on the scene." (170) This
Christian essence of technology is, for Junger as for Lyotard, only par
a deeper and broader theme. It is the incapacity of technology to c
with myth - in Lyotard's term, metanarrative - narrative that cl
to explain and thus to order, dominate, and interpret a culture to
Metanarrative gives meaning, direction, and coherence to a societ
Lyotard, Juinger sees the bourgeois age, or, in Lyotard's term, mo
ism, dominated by a metanarrative which had succeeded to the m
narrative of Christianity. This metanarrative of modernity, or th
geois age, was humanism, the story of the inevitable progress of h
ty to ever-greater enlightenment, freedom, security, and unity. J
calls this metanarrative "the real people's church of the nineteen
tury," built around "the worship of progress" (171). He sees its de
beginning with the First World War. The "arrogant idiom of pro
is displaced by a new modesty, the modesty of a generation th
learned to renounce the illusion of being in the possession of unass
certainties" (201). Equally dead is the narrative of the social co
within and among nations, which was based on another humanist

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38 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger

the fiction of man's inherent goodness. However, for Jiinger man is


not only good; he is also evil, and he is both simultaneously. No
master narrative can be drawn from such ambiguous and contradicto-
ry insights. Man cannot be brought into a narrative at all, fbr there is
no human nature. There is nothing of which humans are not capable,
and not moral prescription, but random laws and changing power re-
lations produce human reality.
Jinger's militancy against the idea of a metanarrative shapes his
interesting and provocative view of historical time. Juinger makes a
sharp distinction between astronomical or clock time and human or
historical time. The traditional division of time into three uniform di-
mensions - past, present, future - is valid only for astronomical
time, not for human time. Astronomical time is conceived of as a sin-
gle line, leading from the past via the present into the future. It is the
same identical line, or the same narrative, for all places and all individ-
ual bodies, a single metanarrative, as it were. Human time, that is, time
appearing as history and human life, offers by contrast a multiplicity of
innumerable local variations. The time of each life has its own narra-
tive pace. It is capable of detours, bends, reversals, and repetitions in-
conceivable in astronomical time. There are as many paces as there are
lives, indeed even more, since one life usually participates in more
than one narrative. Thus it is not one single, unitary history with which
man has to reckon. Each life has its own structure, schedule, and rate
of advance. What is true of individuals is particularly true of genera-
tions; a generation belongs to more than one time, and the rate of tem-
poral flux differs from one generation to another. Thus a generation
might be both younger and older than its parents. That is, narratives
that are human life/times might swing back, double up, retrieve for-
mer aspects that had been lost, resume stretches of time left behind in
the past, but be picked up and continued by a subsequent generation.
Seen fiom their parents' perspective, a new generation might appear
older, further back in time, than the parents view themselves to be.
Thus history is not a single story. It is not linear, but multidimensional,
and exceedingly complex in its structure. It is indeed what Habermas
would call "un ibersichtiich" - ungraspable in a single framework. It
is conceivable, says Junger, that one and the same happening might
signify both an end and a beginning. In one narrative, a particular
happening might appear as the end of a process, while the same event
might signal a beginning in another story. "In the sphere of death, eve-
rything becomes a symbol of death, and yet, at the same time, death

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Walter H. Sokel 39

is the food that nourishes life" (215). It depends on the viewer


spective and situation whether a particular event might appear
end or a beginning.
Let me illustrate Junger's idea of the fragmented and pluralisti
ture of historical time by choosing his own historical location as
ample. In a narrative leading to postmodernism, Juinger, born in
is considerably younger than Habermas, who was born in 1929
is, in a story grafted in such a way that it would culminate
Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition of' 1979, Juinger, writing in
would be much closer to that point than Habermas who, in the 19
was still militating against the abolition of the Enlightenment
one metanarrative that should obligate us all. In terms of a nar
that is to end with the termination of metanarratives, Juin
Habermas's junior by many years, even though in astronomica
his senior by 34.
Habermas criticizes Lyotard's postmodernism for abandonin
progressive story of human emancipation, which first began to b
in the Enlightenment. Accusing postmodernism of a "trahisson des c
Habermas connects it with that reactionary fascism to which he, an
ers, would undoubtedly consign Ernst Junger as well. Indeed, if w
in the metanarrative rejected byJiinger and by Lyotard only the h
ist story of man's progress in emancipation, the charge of a righ
and reactionary bias might be levelled against them with some just
tion. However, like the postmodern rejection of all metanarra
Jiinger's notion of a non-linear historical time is directed not only
liberal Left, but also against the reactionary Right.
Jinger views the right-wing critique of the modern age, so com
in his day, to be just as inappropriate and outdated as the me
rative of bourgeois liberalism. Judgments inspired by socio-cu
pessimism are for Jinger based upon the same fallacious notio
single continuous narrative of history as those inspired by liberal
mism. Both the politics of nostalgia and the politics of hope r
equally taulty toundations; they are both illusory.
Juinger differentiates himself carefully from his reactionary co
poraries, and particularly from their most vociferous group, the N
Socialists. His view of the peasants, the Bauern, whom the Na
tolled as the estate uncorrupted by the bacillus of cosmopolit
megalopolitan modernity, shows that important and essential ditff
most drastically. Jinger's postmortem of bourgeois modernity in
the peasants above all. What Jinger sees as the post-rural age

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40 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger

Worker corresponds to what in our time has been called the post-in-
dustrial age. As Jiinger puts it, "the cliched differentiation between
town and country" is disappearing (176). Even today, that difference
- as Jiinger writes in 1932 - "exists only in the romantic realm; it is as
invalid as the difference between an organic and a mechanical world"
(176). While the physical landscape ot bourgeois modernity was one in
which ever-larger industrial cities were sharply distinguished from a
depressed and backward but still unpolluted rural world, Jianger sees
this distinction increasingly erased in a post-bourgeois world where
both city and country are superseded by a universal, carefully zoned
and planned suburbia. The disappearance ot the peasant, together with
the bourgeois, is caused by the triumph oft technology which includes
agriculture in its planetary domain. Thus Jiinger sets himself off sharply
from the nostalgic and reactionary myth of the soil which, together with
the myth of race, formed the foundation of Nazi ideology as conjoined
in the cultural slogan "Blut und Boden." By declaring the peasant super-
seded, J inger expresses a radical and postmodern position.
The essentially postmodern element of Der Arbeiter is the extreme
historicism which its attitude toward the peasants expresses. From the
perspective of Der Arbeiter, nothing is timeless, and there are not, as for
the Fascists, timeless values of any kind. In a sharp polemical turn
against Oswald Spengler, Jiinger declares "it is not true that the exis-
tence of the peasant is timeless and that great changes simply pass
above his acres like the wind and the clouds" (176). Nothing about hu-
man reality is "natural," nothing is unchangeably rooted either in
man's nature or in nature at large.
I have tried to stake out some key elements of a discourse in Der
Arbeiter, which one can describe in terms of our contemporary notion
of postmodern. I have not been able to consider all aspects of the
postmodern that can be found in Jiinger's essay. Much less have I
been able to touch on the two other discourses that contribute equally,
or even more powerfully, toJiinger's remarkable text: the discourse of
the reactionary German Right and the discourse ot high modernism,
both of which radically contradict the postmodern element which we
have singled out. Only if read with this contradiction in mind can
Jiinger's essay be comprehended in the entirety ot its astoundingly rich
contextuality.

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