[In the following essay, Keller traces the influence of Rimbaud's "Le Bateau ivre" on Jünger's work.]

Looking back to the First World War, Jünger documents his enthusiasm for Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau ivre' in recalling a visit of two fellow officers, to whom he read Rimbaud's poem, which, as he notes, occupied him greatly at that time. One of these officers was Werner von Fritsch who, twenty years later, rose to celebrity in the so-called Fritsch-Krise, as one of the first prominent opponents of Hitler's aggressive policies and one of the politician's first victims within the military. According to his surviving, unnamed fellow-visitor, Fritsch summed up his view of Jünger's recitation with the sentence: 'This man would do well to retire', a judgement which Jünger considered both well-intended and entirely apposite.

The time alluded to here was the year 1919, when Jünger was stationed in Hannover in the Mittelstrasse 7a, in quarters traditionally popular with officers in service there. Thus he points out that one of his predecessors in the flat he was occupying then was none other than the old Paul von Hindenburg, the same man who had presented the coveted 'Pour le mérite' to him, with the sobering commentary that the awarding of such a high distinction had rarely been beneficial for a young officer. Jünger's proximity to the past and future leaders of the German army demonstrates how much he himself was part of this establishment at that time. However, in conjunction with Jünger's own comment that the classification 'Reader' in a personal file hardly constituted a recommendation for a successful military career, Fritsch's suggestion clearly indicates Jünger's position as an outsider in this circle.

The encounter with Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau ivre' occurs at an important point in Jünger's life—at a time when he ceases to be a soldier and begins to become a writer. On the advice of his father, he had begun to write the first version of the account of his experiences in the First World War, published at his own expense in 1920 under the title In Stahlgewittern. More than fifty years later Jünger would describe this venture, in striking agreement with the most recent commentaries on this period of this life, as an attempt to come to terms with an 'overpowering, indeed deadly experience', by means of writing—suggesting at the same time that this attempt might not have been entirely successful. In order to complete the transition which according to his own judgement fifty years later, the 'Bateau ivre' had 'almost' brought about in Jünger's life, a new attempt had to be made. This attempt resulted in the publication in 1929 of Das abenteuerliche Herz, which once and for all broke with the description of the wartime experience. Here, the choice between Bellona and Athene, which Jünger mentions later, has finally been decided in favour of the latter. It is worth noting that here too reference is made to Rimbaud's poem.

In his choice of Rimbaud as representative of the longing for a life beyond the confines of middle class existence, Jünger hardly had a claim to originality. Before the First World War Rimbaud had played this role in the works of Trakl and Heym, and after it, in those of Brecht and Klaus Mann. It is the attraction to this particular poem of this poet, and to the motif of shipwreck, which makes the case of Jünger special.

The theme of shipwreck that constitutes the central motif of Rimbaud's poem had been one of the favoured topics of European Romanticism. Its importance in the works of Eichendorff and Brentano has been demonstrated by Bernhard Blume, who shows that in both cases, shipwreck is seen in terms of a failure, whose consequences only could be overcome by divine intervention. However, Jünger never mentions these two writers in his works and diaries. The impact of Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau ivre' on Jünger in the early twenties seems to be based not only on the image of the shipwreck itself, but also on Rimbaud's reinterpretation of it as 'the end of an experience and the beginning of another', as a recent critic of the poem put it. The concept of failure implicit in this symbol is not seen, as Eva Riedel points out, as a termination, but as the precondition for a new existence.

An overview of Jünger's works from In Stahlgewittern to Eine gefährliche Begegnung shows how central for him was this metaphor in which he later saw a key for understanding our time. The survivor of the First World War uses it in various ways to describe the situation in the barrages of the Battle of the Somme, and his diary entries during the Second World War show that this metaphor has lost nothing of its attraction for him. This fascination is expressed in his often lengthy reflections on the collection of works on shipwrecks which he made during those years, as well as in his remarks on E. A. Poe's 'A descent into Maelström', a work in which he sees 'eine besonders gelungene Diagnose und Prognose unserer Zeit'. In his later readings of such events, the emphasis shifts from the problem of sheer survival to the idea of a new beginning, emerging out of adversity. This is evident, for example, in his diary entry of December 29, 1944. The same principle is also applied in a more general context.

In his comments on Isaiah, it is elevated in accordance with his neo-platonic world-view to a cosmic plane, whereby the prophet's apocalyptic vision of destruction and new birth is explained as 'eine Art Dreifelderwirtschaft …: irdischer Aufbau, Brache, geistige Frucht'. The same principle also underlies the biography of Lucius de Geer, the hero of his novel Heliopolis, in which he sums up the experience of his war years. The disaster which strikes de Geer becomes the basis for his elevation to a higher social and spiritual sphere. And it is certainly not fortuitous that the point of change is marked by a close call at sea.

These examples explain to a certain extent Jünger's enthusiasm for 'Le Bateau ivre'. They do not explain why this particular poem was selected by him at this point in his intellectual biography, and only then. Here, a look at the circumstances in which this poem was conceived, as well as those in which it was received, might help. Rimbaud wrote 'Le Bateau ivre', when he was about to break with his way of life in Charlesville, a fact to which considerable significance is attached by most critics commenting on this poem and this period of Rimbaud's life. Jünger encountered Rimbaud at a time when he was in the process of dealing with his First World War experience and was considering a career as a writer. More than fifty years later he describes his situation in those days in the following terms:

Es kommt mir vor, als ob er (namely, Ernst Herhaus, whose diary Der zerbrochene Schlaf Jünger comments upon here, [EK]), sich in ähnlicher Lage wie ich vor fünfzig Jahren befände: ein Übermächtiges, ja tödliches Erleben ist durch Autorschaft zu bewältigen. Gelingt es nicht, so droht Versandung und Wiederholung … So schilderte ich den Ersten Weltkrieg im Erleben von vier Jahren, dann eines Monats, endlich eines Tags.

In either case, this change to a new way of life could not be achieved at once. Rimbaud made several attempts to flee from Charlesville, before he finally joined Verlaine in Paris in September 1871. Following in the footsteps of his father, Jünger at first tried the career of a natural scientist with his studies in Leipzig, abandoning them in favour of the role of political activist and commentator. After the disastrous failure of his 'Schließt Euch zusammen'-appeal in 1926, he finally settled for the existence of a nonpolitical writer with the publication of Das abenteuerliche Herz in 1929. Three recent critics of Jünger's life and work, of such different persuasions as Gerda Liebchen, Hans-Harald Müller and Julien Hervier, agree that this work marks a new stage in Jünger's development as a writer.

It may be mentioned here that reference is made in two ways to Rimbaud in Das abenteuerliche Herz, in both cases, to underpin Jünger's idiosyncratic world view. Thus, he quotes these lines of 'Le Bateau ivre':

     'Ich wollte, die Kinder hätten mit mir all die
     Arten
     Goldener und singender Fische gesehn'

as testimony for a view of nature opposed to the purely instrumental perspective of science or commerce. Besides Rimbaud, Dürer and Matthias Claudius are also referred to as typifying this view. The second reference to the French writer occurs in the opening paragraph in Das abenteuerliche Herz. This demonstrates the proximity of Jünger's concept of writing to that of Rimbaud, as formulated in his Lettres du voyant. Rimbaud had expressed his view thus: 'Car Je est un autre … Cela m'est évident: j'éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l'écoute…'. Jünger, justifying his interest in his own personality as a starting point for writing says: 'Einmal besitze ich das bestimmte Gefühl, einem im Grunde fremden und rätselhaften Wesen nachzuspüren'.

But here the similarity ends. Whereas Rimbaud proceeds to describe the transfiguration of the poet into a visionary, Jünger settles for the concept of the writer as a witness, and continues:

'Dann aber weiß ich auch, daß mein Grunderlebnis, das, was eben durch den lebendigen Vorgang sich zum Ausdruck bringt, das für meine Generation typische Erlebnis ist …'

The formal consequence of this decision is the choice of the diary as Jünger's favourite form of literary communication—one to which he adhered to both in his first work. In Stahlgewittern and in Das abenteuerliche Herz, as well as in Strahlungen and Siebzig verweht.

Once this period of transition from the soldier to the writer, from the chronicler of the war experience to the commentator of broader cultural issues, had been completed, Jünger's attitude to Rimbaud took a different turn. Where he still refers to him, it is in the context of cultural history, using Rimbaud's work as a marker for particular literary trends. Reflecting on Rimbaud in this way, he wavers between seeing him as one of the last representatives of nineteenth-century poetry, on the one hand, and, on the other, as one of the first precursors of modernity. This reflects a similar dichotomy in French literary criticism. Regarding Rimbaud's poetry as 'ein letztes Fanal … der kopernikanischen Dichtung', namely of traditional poetry, in Blätter und Steine as well as in Strahlungen he seems to share René Etiemble's opinion of Rimbaud's poetry, namely as inspired by the practices of 'les parnassiens'. In 1970 this view changes and Rimbaud is seen in accordance with the judgment of André Breton and Roland Barthes as one of the 'Kirchenväter der Moderne'. As far as Jünger's own readings at that time were concerned he seemed to prefer Verlaine's poetry to that of Rimbaud, noting that his copy of Verlaine's verses was among his most thumbed books. Verlaine, for whom, not unlike Jünger, writing was a means of stabilizing his existence, seemed at that time closer to him than the poet who fell silent at the beginning of his twenties.

Looking back to Jünger's beginnings, we note, however that together with Huysmans, Rimbaud is one of the French writers with whom he began his life-long dialogue with French literary figures, amongst whom the diarists had a particularly favoured position. It is a dialogue which might well have made its contribution to that 'humanistische Wende' which separates the early works of Jünger from his later ones. The encounter with Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau ivre', a work embodying many of Jünger's preferred motifs, appears in retrospect as that event which marked for him the début of his career as a writer, as well as providing one of those jolts which helped him in the end to abandon 'Bellona' for the sake of 'Athena'.