Translator’s Introductionby David C. Durst
Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!
-- Ernst Jünger, “On Pain”
1.
Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) is widely regarded as one of the most important, if also most controversial, German writers of the twentieth century. A highly decorated World War I veteran, Jünger remains perhaps best known for the gripping memoir of his experiences as a shock troop commander on the Western front in Storm of Steel (1920), as well as his oblique critique of the Nazi regime in the acclaimed novel On the Marble Cliffs, from 1939.
Yet since the republication of his political writings from the Weimar Republic in Politische Publizistik 1919–1933 in 2001, renewed attention has been given to Jünger the political essayist.1 As a prominent intellectual in the right-wing nationalist circle of “Conservative Revolutionaries,” Jünger was an outspoken opponent of Germany’s first and fateful experiment with parliamentary democracy. In 1925, he notoriously stated that he “hated democracy like the plague” and advocated in its place an extreme, authoritarian, and militaristic nationalism. His writings of the 1920s and early 1930s capture the radical Right’s criticism of liberalism as the worldview of the bourgeoisie and herald the rise of a new iron order across Europe based on authority, discipline, and sacrifice. This is no less true for his essay “On Pain” (Über den Schmerz), which first appeared in 1934, one year after Hitler’s rise to power.
According to Jünger’s own testimony, “On Pain” is the third in a series of investigations on the dawning age of mobilization, which he began with the essays “Total Mobilization” (1930) and The Worker: Mastery and Form (1932).2 In “Total Mobilization,” Jünger describes the enormous process of mobilization, both technical and spiritual, underway in the establishment of large military-industrial states vying for power across the globe. This process marks an end to the “golden age of security” (Stefan Zweig) that defined bourgeois life in nineteenth-century Europe. The dynamics of large-scale technology and mass society demand collective responses, in which the individual was no longer of value in his own right but only in relation to the state. As Jünger writes, in this age the individual can be “sacrificed without a second thought.” This “transformed world,” as he would term it, became nowhere more visible than in the Great War, where the battles of matériel, i.e., of heavy armor and artillery, “played out in dimensions in which the fate of the individual disappeared.”3
Jünger’s second, longer essay, The Worker, turns attention to the Gestalt (literally, “form,” “figure,” or “shape”) or new, postindividualistic type of human being, whose historic mission lies in embracing this process of mobilization by subordinating his freedom to the imperatives of the state. The Worker proclaims the end of the bourgeois individual, whose liberal values have become obsolete. In the mass industrial societies of the twentieth century, individual liberty, security, and pacifism are replaced by authority, discipline, and militarism; just as the soldiers in the trenches of the Great War had become the day-laborers of death, so too do the workers of the post–World War I era assume the steely shape of soldiers. Here, one no longer speaks of individual rights or private life, but of duty and service to the state. In a symbolically charged gesture, Jünger predates the preface of The Worker to July 14, 1932; in the age of total mobilization, the former Lieutenant in Prince Albrecht of Prussia’s Hanoverian Regiment believed, the authoritarian spirit of Prussia would supersede the liberal spirit of 1789 as the preeminent ideology of European states. The revolution to come would be based on conservative principles from the Right. “The ideal of individual freedom,” he later writes in May 1933, “has become meaningless over against a spirit that sees happiness in rigorous discipline and service for great deeds.”4
Completing this series of essays from the early 1930s, “On Pain” announces a new metaphysics of pain. It no longer seeks the measure of man in the liberal values of security, liberty, and comfort but in the capacity to withstand pain and sacrifice oneself for a “higher” cause. Over the course of the past century, Jünger notes, the “spirit” of man has grown “cold” and “cruel”; life appears ever more clearly as a “will to power, and nothing else.” With the eclipse of liberal culture through the progressive objectification and functionalization of life, it is only those most hardened against pain who will prevail. Although perhaps the least known of the three essays, Jünger himself considered “On Pain” to stand alone as the “most advanced among his works” at the time.5 What Jünger later in life said of The Worker is no less valid for this “trilogy” of essays as a whole: “the developments in Germany fit into its framework, but it was not especially tailored for it.”6
2.
The biographer Thomas Nevin once remarked that Jünger’s intellectual production “calls no philosophical system to attention.”7 This statement is no doubt also true for “On Pain,” at least in part. Jünger’s essay is unorthodox in its approach to the problem of pain, and the author draws intellectually on a remarkably eclectic group of thinkers and artists of the past, from Flavius Josephus, Daniel Defoe, and Mikhail Bakunin to Hieronymous Bosch, Breughel the Elder, and Lucas Cranach. Yet below the surface, Jünger’s essay gives expression to salient features of conservative thought as it had crystallized in Germany after the Great War.
As is often noted, Jünger’s worldview, style of thought, and perception were trained in youth on the battlefield. For the soldier turned writer, the clash of forces has method; it brings clarity to an otherwise confused and chaotic world. Accordingly, in his political writings of the interwar period Jünger “seeks not solutions, but conflicts,” not a neutralization or reconciliation of antagonisms, but a Nietzschean intensification of the struggle.8 Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s ideas on the political, Jünger writes in The Worker that clarity comes
not by blurring the antitheses but through the fact that they become more irreconcilable, and that every region, even the most removed, assumes a political character. . . . This means for each of us not the dissolution but intensification of the conflict. . . . A real force utilizes its excess power not to avoid oppositions but to drive straight through them. . . . This excess is what on this side of the zone of conflict appears as inner certainty and, after the measure of forces, as domination.9
In “On Pain,” this logic of confrontation aims its sights at the bourgeoisie, the arch enemy of the German radical Right. Jünger’s essay, as so much of his work from the period, is anti-bourgeois through and through. The deep and bitter resentment that front-line soldiers felt against the home front after the humiliating collapse of the War effort, surfaces in Jünger’s implacable attitude toward the bourgeoisie as a whole. In 1929, as the Weimar Republic entered its final phase of crisis, Jünger—a self-proclaimed “true and unforgiving enemy of the bourgeois”—spoke openly of the “pleasure the decay [of the bourgeois] gives us.”10 Despite his cool distance to the Nazi leadership, which had long courted him, Jünger must have felt some satisfaction that his prognostications on the “self-dissolution of the bourgeois world” proved to be correct in Germany as Hitler took over power in late January of 1933.
In developments spanning from communist Russia to fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and even Fordist United States, Jünger thus saw the era of the bourgeoisie coming to an end; its values, habits, and very way of life had become incommensurate with the times. This was especially apparent in the confrontation with pain. According to Jünger, the bourgeois individual typically dwells in a “zone of sensitivity,” where “security,” “ease,” and “comfort”—and ultimately “the body” itself—become the essential core of life. Here, one seeks to avoid pain at all cost.
During the liberal nineteenth century, advocates of the Enlightenment were of the belief that pain, both physical and psychological, was something that science and technology could marginalize or even banish from human life. In “On Pain,” Jünger notes the innumerable human efforts undertaken to eliminate pain. Philosophers prescribed the abolition of torture and slavery, doctors discovered vaccinations and the benefits of narcosis, psychologists sought to liberate the individual from the inner sufferings of mental disease, and politicians introduced systems of public insurance and welfare for the old, young, and unemployed. In short, the enlightened spirit of the age brought forth an entire civilized world of prosperity and security.
Yet this liberal Enlightenment belief in ridding the world of pain through reason and science proved to be more a prejudice than a reality. It was not only that the overriding aim of this “security” society, of a social order dedicated to abolishing pain, produced a world of inferior values and, in the end, an existentially vacuous life of “complacency” and “comfort.” “Boredom,” Jünger notes, “is the dissolution of pain in time.” What is more, modern mass society and technology demand not less but ever greater human sacrifice. The age has grown cruel. One need only look to the countless victims of accidents due to mass industrial production and modern transportation or the “bestial” attack on the unborn for proof. And in the sphere of politics, as World War I showed, belief in humanity and the pacification of conflicts between hostile nation-states turned out to be but a grand illusion. War, conflict, and sacrifice remain an ineluctable dimension of human life; if anything, they are now assuming an ever more ominous, planetary dimension.
Drawing on Graf Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), “Iron Chancellor” of Germany in the late nineteenth century and idol of the German Right, Jünger thus concludes that “an essential conviction of all conservative thinking” is that “pain is among the unavoidable facts of the world.” Pain, not pleasure; risk and sacrifice, not security; conflict, not comfort are axiomatic assumptions of conservative politics. A “noble detachment” from human suffering is thus requisite for conservative rule, for which there are more important things than pain.
This conviction of conservative thought concerning the ineluctability of pain strikes at the very foundations of the modern liberal state, upon which the first German democratic Republic was built. Beginning with Hobbes, the modern liberal state was no longer to be founded on aristocratic virtues, such as honor, pride, or duty, but instead on a new bourgeois worldview rooted in the individual right to self-preservation. For Hobbes, it was above all “vanity,” the original, noxious source of aristocratic ideals, that constitutes the root cause of all evil. Vanity blinds man; by contrast, the diametrically opposed passion, fear, enlightens, and fear of violent death compels prudence. Not a belief in honor or valor in glorious deeds of sacrifice for the state, but the desire to pursue one’s own private pleasures in peace and security forms the rational basis for the modern liberal state. An overriding goal of the modern liberal state thus rests in reducing the pain and suffering of its citizens. Duty to the state is no longer natural or absolute, but contingent upon the security that the state provides for private individuals to reap the fruits of peaceful coexistence in the arts, agriculture, and commerce. Hence, the Leviathan’s famous line: “The end of obedience is protection.”11 Yet based as it is on this novel set of bourgeois values, Hobbes’s new political science cannot but progressively reject older aristocratic virtues, such as honor and pride, which are inconsistent with fear, pain, and risk. This is especially the case with the virtue of courage, which, as Aristotle defines it in his Nicomachean Ethics, is concerned with
the things that inspire fear; for he who is undisturbed in face of these and bears himself as he should towards these is more truly brave than the man who does so towards the things that inspire confidence. It is for facing what is painful, then, as has been said, that men are called brave. Hence also courage involves pain, and is justly praised; for it is harder to face what is painful than to abstain from what is pleasant.12
Jünger’s conviction that the downfall of the bourgeois order is a consequence of this denial of courage was no doubt influenced in its articulation by his friend Carl Schmitt. In correspondence from the early 1930s, Jünger and Schmitt exchanged ideas on a range of topics related to their work, including not only Schmitt’s concept of the political as “friend-enemy relation” but also Hobbes’s ideas on fear and pain.13 Jünger read Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political and no doubt would have found in Schmitt’s short but striking discussion of Hegel’s “polemically political definition of the bourgeois” enormous resonance with his own ideas. In the passages added to the 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt writes that the young Hegel describes the bourgeois as
an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his progressive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all “in the total security of its use.” Consequently he wants to be spared courage [Tapferkeit] and exempted from the danger of violent death.14
But beyond Schmitt or even Hegel, we can trace Jünger’s view of the bourgeoisie in relation to the question of courage above all to Friedrich Nietzsche. Jünger read Nietzsche’s The Will to Power and The Birth of Tragedy a year before the outbreak of the First World War, and, according to biographer Heimo Schwilk, this experience had an “explosive” effect on the eighteen-year-old. “Repulsed by the conventions of Wilhelmine Germany,” Schwilk notes, “Jünger felt attracted to Nietzsche and was enthralled by his devastating critique of the bourgeoisie.”15 Indeed, it was none other than Nietzsche, an intellectual shock trooper for the radical Right in Germany especially after the Great War, who saw in the bourgeois individual’s “sensitivity to pain,” “inward acts of cowardice” and “lack of courage,” signs of the mediocrity, decay, and nihilism of European civilization as a whole.16 What was this “Last Man,” of which Nietzsche so menacingly spoke, if not the individual who “loses courage and submits” when “faced with this tremendous machinery” of nineteenth-century mass society?17 It was this same kind of cowardly figure that Jünger would come across in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which he read just as he was completing “On Pain” in early 1934. In this celebrated semi-biographical novel from 1932, Céline, whom Jünger called the “Rabelais of a completely worthless world,” depicts the nihilistic anti-hero Bardamu in his aimless flight from the trenches of World War I to colonial Africa, Fordist America, and the working-class slums of postwar Paris.18
Nietzsche’s influence is not only present in Jünger’s antipathy toward the bourgeois individual as the “Last Man,” but also in the rediscovery of the virtue of manliness for the modern world. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche embraces the idea of a “new courage” with “no a priori truths . . . but a free subordination to a ruling idea that has its time.”19 This no doubt left its trace on Jünger. Already in his field notebooks during the War, the young soldier expresses his conviction that “courage is the only virtue of man.”20 And in The Battle as Inner Experience (1922), notorious for its lust for war and blood, Jünger writes:
. . . courage is the wind that drives to far coasts, the key to all treasures, the hammer that crafts great empires, the armor without which no culture exists. Courage is the effort of one’s own person to the last consequence, the jump start of an idea against matter, without care for what comes of it. Courage means to let oneself be nailed to the cross for one’s cause. Courage means, in the last moment of life, to still show allegiance to the thought for which one stood and fell. To the devil with the times that want to take from us courage and men.21
Yet no one captures this Nietzschean pathos of courage as a kind of amor fati, a standing one’s ground at a lost post or, better, in a lost world, more strikingly than Jünger’s intellectual mentor of sorts, Oswald Spengler. In the final section of Man and Technics (1931), Spengler writes:
There is only one world-view that is worthy of us, and which has already been discussed as the Choice of Achilles—better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without substance. The danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatsoever is deplorable. Time cannot be stopped; there is no possibility for prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must courageously follow the path to the end as destiny demands. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost post, without hope, without rescue, like the Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. . . . The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.22
This “heroic realism” or cult of courage and sacrifice was the German radical Right’s response to a modern world in decline. In what Jünger himself calls “a last and most remarkable phase of nihilism,” the only remaining virtue is courage, i.e., andreia or manliness, the original ideal of the heroic Greek world.23 Yet in contrast to Nietzsche, for whom manliness remained a virtue of the wise and noble few, Jünger transforms this ideal by linking it with the will of the Arbeiter. In “On Pain,” courage is transformed into the “discipline” and “detachment” of the worker; an essential, if no longer noble, capacity to hold out in the “zone of pain.” In the exacting age of total mobilization, the courageous warrior hero is replaced by the obedient laborer of sacrifice and death. The worker no longer tries to anesthetize pain but instead seeks to master pain and organize life so that he is armed against it at every turn.
With remarkable perspicuity, Jünger anticipates here the rise of a new breed of men who become one with new, terrorizing machines of death and destruction. Equipped with an unmatched ability to treat oneself in a cold and detached way as an object, this worker-type makes possible human guided “torpedoes” and “manned planes” that—like later the Kamikaze pilots of World War II —“can dive down to strike with lethal accuracy the nerve centers of enemy resistance.” Indeed, Jünger’s vision of manned missiles seems to reflect a logic that later inspired the design of the Daimler Benz Project “F” in Nazi Germany during the final years of World War II. The DB “F”s were manned jet aircraft holding 3000 kg of explosives that were to be launched from a long-range carrier aircraft (the DB “C” or “Amerikabomber”) once the enemy target was in visual range. The pilot of the DB “F” was to eject through an escape hatch located beneath the cockpit and parachute to safety once he was assured of the hit. In reality, the mission meant almost certain death for the pilot. According to Albert Speer, with these manned missiles Hitler dreamed of turning the skyscrapers of Manhattan into “huge burning torches.”24
In “On Pain,” Jünger also traces how this altered relation to pain is inscribed in new patterns of human appearance, education, and organization emerging in the age of mobilization. The physiognomy of the bourgeois, for instance, is “delicate, pliant, changing, and open to the most diverse and distracting kinds of influences”; it reflects a life and culture of noncommittal ease, vacuous comfort, and security. By contrast, the face of the worker is “resolute and hardened through rigorous training; it possesses clear direction and is single-minded, objective, and unyielding.” These latter are the steely, yet inwardly emptied-out, faces of Hitler’s worker-soldiers, which Leni Riefenstahl would capture on film in Triumph of the Will (1935), parading with shovels in hand at the Nazi’s Nuremberg Rally in 1934. Receiving rigorous, narrow, specialized training and taught to act no longer individually but as a unit, the worker is able to view himself dispassionately as an object ready for service and sacrifice for a “higher,” collective cause. In a plain, unambiguous fashion, requiring neither moral deliberation nor doubt, the worker responds to all life’s challenges as if obeying a command, i.e., beyond good and evil. Hence, the predilection for uniforms, masks, and sports. This differs dramatically from the habitus of the liberally educated bourgeoisie, which, as the dissolute and distracted masses, “are moved morally.” As Jünger writes, “they unite in situations of excitement and indignation. They must be convinced that the opponent is evil and that they are prosecuting justice against this evil.”
But the peculiarity of the worker is not only visible in outward physical appearance, training, or group dynamic; more importantly, it can be seen in the way that this new race of men views the world. According to Jünger, technology breeds discipline (“Technology is our uniform”), and this was nowhere more apparent than in photography. In a reversal of his earlier, negative opinion of photography, at the end of the 1920s Jünger became captivated by the possible uses of the photographic apparatus to advance the political cause. During the final years of the Weimar Republic, Jünger, his brother Friedrich Georg, and his friend Edmund Schultz collaborated on several fascinating, yet today little known, photo books, which covered topics ranging from the sorry state of parliamentary democracy in Germany to the rise of authoritarian worker-states on the ashes of the bourgeois world.25 In all these efforts, as Jünger noted already in The Worker, photography should assume the role of “a political weapon of assault.”26
The use of photography as a political weapon was by no means an invention or monopoly of the German Right. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the newspaper publisher Willi Münzenberg (1889–1940) and his left-wing colleagues sought to form a cadre of worker-photographers who would regard “the photographic image as their weapon” and “the camera as a weapon in the struggle of the proletariat.”27 With the radical polarization of fronts during the last, intense years of the Republic, parties across the political spectrum ever increasingly chose the visual image over rational persuasion in their attempts to mobilize the masses. Photo magazines of all stripes sprouted up as vehicles for the dissemination of political views among the masses and proved to be an effective means in the mass struggle for political power. Here, one only needs to think of John Heartfield’s famous photomontages on the cover of the pro-Communist Arbeiter Illustrierter Zeitung or AIZ (Worker’s Illustrated Magazine) and collected in Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (1929). With instantaneous clarity, one image conveys what a thousand words often could not achieve.28
Yet, for Jünger, the revolutionary nature of photography lies not only in the fact that “the appeal to immediate visual perception works more powerfully and incisively than the precision of concepts” in mobilizing the masses.29 More fundamentally, the photographic apparatus is a “weapon of the worker” because it reflects what he calls the “second, colder consciousness” of the worker and his “peculiarly cruel way of seeing.” In the War, Jünger recognized the decisive value of optical instruments that technically enhance the penetrating power of the human eye. Exposure to enemy reconnaissance or the scope of a rifle meant almost certain death. But the photographic apparatus too has a telescopic quality that stands outside the bourgeois “zone of sensitivity.” As Jünger writes, “one can tell that the event photographed is seen by an insensitive and invulnerable eye. It records the bullet in midflight just as easily as it captures a man at the moment an explosion tears him apart.” Through its objective lens, the camera is capable not only of “hunting down the individual” by exposing his hidden, private spheres of life, but also of destroying in a flash the substance of cultic worlds. “Ultimately,” he writes, the photographic apparatus “is a kind of evil eye”; as such, it is akin to the worker, for whom “seeing is an act of assault.” In short, the worker, like photography itself, captures the world in a cold, cruel, and colonizing way, beyond good and evil.
Jünger’s ideas on photography resonated with other, ongoing efforts in Germany at the time. In autumn of 1933, for instance, the German Museum in Munich held the exhibition Die Kamera, which was designed to mobilize professional and amateur photography for the new tasks of National Socialism.30 It follows a call of the Nazi journal Photofreund from July 1933, in which the editors spoke out in favor of a “German photography” that would “no longer distract from the struggle [of National Socialism]; no, photography should lead into it, become an instrument, a weapon in the struggle. And that photography can be a sharp and powerful weapon, the men of the new Germany have recognized this with clear vision.”31 As was often the case, Jünger acted as a kind of seismograph of the times.
It causes us little wonder, then, when the inside caption of the international editions of Blätter und Steine published in the early 1940s would claim the following in eloquent English: “in the war chapters and above all when dealing with the problem of pain, Jünger sets forth a view of the world which typifies and brings into sharp relief a whole generation of Germans.” Indeed, it is hard to deny just how true this was. For in snapshots that German soldiers took of their “adversaries” during the first successful months of Operation Barbarossa in 1941,32 we find a most convincing illustration of what Jünger referred to as “our peculiarly cruel way of seeing.” German soldiers not only perpetrated abominable crimes against humanity, but they also took photos of their victims in humiliating scenes and made these “trophies of war” available on order for the amusement of others. These heinous acts reveal a peculiarity of German fascism, a cold, cruel, and colonizing gaze that Jünger seems to have heralded.
All the more remarkable, then, is Jünger’s own personal reaction to the atrocities of the Nazi regime perpetrated by German soldiers, SS, and Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Especially in his diaries, Radiations (Strahlungen), Jünger’s response to reports of the systematic murder of thousands of Jews by the SS while on duty in the Caucasus in the fall of 1943 and, later, to the sight of emaciated Jews just released from the Belsen concentration camp in 1945 is not of a man detached from suffering or sure of himself in the zone of pain and discipline. Shaken by the sight of Holocaust survivors, Jünger writes: “Only the sight of the individual, of the nearest, can reveal to us the suffering of the world.”33
3.
Jünger wrote “On Pain” in the early months of 1934 while residing in the medieval town of Goslar am Harz, located in Lower Saxony.34 Goslar, it should be noted, was the first station of Jünger’s “internal emigration” during the Nazi period. In 1932, Jünger was threatened in the Nazi press with “Kopfschüsse,” or “bullets to the head,” because of the collectivistic tendencies in The Worker. And after his apartment in Steglitz was raided by the Nazis in April 1933, Jünger thought it wise to remove himself from Berlin altogether.
“On Pain” was the final essay in Leaves and Stones (Blätter und Steine), a collection of his shorter essays that appeared in print in the autumn of 1934. This essay collection bridges Jünger’s passage from an author of earlier published war and mobilization texts from the Weimar period, such as “Fire and Movement” (1930) and “Total Mobilization” (1930), to an author of “internal emigration,” as reflected in the “Epigrammatic Appendix.” This appendix was a compilation of one hundred epigrams, several of which were a direct challenge to the Nazi regime.
The publisher of Leaves and Stones was the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt (HAVA) in Hamburg. As the biographer Helmuth Kiesel states, collaboration with HAVA, which began in 1929 with The Adventurous Heart, was a stroke of luck for Jünger.35 As publisher of On the Marble Cliffs (1939) and The Peace (1945), HAVA would back Jünger’s stance toward the Nazis throughout Hitler’s rule. Indeed, HAVA would become known as the “Verlag des 20. Juni” (“Publisher of the 20th of June, 1944”), i.e., the date of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, for its support of voices, like Jünger’s, critical of the Nazi dictatorship.
Like much of Jünger’s work in Nazi Germany, Leaves and Stones fared well on the market. In the early 1940s, the collection of essays was republished three times and with only one minor footnoting change in “On Pain.” After the Second World War, “On Pain” did not reappear in print until 1960, when it was published in Essays I: Betrachtungen zur Zeit (Essays I: Observations of the Times), the fifth volume of Jünger’s first edition of his complete works, Werke. Jünger made significant revisions to “On Pain” for this edition. These modifications included numerous stylistic changes as well as the addition and deletion of several passages. For example, Jünger removed a sentence in section 9 on the massacre of the intelligentsia during the Russian Revolution; and at the end of section 8, he added a short paragraph on a terrorist’s readiness to blow himself up to avoid arrest in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907). Of the changes made, however, few, if any, it seems were intended to render the text more palatable for a post–World War II audience, something Jünger had been criticized for by his former secretary Armin Mohler with respect to other works he had revised for republication. With only slight stylistic modifications, this 1960 version of “On Pain” was then taken up in Essays I, the seventh volume of his Complete Works (Sämtliche Werke) published in 1983. This final version is the text used for the current translation.
“On Pain” is a provocative text. Jünger’s uncompromising criticism of bourgeois security, ease, and complacency might be best ascribed to what Thomas Nevin fittingly calls the “Protestant horror of comfort” found in many of his writings. And Helmuth Kiesel describes Jünger’s positive embrace of pain and human sacrifice in “On Pain” as “unscrupulous and cold.”36 Indeed, “On Pain” charts a new, post-humanistic vision of man, which seems to reject the Pauline belief that, although “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22), mankind will find salvation and deliverance from this suffering in hope and faith in Christ. Jünger himself seems to have recognized just how far he had gone in “On Pain.” Only five years later, On the Marble Cliffs (1939) contains passages that can be read as a refutation of the metaphysics of pain articulated in “Über den Schmerz.” This change in perspective is said to be a consequence of his alleged turn to Christian humanism, which culminated in Der Friede (1945), his call on the youth of Europe and the world for a return to Christendom in response to the nihilism of totalitarianism.
“On Pain” poses several challenges for a translator. On the one hand, Jünger makes use of military terminology that, depending on the context, is not easily translated into English, such as Material-Schlacht (battle of matériel) or Rüstung (preparation for war). This is no less true for other terms, such as Gestalt, Sicherheit (security/safety), or Entfernung (detachment/distance), that assume a more systematic role in Jünger’s essay. Here, I have had the luxury of being able to consult earlier translations of Jünger’s writings, such as Michael Hofmann’s Storm of Steel, Joel Golb and Richard Wolin’s “Total Mobilization,” and Joel Agee’s short excerpt from “On Pain.”37 On the other hand, a further, more serious challenge rests in rendering the style or tone of Jünger’s essay into English. As befits his approach to the problem of pain, Jünger’s diction and style aspire to a kind of “noble detachment” in judgment, which this self-proclaimed “field marshal of ideas” felt was “requisite for sovereign rule.” In this sense, “On Pain” is an expression of Jünger’s famed désinvolture. Jünger was no doubt conscious of this. In another essay in Leaves and Stones, “Praise of Vowels” (“Lob der Vokale”), Jünger provides insight into the mechanics of this style of detachment. Borrowing from the German philologist Jakob Grimm, Jünger speaks of the “masculine ground of consonants” and “feminine ground of vowels”; if the consonant is hard and manly, the vowel is soft and womanly. He also adds here his thoughts on the relation of consonants and vowels, words and sounds to pain:
Every significant pain, wherever it may be felt, no longer expresses itself through words but through sounds. The sites of birth and death are filled with such sounds. We have perceived them again perhaps in their full strength in war—on the battlefields at night filled by the calls of wounded, in the great military hospitals, and in the petrifying cry of death, the meaning of which no one will fail to hear. The heart senses these sounds differently than words; immediately, it is touched by both warmth and coldness alike. Human beings become very similar here; through the great pain the uniqueness of the person who feels pain is destroyed. So too are the special qualities of voice destroyed. Consonants are scorched; the sounds of utmost pain have the nature of pure vowels.38
In the original German, “On Pain” has a cold and unforgiving quality, despite moments where the bestiality of the modern age seem to haunt Jünger like the cries of wounded on the battlefield. It is an essay more of “consonants” and “words” than of “vowels” and “sounds.” It is literally “Über” den Schmerz, i.e., as if seeking to surmount, with the stress on “Beyond the Pain” or “Over the Pain.” The challenge of translating this essay thus lies in capturing Jünger’s embrace of silence amidst a “whole creation” that “groaneth and travaileth in pain.”
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Notes:1. Ernst Jünger, Politische Publizistik 1919–1933, ed. Sven Olaf Berggötz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 2001).
2. Ernst Jünger, “Preface,” in Blätter und Steine (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934), pp. 12–13.
3. Ernst Jünger, Sturm (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 1979), pp. 10–11. Jünger published the story Sturm in serialized form in the Hannoverscher Kurier, a conservative daily newspaper, in April 1923. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
4. Jünger, “Untergang oder neue Ordnung?” in Politische Publizistik, pp. 648–49.
5. Jünger, Blätter und Steine, p. 13.
6. Quoted in Paul Noack, Ernst Jünger: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 1998), p. 143.
7. Thomas R. Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), p. 4.
8. Jünger, “Der heroische Realismus,” in Politische Publizistik, p. 555.
9. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), p. 81.
10. Jünger, “‘Nationalismus’ und Nationalismus,” in Politische Publizistik, p. 507.
11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 153.
12. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), bk. 3, pt. 9.
13. See Jünger’s letters to Carl Schmitt, dated December 13, 1933, and April 20, 1934, in Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt: Briefe 1930–1983, ed. Helmuth Kiesel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999), pp. 18–19, 24–25.
14. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, exp. ed., trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 62–63.
15. Heimo Schwilk, Ernst Jünger: Ein Jahrhundertleben: Die Biographie (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2007), p. 87.
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 32, 167.
17. Ibid., p. 23.
18. See Jünger’s letter to Schmitt, dated January 2, 1934, in Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt: Briefe 1930–1983, p. 21.
19. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 459.
20. Schwilk, Ernst Jünger, p. 122.
21. Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, in Werke, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1960), p. 52.
22. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (Honolulu, HI: Univ. Press of the Pacific, 2002).
23. See here Leo Strauss’s account of Jünger’s “On Pain” in Strauss’s “Living Issues in German Postwar Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico- Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), p. 128.
24. Quoted in Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, trans. Colin Meade (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2007), p. xix.
25. See here Die veränderte Welt: Ein Bilderfibel unserer Zeit: 1918–1932, ed. Edmund Schultz, intro. Ernst Jünger (Breslau: Korn Verlag, 1933); Das Gesicht der Demokratie, ed. Edmund Schultz, intro. Friedrich Georg Jünger (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1931).
26. Jünger, Der Arbeiter, p. 122.
27. John Heartfield, for instance, chose the motto “Benütze Foto als Waffe” (“Use Photo as a Weapon”) for his display of works at the International Werkbund exhibition “Film and Photo” held in Stuttgart in 1929. See here Elisabeth Patzwall, “Zur Rekonstruktion des Heartfield-Raums der Werkbundausstellung von 1929,” in Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef, eds., John Heartfield (Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1991), pp. 294–99; and John Willett, Heartfield versus Hitler (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1997), p. 50. For a discussion of the function of the “Arbeiter-Fotograf” and the use of the “Foto als Waffe,” see Edwin Hoernle, “Das Auge des Arbeiters,” in Wolfgang Kemp, ed., Theorie der Fotografie, vol. 2, 1912–1945 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1984), pp. 224–27.
28. Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, trans. Anne Halley (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1972).
29. Ernst Jünger, “Einleitung,” in Die veränderte Welt, p. 5.
30. Hanno Loewy, “‘. . . ohne Masken’: Juden im Visier der ‘Deutschen Fotografie’ 1933–1945,” in Klaus Honnef et al., ed., Deutsche Fotografie: Macht eines Mediums 1870–1970 (Cologne: Dumont, 1997), p. 135. For a discussion of Die Kamera exhibition of 1933, see also Ulrich Pohlmann, “‘Nicht beziehungslose Kunst, sondern politische Waffe’: Fotoausstellungen als Mittel der Ästhetisierung der Politik und Ökonomie im Nationalsozialismus,” in Fotogeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie, Jg. 8, Heft 28 (1988), pp. 17–32.
31. Quoted in Loewy, “‘. . . ohne Masken’,” p. 135.
32. See here Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 245f.; Loewy, “‘. . . ohne Masken’,” pp. 135–49; Dieter Reifarth and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Die Kamera der Henker: Fotographische Selbstzeugnisse des Naziterrors in Osteuropa,” in Fotogeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie, Jg. 3, Heft 7 (1983), pp. 57–71; and Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 1+2 (Munich: Piper, 2000), pp. 493f.
33. Ernst Jünger, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, Strahlungen II (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979) p. 425.
34. Helmuth Kiesel, Ernst Jünger: Die Biographie (Munich: Siedler, 2007), p. 435.
35. Ibid., pp. 436–37.
36. Ibid., pp. 438–39.
37. See Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, trans. Michael Hofmann (London; Penguin, 1996); Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Boston: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 119–39; Ernst Jünger, “Photography and the ‘Second Consciousness’: An Excerpt from ‘On Pain’,” trans. Joel Agee, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Philipps (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art/Aperture, 1989), pp. 207–10.
38. Ernst Jünger, “Lob der Vokale,” in Blätter und Steine, p. 60.