Ernst Jünger wants peace and a united Europe?

>I’m not entirely convinced it’s a reflection of Junger’s thoughts. It seems like the reflections of the last man of Faustian civilization waiting out the dying embers of the occident for some new civilizations force to grab hold.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ascribe such views to Junger at all.

What makes Venator's radical egoism unlike the other characters is his self-awareness.

Near the end of Eumeswil there's a monologue from another character who is almost certainly Junger speaking as a military man, something which he can't do via the character of Venator.

Junger lived so long that "nihilism", if we view that as a total collapse of everything in your world that had meaning to you, became a literal truth for him. Imagine living in the late 90s and dreaming in a non-meme manner about Wilhelm II..

He was man enough to admit his mistakes.

cringe

>obnoxious basement-dwelling swine
ok mate calm down

>In marble cliff he basically says that sitting in a hermitage praying in a natural state is by far the best way. I like to think of Junger in that regard

His hole interaction with christianity is so strange, i don't get it. Does he really believe, or can it just be used as a tool - because as he says the need to believeamong the people is unbroken

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>dehumanization is just a normal part of success
this is what the NPC subhuman workers actually believe.
this contradicts their humanity.
to refuse to slaughter them is the ultimate failure of morality

literally nothing wrong in that

he probably read journey to the end of the night and realized his experience of ww1 was so lucky it bordered on meme-tier and felt embarrassed that he could have been so naive about that war

>Does he really believe, or can it just be used as a tool

He wouldn't be the first man to think religion is good and useful without believing every dogma.

true. its just that in this case given his backround and everything - i really wonder if he believed or if he just liked the implications of a people with a religion

Its not very naive though if anything journey to the end of night is the meme take on war.

Most of storm of steel is rather boring descriptions of routine and trench life iirc and his wartime journals are totally devoid of politcs.

sad to read this

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Why nihilism?

i see alot of people calling him that in his early days, maybe it was the atheism? Aldo this is not so present in his storm of steel.

isnt that due to the fact that many of the people he hung out with in conservative revolutionary circles turned full nazi, and later refused the de-nazification process.

>united europe

Assuming that's true, I'd imagine he meant it in a more Imperialistic sense like Evola, rather than any comparison with modern day Europhiles.

You have to remember that postwar German intellectuals, and postwar intellectuals in general, were absolutely desperate to show that the world had gotten over the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s. This bias was so powerful it wasn't just a preference that manifested occasionally, but a sort of tunnel vision that structured the way they thought. I was reading Furness recently, a very good literary historian of Germany, and you can tell he's squarely a man of the post-war period. He reads the 20th century as "the Big Calamity, followed by the Big Recognition and Perpetual Making-Amends." That unconscious belief is very common among scholars and intellectuals, but especially common among Germans. The post-war generation was loudly, triumphantly "liberal" in the most humanistic sense of the term. And there's a good deal of cringing and toadying inherent in that outlook, because part of why it was so loud is that they wanted to prove to onlookers that they could be good boys and not upset the historical scene ever again.

Now remember that Junger had to swim in those waters. Then look into the private remarks he made in Paris, as the war was coming to an end, and some of the friendships he made in those years, friendships maintained right down to his death. Junger, like Heidegger, never recanted. Neither of them wanted the totalitarian frenzy of what the Nazis became, but both of them knew the stakes and played the game, and both of them viewed the post-war settlement as a disaster and a twilight epoch for not just Germany but humanity as a whole - go read their correspondence.

Things aren't simple like this. Part of the benefit of studying someone like Junger in depth is you will re-learn what you always already knew: a man's inner life is complex, and a man as big as Junger can have an extremely complex inner life. But that life is always holistic and interrelated, even when it seems to undergo radical reversals or shifts in color and tone when viewed as a flat surface from the outside. Leave shallow readings to the plebs and mainstream media-friendly scholars who can't penetrate past any surface, because they have to reduce all of history to whatever lame tribalism is popular this week, and which they've accordingly staked their life on. Their inner life changes with the tides so they assume all humans are the same as them, a "mobile, stormy film over shallow water."

>Does he really believe, or can it just be used as a tool

It's neither and both of these. You'll have to re-live his position through him to understand it. You can't apply flat ready-made abstractions or artificial binaries to it.

this is true, he saw it as an empire

>naive about war
>shot multiple times fighting in the largest battles of the western front
>then also being in WW2 as a German officer
>then living through the entirety of the Cold War

I somehow doubt Jünger could be classified as naive about war. Storm of Steel is probably one of the best purely descriptive works of what being at war is really like, 99.9% boredom punctuated with lots of explosions.

>refused the de-nazification
i think he did this because he never was a nazi

>99.9% boredom
i heard the book was good and filled with action, what is with all this boredom

which translation is best? asking my mom for it for my birthday!

it's pretty naive to write a nationalistic book about ww1

nationalism is, to use celine's expression, trifles for a massacre...junger eventually realized this

I wasn't referring to Jünger but rather people in the broader circle around him.

The nationalism is a later edit in order to make the book easier to sell, The original version does not contain it and his original diaries don't contain any politics what so ever. They don't even betray any reason what so ever for him fighting.

People say the older ones are the best, but they are no longer in print so good luck trying to get one.

Creighton translation is said to be good, his book is based on Jungers earlier version of Storm and Steel (1920's version or something). The book is more brutal and nationalistic. Audible has a recording of his book, but it is no longer in print so good luck trying to find it.

Junger rewrote storm of steel and toned down much of the bloodlust and nationalism. This is the version we are stuck with today. When Jünger gave out this new toned down book it was dubbed the quiet version. Its this latest version of storm and steel than michael hofmann translated. Hoffman claims in the introduction that the Creighton did a bad job in translating the book. however a lot of people would disagree. Hoffman's translation the standard book today, that is the book you will see sold everywhere.

It's the one i read, and it was really good! But i wish could read the more brutal version, namley the Creighton translation - but i did not find it anywhere. The Creighton translation is on Audible. Sorry for spelling errors i'm tired and i'm going to bed right now.

There's a new translation of the 1922 book published by BH Masterworks

The early version is the true version. The later version was edited by a man who might as well have been a different person at that point. The entire novelty of Storm of Steel is the closeness to the actual war with which this book was written. There is zero reason to read the later version, it completely misses the point.

whats the original version called?

>thinking the vast majority of people in WW1 weren’t patriotic and fighting for their nation and didn’t truly believe it and it’s ideals
>thinking that this hasn’t been the case for hundreds of years now
>thinking that most people are even all that bothered by war outside of a general distaste for the suffering that civilians go through

I don’t think you’ve ever spent more than 5 minutes with a soldier in your life. Or have even a mild understanding of war.

kinda this, people often go to hegelian extremes, but I find many people's interpretation of "war is hell" to be very much hypocritical since pretty much all cultures enjoy action. Be that in video games, movies, etc.

Ive been rewatching some gundam for the pulp factor, but those series are especialy hypocritical. They preach peace incesently, but the whole brand is focused on mecha warfare. Of course war isnt peaches and roses, but there is the draw of fighting for something greater.

Yeah, Tomino is autistic.

Your last point is cringe and retarded. Almost certainly an American or Australian point of view -- abstract war-love imagined in an unscarred country. A cursory familiarity with how human beings have written about war over the millennia would refute it. Reading the Iliad would refute it, just as it would the pop culture anti-war cliches sold by people who have never lived through it.
Gundam is unbearably sanctimonious. The idiots on /m/ who take seriously the tacked-on peace preaching of a mega-franchise built on selling simulated murder to preteens are insufferable. The people there are such squares. They will unironically go into long moralistic diatribes about mecha space Nazis and why you should feel bad for liking them. Cartoon-brain automatons. It's not in any way a surprising insight, but I've noticed that when someone's primary form of entertainment is kid shows, their understanding of human behaviour and morality is seriously infantile. People on Yea Forums and Yea Forums will actually feel proud of having the incoherent moral compass of a shounen character... the lazy plot contrivances imagined by bored middle-aged fucks in a writer's room are their principal source of moral education. Bildung by committee.

I mean no one likes getting shot, the same way no one likes crashing a car. But people still speed all the time on backroads.

War is and always will be a social activity that people participate in for untold numbers of reasons. Nobody wants to see a dead kid, or wants to remember their friend bleeding out. But that also doesn’t mean that’s all war is or represents, or really even that it’s a large part of the average experience of war.

“War is hell and All Quiet on the Western Front is the norm for all soldiers” is genuinely a shit take. Most people tend to look back pretty fondly on the military and war outside of civilian deaths.

Fuck Ernst Jünger and his cult of revisionist troglodytes. Jünger was a second-rate writer, overly mannered and not particularly talented at prose, his philosophy flat and politically motivated at best. He was a soldier first, a writer second for all of his career. It is discomforting that people who have never read a page of Von Hoffmansthal, Benjamin, Borchardt, Benn, Broch, Musil, Trakl or even Mann will readily clamour on about Jünger being one of the best modern German writers. I can only imagine that he's the type of writer that will appeal to American taste, that Jünger fits the noble German warrior archetype.

What do you mean? This entire thread is about different editions of the same book...

>Benjamin>Junger
begone

Why is there this one user obsessed with hating Junger? A hatred that comes not from nauseous familiarity but a resentment of the myths around him. Junger was in fact always a writer first and a soldier second, perhaps third, perpetually at odds with himself. An antibourgeois from the outset, a romantic by nature, someone driven toward the military by his attraction for alien modes of being but never able to conform to its loggerhead conservatism, a figure of suspicion even amongst nationalists.

>cursory view of how humans have written about it

Yeah. They’ve almost always written of war as an experience greater than the individual and a source of pride and honor to participate in. Every political society since Greece has considered military service as almost a pre-requisite to political life. Going as far back and Socrates saving the life of Alcibiades, or Achilles being torn between honor and death or a long life with no immortal name it’s never been some “wow so horrible never do this”. The international brigades wrote poems of Catalonia, the Ronin some of the earliest stories in Japan, British novels about expeditions in far off colonies, biblical stories of founding battles with Canaanites, Gilgamesh and his struggles, Islamic conquests in Arabia, or American ballads and songs of the American Civil War. Every society and political system has its idea of a noble war. Nobody glorifies the death of innocents, nor do they pretend that war is a peachy vacation, but across every culture war itself has always fascinated and moved people to ideas greater than themselves.

It wouldn’t keep happening if people were off put by the idea.

You fucking troglodytes the 1924 edition was a revision of the original text, the original text didn't contain any nationalism or politics what so ever in that regard the later revision are more true to the original.

The original was printed in miniscule numbers