Walter Benjamin and Ernst Jünger: Destructive Affinities

German Studies Association

Walter Benjamin and Ernst Jünger: Destructive AffinitiesAuthor(s): Marcus BullockSource: German Studies Review, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Oct., 1998), pp. 563-581Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the German Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1431235 .

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Walter Benjamin and Ernst Junger: Destructive Affinities

Marcus Bullock University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Ernst Jiinger and Walter Benjamin might seem to make a strange pair except as a natural opposition, representing two ends of a compass needle by which we may orient ourselves on a true path through the ideological history of German modernity. Yet it mocks the work of Benjamin himself, whom most of us would be more likely to take as indicating the pole of correct judgment, if we simply follow that vector outwards into the natural physiognomy of a landscape they divide between them. Despite the tactical necessities of political debate which determine his direct comments on Jiinger, Benjamin himself would ultimately have been committed by his own notions of reading to have complicated that opposition, just as he did with many figures who represent positions opposed to his own, including the arch- reactionary philosopher Ludwig Klages, whom he associates most closely with Ernst Jiinger in an essay written in 1930, "Theorien des deutschen Faschismus." Therefore, even out of loyalty to Benjamin's own achievements, we cannot now remain satisfied to read the fulcrum on such a needle as a stable mark of separation and reassuring distance, but as a critical moment and a dialectical approach.

The two men were bom only three years apart, Benjamin in 1892 and Jiinger in 1895, but certainly present two contradictory extremes as they subsequently experience their times and interpret the experiences of their generation. Walter Benjamin was a scholarly Jew who developed a messianic belief in social revolution as the means to redeem human life from oppression and conflict. Ernst Jiinger was a highly decorated officer of the First World War who proclaimed the virtues of heroic conflict as a way of participating in the mythic essence of the cosmos. Benjamin saw the violence of revolution as a way toward a utopian future thatwould overcome the history of sacrifice and struggle. Jiinger took the agonism of warfare and any striving that overcame the desire for comfort and security to be the ultimate value andjustification of the life it consumed, and yet, despite the cult of danger that runs through his life and his work, he survived everything, and died peacefully at the age of one hundred and two on February 17, 1998. Benjamin died at the age of



GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

forty eight, a political refugee hounded by fascist agents to his suicide in 1940. When we consider them now as icons of an uncompromising stand, respectively, on the Left and the Right, they would appear to have little in common except the resolute way both rejected a stable middle ground.

Yet it would be naive to suggest that this "little" area of common departure does not also play a large part in determining the paths each took in their respective directions. German intellectuals of their generation turned the same ardor against the consensus of established culture that they brought to bear on the constructions of their rivals and opponents in vehement critique. It lies in the character of such opposition that common elements, and indeed a common realm of shared illusions, should occupy antagonistic spheres of thought defined within a single field of struggle. Though rival positions may be locked in battle, they are also locked up in that battle, their perspectives bound and narrowed by the struggle that they join and thatjoins them. The Left struggles with the Right over the possibilities of organizing collectivities, and the Left and Right both struggle with the ideologies of the center and the liberal-conservative tradition of bourgeois citizenship and individual rights.

In Maxima-Minima, published in 1964, Jiinger reflects on his own book Der Arbeiter, which had first appeared in 1932. He speculates on the radical endorsement ofcollective struggle that reached its peak in his work at that time, and its connection with the disastrous reaction in the larger political domain that brought about the Third Reich. Even in retrospect, he says, we find it hard not to see the origins of the catastrophe within a perspective dictated by party alignments, and comments: "doch bleibt zu bedenken, daB Begriffe wie 'rechts' und 'links' sich von einer gemeinsamen Symmetrieachse abzweigen und von ihr aus gesehen erst Sinn haben."'

If the theories of the Left and Right are tied to the purposes of political command, he argues, then opposing parties will align themselves internally according to the same dictates of effective struggle, and their relations to one another will join them in the embrace of competition over possession of a single field, the apparatus of state power: "Die Rechte und die Linke, gleichviel ob sie mit oder gegen, ob sie nach oder neben einander wirken, sind von einem Korper abhangig, dessen Einheit sichtbar werden muf3, wenn eine Partei aus dem Rahmen der Bewegung in den des Staates ubertritt" (SW VIII, 371). What ties Benjamin and Jiinger together can be defined as a twofold connection derived from Jiinger's insight. On the one hand, they both had to find a place among the positions of party and movement determined by the moment they shared, but they also both rejected the peculiar history that had produced a particular notion of German citizenship in their times, and had articulated that notion in the German state.

The opposition betweeh Benjamin and Jiinger divides them according to the notions of truth that the energies they seek to set in motion will reveal. The struggle divides and joins them across the boundary defined by the form or the truth of each modality of transfiguring destruction in which they engage. For Benjamin, the

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apocalyptic truth is messianic in character, for Jiinger it is mythic. In both cases, the inheritance of their parental generation and the bourgeois nineteenth century offer little but impediments. Therefore this twofold opposition adopts very different attitudes within its esoteric field of struggle on the one hand, and in the domain of competing political goals on the other. Only by annihilating all that confronts it can that struggle toward a radical transformation make headway against the hollow fascination of what commonplace tradition puts on show as a stable expectation of progress. That radicalism alone clears away a space in which the revelation of truth from esoteric sources can emerge instead. The opposition toward other forms of esoteric struggle does not envisage their elimination, but acknowledges the kinship within their destructive enterprise and is concerned with preserving, transforming, and drawing on the current of those forces to clear a way further in the direction of a truth that may still lie hidden from the other side in that bond.

Jiinger discovers this first in his experience of warfare, and his indifference to the issues for which two sides apparently do battle. The real distinction, he insists, lies in how we fight, not what we fight for.2 This applies equally to all areas of struggle. DerArbeiter acknowledges all who share in the "Sprengarbeit" (SW VIII, 47) of moder times as kindred spirits, committed to the work of the twentieth century which must demolish the tradition inherited from the nineteenth. He includes Marxists in this when they pursue revolution as passion rather than policy, and in the 1929 version of Das abenteuerliche Herz he defines his ideal reader as a "preuBischer Anarchist" (SW IX, p.173).

Similarly, in his Denkbild, "Der destruktive Charakter," Walter Benjamin gives a clear sense of what impulses he recognizes in 1931 as the most promising response to the times - the same unrestrained reduction of the present order to rubble, to clear it away and make space. Benjamin's "Theologisch-politisches Fragment" specifically describes the method ofa messianic politics as a "Nihilismus" that need only pursue the impulse to destruction latent in the simple and natural will to happiness in order to contribute to the ultimate purpose of truth.3 Nor does he fail to detect the implicit correspondence with equivalent forces of destructive potential on the opposite side. Benjamin observes that in his work on Karl Kraus and Franz Kafka, for example, he is attempting to derive a revolutionary theory from the demonic energies of a reactionary disaffection turned against bourgeois modernity. Despite the blistering rhetoric of Benjamin's essay on Ernst Jiinger and his circle, one can also find the same impulse at work there too.

Benjamin wrote that vehement critique as a detailed review of a collection of essays entitled Krieg und Krieger edited by Jiinger and containing the important piece, "Die totale Mobilmachung," by Jiinger himself. The ferocity of Benjamin's attack should not distract us from noting that the substance of its critique lies in the competitive claims Benjamin makes for Marxist forms of violence. He argues that Jiinger and his colleagues are all too limited in their conception of what may be destroyed and transformed. By confining themselves to the subjective potential in

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the technological forces of destruction now controlled by conservative interests, Benjamin argues, they become entangled in a "medusische Gefiige der Ziige" that permits no hope for the liberation and renewal of a different future. "Selbst die Habitues chthonischer Schreckensmachte, die ihren Klages im Torister fiihren, werden nicht ein Zehntel von dem erfahren," Benjamin writes, "was die Natur ihren weniger neugierigen, nuchtemeren Kinder verspricht" (GS III, 249-50). What Benjamin imagines here is not peace, but an even more drastic form of conflict. He promises a Marxist "Biirgerkrieg" that will be ten times more radical and ten times more effective in transfiguring human existence than these limited German fantasies of eternal war to which Jiinger and his associates give their allegiance.

If one reduces Jiinger's statement of a correspondence between opposing political extremes to its simplest possible content, he could be saying no more than that the rival positions in any national politics are joined by the meaning of a common citizenship, which means a shared identity with a single cultural heritage within a single nation. Thus, his claim would express little more than a banality if applied to countries in which nation and state have passed through an extended history of unified development, such as Britain and France. Notoriously, the Germany into which the generation of Jiinger and Benjamin was born differed from that of the other imperial countries of Europe among whom it aspired to take its place. It had, after all, merely come about as an opportunistic compromise created by Bismarck in his haste to organize a modem national power.

This abstract entity did not put an end to the peculiar effects of national existence without a national fatherland that had played such an overwhelming part in German cultural history in the past. Indeed, the appearance of the Second Reich delivered a shock of its own to the aspirations that had nurtured a dream of unity since the demise of the First. Barbablanca, as propagandists had styled the first emperor of the new Wilhelmine Germany, was no Barbarossa. The dream of what

Germany could do, and what Germans could make of a moder society once their energies were set free in a single enterprise, had previously gathered up the resources of many diverse kinds of imagination among Germany's intellectuals. Benjamin and Jiinger could look back on a heritage of bitterly critical philosophy in which Nietzsche articulates the disappointment of that imagination. Now the fulfillment of national unity in the Second Reich only answered the dreams of those whose horizons extended no further than the successes realized by Benjamin's or Jiinger's socially and economically prosperous parents.

The new identity of the nation was wrought out of the crude stuff of triumph and expansion as though that were reality itself. Benjamin and Jiinger shared a skepticism toward the image of success that in both cases inspired their parents to establish households of solid bourgeois wealth. The meaning of Jiinger's statement therefore goes beyond what it might have meant in a British or French context in two ways. What might have played the positive and stabilizing role of an underlying unity in a political culture and a common commitment to the state, emerges here as

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a failure of vision and autonomy. In Jiinger's view, the possibilities of intellectual exploration come to life where they penetrate to extremes. The corrupting tie to a center without real movement can only stifle them. Left and Right both lose their individual direction and integrity as they fall back into the orbit of institutional

power. Jiinger makes his most fundamental commitment to the heritage of speculations

that head off ever deeper into the outermost limits of thought and experience. The most truly and significantly German quality to him is not what a bounded and enclosed fatherland dictates as an object of loyalty and place of identity, but the way Germans and the German tradition can expand the notions of human existence beyond the obstacles of state border and meet others within horizons worthy of great efforts and great undertakings. This spirit is not only evident in the way he writes about foreign countries, even in the context where he describes facing them across the lines of battle, but also in his feeling for a relationship between Germanness and Jewishness. Jiinger's sense that a real Germanness can only be found through distance from the crass image propagated by the state leads him to see the radical autonomy of Jewish positions as exemplary. Far from fearing the disruptive impact of Jewish engagement in contemporary culture against which the right-wing parties raised their standard, Junger embraces it. The conditions that drew the Jewish intellectuals of Walter Benjamin's generation so deeply into the turmoil of German cultural life inspired Jiinger, too, with his liveliest hopes. As early as 1929, he already writes that it is to the shame of Germans that they did not draw more inspiration from this Jewish proclivity for anarchistic embrace of forces beyond the framework of established forms.4

Nonetheless, Benjamin's and Jiinger's response to the outbreak of war followed consistently from the way each had asserted the measure of his own life up to that point. Benjamin, three years older, and already showing evidence of a precocious philosophical intellect, had become an active participant in the youth movement associated with Gustav Wyneken, and had established himself as one of the leading figures of the independent student organization that had formed under the influence of Wyneken's teachings. Jiinger, still a bored and frustrated schoolboy, remained lost in his dreams of escape from the discipline of bourgeois life. At the age of seventeen, he had run away from home and joined the French Foreign Legion. He had planned to use that as a means of traveling to Africa, where he intended to desert and embark on a life of violent adventure and exploration, though, in the event, his father managed to buy him out and bring him back from Algeria.

For many, the dramatic entry of the nation into a European war meant a renewed identity between the citizen and the state. Even Gustav Wyneken joined with this surge of collective feeling, and undertook to lead his young followers into this revitalized embrace of their duty to the Fatherland. In September of 1915, Benjamin wrote a letter to Wyneken in which he ends their association, declaring: "Sie haben dem Staat, der Ihnen alles genommen hat, zuletzt die Jugend gopfert."5 Junger too,

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despite his enthusiasm for the war as such, shared in this refusal of any restored paternal authority of the state through the drama of the moment. What attracted Jiinger to the adventure of modem warfare was anything but the call of service to the state. He was drawn by the prospect of joining up with the combined vital energies of his young cohorts in an enterprise that would sweep away and transform everything that bored him about the adult world. He did not love the Fatherland. He was bored by the Fatherland. He did not hate the enemies of the Fatherland. He was curious about them, curious above all to find out ifmeeting them on the field ofbattle would be a relief from the boredom he knew at home.

Though his father had managed to bring him back to his family and his school after a few weeks in North Africa, that only postponed the moment when he would discover the setting in which he could feel authentically at home, and discover the filial attachment appropriate to this cultic embrace of his own vitality. He found that setting in the war; in the writing through which he looks back on his experience as a young soldier, he states explicitly that war was his true father, and the father of all those with whom he shared that experience, without any distinction between the opposing sides defined by nations and national interests. In the book he published in 1922, Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis, he introduces this as his explicit theme, where he states that "Der Krieg, aller Dinge Vater, ist auch der unsere: er hat uns gehammert, gemeil3elt und gehartet zu dem, was wir sind" (SW VII, 11).

This is another definition of the "we" with whom he is able to assert a common identity. The sons of this father are not just his comrades in the German Wehrmacht, but all those who participate in this struggle. "Das zeigte sich," he writes, "als der Krieg die Gemeinschaft Europas zerri3, als wir hinter Fahnen und Symbolen, iiber die mancher langst unglaubig gelachelt, uns gegeniibertraten zu uralten Entscheidung" (13). The fronts that traversed the continent of Europe and separated nations and alliances only marked lines of division according to the politics of the state. According to the peculiar erotics of experience enacted in this ancient rite of blood, the lines the opposing forces drew up in their trenches, barbed wire entanglements, and gun emplacements, were more like the seams that knit up the tattered patchwork of nations and restored the singular spirit of youth and courage. "Die Feinde von heute und morgen: sie sind in den Erscheinungen der Zukunft verbunden, das ist ihr gemeinsames Werk. Und es tut wohl, sich im Kreise jener harten europaischen Sittlichkeit zu fuihlen" (50).

Never does Jiinger speak of representing or defending the interests of his country. He dismisses those who do represent the consciousness of citizenship in the "Geschrei und die Weichheit der Massen" (50) that the hard virtue of the soldier leaves behind. This shared virtue does not bespeak an abstract internationalism, for it comes to him deeply interwoven in the immediate sensation ofa "we" encountered in his most authentic labors as a maker of war. Jiinger's first book, In Stahlgewittern, published in 1920, describes his reaction on contemplating the body of a very young English soldier he had shot a few minutes before. "Ich zwang mich, ihn zu

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betrachten, ihm ins Auge zu sehen," he writes. "Nun hiel3 es nicht mehr: 'Du oder ich'.... Der Staat, der uns die Verantwortung abnimmt, kann uns nicht von der Trauer befreien; wir miissen sie austragen. Sie reicht tiefin die Triume hinab" (SW I, 252).

The tie of shared dreams that might have united a generation of young soldiers in the rites of heroism came to an end when the states that had organized and equipped the conflict redrew their borders and withdrew their guns. In the silence that followed, the old dominion of success measured by progress and prosperity that had ruled the daily lives of their families was restored also. Yet this did not restore the possibility for either Jiinger or Benjamin to return home and take their place in the tradition established by their fathers.

Jiinger had been a brave and resourceful young lieutenant, highly decorated and wounded repeatedly. Benjamin had taken refuge in Switzerlandwhere he completed his doctoral studies at the University of Ben. While Jiinger subsequently emerged as the inspired voice of a radical militarism on the extreme Right of German political debate, Benjamin's philosophical scholarship developed rapidly into theoretical positions in support of the revolutionary Left. They did indeed not share the same dreams, but they did share the continuation of the German homelessness that they had lived out in such different ways before the war. That is why Jiinger describes a dimension that goes beyond the diametrical opposition between Right and Left within a circle drawn from a single center in the culture they shared, to draw another figure that connects them, and connects the fundamental forms of German and German Jewish experience in the expansion of that intellectual world beyond the limits ofnational circumstances. The potential ofthought and innovative speculation in the German-speaking sphere undergoes a unique extension beyond the national horizon precisely because of that estrangement common to the Germans and Jews. In the 1929 version of Das abenteuerliche Herz he concludes that "die Juden auf3er uns die einzigen verdachtigen Europaer sind" (SW IX, 134). Though Jiinger notes that their energies operate "mit anderen Traumen im Hintergrund" (134), both inspire mistrust as a "Skandalon" (SW III, 291) because they cannot identify with the forms and institutions in which others find the security of home. And in Germany both are exposed to a shattering split between the capacities of the intellectual imagination, or energies of utopian and dystopian dreaming, and the banalities of a nation whose energies have been galvanized by ambitions in the crassest domains of economic power. This split opens up a world of thinking whose horizons are planetary; in that planetary expansion both Germans and Jews have developed the German language into a medium that knows no constraint on its critical potential.

Jiinger returns to his theme of an intimate connection between Germans and Jews in an entry of his Paris Journal dated August 27, 1943, when he writes that in disordered times the German has "auch einenjiidischen Mentor nbtig, seinen Marx, Freud oder Bergson" (SW III, 133).

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These three names bring us back to the comparison with Walter Benjamin and his notion of destruction, for Marx, Freud, and Bergson also occupy primary positions in Benjamin's thinking, but it is at least as important to note how Jiinger himself ranks the emancipatory effect of Jewish ideas he observes in German

modernity. The radicalism of this group confined by its history to the fringes and the extremes strikes a chord in him, just as he separates himself from those who seek to seize some part of the state's paternal powers through the struggles of one party against another merely to incorporate the mass, the main body of the nation. Only those who have no deeper or richer experience of struggle as productive, resort to the pursuit of power as this murderous zero sum game. Junger makes that evident in the distinction he draws between the meaning of the young English soldier' s death to him and to the state. The extermination of each enemy soldier diminishes the

power of the enemy state, and therefore enhances the power of one's own. But for

Jinger as an individual, the absolute loss of one man's life is not to be made up except through the meaning of his responsibility toward a comrade and an equal.

The medium of that equality and comradeship is strange indeed, but nonetheless remains far removed from the narrow hunger for power of one group, one nation, one race, state, or party over another. The struggle between soldiers of the line fulfills its generative purpose for Jiinger, regardless of its outcome. It is productive of heroic substance, of a nobility of deeds and vision. The war is the father of all those who share in its ecstasies, but, Jiinger insists in Der Kampf als innneres Erlebnis, through those ecstasies they all beget this father as their own son (SW VII, 12).

Benjamin focuses his central point of attack by locating the "Herkunft aus der rabiatesten Dekadenz" of this theory of warfare, which consists in "nichts anderes als eine hemmungslose Ubertragung der Thesen des L'Art pour l'Art aufden Krieg" (GS III, 240). Yet here we come upon an idea that marks a parallel as well as an

opposition. It also marks a point of distinction between Benjamin's form ofthinking on the Left, and that which finds a more direct and adequate expression in a party and a policy of state. In standard critiques of cultural phenomena by the Left, there is no such thing as an "apolitical" aesthetics because whatever does not take an

explicit stand against the status quo, implicitly leaves its ruling claims and power intact. Benjamin, however, is willing to see positions of resistance in more subtle refusals to collaborate. L 'art pour l'art is not l'art pour l 'etat, after all. For this

reason, he defends a great deal in surrealism and its antecedents against the charge of simple or decadent aestheticism.

When art turns its concerns in on itself, Benjamin argues in his essay "Der Siirrealismus," it turns away from an established position of authority over it in

anticipation of a more positive direction for its energies in the future. Benjamin looks again at the surrealists' aggressive indulgence in an ecstatic artistic self- creation of which they, too, are both sons and fathers. What he finds may counter "dem obligaten Mi3verstandnis des 'l'art pour l'art"' (GS II/1, 301). The history

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of esoteric modes of language and experience, he says, reveals a process that always seeks to test and repudiate whatever order reigns and propagates itself as the restrictive legitimacy of power. We misunderstand this first rebellious move if we do not find its rightful place in the subsequent historical process. "Denn das l'art pour l'art ist ja fast niemals buchstablich zu nehmen gewesen," Benjamin asserts, "fast immer eine Flagge, unter der ein Gut segelt, das man nicht deklarieren kann, weil der Name noch fehlt" (301).

Benjamin, by identifying Jiinger's aesthetics explicitly with German fascism, has given it just such an imprecise name. In as much as the actual political effect of Jiinger's position does flow from the "obligatory misunderstanding" of aestheticism that Benjamin himself now repeats, and the aestheticization of warfare does indeed accrue as a propagandistic gain to the militarized state, Benjamin's reading can be entirely justified on tactical grounds. It is not justified if we wish to give Jiinger his due as one in whom the significance of a radical split between authority and experience has come to a full expression in one of its most drastic forms. Only under this sign can we understand how he illustrates the relationship between Jewish culture and German culture, and how his work can be connected with the openness to otherness that once lifted German thinking to the level of a world-encompassing medium at the same time as it opened up an unprecedented domain of Jewish participation.6

In the context where he names those Jewish mentors, Jiinger makes the observation that certain elements of German antisemitism among intellectuals can be exlained as an oedipal revolt against such powerful figures. Yet the tragic pathos in the Oedipus story has no place in what lay behind that role for which those mentors were selected - the efforts to displace that crudely ambitious generation of bourgeois parents whom Jiinger would like to see dismissed with all the vulgarity and decadence of the nineteenth century. The movement of history within the relations of tragedy joined power and responsibility together in a process that had to dislodge one image of kingship in order to set up the successor in its place as the renewal of the same dignity and generosity. Jiinger's generation does not sacrifice any such past value when it rejects the reigning paternal power, and without appropriate sacrifice it does not regain that value for itself as other generations have in past times.

Therefore Jiinger will find that the political expression which brought his generation to power repeats the same disappointment that Nietzsche had known, but in a far more virulent form. It turns out that usurpation of these usurpers' power need only be accomplished by the mechanical displacement of the less efficient by the more efficient. It is the triumph in history of the idea of a progress that rules over the forces oftechnology. That is why Jiinger's view of technology undergoes a rapid evolution from his early enthusiasm in "Die totale Mobilmachung," inDerArbeiter, and the essay written in 1934, "Uber den Schmerz."

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By the late nineteen thirties, he begins to see the automatic sequences of progress that take the place of a succession mediated by tragedy as having merely elevated a demonic vision of mechanical power to the status of myth. The blindness that acquires such symbolic depth in the tragedy of Oedipus takes on a new significance as a metaphor in the modern situation. In tragedy, blindness signifies an inevitable eclipse of the past that permitted the present to be fruitfully brought through a change of seasons. For the deluded condition Jiinger describes among those who cannot see as he does, it has become a refusal or permanent incapacity to acknowledge that no oracle will reveal the face of the future into which we are

plunged at every moment. The only transformation that redeems us from this darkness is radical beyond

any mythic succession by which blindness passes away into tragic insight. Because we are now left only with falsified images, the future becomes apocalyptic, and therefore the solution for which Jiinger reaches is to embrace this fate as the last challenge of heroic resolve. The new man of our century, he declares, experiences loss of security in the sequences of traditional time as a demand to which no other has had to be equal. The transference of meaning and dignity through the time of previous history, and the symbolic transference of mythic forms through the repetitions of tragedy, come to a halt before this new darkening of the future.

The position between past and future that Jiinger describes resembles that by which Benjamin defines the situation of Franz Kafka. In a letter to Gershom Scholem written in 1938, Benjamin uses the figure of an ellipse to illustrate Kafka's predicament. One focus of this ellipse, he says, lies in the mystical experience of Jewish tradition, and the other emerges from the experience of the modem city- dweller. In this figure, only the decayed remnants of tradition survive the exposure to urban modernity, and only the hopeless absurdity of the struggle to survive comes to light in the impenetrable weave of crude powers each person confronts in city life. Yet the limitation Benjamin seizes on to criticize in Kafka, and what he sets up as the difference between his own position and Kafka's, also establishes a parallel with Jiinger's perspective. There is no wisdom in Kafka, Benjamin claims, because he remains enclosed by that figure, and sees no prospect of a future beyond it. Along with the integrity of an experience of mystical tradition, Kafka has also lost the sense of the change which that past harbors as a hope and a promise. But for Benjamin, as for Jiinger, the failure of those images in tradition offers the key to a more esoteric, or hidden, future. An opening to that difference in time is only made possible by the sickness or failure of powers in the past to project themselves as the continuity of time.

In Jiinger therefore, and in the consciousness for which he may be representative in a larger sphere of German response to the times, the failure of mythic continuities, which he calls "Vaterentmachtung" (SW XI, 323), produces an apocalyptic or messianic turn toward the future.

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An instinct for the failure that inherently lies at the empty heart of the passion for progress and the triumph of efficiency was the fortunate failing that kept both

Benjamin and Jiinger free of party entanglements whether they turned to the Right or the Left. Yet the unsatisfied passion for a true alternative to the abstractions of the modem state transcends the difference of Left and Right between them, just as it transcended the vulgarity of party organization. Both of them refer to the cult of

party power as a form of idolatry, but they turn toward their own visions of transformation as authentic dispensations of transcendent truth. In politics, when the gods are transformed into images of temporal power they always fail and leave

catastrophe in their wake. These two men shared an understanding that this

catastrophe was implicit in the craving for power that defined all the established institutions of social organization, but their own craving for divine transformation of the human sphere repeated that very same error they had penetrated in the ideas of party and state.

The consequence joins what at first appears to distinguish the position of each one. Jiinger follows the tradition of mythology in which human passions, conflicts, and striving are understood as symbolic images of cosmic necessity, and gives these

profane appearances a role in the total remaking of worldly being. In short, he gives them a messianic dimension. For Benjamin, the messianic element that he draws from the Jewish tradition becomes caught up with the profane world as the site of illumination and transformation. What he derives from Jewish masters of radical thinking, like Marx, Freud, and Bergson, adds a messianic potential to his

interpretation of those things that appear as the necessary forms of modem existence. That is to say, even though Benjamin always mounts his most consistent critical attacks against the world of myth, his own turn to the material world and the

immediacy of material experience for what he calls "profane Erleuchtung,"7 cannot evade an assimilation of mythology to the messianic idea.8

It can, indeed must, be objected here that messianism and mythology are

antagonistic ideas in their essence and origins, and not just in Benjamin's own understanding of his intellectual enterprise. These two ways of thinking conceive of time in entirely contradictory ways. To the mythic understanding of events, an

unchanging order of cosmic forms reasserts itself in the unalterable law of time and nature to which all change is bound. The promise of messianism, on the other hand, turns us entirely toward an absolutely different future, and the illumination of that change will be the truth that sets us free from the darkness and compulsion of mere nature. The complication in the relationship between these opposites becomes

apparent when both use a movement of history to demonstrate a reassertion of truth. The nonhistorical component of a mythic or messianic idea compels each of them to compete with visible or historical explanations in history by opposing explanatory logic with a mythic or messianic counterlogic.

In "Die totale Mobilmachung" Jiinger takes the example of World War I as an event that exceeds any attempt to explain it within the competing interests of

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particular groups or classes. "Das ist auch der Grund, aus dem die Schule des Historischen Materialismus nur die Oberflache des Vorgangs zu streifen Vermag," he observes, and then shows how he will look into the appropriate archaic depths for an explanation: "Bei Anstrengungen dieser Art mu13 der erste Verdacht vielmehr aufeine Erscheinung von kultischem Rang gerichtet sein" (SW VII, 130). That is to say, the extremity of this struggle demands a mode of insight appropriate to another reality whose presence the war can restore to historical experience against the enfeebled conceptions of the bourgeois domain and the explanatory apparatus ofMarxism which he sees as only an offshoot of bourgeois thinking. Benjamin sees the class and economic issues as paramount, and therefore looks forward to an absolute transformation and an entirely new historical condition according to the messianic promise of revolution. Nonetheless, though he reviles the notion of a mythic return of the same in Junger's cultic view of violence, he too adopts a view of the events as apocalyptic signs, but collapses the mythic view of apocalypse together with bourgeois schemata of continuous time and causality because he opposes both for their inability to grasp the messianic promise of absolute change.

Jiinger and Benjamin are both caught up in a comparable repudiation of those limited, measured attempts to construct a reasoned narrative history which emerged in the course of the nineteenth century. They both regard the inherited forms of thought and meaning as so enfeebled, superficial, and useless, that these need to be swept away without discrimination rather than analyzed and disputed in their own terms. The "Vaterentmachtung" that Jiinger notes has clouded the intellectual vision of Nietzsche's less scrupulous contemporaries, is a general affliction of modernity. This condition of modernity that weakens experience and replaces it with the organization of facts, detracts from the outline of all such fundamental structures in meaning including the distinction between myth and messianism when they are drawn against the background of that inheritance. This weakness obscures the extremity of messianism in its universalizing moment of transcendence, and blurs the artifice of myth as the experience of one special position constructed within the repetitions of nature.

Benjamin's scholarly research for his first book attempted to identify Friedrich Schlegel's notion of a "Neue Mythologie" as a romantic version of the messianic idea since it absorbed all particular mythic images in a universally extensive vessel of forms. His effort to preserve the messianic impulse in modem history therefore appears, even at that early date, to run alongside the persistent effort in the German tradition to preserve a consistency of myth.

The primary attack on Junger in Benjamin's "Theorien des deutschen Faschismus" launches its fire against Jiinger's portrayal in 1930 of technology as a new mythic expression of ancient doom-laden natural forces. Benjamin offers the messianic path of social revolution as the effective alternative to this affirmation of conflict. A renewed order of social relations will permit a restored relation to natural forces in which technological powers manage nature for the purposes of human

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happiness, and will expose the absurdity of giving away those powers to the fateful embrace of catastrophic warfare. Turning the key to that plain insight produces "die Ausfiihrung des marxistischen Tricks, der allein diesem finsteren Runenzauber gewachsen ist" (GS III, 250). It would be very hard not to agree with Benjamin in his absolute contempt for the mystique of war, and it would be nonsensical to try to explain away such an essential difference between him and Jiinger. Yet assenting to Jiinger's later thesis of the parallelism between Left and Right in no way requires that we diminish what is real and essential in that distinction. A parallel is only a convergence at an infinite distance, and only in the distance from party and national policies that each man is compelled to take in the period after 1930 can one demonstrate where the parallels between them occur.

The "Marxist trick," Benjamin declares, will outstrip Ludwig Klages's cosmic visions by a difference often to one, but this promise to release and master a power concealed in the mysteries of nature operates no less by a metaphysical allure, for all its materialist garb. Here, Benjamin shows himself incapable of entirely leaving the realm of magical thinking. This incapacity reappears in the last writings of 1940 as his defiant refusal to acknowledge the final destruction of his messianic hopes before his death on the Spanish border while on the run from the Gestapo. The theses "Uber den Begriff der Geschichte" are filled with the function of a messianic theology that has grown uncontrollably mythic in Benjamin's craving for material signs to indicate a coming divine transformation of the human sphere. These passages, dazzling in their imaginative resources and deeply compelling for their expressive economy, still speak of an eventual victory for revolution, but not by the historical sleight of hand-to-hand combat that enacts his "Marxist trick." Now he has to find signs for an explicitly theological intervention from outside the realm of philosophy and politics.

This does not diminish the distance between him and Jiinger, but it does generate motifs that echo between Jiinger's position and his own. The betrayal of socialism by Stalin's pact with Hitler produced the idea of a monastic withdrawal from entanglement in false alliances in the tenth of Benjamin's theses. Jiinger expresses his sense of betrayal in Hitler's Germany by presenting the protagonist of the book he completed in 1939, Auf dent Marniorklippen, in precisely such a situation of monastic retreat. But the necessity of an apocalyptic transformation in the world holds them both to the idea of violent conflict as the opening to the future. The problem of identifying with either of the sides that seem to be involved in this process requires that the struggle be defined in ever more abstract terms, so that both of them come to use the metaphor of a chess game.

The first of Benjamin's theses presents historical materialism through the image of a chess-playing automaton operated by a hunchbacked dwarfwho pulls its strings from a hiding place under the table. This image has provoked many opinions from its commentators that, in the phrase applied by Kafka to his parable of the man

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from the country who comes to the Law in Der Prozefi, offer only "ein Ausdruck der Verzweiflung dariiber."9 Benjamin's position, like Kafka's, expands about the points of its suspension between the profane world of concrete human decisions and actions on one side, and a transcendent world on the other into which the perspective that produces those decisions cannot pry. Yet the problem is not the same. The conflict that Kafka portrays between these two does not allow the reader to decide which the narration takes to be in the right. The conflict that Benjamin describes defines an issue of human interest and the wisdom to recognize where that lies, yet the resources of such knowledge seem to be redefined by the terms in which Kafka presents them. The story appears to look toward the victory of one side or the other as though this engaged the question of justice, but the events move forward by means of an impenetrable logic which no longer permits that judgment.

Kafka's extraordinary achievement contrives to spin out an ever more microscopic examination of all that language can convey about each side, without ever permitting the text to construe any precedence in the claim of one party or the other. The fleeting moment of freedom in the weave of Kafka's literary fiction is achieved by the author's indefinite hesitation to enter the fray on one side or the other. The tradition of "interpretations" or readings of Kafka that try to give him an adversarial function as advocate for one of the antagonistic positions misses the point. They condemn themselves to that very "despair" the text itself names. Kafka's text derives its astonishing beauty from the clarity with which it encloses and displays its actual subject matter, which is the experience of being suspended between two domains of knowledge while being denied entrance and a home in either. The letter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem in 1938 calls that Kafka's failure: "Um Kafkas Figur in ihrer Reinheit und in ihrer eigentiimlichen Sch6nheit gerecht zu werden, darfman das Eine nie aus dem Auge lassen: es ist die von einem Gescheiterten." But while Kafka fails to reach wisdom, Benjamin writes, he also escapes the tension of despair occasioned by striving after that wisdom and achieves a "strahlende Heiterkeit" (Briefe II, 764).

The images of Benjamin's "Uber den Begriff der Geschichte" not only occasion despair on the part of the commentator, they are also inseparable from a moment of despair in the writer. These two sides of despair come in both cases out of the desire for a resolution where none can be found. Though the structure of these images is often cited for what is called their beauty, they are certainly not beautiful in anything like the same way as Kafka's "Heiterkeit." The place at which the narrative stands in Kafka's work is the ironic no-place of art, balanced like an especially lynx-eyed angel on the point of a needle between two equally elusive kinds of truth. On one side flicker the fleeting appearances of real things as they appear in the world, and on the other, the permanent order or pattern of change by which this transient stuff is echoed in forms that lack their own substance. They only touch and join when their shadows fall together across the language in which the work contrives to spy them out and show them. They come to life when combined in that way, but it is only the life of fiction.

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From the first, Benjamin remained deeply suspicious of beauty in art. It appeared to him a seduction by a substitute for the disruptive presence of truth, or a distraction from its absence.'? The special appeal of Benjamin's images lies outside the quality of art. They appear, in the term applied to materialist history in the seventeenth thesis of "Uber den Begriff der Geschichte," as "Monaden." But this manifests historical work only in the very specific, "esoterisch," sense that a historian is "ein riickwarts gekehrter Prophet" (GS 1/3, 123 5) - a phrase cited from Friedrich Schlegel. The monad disrupts the current of time to offer a picture of the meaning that always eludes any viewpoint seduced into grappling with the welter of mere facts that fill up the record of the past. It is a "religious" form of beauty, a sacredness of vision that reveals a source of hope otherwise hidden in the impenetrable order of things. It is therefore devoid of irony, and lies closer to violence than the beauty of art because it lays claim to fulfillment in the present. It lies close to violence because it comes, like all prophecy, as the last resort in the face of despair.

Benjamin's first thesis states that in philosophy, "Gewinnen soil immer die Puppe, die man 'historischen Materialismus' nennt" (GS 1/2, 693). Yet, in the context of Stalin's betrayal, winning has lost its temporal meaning. In actual history it has lost all the time. Victory in this history is like the triumph of the historical materialist in the sixteenth thesis who, Benjamin claims, "iiberlal3t es anderen, bei der Hure 'es war einmal' im Bordell des Historismus sich auszugeben" (702). The apparent sexual potency of those others is merely defeat by her power to fascinate. The continence of the historical materialist that deprives him of that pleasure the others enjoy is actually an enhancement of his powers if he can manifest them in some higher congress: "Er bleibt seiner Krafte Herr: Manns genug, das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen" (702). But there is no blasting open of the material isolation that history has imposed on the historical materialist in his betrayal by the actual forces of political power. His isolation is all he has to show. He has lost his false faith in an idol, but only an esoteric interpretation distinguishes his continence from impotence. Winning has become an entirely esoteric reflex of that losing. Only when his refusal is understood as a temporal reflex of an eternal connection, can the struggle itself guarantee a relationship to the eternal."

For Jiinger, too, defeat can be transformed by the dialectics of an esoteric truth into victory. In a passage of his Paris Journal discussing the experience ofbeing lied to and betrayed by political opportunists, he likens his own involuntary ties to the truth to a form of impotence with theological implications almost exactly corresponding to that of the historical materialist according to Benjamin. Like pimps, those in power have tried to lure him astray with a whore they have decked out in all the tempting trappings of truth. But in the end, he has been preserved by his own failure. "Die Wahrheit gleicht fur mich einem Weibe, dessen Umarmung mich allen anderen gegeniiber zu Impotenz verdammt. In ihr allein liegt Freiheit und damit Gliick" (SW III, 103).

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But Jiinger uses the model of a chess game to illustrate something different from Benjamin about what happens when struggles enter more elaborate circles of refinement. For him, the image of a game indicates what happens when an activity is undertaken in order to set up a domain of indifference to the distinctions reality makes between victory and defeat. In Maxima-Minima, he takes the example of a general who was so enamored ofthe arts ofwar as a pure practice of skill and courage that he expressed the desire during a major battle to be fighting on the opposing side as well. Jiinger writes that "Das hief3e mit sich selbst Schach spielen," and then describes this as "l'art pour l'art" (SW VIII, 371) - precisely the charge leveled in "Theorien des deutschen Faschismus," where Benjamin declares that the new theory of warfare reveals its "Herkunft aus der rabiatesten Dekadenz." While the idea of separating out a practice into a pure expression of its own autonomous sphere does immediately recall the aestheticism of an art pursued for its own sake, the texture of this pursuit in one domain is certain to be different from that in another, just as the sacred or prophetic beauty of Benjamin's writing differed from the literary beauty of Kafka's fictions. Similarly, the aestheticization of warfare is not to be justified in the same gesture of elegant detachment as aestheticism in art. Jiinger says explicitly that General Jomini, to whom that response is ascribed, crossed the limits of the permissible, for "Es gibt in jedem Konflikt eine Grenze zwischen natiirlichen und geistigen Anspriichen, die wohl auch zu beachten und zu achten ist" (371).

Most people would agree that even in Maxima-Minima, Jiinger's line between "natiirlichen und geistigen Anspriichen" in his perspective on conflict does not present an acceptable balance. His enthusiasm for heroic and destructive struggle runs to a monstrous extreme. Nevertheless, his point about a separation between natural and spiritual (or intellectual) claims can be turned back on Benjamin. To invoke the emergency of a specific moment in politics, as Benjamin does, but then give only a prophetic analysis of what can be undertaken against its dangers, might also be taken to cross the limits of the permissible. The term "aestheticism" does not define the issue here, but it does indicate how we might set about describing the correspondences between the different positions the problem connects.

If Benjamin's messianic and theological perspective transforms reality into a purely textual experience built up round the absent center of some messianic guarantor of his powers, then he shares in something akin to Jiinger's writerly transmutation of his experience in combat, just as he shares in something akin to Kafka's fictional representation of alienation and oppression in social modernity. The differences arise with the conditions by which the suspension of natural responses to the concrete existence of human persons is achieved, and the degree to which that suspension also indemnifies the sacrifice by the gain in insight and dispersal of illusion.

Yet any formula that responds to the shortcomings of the world by invoking its mysterious complement, whether mythic or messianic, would seem to present the

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struggle for meaning as itself leading back to illusion, and returns us to the comparison with Kafka. Benjamin's meaning preserves itself in the agonism of interpretation itself, in the activity that pursues the happiness of understanding but is refined into a form of political refusal, or nihilism, because the categorical impossibility of understanding leaves it with the understanding that it can only know the happiness of pursuit itself. To assert this goes against interpretations of Benjamin that insist their arguments arrive at some definite position for him, a positive conclusion equivalent to the "wisdom" Benjamin says Kafka lacked. Yet the plethora of interpretations itself argues the other way. Such language, the ever growing body of interpretations of Benjamin's interpretations, makes its point despite itself by the unending process of negation directed towards other readings. Kafka conveys this effect succinctly and explicitly in his parable on parables:

Viele beklagen sich, daB die Worte der Weisen irmmer wieder nur Gleichnisse seien, aber unverwendbar im taglichen Leben, und nur dieses allein haben wir. Wenn der Weise sagt: "Gehe hiniiber," so meint cr nicht, daB man auf die andere Seite hiniibergehen solle, was man immerhin noch leisten konnte, wenn das Ergebnis des Weges wert ware, sondem er meint irgendein sagenhaftes Driiben, etwas, das wir nicht kennen, das auch von ihm nicht niher zu bezeichnen ist und das uns also hier gar nichts helfen kann. Alle diese Gleichnisse wollen eigentlich nur sagen, daB das UnfaBbare unfalbar ist, und das haben wir gewuBt. Aber das, womit wir uns jeden Tag abmiihen, sind andere Dinge. Darauf sagte einer: "Warum wehrt ihr euch? Wiirdet ihr den Gleichnissen folgen, dann waret ihr selbst Gleichnisse geworden und damit schon der tiglichen Miihe frei." Ein anderer sagte: "Ich wette, daB auch das ein Glcichnis ist." Der erste sagte: "Du hast gewonnen." Der zweite sagte: "Aber leider nur im Gleichnis." Der erste sagte: "Nein, in Wirklichkeit; im Gleichnis hast du verloren."'2

This contradictory distinction between winning and losing emerges in a struggle to which there is no solution. All the second man can gain within this contradiction lies in the one difference left to knowledge, the difference between parables and daily reality. But by winning back his certainty that he remains securely bound to daily reality, he loses the chance to separate himself from what defeats him, and so win. If he had not bet against the parable, but believed in it and the chance to "become a parable" he would have won, albeit only in parable. But in withdrawing from "reality" he loses in reality. On the other hand, he had already lost in reality, since the incomprehensible is incomprehensible and there is no help in our daily cares. Defeat at the hands of the incomprehensible comes about in giving over the power of meaning to it, and calling it reality. Reality is that to which

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one is subordinate. To turn toward the parable changes what one "is." If we take

up that domain, the domain defined by our capacity to speak a language that is not subordinate to reality, by turning fully toward the activity of such speech, we occupy a position over which reality has no hold. This does not carry us over to some

"sagenhaftes Driiben," but creates a separate domain by our speaking that we can

occupy, but only in our discourse. If we apply what Kafka indicates about such language to Benjamin's "Uber den

Begriff der Geschichte," the metaphor of the chess game situates the discourse of

philosophy for precisely the same mode of our occupancy. It is an activity that we must win if we establish it in relation to the "fabulous yonder" of theology. We do not displace the catastrophe of history by a redemption that enters history and brings it to an end. We displace history by the occupation of our game. We abandon our

place in "reality" where we are always part of the ongoing catastrophe, and become the puppets of philosophy. History comes to an end at the borders of the game, the discourse of philosophy. While the messiah "bricht die Geschichte ab" on his arrival (GS 1/3, p. 1243), this discourse merely institutes monadic interruptions in historic time. The game is always won because its discursive nature encloses both sides. To enter into the game, and into the primary relationship with the life of the

game, which is its difference from reality by which "theology" defines itself, is to exit from the primary relationship with the continuum ofh i story and the indefeasible institutions of historical power. In the "reality" of states and powers, to enter into conflict over the resources of social and national power leaves nothing but defeat for human interests for the converse reason. Both sides are engaged in the same

activity, and winning and losing fail to differentiate between two sides as a moment of decision. Jiinger retreats from this game at an earlier stage than Benjamin, and sinks into the inner exile from which he wrote Auf den Marmorklippen, creating a

perspective in which Hitler and Stalin are not opponents in the sense of any decision to be made between them ("Der 'Oberfdrster' sollte bald Hitler, bald G6ring, bald Stalin sein," SW III, 436). In this perspective, struggle against them expands intellectual experience into an esoteric space beyond their domain and outside their limited time. It would be a retreat from which Jiinger did not emerge for the remaining half century until his death.

'Ernst Jiinger, Sdmtliche Werke VIII (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1981), 371. All quotations from Jiinger are from this edition, subsequently indicated as SW with volume and page numbers. 2"Nicht wofur wir kampfen ist das Wesentliche, sondern wie wir kampfen," Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis, SW VII, 74. 3Walter Benjamin, Gesammnelte Schriften II/1, Hrsg. Rolf Tiedemann u. Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977), 204. All quotations from this edition indicated henceforth in the text as GS with volume and page number. 4SW IX, 152. For a more detailed discussion of this surprising element in Jiinger's work, see Marcus Bullock, "Heiner Muiller's Error, Walter Jens's Ilorror, and Ernst Jiinger's Antisemitism," Monatshefte 86/2 (Summer 1994): 152-71.

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5Walter Benjamin, Briefe I, Hrsg. Gershom Scholem u. Theodor Adomo (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1966), 121-22. 6Benjamin even makes the connection between the doctrines of war in Jiinger's collection and those of a contemporary Jewish Kabbalistic philosopher, Erich Unger (see GS III, 241). It does not, however, occur to him that Jiinger might well have felt confirmed rather than shocked or embarrassed by that parallel. 7Benjamin gives this term special prominence in "Der Siirrealismus" (GS II/, 307), but the concept reappears in various forms as a central element in his theory of critical perception and interpretation throughout his mature writing. 8Critical suspicion of how far Benjamin carried this tendency arises quite early. For example Theodor Adomo wrote a letter to Benjamin in 1938 in which he warns that the direct combination of material and theological perspectives contaminates both in a union that was "verhext" (Briefe II, 786). 9Franz Kafka, Der Prozefi (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 260. '?See, for example, the statements in his first book, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften I/1, 106. "One can compare this condition with Kafka's comment: "Eines der wirksamsten Verfiihrungsmittel des B6sen ist die Aufforderung zum Kampf. Es ist wie der Kampfmit Frauen, der im Bett endet" - Franz Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Land, (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1983). '2Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes, Hrsg. Max Brod (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1990), 72.

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Documents

Walter Benjamin and Ernst Jünger: Destructive Affinities