Men have come together at this place, on each side of a hypothetical line, an invisible chalk mark, in this theatrical distortion of reality in which the familiar is uprooted and life removed to its furthest limit, so relentlessly transgressed, as if they were the gods themselves, since what awaits beyond, on the other side, is death, which is to say nature. The existence of an inside the war, in which lives are emptied out into the void, and an outside the war, in which lives go on as before, together with the mechanization of weaponry, something that further cements the link between war and culture, the large-scale industrialization and modernization of ways of killing, reinforces this impression. Trains crammed with living bodies are sent in, the bodies are destroyed, buried, new trains with new living bodies follow in their wake, their bodies too are destroyed, buried. Some eight million living bodies perish in this celebration of death beneath the persistent sun.
In a way, this is the zenith. For nothing is more precious than life, and here it falls to the ground like hail in a storm. Clearly it is a sacrifice of unprecedented dimensions, but for what purpose? The birds inhabit a world that to them is complete, a repertoire of actions they must carry out every day, throughout their every year, in an interplay of events and instincts with no other significance than keeping them alive, sustaining them in their state of existence. They see the world, and they are familiar with it, though only as effect, not as cause. The sun is warm, the rain is wet, the air consists of various strata through which they fly. They are locked inside their birdness, through which the world appears to them.
That we should similarly be locked inside our humanness has always been a natural thought, our religions issue from it and seek to define what is beyond, that which is concealed from us yet visible in its effects, and they do so in images that simplify for us what we feel to be complex. None of these images is useful here. No god descends from on high to appear before them in the clamor of their war, no only begotten son to whose heaven death is the entrance. The only things here that are not human are the burning trees, the stream running through the forest and fields, the birds sitting on their branches in song, their calls and sorrowless ardor, heard perhaps through a sudden lull in the thunder of cannon.
And then Jünger is hit in the thigh by a sliver of shrapnel, his blood begins to trickle, he drops his haversack and runs to the trench, the wounded from the shelled woods converging on the same place from all sides, the pattern of a star.
The trench is appalling, he flees to a nearby copse, where he is found after some hours and taken to a hospital in Heidelberg. After two weeks of convalescence, he visits home for a short period of leave before being sent to the front again.
* * *
He was twenty years old and had gone to war almost straight from school. What he saw and experienced there, the immense battles in particular, like the most violent forces of nature, was so radically removed from ordinary life as to alter forever his outlook on the quotidian. What Jünger saw in World War I was so powerful that it must have been impossible for him to think of it in terms of a haphazard occurrence, an expression of some peripheral idiosyncrasy of the human being, an accident, arbitrary and exceptional. On the contrary, in the years of war he found himself at the very core of the human, with all its exterior fallen away and only the simplest and most basic elements remaining: life and death. That he should have experienced things in this way is not hard to understand in view of the fact that one minute he was a nineteen-year-old living in a world of friends and family, school and literature, an occasional and fleeting romantic infatuation, a chess-playing father who whistled Mozart in the bath and a mother who read Ibsen and had actually met him, and who took her children on pilgrimages to Goethe’s Weimar; while the next minute he was in a world of military camps, mud, cold, hunger, exhaustion, and abrupt death, beneath a sky filled with fire and metal. The first of these worlds had contained the second, in the shape of the wars he had read and heard about, but German culture was as classical as it was militaristic, so a nineteen-year-old such as he would be familiar with Homer and Caesar, as well as with Napoleon and the German generals of the war with France in 1870, whereas the second world, that of the trenches, did not contain the first. Storm of Steel does not concern itself with the superstructures of war, neither the most primary structures, which is to say the political structures that determined it all, the very reason they were there fighting, nor the militaristic structures that directed them here and there, but only with his own tangible experiences, the things he sees and feels himself. He’s the one who must make the decision to get to his feet and stumble out into the hail of fire; no state, no army, no kaiser, no general can do so on his behalf. And he’s the one who is hit in the chest, whose mouth fills with blood as he stumbles into a crater certain he will die, filled by an intense feeling of happiness amid the inferno of explosions, artillery fire, battle cries, and shrieks of terror. What he sees is in the same way connected to him, in the sense that it is he who has to understand it, give meaning to it, or deprive it of meaning. Death is the background from which life emerges. Had death not existed, we would never have known what life was. War is the only activity contrived by man that consciously approaches the line between them. If the processes that lead to war are a scheme, war itself is not, for death is absolute.
Death is not modern.
By our thoughts we try to release ourselves from that fundamental, inevitable circumstance, an endeavor short-circuited by our own demise. In all the efforts of our mind to extricate ourselves from the fact of death, our yearning toward heaven and a life beyond our own, which finds expression so variously depending on the age and culture in which we live, death is ever present. As indeed is the heart, for like death the heart is always the same. The heart is not modern either. It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable, neither rational nor irrational. The heart beats, and then it does not. That’s it.
This is the insight of war. All existential thought, any quest toward authenticity, stems from here. The occurrence of death opens up a new reality within our preexisting reality. It is our existential circumstance, and yet we seek to conceal the gate that is opened by death. Not so in war. In war the gate is opened and opened again, everywhere. Eventually the living become used to it, death becomes the norm, opening itself anywhere and at any time. Within this zone it is as if the distinction between the living and the dead shrinks, consisting in little but the fact of the living being animate and the dead not, the living by way of their animation being free in respect to the earth, while the dead have so to speak become bound to it and are ground down into it, little by little.
* * *
At the time of writing, it is ninety-seven years since World War I began. Considered from such distance it is a war that appears utterly senseless. World War II does not, being essentially a war of defense against Nazism. But what was World War I about? Politically it was meaningless, there being nothing to make real enemies of Britain and Germany, nothing for which they should fight, on the contrary, they had everything to gain by cooperation. Territorially it was meaningless, since nothing was conquered, and even if one of the countries concerned had broken through and conquered the other, it would have been hard put to find any benefit; what would Britain have done with Germany, or Germany with Britain? As such, it was quite as meaningless in human terms too; those who gave their lives did so for nothing.
This meaninglessness exists in the superstructures, whereas in the nearness of the soldier’s everyday life zones of meaning arise, so vivid as to demolish any question concerning the war’s justification or the legitimacy of its carnage. Jünger sees three things in the war. The first is the archaic, the immutability of man, Homer’s sun, whose logical conclusion is death and whose notion is universal and extrahuman. The second consists of the values on which soldiers depend for survival, such as courage, will, and endurance, what could be called the life force, perhaps a universal property of man, but a mere potential of the single person and thereby i
n itself individual. The third consists of the new machines, the mechanical means that have now increasingly taken over the conduct of war, which are an expression of civilization.
It, I, we/they.
These are the fundamental elements of life, which from their hiding place in the complexity of civilization emerge in the simplicity of war, and which, by virtue of their concerning the most essential, must be acknowledged. If instead they are suppressed, life becomes nonlife, an escape from life’s very foundation, as essential as it is grave. Why would anyone wish to escape from the circumstance of existence, one might wonder, why would anyone choose the nonessential? The reason is that the price is such a heavy one to pay. If we accord the highest value to the life of the individual, if we understand life to be a quantitative concept that must be maintained for as long as possible, then death is our foremost enemy and war becomes absolutely meaningless, absolutely undesirable. If we do not accord the highest value to the life of the individual, but to some element of that life, a property, or to something outside it, an idea, then we consider life as something qualitative, something more than the sum of cells and living days, in other words, we hold that there is something more hallowed than life, and then the equation is simple and one might choose to die for it.
But what could be more hallowed than the life of the individual? The life of the all, or one’s own all, one might surmise, this being the legitimization of the majority of wars. Nonetheless, it is an abstraction, and must surely mean nothing in the instant of rising to one’s feet to charge forward into a hail of bullets.
To commence an assault on enemy trenches as one’s comrades are falling before one’s eyes would seem inconceivable on the basis of some abstract notion of collective benefit. In the first edition of Jünger’s memoir there is little mention of patriotism and none at all of defending any other grand notion. In the second edition the author has added some lines toward the end where he is sitting on a train on his way to Germany after his war has come to an end, and here he has “the sorrowful and proud feeling of being bound to the land more intimately for the blood shed in battle for its greatness,” and moreover, according to his biographer Nevin, is filled with the sense that “Life has deeper meaning only through sacrifice for an idea, and that there are ideals compared to which an individual’s life or even a people’s count for nothing.” This second edition ends with the exclamation, “Germany lives and shall never go under!” All this is gone in the third edition, published in 1934; nationalistic rhetoric had become the property of the Nazis, and Jünger wished not to be associated with them. What remains is that the war as an expression of an essentially internal state: “The true springs of war are deep within us, and all that’s atrocious, occasionally flooding the world, is only a mirror image of the human soul.”
Mein Kampf was written in 1923, in the Great War’s shadow, and is impossible to understand without this being taken into account. There was not a single family in Germany left unaffected, no one who had not lost a son, a brother, an uncle, a neighbor, a colleague, or a friend. Their grief was invisible, yet it touched everyone. Visible were the war invalids, hundreds of thousands of them, faces on the streets with cheekbones shot to pieces, bodies without arms or legs, eyes flaring in terror at any sudden noise, any abrupt movement, profoundly confused men in loud conversation with themselves. Those who had survived brought back with them experiences that could only be shared with others who had been there too, for what they had lived through defied words. What they had witnessed left its mark on them for life, not merely in the form of darkness or the shadowy, suppressed images that came over them in dreams or when least expected in their waking hours, but also with respect to the way they related to their surroundings after they got back. A person who has seen others die by the hundreds over a number of years sees life differently. The dead were not anonymous, they were people one had lived with and lived among, whose lives and suffering one had shared in that tight-knit social sphere, the close bonding that comes of war; perhaps you had shown them photos of your loved ones, they were your comrades, and one by one they fell, abruptly and arbitrarily. To anyone who has been through that experience the attachment of human relationships can never be the same again, for even if you know death is no longer likely to strike like a lightning bolt from the sky, the experience of losing a friend in the space of a split second, and of knowing that it can happen again to any other friend at any moment, and moreover to oneself too, is so fundamental that it cannot be erased, not even by an entire lifetime of peace. In such instances people become withdrawn, there being simply too much to lose. This inner disablement, this emotional paralysis, was as invisible as the grief of the sufferers’ parents, it was never talked about, and yet it was there, the catastrophe all too great, all too brutal not to leave those who had been through it scarred for life. To the generation born between 1880 and 1900, World War I was the single overriding event of their lives, and the question they asked themselves when it was over was why it had occurred at all. Millions of young men had perished, but for what? For this? For entertainment, cabaret, cinema, self-indulgent art? Had they given up their lives for such systematized emptiness? Was this what they had fought for? This is the way Hitler saw it, and he was not alone.
They had been to the very perimeter of life, inhabited the borderland between all and nothing, and the intensity that had saturated them there, the carnage they had witnessed, could never be meaningless or empty, could never be nothing; this they knew above all. From a political perspective the possible consequences were basically twofold: never again could there be such an appalling and meaningless waste of human life, or else a new war would render meaningful the sacrifice of those two million German soldiers. To Hitler, only the second of these possibilities was real. For if everything that had gone before the war had been reduced to nothing by it, then the same would hold for the war to come:
Thousands of years may pass, but never will it be possible to speak of heroism without mentioning the German army and the World War. Then from the veil of the past the iron front of the gray steel helmet will emerge, unwavering and unflinching, an immortal monument. As long as there are Germans alive, they will remember that these men were sons of their nation.
It is this, the mythology of war, the Wagnerian or Homerian tale of heroism from the depths of time, that Hitler knew and cultivated, this was his condensation of meaning, and it was this to which he aspired, not only in relation to the war, but in relation to everything in his time, which from that perspective, in the great, echoing chambers of the past, became hallowed and was accorded unity and cohesion, which is the same as meaning. Certainly, that meaning was absent from the war to anyone who had fought in it, for the war was anything but the expression of unity and cohesion, yet there is no reason to believe that Hitler was being calculating in describing it the way he did, and every reason to believe he did indeed experience the war as profoundly meaningful. He risked his life for what he believed in, and did so as part of a great community that provided him with arbitrary comradeship with no obligations as to close friendship or intimacy in a situation in which all were fighting for the German nation, to which ever since childhood he had dreamed of belonging, and also – at least if we are to believe those passages in Mein Kampf where he writes about the impression left on him by reading his father’s book about the Franco-German War of 1870–1 – of fighting for.
This mythologization of war is no dream of war but an essentialization, and the fact of it offering not a glimpse of its everyday reality is typical of the romantic I, the inner being’s exaltation of the external, something Hölderlin’s poems in particular express rather strikingly, they too being devoid of quotidian triviality, elevating and exalting, saturated with existence, always bordering on the ecstatic, the way life is when charged to the brim with meaning. Romantic infatuation, the state of being in love, can charge up a life in such a way, as the mystical-religious experience can too, and death as well. All three states o
f being have to do with the transcending of the I. The sense of there being something close to divine in Hölderlin’s poetry has to do with the same thing, any distinction between the world and the I all but absent, the poem being almost one with its evocations of deep, green shadows and baking-hot sun, thunder rolling in over the high ground, rivers gushing ice-cold from the mountains, everything being significant and meaningful: the identity of the I and the world is the ultimate meaning. If no such identity exists, the world becomes alien, and before the alien the I stands isolated and detached, as if expelled, alien moreover unto itself and its surroundings. This is what the second creation narrative concerns, the fall that knowledge entails being a fall into the alien. The yearning for nature and the natural is a yearning for identity, unity, the absolute meaning of oneness. The Romantic period’s solitary I with its longing to transcend the self is an expression of the same thing, following directly from the dissolution of the religious view of the world, after which only the human remained. The young Karl Marx’s notion of alienation is existential rather than political; only later would it be linked with the specific and mechanical nature of labor under capitalism. Wagner’s tales of heroism, his great storms of emotion, are to do with the same thing, exaltation and the transcending of the self. The I of Mein Kampf expresses itself in terms of the same model, elevating war and the singular life of the self to something untainted by the quotidian, a hallowedness meaningful in itself, but unlike Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl, Wagner, Beethoven, and almost any other German artist of the Romantic and late-Romantic periods, Hitler’s I is constrained by its feeble mastery of form, an inability to mold the language into any true expression of the I and the emotions by which it is pervaded, all he can do is seek to copy the formal qualities of others, in the simplest of ways, a cliché. “Then from the veil of the past the iron front of the gray steel helmet will emerge, unwavering and unflinching, an immortal monument,” he writes. He is constrained too by his very mind-set, which confines itself to the culture in which he has lived, full of prejudice and approximate insight, half-truths, rumor and generally unreliable assumptions, which, as Hamann demonstrates, surprisingly often is in line with the Viennese newspapers of the day as well as more populist publications, in such a way that what to him appeared grand and meaningful was not depicted as such, in the way of Hölderlin, for instance, but rather as something inauthentic, since the idea of greatness, or the desire for greatness, is the only element of the grand that comes out, this then pointing back to the I and its petty-bourgeois nature, which by its very presence disqualifies any quest for the sublime. Reading Hitler’s endeavors toward exaltation in Mein Kampf is like looking at a poor painting of a steep and splendid mountain.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 71