Conservative Revolutionaries in the “laboratory of modernity”

“Did Weimar Fail?” Peter Fritzsche asked in a provocative 1996 review essay. The question's aim was to complicate conventional accounts of Weimar Germany, which cast the years between 1919 and 1933 as a bright flowering of democratization and social progress against a gloomy backdrop of economic chaos and the republic's tragic demise. Fritzsche urged readers to free themselves from the normative assumptions underpinning such narratives and to recognize the full implications of Detlev Peukert's argument, in The Weimar Republic (1987), that Weimar was an extreme case of a general crisis of dislocation caused everywhere by modernization—a crisis that called forth technocratic solutions and visionary interventions. “If Weimar is conceived in terms of experiments designed to manage (however deleteriously) the modern condition,” Fritzsche reasoned, “then the failure of political democracy is not the same as the destruction of the laboratory. Indeed, the Third Reich can be regarded as one possible Weimar production.” A new paradigm, Fritzsche suggested, was already being born, one alert to Weimar's “eclectic experimentalism” and the role of “desire and imagination” in shaping a highly “malleable postwar social life.”Footnote ⁸

Fritzsche's exhortation has been amply met by two decades of subsequent research. As numerous authors have argued, a new consensus has appeared in Weimar studies, one that stresses innovation, contingency, multiple subjectivities, and the fluid boundary between politics and culture. Whereas earlier histories of Germany's supposed “special path” found Weimar's politics burdened by “backward” mentalities and structures, more recent scholarship, informed by the cultural and linguistic turns, has sought out creative adaptation in the array of discourses, representations, and performances that fired the imagination and drew participants into politics.Footnote ⁹ “Weimar's pluralism,” Jochen Hung suggested, could even succeed the old picture of “glitter and doom,” with “the period's very openness and the question posed by contemporaries of how to deal with it” serving as a new “grand narrative.”Footnote ¹⁰ Work on Weimar's political culture has enriched our view of two issues in particular. The first is the notion of “crisis” itself. “[I]f there is one theme that seems to appear across the entire range of Weimar history,” Peter Gordon and John McCormick observed, “it is the very awareness of anxiety signified by the prevalence of the term crisis.”Footnote ¹¹ Rüdiger Graf and Moritz Föllmer, in particular, have explored Weimar's rhetoric of crisis, exploding Peukert's singular and all-encompassing “crisis of classical modernity” into a cacophony of component crises.Footnote ¹² “[T]he meanings of ‘crisis’ were more diverse than previously acknowledged,” Föllmer observed; at the same time, they all generated “strong expectations of unity” and were often “framed in nationalist terms, as national crises that required ‘German’ solutions.”Footnote ¹³ The remark points to the second issue illuminated by the study of political culture, namely, the myriad ways in which Weimar's denizens mobilized sentiment, symbolism, and myth on behalf of the German nation. If most effectively exploited by the Nazis, the desire for a unified and salvific “national community (Volksgemeinschaft)” was broad and deep in post-WWI Germany, extending to the political left as well.Footnote ¹⁴ “Precisely because the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft was so extraordinarily important and widespread under the Weimar Republic, the expectations of its proselytizers ran far in excess of anything that it was actually capable of delivering.”Footnote ¹⁵

The story of “ineffable nationalism” told below sheds new light on each of these avenues of research: historicizing Weimar's “crisis,” mapping the landscapes of experimentalism and desire, and unraveling the millennial hopes heaped on the Volksgemeinschaft. Though indebted to work on Weimar's political culture, my attention is not on discourse or representation per se, but on their perceived breakdown, which freed the imagination and spurred intellectual innovation. If this crisis was still discursive, it was also existential and emotional—aspects easily neglected by the approach to crisis as rhetorical construct.Footnote ¹⁶ My aim is to write the Conservative Revolution more fully into the “laboratory-of-modernity” paradigm of Weimar. This is important because accounts of the radical nationalism typical of Conservative Revolutionary thought have generally (and sometimes rightly) focused on continuities with the culture and society of prewar imperial Germany. These include the “Nazi pedigree” hunt in intellectual history, as well as efforts to trace how mass politics transformed German conservatism starting in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ To be sure, postwar ideological innovation has played a larger role in works focused on Weimar's Conservative Revolution. These have stressed how former frontline soldiers envisioned a utopian “new nationalism” or an idealized “new man” on the basis of their war experience.Footnote ¹⁸ Innovative aspects of postwar Conservative Revolutionary thought have been highlighted in other ways, too, including an irrationalist romance with technology well captured by the term “reactionary modernism.”Footnote ¹⁹ My account of the pull of the ineffable on the minds of Conservative Revolutionaries expands our knowledge of these right-wing fusions and fantasies. It shows the ingenuity with which pre-1914 influences were combined with wartime experiences, and the pressures of postwar life fueling such contingent combinations. Above all, it contributes to answering what Fritzsche declared the “crucial question in German history,” namely how to “account for the enclosure of the modernist spirit of experimentation by the national collective at the expense of the individual and the particular.”Footnote ²⁰

Ernst Jünger's conversion to ineffable nationalism offers a window into this enclosure. I suggest that the personal nature of Jünger's war writings reveals a process of ideology formation that was shared (though not as candidly disclosed) by many Conservative Revolutionaries. Crucial to this process was the intense feeling of crisis in the postwar years—a feeling which literary evidence is well suited to bring to light. As Rüdiger Graf pointed out, a “crisis” is not an objective force or condition; it is always subjective and “prognostic,” rooted in a “dramatic plot” that views the present as a “moment of decision” leading either to disaster or to salvation. For this reason, the postwar crisis of language examined here was necessarily linked to a critical interpretation of the present. For Conservative Revolutionaries, recalling the world of the trenches was a way to measure contemporary Germany's presumed shortcomings and imagine an integrated future nation that was within reach because it had been prefigured in the recent past.Footnote ²¹ Close attention to Jünger's shifting perspective on the war makes clear not only how the postwar crisis of communication arose but also how it drove ideological and literary experimentation. “[E]xplanations of intellectual transformations by reference to crisis,” Graf remarked, often leave “unclear how exactly the crisis became causally relevant.”Footnote ²² In Jünger, historians have a wealth of evidence for the internal dynamics of the Conservative Revolution's crisis mentality.

Modernity and the crisis of representation

The problem of communicating an entrapped subjectivity was already a common theme on the eve of World War I. Its archetypal formulation was supplied by those Viennese writers and theorists—Fritz Mauthner, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others—for whom the inadequacy of language to express ultimate values or one's innermost being had become a burning existential issue. “As soon as we really have something to say,” Mauthner avowed, “we are forced to be silent.”Footnote ²³ In Hofmannsthal's “Letter of Lord Chandos” (1902), the fictional correspondent confessed to having “lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently,” a source of “anguish” and “loneliness” given the “iridescent colouring” of his every thought and sensation.Footnote ²⁴ The limits of language were likewise explored in Wittgenstein's 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which attempted to define the boundary between sense and nonsense, between what could be meaningfully expressed and what could not. Sensical propositions were shown to be restricted to matters of fact and logic à la the natural sciences, to statements that “pictured” the world and modeled its logical relations. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” Wittgenstein concluded, consigning to the realm of the properly unsayable all of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics—the domains, that is, most urgently in need of discussion for those concerned with the significance and value of human life.Footnote ²⁵

For many, such incommunicability seemed a peculiarly modern affliction. According to one interpretation, the problem of language reflected in Hofmannsthal's “Letter of Lord Chandos” stems from the way modern man lives in two irreconcilable mental worlds. The first is a habitual world of commonsense ideas and everyday practices, especially as encoded in language; the second is the world presented by modern science, with its mathematical theorization and reduction of phenomena to impersonal laws. For those who feel this schizophrenia, forms of thought and expression that “made sense” in traditional society, and which cannot simply be thrown off, are now constantly exposed as fictions. Having lost “the simplifying eye of habit,” Hofmannsthal wrote, “everything disintegrated into parts … Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back—whirlpools which gave me vertigo and … led into the void.”Footnote ²⁶ As one commentator put it, Hofmannsthal believed that viewing the lifeworld through science's critical lens “deprives language of its object” and consequently casts the individual into mute confusion.Footnote ²⁷

Social conditions may have been another source of anxiety. As Ernest Gellner observed, the societies created by modern nation-states—mobile and unsettled, with centralized educational and media systems—require standardized languages that allow for communication among distant strangers.Footnote ²⁸ “For the first time in human history,” Gellner noted of modernity, “explicit and reasonably precise communication becomes generally, pervasively used and important. In the closed local communities of the agrarian or tribal worlds, when it came to communication, context, tone, gesture, personality, and situation were everything. Communication, such as it was, took place without the benefit of precise formulation.”Footnote ²⁹ Ironically, the decline of implicit forms of expression and the increasing importance of explicit, context-liberated language could make the problem of communication not less intensely felt, but more. Articulating complex subjects in print and for an audience of strangers requires linguistic resources far beyond the grunts and nods that convey tacit meaning among intimates. It is no coincidence that Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos suffers lost communicability when trying to discuss “loftier or more general subject[s],” developing an “inexplicable distaste” for “abstract words” like “spirit” and “soul.” In response, he turns to a “wordless” rapture focused on concrete experiences—a flight into ineffability that prefigures the Conservative Revolution's own suspicion of language.Footnote ³⁰

With the end of the Great War in November 1918, such anxiety over language spread to broader segments of German culture. Central to this transformation was the felt inability to say clearly what the conflict had been about. “Few issues were as highly contested in Germany between 1918 and 1933,” Wolfgang Natter remarked, “as the question of how to render ‘meaning’ unto a war that had left nearly two million dead and nearly five million wounded and furthermore had left Germany the vanquished opponent charged … with being the sole culprit for the war's outbreak and devastation.”Footnote ³¹ For some, the gulf between the war's realities and its postwar results simply could not be bridged. The war seemed to be what Erich Maria Remarque famously condemned it as: “a completely meaningless surface of things linked to an abyss of suffering.”Footnote ³² According to this turn of mind, the Great War's air of having followed a deranged logic beyond human control made it “the threshold in the crisis of representation of modern warfare.”Footnote ³³ Referring to the postwar scene, Natter noted the “absolute divide … insisted upon by many soldier-poets and their interpreters who deny the possibility of communicating battle experience to those who have not been there.”Footnote ³⁴ As Carl Zuckmayer put it, the Great War's “chaos” simply could not be made “clear in a representation or generalization.”Footnote ³⁵ The trope of incommunicability was voiced outside Germany, too. “Those who have attempted to convey any real war experience,” Richard Aldington wrote in 1926, “must have felt the torturing sense of something incommunicable.”Footnote ³⁶

The fact that such claims coexisted with voluminous writing about the war, and indeed were woven into personal accounts of the front, makes plain that they served as a paradoxical source of legitimacy for writers who had much to say. “If one could fully understand the initiation to combat by reading about it,” Leonard Smith observed of the demands made by French veterans, “then that experience would no longer be the exclusive realm of combatants themselves, precisely what set them apart forever from their compatriots and gave them a special authority to speak on the war.”Footnote ³⁷ For Germany's veterans—and especially for revolutionary nationalists who had no trouble commemorating the fighting—it was the conflict's supposed ineffability which consecrated them as a priesthood uniquely able to interpret the war.

Walter Benjamin, in probably the most famous account by a nonveteran of how the trench experience defied communication, lamented that the Great War had merely made “apparent” a broader crisis in modern civilization. “Was it not noticeable at the end of the war,” he wrote in 1936, “that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth.”Footnote ³⁸ For Benjamin, the traumas of the war were incompatible with the kind of “experience”—understood as a cumulative process of learning or the integration of discrete events into an intelligible story-like whole—that had hitherto guided human affairs. Whereas the shared horizon of traditional communal life had once allowed proverbs and tales to be presented without explanation in the trust that their wisdom would be clear, the Great War's discontinuous shocks resisted any readily transmissible meaning or moral.Footnote ³⁹ The war's incommunicability, Benjamin seemed to suggest, was an index of the poverty of communicable experience in modern life as a whole.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although Benjamin found little to celebrate, this inability to represent the Great War was also an opportunity to imagine new forms of belonging. The diagnosis of crisis was not necessarily a “pessimistic expectation of doom”; more often it was a call to envision—and actively make—an open-ended future.Footnote ⁴¹ In his influential Community and Society (1887), Ferdinand Tönnies had judged “tacit understanding” one of the hallmarks of organic communal existence, the source of the “deep feelings and prevailing thoughts” from which language itself took shape. The contents of this “tacit understanding,” Tönnies wrote, “are inexpressible, interminable, and intangible.”Footnote ⁴² If the Great War generalized a crisis of representation hitherto confined to writers and theorists like Hofmannsthal, who doubted that words could convey the richness of subjective experience, it also highlighted the brotherhood of men at war as just such an organic community in which linguistic mediation was comparatively unimportant.

The politicized suspicion of language in Weimar Germany

As Benjamin's comments indicate, doubts about language's power to describe the First World War were not restricted to the radical right after 1918. Yet it was among Germany's Conservative Revolutionaries that talk of experiences transcending the expressible fed radical political longings. To those who found little worth preserving in the present, moments of tacit understanding, above all in the trenches, offered touchstones for thinking about the possibility of a revitalized national culture and the creation of an organic national community. This was most clearly the case for those writers and theorists—such as Ernst Jünger—who had known the war's realities at first hand. But prominent nonveterans, too, infused their assaults on mass society and Weimar liberalism with praise for communities joined beyond words, often in ways profoundly connected with their own central ideas.

The greatest interwar theorist of tacitness, after all, was Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time (1927) analyzed forms of prereflective awareness that had been obscured since the Enlightenment by a Cartesian model of detached critical reflection. These included the individual's embeddedness in a historical culture, whose customs and language carry built-in interpretations that shape our experience of the world. The task of the poet, Heidegger wrote in 1935, was to make a people's view of the world visible to itself by articulating this background understanding.Footnote ⁴³ For Heidegger, language is constitutive of human existence, a stock of truisms and commonplace meanings delimiting, for the average person most of the time, what it is possible to interpret or understand. In this sense, Heidegger's notion of Gerede—the everyday talk of the “they”—establishes the possibility of comprehending, beneath the surface of words, what is truly being said.Footnote ⁴⁴ Carl Schmitt, in another version of the same idea, deemed such prediscursive agreement the hallmark of a truly populist political order. Given this singular will, Schmitt argued in a gloss on Rousseau's social contract, “the laws come into existence sans discussion … homogeneity elevated into an identity understands itself completely from itself.”Footnote ⁴⁵

While neither Schmitt nor Heidegger were veterans of the front lines, the same was not true of Hans Freyer, one of the Conservative Revolution's foremost academic theorists, who volunteered in 1914 and served much of the next four years on the Western Front.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Freyer, as for Schmitt and Heidegger, the stress on unspoken agreement was a crucial ingredient in a larger communitarian vision. Sounding common radical conservative themes, Freyer argued that human beings are in need of boundedness and integration by the outward creations—institutions, traditions, values, myths—of a unified culture. Without enclosure in such collective particularity, the individual was lost, becoming the pitifully disoriented and deracinated creature familiar to students of modern social theory. Yet what would save modern man was hard to articulate. The historical cultures Freyer extolled were the expression of a “primordial attitude toward the world” that was “thoroughly pre-rational, unformulated, and non-conscious.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In The State (1925), he took as a model of renewal this shared “horizon” of primeval communal life, praising that state “whose constitution consists not at all of formal laws, but of unspoken and tacitly followed customs, of the organic interplay of real forces, of simple leadership and willing trust.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Even when not explicitly invoked, tacitness and ineffability added an aura of profundity to major Conservative Revolutionary themes. A good example is what Walter Benjamin called fascism's “introduction of aesthetics into political life,” a notion he first developed in a review of a collection of war essays edited by Ernst Jünger.Footnote ⁴⁹ In his foreword, Jünger wrote that the essays were joined by the search for a German nationalism beyond

Here Jünger elevates symbols gesturing at less articulable realities above the elucidation of explicit content: if the idea is “symbol” too, then theory is no better than theater. As Benjamin pointed out, fascism offered the masses “a chance to express themselves” in precisely this way—not in the liberal sense of contributing to rational discourse, but theatrically through participation in the signs and rituals of cultic worship. For one Jünger acolyte, Armin Mohler, this aestheticist stress on expression through style—aesthetic in the original Greek sense of something consumed via direct perception, without the rationalist detour through theoretical abstraction—defined fascism tout court.Footnote ⁵¹ Much the same could be said about the radical right's stress on feeling. For Conservative Revolutionaries, the nation was less a topic of discussion than an object of mute sentimental attachment. As Edgar Jung put it, “Only in feeling, in the silently functioning spiritual rootedness in a totality, lies the certainty for genuine and healthy communal life.”Footnote ⁵²

Perhaps nowhere is the suspicion of language clearer than in the Conservative Revolution's attraction to action and decisiveness. Jung himself made the association explicit, drawing a contrast between World War I veterans, whom he deemed “realistic, taciturn, and ready to act,” and the “boastfulness, embellishment, and weakness of will” that he believed marked contemporary political life.Footnote ⁵³ Time and again, Weimar's right-wing radicals reviled political speech as frivolous, empty, feeble, or dishonest; resolute action, by contrast, regardless of the normative foundations guiding it, promised to clear a path through such prattle. For Carl Schmitt, a leading prophet of this “decisionism,” endless talk was the fatal flaw preventing parliamentary democracy from acting firmly in a time of emergency. “The essence of liberalism,” Schmitt argued, “is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet the age itself also seemed impatient with reasoned dialogue. “A calm and factual debate,” Schmitt wrote in 1926, “might appear impractical, naïve, and anachronistic to most people today … Perhaps the age of discussion is coming to an end.”Footnote ⁵⁵

For Schmitt, avoiding the “definitive dispute” meant postponing the choice between friends and foes that defined the nation as an existential community—one determined not by talk but by an essential identity in need of defense. In a 1930 essay “On Nationalism and the Jewish Question,” Ernst Jünger connected the dots between loss of faith in public discourse and the nation's heroic solidarity. Declaring liberal constitutionalism “too hypocritical, too long-winded, and above all too bothersome for modern taste,” Jünger called for a German nationalism grounded in a non-discursive “morphological thinking, that is as opposed to liberalism as fire to water.” This “new German bearing” would intuit German cultural affinities; its telos would be a “German empire resting on its particularistic roots”; and it would confront the Jew as “an adversary,” who could only “cease to be dangerous to the German” when recognized in his unassimilable separateness. As the German “will to form” grows, Jünger concluded ominously, so will “the delusion of the Jew that he is a German in Germany become less tenable, until he is faced with his final alternative: either to be a Jew in Germany, or to not be.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Other Conservative Revolutionaries linked the decay of public language to political crisis in other ways, though with equally decisionistic results. According to Hans Zehrer, editor of the journal The Deed, the “chief obstacle” facing self-styled political visionaries such as himself was the shifting meaning of concepts. “[W]hen we reach for words in order to convey the content of this time,” Zehrer lamented, “we suddenly despair at the linguistic material. These words and concepts are old and worn out, they all contain a sense which no longer survives.” Zehrer proclaimed that even formerly clear terms like “conservative” or “socialist” were now muddled. For both speaker and audience, trust in words was “reduced to a minimum.” While traditional political parties continued to use an outdated lingo that no longer corresponded to reality, new political movements reached for vague, emotion-laden language in order to mobilize supporters. Both sides, Zehrer argued, succumbed to the “crisis of language,” albeit in different ways; the only options were endlessly defining one's terms or speaking in a manner that is “sweeping, long-winded, and obscure.” “Out of the helplessness of linguistic material,” he concluded, “there grows a vitalization which ultimately can only make its impact physically.” The turn to action was simply a desperate response to this “chaos of language.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Zehrer's analysis is important because it helps us see that the embrace of “decisiveness” and “the deed” was driven at least as much by negative emotions—fear of incommunicability, impatience with existing political idioms, frustration over the failure to reach programmatic clarity—as it was by any positive intoxication with action or violence. One should not forget that Zehrer wanted to define what form the German revolution would take. The raison d’être of radical-right publications like The Deed, after all, was giving content to calls for a “new nationalism” that was supposedly born during World War I, and which would break fundamentally with prewar nationalism and conservatism. As Roger Woods observed, Zehrer had “long envied [communism] for having its ideas clarified.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The flight from discursive language out of failure to formulate a political program is clearly displayed by the journal Deutsches Volkstum. Highly regarded in Conservative Revolutionary circles, it took as its aim the theorization of a forward-looking nationalist movement based on the “German national character” (the journal's title). To be sure, its coeditors, Wilhelm Stapel and Albrecht Erich Günther, were hardly at a loss for airy definitions of the Volk. Already in 1917, Stapel had defined it as “a living entity of people who share a soul,” arising out of the deep past and expressing “a shared culture and shared ideals.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Like other celebrants of organic community, however, Stapel held the nation to be grounded in self-evident customs and a “natural” feeling of belonging, which resisted conceptual description. The dilemma confronting conservatives was how to speak about the nation imagined in such terms, while at the same time preserving its mystique.

Over the course of the 1920s, the journal repeatedly failed to square this circle: to work out a coherent political program, it was feared, risked turning a nationalist movement supposedly above all parties and divisions into just another political party. Rather than sully the nation, Deutsches Volkstum elevated ineffability to a virtue. Its editors posited the nation as a sacred totality that could be rhetorically conjured and emotionally or spiritually felt, but which could not be denotatively described, theoretically formulated, or discursively constituted. This proved an attractive solution to the problem of incommunicability for politically engaged writers who had no desire to retreat into silence. In a 1927 essay, Günther likened a nationalist awakening to religious conversion and proclaimed that the Great War had been such a moment, when the nation was suddenly experienced as a “living reality.” “Only as an activist, not as a philosophical onlooker,” he declared, “can the nationalist become fully aware of his feeling for life.” His own words, Günther acknowledged, were a weak substitute: “Just as these lines do little to describe conceptually nationalism's feeling for life, so little can the nationalist state be set out in a draft constitution.”Footnote ⁶⁰ That this hostility to conceptual language presented problems for a nationalist journal was not lost on Günther. Writing in 1929, he argued that the right-wing press was at a disadvantage, since conservatism is “never the result of intellectual discussion, but rather the effect of a life-grounding attitude toward the world,” and is ultimately “unsayable.” It was conservatism's enemies—socialism and liberalism—which sought an “expansion of what is sayable,” subjecting everything to argument, discussion, and public exposure.Footnote ⁶¹

Can the stormtrooper speak?

The lure of the ineffable, as I have sketched it here, involved three independent claims. The first was that explicit language, especially as voiced publicly and for public purposes, had been exposed as deceptive or inadequate. The second was that genuine community is grounded in difficult-to-articulate and often unspoken feelings and values. The third was that the experience of trench warfare on the Western Front was impossible to fully convey and thus created a special intimacy and tacit understanding among those who were there. None of these three claims was destined to be joined to any other; certainly they were not always openly combined on the printed page. What I want to suggest, nevertheless, is that there was a tendency for these three claims to cohere in the minds of many Conservative Revolutionaries. In other words, what one veteran dubbed the “little world of the trenches” was imagined as the recovery, under modern conditions, of the prelinguistic harmony that was supposedly a hallmark of traditional organic communities—a recovery made all the more appealing by a felt crisis of language and social cohesion in the present.Footnote ⁶² The allure of the front community as a model for a revitalized German nation should be understood in this light. This linkage of ideas was made with varying degrees of explicitness across what was always a motley crew of far-right writers and thinkers. In the figure of Ernst Jünger, one finds an archetypal case of this conjunction and the crisis mentality fueling it.

Is Jünger a bona fide modernist, a diagnostician of twentieth-century experience who pushed the boundaries of representation and subjectivity? Or is he a writer of B-literature, a propagandist and “ice-cold sensualist of barbarism,” as Thomas Mann claimed?Footnote ⁶³ Intrepretations of Jünger's works long hinged on how one judged their political and aesthetic dimensions. While detractors damned his writings as literary fascism, apologists hailed Jünger as a sophisticated author by treating his political activities as secondary, the youthful sins of a great writer.Footnote ⁶⁴ The battle lines have softened in recent decades, however, as scholars have evinced a greater willingness to coolly evaluate the interplay of ideology and aesthetics in Jünger's oeuvre, exploring the complexities and contradictions of his writings in their historical context. “Rather than reduce literature to [political] journalism, or vice versa,” Matthias Schöning argued, capturing the general mood, “it is more worthwhile to investigate their reciprocal interdependence as characteristic of Jünger's (and not just his) texts of the 1920s and early 1930s.”Footnote ⁶⁵ My approach here is similarly focused on the formation of ideology within a matrix of motives that cannot be disentangled from Jünger's literary ambitions. In Jünger's ever-evolving corpus, we can investigate writing about the war as an ongoing exercise in which “development, change … [and the] tension and contradiction between ideas” are visible.Footnote ⁶⁶ Within this dynamic process, we can see ideological and literary experimentation at work. What one commentator called Jünger's “violent rejection of literature and language”Footnote ⁶⁷—that is, his 1923 turn to political activism in the wake of increasingly frustrated efforts to write about the war—I read as Jünger's abrupt, crisis-driven conversion to ineffable nationalism. As with others in Weimar's Conservative Revolution, this conversion was less the abandonment of language per se than an attempt to find literary means adequate to a vitalist vision of the German nation.

The charge that Jünger is the quintessential fascist aesthete was first brought by Walter Benjamin, who anticipated many subsequent critics in condemning Jünger's “uninhibited translation of the principles of l'art pour l'art to war itself.” And not without reason: what Benjamin decried as an obtuse “cult of war” was all too plain in Jünger's 1922 essay Battle as Inner Experience, which affirmed combat as an “intoxicating orgy” where “instincts, too long damned up by society and its laws, become once more dominant and holy.”Footnote ⁶⁸ To understand Jünger's evolution, however, we need to understand that he arrived at the Western Front largely untouched by the period's jingoism. How little nationalism meant to Jünger even at war's end can be seen from his original diaries. “I believed myself above the national standpoint before the war,” he wrote in September 1918, “and I don't stand beneath it today.”Footnote ⁶⁹ We should likewise discard any notion that Jünger was blind to the Great War's brutality. An entry from December 1915 is representative of the “dark thoughts” to which he was prone: “What's this never-ending murder for? … War has awoken in me a longing for the blessings of peace.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Jünger's diaries provided the source for the postwar essays and memoirs that made him a darling of the revolutionary right. Like many modernist writers, Jünger was drawn to autobiographical experience as an object of investigation. In a 1966 interview, he described this as a lifelong “drive … to hold onto situations.”Footnote ⁷¹ This graphomaniac need, which marked Jünger's literary production throughout his eight-decade-long career as a writer, was already in place during World War I. “I have tried,” Jünger noted in September 1918, “to bring my impressions immediately to paper … It is curious how quickly impressions blur, how easily they take on a different hue.” “The aim of my book,” he wrote, “is to portray matter-of-factly for the reader what I underwent in my regiment and what I thought in the moment. I want to not just moan endlessly about blood, mud, hunger, thirst, danger, and exhaustion, but also not forget the merry hours in the bunker, the periods of rest behind the lines, and the nights spent clinking glasses.”Footnote ⁷² It is important to note the documentary impulse in these lines, the urge to press language into honest service in working through the experience of the trenches. What's more, they betray an ambivalence about the war and a willingness to arrive at nuanced evaluations that is not always evident in Jünger's postwar accounts, which often celebrate the war's violence as a source of spiritual or political rebirth.

We should also recognize that Jünger's diaries are not an unmediated expression of his thoughts and feelings. Rather than revealing his “real” war experience, what the journals show is how Jünger interpreted the war at a time before it was lost.Footnote ⁷³ Two observations are necessary about Jünger's early view of the war. The first is that he did not portray the front line as a general space of intimate belonging. The second is that, despite his aim to objectively describe the war, he was not always able to master the war's events and bring them to language. Briefly dwelling on these points in his original diaries will provide a baseline for tracing how, and under what pressures, Jünger gravitated to ineffable nationalism in the early postwar years.

Only in commonplaces do Jünger's diaries reflect a sentimental view of the trench community. In a July 1916 entry, for instance, Jünger remarked that the front's “rough life among men” had its share of “cozy moments.”Footnote ⁷⁴ And returning from leave in April 1917, he expressed happiness to be back among his company's “old stalwarts.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Much more emphatic was his preference for the few soldiers (mostly fellow officers) he thought of as kindred spirits. Jünger's will to prevail over the war's chaos grew out of this elitist self-conception. The longing for mastery was clear in his description of the “utter confusion” of a patrol into no-man's-land. “It is … stirring,” he wrote, “how the men cling to an officer in such circumstances … ‘Lieutenant, Sir, where should we go?’ ‘Lieutenant, come help.’ ‘Lieutenant, I'm wounded.’ ‘Where is Lt. Jünger?’ To be a leader with a clear head in such moments is to approximate God. Few are good enough.”Footnote ⁷⁶ But despair sometimes got the upper hand. Just days before the launch of the 1918 Spring Offensive, Jünger wrote, “This time I go into battle with a feeling of utter indifference.” Then, in lines crossed out but still legible, he continued: “But that's no concern to anyone else. So no one speaks of it here. Amico pectus, hosti frontem. O si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses rubbish rubbish crap nonsense finished Beati possidentes Aut ommnia [sic] aut nihil. Capito? Si Signore.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Jünger's mix of Italian, schoolboy Latin phrases, and broken German conveys not just isolation and hopelessness in the face of death, but a total failure of comprehension. His language is so far from representational mastery that it collapses into macaronic babble. In the same low spirit a few days later, he recorded his opposition to another “senseless” attack and confessed to a “rotted-out” feeling that was “difficult to describe in words.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Ambivalence about the trench community and anxieties about his ability to grasp the war continued in Jünger's earliest postwar writings. These were years of personal crisis, as he struggled to work through his disorientation by writing about the war. According to Helmuth Kiesel, Germany's defeat cast Jünger into a “crisis of meaning”: if what replaced the old Kaiserreich was unbearable, then what had all the sacrifice been for?Footnote ⁷⁹ As Jünger himself put it in 1926, “the meaning of our experience [in the war] … must be totally different from the one we believed in at the time … We must believe in a higher meaning … Otherwise the ground on which we stand is pulled from beneath our feet and we tumble in a meaningless, chaotic, random world.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The tensions and experimentation in Jünger's early war writings shed light on the source of this crisis. At its heart was a threatened loss of communicability and imprisonment in a kaleidoscope of private impressions.

This was clear in Jünger's 1922 Battle as Inner Experience, which confessed the impossibility of fully conveying the trench experience. The work tried to make sense of the war by taking battle as the revelation of a timeless natural order. Jünger's introduction, however, was full of misgivings, admitting that “what was felt to the abyss in that frenzied dance can, like every other psychic experience, only be outlined, not described.”Footnote ⁸¹ The likening of war to a “frenzied dance” is a good example of Jünger's reliance on metaphor in his struggle to express the inexpressible. Investigations of Jünger's war writings, including his most famous memoir, Storm of Steel, which he reworked in successive versions from 1920 to 1978, have uncovered both the range of his comparisons—war as eruption, ecstasy, spectacle, sport, hunt, cauldron, etc.—and their increase over time, as Jünger sought the literary tools to convey the war. Metaphors are important because they represent “attempts to master perceptions or experiences that are extraordinary or strange, shocking or staggering, uncanny or unfathomable,” by assimilating them to familiar contexts.Footnote ⁸² Jünger's bewilderment was also evident in his correspondence. In March 1923, days before his twenty-eighth birthday, Jünger brooded that he was approaching an age at which “lack of clarity needs to be overcome.” “Every insight,” he declared, “is immediately paralyzed and relativized by an opposing one.”Footnote ⁸³ As John King argued, Jünger's early postwar writings should be understood as “often contradictory and unstable” efforts to locate an epistemological position able to comprehend a world in which the Great War had taken place.Footnote ⁸⁴

The struggle to communicate the war is at the center of Jünger's 1923 novella Sturm. Amazingly, Jünger claimed later to have forgotten the work (it was rediscovered in 1960), explaining, “I had so many personal problems [at the time] that one can understand why I stopped thinking about the novel.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Jünger took pains at the outset to demythologize the community supposedly created by the war.

Language, too, divided the men. Conversation between simple soldiers and their educated superiors, Jünger observed, is like “passing word-coins back and forth, behind which each party sees quite different values … Today, in the egghead military theorist and the mobilized factory worker, two foreign worlds confront one another.” At stake was the loss of a world in which all are “united [by] views sprung from the same soil.” The problem is amplified when, as in World War I, whole societies are mobilized against one another. Then the “tensions and contradictions” are greater, “the staff officer [stands] disconnectedly above the masses as a cultivated brain” and the masses themselves cannot be “filled equally with the full significance of the goal.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The loss of communicability, Jünger suggests, is a measure of the fragmentation of mass society.

Sturm dramatized this problem of community and communication on multiple levels. Its protagonist, an Ensign Sturm, styles himself a writer but lives too close to the war's violence to “contemplate it as an artist.” Instead of writing about the war, he writes character sketches, which he reads to two fellow platoon leaders. The avant-garde discussions of these three friends make up the bulk of the novella, their talks an escape from feelings of “dread” and “absurdity.” The last sketch describes an alienated veteran named Falk, a man who considers himself a writer but is “unable to summon the words.” Falk's longing for connection is relieved by an encounter with a young lady. Prodded to discuss the war, he is nonetheless unable to articulate the experience in terms she can comprehend. If Sturm contains a practical lesson, it is perhaps that one must try to communicate regardless of the outcome, and that a friendly ear is the best one can hope for. Yet Sturm's remark that “at bottom everyone experiences their own private war” captures the novella's underlying mood of loneliness and entrapment in “inner experience.”Footnote ⁸⁸ As one commentator put it, “Sturm is in Jünger's conception not a novel about the war, but rather about the impossibility of writing a novel about the war.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Though the exact timing is impossible to reconstruct, Jünger's disorientation lasted until at least August 1923, when he resigned from the Reichswehr. His first foray into political journalism followed a month later. Jünger's new tone indicated that he had found some resolution to his inner turmoil. In an exceptionally fuzzy piece, he excoriated the democratic revolution of November 1918 for its lack of a determining “idea” and prophesied that Germany's “true revolution” was yet to come. What was needed, Jünger proclaimed, was a “dictatorship” that would “replace words with deeds, ink with blood, phrases with sacrifice, the pen with the sword.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The hostility to language in these lines is striking. In a development mirroring the path taken by the editors at Deutsches Volkstum, Jünger's new political turn did not so much solve the problem of communicating subjectivity and meaning as opt to avoid it altogether, appealing instead to domains supposedly “deeper” or “higher” than conceptual language. Like Günther's praise of the nationalist's “feeling for life,” Jünger's rhetoric of action and gush of mood-setting signifiers testified to the paradox of a writer who despaired of language while being unable to lay down the pen.

Starting in 1924, Jünger began working out a revolutionary nationalist position in a flurry of essays and memoirs for right-wing publications such as Die Standarte and Arminius.Footnote ⁹¹ His conversion to ineffable nationalism was clear. The advent of war in 1914, Jünger now wrote, brought the return of a “connection that had gone lost,” a “feeling of community in a grand destiny.”Footnote ⁹² This embrace of collective identity needs to be understood in light of the crisis of language that we have examined thus far. Unable to adequately communicate his war experience, Jünger turned to what Thomas Weitin called “prediscursive harmony,” a common consciousness so deeply felt that its expression would be superfluous.Footnote ⁹³ “What really binds a people,” Jünger proclaimed in another memoir, Copse 125 (1925), “will never be anything of a material nature. Only in feeling can I imagine a lasting cement between men.” “There are things of which a man seldom speaks,” he wrote, “things like love and belief, and to these the fatherland must once again belong.”Footnote ⁹⁴ That Jünger would resolve his personal crisis by invoking such prediscursive harmony was not a foregone conclusion. With so many competing impulses in his early writings—Sturm, after all, suggested a disillusioned view of the trench community and resigned acceptance of the limits of communication—Jünger's literary ambitions might have carried him in quite other directions.Footnote ⁹⁵ Understanding the motives behind his ultranationalist politics requires us to see the literary and ideological experimentation of his works as reciprocally illuminating, and to relate both to his postwar befuddlement.Footnote ⁹⁶ The struggle to represent the war traceable in Jünger's early writings was inextricable from his own alienation, his fear of social breakdown, and his desire to find something redemptive in the war experience.

Unable to count on language to deliver him from the “private war,” Jünger opted instead for a silent accord based in “feeling.” In a 1926 salvo, he celebrated this prelinguistic communication as thinking with “the blood.”

Jünger's paradigm for such tacit understanding was that harmony of men in battle that was so marginal to his previous writings—and which he had dismissed in Sturm only a few years earlier! The war, he now wrote, had taught the front soldier “to profess with the blood.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In the front lines, Jünger declared in Fire and Blood (1925), “we know about each other, and a man is recognized without needing to make a big speech … Here, where a word calls to memory a long chain of experiences survived together, lifting your glass is enough to know how it stands with the other fellow.”Footnote ⁹⁹

In the tacit sphere of emotion, everything contradictory and difficult to express in Jünger's crisis-ridden postwar consciousness could be reconciled. Like other soldier–poets and anguished theorists on Weimar's radical right, Jünger imagined the fragmented German nation could be similarly reunited by throwing aside intellectualism and public language, and returning to the harmony of shared feeling. But as Jünger also recognized, the dilemma for ineffable nationalism was the dilemma dogging conservatism since the French Revolution—namely the need to mobilize the intellect to defend a cause whose nature supposedly lies far beneath rational thought. “The ties to the nation,” Jünger wrote in January 1928, “are roots that have grown, and they are not spun by the slender threads of logic.” Those struggling under the banner of nationalism were opposed to the “liberal forces, which, as with everything that's too deep for their shallow understanding, would also like to argue the nation out of existence.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Yet Jünger also acknowledged in the same 1928 essay that efforts to use “mind-based means” (i.e. writing) to forge accord among “blood-based” nationalist forces had failed. His own ambition to galvanize Weimar's veterans’ organizations into a united front had come to naught. The largest of these, the Stahlhelm, had proven, in his eyes, more a stale bourgeois interest group than a vehicle for translating the front community into a revitalized national community. In response, Jünger announced a reverse course that aimed to “stamp and steer the mind's nervous activity” by infusing it with the supposedly deeper intuitions of “the blood.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The result was the first edition of The Adventurous Heart (1929). The book represented Jünger's partial return to the modernist paradigm that was visible in Sturm—to a willingness to struggle at the limits of expression, despite the fact that words are always accidental and never perfectly capture the mind itself. Jünger now endeavored to articulate the subjective side of his nationalist politics, explaining the workings of the “heart” that is moved beyond reason and the value of feelings and instincts in a disenchanted age. He remained committed, however, to the view that the most important truths defy communication. “The inexpressible,” he maintained, “debases itself when it is spoken and made communicable; it is like gold that must be alloyed with copper if it is to be used as currency.”Footnote ¹⁰² The Adventurous Heart thus marked Jünger's pivot toward his mature aesthetic project to rescue language from a nihilistic age and restore it as a carrier of transcendent meaning. In works like Radiations (1949), his diaries from the years surrounding the Second World War, Jünger would endeavor to read objects and situations as allegories of some deeper reality, and to alloy his inner sense of what was revealed with the imperfect—but circulable—stuff of words.Footnote ¹⁰³