Bland arbetare & äventyrliga hjärtan

Om man är intresserad av den intellektuellt turbulenta Weimartiden (oavsett om det gäller någon specifik politisk eller filosofisk strömning eller om man bara vill skaffa sig en överblick) så har man en veritabel guldgruva i tegelstenen The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Den innehåller bl.a. utdrag ur tre verk av Ernst Jünger, alla med väldigt olika karaktär, varav jag nyligen upptäckt att två redan ligger på nätet, närmare bestämt hos Spöknippet. Det tredje följer här, för trots att detta inte utgör ett av Jüngers mest angelägna alster så tycker jag ändå det kan vara intressant att lyfta fram en text som speglar även denna sida av honom.

Men först vill jag nämna On Danger (Über die gefahr), publicerad 1931. Detta är den intressantaste texten av de tre, om hur faran fasas ut ur det borgerliga samhället för att till varje pris skapa trygghet, och om vad detta får/fick för konsekvenser. Om hur det medför ett blint försvar av vad som felaktigt upplevs som en stabil samhällsordning i en tid av förändring, vilket leder till att allt som upplevs som farligt utdefinieras och bekämpas, och att allt som man tror hotar denna upplevt trygga ordning definieras som farligt. Kan ses som en försmak av det av rädsla genomsyrade samhälle som Jünger analyserar i Der Waldgang (1951) ett världskrig – och en revolution som aldrig kom – senare.

Den andra texten är kapitlet Feuer, från Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922). Här möter vi titanen Jünger, den unge krigaren. Det är vackert och hårt, ett stilprov som verkligen visar på en likhet med Yukio Mishima. Och till sist har vi texten jag nu lägger ut här, ett utdrag från Der Arbeiter (1932). Om vi mötte titanen i Feuer får vi här en inblick i tiden som mauretanier, den politiska, aktivistiska sidan hos den unge Jünger.

Både titanen och mauretaniern är visserligen något Jünger gjorde upp med relativt kort därefter. Och även om övergången var glidande, och den börjar tidigt (eller var kanske alltid närvarande), så kan man nog säga att brytpunkten definitivt passerades i och med Marmorklipporna (1939). Men trots allt är det nog så att det är pamflettskriverierna under Weimartiden som lade grunden för Jüngers ”tvivelaktiga ställning”, som Svensson formulerar saken i en av sina många läsvärda betraktelser över Silverräven.

The Worker: Domination and form

First published in Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatishe Verlags-Anstalt, 1932), 197-201.

The world we live in displays on the one hand positive similarities to a workshop and on the other, to a museum. The distinction between these two landscapes, from the point of view of the demands they imply, is that no one is forced to see in a workshop more than simply a workshop whereas over the museum landscape there reigns a grotesquely proportioned spirit of edification. We have risen to a level of historical fetishism that stands in a direct relation to our deficiency in productive energy. Therefore the dismal thought occurs that some sort of secret correspondence causes the pace of our accumulation and preservation of so-called cultural goods to be matched only by the grandiose scale on which we simultaneously create instruments of destruction.

These goods, that is, the art, culture, and the education industry, have so come to permeate our emotional and aesthetic environment that the need to lighten our load can scarcely be imagined in sufficiently fundamental and comprehensive terms. It is not the worst that around the most out-of-the-way little hovel that life has ever forced the body to endure a circle of experts, collectors, snoopers, and curators gathers. Such was ultimately, albeit on a more modest scale, always the case.

More dubious is the issue of all this industriousness in a network of stereotyped values behind which is concealed utter mortification. At play here are only the shadows of things, with advertisements being made for a concept of culture that is alien to all manner of primal strength. This is happening at a time in which the elemental has regained its strength, a time in which it penetrates our environment and poses unambiguous challenges. While the state faces more original and pressing tasks than ever in history, effort is instead expended attempting to attract a new generation of administrators and cultural bureaucrats and to cultivate a perverse feeling for the “true greatness” of the people. Regardless of how far one might wish to lock back, it would be difficult to hit upon such a distressing blend of banality and arrogance as has become common in the inevitable invocations of German culture in the official state language. What our fathers had to say about progress was in comparison truly golden.

The question arises, how, in a time so filled with things of burning importance, those presently transpiring and those yet to come, such a veneer of pale idealism and infused romanticism is possible in the first place. The answer that no one is capable of doing better may well be naïve, but it is also apt. The museum industry represents nothing other than one of the last oases of bourgeois security. It supplies the seemingly most plausible pretext upon which one can evade the political decision. This is an activity the world is happy to catch the Germans undertaking. As soon as it became apparent that the “workers’ representatives” in Weimar in 1919 had their Faust in their knapsacks, it was possible to predict that the bourgeois world had been saved for a reasonable time to come. The flatness with which cultural propaganda was practiced in Germany during the war developed afterward literally into a system, and there is scarcely a postage stamp, scarcely a banknote on which one does not run across the same thing. All of these things have won for us the reproach, unfortunately mistaken, of being perfidious. It is a matter here, however, not of perfidy, but of the bourgeois absence of instinct in questions of value.

This absence is a kind of opium that veils danger and summons up the deceitful consciousness of order. That, however, is an intolerable luxury at a moment that demands one not speak of traditions but create them. We are living at a moment in history when all depends on an enormous mobilization and concentration of the forces at hand. Our fathers had perhaps the time to occupy themselves with the ideals of an objective science and an art existing for its own sake. We in contrast find ourselves quite clearly in a position in which not this or that but the totality of our life is in question.

This makes imperative the act of total mobilization. Its task is to pose to every phenomenon, both human and material, the brutal question of its necessity. Instead, in the years since the war, the state has occupied itself with things that are not just superfluous to an endangered existence but harmful, and it has neglected other things that are critical to survival. The image one ought to have of the state today resembles not a convivial passenger steamer but a warship ruled by extreme simplicity and economy on which every motion is made with an instinctive sense of confidence.

What ought to inspire respect in foreigners visiting Germany are not facades preserved of past times, not ceremonial speeches made during the centenary celebrations of classic artists, and not the concerns from which novels and plays derive their themes; it is rather the virtues of poverty, work, and diligence which today represent cultivation much more profoundly than the bourgeois ideal can ever dream.

Do people not know that our entire so-called culture is incapable of preventing even the smallest neighboring country from violating our territory? Do they not know that it is, on the contrary, enormously important for the world to know that the defense of the nation will enlist even children, women, and the aged in its cause? And that, just as individuals renounced the pleasures of their private existence, so would the government not hesitate for a second to sell the art treasures in all the museums to the highest bidder, if this defense required it?

Such expressions of the highest form of tradition, namely, the vital, living form, obviously presuppose a supreme sense of responsibility, a sense to which it is clear that the point now is not our responsibility to images but to the primal strength to which these images bear witness. That requires, to be sure, a genuine greatness of another kind. Let us however be persuaded: if there still exists among us genuine greatness, if somewhere a poet, an artist, a believer is hidden, then it is this sense of responsibility and their need to make themselves useful that will make them recognizable.

It requires no prophetic gift to predict that we are standing not at the beginning of a golden age but before great and difficult change. There is no optimism capable of obscuring the fact that great conflicts are more numerous and more serious than ever. The point is to match the stature of these conflicts by creating orders that are unshakable.

The situation in which we find ourselves, however, is that of an anarchy concealed behind the delusion cast by values become obsolete. This situation is necessary insofar as it guarantees the decay of those old orders whose fighting strength has proved insufficient. The strength that one finds in the depths of the people, in contrast to the creative soil of the state, has preserved itself in unsuspected ways.

Already today we are justified in saying that exhaustion has been essentially overcome – that we possess a youth that knows its responsibility and whose core was invulnerable to anarchy. It is inconceivable that Germany would ever lack good people. How grateful is this youth for every sacrifice asked of it. The critical point, however, is lending this willing and ready issue of nature a form corresponding to its essence. This task poses the greatest and most significant challenges to our productive energies.

But what can be the spiritual nature of minds that fail to comprehend that there is no more profound or knowing spirit than that of any given soldier who fell somewhere on the Somme or in Flanders?

That is the standard that we need.