m.bullock_ernst junger_dialectician of treason_cultural critique 69_2008

7/28/2019 M.bullock_Ernst Junger_Dialectician of Treason_Cultural Critique 69_2008

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Cultural Critique 69Spring 2008Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

Georges Braque, the French cubist painter, wrote in his journal:As socialism becomes more complete, war will become more andmore total (Braque, Notebooks, 68). Although the record does notindicate an exact date when Braque wrote that comment, we do knowthat it could easily have coincided with a visit to his studio in Paris by

Ernst Jnger during the Occupation, for which we do have an exactdate: October 4, 1943. Certainly, Braques words sound like a ratherprecise reXection on Jngers notion of totale Mobilmachung ortotal mobilization as a new development characteristic of moder-nity. Where social organization marshals all of a countrys resourcesand energies within the disposal of the state, a regime acquires thecapacity for the Wrst time in history to invest the totality of nationallife in warfare.

Like Jnger, who sees the forms of power as the determinantof their own direction or expression, Braques formulation does notincorporate distinctions that might reXect differences in intention onthe part of a socializing policy, or differences of circumstances thatpermit a different choice to guide the national will. His further com-ment in that context, where, dismissing the conventional faith in pro-gressive policies, he notes: Utopia is a myth whose consequencespeople foresee. The people are wrong (68), also aligns him with the

position at which Jnger had arrived after all his hopes for the collec-tive realm in the 1920s and 1930s had foundered in disappointment.Nonetheless, the characterization of socialization in this historicalfunction delivers a critical shock to the notion of socialism that we

Socialismo o muerte!

Fidel Castros wall slogan, 1991

ERNST JNGERA DIALECTICIAN OF TREASON

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would expect to Wnd operating in Braques understanding of inter-national relations since we know him to be in every general sense

a man of the Left. Certainly, this statement should not be taken ashis Wnal and deWning word on political power, nor indeed should weexpect to Wnd fully articulated insights about politics and history inhis notes. Yet the way it shows up so unexpectedly in the midst ofthese pages from the world of a painter might give us an equallyunexpected opening into the critical force exerted by the world ofJngers vision.

The difWculty of documenting the exact connection between

Jngers visit and Braques response need not impede us in turning itto account in solving a major problem in assimilating the idea of thatvision to the larger scale of European reXection on politics and his-tory. It lies in the nature of Jngers project to articulate rather com-monplace elements of modern phenomena, even though he appearsto speak from an extreme position in the warriors heroic encounterwith violence. Part of the solution offered here will involve an effortto show that there really is a problem in the Wrst place, or to demon-

strate the degree of misunderstanding that he provokes by drawingon a series of rhetorical strategies aimed at couching all his thought inan idiom of extremity. The problem, therefore, takes the form that hisextreme rhetoric is treated as an unequivocal expression of identitywith the persona that he creates in his literary medium. Neither side ofthe ideological division over Jngers ideas seems willing to separatehis observations on the phenomena of modernity from his identity asa man of the Right. The ideas that he depicts through these images

of enraptured response are not really treated as ideas at all, as themesto be experimented with and explored, but rather as exempla of abroad political orientation, as symptoms of a predetermined theoret-ical outlook. That preconception strongly underplays the literarinessof Jngers work, the Wctional quality by which he creates impres-sions that do not effect the mere propagation of a singular theory. Itobscures the extent to which his writing generates citations from var-ious established idioms of such propagation. The implicit location

from which he reaches into those conventions of language preserveshis value as a literary Wgure, or an effective authorial subject, to theextent that the basis of his experience actually preserves an elementof distance from his compositions.

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Simply encountering Braques rather pungently compressed for-mula in the context of his notebooks helps us entertain the notion that

even though Jngers thinking might stray out into the rhetoric of aromanticized extremism as political ideology, and envelop itself inthe language of uncontrollably proliferating myth in framing its con-crete observations, still the core of his concerns remains tenaciouslywithin a narrow band of common worldly issues. In that distance fromthe implications of the extreme idiom, he remains implicitly in touchwith a more generally accessible level of human experience. To incor-porate his writing into a usable body of observation and a response

to those worldly issues requires that the commentator strip awaythe outward encrustation of manner and posture that Jnger oftenconcedes he employs to cite or to perform the role he brings beforethe reader. That stripping away is not so easy, because the traditionof hostility towards Jnger on the Left can seem unshakable, and hisauthority as a monument on the Right persists with equal solidity. Noamount of patience in analyzing the work directly can be guaranteedto prevail over the tenacity of this vast development in reception. The

way that promises the most real movement engages what Jnger doeswith the language that has so indelibly colored twentieth-centurymodernity in the contrasting hues of leftism and rightism.

The analysis of how Jnger does use language should also workas a test to establish how he has been able to sustain positive rela-tionships with individuals on the ostensibly opposite side, and, moreimportantly, how they have been able to interpret his work as con-taining important insights capable of furthering the values of the

Left. The relationship that stands as the foremost of such test cases ishis long friendship with Alfred Andersch. And the result of such atest should not be the vindication of a standard body of convictionsthat deWnes the literary and ethical tradition through their mutualrespect, but rather a thesis about why the theories and ideologies ofthe Left and Right should make this friendship such a recalcitrantcase to understand in the Wrst place.

The small jolt afXicting the terms socialization and socialism in

Braques formula can lead us back to the major feature of Jngerswriting in a highly characteristic mode of irony that does not openits workings up to scrutiny from a committed ideological standpoint.Although Braques comment broaches the question as a political issue

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of social organization, the impact it has in the realm of values, con-victions, and alignments requires that we resituate it on the margin

between affective and objective discourse. That is to say, we need toacknowledge the extent to which political formulations teem withconcepts and terminology, with only the most tenuous reach into aworld of speciWc changes that may be achieved by speciWc measures.They are just as likely to be the means to produce solidarity amonggroups of people or to transform individual affect by invoking shareddreams. Thus, we need to acknowledge the exchange between quali-ties of language or expression that operate in the realm of the arts,

and those that operate in the realm of policy and practice. For thisreason, it is also important to note that while Braques statement re-Xects a viewpoint on politics by a man overwhelmingly absorbed inart, it passes through a complementary antecedent on Jngers side.His profound absorption in documenting the political catastrophesof Germany under Hitler presents him with a rare struggle with hismedium to Wnd a literary representation adequate to those effects hewas uniquely placed to witness and record.

The journals that constitute his primary mode of writing in thisperiod deal with the situation by transWguring it within a layer ofallegorizing ideas and mythic expansions. This manner of framingevents produces a growing inadequacy between the private affect hecultivates and the impact of raw events in the public realm. The con-tradiction culminates in a personal loss that resists transWgurationand connects him in a new way with the accumulating disasters thatthis history has been visiting on families and on individuals every-

where, namely the death of Jngers own son in 1945. The struggle touphold a vision of afWrmation despite every negative developmentalso takes its toll in the form of an alienation that makes it difWcult forhim to respond to the arts that express a different way of articulatinghuman experience. His record of the activities that led him to Braquesstudio begins with his brief account of visiting an art gallery. Hehad been suffering from gloom and depression immediately beforethe visit, and he clearly had tried to derive some strengthening of his

spirits from the exhibition.He remarks that he prefers Braques canvases to Picassos; they

are painted with more heart, he says. His description attemptssome detail about form and color, and he identiWes the precise mode

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of experience from which the works originate: The moment thatthey incorporate for me is that in which we emerge from nihilism and

the material grows out into new compositions (Smtliche Werke, 3:163). And yet for all this accuracy of the eye and decisiveness of intel-lect, he cannot nourish his spirit from this source. He remarks, Asalways, looking at pictures exhausts me; the crowded assembly ofartworks subjects me to a magical assault (163). Nonetheless, whenconfronted with worldly objects in a context that permits him toconstruct his own allegorizing vision, Jnger shows the most extra-ordinary powers of interpretation. When he is the source of magical

transWguration, he exerts astonishing mastery over all he surveys, overfossils and insects, birds, antique weapons, fugitive street scenes, land-scapes, whether as spectacles of vitality or destruction. But the veryrichness of his arsenal in those struggles leaves him impoverishedwhen faced with a canonical expression of the human heart. As weshall see in his response to Alfred Andersch, it is the struggle to gobeyond simple expressiveness that addresses kinship in him, whetherthe direction of that struggle goes to the Left or the Right.

The notion that he always Wnds this difWculty in looking at pic-tures is borne out wherever we come upon references to painting inhis work, as is the parallel difWculty with a humanistic appreciationof any of the arts, including literature. When commenting on estab-lished literary masterpieces, he is able, as here with Braques paint-ing, to veil this weakness with other modes of response, but for aman of such culture and education, he manifests a remarkably lim-ited capacity for spontaneous aesthetic feeling.

His Bildungsbrgertum reveals itself in his own literary expres-sion through an excessively polished, excessively allusive diction.The coldly aloof quality of his prose has been remarked on by hiscritics from the Wrst. Yet there is something else at work here whosesigniWcance emerges more slowly, only acquiring its sharp outlinethrough the extended process of an exceptionally long, productivecareer. That less immediately discernible critical problem lies in thechameleon quality of his writing. Beneath the repeated surface ges-

ture, the ductus literarium of an imperturbable individual mastery,readers can usually detect the workings of a borrowed terminologicalsystem. Yet scholarship has still not completely come to grips withhow each particular phase and instance of such borrowing reXects

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on the technique of assimilation that Jnger pursues. That completegrasp really requires a perspective over the entire production of his

hundred years of life, but something of its scope can be illustrated bythe changes that do and also do not occur at the end of World War IIwith the irreconcilable loss of his son.

If there were one simple way to formulate the most forceful ele-ment of Jngers vision, it would be that Jnger preserves a uniquelyresolute ability to acknowledge the very worst in the human condi-tion. That is to say, he looks everywhere, and Wnds always, evidencein the phenomena of the world that contradicts the suppositions of

humanistic optimism. His rhetoric, moreover, almost always preservesthe gesture of imperturbable conWdence, an unwavering gaze, a handthat never tightens or trembles as it writes. The shock he absorbs atthe end of the war in 1945 produces a vivid turning point in the wayhe regards his own situation, and yet the shattering experience hedescribesprimarily through the loss of his older son, though clearlyin the total disaster that had overtaken German and European civi-lization as welldoes not register as a change in his way of inhabit-

ing language so much as add one more locus to the many facets oflanguage from which he is able to cite. This deWning moment demon-strates how profoundly he depends on the artiWce of language toabsorb the shocks of life. Precisely because the experiences of 1945expose the catastrophic failure of a previous model by which he con-structed a prose of dissociation, the process of reinstating his imper-turbably serene voice in a renewed assemblage of components revealsjust how his writing has always drawn on a panoply of idioms to

serve his characteristic literary purpose. The response to bereavementand a grief he cannot camouXage in its Wrst onrush slowly defeat hisefforts to Wnd a new framework of understanding that would assimi-late this loss. The pain lingers, resists resolution, and he retreats againin the subsequent recourse to that chameleon technique. What we canobserve of this technique under the conditions of his most human suf-fering suggests that the manner of artiWce and borrowing after 1945merely returns as a new version of the same practice employed before.

So what should we understand as the meaning behind the magpiepowers that Jnger demonstrates as a stylistic collector, able to pro-duce with polished ease from any number of glittering models? Itwould seem essential to consider this emphatic artiWce in the manner

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of this eclectic prose as the means to generate a distance from any ofthe roles in which he appears. This capacity should frame our critical

perceptions of the strident ideological rhetoric that makes his fasci-nation with the idea of total mobilization so repugnant in 1930, orthat makes Der Arbeiter (The Worker), his extended dystopian specu-lation about the rise of a completely new physical and moral typein industrial organization, such a chilling prognosis for global moder-nity in 1932. The understanding of that distance might justify ourreframing or rereading the most disturbing of what appear his ideo-logical postures as a mode of ironynot an irony of tone that we hear,

but one that we see as a pattern of contrasts in his observations of histimes, and of the modernity that he grapples with so provocatively.He refers to this mode of moral or emotional dissociation in many

contexts and many perspectives as implicit in his chosen task as anobserver, his responsibility as a writer who experiments on himselfwith alien modes of conviction and consciousness. He embarked onjust that project with the lifetimes investigation of mind-alteringdrugs described in Annherungen. It is not difWcult, therefore, to read

that language in Der Arbeiter, which elaborates the idea of creating anew form of the human body, insensible to pain, as part of a simi-lar internal investigation. The simplest or most immediate criticismelicited from the mainstream of humane values because of this dan-gerous passage through modalities of inhuman experience accuseshim of failing in the balance of judgment, of embracing the worst.Yet if this were so, if he had simply perverted or inverted the scale ofvalue, it seems unlikely that his life would be so strongly populated

with positive connections between him and people who would osten-sibly oppose him. To name just one example that also reXects on themeeting with Braque: the previous year, when Jnger had gone tovisit Pablo Picasso in his studio, the two men had understood oneanother perfectly in their discussion of the war and Occupation de-spite everything that ostensibly divided them. At the conclusion oftheir conversation, so Jnger reports, Picasso remarked: The twoof us, as we sit here together, would be able to negotiate a peace this

very afternoon. In the evening, people would be able to turn theirlights on again (Smtliche Werke, 3: 351).

The text about which the most determined rejection of Jngersjudgment has gathered the most determined hornets wielding the

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sharpest critical stings is Der Arbeiter. His sustained refusal to permitan English translation of this work throughout his entire life might

look like evidence of embarrassment that he had strayed too nearto an explicitly fascistic standpoint. No objective reader will fail tosee the rapture of fascination he brings to this vision of the furthestextremity in total mobilization or socialization of human resources.Extensive allusions to this book over the remainder of his life in hisjournals, and the volume of commentary on it entitled Maxima Min-ima (published in 1964), reveal something far more useful than sub-sequent equivocation about an earlier enthusiasm. His method of

unfolding his vision, whether in an extensive speculation like DerArbeiter or in some brief, intensive, allegorizing aperu about an iso-lated natural object, depends on a technique that he often refers toas the stereoskopischer Blick (stereoscopic view), but whose manyforms and variations may also be gathered together under the morecommonplace term Zuversicht (conWdence, assurance, steadiness offaith and hope). This involves a splitting of his consciousness and itsdistribution among different senses in a characteristic manner that

exposes him to an impact of the spectacle in one of its facets, whileholding him secure and removed in others. It operates speciWcallyand explicitly as a means to subvert the sensitivities of a homoge-neously constructed bourgeois subject.

As a method, it bears comparison with the construction of dia-lectical images by Walter Benjamin. In the 1920s, Benjamins collec-tion One-Way Street introduced a process of material awareness quitesimilar to that exempliWed in Jngers Das abenteuerliche Herz (The

Adenturous Heart, Wrst version published in 1929). As one mightargue in Benjamins case too, for the purpose of careful critique, thereader needs to step back out of the hypnotic range of that explosiveenergization of objects which the writer frames with such emphaticdevelopment. The objects appear in the great forcefulness of theirfacticity. As they depart, they leave the reader exposed to a powerfulirradiation of implicit theory. From the affective standpoint, this re-calls what Goethe writes of his method in the introductory passage of

the Farbenlehre (his attack on Newtons theory of colors), claiming thatthe intensive address of facts implicitly entails the theory that theysustain, and this spontaneous mode of theory enunciates the true voiceof nature. The immediate and concentrated Xash of insight extracted

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from the images and encounters in concrete objects or dreamlike sen-sations remind one of the line that Benjamin quotes from Hugo von

Hoffmansthal in On the Concept of History: Was nie geschriebenwurde lesen.to read what was never written (Benjamin, SelectedWritings 4: 405). Yet the images do not speak in unmediated addressto their inspired interpreter, neither to Goethe, nor anyone else. Theyare always read, as are all revelations, speculations, prophecies, andvatic utterances, within the framework of a well-established mode oftextual representation.

In Jngers case, these vatic utterances can to a great extent be

identiWed and broken down into lists and categories of separate mythsand conventions. They constantly enter into the established modelsof magical power for precisely the reason that he felt so magicallyassaulted by the spontaneities of artistic expression in the exhibitionwhere he contemplated Braques paintings. The conventions, evenbanalities, of such contexts yield to his mastery in a way that canon-ical artistic expression does not. He draws on standard conWgura-tions of astrology, of gnosticism, of every pagan mythology that his

eclectic reading gathers up; he will have recourse to medieval legend,to heroic history, to the mystiWcations of nature by mesmerism andgalvanism. Although skeptical in some moments, in others he vibrateswith eager fascination to the claims of witchcraft. Although resolutelydetermined to open his horizons beyond the conWnes of standardbelief, he will delve into the Bible and Christianity. Although conver-sant with stable forms of knowledge demonstrated by experimentalmethod and evidence, he has an appetite also for the pseudosciences

and fringe theories that circulated in the intellectual vagaries of roman-ticism and the nineteenth century.

These, and any of the other exotic worlds of thought from whichhe borrows, always serve the same purpose. They permit him tosustain an exceedingly close approach to phenomena that would pro-duce a direct force of revulsion acting on a person who consideredthem from within the hopeful but insecure circle of ordinary humanevalues. The results are inescapably mixed. In the case ofDer Arbeiter,

the mix is too dangerously close to the formulations of fascism tocontemplate with neutrality. Yet fascist critics at the time found theconnections with other ideologies all too suspect as well.

The formulations of apocalyptic collectivism in Der Arbeiter do

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contradict a simple political identiWcation for the very reasons dis-cernible in the contemporary reception, namely the tension between

the multiple dimensions in which he mythologizes the organic con-struction of social energy and any possible singular view on whicha political program could propagate itself. He extends his notion toinclude other mythologies, other programs, including those of theSoviet Union under international socialism, and the Zionist creationof a new Jewish state. Jngers position, the irony in the theory ofhis Gestalt, that new Wgure of the worker, therefore preserveshim from giving away any of his independence to the rising National

Socialist German Workers Party. This stands in stark and shockingcontrast to the singularity of Martin Heideggers mythologization ofan original and recoverable Sein, or Being, which left him power-less to resist incorporation into the political wave of frenzy that sweptGermanys preeminent thinker along with its unthinking mass.

Without doubt, the light of what we can now see of twentieth-century history in the various mythologies that intertwined them-selves in political programs of socialization invites a difWcult reXection

on the political dreams that emerged from the nineteenth century inthe promise of socialism. It invites us to reXect on our most funda-mental conceptions of political distinction and opposition, because abackward glance over the history of the twentieth century shows thatthe connection between socialization and socialism imposes a funda-mental restriction on separate identities between a Left and Rightorientation. And this is where we Wnd Jnger during his half-centuryof engagement with the German Federal Republic: a man who sees

himself standing substantially between Left and Right. In that period,we Wnd him involved with both sides, and, in his close ties to AlfredAndersch, though not him alone, treading a path critical of tradi-tional conservative authority and upholding a vindication of individ-ual experience. His prose continues endlessly citing and exchangingmodes of language in the same eternal experiment whereby his liter-ary voice will test the conWnement of any single scale. In Siebzig ver-weht (Seventy Blown Away), the collection of Jngers journals and

commentaries from 1965 to 1980, he notes that Andersch is almostthe only German whose work I follow (Smtliche Werke, 5: 195). Thereason for the attraction lies explicitly in the self-conscious, reXectivewriters relationship to language. The very thing whose deliberate

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elaboration in proud independence alienates many among contem-porary readers sustains Jnger in the kinship of a shared concern.

Commenting on Anderschs novel, Winterspelt, he notes that heW

ndsthe prose truly refreshing compared with the general level today. Yetexactly that which pleases me, that a person really knows how to han-dle language, might well work to annoy many others (195).

IfthisreXection should go against the limited role by which JngerWgures as the quintessential rightist and conservative, it should onlyremind us that the experience of the previous century indicates theextreme precariousness of any tightly constructed abstract theoretical

structure that conWnes these opposing identities in a stable arrange-ment. A more loosely Wtting understanding of the Left in its two cen-turies of history places it more comfortably as the impulse to dissolveand distribute social power. Theories or programs prescribing howthis might be done cannot survive the historical demonstration thatthey merely re-embody the impulse of the Right to focus and con-centrate power. Similarly, in its loosest understanding, conservatismidentiWes an essence in the human condition whose determinate

order offers the sole criterion of authenticity in a single origin. Con-servative values spring from the piety of devotion to that essence.This determines Martin Heideggers social thinking when he assertsthe value of patient dedication to the source of human order in dasSein as the piety of thinking. It also determined his naive embrace ofauthoritarian power as the medium that embodies and realizes suchauthenticity in the social order.

Neither in any unequivocal identity in his conception of power,

nor in any identiWable singularity in an essence underlying his visionof a human order, can Jngers full opus Wt that traditional place towhich he has all too readily been assigned. But if we allow the com-plex mediation of that irony by which he explores the multiplicityof what those many sources of myth mediate for him, we see himmoving with vivid reactions through a signiWcant critical turbulencein the established orientation of the previous century.

The conception of socialism as a potential resolution of human

conXicts implies socialization of all resources over which competitiverelations could arise. Within Left ideology, this project raised questionsabout mediation from the start because the project of realizing some-thing held to be latent in history calls the notion of programmatic

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politics and planning into questiona questioning that takes itsextreme form in Walter Benjamins assertion in On the Concept of

History that such latency must be understood as theological, and therealization as messianic. From outside that ideology, the struggle toabsorb all resources looks indistinguishable from a new expression ofold conXicts to the extent that the manifest history of socialism hasfound only one means to effect that development, namely the state.

The rise in power of the state, whether pursued according to aleftist or rightist purpose, and according to a rightist or leftist concep-tion of social tensions, can scarcely attain a different result than that

which always supervenes in the space between power and powerless-ness, namely alienation. Consequently, the greater the degree of social-ization, or the total organization of power over all social resources,the less the political conditions resemble socialism as an expressionof Left aspirations. That is, not only do wars become total betweentotally mobilized countries but social relations also assume the char-acter of total conXict within the totally organized state. In the origi-nal formulation of socialism, concrete community relations mediate

all human activity, so that each contributes according to his or herabilities, and each receives according to his or her needs. The actualeffect of socialization mediates everything through the state, andalienates everything from the community.

Despite all this, it remains extremely difWcult to refute the long-established role in which Jnger has been cast. There are facts andtexts that distinguish him from the form in which he circulates asthe essential fascist writer, yet none of that carries much persuasive

force before the rhetorical blaze of a military hero proclaiming theappeal of military heroism. How does one reinterpret this vision-ary exponent of dedication and endurance who portrayed a transWg-ured existence procured by sacriWce in the Wgure of Der Arbeiter?No one can doubt that the effect of his writings contributed to theintellectual and cultural disasters that helped Hitler come to power.That he participated in reactionary polemics in the 1920s is notopen to dispute. That writings like Total Mobilization reeked of

fascist sensibility in their time is a matter of undeniable history. In1930, Walter Benjamin marked out that moment in Jngers longcareer in a furiously outraged review entitled Theories of GermanFascism.

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In 1930, substance and theory had not yet found their points ofengagement in an actual National Socialist regime, but even if his

involvement might have turned out in retrospect to have acquiredquite small proportions, and proved highly indirect, peripheral, andcircumstantial, it is difWcult to dismiss it as inconsequential sincethe historical catastrophe did entail such immense consequences.And yet it also depends on a failure to register an idea that lies at thecore of Jngers thinking from the start in his view of political col-lectivities, and especially fails to recognize the transformation thatthis brought about in him through the catastrophes the Third Reich

wrought in his own life.Jngers ideological critics pass rather lightly over the story of hisson Ernstl and the boys untimely death. In 1944, Ernstl was arrestedfor having told his school friends he thought the only salvation forGermany would require hanging Adolf Hitler. Father and son wereby all accounts exceptionally close, and one can hardly doubt thatthis was the rash and boyish expression of ideas long contemplatedand discussed in the Jnger household. Its signiWcance does not lie in

its weight as evidence that Jnger sincerely despised the Nazi regime,nor in the sincerity of his grief and the understanding of the loss thatthis war had brought to families everywhere. It lies in the deWningpower of the sons death to crystallize a gathering change in Jngersthinking from his own youth, and the resulting complete and Wnaltransformation in the way he henceforward poses questions to all thephenomena of the world.

This moment produces a clarity in the mode of his subsequent

interpretation of the history he has lived through that we can see asthe shattering opposite of Martin Heideggers intellectual perspec-tive, just as his personal conduct of relations with the regime standsin Werce contrast to Heideggers. The difference can be drawn up as acontrasting view of authority, but not simply in the authority of thehuman hierarchy. It penetrates to a new skepticism about the fun-damentals of truth and authority in the realms of myth and intuitionas these might manifest themselves in any level of social expression.

In a word, he has lost the illusions that Heidegger retains in his notionof piety, or Frmmigkeit. The forms in which a Denker (thinker) inHeideggers terminology approaches and attends the intimations ofBeing no longer bind Jnger to the limited and pious questions and

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imperturbable intellectual passivity of Heideggers view of worldlyaffairs. The word that most distinctly conveys the change is Zuversicht.

From the days in which Jnger miraculously escapedX

ying bulletsand exploding shells in World War I, he also sustained a faith in theorder of things, and a mysteriously kept promise that rewarded hisfaith. Somehow, somewhere, the unshakable harmony of destiny andthe secret life of things always remained intact. In the novel he wrotejust before the outbreak of World War II, On the Marble Cliffs, thisguaranteed an indescribable but indestructible safety before the on-slaught of the Lemuren (spirits of the dead)murderers, torturers,

desecrators of human dignityunleashed by the triumphant powerof the antagonist who rules from the forests and swamps. The broth-ers who attempt to resist the murky onslaught have labored long incollecting and documenting the Xora of the region. They protect thefruits of their work through all the years by consuming them in Wre,which they regard as a Sicherheit im Nichts (Smtliche Werke, 15:301)safety in nothingness. As the story closes, the defeat of an entirecivilization stands contradicted by the brothersHeimgangthe return

home that also suggests death and return to Godand the certaintythat this turn of events, too, has its place in the cosmic order and theturning of a grand cycle. Jnger will still write about Zuversicht insmaller questions after the loss of his son and the loss of the war, butthat refusal to think or question the order of Being that characterizesHeideggers piety of thinking has discreetly slipped away.

This discretion about an ultimate order and origin, understoodcorrectly, throws Jngers position on the Right into a new and more

complicated locus. Terms like konservativer Anarchist have had theirmoment as formulae to describe him, but their usefulness belongs toa narrower set of concerns. The paradoxical formulae derive most oftheir tenuous coherence from the ever-sharper revulsion that movedJnger away from the National Socialist regime. It would, however,be very hard to map the movement along the simple LeftRight axis.For this reason, a connection to the Left is certain to produce stillmore difWcult twists of language. And yet we can follow at least one

explicit and long-standing ambition to produce that connection by anactive associate, Alfred Andersch. Andersch not only admired Jngeras an artist but also always approached his work as though he could,in some way, be won for the Left.

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This endeavor certainly does not set out to contradict what, in1930, Walter Benjamin had identiWed in Theories of German Fas-

cism. But Benjamins analysis engaged a moment in a different Ger-many, and the theory he identiWed remained at the stage of rhetoric,not political alignment within a party apparatus. And indeed, a the-ory remains a basis of questioning too, if it refuses to accept the align-ment with programs and powers. Benjamin and Jnger shared anambition to bring an end to the enfeebled political structure of theWeimar Republic, though its passing would prove costly to them both.What they shared in the utopianism that expected a more advanced

state to replace Weimar lay in their respective theories of power,which, as Braque notes in the remark about utopia quoted above,proved to be such dangerously deceptive myths. Whatever Anderschhad in mind in the period of the Bundesrepublik, it would not haveentailed Jngers joining up in an organization of the Left. It seemsunlikely that it would have entailed persuading Jnger to adopt anynew positions at all. The idea of winning over does not in this con-text mean moving Jnger on to new ground, but rather redrawing the

lines of demarcation that surround where he already stood.Jngers long and generous association with Alfred Anderschindicates that he himself was far from shutting out such considera-tions in that he both draws back from attempts to assimilate him fromthe Right and extends a degree of acknowledgment towards the Left.Yet the intricacy of his speculation always returns to his perpetuallyextended reXections on how he might deWne his own idiosyncraticposture. In the journals collected under the title Siebzig verweht,

the great monument he swells with details about himself from everyangle, he illuminates his positions by quoting his letters to a surpris-ing selection of recipients. He writes warmly to Benjamins friendGerschom Scholem, and in a letter to a rather prominent Holocaustsurvivor and historian, Joseph Wulf, he extends recognition of allthat connects the two of them as well: We two, so different in kindand in origin, meet in our common humanity . . . that runs deeperthan agreement in our opinions, and it endures longer (Smtliche

Werke, 5: 182). Siebzig verweht also continues to repeat a theme ofGerman and Jewish identities that begins in Jngers writings datingwell before the Third Reich. When situations arise that remind himof negative responses to Germans, he very frequently compares this

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experience to that of Jews suffering anti-Semitism. But, of course, wealso Wnd letters to Carl Schmitt and to Martin Heidegger that fulWll

his place alongside them as representatives of an extreme reactionaryintellectual establishment.Nonetheless, the man at the center of this curiously knotted web

of communications knits up another role for himself, or perhaps sev-eral, as he extricates himself from a LeftRight axis. In January 1972,for example, he writes to a journal in Italy that simply calls itselfLaDestrathe Rightthat has included him, without consultation, onthe list of its international associates. He words his letter carefully,

since he would be hard put to prevent publication in its pages, andwrites: I permit myself to accept it as an honor, although the titleruns counter to my principles, since I try to walk with both legs, toact with both my arms, and to think with both halves of my brain, bywhich I mean in the exercise of reason (64).

Some years earlier, he had written to Ernst Niekisch that thecause of the disastrous fate that had overwhelmed them and the Ger-man Reich lay in our never having had a strong Left . . . can we hope

that this will one day change? (Smtliche Werke, 4: 11). Comments ofthis kind are not rare in Jngers writings from the Bundesrepublikperiod. In 1969, Jnger sends some advice to Carlo Schmid, a memberof the Social Democratic Party (SPD), whom Jnger had long admiredand whom he supported as a candidate for Bundesprsident againstHeinrich Lbke. Although Jngers correspondence with Carl Schmittshows more consideration for the latters concept of the FreundFeind-Verhltnis (relationship of friend and foe) in national orien-

tation, he questions its applicability in the LeftRight axis betweenparties when advising an active politician. Indeed, he questions theentire conception of competing parties in distributing power and re-sponsibility. My opinion leads me to look on the body of our nationas a whole, and not as one half on the left, and the other on the right,he says. Therefore the Left must also fulWll tasks in government towhich the Right has regarded itself as privileged (576). It is not difW-cult to smell a reactionary rat in this notion of incorporation, of course.

The impulse to preserve the body politic as a uniWed organism is con-servative, but here it becomes conservative in a particular vein.

That vein, in its simplest current, runs against the notion of par-liamentary politics altogether. And yet insofar as it also runs against

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any of the historical alternatives, it does not permit us to reduce it toany ideology of political power. This proposition is fundamental. Al-

though Jnger writes much about the notion of power, his notion willnever quite match what the rest of the world recognizes as politicalpower. For this reason, we cannot effectively deWne him if we simplypresuppose that set of differences that Jnger subjects to his critique.We are bound to let him deWne himself.

We need to suspend and reconsider the apparatus of terminologythat shows itself inadequate to the task of deWning him. The necessitythat I claim may take its more obvious urgency on the negative side,

on the right-wing side that continues to proWt by Jngers effect inhis role as militaristic national monument. The possibility of cancel-ing that identity might constitute one aspect of the positive momentthat Alfred Andersch conceives in his ambition to transform theway Jnger is read. Yet it most deWnitely does not exhaust the scopeof Anderschs project. The urgency that Andersch felt in his taskclearly had little purchase within the larger situation of establishedleftist mythologies, because within that framework the most efWcient

means to achieve the political goal of diminishing Jngers inXuenceappears to lie on the path of literary negation. The standard way toread Jnger on the Right so as to achieve an ideological beneWt frameshim according to a leftist mythology in the role of quintessential fas-cist aesthete. And yet attacking that aesthetics from the Left can nevernegate the beneWt drawn from Jngers reputation on the other side,the side of right-wing propaganda. That side has proved imperviousto left-wing critique because the criteria that carry weight among con-

servatives are if anything only conWrmed by such literary resistance.Jngers own vivid project of self-deWnition similarly leads a con-

servative response into a limited and rather primitive reading. Therhetoric of heroism, the cultic language of revelation through experi-ences of conXict, produce an immediate impact that reduces the textto a single dimension. They deWne the writer within the repetitive toneof a collective fantasy and stiXe the subtler exploration of individualimagination and individual sovereignty. The rhetoric of a man who is

so obsessively intent, so vastly excessive, in deWning himself, there-fore lends itself to the most grotesque and dangerous misreadings.The process by which the man pursues self-deWnition inevitably com-promises his literary rigor. It inevitably ends in self-mythologization.

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This marks the limit, the Xaw in his activity as a writer; it obscureshim within the frame of rational self-perception and delivers him up

within public expression as a model identity of the most deplorablekind. Abandoned to the embrace of naive neofascists and adolescentthugs, this grandiose arc of heroic reXection turns into a Xagrantlydecadent role model. And indeed, it would seem that for any personto model himself in the mirror of another persons reXections couldnot yield anything but decadence.

This, of course, brings us right back to 1930 and to Walter Ben-jamins essay Theories of German Fascism. Benjamin, with every

justiWcation, sets the effect of a text within an institution of readingbefore all other concerns, and for that reason sees the decadence writ-ten across the faces of those who come before a readership eager forfantastic reXections of false identity. The work exists for Benjamin asa historical phenomenon, and the phenomenon that he deplored solong ago will most likely continue to live on, perhaps forever, underthe name Ernst Jnger. Yet that takes nothing from the responsibil-ity of criticism and commentary to follow the complete route paved

by this long sequence of texts. It remains open to everyone to lookbeyond the absurdity of cultic reception and trace more exactly howJnger himself has drawn his own life and persona across the land-scape of language.

As we have already noted, Jnger showed no inclination in the1960s and 1970s to identify his position according to the divisionbetween Left and Right. More importantly, when he looks back to hisearlier orientation, and to the changes in his outlook, he very deftly

avoids identifying the movement in his thinking through that samecommonplace opposition. In 1950, his essay ber die Linie (Overthe Line) responds to a modern Germany primarily drawn up intodifferent versions of progressive bourgeois ideology by repudiatingthe struggle between political parties. The competition between themdemonstrates the failed and lost ideas that merely appear to havepersisted from past projects, and now merely appear to divide them.Like Benjamin himself, whose Critique of Violence expressed con-

tempt for the Xaccid relation to law of parliamentary institutions in1920, Jnger develops a theory of law in his essay ber die Liniethat redeWnes the relationship between individual and collectiveobligations. Unlike Benjamin, however, he turns away from any idea

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of a reinstalled fabric of law at a higher, a theological, level. Instead,he simply sees the collapse of any clear orientation in the social order.

Political parties can no longer separate themselves from the thor-oughly formed state with its ofWcials and its mechanisms nor fromone another, so that whichever wins power, it is hard to distinguishbetween them both. This is the mark of a time in which the deter-mining ideas in their nomos and ethos are lost or have fallen intodecay, even though on the surface or in exaggerated display they maycontinue to live on (Smtliche Werke, 4: 24748). This implicit notionof deception and illusion now deWnes all social relations at the polit-

ical or national level because [t]he age of ideologies, which werestill possible to uphold after 1918, is now over (271). Moreover, thisafXicts the noblest ofWgures from a tradition with which he had onceidentiWed himself, and embraced: Not even powerful warriors havethe strength for that now; their commission does not go beyond thelimit of illusions. Therefore martial glory pales where only the ulti-mate reality that defeats mere appearances still counts (270).

Meeting the challenge of illusion requires a different mode of

effort from that of heroic commitment to any kind of cause. The nobil-ity of loyalty vanishes, and, as we shall see, had in fact vanished forJnger long before. The nature of personal decisions, the pursuit oftruth, choosing heroic realism, all turn away from solidarity withany abstract mass. And one turns neither to the Right nor the Leftas these were constituted in another time. One simply turns away.As Alfred Andersch put it in The Cherries of Freedom, the story of hisdesertion from the German army, published in 1952, all undertakings

within an organized domain represent a captivity. Freedom occursin the Xeeting passage from one captivity to another. And it is here,in the recognition that Jnger, Germanys most celebrated literarysoldier, brings to Andersch, Germanys most eloquent deserter, thatwe uncover what it might mean for Andersch to win Jnger forthe Left. And within that reconsideration, we might Wnd ourselvesobliged to recall that the term Left may have changed substantiallythrough its history, or perhaps never referred to a stable political

position at all. Certainly, its literary history covers signiWcant shifts.Perhaps the earliest point at which we can see it circulating as a gen-eral concept, beyond its origins in the French assembly, would bein Heines remark in his jaunty tale of life in the 1820s, Die Harzreise

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(Journey to the Harz Mountains). There he addresses his reader insome conWdence on the topic of aesthetic emotions felt when contem-

plating the charming castles of a ruined past: If one has ones heartthere, where it belongs, on the left, the liberal side (Harzreise, 22).Whatever he has in mind at that moment, it does not correspond to thesocialist state organization that aroused Braques anxiety. The con-centration of national resources within a consolidated state author-ity implies a different relationship to power, a different dispositionof historical energies; and the organization of human thought intocollective projects no longer engages the heart with any lightness at

all. All literary expression that permits itself to absorb the restrictedlanguage of such divisions is likely to arouse the deepest dislike ofa reader for whom the essential project of writing begins with thedeWning act of individual sovereignty; and indeed, Jnger did nothold the literary productions of the Bundesrepublik in high esteem.But he found a signiWcant exception in the work of Alfred Andersch.The remark in which he singled Andersch out as the only writer ofthat generation whose work he always read occurs in the journal

entry of September 19, 1974, when he mentions that for the last fewdays, he has been reading Anderschs new novel, Winterspelt. Jngerwas then enjoying a vacation in Turkey, so he was not especiallypressed for time, and he lingered over the book with pleasure, onlyreaching the Wnal chapters while aboard the plane returning to Ger-many on September 27. The friendship and admiration between thesetwo men always elicits a certain surprise, and yet it quite evidentlystood on a Wrm basis, lasting from the early 1950s until Anderschs

death in 1980. Andersch, after all, had not only deserted from theWehrmacht during the Italian campaign in 1944 but had moved toSwitzerland permanently in protest against West German rearma-ment. And Winterspelt takes up the theme of desertion once more. Ittells the story of a major on the Western Front, in the last stage of WorldWar II before the Allies advance into German territory, who consid-ers how he might lead his battalion across enemy lines in surrender.

While the personal and intellectual relations with Heidegger and

Schmitt Wt comfortably into the frame that sets Jnger up as a con-servative Wgure, inspired by national loyalty and bound to the tradi-tions of the Right, the frame appears quite broken if we believe Jngeris serious about his reXection on Anderschs book:

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I too have often stood before a decision between high treason andbetrayal of my country, although I distinguished more sharply betweenthe two. Nonetheless, Andersch has not made it easy for himself. Whatwe share in common are fundamentally our anarchic tendencies, and theself-aggrandizement that overcomes one between the fronts. (SmtlicheWerke 5: 195)

Moreover, as Jnger reads on in the text, speculating about how thestory will resolve its primary problem, he connects it with a quitespeciWc backward glance at his own decisions and indecisions as asoldier in Hitlers Wehrmacht: The situation he sets up is not un-

familiar to me. Thoughts like those of the hero, Major Dincklage, willoccupy the mind of every educated soldier; in The Raphael theywere even debated more or less explicitly (198).

The Raphael was the hotel taken over by the German militarystaff commanding Paris where Jnger was stationed, and where herecorded his observations on the French Occupation in his two Parisjournals. Although he has not yet read to the end of the novel, he sus-pects that it will culminate in either a deferred decision, or one lost in

illusion, revealing Dincklage as either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote.That Jngerthe last German heroshould Wnd a substantial partof himself in either of those roles indicates a difference between thepublic institution that goes under his name, and the author himself.But, of course, no one wants to bet too heavily on the concept of theauthor himself. Let us say, more cautiously, that we have to acknowl-edge a complexity spun into the texts out of which the public monu-ment rises on the plinth of modern European culture. On one side,

we are faced with the question of who it was that the luminaries ofpolitical legitimacy, Franois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl, went tovisit on July 20, 1993, to commemorate a plot in which he did notparticipate. On the other side, who is it that recalls the voices andthe thoughts of soldiers torn between different obligations, and who,ruminating over a novel by Alfred Andersch, remembers the past asa tissue of betrayal?

Walter Benjamin rather famously wrote in an early passage of

his Berlin Chronicle, If I write better German than most writers of mygeneration, it is thanks to twenty years observation of one little rule:never use the word I except in letters (Selected Writings, 2: 603). And,as so often, Benjamin and Jnger run in close parallel to one another

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in their opposing directions. Each embarks on the project of undoingthe deWning presence of the nineteenth-century bourgeois subject in

his language. Although Benjamin does not really apply this rule asthus expressed, he does treat the Wrst-person pronoun as a peculiarartiWce, a congealed object capable of fracture and analysis. Jnger,by contrast, treats it as a genus of wild growth, rich in multiple spe-cies, and Wlls his books up with every possible form into which itevolves. Both authors write as collectors of their own identities, and,in the memorable phrase Benjamin used in his letter to GerschomScholem of May 29, 1926, Jnger too Xows through a construction

of changes that holds its course as always radical, never consistent(Benjamin, Briefe, 425). The body of their language moves throughthe experience of shocks with a characteristic historical rhythm, ableto take up, absorb, and incorporate what might, within the route ofa consistent subjectivity, throw that I so much more radically offits track as to necessitate a constant recoloring and reframing of whatwent before.

Yet we can also turn Benjamins little rule around. The ability to

hold on to the convoluted and polyvocal course that distinguishes himpresupposes a capacity in his writing that outstrips that of any mem-ber of his generation who dares to represent history as immediatelyas he does. Certainly, in the dialectical resourcefulness to use eachcatastrophe as the turning point to initiate a new idiom, Benjamin hasno peer. In the tenth thesis of his On the Concept of History, notingthat the socialist politicians who failed to resist fascism [c]onWrmtheir defeat by betrayal of their own cause (Selected Writings, 4: 393),

Benjamin moves his entire expository apparatus to another registerof language. He skips a beat, and then restores the rhetoric of revolu-tion to reXect the hidden presence of the Messiah. Jnger has no suchenormous resources at his disposal. When we see him at the decisivepoint that captures him in an identity from which he cannot proceedas before, the father mourning for his son, he absorbs this shock amongthe folds of his multifarious mythic discourses, and veils his equivo-cations in the smooth elusiveness of that multiplicity, but is never

able to represent the myth of nationhood in quite the same way again.Despite this, Jnger persists as an institution, as a symbol or a

site of exchange from which others can draw a more primitive formof discourse, like the political gesture in which Mitterand and Kohl

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indulge, or the fantasy of heroic sovereignty in the cultic receptionby right-wing adolescents. This aspect of public identity reXects the

conception with which Michel Foucault closed his essay What is anAuthor? which advises us to ask: What are the modes of existenceof this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, andwho can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it wherethere is room for possible subjects? (What is an Author? 391). Andthis in turn redeploys and reappropriates Roland Barthes positionin The Death of the Author that restricts reading to a procedurein which everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the

structure can be followed, run (like the thread of a stocking) at everypoint and every level, but there is nothing beneath (Barthes, Deathof the Author, 147). That might do for a dead author, but what if theauthor belongs to the undead?

As Alfred Andersch lay sick and dying in 1980, he exclaimed,How does Jnger manage to live so long? He is twenty years olderthan I am. And as for me . . . (Reinhardt, Alfred Andersch, 632). On theone hand, it is true. Jnger cuts a remarkable Wgure simply for having

had the beneWt of much time. Not only did he persist with apparentease and conWdence until 1998, living on to just a few weeks shortof his 103rd birthday, but he somehow managed to continue to writeand produce signiWcant work almost up to the last. On the otherhand, one could argue that he had died long before. The person towhom Jnger had always referred as I in the Wrst half of his lifeunderwent an extinction just before his Wftieth birthday. The personaout of which Ernst Jnger as an institution had been so marvelously

conjured up vanishes, and henceforth returns as an equally marvelousreconstruction.

This might seem a precarious claim. The stream of his work con-tinued to Xow over and through that point with undiminished vigor.The persona in which he presents himself to the world in the secondhalf of his life matches that which his writing created in the Wrst half.Yet the match itself contains the change because the apparent vigor-ous continuation nulliWes what it recapitulates. The act of preserva-

tion negates, even betrays what went before. The desire to preserveruns contrary to the heroic posture that colors every fundamentalidea in Jngers earlier development, whether he reveals this in theresponse to spectacles of struggle and destruction in the realm of

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insects or in the battles of World War I. Whether speculating aboutcycles of world history or natural history, whether contemplating the

destruction of bourgeois modernity with the rise of Der Arbeiter orthe domination of the civilized Marina by the dynamic barbarism ofthe ruler over the forests in On the Marble Cliffs, Jnger sustains hisHaltung der Zuversichtthe pose of conWdence.

The mark of a man equal to the demands of any pain, any shock,any loss, appears in his sustaining the coolness and the distance ofwhat, in Das abenteuerliche Herz, he calls dsinvolture (SmtlicheWerke, 9: 260), yet nothing of this equanimity appears in the Kirch-

horster Bltter (Pages from the Village of Kirchhorst) under the journalentry for January 12, 1944, when he received the news that Ernstlhad been killed on the Italian front at Carrara. He is, quite naturally,stunned, paralyzed, completely overwhelmed by pain. Two days later,he writes: The pain is like a rainfall that Wrst runs off in a mass, thensoaks slowly into the earth (Smtliche Werke, 3: 360). The manner inwhich the news reaches him as an ofWcial communication of the Naziregime renders him incapable of drawing on any part of his estab-

lished ideas, even though death in warfare had always been his majortheme. He responds simply: horrible (362), but cannot expand thisin the way he had once unfolded the feeling of horror in Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis (Battle as an Inner Experience). There, he had writ-ten scornfully of the modern person who has no inkling of whatriches lie hidden in horror as the ring of feelings that have long lainstill in our depths only to break forth with immense power when weconfront some great shattering event (Smtliche Werke, 7: 18). Nothing

breaks through here. Nothing transforms his grief. Yes, this is part ofour reality, he writes in a new tone of resignation, and soon it grewclear to me that only one quality Wnds its place here with any signiW-cance: pain (Smtliche Werke, 3: 362).

Although without explicit acknowledgment, his invocation ofpain in the mourning of his son recalls a passage in his essay fromover a decade before, ber den Schmerz (On Pain). There, he offershis reader the Wgure of a Japanese soldier, General Nogi, as one of

the few Wgures of our time, to whom one can apply the word hero(Smtliche Werke, 7: 161). He earned this status, in Jngers view, be-cause he received the news that his son had fallen in battle with deepsatisfaction (161).

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The only moment that records any respite from the grief of thoseWrst days and weeks occurs when he receives a letter from Carl

Schmitt. He brieX

y absorbs a spark of Schmitts burning faith in thenational and natural order of things, but it goes out again in the stormof misery provoked by the spectacle of how the Lemurentheoperators of Nazi terror and humiliation whose regime destroyedErnstlfed on the tragedy in the rituals of their own cult. This inXu-ence recalls another moment of despair and disillusion in Jngersencounter with those Lemuren at work in the abominations practicedduring the Russian campaign. In the record of Jngers visit to the

Eastern Front, Kaukasische Aufzeichnungen (Caucasian Sketches), hedescribes his disgust at what he has learned about this new formof total war, and his horror at what the emblems and insignia of themilitary that he once revered have now come to signify. Then, too,he received a letter from Carl Schmitt, and derived a momentary liftin spirits and convictions. Yet that also soon evaporated in the face ofa far more powerful and enduring recognition.

Never again would he look on the state, the nation, the country he

lived in, either through its connections or its oppositions, as the modelor the mirror of his intellectual struggles. The foundation for all polit-ical engagement vanished in a Wnal moment of alienation that permit-ted no further thought of reappropriation. It is part of the tragedythat afXicts the best people today that ethos and polis no longercoincide in our actions (Smtliche Werke, 3: 362). The public realmhas now ceased to offer itself as a Weld of action in which ethos andpolis meet as truth. Only emptiness ensues. The tragedy of this

ending annihilates speech that addresses anything but emptiness. Atthat moment, Jnger enters another realm, an afterlife. Henceforth,he only contemplates das Nichtsnothingnessas the Xeetingpoint of negation between one captivity and another. Freedom sur-vives only in betrayal of a cause rendered loathsome by the action ofits Lemuren, for a state, a nation, that feels free to torture, to assassi-nate, to terrorize, negates the very principle by which loyalty mightfall together with ethos.

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Works Cited

Andersch, Alfred. Die Kirschen der Freiheit: Ein Bericht. Zrich: Diogenes, 1971.

. Winterspelt. Zrich: Diogenes, 1974.

Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen

Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 14248.Benjamin, Walter. A Berlin Chronicle. 1978. In Selected Writings. Vol. 2. Ed. Michael

W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass. and London,

U.K.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 595637.. Briefe I. Ed. Gerschom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1966. (My translation.)

. On the Concept of History. 1968. In Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Ed. Howard

Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass. and London, U.K.: HarvardUniversity Press, 2003. 389400.

. Paralipomena to On the Concept of History. 2003. In Selected Writings. Vol.4. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass. and London,

U.K.: Harvard University Press, 2003. 40144.

. Selected Writings. Vols. 14. Ed. Michael Jennings et al. Cambridge, Mass. andLondon, U.K.: Harvard University Press, 19972003.

. Theories of German Fascism. 1979. In Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 2. Ed.

Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 31221. Cambridge, Mass.

and London, U.K., Harvard University Press, 1999.Braque, Georges. Illustrated Notebooks 191755. Trans. Stanley Applebaum. New York:

Dover, 1971.

Foucault, Michel.What is an Author? In The Essential Foucault: Selections from the

Essential Works of Foucault, 19541984. Eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New

York: New Press, 2003. 37791.

Heine, Heinrich.Die Harzreise. In Heines Prose. Ed. Albert B. Faust. New York: Crofts,1928. 1850. (My translation.)

Jnger, Ernst. Das abenteuerliche Herz. Zweite Fassung. Figuren und Capriccios.

1938. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 9. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. 177330.. Auf den Marmorklippen. 1939. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 15. Stuttgart: Klett-

Cotta, 1978. 247351.

. Das erste Pariser Tagebuch. 1949. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Klett-

Cotta, 1979. 223406.. Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis. 1922. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 7. Stuttgart:

Klett-Cotta, 1980. 9103.

. Kirchhorster Bltter. 1949. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,1979. 295401.

. Smtliche Werke. Vols. 118. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 197883. (My translations.)

. Siebzig verweht I. 1982. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 4. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,1982.

. Siebzig verweht II. 1982. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,

1983.

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. ber den Schmerz. 1934. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 7. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,

1980. 14391.. ber die Linie. 1950. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 7. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980.

23980.

. Das zweite Pariser Tagebuch. 1949. In Smtliche Werke. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. 11294.

Reinhardt, Stephan. Alfred Andersch: Eine Biographie. Zrich: Diogenes, 1990. (Mytranslation.)

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