War as an Inner Experience

A short essay about Ernst Junger and the First World War

This essay is to accompany a discussion I recently had with Josh Barnett about Ernst Junger and his recently-translated book, War as an Inner Experience. The audio version of this essay, as well as the discussion with Josh, will be released as soon as I’m done editing (should be later this afternoon).

I recently watched the new Netflix version of All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the famous novel of the First World War by German author Erich Maria Remarque. It was an excellent, very depressing film that captured the spirit of the book, even if it deviated from a scene-by-scene rendition. The book was an instant international bestseller when it was published in 1928, and perhaps more than any other piece of literature colored our memory of what the Great War was like for those who participated in it: an irredeemably pointless slaughter of naive young men in the name of empty principles invoked by blindly prideful old men. Remarque’s account of an innocent young man swept off to his destruction by historical forces beyond his comprehension provided the blueprint for most Western war literature written in the years since. It’s a perspective easily familiar to us today, partly because our perspective has been shaped by such literature, but also because Remarque was speaking from the liberal humanist perspective that we now take for granted. In a way, Remarque’s side won the First World War even though his country lost it. It took Remarque’s countryman and fellow German soldier Ernst Junger to provide us an account of one who was truly on the losing end.

Reading Ernst Junger is like rummaging through a time capsule, for his consciousness took shape in the old world, before values and ideologies we take for granted had become self-evident. The book for which he’s most famous, Storm of Steel, was based on his war diaries describing life on the front and is unblinking in its style and focus. His straightforward rendering of the battlefield experience wears little embellishment and no sentimentality. If All Quiet on the Western Front is the account of a soldier who recoiled and held at arm’s length the horror of war, Storm of Steel is the account of one who plunged into it headlong. A short time after publishing it, Junger wrote another short book called War as an Inner Experience, a thundering manifesto on the metaphysics of armed combat that has the lyrical style and philosophical speculations Junger was disciplined enough to leave out of Storm of Steel.

It was war that made men and their times what they are… Never before has a generation returned to the light of life by stepping out of a gate as dark and mighty as that of this war. And we cannot deny, as much as some would like to: war, father of all things… has hammered, chiseled, and hardened us to what we are. And always, as long as the spinning wheel of life continues to whirl within us, this war will be its axis. (This father) has educated us to fight, and we will remain fighters as long as we live. It is true that he seems now to be dead, his battlefields abandoned and disreputable, like torture chambers and mounted gallows, but the warrior spirit has moved into his front servants, and he never leaves their side. He is within us, (and is) therefore everywhere, because it is we who shape the world, not the other way around… Do you not hear him roaring in a thousand cities, do you not hear his thunderstorms all around us, as in the days when the battles engulfed us? Do you not see his flame glowing in the eyes of each one of us? Sometimes he sleeps, but (then) the earth trembles, and he bursts forth boiling from the mouth of every volcano…

As sons of an age intoxicated with the material, progress seemed to us perfection. The machine was the key to God-likeness, the telescope and microscope were our organs of perception. But underneath that always polished and shining shell, underneath all the garments that we wore like magicians, we remained naked and raw like the men of the forest and the steppe.

All this became clear when the war tore apart the communities of Europe, when behind flags and symbols about which some had long since smiled in disbelief, we faced each other for an ancient decision. There, the true man compensated himself in a rushing orgy for all he had missed. There, his instincts, too long curbed by society and its laws, became the only sacred thing and the last justification. And everything that had shaped his brain into ever sharper forms over the course of the centuries served only to increase the force of his fist to the utmost degree.