Ernst Junger - Tumblr Posts
Trench warfare is the bloodiest, wildest, and most brutal of all warfare, yet it too has had its men, men whom the call of the hour has raised up, unknown foolhardy fighters. Of all the nerve- racking moments of war none is so formidable as the meeting of two storm-troop leaders between the narrow walls of the trench. There is no retreat and no mercy then. Blood sounds in the shrill cry that is wrung like a nightmare from the breast. Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel
To me the mere sight of an enemy in tangible form was a release. Grinding my teeth, I pressed the muzzle to the temple of this wretch, whom terror now crippled, and with my other hand gripped hold of his tunic. With a beseeching cry he snatched a photograph from his pocket and held it before my eyes . . . himself, surrounded by a numerous family. ... I forced down my mad rage and walked past.
-Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel
Moses strikes his staff on the rock and the water of life spurts forth. A moment like this suffices for millennia. All this only seems to have been given in remote places and times. In reality, it is concealed in every individual, entrusted to him in code, so that he might understand himself, in his deepest, supra-individual power. This is the goal of every teaching that is worthy of the name. Let matter condense into veritable walls that seem to block all prospects: yet the abundance is closest at hand, for it lives in man as a gift, as a time-transcending patrimony. It is up to him how he will grasp the staff: to merely support him on his life path, or to serve him as a scepter.
Ernst Junger, The Forest Passage
Life strives incessantly to stay in contact with pain. Indeed, discipline means nothing other than this, whether it is of the priestly-ascetic kind directed toward abnegation or of the warlike-heroic kind directed toward hardening oneself like steel. In both cases, it is a matter of maintaining complete control over life, so that at any hour of the day it can serve a higher calling. The central question concerning the rank of present values can be answered by determining to what extent the body can be treated as an object.
Ernst Jünger, On Pain
Like atoms, words contain a nucleus around which they orbit, vibrating, and they cannot be touched without unleashing nameless powers.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 25 October 1941
The return of the structures of the absolute state, but without aristocracy—meaning without objectivity—makes catastrophes of unimaginable dimensions possible.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 25 October 1941
The true leaders of the world are at home in their graves.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 November 1941
Conversations among men should be conducted like those among gods, among invulnerable beings. To duel with ideas is to use swords of the intellect that cut through matter without pain or effort. The deeper the cut, the purer the enjoyment. In such intellectual encounters, one must be indestructible.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 30 November 1941
We live life merely at its edge: it is but a battlefield where the struggle for life is fought. It is a remote fort, hastily built in the dimension of the citadel into which we shall retreat in death.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 8 March 1942
The poet bestows with language what the priest does with wine.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 22 May 1942
I have a tendency to distance myself from people I love. It’s as if their images developed such power in me that their physical presence becomes intolerable. The man who murders his mistress chooses the opposite path: to possess her he extinguishes her likeness. Perhaps this is how immortals treat us.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 14 October 1942
The mechanical habit of killing produces the same ravages in the facial features that mechanical sexuality does.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 18 December 1942
The path to God in our age is inordinately long, as if man had lost his way in the endless expanses that are the product of his own ingenuity. Even the most modest advance is therefore a great achievement. God must be imagined anew. Given this condition, man is essentially capable only of negativity: He can purify the vessel that he embodies. That will suit him well, for new luster brings increased exhilaration. Yet even the greatest rule he can impose upon himself culminates in atheism, where no god dwells, a place more terrifying than if it had been abandoned by God. Then one day, years later, it may happen that God answers—it could be that He does so slowly, through the antennae of the spirit; or He may reveal Himself in a lightning bolt. We sent a signal to a heavenly body, and it turns out to be inhabited.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 7 May 1943
The philosopher’s stone stands at the culmination of a series of distillations that lead with ever-greater purity toward an absolute, undiluted state. Whoever possesses the stone no longer needs chemical analysis. We can think of this relationship as traversing a series of gardens where each surpasses the one before it. In each succeeding one, the colors and forms become richer and more luminous. Abundance necessarily reaches its limits at the point when it can no longer be enhanced. Then qualitative changes appear, which both simplify and conceptualize. In this way, the colors gradually become brighter, then as translucent as gems as they lose their tint and ultimately transmute into colorless clarity. The forms increase into ever-higher and simpler relationships, recapitulating the forms of crystals, circles, and orbs, ultimately eliminating the tension between periphery and center. At the same time, the demarcated areas and differences merge as fruit and blossom, light and shadow are transformed into higher entities. We emerge from this abundance into its source as we enter the glass-walled treasury rooms.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 May 1943
When something is right—right in the highest sense—it must not be demonstrable, it must be debatable. We mortals must strive for it in configurations that are accessible but not absolutely attainable. This then leads to areas where imponderable rather than quantifiable concepts honor the master and produce the artistic urge. Here it is especially the service to, and with, the word that enthralls me—that subtlest of efforts that takes the word to the dividing line that separates it from the ineffable. This also contains a longing for the correct dimensions according to which the universe was created, and which the reader should see through the word as through a window.
Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 18 July 1943