Ernst Jünger is among the few writers of the twentieth century to stand out for an extraordinary ability to explore reality with a pervasive gaze that transcends the boundaries of disciplines and allows him to dialogue with a multiplicity of fields.
Since his first works, dedicated to war scenarios, he has explored the reality of technology and the new horizons that it opens up in every field. He analyzes their impositions, direct and indirect, tracing their profiles with clarity, until he also focuses on the artistic transformations that arise from them. Particular attention is paid to photography and cinema, which the author considers instruments of maximum objectivity and reproducibility and which would supplant the unrepeatable uniqueness of the theatre, with representations destined for infinite reproduction. The peculiarity of the industrial arts would mark the decline of the epic gesture, which, however, finds new expression in modern war, characterized by rapid and impersonal action which, thanks to these tools, can however be eternalized.
This change emerges particularly clearly during the Great War, the first conflict systematically documented thanks to the use of photographic devices mounted on balloons and airplanes. Photography, defined as “the way of observing the world of the Worker”, thus proves to be the ideal tool for capturing the profound essence of the new reality, going beyond the mere recording of details, and showing how the human being is about to radically transform one’s own way of perceiving and interpreting the world, inaugurating a new perspective capable of combining technique and absolute observation.
Jünger fully embraces this perspective, not only through the filter of philosophical analysis and literary narrative, but trying to fix it in visual forms. In the short space of four years, in fact, he published a series of photographic volumes which offer a disturbing representation of widespread terror and the constant condition of risk, with the intention of demonstrating that they are about to become distinctive features of society even outside of the war context. In 1930, in Leipzig, he published two works: one dedicated to aviation and another to the experiences of German soldiers at the front. The following year a third volume was released, focused on the enemy and the war events of the adversaries. In 1933 it saw the light The changed worldwritten in collaboration with my journalist and photographer friend Edmund Schulz, e The dangerous moment. The latter is accompanied by an introduction that explores the “dangerous moments” of the life of modern man, starting from the emblematic figure of the Worker, who appears as the perfect embodiment of this new reality. The volumes range from the wonder of aviation to the wartime experiences of both sides, culminating in The dangerous momenta work that highlights the perpetual contrast between order and threat. In it, we recognize the constant but latent tension that Baudrillard would have defined as the “new regime of catastrophes”: a condition in which terror and stability, chaos and control paradoxically coexist. From this point on, these dynamics will become the central focus of Jünger’s reflection on modernity.
A significant example of this reflection can be found in The changed worldwhere the theme of work in the era of globalization is explored in all its variations. Through photography, which becomes a privileged tool, both moments of intense human expressiveness and the dynamics that merge the individual with the reality of work and total mobilization are captured. The use of photography and iconography not only accompanies Jünger’s extraordinary intellectual evolution, but sometimes reflects an intent to reveal the “new” and, at the same time, to veil complex meanings, in parallel with the refinement of one increasingly rarefied and enigmatic literary style, as observed by Heimo Seferens, who encloses all this in the concept of “restraining hermeticism”. This approach is manifested in the attention dedicated precisely to visual representations, which evoke altered states of consciousness or can open up new interpretative perspectives. Consequently, photography no longer represents just a stylistic choice, but takes on the characteristics of a true philosophical itinerary.
In this context, Nils Fabiansson’s volume, Ernst Jünger in the steel storms of the great warrecently published by the Italia Storica publishing house, proves to be of great interest. The work is presented as a documentary collection enriched by a wide selection of photographs from public and private archives, as well as unpublished materials taken from numerous diaries, images of battle sites, maps and original drawings made by the writer himself. A considerable documentary apparatus that offers a detailed historical and geographical perspective, allowing a deeper understanding of the narrated context and of the work which, in that phase, gave it absolute notoriety: In the storms of steelpublished in at least seven editions, from 1920 to 1978, each of which underwent significant changes and revisions.
The text is accompanied by this photographic apparatus which, in fact, amplifies its documentary value. The story begins in January 1915, when he arrives at the Western Front after a year spent in training and travel and, from that moment, describes with almost surgical precision the preparations for the attacks, the military tactics adopted and every natural or urban element, composing an extraordinarily meticulous account of every single item.
But the narrative is closely intertwined with his photographic gaze. His vision remains glacial, detached, linked to a “stereoscopic” perception, that is, the ability to simultaneously observe and analyze the physical and spiritual levels of events, objects and living beings. Jünger himself confessed to possessing a sort of “double sight”, which allowed him to grasp both material details and deeper meanings. During the Second World War, he recounts the episode of the bombing observed from the roof of the Hotel Raphael in Paris, where all the German officers were. Holding a glass of Burgundy with strawberries sprouting in his hand, he describes the event as an aesthetic spectacle of pure power, while the others hurriedly run for shelter. Once again, he does not revisit those facts with ordinary sentimentality, but with a sort of photographic gaze, maintaining an approach to appearance separated from context.
Jünger was this! In 1992, during the inauguration of the Great War Museum in Péronne, when asked what his most dramatic experience was, he replied: “Losing the war.” A figure difficult to classify, just as described by Bruce Chatwin, who met him in the seventies and painted him as foreign to the pastoral reflections of Siegfried Sassoon or Edmund Blunden, devoid of the cowardice of Hemingway, the masochism of TE Lawrence or the compassion of Remarque .
In the analytical and detached tone of the narrative he admits to being influenced by Caesar and his own De bello Gallico and let us now put aside the inspiration deriving from The French Campaign of 1792 by Goethe. A change in style that coincides with this glacial perspective which would justify – even in the eyes of many – the reduction and elimination of some episodes in the various reprints, as in the case of Grove 125 which, in 1933, was shortened by a third compared to the original version. The same goes for some personal episodes, such as a brief love affair in 1916 with a girl he calls “Jeanne d’Arc”, present in some editions of his writings, but eliminated in others.
A detached gaze, which therefore allows him to appreciate the photographic paradigm, and which is also reflected in his scientific interests, such as his constant passion for entomology, which is another anomalous element: «After all, it is just a prejudice that during wars, subtle hunting must be suspended. On the contrary, it allows the initiate one of the possible absences, even if only for a fleeting glance. This restores internal order.”
Fabiansson’s volume reproduces photographs of notebooks or sheets containing a series of drawings. During the war, he compiled a notebook called Fauna coleopterologica douchyensisin which he cataloged 143 species of beetles found in trenches and which did not become an integral part of the storms of steel. The book mentions 125 French and Belgian cities and villages, as well as 160 names of people, thanks to which it is possible to construct a map that is not only that of a theater of war, but topography and anthropology of various humanity. But it was, in fact, a reconnaissance with an almost photographic expressiveness. He himself admitted it. Decades later, he almost always showed himself to be disinterested in revisiting those places (which, in Fabiansson’s volume, we can find in the ancient configurations and in the more recent ones relating to more recent times), criticizing the commemorative tourism of the battlefields. Already in 1929, during a trip to Paris, he wrote: «I feel no attraction to these places, which stimulate the museum taste of our time, made even more unpleasant by American tourists with their banal ‘Here you can see…,’ precisely as happened during my visit to the Forum Romanum.”
All this because those diaries and those photographs had eternalized a time and an internal world that could no longer be recalled.