SOURCE: "Written Right Across Their Faces: Ernst Jünger's Fascist Modernism," in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, edited by Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 60-80.

[In the following essay, Berman discusses the fascist representation of Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will and the fascist modernism of Jünger's The Worker.]

If the will triumphs, who loses? Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's cinematic account of the 1934 Nazi Party convention at Nuremberg, is one of the few aesthetic monuments of German fascism that have attracted serious critical scrutiny. In scene after scene one finds evidence of the ideological self-understanding of National Socialism: Hitler's descent from the clouds, the cathartic applause welcoming the charismatic leader, the visions of the medieval city, the presence of the unified folk including contingents of peasants in their traditional costumes, the rough-and-tumble life in the encampment, the mass chorus of the Work Front, the demonstration of the Hitler Youth, the celebratory display of banners, torchlight processions, and a soundtrack that mixes Wagnerian strains with patriotic songs and martial anthems. The list could be extended, and each item could be decoded and explained within the constellation of the rightwing populism, the völkisch ideology, on which German fascism thrived. That sort of investigation can have a compelling explanatory value in regard to the political content of the film. However, I should like to eschew the ideological-critical stance and investigate the rhetorical grounding of Riefenstahl's énonciation, an investigation that can shed light on a politics prior to ideological contents, that is, the politics of fascist representation. It is this rhetorical politics that will concern me later when I turn to Ernst Jünger's construction of a fascist modernism, and it is the examination of rhetoric that may allow me to answer the question posed initially: if the will triumphs, who loses?

Triumph of the Will begins, like most films, with script, with words on the screen, but this opening gesture takes on particular importance within fascist rhetoric. Elsewhere titles name the individual work, give credit to individual artists, and, perhaps, locate the precise historical setting. Here, by way of contrast, the writing on the silver wall invokes the history that has passed—history, or historiography, the writing of history, as past—in order to introduce the agent of its supersession: in the cloudy heavens emerges an airplane, the paradigmatic modernist vehicle, bearing the body of the divine leader, the guarantor of national resurrection, whose arrival on earth signifies the miraculous incarnation of the will triumphant. Henceforth history is overcome, and the jubilant folk rejoices in a redeemed present provided by the presence in flesh and blood of the visible savior. The point is not that Hitler lands in Nuremberg; the point is that Hitler lands in Nuremberg and is seen. "Wir wollen unsren Führer sehen" (We want to see our leader), cries the crowd, and the film, Triumph of the Will, defines itself as the proper medium of a fascist privileging of sight and visual representation. The will triumphs when it becomes visually evident, and it triumphs over the alternative representational option, cited at the commencement of the film, writing and an associated culture of verbal literacy. When the will triumphs as image, it is script that is defeated: the verbal titles of the cinematic preface, henceforth displaced by Riefenstahl's shots; the written signatures of the "November traitors"; the Versailles Treaty, denigrated as just so much paper; and the volumes that disappeared in the conflagrations of May 1933.

Triumph of the Will defines a fascist rhetoric as the displacement of verbal by visual representation: the power of the image renders scripture obsolete. This contention may be tentatively, although not conclusively, confirmed by two pieces of evidence. I draw the first from the folklore of fascism, the infinitely repeated vernacular attribution of Hitler's success to the unique power of his eyes that allegedly fastened his interlocutors and fascinated the captivated masses, as if the force of fascist rhetoric depended less on words than on the energy of vision (cf. the parallel claim that no one ever "read" Mein Kampf). I return to the film for the second piece of evidence, the self-effacing signature of the director. After Hitler's triumphal arrival and the evening demonstration outside his window, the cinematic narrative proceeds to the next morning, crack of dawn in Nuremberg—sleeping streets, the city walls, the ancient bridges—and for a brief moment one catches a glimpse of the shadow cast by the photographic apparatus. Note: not a glimpse of the apparatus itself (technology is excluded) but its shadow projected onto the wall as a metaphor of the cinematic screen. The signature announces the age of the film and the priority of visual representation as the rhetorical practice of fascism. Hitler turns out to be precisely the enigma described by the subtitle of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's cinematic investigation of National Socialism: "a film from Germany."

Much more could be said about the specifically rhetorical problems posed by Triumph of the Will, especially with regard to the status of speech in the film: the political speeches at the convention. Hitler's several addresses, and the text of the mass chorus. Briefly, I would argue that its verbal character is always secondary to the visual spectacle and the image of the present speaker, and that it therefore differs fundamentally from the initial script, the writing whose author is necessarily absent. A considerably more difficult problem involves the role of radio and loudspeakers in National Socialist Germany, an obvious case of disembodied speech, on which the power of the regime indisputably depended. Rather than pursue these matters, however, I will conclude these introductory observations, having used Riefenstahl's film in order to isolate a crucial conflict between visual and verbal representation, in particular the insistence on the priority of image over writing as a stratagem of fascist power. I call this a crucial conflict because it turns out to be the central rhetorical principle in Ernst Jünger's formulation of fascist modernism as described in his 1932 volume The Worker, bearing the telling subtitle Herrschaft und Gestalt, which I render inadequately as Domination and Form. For it is visual form that will, in Jünger's modernist account, displace an obsolete culture of bourgeois writing and guarantee the authority of fascist domination.

Jünger's proximity to the problematic isolated in Riefenstahl's film is evident in the first paragraph of the 1932 preface. I will cite it now and later comment on its rhetorical self-positioning, its claims regarding competing modes of representation, rather than on its ideological contents, that is, the significance of his terminology, such as "worker."

It is the plan of this book to make the Gestalt of the worker visible, beyond all theories, all parties, and all prejudices—to make it visible as an effective mass, which has already intervened in history and imperiously determines the forms of a transformed world. Because this is less a matter of new thoughts or a new system than of a new reality, everything depends on the sharpness of the description, which demands eyes capable of a complete and unclouded vision.

It is nearly unnecessary to underscore Jünger's insistence on the urgency of visual representation. The project of his book amounts to a making visible (sichtbar zu machen) of a form (Gestalt); this in turn leads to a presentation that demands eyes (die Augen voraussetzt) with an unclouded vision (denen die volle und unbefangene Sehkraft gegeben ist). The desideratum of sight and form, the image of images, pervades the text, which consequently defines its rhetorical mode as descriptio—to be understood less in terms of the etymology pointing toward writing (be-schreiben) than as a project of visualization to be carried out by writing. Imagistic vision is then set in contrast to an alternative constellation of theories, parties, and prejudices, a domain of ideas, defined as mere ideas, that is, separate from reality. The descriptive representation of Gestalt has powerful practical consequences (die bereits mächtig in die Geschichte eingegriffen), as opposed to the ultimately powerless ephemera of "new thoughts or a new system," "System"—a standard Nazi pejorative for the Weimar Republic; Jünger is suggesting in 1932 that a new order of power, structure, and form will replace an anachronistic amalgam of empty theories, political parties, and effete idealism. This paraphrase points out the underlying diachronic presumption, the transition from a bourgeois age of subjective interiority, the site of literary culture, to a postindividualism of visible power. This transition is central to Jünger's political ideology, his hostility to democracy, and his totalitarian preferences. It is, moreover, central to his aesthetics; the disparagement of a powerless culture of idealism and the advocacy of artistic formations (Gestaltung) with life-practical ramifications are homologous to the terms of the modernist attack on the bourgeois institution of autonomous art such as Peter Bürger has presented in his Theory of the Avant-Garde.

In The Worker, Jünger undertakes myriad permutations of these themes, but the overriding concern remains the Gestalt, the visual form or structure: "The Gestalt contains the whole, which encompasses more than the sum of its parts and which an anatomical age could never achieve." Here Jünger borrows from a reactionary strain in German romanticism running through Wagner and Langbehn that denounced the analytical intellect and the individuation of bourgeois society; in the Gestalt, Jünger discovers synthetic power. "It is the sign of an imminent epoch that one will again see, feel, and act in the thrall of Gestalten." Again Jünger declares an epochal transformation and emphasizes the practical ramifications (handeln) of the Gestalt. "In politics too everything depends on bringing into battle Gestalten and not concepts, ideas, or mere illusions." The force of the Gestalt is set in contrast to the forms of subjective consciousness, denounced for their irrelevance. Thus the Gestalt is capable of totalization, it is practical, and it is therefore superior to the verbiage and concepts of autonomous culture. The visual Gestalt displaces the terms of writing. The fascist Gestalt displaces the bourgeois who was never a Gestalt but only an individual, a mere part, in an "anatomical," which is to say, analytic or atomistic age. It is finally the heroic Gestalt, the will incarnate, plain for all who have eyes to see, whom Riefenstahl brings to Nuremberg, to wipe away the writing and everything that writing represents.

Before proceeding with my discussion of The Worker and the particular character of the descriptive rhetoric of fascist representation, I want to explore some aesthetic and aesthetic-historical aspects of the problem of fascism and modernism. Fascism and modernism—that is a touchy combination. Postwar criticism, at least in the West, was eager to exclude from serious discussion literature complicitous in fascism. A conservative humanism attempted to escape the political turbulence of the twentieth century by turning its gaze toward the values of an unimpeachable occidental tradition with which one could hope to overcome the political catastrophes of the present. The same exclusionary move could of course be repeated on the left, for example, Sartre's reading Céline out of the French literary tradition. A further case that makes the issue clear; the efforts by the defenders of Ezra Pound to separate his poetic from his political imagination in order to canonize the former while relegating the latter to the domain of insanity, as if modernist innovation were necessarily separate from or even opposed to fascist totalitarianism. Meanwhile, during the first postwar decade in Eastern Europe, when the Lukácsian paradigm held sway (before the Hungarian Revolution of 1956), an association of modernism and decadence tended to lead to a collapsing of modernism and fascism tout court. That may overstate the case and do the critic Lukács some injustice, but it certainly corresponds to widespread political judgments associated with the aesthetics of socialist realism in that period. Classical critical theory, anxious to develop a general account of fascism, did little better in formulating a specific account of fascist aesthetics, although it provides a wealth of insights and comes close to an answer in the exchange on surrealism.

Recent critical work has begun to move beyond both the absolute separation of fascism and modernism and the thorough identification of fascism and modernism. Several preliminary points can be made. First, against efforts to prohibit a thematization of fascism within literary criticism, one notes that a considerable number of authors, whose works are irrefutably embedded in modernism, were drawn to various models of fascism: Marinetti, Céline, Maurras, Pound, Lewis, Hamsun, Benn, and Jünger, Second, against (socialist realist) efforts to collapse fascism and modernism, one notes the plethora of clearly modernist authors to whom it is patently absurd to ascribe an association with fascism: Brecht, Kafka, Mann, Döblin, Proust, Sartre, Joyce, and Woolf. Therefore if one were to endeavor to set the poetics of the modernist authors attracted to fascism in some resonance with their political proclivities, then the resulting model (or models) would not be adequate as accounts of modernism in general. A fascist modernism would have to be distinguished from competing versions that, as also modernist, are likely to display certain affinities or homologies, but that will be clearly distinct variations of the modernist problematic. Finally, the aesthetic profile of models of a fascist and a leftist and a liberal modernism ought to highlight aesthetic features and not concentrate on the political deeds of the historical individuals. Writers near political movements may always tend to be eccentric figures, outside of the inner circle of institutionalized political power. The proper question for literary critical inquiry has to do with the extent to which the political imagination of the author or the text (which may be extraordinarily eccentric when measured against the standard of the established political power) contributes to the construction of an aesthetic project and, in particular, one that can be labeled characteristically modernist.

In order to describe three competing models of modernist aesthetics—all of which are initiated by political motivations—I begin by limiting the term to its normal usage, parallel to the connotation of the term "modern art," that is, the radical aesthetic innovation that commences around 1900. Whether the proper dating begins somewhat earlier (with Heine and Baudelaire) or later (the generation of 1914) is less important than distinguishing this sense of the "modern" from the larger usage of a postmedieval modernity suggested by the German term Neuzeit. In his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas works with this second, epochal model and, drawing on Weber and one strand in Adorno's thought, describes the differentiation of a particular aesthetic value-sphere undergoing a linear progress of autonomization. More sensitive to the vagaries of aesthetic representation in the twentieth century, Bürger insists on a rupture in the trajectory of autonomization produced by the historical avant-garde movements. In this context, I cannot even attempt a critique of Bürger's analysis of that rupture and I cite him only in regard to his insistence on the distinction between, on the one hand, an aesthetic culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, on the other hand, one of the avant-garde and modernism (I will also bracket a discussion of the exaggerated distinctions between modernism and the avant-garde).

These reflections on the theoretical construction of a category of modernism indicate the need for a nonmodernist foil, a countermodel of bourgeois culture against which one indeed finds all the aesthetic innovators of the early twentieth century railing: the art of the Victorian or the Wilhelmine establishments is regarded as just so much philistinism, historicism, sentimentalism, ornamentalism, and so forth. The key features of that countermodel include: (1) a developmental teleology, especially in the linear narratives of the Bildungsroman as well as in the bourgeois drama; (2) a thematics of identity-construction for the bourgeois subject undergoing the development; (3) an aesthetics of fictionality guaranteeing an autonomy, that is, a separation of the work of art from immediate life-practical concerns. It is this third point that Bürger underscores, singling it out as the object of attack by the historical avant-garde movements in order to sublate art and life-practice. That attack also leads, I contend, to a revision of the other aspects of the model—teleology and subjectivity—and all three aspects are lodged in an ostentatious antibourgeois gesturing that often induced an explicit politicization, particularly in the context of World War I and its aftermath. The moment of modernism was marked by the belief in the confluence of aesthetic and political change. The optimistic and perhaps self-serving assumption of modernist writers was the claim that literary innovation stood in some easy correspondence with political innovation. Hence the political motivation behind the competing modernist models.

Modernism was constituted by what it perceived to be the bourgeois aesthetics of autonomy, that is, teleology, identity, and fictionality. I identify three ideal types of German modernist aesthetics—fascist modernism, epic leftism, and liberal modernism—each of which proposes homologous alternatives to the terms of autonomy aesthetics. In place of bourgeois teleology, fascist modernism operates with iteration, a perpetual repetition of the same, suggesting the eternal return of a cyclical history. In place of identity-construction, it offers the spectacle, unnuanced and unquestioned, the authoritative presence of Jünger's aestheticized battlefields; in place of fictionality, it denounces escapism and claims for its texts a curious pseudodocumentary status. Hence Dinter footnotes his völkisch novels with alleged proofs, and Jünger prefers the memoir; he does not turn to the novel form until the mid-1930s, when, as in the case of Benn and Heidegger, a disappointment with the reality of the fascist revolution began to induce minor revisions of the positions held earlier.

Epic leftism replaces development with static examples of false consciousness (Döblin's Biberkopf), identity with dialectical constellations (Brecht), and fictionality with an operative aesthetics of documentary literature (Ottwalt). For liberal modernism, the corresponding features are seriality (Mann's Doctor Faustus), ambivalence (Broch's Bergroman), and the objectivity afforded by essayism (Musil). This map is of course only a map and would need extensive elaboration. I mention it in order to locate a fascist aesthetics within the modernist field next to alternative versions of German modernism. This is a necessary task, since Jünger himself underscores only the diachronic component, fascist aesthetics as a critique of an obsolete autonomy aesthetics, and does not recognize simultaneous but alternative critiques of the same autonomy aesthetics. Nevertheless this map has in fact only placed modernism as a catalogue of aesthetic categories. It has not yet led us much closer to the answer to the question that I began to examine before regarding the rhetoric of fascism: is there a specifically fascist politics of representation? Now I add an additional question: how does fascism subvert its own claim? Do immanent contradictions erode the flaunted stability of fascism? To find the answers, it is necessary to return to The Worker and to investigate a rhetorical micropractice in Jünger's text.

In the second part of The Worker, sections 58-67 bear the title "Art as the Formation (Gestaltung) of the World of Work." Since the whole book is devoted to the project of producing form as visually evident, the question of representation is not at all restricted to these passages. Everywhere the grand theme is the imposition of contours and the description of surface structures. There is no longer any inside and outside; there is no longer any above and below but only a ubiquitous constellation of power as form. Therefore the whole book enters a plea for the projection of the categories of art onto everyday life, an "aestheticization of politics," to use Benjamin's designation of fascism. In sections 58-67, Jünger consequently does not articulate a separate aesthetics, describing instead the separation of a sequestered aesthetic realm as itself anachronistic. Autonomous art is an expression of the obsolete bourgeois world view, that is, in place of an explicit aesthetic theory, Jünger provides a fascist version of the end-of-art theorem.

For Jünger, bourgeois conceptions of aesthetic autonomy are corollaries to the modern, that is, postmedieval (neuzeitliche), constructions of individuality. Despite the fragmentation of the universalist claims of the Catholic Church and a sweeping process of secularization, bourgeois individuality remains grounded in the tradition of the Christian soul. The constitutive categories of the autonomous personality recur in the autonomous work of art as the discourse of the individual genius: "The history of art appears here above all as the history of the personality, and the work itself as an autobiographical document." As the bourgeois individual loses legitimacy—Jünger counterposes him to the soldier in his war memoirs of the twenties and to the worker in 1932—so does the bourgeois understanding of art. In the era of total mobilization, autonomy in no field can be tolerated. To the extent that bourgeois culture still plays a role, it merely provides an escapist refuge for a privileged few, while impeding the urgently necessary decisions in the ongoing state of emergency. Jünger has nothing but contempt for the manner in which the Weimar state draped itself with signs of culture, the portraits of writers and artists on stamps and currency, as compensation for its inability to master the political crisis. "It is a kind of opium that masks the danger and produces a deceptive sense of order. This is an intolerable luxury now when we should not be talking about traditions but creating them." Bourgeois autonomy has run its course and can no longer claim the allegiance of the generation of the trenches: "Our fathers perhaps still had the time to concern themselves with the ideals of an objective science or an art that exists for itself. We however find ourselves clearly in a situation in which not this or that but the totality of our life is in question"—thus the fascist version of the modernist hostility to the culture of the philistine nineteenth century. In place of philistinism and autonomy aesthetics, Jünger advocates a postautonomous, postmodern culture that structures life-experience within an overriding Gestalt of authority. He identifies public practices likely to organize the masses and abolish private identity: film, architecture, urban planning, Landschaftsgestaltung—practices that are inimical to the victims of fascist modernism: subjectivity, privacy, and writing.

I turn now to a passage that I consider particularly important, not only because it again repeats the critique of autonomy aesthetics—such repetition corresponds to the iterative aspect of fascist modernism—but because it does so with a phrase that will allow me to unravel the textual web and explore the politics of fascist representation. Jünger first identifies a parasitic artistry (schmarotzendes Artistentum) that, like standard bourgeois art, sets itself apart from life-practice but that, in addition has lost the genuine values of earlier generations. Clearly the object of attack is contemporary innovative art, which, for Jünger, is not only bourgeois (which would be bad enough) but epigonic as well.

Jünger then proceeds to associate these degenerate artists with the advocates of an aesthetics of autonomy. Recall that, for Jünger, the insistence on the autonomous status of art represents an impediment to resolving the political emergency. He therefore accuses the proponents of autonomy of treason in a remarkable turn of phrase: "Therefore in Germany one meets this artistry with dead certainty (tödlicher Sicherheit) in close connection with all those forces on whom a hidden or overt treasonous character is written right across their faces (denen ein verhüllter oder unverhüllter verräterischer Charakter ins Gesicht geschrieben ist)."

Why does the accomplished stylist Jünger choose this phrasing? Whose faces does he envision and what is written across them? And what does this figure of speech tell us about the status of writing in fascist rhetoric?

Let me first complete the recapitulation of the passage in order to indicate the importance of the matter for the history of fascism and the status of literature within it. Jünger goes on to predict or, better, to look forward to the wrathful retribution these treasonous aesthetes will soon meet:

Fortunately one finds in our youth a growing attention for these sorts of connections; and one begins to understand that in this domain even just the use of abstract thought is tantamount to a treasonous activity. A new sort of Dominican zeal has the nerve to regret the end of the persecution of heretics—but have patience, such persecutions are in preparation already, and nothing will hold them back, as soon as one has recognized that for us a factual finding of heresy is called for on the grounds of the belief in the dualism of the world and its systems.

Clearly Jünger is not, as he has recently claimed in retrospect, merely describing an objective historical process but rather applauding the impending initiation of a new inquisition in order to purge Germany of the heresy of dualism, that is, the claim that autonomous dimensions of human activity might operate outside the structure of power. The general heresy exists in several versions; he speaks of materialist and spiritualist positions that appear to be mutually exclusive. He must be referring to Marxist materialism and conservative idealism, the twin opponents of fascism that the Nazis would name with the crude alliteration of "Rotfront and Reaktion." Despite their apparent antagonisms, Jünger insists that both have a fundamental hostility to the survival of the German Reich: November treason in art. Both are implicated in an ultimately bourgeois discourse of an emancipatory narrative; both propagate the enervating nihilism of dialectical thought, shattering the totality into an endless series of antinomies; and both are blind to the Gestalt of Herrschaft.

The passage, especially the description of opponents with treason written right across their faces, immediately suggests several points. Recall that their crime involves the advocacy of autonomy, that is, the separation of art and, more broadly, all representational practices of culture from life-practice. Jünger's image denounces that belief by reducing the distance between writing and the body to nil. The body of the text is transformed into the body as the text, as if Jünger were already preparing to tattoo the victims of the emerging Dominican zeal. Jünger metes out a punishment fit to the crime: the proponents of bourgeois idealism learn about the materiality of language, aṡ script branded in their flesh, across their faces.

In addition to this corporealization of writing, homologous to the appearance of Gestalt and the incarnation of the will in the body of the leader, the passage betrays a simultaneous hostility to particular identity. The victims are guilty not simply of treason but of having treason written across their faces, thus rendering them identifiable. Because they emerge as particular, they are fair game for particular persecution. Jünger does not like their faces because he does not like faces, that is, the representation of an individual personality, at all, especially those that are constituted by writing. The vision of persecution to which he looks forward anticipates the book-burnings of 1933, which can be considered not only as political demonstrations but as literary acts, the fascist realization of the generally modernist posture of iconoclasm toward a literary culture deemed traditional.

Beyond these explicit ramifications of Jünger's figure of the inscribed physiognomy, the passage is implicated in fundamental aspects of fascist representation. I want to isolate three points and comment on each of them: (1) the moment of recognition and the priority of vision (sight and the faces); (2) the perception of particular identity through a characteristic marking (writing as scar); and (3) the antipathy toward a symbolic order and the imaginary desire to escape writing.

1) Throughout Jünger's oeuvre, a series of descriptions defines the dimension of sight and its counterpart, physiognomy, in both negative and positive versions. The sentimental bourgeois, with sight clouded by emotion, is out of place in the age of total warfare, for "it is not the time to read your 'Werther' with tearful eyes." Eyes trapped in the darkness of bourgeois interiority cannot provide the clarity of vision demanded at the outset of The Worker. Moreover it is writing, a founding text of German bourgeois culture, Werther, that leaves its traces on the cheeks, traces that mark the individual as such, while they simultaneously distort his vision.

The positive Doppelgänger of the lachrymose bourgeois stares out from under the Stahlhelm, a physiognomy devoid of literacy or emotions but toughened by modern warfare into a calloused clarity:

[The face] has become more metallic, its surface is galvanized, the bone structure is evident, and the traits are clear and tense. The gaze is steady and fixed, trained on objects moving at high velocities. It is the face of a race that has begun to develop in the peculiar demands of a new landscape, where one is represented neither as a person nor an individual but as a type.

The right-wing critique of bourgeois individuality could not be more explicit; it announces the end of interiority and the emancipation of vision. The new man has unimpaired sight, just as the contours of his face take on the sharp and clear lines of Gestalt. Yet no lines of age deface the complexion of the eternal youth invoked by fascism. Ambiguity disappears. The face of the hawk-eyed soldier is the diametrical opposite of the image of a spectacled intellectual, a rigid mask without nuance.

Jünger's moment of recognition privileges the clear image of the soldier and then doubles the point by attributing to it a clarity of vision. Conversely, the bourgeois, who cannot see through his tears, is embedded in a literary culture of writing. Hence the treason of those whose faces are marked by writing: they disrupt the presence of the image with the mendacity of words. Jünger's fascist modernism promises to liberate the imaginary from the Jacobin tyranny of the symbolic order. It draws on a long-standing reactionary tradition, a Wagnerian formulation of which can help us identify Jünger's traitors. Polemicizing against the actor Josef Kainz, Wagner writes: "One's impression is as though the Saviour had been cut out of a painting of the Crucifixion, and replaced by a Jewish demagogue." It is not Christ but Christ's image that concerns Wagner, but the point is moot since Christ as the visible incarnation is image and is threatened by the Jew as language and the people of the Book. Based on the Old Testament prohibition of graven images, the aporetic construction of Wagnerian anti-Semitism contrasts the visible Gestalt with an alternative defined as verbal and hence inimical to visual appearance. Wagner's logic is perversely consistent when he continues: "A race whose general appearance we cannot consider suitable for aesthetic purposes is by the same token in capable of any artistic presentation of its nature." Because their God is invisible, Wagner denounces the visible appearance of Jews and considers them a threat to any representative images. The legacy of Wagner's anti-Semitism recurs in Jünger as the contrasting physiognomies and the agonistic confrontation of Gestalt and writing. Figures with writing in their faces are Jews: "And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes" (Deuteronomy 6:8). The phylacteries, the sign of treason, have become the mark of Cain by which the fascist modernist recognizes the enemy. The French racial anthropologist and fascist collaborator Georges Montandon entitles a pamphlet Comment reconnaître le Juif? Jünger's answer must be: by signs of writing.

2) Signs of writing in the face mar the image and make it particular. The scar produces identity, be it the wound received by Rotpeter in Kafka's "Report to an Academy" or the vernacular understanding of the significance of the tattoo, as expressed in an advertisement: "Who you are / What you stand for / On your skin / If you like—forever." Scarring the face in the ritual dual, the Bestimmungsmensur, a key element in German student culture, survived despite an imperial prohibition of genuine duels in 1883, various papal encyclicals, and the agitation of the Deutsche Antiduell-Liga, founded in 1902; if the social function of the Schmiss had to do with the production of the signs of an elite, its expressed purpose involved the preservation of individual honor and the strengthening of the participant's personality. Jünger could recognize treason "written right across their faces" because that writing, the scar, produced individual identity, which was anathema, as we have seen, for fascist modernism.

This connection is confirmed by the discussion of the scar of Odysseus in the first chapter (written in 1942) of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, the servant Eurykleia, who had nursed him as a child, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh, as if the marking on the body were the locus of the personal identity that Jünger detests. Auerbach describes how Homer interrupts the narrative at the moment of recognition in order to recount how young Odysseus, visiting his grandfather Autolykos, received the scar. The wound marks the body and marks the rite of passage from a preliterate infancy to a symbolic maturity associated with writing and language. This suggestion goes beyond Auerbach but is compatible with his argument that the interpolated incident does not heighten suspense; instead it testifies to the mimetic impulse in the Homeric text to encompass the world with language and to omit nothing from the verse. The scar on the body that grants Odysseus identity and personal language also generates the expansive agility of poetic language.

Auerbach juxtaposes the story of Odysseus' return with the sacrifice of Isaac in order to contrast Homeric and biblical narration. Critics have however pointed out the fundamental similarity, the thematic concern with the production of male identity in barely hidden practices of ritual scarring. When Jünger denounces the marked bodies of his opponents, he participates in a sublimated anti-Semitism by articulating a displaced critique of circumcision. His critique of identity is a fascist critique of male identity. Patriarchal culture depends on the symbolic order of law and language; fascist anti-patriarchy, which is always implicitly an attack on the patriarch as Jew, is an attack on the practices of writing in order to resurrect the imaginary as Gestalt, the visible body without stigmata, descending from the clouds over Nuremberg.

3) "Written right across their faces"—the scar in the face is a long-standing topos of the writer. It is because of a scar of irresolution that Montaigne, in his essay "Of Presumption," chooses a private life of writing and abjures the courtly public where kings are represented in portraits. The writer Jünger abhors that bourgeois privacy and casts constant aspersion on "the desks of Europe" where the culture of literacy takes place. The fascist modernist denounces identities constituted by language, while expressing a desire for the image freed from verbal mediation. Of course both this denunciation and this desire are themselves lodged in language. Jünger's prose searches for the Gestalt, which is outside of language, by means of language. Its descriptive parole is committed to the abolition of langue. Similarly Jünger hopes to be able to recognize the new post-bourgeois type who, by definition, can have no identifying features. This slippery rhetorical situation can be analyzed through the parameters of the trope of ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis was the primary technical option in the speech of praise (epideixis or panegyric) that, during the Roman Empire, overshadowed the other two objects of classical rhetoric, judicial and deliberative speech. It profoundly influenced the poetry of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. For Ernst Robert Curtius, ekphrasis is above all laudatory description, accounts of beautiful persons and landscapes, leading to the topos of the locus amoenus, in the tradition of which the sensuous spectacles of Jünger's battlefields have to be placed. However, as a description of beautiful objects, ekphrasis has a somewhat more precise usage, which Leo Spitzer articulates with reference to the definition of the trope provided by Théophile Gautier, "'une transposition d'art,' the reproduction through the medium of words of sensuously perceptible objects d'art (ut pictura poesis)." Classical examples include the descriptions of the ornamental shields of Achilles and Aeneas and of various cups, garments, and sculptures. The term is occasionally extended to include descriptions of poetic renderings, e.g., the interpolated narrations included in the Metamorphoses, although this usage certainly goes beyond the limits suggested by Spitzer. In either the limited or this extended sense, ekphrasis has to do with the verbal representation of aesthetic representation. It functions either to interrupt the course of the narrative (like the account of Odysseus' scar which is ekphrastic only if one accepts my suggestion that the scar is an instance of writing or aesthetic marking) or as an allegorical interlude: Achilles' shield reproduces the cosmos and Aeneas' shield predicts the future. "Its images of Roman history chart the course of destiny in which the hero must play his inevitable role and illumine the similarity between his own deeds of violence and those of his descendants." The proximity to Jünger's military fatalism is evident.

However, the connection between this aspect of classical rhetoric and fascist modernism is not merely thematic, Jünger's descriptivism and his fascination with the visible Gestalt are ekphrastic in a new and revealing manner. The authors of antiquity devote special attention at particular moments to works of art, as if art were already a relatively autonomous sphere, separate (no matter how integrated) from the rest of the narrative, to which the author would return at the conclusion of the aesthetic description. For Homer the whole world and all its details can of course be mastered by poetic representation, and Auerbach could therefore contrast the Homeric text with the sparse abstraction of the biblical epic. This does not mean that the Homeric cosmos is always aestheticized in advance or that the work of art is indistinguishable from all other dimensions of human activity. Yet this is precisely the case for fascist modernism where the aporia of bourgeois autonomy is sublated through a universal aestheticization. The writer approaches a cosmos that is only art, and he can only recount its aestheticized Gestalt. Ekphrasis becomes the sole option of a literature that takes the classical admonition to an extreme: ut pictura poesis.

I have tried to demonstrate the ekphrastic character of Jünger's rhetorical stance not only to identify the continuity of certain topoi—from the shield to the Stahlhelm, from locus amoenus to Langemarck—but to investigate the politics of representation in fascist modernism. Ekphrasis necessarily implies a double dialectic: it invokes as present a missing object, and it appropriates speech to produce a visual image. Each of these points is worthy of consideration with reference to Jünger's writing.

Ekphrasis conveys the desire for an absent object, which Jünger attempts to redeem as Gestalt, just as the Gestalt of Hitler arrives in Riefenstahl's Nuremberg as the vehicle of national resurrection. A regenerative aesthetics pervades much of European fascist ideology; the object that is missing has to be retrieved from death, Jünger's writing constitutes an extended project to overcome the mass death of World War I. In The Worker he asks: "What kinds of minds are these that do not know that no mind can be deeper or wiser than that of any of the soldiers who fell on the Some or in Flanders?" Jünger, the intellectual, is prepared to sacrifice intellectual identity in order to revivify the anonymous cadavers of the war. Ekphrastic writing becomes an exchange, a sacrifice of atonement as payment for the absent bodies. Because bullets have robbed them of their subjectivity, Jünger makes a career of denying his own and repressing his pain. This self-denial and repression account for the banality of his contributions to the controversy around his receipt of the Goethe Award: a fundamental inability to give serious consideration to the consequences of his fascist advocacy. Reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann, Jünger's mental blockage is due to the trauma of the trenches. He is marked by the guilt of the survivor who cannot account for his having escaped death. When asked by an interviewer if he was sad to have survived 1914, he only objects to the coarse phrasing and adds that he "agrees with the ancient Greeks: those who fall in war are honored by men and gods. That would have been a good ending." He refers to his refusal to flee into a bomb shelter during a British air raid on Paris in 1944 (the incident is described in Strahlungen) as a "toast with death" (ein Bruderschaftstrinken mit dem Tode). Similarly when critics complain that he did not resist the Nazis adamantly enough after 1933, this testy response that opposition would have led to execution in a camp has all the earmarks of a classical psychoanalytic denial: as if he knew he should have acted differently and had met his death long ago.

His ekphrastic rhetoric is therefore both a desire for the absent object and a desire for the absence of the author. Jünger simultaneously undertakes resurrection and enacts his own death. In this gruesome exchange, the idealized physiognomy of the new man is the facies hippocratica: for Benjamin a critical tool to pursue the mortification of the artwork with an eye to redemption, for Jünger a prescription for the aestheticization of life as death mask without transcendence.

Jünger's version of the death of the author can be treated as one item in the history of German intellectuals responding to the catastrophes of war and holocaust. It is also implicated in the second dialectic of ekphrasis, the effort to appropriate language in order to surpass it with the production of image. This tension is a constitutive moment of the trope but comes to the fore in the ekphrastic rhetoric of fascist modernism. It corresponds to the displacement of writing by image in Triumph of the Will and to the emphatic prescription of The Worker where "it is no longer a matter of a change of styles [i.e., modes of literary expression] but rather of the becoming visible of another Gestalt (das Sichtbarwerden einer anderen Gestalt)." Fascism as the aestheticization of politics transforms the world into a visual object, the spectacular landscapes of industry and war, and this first renders writing solely descriptive only to proceed to the denigration of writing as not-visual. The author's hatred for identities constituted by the presence of writing in their faces is also a self-hatred of the author as writer. It is a writing trying to escape writing. In fascist modernism, the imaginary rebels against the symbolic order of language where the author, dependent on language, is necessarily at home. It is literature at the moment of the auto-da-fé, always about to go up in flames along with the identity of the writer. If Jünger's military thematics recall Virgil's account of Aeneas' shield, his constitution of a self-subverting writing is closer to the Ovidian version of ekphrasis, the perpetual destruction of the second-order narrators in the Metamorphoses: Jünger's decimation of his own subjectivity repeats the slaying of Marsyas, the death wish of the descriptive poet, fleeing language.

Fleeing language, the fascist rhetorician also flees time. The classical ekphrasis interrupted the linear progress of the surrounding narrative, drawing attention to a particular locus apparently impervious to the vagaries of temporality. In fascist modernism, ekphrastic representation resonates with the antiteleological bias that all versions of modernism share in their rejection of traditional bourgeois culture. I want to conclude with a remark on the organization of time associated with autonomy aesthetics and its critique at the moment of the modern.

Horkheimer and Adorno's account of Odysseus and the Sirens in the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment describes the moment of birth of bourgeois aesthetic culture. It is a process of autonomization, insofar as the local myth, still embedded in primitive religious cult, is subjected to the force of enlightenment secularization and robbed of its apotropaic power: the song of the Sirens becomes the song of art. Henceforth art has no life-practical consequences, although the nonoperative character is experienced in different manners by the opposed classes in heteronomous society. Art is simply denied the slaves whose ears are plugged with wax, while the bourgeois adventurer can partake of aesthetic expression only at the price of binding his hands to the mast. This cultural autonomization is located meanwhile within the context of a victory over space: Odysseus, the first hero in the age of discovery, navigates unknown seas and subdues them, while his body, which is separated from art, also escapes danger. Mastering the globe, he lives to tell the tale, and this is the birth of history, the victory over the lyric entreaties of forgetfulness, which allows the constructions of narratives of teleological practice.

Because historical memory and aesthetic autonomy are consanguineous, the modernist attack on autonomy aesthetics begins to pull apart the intricacies of the Odyssean nexus. The distance between body and text is radically reduced, and experience undergoes a respatialization: Odysseus could traverse every dangerous terrain, while Jünger's hero remains in the field with neither personal past nor individual future. The optimistic temporality of linear progress is frozen, but each version of modernism records the end of history in a different way. Liberal modernism, as a rhetoric of irony, critiques structures of representation and explores the immobility of the present. Epic leftism, with its anticipatory hopes of radical revolution, operates as prolepsis and explodes the continuum of history. The ekphrasis of fascist modernism asserts the immutable presence of Gestalt and exalts the luminous positivity of visible power that will shine for a thousand years, uncorrupted by the infectious nihilism of writing. It glows with the light of the image; "the fully enlightened earth radiates in the sign of disaster triumphant."