The last soldier-poet, who wanted to transfer the spirit of war into politics

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A flood, an avalanche, an epidemic: once they begin, it is difficult to stop them. The same goes for war. The spirit of mobilization tends to survive peace. This is what happened in Europe in 1918, especially in Germany: what to do, after the armistice, with orders, obedience, courage, the blood shed? The national revolutionary movements, which were sprouting like mushrooms in the Weimar Republic, wanted to transfer the spirit of conflict into political life . Among the writers committed in this direction was Ernst Jünger , a hero of the trenches (with Rommel and von Richthofen, one of the officers awarded the Pour le mérite cross, a sort of super gold medal), author of In Storms of Steel, a diary that reflects on the anthropological mutation triggered by the new “battle of materials”. The war had frustrated the romantic aspirations of the volunteers who had set out amid fanfares and flowers, revealing itself to be a colossal machine whose organization and functioning eluded the combatants. The courage and audacity of individuals counted for nothing in the face of the power of technology. The democracy of English machine guns made no difference between the Zulus of South Africa and the German soldiers who set out to attack Langemark with Nietzsche's Zarathustra in their haversacks. It was a horrible epiphany .

As Gabriele Guerra asks in the well-documented Ernst Jünger. A literary and political biography (Carocci, 2025): what lesson can be drawn from an “unspeakable and unrepresentable” war experience? In his major theoretical work, The Worker published in 1932, Jünger imagines a form of existence that fuses together soldier and worker. The situation required the invention of a human type that, going beyond Leninist planning, gives meaning to the senseless mechanism of advanced modernity. The question of technology is too important to be abandoned to technicians. Outsiders, men of letters and philosophers, “men who sit alone in nocturnal rooms, immobile like rocks from whose cavities the current that, outside, keeps the machines running, erupts in sparks” must appropriate it.

After 1945, Jünger, who died at almost one hundred and three in 1998, sought refuge in a mythological and esoteric dimension. In this way, Guerra notes, historical anguish found a predictable metaphysical consolation. But at least until the rise of National Socialism, he was not so accommodating, neither with himself nor with others . The last soldier-poet of Germany and Europe crossed with impetus a landscape of iron and fire, not to be dazed by the apparent disorder, but "to have an idea of ​​unity: the secret and immobile negative of the world that turns without respite". With mixed results, Jünger searched throughout his life for a non-technical space and time in the very heart of technology and its most annihilating manifestations. The path he inaugurated is still open, one of the few up to the task of our time.

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