I. POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND INNER EMIGRATION BEFORE 1945

The appeal of fascism to intellectuals remains an oft-treated but still unresolved issue in twentieth-century intellectual history. The question why so many intellectuals sympathized with the openly anti-intellectual National Socialist movement in the interwar period and allowed themselves to be coopted by the Nazi regime is generally answered with reference to ideological overlap between the National Socialists and the majority of German “mandarins”.Footnote ⁵ But the evidence of shared beliefs does not sufficiently explain the political activism of many right-wing intellectuals. As Dieter Thomä has argued, Heidegger's political engagement in 1933 required a conception of the transition from theory to practice.Footnote ⁶ This observation opens a new approach to the problem of intellectuals’ commitments to National Socialism and, moreover, places this problem within the specific purview of the history of intellectuals. For it is precisely this question of the mediation between theory and practice—or between Geist und Tat, as early twentieth-century diction had it—that lies at the heart of broader questions about the role and (self-)definition of intellectuals in modern societies.Footnote ⁷ For a certain group of radical conservative intellectuals, whose ideological beliefs overlapped sufficiently with those of the Nazis, their efforts on behalf of National Socialism offered them a long-hoped-for opportunity to forge a direct connection between mind and deed. They could now resolve the problem of mediation between theory and practice unambiguously in favor of practice.

The cases of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger exemplify this pattern. Both are generally considered part of the so-called “conservative revolution”. This interwar intellectual movement was characterized by a fixation on the problem of the deed. It was not just Carl Schmitt who called for “action, not opinion” during the Weimar Republic.Footnote ⁸ A sophisticated “philosophy of the deed” is also found in the work of Hans Freyer. As early as 1923 he declared, “We are finished with concepts. Now we intervene in the world. We have refuted. Now we revolt. And in light of the premises of philosophy, we have reached the great conclusion that what counts is the deed”.Footnote ⁹ In the same year, in an article for the Nazis’ Völkischer Beobachter, Ernst Jünger urged the replacement of “word by deed, ink by blood, phrase by sacrifice, and pen by sword”.Footnote ¹⁰ The precise meaning of this “call to action”, propagated by Freyer, Jünger, and others, was characteristically vague.Footnote ¹¹ Those whom it inspired knew that they were against prevailing realities, against the “November Republic” and Weimar democracy. But they could rarely state exactly what kind of political order should replace the Republic. Hans Freyer went on the offensive, raising this vagueness to the status of “revolutionary principle” in his manifesto Revolution from the Right of 1931. There, he invoked this principle as a “pure force, a pure process”, that must consciously be kept free of any specific definition:

This propaganda of active nothingness and pure action not only concealed an “emphatic rejection of thinking”.Footnote ¹³ It also expressed the commitment to decisionism—so central to revolutionary conservatism—that Karl Löwith recognized as the key characteristic of Carl Schmitt's thought as early as 1935. For Löwith, Schmitt's resolve to be resolute was ultimately meaningless and could issue only in acts of violence.Footnote ¹⁴ Turning to Martin Heidegger, Löwith referred to the “inner nihilism of this naked resoluteness”.Footnote ¹⁵ In Heidegger's case, this decisionism can also be understood as a form of political existentialism that applies to politics the privileging of existence before essence, of the Dass before the Was, and a resulting primacy of practice.Footnote ¹⁶ In general, decisionism was integral to the “combination of apocalyptic thought, propensity for violence and masculine, fraternal spirit” that Stefan Breuer has described as hallmarks of the conservative revolution.Footnote ¹⁷ The less capable right-wing intellectuals were of stating what was to come once the present order had been destroyed and the revolution realized, the more clearly they expressed the belief that this future reality could not be achieved through the intellect, but only through an act of violence. In this sense, such intellectuals took on the role of propagandists of the revolutionary deed and often engaged in political action themselves.

This applies especially to Ernst Jünger, who reduced the perspective of intellectual anti-intellectualism—inherent to action-oriented voluntarism—to the simple formula of the “treason against ‘mind’ by the mind” in 1932.Footnote ¹⁸ In the 1920s, Jünger, the First World War hero and celebrated war author, was at the forefront of a broad group of former officers and nationalist revanchists who saw politics during the Weimar Republic as a continuation of the war by other means. The politicization of wartime experience served them as a nationalist propaganda tool in their quest to abolish the Republic, establish a nationalist state under a strong Führer and revise the Versailles peace treaty. Within this broader context, Jünger formed the nucleus of a small group calling themselves the “new nationalists”. They were chiefly active as political journalists, but also sought to shape the organizational form of the right-wing youth movement.Footnote ¹⁹ For a time, in the course of this political agitation, Ernst Jünger put his faith in collaboration with the National Socialist movement. In 1926, for example, he wrote, “But today there are no combat troops that might serve the interests of nationalism other than the youth organizations [Bünde] and the National Socialists”.Footnote ²⁰ As late as October 1929, he “sincerely” hoped that National Socialism would be “victorious”.Footnote ²¹ But the less successful Jünger was in his concrete efforts at political organization, the more he turned away from day-to-day political activity. At the same time, he intensified his revolutionary rhetoric. As early as 1930, this led him to distance himself from the Nazi Party, which was now attempting to proceed by legal means—provoking criticism from the nationalist revolutionaries around Jünger.

Following the National Socialists’ seizure of power, Jünger attempted to prevent his cooptation by the new regime. In November 1933, for example, he rejected his election to the German Academy of Literature. His letter of refusal was prevented from appearing in the press. In June 1934, he protested against the publication, which he had not approved, of an extract from his book The Adventurous Heart in a supplement to the Völkischer Beobachter, as he was unwilling to appear as a contributor to this organ of the Nazi Party. Furthermore, as early as 1933 he left the capital, Berlin, for a life of rural seclusion, first in Goßlar in the Harz Mountains, later on the shores of Lake Constance and finally in Kirchhorst near Hanover. This withdrawal to rural backwaters corresponded with a retreat into introspection (Innerlichkeit), which is generally regarded as a hallmark of inner emigration. His novel On the Marble Cliffs appeared in 1939 and was read already during the war itself as a document of resistance to National Socialism.

Jünger was no active dissident and his relation to National Socialism remained ambivalent, as is apparent from his service as a Wehrmacht officer in occupied France. It is true that he maintained close links with the resistance group around Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel and saw his membership in the officer corps as an “aristocratic form of emigration”, to borrow a term from Gottfried Benn.Footnote ²² But in this way he obscured and failed to acknowledge the Wehrmacht's role within the Nazi apparatus of domination and annihilation—and the fact that he himself was doing its bidding as an agent of occupation. In the present context, however, the key point is that Jünger had already distanced himself in the 1930s from the voluntarism and political activism of the 1920s. In On the Marble Cliffs, for example, he explicitly espoused the ideal of artistic contemplation as an alternative to political action. In their own conflict with tyranny, his protagonists rejected the “solution through force” and resolved to “resist with spiritual forces alone”.Footnote ²³ As early as 1934, in a letter to this brother Friedrich Georg Jünger, Ernst Jünger had recommended “non-participation in lower forms of behaviour” as the most appropriate stance, given the political circumstances.Footnote ²⁴ At the same time, he referred to the Nazi regime as “mob rule”, as a form of absolute democracy stripped of bourgeois parliamentarism.Footnote ²⁵ In July 1933, with an eye on political events, he referred to a “chaotic repetition of national democratic ideology”.Footnote ²⁶ He thus combined hostility to democracy with opposition to National Socialism, withdrawing to the aristocratic–elitist position of the antipolitical critic of the demos. As such, in the epigrammatic appendix to his 1934 anthology Leaves and Stones, he wrote, “The demos is its own tyrant.”Footnote ²⁷

In contrast to Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger was not conspicuous for his political activism during the Weimar Republic. His activities were limited to the academic field. This is not the place to recapitulate in detail the complex and controversial question of the extent to which his early philosophy, and in particular Being and Time (1927), should be interpreted as a revolutionary conservative text and an expression of antidemocratic ideology. Prior to 1933, Heidegger had neither expressed explicitly political views nor engaged in political activities. However, the “heroic existentialism”Footnote ²⁸ of his magnum opus and its call for individuals to embrace “authenticity” and reject the “dictatorship” of “the they” constitute a kind of “inner activism”Footnote ²⁹ and anticipated key elements of a political existentialism. Heidegger was able to build on these elements when he took up the rectorship of Freiburg University in May 1933 and set about reworking them in line with his understanding of intellectual leadership within the Nazi state.

Again, this is not the place to recount the details of Heidegger's engagement with Nazism during his time as rector, which extended until April 1934. The crucial point is that he explicitly understood this engagement as mind becoming action. His “philosophical work” now had to “prove itself in the realm of the ‘practical’”, as he wrote to Paul Häberlin in August 1933.Footnote ³⁰ On 27 May 1933, Heidegger delivered his famous rectoral address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University”. Here, Heidegger undertook, as Rainer Alisch writes, to “reformulate the relation between theory and practice” by engaging in theory not for its own sake, but as the “supreme realization of genuine practice”.Footnote ³¹ As rector, he justified the labor service programme he initiated for Freiburg students with reference to Ernst Jünger's book The Worker (1932). In his November 1933 speech at the university enrolment ceremony, he explained,

As he wrote elsewhere, Heidegger wished to build a “living bridge between the worker of the ‘hand’ and the worker of the ‘head’”, in order to raise academic activity to the status of nationally significant labor.Footnote ³³ Heidegger thus fit within the complex of intellectual anti-intellectualism differently than did Jünger, since his apotheosis of “work” sought to deal with the mind–deed problem explicitly. It was an attempt to answer the question that arose in 1933 of how, as a scholar or intellectual, one could come to an arrangement, or even show solidarity, with an ideology and practice that was avowedly hostile to scholarship, intellectuality, and academia.Footnote ³⁴

After Heidegger's political ambitions for the university came to nothing and he resigned from the rectorship, he began “a process of working through a series of disappointments, without any real insight”, in the words of Jürgen Habermas.Footnote ³⁵ As this process unfolded, Heidegger gradually distanced himself from the Nazi regime, without entirely abandoning his own conception of the “inner truth and greatness of this movement”.Footnote ³⁶ He ultimately came to reinterpret real existing National Socialism as a symptom of nihilistic modernity rather than a force that might overcome it, as he had originally hoped. At the same time, he moved away from his own conception of the mind's coming-into-action. The “other beginning” for which Heidegger had been hoping since the mid-1930s could no longer be brought about actively but only awaited with intellectual contemplation.Footnote ³⁷

This development in Heidegger's thought cannot be traced here in detail.Footnote ³⁸ But two points are worth mentioning. First, alongside his study of Nietzsche and Hölderlin, it was above all his attempt to get to grips with Ernst Jünger and especially The Worker that helped Heidegger distance himself from the “metaphysics of the will to power” during the 1930s and attain his own standpoint beyond it.Footnote ³⁹ Even after 1945, The Worker remained the key point of reference within Heidegger and Jünger's intellectual relationship, as is evident, for instance, in their exchange of contributions to each other's Festschriften in the 1950s.Footnote ⁴⁰ Second, in the course of his withdrawal into “inner emigration”, especially as he grappled with Hölderlin and the idea of a “secret Germany”, Heidegger developed a textual strategy of “sigetics”, the art of silence.Footnote ⁴¹ This entailed saying everything “that needs to be said in such a way that it will be sensed as the unspoken”.Footnote ⁴² This was not only a variant on the “undercover style” so typical of inner emigration, but also a communicative “strategy of election”, which aimed to include those in the know and exclude the ignorant.Footnote ⁴³ For Heidegger, the concealed aspects could only ever be detected by the few, the initiated. The many never noticed “what is being spoken about and who is being spoken to”.Footnote ⁴⁴ As it happens, Ernst Jünger's abandonment of political activism also took the form of a withdrawal into closed circles of communication and the isolation of intellectual soliloquies, an isolation Jünger portrayed in On the Marble Cliffs.Footnote ⁴⁵ Both Heidegger and Jünger continued to utilize this communicative strategy of secrecy after the end of the “Third Reich” in very much the same way.

II. INNER REMIGRATION AFTER 1945?

Both Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger experienced the war's end in the spring of 1945 as a defeat for the German nation and the beginning of a new tyrannical regime. The key turning point in their intellectual development had already occurred in the mid-1930s, and the experience of the Second World War served primarily to confirm their thinking. But for them, too, the end of the war was a decisive event. This was due, first, to their ongoing nationalism. Despite all their criticisms of National Socialism, the end of the “Third Reich” also meant the end of the German Empire. Hence they saw the destruction of German cities and the country's occupation by Allied troops, the cleaving off of territory in the East and the “loss of national sovereignty”, first and foremost as a humiliation for their nation, a humiliation associated with “incredible pain”.Footnote ⁴⁶ Second, Heidegger and Jünger also found themselves confronted with a changed situation in a very personal sense. During the final years of the “Third Reich”, they had been effectively silenced in the public sphere—Goebbels barred any mention in the press of Heidegger's 1943 essay on Plato and of Ernst Jünger's fiftieth birthday during the regime's last weeks. From 1945 on, in contrast, they became the object of public debate in a dual sense: in the course of Allied efforts at denazification and “cleansing”, which temporarily banned Heidegger from teaching and Jünger from publishing, as well as within postwar journalistic debates.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ernst Jünger in particular was construed as an exemplary “case” in discussions of the transformation and persistence of German militarism, guilt, and intellectual renewal.

Heidegger and Jünger themselves, however, refused to take part in this discussion. They felt that they were once again being persecuted in a public sphere subject to “coordination” (Gleichschaltung), this time, as it were, from the left, a public sphere that was using the imperative of reeducation and denazification as a pretext to launch an inquisition against disagreeable intellectuals and self-styled “free spirits”. Their responses to this perceived persecution included withdrawing from the public sphere and cultivating nonpublic forms of communication. This strategy of secrecy among a group of individuals “in the know” helped them create a communicative refuge. This was intended to shield them from public attacks and allow them to contemplate their stock of ideas unmolested.Footnote ⁴⁸ This network building is particularly evident in the case of Ernst Jünger. In the summer of 1946, for instance, Jünger circulated a number of “letters to friends” in order to forge links among the initiates. Jünger's reference to the success of the first letter at the beginning of the second clearly expresses his intentions. The letters were to function as an antidote to the supposedly coordinated public sphere: “As many people have told me, the ‘letter to friends’ made the rounds in a flash. This lends credence to my view that a pen in the right hand is superior to the combined efforts of the rotary press and its functionaries.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Through this communication among friends, Jünger participated in what we might call the discourse of the occupation.Footnote ⁵⁰ One of its distinguishing features—alongside rejection of the collective-guilt thesis—was the equation of Nazi and occupation regimes, a move made in a number of places in Jünger's work. In the foreword to his war diaries, published as Strahlungen in 1949, after his publication ban had been lifted, he wrote, “The succession of regimes in the modern state changes the arguments, but not the means of violence. One will certainly be in danger if one deviates from the norm in some way.”Footnote ⁵¹ Here and at other points, Jünger suggested a direct equivalence between the Nazi regime and Allied occupation. For Heidegger, meanwhile, this equation tended to take the form of problematic, overwrought claims in a philosophy-of-history idiom. In summer 1945, for instance, he asserted that everything now stood under the “universal domination of the will to power”, “whether it is called communism or fascism or world democracy”.Footnote ⁵²

Martin Heidegger joined the group of friends around Ernst Jünger in the late 1940s. After Heidegger met Jünger's younger brother Friedrich Georg Jünger through publisher Vittorio Klostermann in 1942, Heidegger and Ernst Jünger met in person for the first time in 1948. They immediately engaged in a lively intellectual exchange.Footnote ⁵³ Beginning that summer, Heidegger and the Jünger brothers developed the above-mentioned plan to jointly edit a journal, in which Werner Heisenberg and Carl Schmitt were initially also to be involved. Gerhard Nebel and Armin Mohler were also foreseen as contributors, and—along with the publisher Ernst Klett—they soon emerged as the driving forces behind the project. For while the idea was originally Ernst Jünger's and Heidegger embraced it with keen interest, both soon expressed reservations about exposing themselves unnecessarily to public criticism by jointly launching a journal. Ernst Jünger conveyed these concerns in a letter to Ernst Klett:

Heidegger made it clear that he shared these reservations in a June 1949 letter to Gerhard Nebel, in which he wrote that the “plan for a journal . . . would culminate in our public emergence, which would mean giving up our last remaining line of defence. That which is essential must remain within the realm of the inconspicuous. It is only there that we can muster our forces”.Footnote ⁵⁵ The next day, he confirmed this view in a letter to Ernst Jünger:

These passages from his letters uncover the most important elements of Heidegger's stance in the postwar period. First, they reveal an awareness of being a kind of preserver and renewer of the “occidental tradition” and thus able to offer guidance to those “waiting” and “searching”. Second, they are evidence of Heidegger's conviction that the “gathering” together of those waiting could be carried out only “inconspicuously”, never under the “dictatorship of the public realm”.Footnote ⁵⁷ Heidegger's reference to preservation by remaining inconspicuous picked up the thread of the above-mentioned art of silence from the inner emigration period, an art that Heidegger continued to practice seamlessly after 1945 and under the conditions of Allied occupation. Ernst Jünger agreed with him that the public forum of a journal was not (yet) the right place for them to exchange their views: “Such a forum for clarifying questions such as those touched on above would have been good”, as he wrote to Heidegger in January 1950, “but a dialogue concealed from the lemures is still the best approach”.Footnote ⁵⁸

Furthermore, the quoted passages make clear that the scepticism toward any “public emergence” was bound up with internal differences over the political content and character of the planned journal. For Nebel, Mohler, and Klett, the plan for a journal was clearly linked to political aims. As Nebel wrote to Heidegger in June 1949, the journal should be “the first expression of German sovereignty, rather than the agent of any occupying power”.Footnote ⁵⁹ Heidegger and the Jünger brothers, however, were eager to avoid any “appearance of political action”, as Ernst Jünger had written to Ernst Klett. This was no mere tactical move. Already in the 1930s, both Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger had begun a long-term process of turning away from political engagement.

Crucially, the rejection of political activism and politics in general persisted even once the occupation was over. With respect to Ernst Jünger, this is clearly apparent in Der Waldgang (The Treatise of the Rebel, 1951).Footnote ⁶⁰ Several strands of Jünger's political and intellectual development came together in this essay. First, it still clearly exemplified the discourse of occupation: Jünger condemned both the “theory of collective guilt” and the practice “of condemning the defeated in legal terms”—clear criticisms of the Allies, the process of denazification and the Nuremberg war crimes trials.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet the figure of the forest hiker depicted by Jünger was not only a resister against foreign political domination. He can also be seen as an early form of the social dropout. For Jünger, from the 1930s on, the critique of mass politics in National Socialism and then in democracy after 1945—which he saw as merely the continuation of National Socialism by other means—was bound up with a critique of technology and the technocratic state. He thus implicitly rejected the technocratic Machtstaat or “power state,” which he himself had portrayed and propagated in The Worker. In fact, many of Jünger's later writings can be read as attempts—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—to come to terms with this essay. Jünger was partly influenced here by his younger brother Friedrich Georg, whose 1946 The Perfection of Technology was an early manifesto in the antitechnology and proto-ecological vein that would become popular in the Federal Republic.Footnote ⁶² This book in turn had been influenced by The Worker, as it were ex negativo.

Against this background, The Treatise of the Rebel appears as a reflection both on the situation of a defeated postwar Germany and on the freedom of the individual in times of total political and organizational planning. Jünger fused these meanings in the concept of the “Leviathan”, borrowed from Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt.Footnote ⁶³ This stood not only for political dictatorship, but for the modern state in general, the state that controls and regulates every aspect of its subjects’ lives. At the same time, he retained his concept of the age of the worker to characterize a world monitored and dominated by statistics. But just as the figure of the worker had superseded that of the “unknown soldier” after the First World War, the forest hiker now emerged for Jünger as a third figure that would “resist automatism” and regain “a natural relationship to freedom”. While walking through the forest, “the individual grapples with the technological collective and its world”. The “forest” here stands very generally for the “site of freedom” and could be anywhere.Footnote ⁶⁴

This line of argument demonstrates that in The Treatise of the Rebel Jünger attempted to portray an alternative figure to that of the worker. His aim was to create a symbol of resistance to the technocratic world of work, which he himself had once affirmed and from which he now wished to retreat. If The Worker revolved around the need to fit into the statistically organized collective, Der Waldgänger was concerned with “getting away from statistics” and leaving the “statistically comprehensible order” for “the invisible one we identify as the forest walk”.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Jünger, this invisible order of the forest was also an order beyond time. The Waldgänger must remain open to “forces superior to temporal ones”, as Jünger wrote.Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus, for Jünger, the forest walk, as a shift into the timeless, also meant a departure from history.

In the 1950s, Jünger was not alone in taking a step into posthistoire, a development reinforced in his book At the Wall of Time (1959). Some years ago, Lutz Niethammer described the thought figure of posthistoire as a postwar metaphysical refuge for a subdued fascist intelligentsia.Footnote ⁶⁷ The key point here, however, is that Jünger's withdrawal from time also intended a withdrawal from the prevailing circumstances of the early Federal Republic (which was not the case for other posthistorical intellectuals such as Arnold Gehlen). In The Treatise of the Rebel, Jünger explicitly propagated nonparticipation in the Federal Republic's political system. Despite his break with the reactionary modernism of The Worker and his withdrawal from political activism, Jünger continued to reject democracy. His approach was no longer to call for its active destruction; instead, he adopted a stance of passive resistance. He not only cultivated it in the early days of the Federal Republic but maintained it even in later decades, as is apparent in the posthistorical novel Eumeswil of 1977, whose central figure, the anarch, stood outside and rejected society in an even more radical way than the forest hiker.

Much like the thought of Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger's postwar philosophy revolved around questions concerning the technological makeup of the world. It contains many parallels to Jünger's posthistorical turn. In Heidegger's work, this attitude was framed as “releasement” (Gelassenheit), a concept developed in a slim 1959 volume.Footnote ⁶⁸ His late philosophy as a whole was distinguished by notions of passivity, in which humanity, rather than striving to become master of the world, was to become the “custodian” and “shepherd” of being. In Heidegger's eyes, technology was a product of the will to power's metaphysics. Only if humans broke free of domination by the latter could the unprecedented risk which technology posed to their essence be averted. But this could be done only by being “mindful of essentials” and not through any kind of activism.Footnote ⁶⁹ This “plea for meditative thinking” also entailed a “plea for inactivity”, which Heidegger's former student Günther Anders criticized as “paralyzing and defeatist” in view of the very real dangers of nuclear technology.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nonetheless, after 1945 the philosophical ennoblement of doing nothing tapped the pulse of the age, as Anders noted in an acute observation on Heidegger's popularity in postwar Germany:

But Heidegger's later conception of being also emerged from another set of motivations. It can be read as a response to, and way of processing, his earlier philosophical and political voluntarism. As mentioned above, this voluntarism may be interpreted as a response to the problem of the mediation of theory and practice, thinking and acting. Heidegger's temporary support for National Socialism may or may not ultimately have been motivated by his hopes of finding the solution in a preponderance of the deed. In any case, the dashing of such hopes initiated a process of intellectual abstention, which led to a reformulation of the mind–deed problem. It was now to be resolved firmly in favour of the mind. Heidegger's late philosophy of “releasement” or Gelassenheit, and Ernst Jünger's posthistoire thus appear as covert reactions to their former voluntarism of the “deed”.