There are times when an author can catch the spirit of an age, or even be remarkably prescient about a still unrealized future. Ernst Jünger’s memoir, Storm of Steel (1920), and his two short novels, On the Marble Cliffs (1939) and The Glass Bees (1957), are remarkable instances of both phenomena. Jünger was a brilliant diagnostician of the times in which he lived. Works like these, rooted in a particular time and place, still afford us a lens through which our time can be understood.
Jünger was born in 1895 into a prosperous bourgeois German family, and as a schoolboy began a lifelong pursuit of literature and the natural world. Seeking adventure and travel, he joined the French Foreign Legion in 1913, serving for a short time before deserting. With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, he enlisted in the German army; later commissioned as an officer, Jünger fought on the western front in France. In 1918, in Germany’s final unsuccessful offensive, he was gravely wounded and awarded the empire’s highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite or “Blue Max.” It was an exceptional recognition of bravery in a mere captain.
Jünger’s experience of war became the basis for Storm of Steel. It was a noteworthy beginning to a career in letters that lasted until his death in 1998. Jünger’s collected works, first published after the Second World War, included poems, essays, novels, short stories, and memoir, and spanned multiple volumes in two editions. He was an avid entomologist and photographer. In the 1950s, he was an early experimenter with LSD.
Storm of Steel demonstrates the power of Jünger’s prose. Jünger fought in the Battle of the Somme, a campaign that resulted in over a million casualties with scant effect on the resolution of the conflict. Junger wrote about mounting a patrol between the trenches:
These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape (Penguin Classics, 2004, Michael Hofmann trans., 71).
Jünger’s account captures the extraordinary mixture of horror and exhilaration that marks the experience of battle.
It also captures German ambivalence about the war. Jünger’s memoir reflects a belief in the redemptive power of war. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), an anti-war classic, is a much better-known book, but Jünger’s memoir reveals more about the eventual rise of fascism. Germany’s officer class, its traditional leaders, and many of its people did not feel defeated, even though they lost the war. The feeling of being stabbed in the back by traitors set the stage for German revanchism, for Nazi ascendancy, and for the outbreak of the Second World War.
Jünger was not a Nazi, but a conservative nationalist; though he served in the German Army in the Second World War, like many others of his class, he and his family were under suspicion because of their lack of enthusiasm for the Nazi regime. When his regimental reunion group excluded Jews, Jünger resigned from the association. His son, also a soldier, is believed to have been executed by the SS during the war. In retrospect, however, Jünger’s warrior creed fit far too comfortably with the Nazi exaltation of violence.
On the Marble Cliffs, published as the war was breaking out, was widely seen as a parable of the Third Reich’s ascendance — a simplistic interpretation Jünger resisted. “Although this assault from the realm of dreams reflects and captures the nightmarish political situation,” he wrote in 1972, “it also transcends — in time and space — the scope of the actual and episodic” (New York Review Books, 2023, Tess Lewis trans., 117). Jünger invites a broader application of his dreamlike parable.
The novel describes a quasi-mythic polity centered on the Marina, a lake separated from the surrounding countryside by marble cliffs. The Grand Marina resembles one of Calvino’s “invisible cities,” more sign than substance; indeed, Jünger was a literary pioneer of magical realism. Beyond the cliffs to the north there are the meadows of the Campagna, and beyond them the forest presided over by the Head Forester, gradually revealed as the malevolent force behind the subversion of the realm.
The narrative proceeds from the perspective of two brothers, war-weary veterans of a past conflict, with Alta Plana to the south, living in monastic seclusion at the Rue-Herb Retreat. They study natural history and science as the world grows slowly darker under the influence of the Head Forester and his allies. These include embittered inhabitants of the Marina and the Campagna, out-of-work officers from the last war, “shady attorneys,” and others. Jünger writes:
In these circles, it was the fashion to disdain the cultivation of grapes and wheat and to see the herdsmen’s wild lands as the source of authentic ancestral customs. We are familiar with the confused, madcap ideas that captivate enthusiasts. It would have been easy to laugh them off had they not led to blatant sacrilege inconceivable to anyone still in possession of his reason. (33)
The brothers are lured from their retreat by the increasing enormity of what is taking place around them. One by one, centers of resistance in countryside and town fall to the shadowy forces of the Head Forester. Stout yeomen, privileged aristocrats, aspiring politicians: all are swept from the field. The violence increases, and becomes more and more bestial. In the end, as the cities of the Marina are engulfed in flame, the refugees flee the country. The story concludes on a note of resignation: “No house is built, no plan created, in which ruin is not the cornerstone, and what lives imperishably in us does not reside in our works. We perceived this truth in the flame, and its glow was not devoid of joy” (108).
If On the Marble Cliffs is elegy, then the later novel The Glass Bees is prophecy. Written after the Second World War, and set in the near future, it is the story of a job interview, with digressions into the past. Jünger’s narrator, Captain Richard, is a cashiered ex-soldier, a “dismounted cavalryman” (New York Review Books, 2000, Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer trans., 184) as he describes himself. War and society have both become cheapened and mechanized; but Richard’s troubles are more extensive than simple failure to adapt. Though he is nostalgic for the old order, he has also been found guilty of treason, and blacklisted. Unwilling to start over, he is looking for a place where he can put his special skills to work.
It is exactly his potential moral pliability, his need to find a place without being too particular, that makes him of interest to Zapparoni, a fabulously wealthy inventor and manufacturer of small automatons (nanotechnology before its time). Zapparoni needs someone to help keep his affairs in order, a confidential agent with few moral scruples. “He needed someone who was solid but not through and through” (28); “a man to do the dirty work” (12).
Zapparoni is a virtual magician, and his tiny apparatuses have replaced the cruder artifices of past generations, in science and industry and even on the domestic front. This includes forms of entertainment, in which “lights, words, yes even thoughts” have replaced “crude embodiment.” “He created novels which could not only be read, heard, and seen but could be entered as one enters a garden. In his opinion, nature was inadequate, both in its beauty and logic, and should be surpassed” (38).
The job interview takes place at Zapparoni’s residence, located on the park-like grounds of his factory: an old-fashioned country estate with few outward signs of technical wizardry. Richard is interviewed by Zapparoni himself, and the questions seem unrelated to the matter at hand. After an exchange about military tactics and government policy, Zapparoni asks Richard to wait in the garden while he attends to some other business. His parting words are “Beware of the bees!” (115).
The bees are the “glass bees” of the novel’s title. In the garden, as Richard gradually notices the presence of these small, deadly drones, he also discovers something even more menacing: a succession of severed human ears. He realizes he has been set a test, a measure of his moral flexibility. Jünger writes:
At this sight, like a wanderer who walks along the seashore and suddenly comes upon the abandoned remains of a cannibal fire, I was suddenly seized by nausea. I realized the provocation, the shameless challenge, that was intended here. It led to a lower level of reality … Now there was no longer a job at stake: it was a matter of life and death, and I could call myself lucky indeed if I left this garden safe and sane (151-52).
Richard emerges from the garden that turns out to be Zapparoni’s nightmarish creation. He has somehow failed the test. Zapparoni tells him he won’t land the job he interviewed for, but he has another unspecified role for which Richard might be suited. With this, the novel comes to an inconclusive end.
Jünger’s memoir and his two novels capture the spirit of an age. They also provide a lens for our time, marked as it is by war, political turmoil, and technical terrors. If Jünger, the consummate diagnostician, leaves us with a sense of cultured resignation in the face of barbarity, there may still be grounds for hope.
As one contemporary, the philosopher and historian Raymond Aron, wrote in 1944, “The future remains to be written. We project on it, in turn, our memories, hopes, and fears. Resignation to a future perceived to be inevitable is always a form of defeatism” (“The Future of Secular Religions” in The Dawn of Universal History, Basic Books, 2002, 195). Jünger gives us a perceptive glimpse into his time (and ours by implication) and into the future, but the future is still ours to make.
The Rt. Rev. John Bauerschmidt is the 11th Bishop of Tennessee. A native of South Carolina, he was consecrated bishop in 2007, having previously served parishes in Western Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
He served in the Church of England from 1987 to 1991, and holds a D.Phil. in theology from Oxford University, where Oliver O’Donovan supervised his work. He has a continuing interest in the early Church (especially Augustine, the subject of his doctoral thesis), as well as in 17th-century Anglicanism. He owes an abiding debt to the Oxford Movement for his spiritual formation.
Bishop John is married to Caroline, and they are the parents of three children.