This fundamental ideological standpoint, that the social, political, and societal were superficial phenomena behind whose pragmatic façade something more important existed, at least potentially, was widespread throughout prewar German culture, which more than anything cried out for essence and unity. It manifested itself in the wild paintings of the expressionists, who in their powerful subjectivity, their powerful primitiveness strived for the life that lay beneath the sheen of civilization and culture, where instinct and basic human drives prevailed. But it came out too in another, almost diametrically opposed orientation, in which the answer to the rising social unrest and instability that had come with industrialization and modernity was sought and focused in overarching, ahistorical notions such as that of the people and the rootedness of culture. Alienation entailed a loss of meaning that could not be offset by the material. If a single idea recurs throughout the mind-set of the age it is a distaste for the pragmatic and what Wagner in an essay called “soulless materialism.” Modernity was characterized as rationality, therefore they turned toward what was not rational, not purposeful, but which transcended such tendencies and found meaning in notions considered timeless and nonpragmatic. The people was one such notion, bringing together concepts of home, nature, culture, and religion, against whose immutable core the constant shifts of industrialism and modernity could only flake away, against whose profound depths, evoked by history, mythology, and religion, the entertainment industry and increasing commercialization of the day appeared abjectly shallow and banal.
The infatuation with art that Zweig describes as so strongly affecting his youth, and which also ran through Hitler’s teenage years, was not faddish but genuinely meaningful. Wagner, Hölderlin, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, George, all those writers and poets cultivated by German youth, celebrated the great, the divine, the essential, and they lauded death, too, which lay beyond it all. Stirb und Werde, die and become – something to die for means something to live for. The people, the earth, the war, the hero, death. The local, the own, the great, the eternal. These were the predominant concepts of German culture prior to the outbreak of World War I, and many of those who saw it coming looked on it as a catharsis, long-awaited and good.
What was singular about the enthusiasm many made manifest was that it was not politically but existentially motivated. Thomas Mann expressed pleasure at the collapse of a peaceful world, so full of loathing. Freud regained his belief in Austria as a nation. Rilke wrote of war being a god. Kafka envied the soldiers who were fighting. Georg Simmel saw the war as a great opportunity for Germany and proclaimed his unconditional love of his homeland. But neither Mann, Freud, Rilke, Kafka, nor Simmel took any part in the war, their enthusiasm was that of the onlooker. Ernst Jünger on the other hand, only nineteen years old when war broke out, joined up as a volunteer like Hitler. He kept a diary throughout, publishing in 1920 perhaps the best book about World War I, Storm of Steel. This is how he describes the mood of his generation in the summer of 1914:
We had come from lecture halls, school desks, and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses. Surely the war had to supply us with what we wanted; the great, the overwhelming, the hallowed experience. We thought of it as manly, as action, a merry dueling party on flowered, blood-bedewed meadows. “No finer death in all the world than…” Anything to participate, not to have to stay at home!
The hallowed dream of greatness and glory, this was what the war was about. Carefree dueling on blood-bedewed meadows, this was the vision. In his biography of Ernst Jünger, Into the Abyss, Thomas Nevin points to some of the origins of this mind-set, noting essay assignments given to students of the gymnasium schools in the Hanover District in the spring of 1914, topics to be discussed including “The Kaiser’s words, ‘I am a citizen of the German Reich,’ words of pride and duty,” “War is as terrible as plagues from heaven, but it is good, it is a fate like them,” “How authentic is the saying of Frederick the Great, ‘Life means being a warrior’?” “The bow when bent first shows its power,” “My favorite hero in the Nibelungenlied,” “A nation is worthless if it doesn’t set everything upon its honor.”
Jünger’s conceptions of war, Nevin writes, came mainly from his readings of Homer, whose influence was acknowledged by the school’s director, Dr. Joseph Riehemann, in his speech to graduating students, who were told that “apart from the light of Christianity, nothing will penetrate your future life with a brighter and warmer glow than Homer’s sun.”
Europe had been at peace since 1871, and in the war between France and Germany that ended that year, the machine gun as yet to be introduced, transport taking place by means of horse and cart or sailing ship, some 150,000 people lost their lives. In 1914 most believed that this new war would be conducted in much the same way and last no more than a few short months.
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In the waning summer of 1914 Hitler too was afraid the war would be over before he got there. In Mein Kampf he writes:
For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence. Compared to the events of this gigantic struggle, everything past receded to shallow nothingness. Precisely in these days, with the tenth anniversary of the mighty event approaching, I think back with proud sadness on those first weeks of our people’s heroic struggle, in which Fate graciously allowed me to take part.
As though it were yesterday, image after image passes before my eyes. I see myself donning the uniform in the circle of my dear comrades, turning out for the first time, drilling, etc., until the day came for us to march off.
A single worry tormented me at that time, me, as so many others: would we not reach the front too late? Time and time again this alone banished all my calm. Thus, in every cause for rejoicing at a new, heroic victory, a slight drop of bitterness was hidden, for every new victory seemed to increase the danger of our coming too late.
Two weeks after Germany’s declaration of war against Russia, Hitler joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment in Munich, where he underwent a seven-week stint of basic training. Before being moved on to Augsburg for more intensive training, he visited his landlady’s family asking them to pass on word to his sister Angela should he fall in battle. In the event that she did not wish to inherit his few possessions, the Popp family would be welcome to them. He hugged the two children, and Frau Popp wept as he left, Liljegren reports. The regiment marched west for some eleven hours in pouring rain, Hitler writing in a letter to Frau Popp that he had spent the night in a stable, soaked to the skin and unable to sleep. The following day’s march took thirteen hours, after which they bivouacked in the open, so cold that another sleepless night awaited. Reaching their destination the next day, they were “deathly tired, ready to drop,” Toland writes. There, in the camp at Lechfeld, they trained for two weeks, until October 20, when in the evening they boarded the trains that would take them to the front in Flanders. “I’m terribly happy,” Hitler wrote to Frau Popp that same day. “After arrival at our destination I will write immediately and give you my address. I hope we get to England.”
Mein Kampf tells us nothing of this, no names are mentioned, no faces appear to us, no detail is described. All we have is Hitler and the war he has entered.
At last the day came when we left Munich to begin the fulfillment of our duty. For the first time I saw the Rhine as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend it, the German stream of streams, from the greed of the old enemy. When through the tender veil of the early-morning mist the Niederwald Monument gleamed down upon us in the gentle first rays of the sun, the old “Watch on the Rhine” roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky, and I felt as though my heart would burst.
And then came a da
mp, cold night in Flanders, through which we marched in silence, and when the day began to emerge from the mists, suddenly an iron greeting came whizzing at us over our heads, and with a sharp report sent the little pellets flying between our ranks, ripping up the wet ground; but even before the little cloud had passed, from two hundred throats the first hurrah rose to meet the first messenger of death. Then a crackling and a roaring, a singing and a howling began, and with feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward, faster and faster, until suddenly past turnip fields and hedges the fight began, the fight of man against man. And from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears, coming closer and closer, leaping from company to company, and just as Death plunged a busy hand into our ranks, the song reached us too and we passed it along: “Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles, über Alles in der Welt!”
Four days later we came back. Even our step had changed. Seventeen-year-old boys now looked like men.
The volunteers of the List Regiment may not have learned to fight properly, but they knew how to die like old soldiers.
This was the beginning.
The List Regiment, to which Hitler belonged, numbered 3,600 men on arrival at Lille on October 23. After the first four days of action at Ypres only 611 were left. Five out of six had perished. The risk of being killed during the push forward was considerably greater than the chance of surviving. The mental effect of such losses on those who survive, with comrade after comrade falling in their midst and every minute potentially one’s last, is something known only by those who have been to war. The Battle of Ypres was one of the most comprehensive in the war’s initial phases; the British in their efforts to break through the German lines there in October and November lost 58,000 men. Writing to an acquaintance by the name of Ernst Hepp in Munich, Hitler describes the first engagements:
Now the first shrapnel hisses over and us and explodes at the edge of the forest, splintering trees as if they were straws. We watch with curiosity. We have no idea as yet of the danger. None of us is afraid. Everyone is waiting impatiently for the command, “Forward!” … We crawl on our stomachs to the edge of the forest. Above us are howls and hisses, splintered branches and trees surround us. Then again shells explode at the edge of the forest and hurl clouds of stones, earth, and sand into the air, tear the heaviest trees out by their roots, and choke everything in a yellow-green, terribly stinking steam. We cannot lie here forever, and if we have to fall in battle, it’s better to be killed outside … Four times we advance and have to go back; from my whole batch only one remains beside me, finally he also falls. A shot tears off my right coat sleeve, but like a miracle I remain safe and alive. At 2 o’clock we finally go forward for the fifth time, and this time we occupy the edge of the forest and the farms.
The regimental commander is killed and his deputy seriously wounded. The new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Engelhardt, taking Hitler and another man with him, ventures forward to observe the enemy lines. Detected, they are sprayed with machine-gun fire, Hitler and the other man pulling Engelhardt to safety in a ditch. A thankful Engelhardt tells them he intends recommending the two men for the Iron Cross, but the very next day he is badly wounded when the regimental headquarters tent takes a direct hit from a British grenade, killing three and wounding three of its occupants. Only moments earlier, Hitler, together with three other enlisted men, had been told to vacate the tent to make way for four company commanders, as a result of which perhaps he was saved. “It was the most terrible moment of my life,” Hitler would write to Hepp. “We all worshipped Lieutenant Colonel Engelhardt.”
The new adjutant, Lieutenant Wiedeman, recommends Hitler for the Iron Cross, First Class. The recommendation is turned down, but Hitler is instead decorated with the second-class award, prompting him again to write to Herr Popp, this time with news of the happiest day of his life. “Unfortunately, my comrades who also earned it are mostly all dead.” He asks Popp to save newspaper reports of the battle. He is promoted to the rank of corporal and begins his duties as an orderly, a position he holds throughout the four years of the war. His job is to take dispatches from regimental headquarters to the soldiers in the front line. It is a perilous assignment, not only because it involves crossing open land, either by bicycle or on foot, and, unlike the men in the trenches, unprotected by any cover, but also because he is an important target for the enemy. The dangers faced by dispatch runners pale in comparison with those of assault troops, who rush forward across noman’s-land to break into enemy positions, but are considerable nonetheless; Kershaw reports that three of the eight runners attached to the regimental staff were killed and another wounded in a confrontation with French troops on November 15. Where possible, dispatches are sent via two runners, increasing the chances of their reaching the lines. But death is not just in the trenches or between the lines; shells burst everywhere and at any time, in the camps to which the men withdraw for rest, in villages kilometers behind the front and in the various makeshift headquarters that are the domain of the highest-ranking officers.
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Of all the depictions of the war in the trenches, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel is the most closely detailed and therefore also the most appalling, alongside the Englishman Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, which provides a view from the other side. Jünger describes everything at eye level, from the moment he arrives at the front until he leaves it again four years later, and the sense of chaos is never absent from his account; this is a world devoid of any privileged vantage point, a disordered, tumultuous world in which lives are reaped by the minute.
Joining the front in Flanders in December 1914, Jünger is oblivious to what lies ahead, and the eyes by which he sees become ours. His company base is a staging point, Orainville, a village of some fifty houses grouped around a château in parkland. Wide-eyed, he observes the hectic comings and goings of ragged soldiers with weather-beaten faces, the glowing field kitchen with its smell of pea soup, men jingling their mess tins as they wait to eat. He spends the first night in a barn, eating breakfast the next day in a school building, when suddenly they hear a series of dull concussions. The more experienced soldiers rush out, those just arrived follow them without knowing why. There is a curious fluttering and whooshing sound above their heads, those around him cower or fling themselves to the ground. “The whole thing struck me as faintly ridiculous,” he writes, “in the way of seeing people doing things one doesn’t properly understand.” Immediately afterward he sees dark figures emerge onto the empty village street, carrying black bundles on canvas stretchers. “I stared, with a queasy feeling of unreality, at a blood-spattered form with a strangely contorted leg hanging loosely down, wailing ‘Help! Help!’ as if sudden death still had him by the throat.”
This takes place far from the enemy lines, at a place for recreation and rest, and it is Jünger’s first experience of the war.
It was all so strange, so impersonal. We had barely begun to think about the enemy, that mysterious, treacherous being somewhere. This event, so far beyond anything we had experienced, made such a powerful impression on us that it was difficult to understand what had happened. It was like a ghostly manifestation in broad daylight.
A shell had burst high up over the château entrance, and had hurled a cloud of stone and debris into the gateway, just as the occupants, alerted by the first shots, were rushing out. There were thirteen fatalities, including Gebhard, the music master, whom I remembered well from the promenade concerts in Hanover … The road was reddened with pools of gore; riddled helmets and sword belts lay around. The heavy iron château gate was shredded and pierced by the impact of the explosive, the curbstone was spattered with blood. My eyes were drawn to the place as if by a magnet; and a profound change went through me.
They are moved to the trenches, where life between the fighting is cold, wet, muddy, sleepless, marked by routine, harsh and dull. In a stream only a stone’s throw away lie the irretrievable, rotting corpses of soldiers from a French colonial regi
ment, their skin turned to parchment by the water that flows over them. Exhausted and mostly unused to physical work, Jünger and his comrades dig their trenches still deeper, and the merry dueling on flowered meadows has never been more distant. After four months they take part in their first major battle, at Les Éparges. Shells come down with dull thumps in a clump of firs, and when they get to the spot bloody scraps of cloth and flesh hang from the bushes around the crater, “a strange and dreadful sight that put me in mind of the butcher-bird that spikes its prey on thornbushes.”
In the ensuing battle Jünger is wounded for the first time. The artillery fire intensifies, flashing about them, clouding the air with the dust and debris of detonation, splitting the ear with its dull clamor. Jünger describes it all as being as distant and peculiar as events on another planet, and he is unable to distinguish between the Germans’ own gunnery and the shells of the enemy, everything is a tumultuous confusion, the wounded lie slumped around him, shrieking and wailing, and the reader can vividly imagine this inferno, so utterly detached from the familiar world, and then suddenly he describes happy, ardent birdsong, as if the birds were inspired or even encouraged by the bombardment, and one understands that the battle is being fought in an ordinary forest, on the edges of an ordinary village, in the middle of an ordinary day.
This brief glimmer of everyday life, continuing as before, proceeding according to its own laws and habits, makes clear to us that this is a construction, that the forest, presently set ablaze, the twittering birds, the sun in the sky and the grass in the fields are nature, and that the wave of unprecedented destruction that takes place within it is civilization, regardless of the savage and primitive gash it gouges in those who fight, regardless of how blind the rain of metal lashing down.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 70