SOURCE: "The Adventures of Ernst Jünger," in Books Abroad, Vol. 32, No. 4, Autumn, 1958, pp. 365-68.

[In the following essay, Cooley traces the place of adventure in Jünger's life and work.]

Ernst Jünger's career as an author has been built around the search for adventure. With Germany, he found what he sought in war, and was finally appalled by the consequences. With her, too, he has struggled with the spirit of nihilism, both in the acute political form to which the German people fell prey between 1918 and 1945, and in the private realm of his own life. From his later books it appears that he feels both struggles to have been successful, at least temporarily.

Jünger may fairly be viewed as a more purely German writer of prose, just as Stefan George was a purely German poet, whereas Hesse and Rilke would be artists with a more European outlook who simply happened to be born to the German language. Jünger's career before 1945, at least, was in fact bound up inextricably with Germany's fate. In this year appeared his own formal break with the past, the pamphlet Der Friede. Whether his own rejection of nihilism and violence, and his recent quests for new experience in travel and metaphysics are part of a German trend is still uncertain.

Jünger's early life stands under the sign of Mars. Born in Heidelberg in 1885, he went almost directly from school to the battlefields of World War One. Wounded fourteen times, he received the Pour le Mérite. His book In Stahlgewittern celebrates the military virtues with unabashed fervor. In the same warlike vein were Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, Das Wäldchen 125, Feuer und Blut, and the first version of Das abenteuerliche Herz.

If war was Jünger's first formative experience, natural science was his next. In far-flung studies and travels he discovered the worlds of zoology, botany, mineralogy. They reappear vividly in such descriptions as those of the Naples aquarium in Das abenteuerliche Herz, or the herbarium in Auf den Marmorklippen. His scientific training helped to model his prose into its hard, polished forms; precise, yet rich in suggestion and meaning, with a powerful inner rhythm which reached its heights in Auf den Marmorklippen.

Politics was Jünger's third and certainly his most perilous adventure. In the years after 1918 he flirted seriously with the Right wing, ultranationalistic groups that badgered the Weimar Republic. For a time he even edited a magazine for the Stahlhelm, the militant veterans' group of the Twenties. He militated in the ranks of the new Reichswehr, the semisecret Führerheer, or "army of leaders," that subverted the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, thus playing into the hands of the Nazis, the "street rabble" which their snobbish aristocrats professed to despise.

Jünger's later regrets about this period are revealed in his work. Here the nationalist groupings are usually identified as the mythical order of Mauretania, upon which Max Bense commented at length in his absorbing study Ptolemäer und Mauretanier. "Instead of remaining at my studies," Jünger confesses in a revealing passage of Das abenteuerliche Herz, "I enlisted in the ranks of the Mauretanians, those subaltern polytechnicians of power."

Power and technics in their widest implications became Jünger's next preoccupations. In an imaginative, yet sociologically profound study entitled Der Arbeiter, he dissected the emotional structure of the modern worker and compared it with that of the soldier. In this light he examined the terrible dilemmas which total mobilization and total automation present for the human race.

When did Jünger, now grown taciturn in public life, decisively turn away from his earlier gods of power? It is hard to say exactly, but it is interesting that his next book, appearing less than two years after Hitler seized power, was Blätter und Steine, a delightful collection of rather whimsical essays. His fanciful Afrikanische Spiele were based on a brief experience with the French Foreign Legion before World War One and continued the "escapist" line in many respects. So did the second, self-censored version of Das abenteuerliche Herz, a remarkable short volume of scientific or pseudo-scientific sketches, allegorical fantasies, dream sequences, and poetical renditions of existential philosophy, from which much of the blood and gore of the earlier edition was missing.

Jünger promptly answered the call to the colors again in 1939 and served on both Eastern and Western fronts. All the available evidence suggests that this time his enthusiasm was greatly diminished. With some astonishment, Germany witnessed the somewhat tardy withdrawal from circulation, apparently on Gestapo orders, of the allegorical novel which may prove to be the finest of his career, Auf den Marmorklippen. It is this book which many of Jünger's present admirers contend places him among the ranks of the "inner emigration," the writers who stayed inside the Nazi pseudo-society but uttered veiled protests against it.

The plot, if it could be called one, is wholly removed from any single real setting; it is zeitentrückt, "removed from time," as the Germans like to say. The "Chief Forester," a villainous, backward ruler with an insatiable lust for power and destruction, preys, from the depths of his dark forest, upon the serene, time-ripened community which stands on the Marble Cliffs, overlooking the sea. In the idyllic civilization of the Marble Cliffs, the conservative European values are symbolized in the gardens and herbarium of the narrator, who finally flees the encroaching hordes of the barbarian enemy with the oath that "for all the future it was better lonesomely to fall with the free, than to go forward in triumph with the serfs."

Though the orthodox interpretation of this book outside Germany has been that it was anti-Nazi allegory. Jünger himself has appeared to deny this in his next book. This was Strahlungen, a collection of wartime diaries which, due mainly to French curiosity about Jünger's period of service with the occupation in Paris, was first published under French license in the French occupation zone of Germany (despite the fact that Jünger himself had not yet been pronounced "de-Nazified"). Commenting on an article about Auf den Marmorklippen by the Swiss critic Naef. Jünger writes. "If an intelligent critic like him, who can have no doubts about the real situation in Germany, relates the contents of this book to our political circumstances, then carelessness, if not malice, must have played a role."

Yet the book is certainly allegory on the total plight of Western civilization in this century, even if not specifically meant to deal with the German situation. And in the same book, Strahlungen, does not Jünger contemptuously refer to Hitler as "Knièbolo," a mad tyrant, and does he not tell with obvious approval what he knew of the unsuccessful officers' conspiracy to kill him during the summer of 1944?

Ernst Jünger, as he all but admits, was probably in considerable danger himself. His protector, General von Stülpnagel, the German commander in Paris whom Jünger calls "one of the last knights," killed himself to avoid the "lemurs," as Jünger calls them, of the Gestapo. Bitter, too, are his thoughts on the useless death of his son, Ernst, in some of the late fighting on the Italian front. And by the time he came to describe, at the book's end, the entry of American tanks into Kirchhorst in April, 1945, he had realized that, "From such a defeat, one does not recover as once after Jena or Sedan. This means a turning point in the life of the nations, and not only innumerable men, but also much that lies in our innermost, must die during such a transition." With many of his country men come to this realization very late indeed, Jünger gazes into the ashes, hopefully looking for the Phoenix of a new Germany.

Heliopolis continues this search and projects further some of the prophetic themes suggested in Auf den Marmorklippen. It is roughly comparable to some of our better science fiction. Somewhere in a southern civilization of the future stands Heliopolis, the seat of two hostile rulers. One is the aristocratic "Proconsul," in whose cause Lucius, Jünger's hero, serves. The other is the "Landvogt," who commands the power of the masses and the street. Caught between the two and reminiscent of the Jews in Nazi Germany, are the "Parsees," a persecuted race. Space ships, televisors, power rays are matter-of-fact accessories.

In the end, Lucius, recognizing the hopelessly Utopian nature of the Proconsul's desire to preserve the old culture through enlightened despotism, leaves his service to answer a mysterious summons from the "Regent." The latter is a third, remote and apparently all-powerful ruler who may be God, or the ideal state, or both. In any case, though Lucius hopes to return as a harbinger of the Regent's universal peace, the author recognizes the futility of this hope for the present: "But these days are far removed from us."

This futility is, doubtless, for Jünger as for so many of his European contemporaries, one reason for his postwar preoccupation with metaphysics, and especially the philosophy of existence. It could hardly have been coincidence that his book Der Waldgang appeared in the same year and under the same publisher's imprint as Martin Heidegger's Holzwege, or that other philosophical essay of Jünger's, Über die Linie, a postscript to Nietzsche which professed to see a way out of nihilism at last.

It is probable that Jünger had long been familiar with Heidegger's "Being and Time," and the philosopher's influence on him seems to have grown through the years. A figure appearing repeatedly in his books, imparting to him dreamlike admonitions and communications, is the "teacher" Nigromontanus, or Schwarzwäldler in German. This "Black Forester" is none other than Heidegger himself, who comes from the Black Forest. In Das abenteuerliche Herz and other books he warns his disciple to look behind the veils which cover the "authenticity of things" and discover his true nature, as well as that of death. He presents the existentialist dogma of first acknowledging the inevitable fact of one's own eventual death and then beginning one's life anew.

Jünger sees three main roads to "authentic existence": dream (Traum); intoxication (Rausch); fortune (Glück). At the end, however, actually lies death, the supreme contact with Being and Reality. On the "lonesome march" to this final encounter, says Jünger in Das abenteuerliche Herz, "one is like a soldier who will regain his rank" after he has halted before the gates of death "as before a lonely customs house in the highest mountains, where the coin of memory is exchanged for gold" and where the dying man perceives that no one is at his heels, not even the Devil, but that "on the contrary, he exchanges fear against security."

Jünger differs from Heidegger in that to him animals and plants are examples of real "beings" in the "authentic" state, whereas for Heidegger they are merely vorhanden, "present in the world," unable to participate in "authentic" existence, which is reserved to the human individual alone. Jünger, however, sees this reality in all living creatures: in a woodpecker by the Bodensee, in a black codfish twitching its life away in a Norwegian fish market, in a rare scarab he turns up under a rock near Casablanca. This insistence that a human being, in order to be whole and healthy, must develop an awe and respect for other creatures, reappears in all his recent travel books, which, like Ein Inselfrühling and Am Sarazenenturm are mainly records of his very German fascination with the Mediterranean.

In his latest book, Gläserne Bienen, Jünger returns to his earlier preoccupations with the power of technology and the technology of power. The hero, Rittmeister Richard, a former cavalry officer stemming from the ordered society before World War One, is faced with the choice of starving or seeking employment with Zapparoni, an industrial magnate who produces all types of mechanical toys and robots which can readily be adapted as weapons. Again, the themes of Germany's defeat and possible redemption are suggested. Jünger sees some kind of modus vivendi, perhaps an armed truce, between the individual and the dehumanized world of technology as the only program for survival. In this book, he is on warmer, easier terms with the human personality than he has been before.

It is a fair conclusion, I think, from the body of his work thus far, that Jünger, after having grown thoroughly familiar, during all his adventures, with the worst and most demonic sides of man's nature, now entertains hopes for the triumph of his better side. In the final episode of Das abenteuerliche Herz, the narrator walks the streets of Ponta Delgada, in the remote Azores, where "the eye beholds the flowers of a new world." Suddenly he spots a fish dealer who, in crying out his wares to windows closed tightly against the noonday sun, seems to add something in a mumble, softly to himself:

And so we walked through the hot alleys to offer fish which no one wanted at noon. And long I listened to his two voices, the loudly echoing, exuberantly soliciting cry, and the soft, despairing monologue. I followed him with an eavesdropping lust, for I marked well that here it was no longer a question of fish, but that on this lost island I was hearing the poem of man—at once his loud bragging and his soft, imploring song.