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Radiance is the perfect term to express the influence that Ernst Jünger’s literary work and personality have had on me. In the light of his perspective, which stereoscopically comprises the surfaces and depths of things, the world I knew took on a new, translucent splendor. That happened a long time before the discovery of LSD and before I came into personal contact with this author in connection with hallucinogenic drugs.

My enchantment with Ernst Jünger began with his book Das Abenteuerliche Herz [The adventurous heart]. Again and again in the last forty years I have taken up this book. Here more than ever, in themes that weigh more lightly and lie closer to me than war and a new type of human being (subjects of Jünger’s earlier books), the beauty and magic of Jünger’s prose was opened to me — descriptions of flowers, of dreams, of solitary walks; thoughts about chance, the future, colors, and about other themes that have direct relation to our personal lives. Everywhere in his prose the miracle of creation became evident, in the precise description of the surfaces and, in translucence, of the depths; and the uniqueness and the imperishable in every human being was touched upon. No other writer has thus opened my eyes.

On the other hand, after reading Juenger’s Preface to Copse 125 this morning, only now do I finally understand why Juenger’s reputation remained so controversial throughout his long lifetime, and why in certain circles he was vilified as the godfather of German fascism. My reading of Storm of Steel (1920) did not explain this judgment, nor did my reading of Total Mobilization (1930), and I had begun to suspect that Juenger had simply been misrepresented and slandered. Here, for example, is a representative passage from the latter work:

The Kremlin’s old chimes now play the Internationale. In Constantinople, schoolchildren use the Latin script instead of the Koran’s old arabesques. In Naples and Palermo, Fascist police regulate the pace of southern life as if directing modern traffic. In the world’s remotest, even legendary lands, houses of parliament are being ceremoniously dedicated. The abstractness, hence the horror, of all human circumstances is increasing inexorably. Patriotism is being diluted through a new nationalism, strongly fused with elements of conscious awareness. In Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, Zionism, in the movements of colored peoples, progress has made advances that until recently would have seemed unthinkable; it proceeds, as it were, head over heels, following the circular course of an artificial dialectic in order to continue its movement on a very simple plane. Disregarding its much diminished allowances for freedom and sociability, it is starting to rule nations in ways not very different from those of an absolute regime. In many cases the humanitarian mask has almost been stripped away, replaced by a half-grotesque, half-barbaric fetishism of the machine, a naive cult of technique; this occurs particularly where there is no direct, productive relation to those [pg 138] dynamic energies for whose destructive, triumphal course long-range artillery and bomb-loaded fighter squadrons represent only the martial expression. Simultaneously, esteem for quantity [Massen] is increasing: quantity of assent, quantity of public opinion has become the decisive factor in politics. Socialism and nationalism in particular are the two great millstones between which progress pulverizes what is left of the old world, and eventually itself. For a period of more than a hundred years, the masses, blinded by the optical illusion of the franchise, were tossed around like a ball by the “right” and “left.” It always seemed that one side offered refuge from the other’s claims. Today everywhere the reality of each side’s identity is becoming more and more apparent; even the dream of freedom is disappearing as if under a pincers’ iron grasp. The movements of the uniformly molded masses, trapped in the snare set by the world-spirit, comprise a great and fearful spectacle. Each of these movements leads to a sharper, more merciless grasp: forms of compulsion stronger than torture are at work here; they are so strong, that human beings welcome them joyfully. Behind every exit, marked with the symbols of happiness, lurk pain and death. Happy is he alone who steps armed into these spaces.

That does not sound fascistic to me. But in Juenger’s Preface to Copse 125, published five years earlier, we find reflections on WWI such as these:

Those frightful landscapes were our daily surroundings where destruction ruled over all and nothing stood except the might of the soul that no force can subdue. In one thing alone we were great — in our aims that dwarfed the individual and made his life and fortunes of no account. Thousands died for an acre of ground, for a bit of trench, for a copse or a village — and rightly; for the shaping of a world still hidden in the future was bound up with the gain or loss of scraps of ground like these. And the length of the war only heightened its intensity.

To stand thus, night and day without a breathing space, always on the alert; to answer the great and utmost question of fate by the offer of one’s own life — must not that be an education that goes deeper and lasts longer than any other? And over and above it all to see the tangible success, the hoped-for and well-earned reward sunk in shipwreck utterly unforeseen — this is the severest trial that can be laid on a people, as on any single person who feels himself in heart and soul bound up with it. He who can pass a test like this shows that he is born for command and is fit for the exercise of power.

Certainly no one who is not carved out of the hardest wood goes on unshattered from such a schooling, and it is only in the day of distress that a nation can tell whether it has men at its disposal. We, too, have no lack of those who, like the Frenchman, Barbusse, regard war as a material affair and, turning its negative side outwards, endeavour to run up on the other a temple of peace and happiness. They give as their reasons devastated towns and frightful sufferings — as though our highest duty was the avoidance of pain. They have no mind to accept the responsibilities that demand sacrifice of such corruptible treasures as life and property when a nation’s greatness and its ideas are at stake. It is here, though, that the greater moral strength lies, and there is no doubt on which side the materialists are to be found.

An Amazon customer review of Copse 125 I found helpful remarked:

If you simply follow Junger, you’ll also be interested in this, because it’s exactly the sort of thing he was trying to disavow in his later years.

. . .

While I’m a fan of the man and everything he accomplished in a long and storied life, he was a pretty slippery character. That was true before the concept of the ‘anarch’ had been fully developed, and it’s definitely on display here.

. . .

This is Junger before he got burned by the ascent of the Nazis. This book amply documents why he was able to do what he wanted in occupied Paris, and why On the Marble Cliffs wasn’t banned by the Nazis. I don’t mean to smear him as a true-believer, but he did sow the seeds for the ascent of the NSDAP through his contributions to the post-war marketplace of ideas. He was definitely pro-Germany, pro-military, and anti-democratic. He wasn’t a loyal Nazi, but he was definitely a Right Wing intellectual who was proud to wear these attitudes on his sleeve when it mattered.

In Juenger’s partial defense may be offered Albert Jay Nock’s book about the causes of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles, The Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922).

Incidentally, Storm of Steel, while brutally honest, is not quite the cold and pitiless chronicle of war it’s sometimes made out to be. In includes, for example, this passage:

It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of the pistol at the man’s temple — he was too frightened to move — while my other fist grabbed hold of his tunic, feeling medals and badges of rank. An officer; he must have held some command post in these trenches. With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace.

It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all often appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again.

And this:

The occupants of a row of dugouts along the side of the path also ran away. I encountered one such as he was just about to leave the last one. . . . Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.

Furthermore, although Juenger’s ideas and those of the National Socialists in the years between the wars coincided in some points, Juenger was never guilty of their anti-Semitism. He wrote in his journal on June 7, 1942, after seeing during a stroll on a Paris street for the first time the newly imposed yellow star worn by Jews: “I consider such events, even within one’s own personal history, as marking a date that cuts deeply into the record. Such a spectacle does not pass without leaving a reaction in its wake — and immediately I felt embarrassed to be in uniform.”

I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon the complete text of Total Mobilization online a couple weeks ago, and even more pleased a few days ago to stumble on a substantial online excerpt from Juenger’s The Forest Flight (1951). Juenger’s figure of the Anarch evolved from his earlier figure of the Forest Fleer, described in this essay. Not only the stark contrasts but also the continuities in this essay with Juenger’s thought in Copse 125 are revealing:

New conceptions of authority and great concentrations of power have arisen. In order to resist them, we require a new conception of freedom transcending the anemic abstractions we have come to associate with this term. The first prerequisite for this new awareness is that man must not content himself with being left in peace; that he must be ready to risk his life. In that case, we shall soon learn that even in the states in which the power of the police has become overwhelming, independence is by no means extinct. The armor of the new Leviathan has its chinks which must be constantly sought out, an activity requiring both caution and audacity of a kind hitherto unknown. This suggests that elites are about to begin the struggle for a new freedom which will require great sacrifice and which must not be interpreted in a manner unworthy of it. In order to find analogies we must go back to ages of strength, say, to the period of the Huguenots or of the guerillas as Goya saw them in his Desastros. Compared to these, the storming of the Bastille – an event which still provides nourishment for the current notion of freedom – appears like a Sunday stroll into the suburbs.

. . .

The arguments change, but stupidity sits forever in judgment.

Men were brought before its tribunal first, because they despised the gods; then because they did not recognize a dogma; or again, because they offended against a theory. There exists no great word or noble thought in the name of which blood has not been spilled. The message of Socrates resides in the conviction of the invalidity of the verdict which testifies to a standard transcending the human scale. The true verdict was spoken long before the trial began and took expression in the exaltation of the victim. The trial is perennial, and the philistines who sat in judgment then may be met today on every street corner and in every parliament. The idea that this might end has always distinguished the shallow thinkers. But human greatness must be reconquered again and again. It triumphs whenever man masters the onslaught of vulgarity in his own heart. Therein resides the real substance of history; in the encounter of man with himself, that is to say, with his own divine power. That must be understood if one wishes to teach history.

. . .

In Germany, resistance against authority is, or was, especially difficult because, from the days of legitimate monarchy, the population preserved a modicum of respect for the state. Hence the individual found it difficult to understand why the victorious powers prosecuted him, not merely by means of a blanket accusation of collective guilt, but also as an individual for having, for example, continued in his profession as a conductor of an orchestra or as a public official. Although this state of mind produced some grotesque results, we must not treat it as a mere curiosity. It is indicative of a new feature in our world, in which foreigners may accuse the individual as a collaborator with popular movements, while political parties try him as a sympathizer of unpopular causes. The individual is thus placed between Scylla and Charybdis; he is threatened with liquidation either because he participated or because he failed to participate.

Hence, a high degree of courage is required which will enable him to defend the cause of justice all alone, and even against the power of the state. It will be doubted whether such men can be found. Some will appear, however, and they will be wanderers in the forest (Waldgänger). Even against his will, this type of man will enter the historical scene, for there are forms of coercion that leave no choice.

. . .

Let us assume that a small number of truly free men are left in a city or state. In that case the breach of the constitution would carry a heavy risk. In this sense, the theory of collective guilt is justified, for the possibility of violating a law is directly proportional to the degree of resistance it encounters at the hands of freedom. An attack on the invulnerability and, indeed, on the sanctity of the home would not have been possible in old Iceland, in the form in which it was possible as a purely administrative measure in Berlin in 1933, in the midst of a population of several millions. As an honorable exception we should mention a young Social Democrat who killed half a dozen of the so-called auxiliary police at the entrance of his apartment. He still partook of the substantial Old-Germanic sense of freedom which his opponents celebrated in their theories. Naturally, he had not learned this from the program of his party.

Let us suppose, furthermore, that the authorities would have had to expect an incident of this sort in every street of Berlin. In that case, things would have been different. Long periods of peace and quiet favor certain optical illusions. Among them is the assumption that the invulnerability of the home is founded upon the constitution and safeguarded by it. In reality, it rests upon the father of the family who, accompanied by his sons, appears with the ax on the threshold of his dwelling. This truth is not always apparent, however. Nor is it to be construed as an objection to the constitution. It is simply that the old saying still holds: the man must vouch for his oath; the oath cannot vouch for the man. The German has been reproached for his lack of resistance to official acts of violence and perhaps justifiably. He did not yet know the rules of the game, and he felt threatened from other directions where there has never been any question of basic human rights. Those who died in a hopeless struggle, unarmed, and in defense of their wives and children, are, as yet, hardly noticed. But their lonely destruction will become known. For it counts as a weight in the scale of history. We, who survived, must see to it, however, that the spectacle of coercion which met no resistance shall never be repeated.

. . .

The great experience of the forest consists of the encounter with the Ego, with the self, with the inviolate core and essence that sustains the temporal and individual appearance. This encounter, so decisive for the conquest of health and for the victory over fear, is also supreme in its moral value. It leads to the primal basis of all social intercourse, to the man whose example defines individuality. In this sphere we will encounter not only community but also identity. This is the symbolic meaning of the embrace: the Ego recognizes itself in the other human being in the saying, ”This is you.” The other can be the beloved, the sufferer, or the helpless victim. In giving help, the Ego helps its own immortal essence and confirms the basic ethical order of the universe.

Countless men are alive today who have traversed the nadirs of the nihilistic process. They know that the mechanism reveals itself as an ever-greater menace, that man has entered into the interior of a huge machine which has been designed for his annihilation. They have learned that every form of rationalism leads to machine-like mechanism, and every mechanism to torture as its logical consequence, a fact which the nineteenth century failed to grasp. A miracle must take place if a man is to escape from such whirlpools. And this miracle has taken place times without number when among the faceless numbers there appeared an individual and gave succor. This was the case even in the prisons and, indeed, especially there. In every situation and in his relation to every man, the individual can become the brother – this is his genuine, his sovereign, trait. The origin of nobility was the task of protection – protection against the threats of beasts and monsters. This is the token of the aristocratic being, and it shines forth in the guard who secretly gives a piece of bread to a prisoner. Such actions can never cease, for the world subsists on them. They are the sacrifices upon which it rests.

. . .

Even if one is prepared to accept the worst case of breakdown, there remains a distinction between light and darkness. Here the way rises into high realms, towards a sacrificial death or to the fate of one who falls fighting; there it sinks into the lowly spheres of slave-camps and slaughter houses where primitives murderously unite with technology. There destiny is absent, and only numbers exist. Having a destiny or being regarded as a statistic: this is a decision that is forced on everyone today, but which has to be taken individually. The individual is just as sovereign today as in any other period of history, perhaps even more so? As collective powers gain ground, the individual becomes separated from the old, established associations and stands alone. He now becomes the opponent of Leviathan, even its conqueror, its master.

. . .

Mention here of individuals refers to true human beings, without the overtones the idea has attracted over the past two centuries. The reference is to the free human being as God created him. This human being is not an exception, does not embody an elite. He is in fact concealed within everyone, and differences only arise out of the degree to which the individual manages to implement the freedom granted to him. As a thinker, a friend, as one who knows and loves, one has to help him achieve that.

It can also be said that man is sleeping in the forest. In the moment when he awakens and recognises his power, order is restored. The higher rhythm of history can generally be interpreted in terms of the human being periodically rediscovering himself. The powers that want to mask this are sometimes totemic, sometimes magical, and sometimes technological. Then rigidity increases, accompanied by fear. The arts petrify and dogma becomes absolute. But the spectacle of man removing his mask has repeated itself since earliest times, to be followed by joy, the reflection of freedom.

The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch but his antipode, untouched by him, though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant.

. . .

The anarch, as I have expounded elsewhere, is the pendant to the monarch; he is as sovereign as the monarch, and also freer since he does not have to rule.

The dictionary was no help, and I concluded that my perplexity was due to an error in translation. But upon reading this passage in Juenger’s first and still most famous work, Storm of Steel (1920), as translated by Michael Hofmann, my perplexity was alleviated:

I also brought back my holed helmet, and keep it as a pendant to the other one that the lieutenant-colonel of the Indian Lancers had worn when leading his men against us.

It is not only the fit who survive, but also the honest. The fact that these two survivals do not coincide in time goes back once more to Genesis, to the separation of the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge.

*
Needless to say, when praying, the anarch neither requests nor thanks. Nor does he seek a magical force in prayer. How many ardent prayers have not been heard? As a historian, I linger in the cells of the condemned; as an anarch, I would like to offer them posthumous solace; and I know that the guilty need this even more than the innocent.

I was in the dungeon with Boethius and in the temple with Marie
Antoinette when her hair turned white. I was there when the mob was howling outside and the father put on his prayer thongs. The child groped for his hand. But neither the father nor the child was heard.

From an account by Stuart Hood, the first English translator of Jünger’s Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) (1939), of his conversation as a British officer in Germany with Jünger following the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945:

Of Jünger I knew that he had been much wounded, much decorated, as a very young officer in the 1914-18 war and had written of his experiences in a book published in English as Storm of Steel. It was, I seemed to remember, a description of war as the ultimate experience, an example of the military mysticism on which Fascism had drawn. Knew too that he had written a work called Der Arbeiter (The Worker), which I believed to be an approving account of the totalitarian society and of the concept of ‘total mobilization.’ . . .

One of the expectations many people had had was that when the Nazi regime collapsed literary works would emerge which had been hidden away under the dictatorship – the results of the ‘inner emigration.’ It was an expectation that was not fulfilled. It was all the more surprising to find in [Marmorklippen] what was clearly a coded but easily decipherable picture of a tyranny that had marked resemblances to the Nazi state. It had, I noticed, been published in 1939. This seemed to me to be a literary act of considerable courage. . . .

We spoke about his political past. He had, he said, at one time – long ago in the Twenties – thought that the National Socialists had something to offer Germany but he had been mistaken. He had therefore distanced himself from them. Such political honesty was rare at this time; the usual assertion was ‘Ich bin nie PG gewesen’ (I was never a Party member). Was Marmorklippen, I asked, to be thought of as an attack on Hitler and his dictatorship? No, he said, it was aimed at tyrants in general. But it had had a certain importance – thus when his son was in trouble with the authorities he had gone to see a high official to try to help the boy. During the interview a copy of the book lay on the desk between them. It was never referred to.

According to Wikipedia, Ernst Jr. was imprisoned in 1944

for engaging in “subversive discussions” in his Wilhelmshaven Naval Academy. Transferred to Penal Unit 999, he was killed near Carrara in occupied Italy on 29 November.

After the war, Jünger was initially under some suspicion for his nationalist past, and he was banned from publishing in Germany for four years by the British occupying forces because he refused to submit to the denazification procedures.

Jünger died in 1998 at the age of 102, but to this day his reputation has not outlived accusations of fascism. Compare this review today of a new book by Yvonne Sherratt titled Hitler’s Philosophers:

Dr Sherratt provides compelling studies of the philosophers who fled or died rather than play along with Hitler. . . . There was also Hannah Arendt, brilliant student and sometime mistress of Martin Heidegger, who managed to escape round-ups in an almost miraculous fashion. And it is Arendt who brings us back to the most puzzling and disturbing feature of this story.

Heidegger embraced Nazism with apparently complete enthusiasm. He was a genius: Dr Sherratt calls him “Hitler’s Superman” but asks the question whether Hitler could possibly, with his “pernicious” and ignorant views attract to his cause someone so gifted. The answer was yes, and it was Heidegger. She recounts how in 1929 Heidegger had complained about the “Jewification” of his university — the word he uses is Verjudung, one that peppers the pages of Mein Kampf.

On May 1, 1933, three months after Hitler came to power, Heidegger had joined the Nazi party in a blaze of publicity at the University of Freiburg, where he was professor and celebrated for his work in metaphysics. He had taken the precaution beforehand of disembarrassing himself of Arendt who, being Jewish, was not an ideal bedfellow. Heidegger made a speech protesting his devotion to National Socialism, and described the urgency of the need to Nazify Germany’s universities. His reward was to be made rector of Freiburg, with an inauguration ceremony that he underwent in Nazi uniform and whose programme had the words of the Horst Wessel Lied printed on its back page. He then proceeded to remove all non-Aryans from the university. With the philosopher’s approval, Brownshirts toured the campus and conducted military exercises there. Heidegger was such a disaster in his new post that even his loyalty to the party and the Führer could not preserve him in it for more than a year.

Heidegger endorsed the corruption of the German legal system under the Nazis. He also supported censorship. He maintained his devotion to Hitler until 1945, which ensured he would retain his chair and continue to have his books published.

With the fall of the Third Reich, so began Heidegger’s attempts to exculpate himself. He was outraged that there was a suggestion that he should be subject to denazification hearings, “singled out for punishment and defamation before the eyes of the whole city — indeed the whole world”. Despite the zeal with which he had supported the Nazi party and its doctrines, Heidegger was classed merely as a fellow traveller, given emeritus status, and allowed to continue to teach.

That, though, was only the beginning of his good luck. His rehabilitation continued, and was managed not least by his former lover, Hannah Arendt. She argued the case for Heidegger around the world. She celebrated and promoted his genius. Heidegger had fallen in 1934 from the rectorship at Freiburg not least because his nationalism was considered to be too “romantic”, and not of the Darwinian/Nietzschean variety favoured by the Nazis. He claimed to have found Mein Kampf, in parts, repugnant. What seems to have motivated Arendt in taking up the cudgels in favour of her former lover and teacher was not so much that she believed any of his excuses, but that the flame of their former relationship was rekindled when she met him again after her exile.

Whatever her motivation, the results were sobering. Heidegger died in 1976 with his reputation as intact as it could possibly be. Dr Sherratt describes him as being now the “star” of continental philosophy. The Jewish thinkers such as Arendt, Benjamin and Adorno, whom Nazis like Heidegger drove out of the country, are more peripheral. We like to pride ourselves on having finally disgraced and marginalised Nazism. Perhaps we should not be so sure.

See also, because this blog used to at least sometimes be about the practice of law, this post by Scott Greenfield:

The players in our system all have the potential to cause criminal defendants much grief. From the cops, who can lie and manufacture evidence, to the prosecutors whose discretion can be colored by how much they hate us or want to make us look like chumps, to the judges who decide critical motions or, if it comes to it, the length of time our clients are guests of the government, we have far more people, and far more powerful people, to deal with than any civil lawyer can imagine. And they’re all easily angered. And they tend to get miffed pretty easily. And they tend to take it out on us in ways we can never prove.

. . .

Here’s the 411: Blawgers who take a stand on anything real open themselves up to retaliation. We make ourselves targets. We take risks. Huge risks. And sometimes, we get spanked hard for what we do.

More than once, while I’m sitting on a hard bench waiting for my case to be called, will a clerk come from behind and whisper in my ear that the judge didn’t appreciate what I wrote last week.  More than once has a prosecutor greeted me with a sly smile and ”I saw your blog the other day,” just to let me know that he can’t wait to take me down a few pegs.

Readers have no clue the risk blawgers take with every post.

Not all “blawgers,” mind you. I see the criminal defense lawyers on twitter whose bio says they’re blawgers, though I’ve never read them. I sometimes stop by to see what they write, and cringe at the insipid blurb from the paper with nothing remotely approaching thought or insight. Just words murdered without purpose, exactly as their marketer told them to do. They take no risk. They take no stand. They serve no purpose.

But those of us who try to write something that provokes thought and challenges the powerful take risks every day. Sometimes I think I’m nuts, putting things online that will almost certainly anger someone who I will someday have to stand before. I ask myself, “what am I thinking, taking the risk of stating an opinion publicly that will come back to bite me in the ass?”

. . .

Criminal defense blawgers make choices too, and the ones who stand for something have made the decision to do what they can to make our system better for everyone, even if we face personal consequences for what we write. Kris Kristofferson wrote “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” We’ve got everything to lose, yet we stand up anyway. And we do it for freedom.

After I have stood behind the bar all night, it may already be light out,
often close to noon, by the time I awaken – but I am still lying in the dark,
for I sleep behind a thick curtain in the alcove. I then spend another quarter
hour in bed before getting up.

If I say, “in order to pray” it may sound strange. Of course, this word is
quite worn, and it has been corrupted by the padres. Religio, as we know,
harks back to a word (re-ligo) meaning “bond”; and that is precisely what
the anarch rejects. He does not go in for Moses with the Ten Commandments
or, indeed, for any prophets. Nor does he wish to hear anything concerning
gods or rumors about them, except as a historian – or unless they appear to
him. That is when the conflicts begin.

So if I state, “in order to pray,” I am following an innate instinct that is
no weaker than the sexual drive – in fact, even stronger. The two are alike
insofar as foul things can happen when they are suppressed.

Regarding this need, the anarch is again no different from anyone else.
But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best
energies. He accepts no substitute for his gold. He knows his freedom, and
also what it is worth its weight in. The equation balances when he is offered
something credible. The result is ONE.

There can be no doubt that gods have appeared, not only in ancient times
but even late in history; they feasted with us and fought at our sides. But
what good is the splendor of bygone banquets to a starving man? What good
is the clinking of gold that a poor man hears through the wall of time? The
gods must be called.

*
The anarch lets all this be; he can bide his time. He has his ethos, but not
morals. He recognizes lawfulness, but not law; he despises rules. Whenever
ethos goes into shalts and shalt-nots, it is already corrupted. Still, it can
harmonize with them, depending on location and circumstances, briefly or at
length, just as I harmonize here with the tyrant for as long as I like.

One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is
intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians
(”God is goodness”) castrate the Good Lord. This is a Saturnian trait.

Natural law has been twisted every which way – from legitimation to
brutal violence to a paradisal idyll. This is grounded in the possibility of
reading anything at all into nature. “It is everything at once.” Well, fine;
then let every human being get his own bit from Being.

The random and the arbitrary begin in the realm of molecules. There must
be a crack in the universe from the very start. The very word “nature”
contains a “nay.” Genesis offers marvelous hints, but only rumors, as if a
shepherd had been listening at an unclosed door.

Lawfulness must be sought in the atoms and even deeper, including our
own atoms. From these depths, the ethical and aesthetic judgment reacts to
the finest variations. That is why injustice usually appears as ugly. The
dangers increase in the ascent, as on a tightrope without a safety net, or as on
the Sirat, that sliver of a bridge across the chasm of hell. Never is the
temptation to summon the gods more powerful and never is there greater
merit in resisting it.

As a historian, and only as such, I am a positivist. Lawfulness is valid so
long as it is observed and can be observed. A good conscience – though not,
of course, in the form of moral arrogance – is one of the prerequisites. It is
not only the fit who survive, but also the honest. The fact that these two
survivals do not coincide in time goes back once more to Genesis, to the
separation of the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge.

*
Needless to say, when praying, the anarch neither requests nor thanks.
Nor does he seek a magical force in prayer. How many ardent prayers have
not been heard? As a historian, I linger in the cells of the condemned; as an
anarch, I would like to offer them posthumous solace; and I know that the
guilty need this even more than the innocent.

I was in the dungeon with Boethius and in the temple with Marie
Antoinette when her hair turned white. I was there when the mob was
howling outside and the father put on his prayer thongs. The child groped for
his hand. But neither the father nor the child was heard.

*
Nevertheless, prayer comes from an innate drive. It is more important
than food and drink, since it testifies to more than transient life. It takes us
behind the bleak stage set with which knowledge disguises the universe.
Water is seen differently in retorts than in the aqueducts leading to big
cities, and differently again in the ocean – and as the water of life in prayer.

The padres set great store by addressing prayers to personal gods:
“Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person
and a shape and endowed with a will.”

That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to have
anything to do with that conception. As for the One God: while he may be
able to shape persons, he is not a person himself, and that he is already a
patriarchal prejudice.

A neuter One is beyond our grasp, while man converses with the Many
Gods on equal terms, whether as their inventor or as their discoverer. In any
case, it is man who named the gods. This is not to be confused with a high-level
soliloquy. Divinity must, without a doubt, be inside us and be
recognized as being inside us; otherwise we would have no concept of gods.

“For a God reigns within us” (Hölderlin). “ONE is the start of everything”
(Philolaus). “A God is the greatest among gods and among men, not
comparable to mortals in shape or thought” (Xenophanes). “A whirlwind of
multiple shapes detaches itself from the Totality” (Democritus).

And, over and over again, Heraclitus. We should not make a fuss about
the numinous; it lights on everyone – every man has his Sinai and also his
Golgotha.

I am prompted now to write (albeit briefly) by Eugene Volokh’s post yesterday, aptly titled Harshly Criticizing Judges (or Others) for Their Past Conduct = Crime?, about a unanimous Indiana Court of Appeals decision published last week. Incidentally, I’m again impressed by Volokh’s uncanny ability to confront the outrageous in the law without outrage.

It occurs to me that by the logic of this decision this very blog, People v. State, the very theme of which is to point out the criminal nature of most of what is done in the name of the spook whose name is the State, could get me not only kicked out of the law business, a possibility I don’t fear, but also convicted of a felony. It further occurs to me that I myself could name off the top of my head three judges whom I consider (based on well considered and readily articulable facts) “child abusers” in the sense clearly meant by the defendant whose conviction was upheld by this decision. Incidentally, the author of this decision dissented from an Indiana Court of Appeals decision which would have overturned the conviction and 45 year sentence of an innocent man but which was itself gratuitously overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court.

To conclude this otherwise brief post, let me quote Stirner in The Only One and His Own on liberty of the press:

Do I perhaps hereby show myself an opponent of the liberty of the press? On the contrary, I only assert that one will never get it if one wants only it, the liberty of the press, i.e. if one sets out only for an unrestricted permission. Only beg right along for this permission: you may wait forever for it, for there is no one in the world who could give it to you. As long as you want to have yourselves “entitled” to the use of the press by a permission, i.e. liberty of the press, you live in vain hope and complaint.

“Nonsense! Why, you yourself, who harbor such thoughts as stand in your book, can unfortunately bring them to publicity only through a lucky chance or by stealth; nevertheless you will inveigh against one’s pressing and importuning his own State till it gives the refused permission to print?” But an author thus addressed would perhaps — for the impudence of such people goes far — give the following reply: “Consider well what you say! What then do I do to procure myself liberty of the press for my book? Do I ask for permission, or do I not rather, without any question of legality, seek a favorable occasion and grasp it in complete recklessness of the State and its wishes? I — the terrifying word must be uttered — I cheat the State. You unconsciously do the same. From your tribunes you talk it into the idea that it must give up its sanctity and inviolability, it must lay itself bare to the attacks of writers, without needing on that account to fear danger. But you are imposing on it; for its existence is done for as soon as it loses its unapproachableness. To you indeed it might well accord liberty of writing, as England has done; you are believers in the State and incapable of writing against the State, however much you would like to reform it and ‘remedy its defects.’ But what if opponents of the State availed themselves of free utterance, and stormed out against Church, State, morals, and everything ‘sacred’ with inexorable reasons? You would then be the first, in terrible agonies, to call into life the September laws. Too late would you then rue the stupidity that earlier made you so ready to fool and palaver into compliance the State, or the government of the State. — But, I prove by my act only two things. This for one, that the liberty of the press is always bound to ‘favorable opportunities,’ and accordingly will never be an absolute liberty; but secondly this, that he who would enjoy it must seek out and, if possible, create the favorable opportunity, availing himself of his own advantage against the State; and counting himself and his will more than the State and every ‘superior’ power. Not in the State, but only against it, can the liberty of the press be carried through; if it is to be established, it is to be obtained not as the consequence of a petition but as the work of an insurrection. Every petition and every motion for liberty of the press is already an insurrection, be it conscious or unconscious: a thing which Philistine halfness alone will not and cannot confess to itself until, with a shrinking shudder, it shall see it clearly and irrefutably by the outcome. For the requested liberty of the press has indeed a friendly and well-meaning face at the beginning, as it is not in the least minded ever to let the ‘insolence of the press’ come into vogue; but little by little its heart grows more hardened, and the inference flatters its way in that really a liberty is not a liberty if it stands in the service of the State, of morals, or of the law. A liberty indeed from the coercion of censorship, it is yet not a liberty from the coercion of law. The press, once seized by the lust for liberty, always wants to grow freer, till at last the writer says to himself, really I am not wholly free till I ask about nothing; and writing is free only when it is my own, dictated to me by no power or authority, by no faith, no dread; the press must not be free — that is too little — it must be mine: — ownness of the press or property in the press, that is what I will take.

“Why, liberty of the press is only permission of the press, and the State never will or can voluntarily permit me to grind it to nothingness by the press.”

Let us now, in conclusion, bettering the above language, which is still vague, owing to the phrase ‘liberty of the press,’ rather put it thus: “liberty of the press, the liberals’ loud demand, is assuredly possible in the State; yes, it is possible only in the State, because it is a permission, and consequently the permitter (the State) must not be lacking. But as permission it has its limit in this very State, which surely should not in reason permit more than is compatible with itself and its welfare: the State fixes for it this limit as the law of its existence and of its extension. That one State brooks more than another is only a quantitative distinction, which alone, nevertheless, lies at the heart of the political liberals: they want in Germany, i. e., only a ’more extended, broader accordance of free utterance.’ The liberty of the press which is sought for is an affair of the people’s, and before the people (the State) possesses it I may make no use of it. From the standpoint of property in the press, the situation is different. Let my people, if they will, go without liberty of free press, I will manage to print by force or ruse; I get my permission to print only from — myself and my strength.

If the press is my own, I as little need a permission of the State for employing it as I seek that permission in order to blow my nose. The press is my property from the moment when nothing is more to me than myself; for from this moment State, Church, people, society, etc., cease, because they have to thank for their existence only the disrespect that I have for myself, and with the vanishing of this undervaluation they themselves are extinguished: they exist only when they exist above me, exist only as powers and power-holders. Or can you imagine a State whose citizens one and all think nothing of it? It would be as certainly a dream, an existence in seeming, as ‘united Germany.’

The press is my own as soon as I myself am my own, a self- owned man: to the egoist belongs the world, because he belongs to no power of the world.

With this my press might still be very unfree, as e.g. at this moment. But the world is large, and one helps himself as well as he can. If I were willing to abate from the property of my press, I could easily attain the point where I might everywhere have as much printed as my fingers produced. But, as I want to assert my property, I must necessarily swindle my enemies. ‘Would you not accept their permission if it were given you?’ Certainly, with joy; for their permission would be to me a proof that I had fooled them and started them on the road to ruin. I am not concerned for their permission, but so much the more for their folly and their overthrow. I do not sue for their permission as if I flattered myself (like the political liberals) that we both, they and I, could make out peaceably alongside and with each other, yes, probably raise and prop each other; but I sue for it in order to make them bleed to death by it, that the permitters themselves may cease at last. I act as a conscious enemy, overreaching them and utilizing their heedlessness.

The press is mine when I recognize outside myself no judge whatever over its utilization, i.e. when my writing is no longer determined by morality or religion or respect for the State laws or the like, but by me and my egoism!”

I’m white. Back in law school at the University of Wisconsin I participated in a moot court competition. The topic was the constitutionality of affirmative action in law school admissions. We had to argue both the “pro” side in front of one panel of three of our fellow law students and the “con” side in front of another panel of three of our fellow law students. Personally, after examining both sides, I had arrived at the opinion that if state-funded law school had a legitimate purpose it was not primarily to provide an education for people who wanted to be lawyers but to provide lawyers for the people, and that therefore affirmative action in law school admissions was constitutional, for the same reason that affirmative action in hiring correctional officers, to better reflect the racial diversity of the people being “corrected,” made all kinds of sense and was constitutional.

But imagine my surprise when I walked into the appointed classroom to argue the “con” side and was confronted by an all-black panel of my law school peers. (The law school had affirmative action but few black students.) Part of “my” argument (it didn’t originate with me) was that affirmative action “stigmatized” minorities who are accepted to law school, tarring all of them with the suspicion that they are not really qualified and were only admitted because of their race.

Maybe it was just me, but this argument didn’t seem to go over well with the panel.

Some part of me did feel betrayed.

The copy of On the Marble Cliffs I read (which I bought from the seller in “fair condition,” for a more-than-fair price, compared to the alternatives) was published by Penguin Modern Classics in 1970, with an Introduction written by a George Steiner in 1969, the year of my birth. Assuming this Wikipedia article is about the same George Steiner, Steiner wrote the Introduction when he was about 40, and is 83 today. He would have been about 10 when On the Marble Cliffs was first published in Nazi Germany in 1939. According to Wikipedia:

Steiner’s first formal education took place at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris. In 1940, during World War II, Steiner’s father once again relocated his family, this time to New York City. Within a month of their move, the Nazis occupied Paris, and of the many Jewish children in Steiner’s class at school, he was one of only two who survived the war.

According to another article in Wikipedia:

[Jünger] served in World War II as an army captain. Assigned to an administrative position in Paris, he socialized with prominent artists of the day such as Picasso and Jean Cocteau. His early time in France is described in his diary Gärten und Straßen (1942, Gardens and Streets).

Jünger appears on the fringes of the Stauffenberg bomb plot. He was clearly an inspiration to anti-Nazi conservatives in the German Army, and while in Paris he was close to the old, mostly Prussian officers who carried out the assassination attempt against Hitler. He was only peripherally involved in the events however, and in the aftermath suffered only dismissal from the army in the summer of 1944, rather than execution.

His elder son Ernst Jr., then a Kriegsmarinecadet, was imprisoned that year for engaging in “subversive discussions” in his Wilhelmshaven Naval Academy. Transferred to Penal Unit999, he was killed near Carrara in occupied Italy on 29 November.

Steiner’s Introduction, borrowing from Jünger’s journals, is not flattering. He writes:

Admirers of Ernst Jünger, apologists for the right-wing elitism and nationalist mystique he advocated in the 1920s and 30s, have hailed [On the Marble Cliffs] as anti-Nazi. It has been widely asserted that this arcane fable is the only major act of resistance, of inner sabotage, carried out by German literature under Hitler. Jünger himself has been more circumspect, and rightly so. . . . Even the bestial image of the Flayer’s Copse is less trenchant or unambiguous than might appear. The analogy with the concentration camps about which Jünger had heard and intimated a good deal as early as 1939, but against which he never raised a public cry, is evident and graphic. . . .

. . . At the nadir of the Reich, Jünger still joined other Knights of the Order of Pour le merite in commemorative ceremonies in Berlin. . . .

. . . Watching a raid on the Renault works in March 1942, the chevalier of the marble cliffs comments that several hundred are reported slain and over a thousand gravely hurt: ‘but seen from my quarter, the affair looked rather like stage-lighting in a shadow-theatre.’ This is the focus of the dandy. I mean the word in its strong, condottiere sense, as comprehending asceticism and cool courage. The dandy confronts the sum of life but keeps it at gauntlet’s length. Like his counterparts in the dramas of Montherlant, there is one temptation only which Jünger finds it really difficult to resist: . . . the temptation to despise human beings. . . .

A ‘twentieth-century classic’? Perhaps so. And in an almost mathematical sense. On the Marble Cliffs is a theorem of limitation. It enacts the precise incommensurability between a certain cast of abstract humanism or high civilization and the realities of modern terror. In its ritual tranquillity, in its candid suggestion that flight into archaic utopia (the domain of privacy, of aesthetic and antiquarian cultivation) is the only way out, Jünger’s legend embodies a tragic failure of nerve. . . .

Steiner concludes:

The incapacity to feel lest feeling grow corrupt and banal is perhaps the paralyzing dilemma of a classic, necessarily elitist culture. [On the Marble Cliffs] has importance as a statement of this dilemma. The nocturnal word which Jünger himself applies to this condition is tristia. Through it blow the coldest winds from Limbo. Robbed of his only child, seeing Germany collapse into hideous abjection, Ernst Jünger attends a final, absurd meeting of local Nazi officials. He watches Hitler’s thugs scheming their last act of murder or getting ready to scurry for cover. Yet no cry, no leap of rage escapes him. He notes in his diary: ‘I lack the capacity for hatred’. There have been too many moments in our savage time when the absence of hatred is the same as the absence of love.

Thus Steiner’s Introduction is an indictment of both the book and the man. I know not how one can judge the man. The following excerpt will suffice to defend the book:

At the sight I felt tears start to my eyes, but they were such tears as fill us with wonderful exultation together with their sorrow. On this pale mask from which the scalped flesh hung in ribbons and which looked on the fires from the elevation of the torturer’s pike there played the shadow of a smile intensely sweet and joyful, and I knew that on this day the weaknesses had fallen from this noble man with each step of his martyrdom, like the rags of a king disguised in beggar’s weeds. Then a shudder ran through my inmost heart, for I realized that he had been worthy of his forefathers, the tamers of monsters; he had slain the dragon fear in his own breast. Then I was certain of something which I had often doubted — there were still noble beings amongst us in whose hearts lived unshakeable knowledge of a lofty ordered life. And since a high example leads us in its train, I took an oath before this head that from that day forth I would rather fall with the free men than go in triumph among the slaves.

First, the “tyrant” who rules Eumeswil, the Condor, is revealed in the final pages to be himself a “forest fleer,” deciding to go on a Great Hunt “beyond the desert and into the woods,” along with his right-hand man (the Domo, who feels uneasy about the whole thing) and a retinue including the narrator. As the narrator had explained earlier in the novel, the anarch lurks in everyone, including the monarch, and power is burdensome for the anarch. “[E]veryone is anarchic; this is precisely what is normal about us.”

Second, we learn from an epilogue to the narrator’s “notebooks” written by his brother years later that no one who went on the Great Hunt was ever heard from again. We know from these notebooks that this brother is a “typical liberal,” and that the narrator when he was alive gave the phrase “capital punishment,” as well as “freedom of the press,” a wide berth at the family table, for if he had voiced even the slightest criticism he would have laid hands on his brother’s “most hallowed treasure.” But the brother in his epilogue writes:

Reading these pages has thrown me into an inner conflict — between the private man and the historian. My brother did not love his family. Such was his peculiar character. But we loved him. His presentation is larded with judgments and, in my opinion, misjudgments that would justify my burning it as a private person; I have thought about it. Burnings take place with every legacy, perhaps to purge the deceased’s image in our memories, perhaps for the sake of his family.

I, however, am a historian and come from a family of historians. My dear brother — one of the titles he loved was “historian by blood.”

Eumeswil is widely and justifiably regarded as spiritual autobiography, but with this epilogue, written in a different voice than the one we have heard throughout, Juenger reminds us again that what we have read is a novel, and that its fictional narrator should not necessarily be identified with Juenger himself. Thus, it was misleading of me to title some of my recent posts which quoted from Eumeswil “Ernst Juenger on Capital Punishment,” or “Ernst Juenger on Benjamin Tucker.” Thus, it would also be a mistake to regard the narrator of Eumeswil as intended by Juenger as a model for how a person should live his life.

The literary figure of the “anarch” as expounded by the fictional narrator of Eumeswil is striking, but is put in perspective and in its place, as a figure among other figures, by the epilogue. It can be cut down to definitional size as follows: Anarchy is rulerlessness. Rulers are human beings who have the right to make laws for others. The anarch understands that there are no rulers, and sees that society is rulerless.

The anarchist, by contrast, according to the narrator of Eumeswil, emphasizes the will at the expense of the substance. (What exactly then the anarchist wills can be guessed at and stated by individual self-described anarchists, but does not appear to lend itself to precise definition, since the anarchist’s presumed goal — Anarchy — is the presently existing reality.)

The narrator arguably makes too much of this distinction between the anarch and the anarchist, or makes it too dogmatically. Would the pure anarch lift a finger to help or make others see what he sees, as Juenger himself did with Eumeswil and other novels? Would he say aloud, at the family table or elsewhere, that unnecessary killing is morally murder?

The reader of Eumeswil will have to judge for himself, and I think this is precisely what Juenger intended.