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New German Critique
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The 'Postmodernism' ofErnst Jiinger
in his Proto-Fascist Stage
Walter H. Sokel
33
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34 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger
1. EmstJiinger, Werke, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1960) 216. All subsequent references
are to this text. This and all following translations are my own.
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Walter H. Sokel 35
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36 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger
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Walter H. Sokel 37
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38 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger
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Walter H. Sokel 39
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40 The 'Postmodernism' of Ernst Jiinger
Worker corresponds to what in our time has been called the post-in-
dustrial age. As Jiinger puts it, "the cliched differentiation between
town and country" is disappearing (176). Even today, that difference
- as Jiinger writes in 1932 - "exists only in the romantic realm; it is as
invalid as the difference between an organic and a mechanical world"
(176). While the physical landscape ot bourgeois modernity was one in
which ever-larger industrial cities were sharply distinguished from a
depressed and backward but still unpolluted rural world, Jianger sees
this distinction increasingly erased in a post-bourgeois world where
both city and country are superseded by a universal, carefully zoned
and planned suburbia. The disappearance ot the peasant, together with
the bourgeois, is caused by the triumph oft technology which includes
agriculture in its planetary domain. Thus Jiinger sets himself off sharply
from the nostalgic and reactionary myth of the soil which, together with
the myth of race, formed the foundation of Nazi ideology as conjoined
in the cultural slogan "Blut und Boden." By declaring the peasant super-
seded, J inger expresses a radical and postmodern position.
The essentially postmodern element of Der Arbeiter is the extreme
historicism which its attitude toward the peasants expresses. From the
perspective of Der Arbeiter, nothing is timeless, and there are not, as for
the Fascists, timeless values of any kind. In a sharp polemical turn
against Oswald Spengler, Jiinger declares "it is not true that the exis-
tence of the peasant is timeless and that great changes simply pass
above his acres like the wind and the clouds" (176). Nothing about hu-
man reality is "natural," nothing is unchangeably rooted either in
man's nature or in nature at large.
I have tried to stake out some key elements of a discourse in Der
Arbeiter, which one can describe in terms of our contemporary notion
of postmodern. I have not been able to consider all aspects of the
postmodern that can be found in Jiinger's essay. Much less have I
been able to touch on the two other discourses that contribute equally,
or even more powerfully, toJiinger's remarkable text: the discourse of
the reactionary German Right and the discourse ot high modernism,
both of which radically contradict the postmodern element which we
have singled out. Only if read with this contradiction in mind can
Jiinger's essay be comprehended in the entirety ot its astoundingly rich
contextuality.
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