Ernst Jünger and Mechanized War as a Boundary Condition
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Friday 29 March 2024 is the 129th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Jünger (29 March 1895–17 February 1998), who was born in Heidelberg on this date in 1895. He served in both world wars of the twentieth century and lived more than a century.
Many books were published in the immediate aftermath of the First World War examining every aspect of the war. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel was one of these books, a memoir of experiences of the war with very little in the way of commentary. Andre Gide, who was himself a great literary stylist, wrote in his diary:
“Ernst Jünger’s book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith.”
Probably it was these qualities Gide mentioned that made the book so popular. Storm of Steel was Jünger’s springboard to inter-war literary fame. Jünger and Spengler were the two most influential members of the “conservative revolution” in inter-war Germany, Jünger because of Storm of Steel and Spengler because of his Decline of the West. Jünger wrote many subsequent articles and books not only looking back over the past war, but looking forward to the consequences of the war and its implications for the future.
Although the First World War was a catastrophic experience of industrialized warfare that almost no one predicted or expected, many who participated in the war, when reflecting on their experience, realized the technologies that were deployed in WWI were only imperfectly used, and that industrialized warfare has a rationality of its own that had not yet been fully realized. In a couple of previous episodes (“The Bombing of Dresden” and “Wars and Rumors of Wars”) I have mentioned the Italian general Giulio Douhet, who foresaw the use of airpower to expand a war behind enemy lines. In the US, Billy Mitchell conducted a demonstration to prove that air power could sink capital battleships, and this was also to be prophetic of action during the Second World War. Heinz Guderian in Germany and J. F. C. Fuller (incidentally, a disciple of Aleister Crowley) and B. H. Liddell Hart in England saw the possibilities of combined arms operations in mechanized warfare and so became the prophets of what came to be known as Blitzkrieg. During the inter-war period in Russia, Georgii Isserson developed the concepts of the operational art and deep battle, both of which would be highly influential. I don’t know what Isserson’s experiences were during the First World War, but given that he was born in 1898, he was alive to have witnessed the war, and it has been suggested that Isserson was influenced by Heinz Guderian’s book Achtung — Panzer!
It has often been asserted that the First World War largely consisted of stagnant trench warfare because doctrine and tactics hadn’t yet caught up with the new technologies available. In the inter-war period, intensive work was done on mechanized warfare doctrine, and Junger was part of this development, but Junger’s work went far beyond military doctrine and developed political and social themes relevant to the new kind of warfare revealed by the First World War.
The translator of the Penguin edition of Storm of Steel, Michael Hofmann, writes in the Introduction:
“Junger was recruited by Mittler & Son, a noted publisher of militaria in Berlin, and wrote more books on the war, including the viscerally — as well as headily — unpleasant treatise On Battle as an Inner Experience (1922) — of which I could not bring myself to read more than the excerpts I read years ago in a book on German history.”
There has been a tendency to focus on Junger’s later fictional work, rather than the disturbing inter-war writings, but these inter-war writings are interesting precisely because they are disturbing, because they call our presuppositions into question in a more radical way. One of these inter-war works is an essay titled On Pain. There is now a helpfully annotated translation of this into English by David C. Durst. (I was interested to learn that On Pain was Written in Goslar am Harz, where I have visited, to which Jünger had retreated from Berlin because of threats to his life.) On Pain is an unforgiving book. In it, Jünger begins:
“Pain as a measure of man is unalterable, but what can be altered is the way he confronts it. Man’s relation to pain changes with every significant shift in fundamental belief. This relation is in no way set; rather, it eludes our knowledge, and yet is the best benchmark by which to discern a race. We can observe this clearly today, since we have a novel and peculiar relation to pain in a world without binding norms. Through examination of this new kind of relation to pain, we now intend to secure an elevated point of surveillance, from which we may be able to catch sight of things still imperceptible on the ground. Our question is: What role does pain play in the new race we have called the worker that is now making its appearance on the historical stage?”
Jünger’s inquiry into pain bears some resemblance to contemporary Japanese philosopher Masahiro Morioka’s conception of “painless civilization,” which also considers the human relationship to pain in terms not unlike Jünger’s. It would be worthwhile to read Morioka in light of Jünger, or vice versa.
In the Preface to On Pain by Russell A. Berman, the relationship between Jünger’s comments on photography and Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is noted. It is characteristic for Jünger to discuss a transformative technology like photography. Of photography Jünger write in On Pain:
“The photograph stands outside of the zone of sensitivity. It has a telescopic quality; one can tell that the event photographed is seen by an insensitive and invulnerable eye. It records the bullet in mid-flight just as easily as it captures a man at the moment an explosion tears him apart. This is our own peculiar way of seeing, and photography is nothing other than an instrument of our own peculiar nature… Photography, then, is an expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing. Ultimately, it is a kind of evil eye, a type of magical possession.”
Jünger wrote extensively on the many new technologies which had transformed the battlefield. We could, with some justification, call his work as much a philosophy of technology as a philosophy of war. The intersection of war and technology is to be found in the concept of the Materialschlacht, the battle of materiel. Materialschlacht became a talking point as one of the distinctive features of industrialized warfare. Walter Benjamin’s review of Jünger’s “Total Mobilization” (or, rather, his review of the volume of collected essays edited by Jünger, Krieg und Krieger, which included the essay “Total Mobilization”), included a reference to “…the new warfare of technology and material [Materialschlacht]…”
The central importance of technology for the war effort, and the emergence of Materialschlacht as a distinctively technological form of warfare, was widely interpreted as de-humanizing, as the war itself was seen as de-humanizing. In Materialschlacht, the production of war industries and the technological mastery of the tools of war is seen as being as important as, or more important than, mere personal courage and martial spirit. But, as I discussed in my “Wars and Rumors of Wars” episode, this emergent form of technological warfare in turn resulted in the emergence of a technologically-adept hero of mechanized warfare — an Achilles of the Materialschlacht, if you will.
So while we can see the Materialschlacht of industrialized warfare as de-humanizing, we can also see it as the boundary condition for an emergent form of heroism distinctive to mechanized warfare. Something qualitatively new had appeared in history, and this novel emergent generated a cluster of other emergents for which mechanized warfare was the boundary condition. However, we can also think of the Materialschlacht of industrialized warfare as the pervasive infiltration of personal courage and martial spirit throughout a society and an economy in a condition of total mobilization. In other words, not only the soldier, but the workers in industry who design and build the machines of war, and the directors of industry who organize war production, become, or can become, heroes of Materialschlacht.
Also, technology shapes war, and, as we have seen, war shapes society. Industrialized warfare is an emergent from industrialized society, and as war accelerates technological innovation, this technological innovation feeds back into society and accelerates social changes, so that a more industrialized society is an emergent from industrialized warfare. This is one of the themes of Junger’s essay “Total Mobilization” and his book The Worker — Dominion and Form, which is an expansion of his essay on total mobilization.
In my episode on “Wars and Rumors of Wars” I mentioned Junger’s essay, “Total Mobilization,” and I argued that Clausewitzean total war required total mobilization. For Jünger, this total mobilization transformed society, and we can now see in the present context that new forms of social organization, new forms of society, also emerge from the boundary condition of industrialized warfare.
Bogdan Costea and Kostas Amiridis, in their paper “Ernst Jünger, total mobilisation and the work of war” (2017), write:
“Jünger grasps that something new had emerged from these endless battles of material. He shows how the domination of technological death had begun to change the ethos of war among soldiers. In permanent danger of being simply used up in the consumption of raw materials for the production of mechanical destruction, they understood the historical essence of the war; they no longer saw themselves as soldiers, but as machine operators, as workers claimed by the mechanical logic of a line of production akin to that of the factories manufacturing these infernal devices.” (Costea, B., & Amiridis, K. 2017. Ernst Jünger, total mobilisation and the work of war. Organization, 24(4), 475–490.)
Costea and Amiridis emphasize the role of the soldier in mechanized warfare as a worker of destruction in the industry of war. This is a peculiar realization of what Edith Wyschogrod called “man-made mass death” (in her book Spirit in Ashes); the soldier as a worker of destruction, with emphasis upon the man-made character of the mass death, is a curious inversion of Homo faber, not man the builder, but still man the worker, only now, man the worker at destruction.
But even here we can understand how heroism emerged in a distinctive form in the midst of mechanized destruction. Recall that the Soviet Union decorated Heroes of Social Labor — Mikhail Kalashnikov was on the recipients of the award — since the true heroes of the worker’s paradise were of course the workers. Feats of labor productivity were organized for propaganda purposes, which came to be called Stakhanovite, named after coal miner Alexei Stakhanov, who began the Stakhanovite movement, and who was featured on the cover of TIME magazine in 1935. While the Soviet Union represents a very different ideological vision for society than that of Ernst Jünger, Jünger’s book The Worker — Dominion and Form celebrated the worker in a similar fashion. The heroic worker of war is more productive of destruction, and finds novel ways to increase productivity.
Jünger was aware that his celebration of the worker could easily be mistaken for communism and historical materialism, and he addresses this directly in a 1927 essay:
“‘Worker’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘the working class’ — a term of historical materialism, invented by the bürger and the university professor.”
And in the next paragraph he writes:
“The worker in the new sense means a commonality of blood of all workers within the nation and for the benefit of the nation. Only this commonality is capable of overcoming the ugliness of capitalism.”
But for all emphasis on technology, workers, and Materialschlacht, for Junger, war was ultimately a spiritual calling:
“No — war is not a material matter. There are higher realities to which it is subject. When two civilized peoples confront one another, there is more in the scales than explosives and steel. All that either holds of any weight is in the balance. Values are tested in comparison with which the brutality of the means must — to anyone who has the power to judge — appear insignificant. A strength of will, all-embracing and concentrated to the last pitch in the highest untamed expression of life asserting itself even in its own annihilation, is brought into play.”
And in a 1925 essay on mechanized warfare Junger wrote:
“It was already during the Battle of the Somme when man found himself at his limit. And then the sons of the materialist age suddenly realized that in reality there was nothing that a man couldn’t withstand, there is no such technology that could rival spiritual strength. We were convinced of this countless times, this fact was proven by every unknown soldier, who had passed through all the horrors of military technology and placed his indestructible, sturdy heart on the scales. This is when it became apparent that what was important is man, not technology.”
One of the reasons I wanted to emphasize the possibility of individual heroism in the context of the dehumanizing conditions of mechanized warfare, as well as the spiritual dimension of war that Jünger identified, and which Walter Benjamin called “depraved mysticism,” was to explicitly contrast Jünger with Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s influential analysis of totalitarianism is essentially the idea of the “lonely crowd.” Possibly the best part of The Origins of Totalitarianism is in the final section of the book where she distinguishes among isolation, loneliness, and solitude. Arendt calls isolation “pretotalitarian,” i.e., it is a condition of totalitarianism but not totalitarianism itself. It is loneliness that is for Arendt crucial to totalitarianism:
“…loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”
Arendt mentions Jünger in passing, but does not make any detailed analysis of his work. In one mention of Jünger, she footnotes the following with a bare reference to Storm of Steel:
“…the worshipers of war were the first to concede that war in the era of machines could not possibly breed virtues like chivalry, courage, honor, and manliness.”
I am making precisely the opposite argument, that, in fact, “worshipers of war,” if that’s what we’re going to call Jünger, were emphatically making the case that courage and honor were an integral part of mechanized warfare. Further, I will make the counterfactual claim that if Arendt had taken up a detailed analysis of Jünger’s work, especially “Total Mobilization” and The Worker — Dominion and Form, she would have assimilated this to her overall critique of totalitarianism, with the society prophesied by Jünger as either proto-totalitarian or outright totalitarian. But Jünger anticipated a critique that would deny individuality in the society that he envisions, reducing everyone to an isolated dependence upon institutions:
“From the moment when form shapes one’s experience, everything becomes ‘form’. Form is thus not a new dimension to be discovered in addition to those already known; rather to a new gaze the world appears as a theatre of forms and their interrelations. To point out an error typical for the period of transition, it is not a question of the ‘individual’ disappearing and only being able to derive meaning from corporations, communities, or ideas, as higher-order units. Form is also represented at the individual level: every finger nail, every atom in him is ‘form’.”
It is because the individual exemplifies form that heroism remains a possibility in industrialized civilization. Here, and throughout the book, Jünger is using “form” in a distinctive way. His definition of form is as follows:
“…we will call ‘form’ those dimensions which become visible to an eye capable of grasping that the world is held together by a law which is more decisive than that of cause and effect, without yet seeing, however, the unity under which this integration is achieved.”
Junger also employs his conception of “form” in a sententious definition of history:
“History is Form inasmuch as its content is the destiny of forms.”
If the content of history is the destiny of forms, and forms are an incomplete grasp of the law-like nature of the world, but a law-like character that transcends mere cause and effect, then are we to understand history as the completed grasp of such forms, their destiny fulfilled, and now revealing the previously elusive unity of integration? I don’t know if that’s what Jünger meant. This would be one way to interpret what is clearly an aphorism that could only be unpacked in a more detailed reading, and that is all I will say about it for the moment.
