Nietzsche and the Fascist Dimension: The Case of Ernst Junger
by David Ohana
From "Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy," edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Witrich
© 2002 by Princeton University Press
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The Nietzschean Revolution: From Ethics to Aesthetics
What was the nature of the intellectual revolution instigated by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century? Why were both left-wing and right-wing groups inspired by this revolution? Why does it still continue to disturb so many people? It is impossible to separate out any one element of Nietzsche's thought as the answer to these questions -- the death of God, the critique of morality and religion, the "Overman" or the will to power. It is rather the revolutionary combination of the consciousness of nihilism and the will to power that brings Nietzsche so close to us at the beginning of a new century: When the "new Man" rebelled against the burden of the past and rejected the contents of Western history, he became the midwife of his own world. Thus the nihilistic revolution is necessarily linked with the aesthetic one: Nietzschean nihilism [1] -- having gone beyond the traditional criteria of good and evil, truth and falsity -- led to the new creative principle of the will to power. Traditional ethics was replaced by a new aesthetics.
Nietzsche made use of a philosophy of unmasking that attempted to dig down to the root of things and eliminate the disguises worn by Western culture throughout history. But his critique itself led to a historicism that examines concepts along the continuum of time. This method became a nihilistic unmasking that undermined the origins of traditional values. Even the basic notions behind what is generally considered Nietzsche's positive philosophy -- self-overcoming, eternal recurrence, the "Overman, " the will to power -- expose the Janus-faced aspect of Nietzsche's method: on the one hand, the compulsory nihilism of the notion of "the eternal recurrence of things," yet on the other, the love of fate (amor fati) and the total affirmation of life as the implication of the Overman's will to power. The primacy of nothingness and the primacy of life are mutually linked.
Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist played a vital part in the essential task of clearly separating Nietzsche from Nazism. [2] Yet this influential book left Nietzsche without teeth and deprived him of his philosophical hammer. He was given a place of honor among other humanist thinkers. But we must not ignore the fact that in the twentieth century fascist thinkers seized upon different aspects of Nietzsche's nihilism, painting it with their own political colors. Nietzsche's philosophical radicalism presaged various forms of political radicalism. [3]
Those thinkers, culture critics, and artists who were close to fascism seized upon various elements in the existentialist approach of the Nietzschean school, but added a political dimension. This approach repudiated historical and romantic assumptions just as it rejected the philosophy of progress and Enlightenment. While historicism was guided by the past, the Enlightenment stressed the openness of the future, from which it derived the concept of progress. In contrast, the fascist intellectuals ignored both the guidance of the past and the open future in favor of the dynamic present. This led to the rejection of the concept of progress, since historical continuity, in either the open rationalist sense or the rigid determinist one, was broken, and the dynamic present was detached from the cultural context with its centuries of accretions.
The existentialist approach is centered around the Nietzschean assumption that the enhanced concept of humanity can be given a variety of interpretations, and is continually developing and self-creating. The historical, romantic, determinist and progress-minded approaches described the individual as a culture-dependent and tradition-dependent historical entity; Nietzsche, however, created an original, unique anthropological image of the individual as affirming his fate (amor fati), yet also shaping it with his own hands by using the will to power as a creative principle! No longer must the individual blindly follow the heritage of the past; from now on the continually evolving world is identified with the continually evolving self, as the essence of the existentialist idea. Since the world is dynamic and self-creating, the individual must not remain fixed, but rather identify with the world's rhythm.
The existentialist approach to history thus served as a revolutionary turning-point by rebelling against the Judeo-Christian ethic and the classical tradition, and adopting the notion that the (nonrational) self must shape aesthetically the (nonrational) reality. This aesthetic view of reality is not subject to the domination of reason and goes beyond the accepted ethical distinctions of good and evil to adopt new distinctions based on creativity, stagnation, or degeneration. The implications of this view are far-reaching: sanctifying the here and now, affirming activism, and adopting a clear modernist approach that is neither teleological nor ethical, and that does not constitute a necessary link in the chain of progress or an accretion to the achievements of humanity that are passed on through cultural experience. This view thus disqualifies the concept of culture as the consolidation of historical continuity, consciously annihilates the continuity of time, and affirms the dynamic moment in the present.
Nietzsche was also the prophet of modern secularism -- not the kind that claims, with Spinoza, that the sacred is within us, but the sort that reveals the secular without the sacred, a new humanity sovereign over the world. [5] This world has no universalist pretensions, whether sacred, rational, or moral. Perspectivist philosophy thus reached nihilist conclusions. It is not searching for the truth as the primary ambition of philosophy, but instead seeks to create the world as a new myth. At the same time, there arises a dynamic and creative conception of time. This modern concept, which creates myth, is not a reactionary call to return to our mythical roots in the past, but a claim that only the future will permit the rise of myth. [6]
Underlying this modern mythology was Nietzsche's genealogical approach and philosophy of unmasking, which were intended to remove all moral, utilitarian, and directional camouflage from culture -- whether this disguise took the form of a messianic paradise in the secular progressive vision, or a golden age in the religious version. Nietzsche was committed to a cyclical concept of a nonteleological history, and Zarathustra is the personification of the myth of eternal recurrence. [7]
The revival of myth paradoxically constituted the conclusion of philosophical inquiry. In place of the philosophy of reason Nietzsche sets up the myth of the will to power; in place of the search for objective truth, he extols subjective creativity; in place of universal rationalism he urges creative aesthetics. The traditional philosophers had hitherto offered interpretations of the world or attempted to justify its existence; in contrast, the new philosophers -- including those of fascism -- were trying to create a world ex nihilo in their own image. This style of mythical creation, which has profoundly shaped modern civilization, is a product of the kind of aesthetic imagination first embraced by Nietzsche.
The "new Man" is the crown jewel of the myth-creating fascist ideology. He is an individual who identifies with the rhythm of the modern world, who is tested in action rather than contemplation, through initiative rather than continuity, and creativity rather than the preservation of culture. Such a person considers the reality of conflict to be the natural arena and the necessary condition for the creation of authenticity. Nietzsche's "new Man" is a source of inspiration for the future, while the "old Man" is a historical type who has been defeated by the past. Out of the mass society of "old persons" Nietzsche hoped to create an "Overman" who would look soberly at the world with a modern awareness of nihilism, and would activate and enhance the will to power. [8]
It was this Janus-face of nihilism and the Overman's will to power that attracted radicals like Ernst Junger, who created the "totalitarian nihilistic syndrome." [9] They considered nihilism the litmus test for distinguishing between the weak and the powerful, while the will to power distinguished between the degenerate and the authentic. Nihilism of the negative-type pattern -- to use Nietzsche's language -- frightens the weak and makes them flee to their refuge of passivity and paralysis; while nihilism of the positive or active variety -- again in Nietzsche's terms -- provides a challenge for the powerful, who create a new reality ex nihilo in the process of coping with it. [10] Similarly, there is a degenerate will to power that is the province of the weak, while the will to power of the powerful is an authentic one.
The Overman is the challenge of the intellectual revolution which Nietzsche instigated in Western civilization -- destroying the classical heritage, historical culture, the Judeo-Christian ethic -- and at the same time strengthening the will to power as an existential, aesthetic, and metaphysical principle. Destruction and rebuilding are the methods of the "new Man," who is continually creating and destroying his own world. He is destroying super-illusions and striving for comprehensiveness. He is not interested in categorizing or defining his values, but only in creating them and continually overcoming them. He does not sanctify permanent values as such, and contradictions do not frighten him. He is therefore considered a master of deceit and a legislator-king. Since the authentic individual -- the crown of existential thought -- emerged from the Nietzschean school, the will to power is his human and cosmological principle. The individual as will to power is characterized by self-overcoming, while the world as will to power is characterized by the eternal recurrence; neither has any ethical aspect, both are lawless and meaningless. Therefore neither the existence of the individual nor the world -- both of which have been revealed as nihilistic -- requires any particular content or meaning, and they can be actualized and bestowed with meaning only in an aesthetic context. [11]
The world's eternal recurrence and humanity's self-overcoming consist of development without any goal, which implies a cyclical process that continually annihilates itself, or by the same token reconstructs itself. Either way the result is the same: there is neither direction nor goal. [12] Nietzsche affirms energy for its own sake, and so the Janus-faced aspect of the "Overman" -- who annihilates all values and affirms existence as it is -- has no force. After all, the "Overman," who strives to be a sovereign individual and attempts to enhance the will to power, lives with "empty energy" -- energy that consumes itself. Nietzsche calls this energy "the world" and demands that we accept it as it is. The change in values therefore consists of replacing the value of the goal by that of the process, the value of reason by authenticity, and ethics by the principle of the will to power; moreover, ethics is no longer a social issue but an issue between the individual and his world. The concepts of good, rational, and true are abandoned in favor of the concept of the authentic identity of the individual and the world (that is, the will to power) as a new unified conception.
Nietzsche's concept of the new Man is totally subjectivist and thus open to various interpretations. If there are no universal, objective criteria, then the whole basis of Western civilization is called into question. Each human being is a force of separate will to power, which means that he exists for his own sake and is validated by his own power. Thus all the foundation stones of Western civilization topple one after another; Judeo-Christian morality, rationalist philosophy, historical tradition. In legitimizing all interpretations, Nietzschean perspectivism also includes its own weak points, since objective explanations, moral norms, and rational validity are no longer possible. Nietzsche uses history as a point of departure for reconstructing Western philosophy: [13] After rejecting whatever has become redundant in history, what is left is the affirmation of existence -- not out of historical conditioning or inherited custom, but out of a heroic existential approach, which embodies the exaltation of freedom and power in its "Yes." The will to power -- as the central manifestation of the subject, and an existential, intuitive cognitive assumption -- replaces the old criteria with new distinctions that affirm the authentic rather than the degenerate, the strong rather than the weak, the individual rather than the collective. Nietzsche's radicality stems from the fact that he rejected the traditional criteria of Western thought and placed a new philosophical principle at the helm to drive the "new Man": the will to power. [14]
The will to power displaced reason from its central position. If Kant is the outstanding representative of the "classical aesthetics" of the eighteenth century, then Nietzsche is the exact opposite: In his view aesthetics, as the "critique of judgment," is not parallel to morality, as the "critique of practical reason," but rather replaces it. This is indeed Nietzsche's great revolution -- substituting the will to power, as a particularist aesthetic principle, for the universal moral imperative. Separating aesthetics from morality, which means raising creativity from a normative to a metaphysical level, was the central axis of the revolt against bourgeois norms in the late nineteenth century. The Nietzscheanism of the radical Right led in the end to the aestheticization of philosophical thought and moral principles: Although the concept of "the aesthetic education of humanity" had already been formulated by Schiller, Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, the principal innovation of the intellectual trend under discussion was the interweaving of the political dimension, existential experience, and the aesthetic conception as complementary manifestations of the new Man.
The Burden of Responsibility
Half a century after the vanquishing of European fascism, as we gained an increasingly clear insight into the causes of fascism's rise and success, we can identify that nihilism is hidden at the core of fascism -- in its essence, its nature, its genes. The roots of the fascist mentality lie in its utopian view of the "community of experience" and the quest for the new man. As a cultural phenomenon, fascism accords pride of place to action rather than to thinking, to experience rather than to awareness, to style rather than to content. Its political acts are performed for the sake of the action itself, divorced from the social context. Fascism is not interested in social change, but in a perpetuum mobile that creates the illusion of change on the road to some utopian destination.
The importance of the European thinkers, cultural critics, and writers like Ernst Junger who were informed by Nietzsche's existential credo, lies in their fabrication of a modern political mythology that inspired politicians and leaders of mass movements. [15] They created a new terminology and political dictionary of modernism, based on such key concepts as the "new man," "political myth," "dynamism," "will to power," and "community of experience." This new style signified a transition from the centrality of ideology to that of myth. The modern political style of "anti-intellectual" intellectuals, who gave myth precedence over reason, became the heart of a dynamic political culture that created the "generation of 1914" and shaped the fascist mentality that arose in its wake.
What is the intellectual mainspring of the bellicose enthusiasm of the 1914 generation? In a chapter entitled "The Impulse of Nietzsche," in The Heritage of Our Times, Ernst Bloch answers that it is "Dionysus as a symbol of abstractly fantastic escape into anarchy: only here do we grasp Nietzsche's serious impact on the age." [16] The danger, as Bloch sees it, is inherent in the Nietzschean theory of the "eternal recurrence of the same," which he qualifies as "a strange doctrine," "banal," and so on. This cyclical notion, when added to Nietzsche's "boundless willpower," is an explosive mixture. "That is why," Bloch writes, "super-fascist Nietzsche interpreters, such as Baumler, for instance, seek to eliminate Dionysus." [17]
Even if Nietzsche is not directly responsible for fascism, he certainly had an intellectual influence on the 1914 generation that metamorphosed into fascism. As Ernst Bloch wrote,
The struggle for existence rages on endlessly ... with the "eternal natural right of the stronger" as its sense and content. This kind of activism, evil activism of course, obviously derives from Sorel and also from Nietzsche .... Yet neither Sorel nor Nietzsche consciously intended their use by fascism: to this extent their wishful images of power are still ante rem .... Nonetheless, both philosophers were usable by fascism. [18]
The utopian visions of German Nietzscheans such as Alfred Rosenberg, Moller van der Bruck, and Ernst Junger contributed to the myths that helped shape fascism as "community of experience." The demagoguery of Ernst Junger's imagined unity of workers and soldiers ultimately comes down to something comparable to the blood and flames of Rosenberg. Fascism utopized the dynamism anchored in the myths that stimulate experience. [19] This syndrome first appeared in the intellectual climate of the fin de siecle and the 1914 generation, in the cultural milieu of the interwar decades, and in the fascist movements and regimes that constituted its political zenith.
A Man for All Seasons
Ernst Junger, born in Heidelberg in 1895, was the eldest of four sons in a typical German bourgeois family. [20] In his early years, his family moved to Hanover, following the decision of his father, the owner of a chemical factory, who was concerned for his children's economic welfare. However, dissatisfaction with a comfortable bourgeois existence caused the seventeen-year-old Junger to seek out a life of danger and adventure. He crossed the French frontier at Metz and burnt all the money in his possession in order to sever his connection to the past. He then made his way to Africa where, like Marinetti, the founder of the Italian Futurist movement, he discovered what he called "the promise of happiness." [21] After he had stayed a few weeks at Sidi-Bal-Abbas in North Africa, his father brought him home, but he did not remain there for long. Later, Junger described the reasons for his frequent flights from home: "We grew up in the atmosphere of a materialistic epoch, and we all consequently had a taste for something out of the ordinary, for situations of great danger." [22]
In 1914, before the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the 73rd Hanover Fusilier Regiment, in which he served for four years. He began as a private, and a year later was appointed a junior officer. He did not volunteer for ideological or nationalistic reasons, but in the hope of finding in the army what he had sought in Africa: a life of existential significance, of danger, of spontaneity and vitality. He finally found his Africa in the fields of Flanders. The primitivism he longed for changed in content but not in essence, and his myth of Africa was now replaced by the myth of the war. In those years in which he dwelt in the trenches of northern France, Junger was in charge of platoons of commandos and was wounded seven times. Like Rommel, he received the highest decoration for valor in the German army. After the war, he returned to his defeated country, and began to take his first steps in civilian life. His sojourn in the trenches had given birth to an exhaustive battle diary documenting his experience in the war. The diary, which appeared in 1920 under the title Stahlgewittern (The Storm of Steel), won its author immediate fame and was an instant best-seller. Junger became the spokesman of the generation of the trenches that had sacrificed all without receiving anything in return. [23]
From 1927 onward, Junger lived in Berlin and imbibed the atmosphere of intrigue and machinations, clubs that spawned utopias, subversive agitation in beer cellars, violence in the streets, and corruption in high places. Junger declared in the spirit of that time (as Thomas Mann had done a dozen years previously) that all democratic regimes were in contradiction to the essentially tragic nature of the human destiny. His interest in botany and zoology was not scientific but metaphorical: he wished to study the sphere of animals and vegetation as a language of symbols for an understanding of the metaphysical essence of the world. In the 1930s, he traveled a great deal in Brazil, Morocco, Scandinavia, and France, and in his travel notes there was still a sense of nostalgia for the primitive and a feeling of hostility to the compromises and adjustments of the world in which he lived. In 1932, Junger published Der Arbeiter (The Worker), a technological utopia of the modern world that was the high point of his intellectual achievement. [24]
Junger took the "nihilistic-totalitarian syndrome" to its ultimate conclusions. He used the myth of the "masculine community" of the trenches and the public memory of the first mechanized war in order to construct a utopia in which technology directed, guided, and molded man and his role in the new hierarchical society. Indeed, the Jungerian technological utopia would be prophetic of a new political form of totalitarian nihilism.
For Junger, the Second World War was a completely different experience from the first one. If the First World War was a hell in the trenches, the second was for Junger a pleasurable experience in the streets of Paris. As an officer of the German occupation, he spent his time in the French capital in the company of "collaborationist" authors and cultural critics, visiting artists like Picasso and Braque and in frequenting literary clubs and cafes on the boulevards. All this is described in his wartime notes, the first part of which was published in 1942 under the title Garten und Strassen (Gardens and Streets). [25] Toward the end of the war (1943), his book Der Priede (The Peace) appeared and was popular among the young German soldiers on the western front. When the war ended, his books were banned in the British zone of occupation in Germany, but at the same time were freely available in London. In November 1944, when he lost his eighteen-year-old son Ernestal on the Italian front, he wrote that "the only true community of the war" was the community of the bereaved. His stay in Paris was interrupted by a six-week journey to the Caucasian front, but the quiet places he visited there in no way recalled his experiences in Flanders. These landscapes were later described in his utopia Heliopolis (1949), which developed the theme of Auf den Marmorklippen in which the representatives of anarchy and the representatives of nihilism confront each other in the person of the hero, Lucio de Gir. [26] After his commander General Heinrich von Stulpfnagel was executed, Junger was sent back to Germany, and in October 1944 he was discharged from the army. His diary (1949), which covers the period of the Second World War in detail, ends with the entry of American tanks into a village near Hanover in April 1945. [27]
After the war, there was talk of him being placed on trial in Nuremberg. Seeking to preserve his honor, Junger refused to be tried by the de-Nazification court, although clearance would have enabled him to publish his books freely. However, Junger lived on to become the most important cultural figure in Germany after Heidegger. His long life and his many books, which appeared in successive editions, caused the character of his youthful writings to be forgotten. In 1982, he received a dramatic rehabilitation when he was awarded the prestigious Goethe prize in a splendid ceremony in Frankfurt. Three years later, the chancellor Helmuth Kohl made a pilgrimage to the village of Wilflingen, where Junger lived, to congratulate him on his ninetieth birthday. He died in 1998, at the age of a hundred and three.
The Aesthetics of War
In the writings of his youth, Junger seized on the war as an "existential moment" in terms derived from Nietzsche. Unlike many thinkers who betrayed Nietzsche when they took Zarathustra into the trenches, he had a profound understanding of the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie and an intense sympathy for the progenitor of the "will to power." When Junger fused his interpretation of Nietzsche with his sense of the aesthetic attraction of the war and the experience of the trenches, he was no longer one more author writing about the war but had become its most enthusiastic advocate. Junger saw the First World War as the most concrete manifestation of Nietzsche's existential, aesthetic, and nihilistic vision. He did not look for the most "exalted" moment but for the moment. One cannot prepare oneself for a mystical moment of this kind, for such a moment is like an earthquake that overtakes a man unawares. According to Junger, the experience of the war was not relative but absolute, enabling a man to discover himself and finally understand the meaning of life. [28]
Stahlgewittern is a realistic description of the soldiers in the trenches. Junger strikes an admirable balance between the perspective of the soldier who feels horror when going into battle and that of the detached observer who tries to perceive the real meaning of the scenes of the war. In his battle diary, the private and later the officer Junger noted everything that took place and "what he thought about it at the time it happened." [29] The war was depicted soberly: columns of soldiers filled with their bodies a battlefield that was like a desert of the insane; the dugouts, trenches, and holes that served as shelters and homes for millions of soldiers were a sort of microcosm of Dante's Inferno. The war changed its character after the Somme offensive of 1916, and it was now clear to many young people that it would not be a temporary affair and a joyous youthful adventure, but was something with which they would be burdened for weeks, months, and years. What was the value of men's lives when the eye became accustomed to the daily sight of thousands of exploding bodies flying in the air? Nothing existed except a frenzied crescendo of mutual slaughter. Noble feelings ceased having any significance at a time when the machine dominated humanity. Men were hardened and became atoms, and their outward appearance reflected this: this was the first time that German soldiers wore steel helmets. In the shadow of death, stiffness and rigidity became a way of life. The soldiers became a laboratory for the production of death on a massive scale and for the exploitation of means of destruction.
Junger's description of the war reached its climax in his account of the great German offensive of March 1918. The moment approached for the last supreme effort. The fate of nations was to be sealed in blood and steel, and the destiny of the world hung in the balance. Junger was aware of the historical significance of this moment and was convinced that each man felt that his individual existence was rendered insignificant by the weight of the historic responsibility placed on his shoulders. Such moments made him feel that in the final analysis, the history of nations and the fate of the individual were decided in battles. On the eve of the battle, the tension in the air could be cut with a knife. The officers gathered in a circle exchanged nervous jokes and were unable to preserve their clarity of mind as the artillery bombardment proceeded. Nerves were paralyzed, and people were no longer even frightened. Death lost its meaning because "the will-to-live passed collectively to the nation." This made everyone indifferent to his personal fate. This jumble of feelings mixed with alcohol as the army advanced toward the enemy aroused both the bestial and the godlike in man. The army was infused with a blood-lust.
In Der Kampf also inneres Erlebnis, the war was also described as an aesthetic and existential phenomenon:
All goals are past, only movement is eternal, and it brings forth unceasingly magnificent and merciless spectacles. To sink into their lofty goallessness as into an artwork or as into the starry sky, that is granted only to the few. But who experiences in this war only negation, only inherent suffering and not affirmation, the higher movement, he has experienced it as a slave. He has no inner, but only an external experience. [30]
Junger experienced the reality as a mysterious movement of spirit: "We are confronted with a riddle: the mystery of the spirit that pours out now and then across the world, seizing whole multitudes of men together. No one knows where it originates." [31] Ernst von Salomon also wrote of the thread binding together the loyalties of a single race, in which each person shares the same sufferings and is subject to the same penetrating vibrations. [32] Junger described the riddle and at the same time provided the interpretation: he was a barometer who experienced the present within himself but who also discerned the significance of his era and his place in it. Men of action like Salomon and Junger described themselves in their books as reflecting the things that were taking place in their time.
The Vanguard that Precedes the Reich
According to Josef Goebbels, the overriding aim of the radical nationalists in the time of the Weimar Republic was to transform the masses into a people. In the war, order had been universally imposed: the masses disappeared overnight, and an exultant, enthusiastic mob had been transformed into a people marching into battle. Junger describes how this mob became a people and an army:
New gods were raised to the throne of the day: strength, the fist, and virile courage. The long columns of armed youth thundering along the asphalt embodied all of these qualities: the crowd was suffused with jubilation and reverential awe. [33]
This was the vanguard that preceded the Reich. The mob was organized into a fighting formation, and the moral Junger drew from it was, "This is how things should be!" The anarchic nature of existence should be molded by the will into strength, audacity, and courage. After the war, with the defeat of Germany, the people had split apart into a disorganized mass as it had been before. According to Junger, the subculture of the Weimar Republic now raised up the masses from the dunghill and made them the arbiter of cultural norms in place of the elite. Junger expressed his patrician disdain for this phenomenon in language reminiscent of the Nietzschean contempt for the "herd":
Since the mass is unable to emulate the few, the few are being called upon to emulate the mass. Politics, drama, artists, cafes, patent-leather shoes, posters, newspapers, morality, tomorrow's Europe, the world of the day after tomorrow: all this is to become thundering mass. The mass is a beast of a thousand heads, it obstructs all movement, crushes anything it cannot swallow or engulf; it is envious, parvenu, common. The individual has once again been defeated, betrayed most savagely by men born to represent him. [34]
Junger advocated a nationalism of a new kind -- one based on the individual rather than social beliefs or traditions. The existential outlook that connected the individual with his universe automatically identified nationhood with the individual.
It [nationalism] is more than just one idea among others. It does not seek out the measurable, but the measure. It is the surest route to the maternal being that gives birth to new forms in every century. And we have seen that there are still men who can create after the fashion of the warrior. [35]
Junger's existential nationalism was based on an affirmation of the instincts, a merging with the cosmos and the creation of a new man, ex nihilo, entranced by the rhythms and "bestiality" of war.
The subject of Junger's article "On Pain" was this man of steel or "new man." According to this article, bourgeois culture tries to disregard poverty and servitude by creating a whole world of political and technical "comfort." This was exemplified by Nietzsche's "last man," who was bourgeois, hedonistic, and comfortable. The meritorious man, on the other hand, is the one who is full of contempt toward the world of bourgeois mediocrity, and who is able to bear the pain of the technological era. An elite group or an artist or hero knows the value of self-discipline and realizes that it is pain that directly creates the power of life. The body is not regarded as having any value in itself, but is an object or tool for the attainment of higher values that are achieved through the technological impulse. Man must therefore be transformed into a machine. Discipline is "the means by which man connects himself to pain." [36] For the bourgeoisie, a "good" man is one who can be influenced, who is changeable, mobile, somewhat restless. By contrast, "the disciplined man is closed up: he has a stern mentality -- one-sided, objective, hard." Above all, a man must learn the value of self-sacrifice. From this aesthetic starting point, man can achieve a complete objectivization of his own body. This self-objectivization can take place only in a world in which the concepts of space and time have radically changed. [37]
The battlefield was the progenitor of the "new man." Junger's patrician Nietzscheanism led him to the conclusion that the masses who invaded the battlefield destroyed the image of an organized army of select individuals. In his opinion, the bourgeoisie had opened up the trenches to the masses and made a business out of the war, which is the only place where a man can be truly a man: "Only one mass-phenomenon is not ridiculous: the army. But the bourgeoisie has made even the army ridiculous." [38] According to Junger, the man who was not militaristic was "bourgeois." Junger attacked Marxism at a sensitive point by depicting its mentality as bourgeois and anti-militaristic, or, in other words, as degenerate. The answer to degeneracy was dynamism. The "new man" paved the way for a society, culture, and nation that existed on a permanent war-footing. This model had been forged in the trenches.
The mentality of the soldiers at the front was exemplified not only by Junger but in the Freikorps, private armies that sprang up after the First World War. Klaus Theweleit's study Male Fantasies (1978) seeks to examine their psychology. [39] These "white troops" -- hence the name "white terror" -- were used by the socialist government of Friedrich Ebert to suppress the communist insurrection of the years 1919-20. They saw the radical German working-class movement as the greatest threat to their image of the German nation. Theweleit's study, which covers about 250 novels and memoirs by the members of the Freikorps, investigates their hopes and fears as well as their glorification of war and violence. A literature of recollection was popular in the 1920s, and there were hundreds and thousands of books giving an obsessive description of feelings of violence, male fantasies, and experiences of the war. This mass phenomenon paralleled the flowering of a protofascist literature in France and Italy in the 1920s reflecting the rise of militarism and a longing for male comradeship and nostalgia for one's lost heroic youth.
The writers of the Freikorps were also drawn to an existential rather than to the National Socialist ideology. Their aim was not to communicate but to totally uproot and destroy. In their writings, the self became machine-like through what Foucault once called "techniques of the self." Theweleit analyzed the discourse of the Freikorps, and Male Fantasies is undoubtedly a work of political symbolism. It is not an ideological survey of the subject but a study of the symbolic construction of the "other" as a mechanism for consolidating the self. Fascism, according to Theweleit, was not "a form of domination, a general ideology or a system at all" [40] but a sexual language, an "epistemological code " an anti-Eros in the service of nihilism. Underlying fascist propaganda, there is a constant war against anything that contains enjoyment and pleasure. [41] War is not regarded as a process of maturation in which the fighter passes through an initiation ceremony on the path to maturity, an event that sharpens his perception of the world. War is an experience one chooses, a mirror that reflects one's identity. War is neither an initiation ceremony nor a confrontation with the beast within us. Theweleit effects a deconstruction of these myths concerning war, which describe it as an initiation to manhood or to bestiality.
In 1925, Junger joined the staff of the journal Stahlhelm, whose principles were similar to those of the 'Croix de feu' in France: namely, opposition to the treaty of Versailles, to the republican regime and to universal franchise. In 1926, Junger described war as the mother of modern nationalism: "Modern nationalism ... needs that which is out of the ordinary .... The mother of the nation is war .... War is our mother, it infuses us with soul ... so that our values will be heroic values, values of fighters and not of shopkeepers .... We do not want the useful, the private, and the pleasurable, but what is necessary and what is required by destiny." [42] By 1927, he was disappointed with the leagues of the Bund (association) of front-line soldiers (and especially with the Stahlhelm), which he had ceased to see as suitable models for a future society since they had become party-like structures. Junger now conceived his "new man" in the image of the soldier-worker of the trenches of the First World War. The anonymous soldier of the war was a fitting symbol of the hero of the industrial-military process: "His positive feature is that he is replaceable, and for each one that falls there is another to take his place." [43] The community of "new men" came into being with the new modes of existence and new industrial forms that grew out of the war era: "This war is not the end but the beginning of violence ... a breaking of new frontiers .... The war is a great school and the new man will spring forth from our race." [44] The war, which produced the new communal masculine relationship, was not seen by Junger as an experience of the past, a trauma, or something unrepeatable, but as an ever-valid model and a creative phenomenon: "Battle is not only destruction but also the masculine form of recuperation from sickness." [45]