Noble Beings (Jünger)

'It suffices to say that among all the old and long since fleshless heads my eye caught sight of two new ones hoisted high on poles--the heads of the Prince and of Braquemart. From the iron pike-heads with their curving hooks they looked down upon the glow of the fires which were flaking away to ash. The young Prince's hair had turned white, yet I found in his features greater nobility and the lofty, sublime beauty to which only sorrow gives birth.

 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 heart in his own breast. That 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 man than go in triumph among the slaves.'

Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs (1939)

Fidelity

'There are periods of decline when the pattern fades to which our inmost life must conform. When we enter upon them we sway and lose our balance. From hollow joy we sink to leaden sorrow, and past and future acquire a new charm from our sense of loss. So we wander aimlessly in the irretrievable past or in distant Utopias; but the fleeting moment we cannot grasp.'
...

'So I swear to myself in the future to fall alone in freedom rather than to accompany the servants on the path to triumph.'

Ernst Jünger, On The Marble Cliffs (1939)

Jünger-Haus

Jünger: Interesting Drugs

Kirchhorst, 3/3/1948

"What interested me above all was the relationship of these substances to productivity. It has been my experience, however, that creative achievement requires an alert consciousness, and that it diminishes under the spell of drugs. On the other hand, conceptualization is important, and one gains insights under the influence of drugs that indeed are not possible otherwise. I consider the beautiful essay that Maupassant has written about ether to be such an insight. Moreover, I had the impression that in fever one also discovers new landscapes, new archipelagos, and a new music, that becomes completely distinct when the "customs station" appears. For geographic description, on the other hand, one must be fully conscious. What productivity means to the artist, healing means to the physician. Accordingly, it also may suffice for him that he sometimes enters the regions through the tapestries that our senses have woven. Moreover, I seem to perceive in our time less of a taste for the phantastica than for the energetica—amphetamine, which has even been furnished to fliers and other soldiers by the armies, belongs to this group. Tea is in my opinion a phantasticum, coffee an energeticum—tea therefore possesses a disproportionately higher artistic rank. I notice that coffee disrupts the delicate lattice of light and shadows, the fruitful doubts that emerge during the writing of a sentence. One exceeds his inhibitions. With tea, on the other hand, the thoughts climb genuinely upward."

Ernst Jünger to Albert Hoffman (Private Correspondence)

In All His Power

“Man is too profoundly trapped in his construction. He sells himself below his value and loses balance. He goes towards catastrophe, great risk and suffering. He forces himself into places without exit, they lead to his downfall, yet strangely it is precisely there, forbidden, condemned, fugitive, that he meets himself in his imperishable, indivisible substance. He lays bare the fictions of time and spirit to know himself in all his power.”

Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang (1951)

Into The Stratosphere

“The game must have exhausted all its possibilities. Then, only, can one dare the impossible. We are searching for those who have escaped into the stratosphere. We approve of the doctrine of Zarothustra, according to which, man must be surpassed by the overman. We do not see a moral obligation but a historical necessity. The following stage will be the surpassing of the overman. He will be broken on the human, which will draw from this encounter a superior power.”

Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis (1949)

Night Bar Notes

"The main reason I have a hard time getting along with these men is their indecisiveness. They feel when they ought to think, and vice versa. All they have inherited from Socrates is scepticism, but, unlike Xenophon, they would not hoist him on their shoulders and carry him out of the fighting. Convinced as they are of the temporal and finite nature of things, they shy away from pain, sacrifice, devotion."

Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (1977)

Mastery

"On the right edge of the little valley, to the general amusement, Lieutenant Breyer—who had been seconded to us from the 10th Jägers—was strolling about seemingly oblivious of the flying bullets, walking-stick in hand, and long huntsman's pipe in mouth, rifle slung over his shoulder, every bit as though out shooting rabbits."

Ernst Jünger , Storm of Steel (1920)

The Devil's Captain: Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944

"Author of Nazi Paris, a Choice Academic Book of the Year, Allan Mitchell has researched a companion volume concerning the acclaimed and controversial German author Ernst Jünger who, if not the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, certainly was the most controversial. His service as a military officer during the occupation of Paris, where his principal duty was to mingle with French intellectuals such as Jean Cocteau and with visiting German celebrities like Martin Heidegger, was at the center of disputes concerning his career. Spending more than three years in the French capital, he regularly recorded in a journal revealing impressions of Parisian life and also managed to establish various meaningful social contacts, with the intriguing Sophie Ravoux for one. By focusing on this episode, the most important of Jünger's adult life, the author brings to bear a wide reading of journals and correspondence to reveal Jünger's professional and personal experience in wartime and thereafter. This new perspective on the war years adds significantly to our understanding of France's darkest [sic] hour."

Dispassion

"The special trait making me an Anarch is that I live in a world which I ultimately do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer."

Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (1977)

Prussian Prototype

All manly peoples today have a bad name; the Prussians are the prototype. In the interregnum, however, it is not mothers but hermaphrodites who prevail.

Alle männlichen Völker sind heut in Verruf; die Preußen sind der Prototyp. Im Interregnum sind aber nicht die Mütter, sondern die Zwitter maßgebend.

Ernst Jünger, Ernst Jünger – Carl Schmitt: Briefe 1930-1983 (1999)

Will to Style

"The dandy represents the type of man who stylizes himself...He has sublimated the will to power into a will to style...Endeavoring to stylize himself, he stylizes the world and accomplishes this mission when he captures a situation in an elegant formulation...For that, he must subject himself to discipline, abnegation, and rigorous asceticism."

- “Le dandy dans sa maison forestière: remarques sur le cas Ernst Jünger,” Nicolas Sombart (2000)

je combats pour moi

"Quand je ferme les yeux, j’aperçois parfois un sombre paysage de pierres, de falaises et de montagnes, à la lisière de l’infini. A l’arrière-plan, sur le rivage d’une mer ténébreuse, je me reconnais moi-même, minuscule figure qui est comme dessinée à la craie. C’est mon avant-poste, tout proche du Néant--là-bas, au bord du gouffre, je combats pour moi."

- Ernst Jünger

On the Marble Cliffs (Ernst Jünger)

le recours aux forêts

"Contre l'Etat technicisé omniprésent...le recours aux forêts réelles ou symboliques où se réfugiaient autrefois les hors-la-loi islandais permet d'affirmer individuellement sa liberté...L'Anarque qui, au lieu de s'opposer brutalement à un pouvoir qui risque de l'écraser, se met en marge de lui par un semblant d'acceptation qui lui assure sa liberté intérieure".

Ernst Jünger

c'est par-delà la mort

"Le combat de la vie, le fardeau de l'individualité. A l'opposé, l'indivis et ses tourbillons toujours plus profonds. Aux instants de l'étreinte, nous y plongeons, nous nous abîmons dans des zones où gîtent les racines de l'arbre de vie. Il y a aussi la volupté légère, fugitive, pareille au combustible qui flambe, et tout aussi volatile. Au-delà, au-dessus de tout cela, le mariage. "Vous serez une seule chair." Son sacrement ; le fardeau est désormais partagé. Enfin, la mort. Elle abat les murailles de la vie individuelle. Elle sera l'instant de l'accomplissement suprême. (Matthieu XXII, v. 30.) C'est par-delà la mort, et là seulement, où le temps n'est plus, que nos véritables liens ont formé le noeud mystique. Il nous sera donné de voir, quand la lumière s'éteindra."

Premier journal parisien, Ernst Jünger

In the Afterlight

"You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. In the afterlight, too, the images stand out more enticing than before; we think of them as we do of the body of a dead loved one who rests deep in the earth, and who now in his enhanced and spiritual splendour is like a mirage of the desert before which we must tremble. And constantly in our thirst-haunted dreams we grope for the past in its every detail, in its every line and fold. Then it cannot but seem to us as if we had not had our fill of love and life; yet no regret brings back what has been let slip. Would that this mood might be a lesson to us for each moment of our happiness.

Sweeter still becomes the memory of our years by moon and sun when their end has been in the abyss of fear. Only then do we realise that for us mortals even this is great good-fortune - to live our lives in our little communities under a peaceful roof, with pleasing discourse and with loving greeting at morning and at night. Alas! always too late do we grasp that, if it offered no more than this, our horn of plenty brimmed with riches."

On The Marble Cliffs, Ernst Jünger