Ernst Jünger

[Anonymous No.16906001]

I wanna get an Ernst Junger book during the online sales this time of year.

Which ones are mandatory reads or his most important or best works?

Definitely getting Storm of Steel

[Anonymous No.16906038]

For quality definitely get his pre-ww2 work like Storm of Steel, the Worker, On Pain.
His postwar work like the Forest Passage takes on a more conservative, technology-skeptic leaning, and he seems convinced that nationalism/German particularity are over. Quite characteristic of the time but not very inspiring.

[Anonymous No.16906075]

>>16906001
If you're getting Storm of Steel, I've heard the 1929 translation is the way to go. The Penguin edition apparently has better prose but left out excerpts from the original 1929 translation which were deemed too controversial.

[Anonymous No.16906125]

>>16906038
Forest Passage has more to it than you think. I recommend reading it together with his letters to Heidegger (there aren't many so it's a short volume, and it's in English). Keep in mind that Junger and to some extent also Heidegger both knew that Nazism was not the organic nationalism they had wanted in the 1920s and early 1930s (Junger was already disillusioned even by that point). So they had a long time to stand back and think while others continue to place their hope in the Nazis, which in many ways put them ahead of the curve - many others only had to face the failures of an organic solution to technology with the material defeat of Germany, but they thought technology was likely to win either way, at least by the middle 1930s.

Junger's reaction to Germany's defeat is not like the usual post-war melancholy, either the bland "where did Germany go so wrong?" of the winners, or the bitterness and despair of the vanquished like Ernst von Salomon. He felt, rightly or wrongly, that the crisis ran deeper than the war, and the war was only a manifestation of it. And rightly or wrongly he still wanted to plant seeds for others to harvest. I think he expected them to take a very very long time to grow though.

I really wonder what he would have said and done if he knew how bad things have become and in how short a time they have gotten so bad. I don't know if he anticipated that "Americanism" would infiltrate Europe so thoroughly, or that good old Europeans would so thoroughly begin destroying their own nations right around the time he died.

[Anonymous No.16906287]

>>16906038
Of the three post WWI what's the order you'd put them in as most essential to least essential?

[Anonymous No.16906525]

>>16906075
Noted, thanks

[Anonymous No.16906635]

>>16906287
He also wrote many other books and essays which I have not read, but I would recommend Storm of Steel, the Worker, On Pain, the Adventurous Heart, and his ww2 journals.
>>16906125
He does make a similar remark to Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology near the end of Forest Passage where he says "only a miracle can save us from the maelstrom (of mechanization)", which stood out to me although I have not read their exchanges. There is a positive way forward laid out and a hearkening to transcendence - I did not mean to sound like I was accusing him of liberal whinging. However he was clearly quite pessimistic, at several points discussing the possibility of Germans going to war with each other over interests with nothing to do with their own, and how honest Germans might navigate such an event - a very grim picture indeed. I suppose the final message of the book is similar to Ride the Tiger, with a bit more emphasis on immediate practicality. It is positive, but not optimistic.