Translated material
My comrade Junger
Conversation with Alexander Mikhailovsky about the Russian fate of the German writer
The publishing house "Ad Marginem" will very soon release a new edition of "The Heart of an Adventurer" by Ernst Junger, supplemented by one essay by an outstanding German writer, which has not previously been published in Russian. On this occasion, Nikita Barkov discussed with the philosopher and translator of the book Alexander Mikhailovsky this re-edition, Jünger’s obvious and not so obvious connections with Russia, and also found out how one of the inspirers of the conservative revolution managed to avoid Heidegger’s fate after the war.
— How different is the publication that is now being prepared from the one that was published in 2004? How much changes have been made, besides the fact that a previously unknown to our reader “Sicilian Letter to the Man on the Moon” appeared there?
— I decided to prepare for the publishing house “Ad Marginem” not just a second revised edition, but — to make it more interesting for our readers — a second revised and expanded edition. The reissue of The Heart of an Adventurer includes a translation of the 1930 essay “A Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon”; In addition, stylistic corrections were made in the text of the old translation itself. Some things were improved with the help of the editors, who paid attention to places that were not entirely transparent to the Russian reader. This necessitated the insertion of a few explanatory notes with references to those sources that Jünger either directly quotes or has in mind as a reader. This is a kind of intellectual game of a very high level, when you guess certain allusions to works of art and literary texts that the author implies.
I also had to update the afterword, because at the end I summarized: “The Heart of an Adventurer is the fifth book by Ernst Jünger in Russian, although one cannot yet speak of the Russian Jünger the way they speak of the French Jünger.” I meant that at that time Jünger's works were already included in the Pleiades Library . The very last paragraph of my afterword sounds like this: “A favorable moment, kairos, is not created by the efforts of people, but arises on its own, perhaps right now such a favorable moment has come for reading Jünger, not only in Russia.” You see that I was right, I managed to get into this kairos. At the moment, we already have at least fifteen books by Jünger translated into Russian. In Germany, his books are on the shelves of the largest German stores like Dussmann in Berlin or Wittwer in Stuttgart in the “Literature of the 20th Century” section and compete with such authors as Heinrich Böll, Thomas Mann, Martin Walser. In my opinion, Ernst Jünger has already received the status of a classic.
In German there is such a word - umstritten, that is, “disputed,” “ambiguous,” or “disputed.” In the 1990s, when I was just beginning my translation and research activities, it was actively applied to at least two of the authors I study: Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt. The latter still remains umstritten due to the fact that he, in his own words, “took National Socialism inside, and it did not harm him.” It may not have hurt him, but it did damage his reputation. Jünger took a much more uncompromising position, so that he could only be charged with his right-wing radical speeches during the Weimar Republic and his service in the Wehrmacht. According to my observations, somewhere after the 10th anniversary of Jünger’s death was celebrated in Germany, the situation began to improve, the “controversial” marker was generally removed.
- That is, we can now talk about the German Jünger in the same way as about the French one.
— If the mention of Jünger causes a wave of hatred, it is only among left-liberals, for whom all German conservatives are tarred with the same world. In general, the public attitude towards this author is now calm.
— Has Heidegger now taken the place of these disputed authors after the publication of his Black Notebooks ?
— As far as I can tell, the word umstritten was never applied to Heidegger. Before the famous scandal associated with the publication of Victor Farias’s book “Heidegger and Nazism” in 1987, Heidegger was considered a completely decent academic philosopher, even a philosopher of the first rank, who distinguished himself as rector of the University of Freiburg. Then, when Farias, as a journalist, unearthed what he thought was sensational materials related to Heidegger’s rectorship, a wave of indignation arose among the left-wing public. François Fedier, a French translator of Heidegger and a student of his friend Jean Beaufré, even wrote a book, Anatomy of a Scandal, in which he tried to defend Heidegger. As a result of these two publications, such a concept as the “Heidegger case” arose, which was also heard in our country. It was a high-profile case, but then it died down somewhat. When the last series of volumes of the complete works was being prepared for publication, these same “Black Notebooks”, from volume 94 onwards (and this was in 2013), the German editor of the volumes, Peter Travni, told me in a personal conversation that the publication of these books “will make people talk about Heidegger again.” It seemed to Travni that at that time little was said about Heidegger. Well, he managed to correct this situation.
The publication of the first volume of the Black Notebooks - records from 1931 to 1934 - indeed provoked a new round of discussion on the topic of Heidegger and National Socialism. True, the Jewish question was already in the first place there, because before that the public was warmed up by Travni’s own publications about “Heidegger and the myth of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.” Another book by the Italian researcher Donatella di Cesare about Heidegger and the Jews was published , and thus readers were prepared to specifically read anti-Semitic passages in the first volumes of the Black Notebooks. To the credit of Heidegger's German readers, responses have been published, including one from Hermann Heidegger, the philosopher's son, who curated the collected works (now, after his death, the work has been taken over by his grandson Arnulf Heidegger). Among other things, he reasonably noted that it is completely wrong, even purely chronologically, to connect Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, even if we attribute it to him, with his National Socialism, because we are talking about records from 1931, when Heidegger had never admired the National Socialist Party anywhere, much less was not a member of it. Heidegger joined the party in May 1933. I believe that this whole story with the Black Notebooks was initially included in this very opportunistic context; This contributed very little to the understanding of Heidegger's thoughts. As I wrote in one of my publications, it was not Heidegger’s “posthumous suicide” that occurred, but the suicide of most of German Heidegger studies. Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft behaved very honorably in this situation: despite everything, a large conference is held every two years in the philosopher’s homeland in Messkirch, volumes continue to be published, and young researchers from Italy and Eastern Europe are actively supported and involved. I myself am also a member of the Heidegger Society and do my best to ensure that he is spoken of as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.
— Can we now, seventeen years after the publication of the first edition, when you spoke about the impossibility of the Russian Junger, say that now he has finally appeared?
— I did a Russian translation of “Heart” at the German Literary Archive in Marbach am Neckar in 2004. (If you look carefully at the afterword, there are many references to archival materials, including unpublished correspondence.) When comparing the Russian Jünger with the French, what should we pay attention to? The French are a nation of writers; for them, it seems to me, Ernst Junger is interesting and important as an author of novels. If we look at Jünger as a writer of fiction, we have diaries first. “In Steel Storms” is a diary of the First World War, literary revised. All of Junger's diaries are fictitious, I think readers of Gorky know this. Of course, for the French, the “Paris Diaries”, or more precisely, the “First and Second Paris Diaries”, which are part of the “Radiations” series, are of particular value. This also includes the novels “Heliopolis”, “Glass Bees” , “Eumeswil”, “Aladdin’s Problem” and a number of other texts. Jünger is also well known as an essayist in France, but to a lesser extent. It was also translated; there is a translation of “The Worker” by the brilliant Germanist Julien Hervieu.
And so I think that in Russia Junger is known and valued primarily as a diagnostician of the era, as a witness to the “short 20th century,” which begins with the First World War and ends with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Between these two points his whole life fits. Accordingly, these are “Steel Thunderstorms” and “Heliopolis”, by the way, the first novel translated by Galina Kosarik, published in Russian in the early 90s in the series “Utopia and Dystopia” by the Progress publishing house. I would say that in Russia, Jünger’s books such as “The Worker” or “Going into the Forest” have become very famous , which contain not only a metaphysical assessment of the technical revolution from the position of a detached observer, but also a certain program of action: what to do, what should an individual person do in the situation of an atomized post-war society, sandwiched between the USA and the USSR. In this sense, Jünger remains an old European with a typical European consciousness, and it is no coincidence that he is so loved by the “new right” in Europe. In light of his popularity among some young people with right-wing ideas who want to be nationally rooted, Jünger is interesting as a guide to old Europe. However, his “Paris Diaries” or “Seventy Passed,” published in good translations in large editions, also enjoy the love of readers.
— In “Going into the Forest,” Jünger himself talks about the Russians. Did such special attention contribute to a more favorable reception of the book?
- Yes, it says that the Russian as a Bolshevik is on the ship, and the Russian as a Russian is in the forest. However, such an attitude towards Russia is not one of the main motives for the love of Russian readers for Jünger. This somewhat reminds me of the attitude towards the leader of the Rammstein group Till Lindemann: the group’s lyrics contain references to Russian material, they themselves are from East Germany, but at the same time it cannot be said that songs like Moskau played a key role. It’s just that Till comes to Moscow, performs on Red Square, and he likes it. Another example is Udo Dirkschneider, a German rock musician whose work also contains Russian motifs, but is hardly loved for this. They are loved for something else, maybe because they willingly come to Russia and drink with their Russian fans. There is some strange cultural symbiosis, some kind of mutual attraction. There was a craving for Junger to Russia and there is a craving of Russian readers for Junger.
The idea of “two Russias” is not very familiar to us. Of the texts known to me, there is only one on this topic - Rozanov’s article “The Psychology of the Russian Schism” of 1896, where he talks about visible Russia, “Russia of appearances,” and hidden Russia, “Russia of essentialities.” Moreover, by the first, he means the Russian Empire with its official cult, and by the second, Old Believer Russia.
In Germany, the idea of “two Germanys” was known in connection with the “intellectual mobilization” of the First World War. German intellectuals then reacted to attacks from the French and, above all, the English press, which promoted the idea that, on the one hand, there is a beautiful Germany of “poets and thinkers,” and on the other hand, there is a militaristic monster of Wilhelmine Germany, which does not stop at anything sacred for a European. During the Great War, German intellectuals themselves, on the contrary, defended the idea of a united Germany, the solidarity of spiritual warriors with those fighting on the fronts. Then, already in the 30s, when the National Socialist revolution was taking place in the country, some patriotic intellectuals went into internal emigration and took a position within which there was a “secret Germany,” another or sacred Germany: it was this that opposed the Germany of appearances, where petty demons ruled the roost.
Everything is very complicated with these two Germanys and two Russias. In the case of the division of Russians into Bolsheviks and those in the forest, we need to remember the experience of Ernst Jünger as a reader of Dostoevsky. For him, true Russia is the Russia of Alyosha, Zosima, and perhaps Raskolnikov. And there is another Russia - Luzhin, Svidrigailov or Stavrogin. They meet each other in the Bolshevik revolution and in the modern history of Russia they are in a tense relationship with each other. Let's put it this way: Jünger understood that Dostoevsky saw further paths for the development of Russia, a country that is necessary for Europe. For all German intellectuals of the 20th century, Russia was important in terms of reflection on the essence of Europe: here we should remember Thomas Mann and Hermann Keyserling, Oswald Spengler and Walter Schubart. Jünger had a literary image of Russia, and we can guess how it happened: in Russia, the first violin in the public consciousness was always played by writers, and not by philosophers or publicists. At the same time, he had experience of acquaintance with Bolshevik Russia. Living in Berlin in the late 1920s, he attended planned economy evenings at the Soviet embassy. In 1932, his friend and comrade-in-arms Ernst Nikisch traveled to Russia at the invitation of the Soviet government. Nikisch perceived the Soviet Union through the lens of the “Worker.” (By the way, it would not be a mistake to call this work a National Bolshevik manifesto.) Finally, Jünger traveled to the Caucasus, as he says in an interview with Yuri Arkhipov, on a secret mission from people close to General Erwin Rommel. The task was to probe the generals’ sentiments regarding Stalin, whether something similar was brewing there, which took place in Germany and resulted in a conspiracy on July 20, 1944. This is the only place where Jünger reveals in the interview what was behind his business trip. This is why I have doubts about this “mission”.
— Did Jünger attend meetings of Stefan Gheorghe’s circle?
- No, he was not part of Gheorghe’s circle. But Claus von Stauffenberg, together with his brother Alexander, were the youngest members of this esoteric circle, one might say, the last confidantes of Stefan Gheorghe on the eve of his death in Italian Switzerland in 1933. But Jünger himself, as an active participant in the literary process, of course, knew about the existence of George’s circle and used his password “sacred Germany”. Moreover, he directly names it at the very beginning of his 1933 journalistic article “Aviation to Be.” He begins the text by describing the laying of a wreath with the inscription “From Secret Germany” on the tomb of the German Emperor Frederick II Staufen in Palermo. For Jünger himself, this image was also important for his own self-identification. Having completed such a hermeneutic loop, we arrive at the “other Russia” through the “other Germany”, which does not identify itself with the Weimar Republic, nor with the Third Reich, nor with the Federal Republic.
— If “The Heart of an Adventurer” is a work already familiar to the Russian reader, then “The Sicilian Letter” is published in Russian for the first time. In a letter to Walter Patt dated February 6, 1980, Jünger speaks of it as a magico-realist text. Could you tell us more about this text by Jünger?
— Ernst Junger is a master of stereoscopic optics, the creator of a special style that is best suited to the name “magical realism.” Jünger calls stereoscopy “higher trigonometry”, a technique that helps to penetrate the secrets of the universe by reading essential types and gestalts on the visible surface - what Goethe called the word “Urphänomen”, “proto-phenomenon”.
This “magical” experience of the world is described in detail by Ernst Jünger in “The Sicilian Letter to the Moon Man” - a kind of document of the spiritual autobiography of the writer, soldier and dandy at its turning point, somewhat similar to Hamann’s “London experience” . “The Sicilian Letter” is the fruit of a trip Jünger made with his brother in the spring of 1929. Climbing one morning into the gorge of Monte Gallo, he experienced a profound experience. “...Suddenly it dawned on me that this valley was addressing the traveler in its language of stones... There are rarely such moments when a person, having cognized the animated life of nature, is faced with an extremely clear, bodily expression of this life... I felt the eyes of this valley stop on me. In other words, I clearly understood that this valley had its own demon.”
Stylistically, the text of the “Moon Letter” is close to Nietzsche’s excessive expression and is as much a poetic as a worldview document. From a perspective of almost a hundred years, the reader can see in the “Letter” elements of narcissism, youthful glorification and deliberate obfuscation of meaning and, most importantly, an attempt to resolve the key issue of late modernity: how to overcome the positivist and nihilistic attitude towards the world and not dissolve in lifeless symbolism.
My late St. Petersburg friend, translator of English literature and experienced boatswain Victor Gelrud once remarked: what Junger called “the need for stereoscopic vision”, Mandelstam consolidated in the metaphor of “the vision of predatory wasps sucking the earth’s axis”... The poet very accurately expressed Junger’s question about the silver lining of life, the awareness of which requires a special language, in a more laconic form, although with a different sign (and almost at the same time - 1928): “You just need to remove the film from... the air, and then its hidden layer will be exposed... But the pen that removes this film is like a doctor’s teaspoon infected with diphtheria plaque. It’s better not to touch him.”
— One of the central themes of “Heart of an Adventurer” is dreams. If I may say so, then this is Jünger’s most “dreamlike” work, and often the reader is not always clear from the beginning whether we are talking about something real or whether everything that happens in a particular passage unfolds in a dream. In this regard, one can also draw a parallel with Dostoevsky, about whom Bakhtin spoke as follows: “Perhaps, in all European literature there is no writer in whose work dreams would play such a large and significant role as in Dostoevsky.” And indeed, if you think about it, then you remember Raskolnikov’s dreams, and Dmitry Karamazov’s dream, and the story “The Dream of a Funny Man.” Returning to the question: what role do you think Jünger assigns to the descriptions of dreams in “The Heart...” and what function, so to speak, do they perform?
— There is a saying in German: “Träume sind Schäume.” “Dreams are foam.” This phrase is muttered to himself by the hard-working father of the protagonist of Novalis's novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. So, since the times of German romanticism, dreams cannot be called “foam”, something ephemeral, Balzaminov’s dreams, which lead away from real working life into the realm of pipe dreams. In the book about the blue flower, a dream, on the contrary, acts as a divine medium; it breaks through into reality and serves as a way of understanding it. Jünger (by the way, a great connoisseur of Novalis) learned this lesson of romantic literature well.
The genre of “Hearts...” is not easy to define. The book is very “capricious” in the sense that the author himself indicates a closeness to “capriccio”. Of course, he is referring primarily to Goya's series of etchings "Caprichos" and the most famous etching entitled the Spanish proverb "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos." In the afterword, I explain the surreal effect of some of Jünger's sketches by "the expansion of dream experience into the reality of waking consciousness." This is a kind of revenge of the unconscious in the Jungian sense for the expansion of Cartesian consciousness and, in general, that semantic structure that is commonly called the New Time.
— In an interview with Yuri Arkhipov, he said that Russian literature had been with him all his life, that his father’s favorite play was “The Inspector General,” and he himself became acquainted with Dostoevsky very early. As far as I understand, he changed his attitude towards certain points: in “The Risky Heart” Jünger says that everything that the Russians write is unbearable for us, and already in 1938 in “The Heart of the Adventurer” one can read more meaningful remarks about Dostoevsky.
— “The Risky Heart” is a translation of the same essay, which in German is called “Das Abenteuerliche Herz”, only in the first edition of 1929, which was translated by Vladimir Mikushevich.
“What is good for a Russian is death for a German.” Jünger is generally a master of aphoristic formulations, but this is one of the rare cases when he is quite banal. He has a collection of aphorisms called Epigrammen, which I translated in 1999 for New Youth, and they are now available in the Magazine Hall. There he demonstrates a brilliant mastery of the genre in the spirit of Lichtenberg, there are no platitudes there. The example you gave suggests that Russian soul-searching and the psychologism of Dostoevsky’s novels can prevent a German from realizing his heroic potential. At this time, Jünger is precisely creating the utopia of the Worker, who, with the help of total mobilization, sets the whole world in motion. But total mobilization for him is a figurative designation of technology. Jünger himself was fascinated by technology in the 20s, like many representatives of front-line youth. We can imagine this well because modern man is also fascinated by technology, although the technology of that time is completely different from the passive technology that now fits in the palm of our hands. This is an active technique. You admire an airplane, want to fly it, and go to an aviator school to study and take an exam. A lot of young people at that time get driving licenses for cars because it's cool to drive a car. This is a world of speed, a world of new acoustic and visual experiences, but at the same time it is also a world in which the body is involved, unlike the modern era. Now we are seeing a largely passive body, which is, as a rule, excluded from these processes.
It is no coincidence that Jünger wrote the essay “On Pain” in 1934. He put forward the thesis that the level of modern man is measured by his attitude towards pain. We can speak about the essence of not only a person, but also an era in relation to pain. “Tell me how you feel about pain and I will tell you who you are.” The context is clearly set by the epigraph from the book “Bushido. Samurai Code." This is the relationship that leads to the appearance of an organic structure, as he calls it, when man is fused with the machine, when he is part of the mechanism. The image of an organic structure is a very interesting anthropological concept that can be applied to the description of modern human-robot interaction or interaction with various kinds of gadgets in the modern era, although this, of course, will be a different interaction, which should be discussed separately.
— How would you yourself characterize the difference between the first version of this work, which was published with the subtitle “Notes by Day and Night” and “Figures and Capriccios”? Jünger himself, in the already mentioned letter to Walter Patt, characterized this difference, primarily stylistically, as “a transition from expressionism to surrealism.”
- “The transition from expressionism to surrealism” - yes, this assessment is quite adequate, even in its literary quality it has matured over 50 years. In addition, I would like to say that by the time he wrote the second edition of “Heart...” Jünger had reached his optimal form as a stylist or, as people of the old school would say, “a master of the artistic word.”
— We can say that Jünger of 1929 is the Jünger of “The Worker,” political and maximally idealistic articles that were published in the collection “Nationalist Revolution.” And the Jünger of 1938 is a calmer and more wary person.
— Here we can mention a common passage from Junger studies, which resembles a common distinction in Heidegger studies: there is Heidegger before “Being and Time” and Heidegger after. Here we are also talking about Jünger before and after “The Worker”. This distinction is partly played up by the author himself, who after the war found it possible to somewhat pompously declare his “Old” and “New Testaments.” So, in my candidate’s dissertation, I considered this wonderful essay as the result of Jünger’s national revolutionary journalism. It is quite natural that this large-scale picture of the planetary domination of the worker, the metaphysical master of technology, fits well into the National Bolshevik idea of the worker's state “from Vlissingen to Vladivostok,” as Nikisch once formulated. With the coming to power of the National Socialists, everything changes in the same way as with Heidegger, after an unsuccessful rectorate - the last collection that Jünger published at this time is called “Leaves and Stones”, it includes a new edition of “Total Mobilization” and the essay “On Pain”. There are already words about the modern era as a nihilistic era. It is clear that he is gradually beginning to leave the position of an activist, which Russian literature allegedly prevented him from realizing, and moves to the position of a contemplator. First, the life of a front-line soldier, then a national-revolutionary publicist, a social activist, and then Jünger more and more discovers his talent as an artist, which is in no way compatible with involvement in current politics.
The apogee of this internal development was the writing of two texts: the second edition of “The Heart of an Adventurer” in 1938 and the novel “On the Marble Cliffs” in 1939. These two books finally mark the turn that has taken place, which is often associated with “internal emigration.” Jünger turns to Dostoevsky not only in “Heart”, but also in the novel “On the Marble Cliffs”. There is a character there, Prince Sunmir, in whose image many Jünger scholars note a number of similarities with the image of Prince Myshkin. Jünger himself never denied this opinion, although he did not interpret himself in this way.
He has a wonderful aphorism on this subject: “He who interprets himself sinks below his level.” In this sense, Jünger never stooped below his level, but, on the contrary, believed that the author was assigned a special kingdom. “I do not change myself, I move through different layers of truth.” So, Jünger as an author does not betray himself. If suddenly someone decides to reproach him for the fact that in his late work he writes something completely different from what sounded from the pages of “The Worker,” we can always say: he moves through different layers of truth.