Dominique Venner
Ernst Jünger: Un autre destin européen
Paris: Éds. du Rocher, 2009
http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=7550
In http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=7089’s historical essay, Ernst Jünger: Un autre destin européen, the subject is presented as une figure ultime, a European archetype provisionally absent from Europe today, but nevertheless one rooted in the depths of the European spirit — and destined, thus, to re-appear should Europeans ever re-awake to re-assert themselves in the world.
Somewhat like a seismograph, the successive stages of Jünger’s long life (1895-1998) seemed to register the successive twentieth-century epochs of which he was its most emblematic representative.
In the period 1914-18, when Europeans worshiped the gods of war, he was a great warrior. After the defeat of 1918 and the shame of Weimar, he served as an eloquent proponent of the Conservative Revolution’s resistance to the Wilsonians “new world order.” Then, after looking to Hitler to deliver the Germans from their travails, he found that their presumed deliverer threatened an even more devastating travail, becoming, then, a precocious critic of the NS dictator.During the Second World War, when French and other Europeans living under the swastika hoped for a united Europe, Jünger, stationed in Paris with the Wehrmacht, was their champion. Following the war, when Europeans sought a new humanism to re-animate their exhausted civilization, Jünger’s Der Friede (The Peace, 1944), with its thoughts on spiritual regeneration amidst the ruins, was its exemplar. Finally, as the postwar expectations turned to a subduing sense of powerlessness, born from the occupation of the two extra-European continental blocs, his later work prescribed an autonomous, almost indifferent detachment from the prevailing powers.
Spanning these varied epochal roles, there were, in Venner’s view, two different Jüngers: the rebellious one of his youth (whom Venner extols) and the Olympian one of his maturity (with whom he is less sympathetic).
The first, true to pre-1945 Europe, was dominated by Mars and the radical anti-bourgeois spirit of the German 1920s.
The second Jünger begins with On the Marble Cliffs (1939) and develops during the course of WORLD WAR II, as he assumed a more artistic, contemplative course — less Nietzschean than Goethean. This is the Jünger who adapted himself to Europe’s post-1945 prostration.
For Venner the two seemingly contradictory Jüngers symbolize the alternative destinies to which Europeans have been subject in the twentieth century.
http://www.toqonline.com/2009/09/another-european-destiny/