Telos Press has recently re-issued Joachim Neugroschel’s translation of Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil, this time with an introduction by Jünger biographer Russell A. Berman. This is to be celebrated of course, as Jünger deserves to be more present on the English-speaking market.
In this novel from 1977, Jünger gives voice to Martin Venator, a philosophising historian who works nights as a bartender for the ruling elite of a North African city state called Eumeswil. Already here, we see a set-up so proto-Jüngerian that it is correct to regard this book as a key novel in Jünger’s oeuvre: an outsider on the inside thinking about the structure of power from both philosophical and historical perspectives. How to retain the necessary distance every free human being needs?
Venator’s solution is two-fold: he studies and teaches under the supervision of enlightened academic mentors, who provoke new angles and perspectives in subtle historical hints. But he also secretly constructs a little safe haven in a discarded bunker way out in nature. This latter solution in case something violent and overthrowing would take place in the Casbah of Eumeswil, where he works. The times are potentially dangerous in the current tyrant’s liberal dictatorship, and Venator wants to remain free at all cost. Hence he takes no sides, neither with the political environment that sustains him nor with with his father and brother, who are ardent yet silent critics of the current regime.
“I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.”
Nothing could be more Jüngerian. Venator’s narrative, composed of diary-like entries in secret notebooks, is very much like that in Jünger’s own diaries from the second world war. Meditations on nature as such drift elegantly into meditations on human nature and the complicated relationships that always rise up within totalitarian environments. Like Venator, Jünger had to be careful in his attitude as a writer/philosopher during a totalitarian rule that often flirted with his qualities and persona.
“If I love freedom ‘above all else’, then any commitment becomes a metaphor, a symbol. This touches on the difference between the forest fleer and the partisan: this distinction is not qualitative but essential in nature. The anarch is closer to Being. The partisan moves within the social or national party structure, the anarch is outside it.”
To be involved is to decimate one’s own freedom as an individual. Jünger’s staunch and diligent anarchic stance (not to be confused with “anarchistic”) as a thinker and writer has helped preserve his immense value also for later generations. He not only wrote about an aloof attitude of désinvolture – he truly lived within it. Although criticised by adamant Nazis and, later, by sloganeering lefties, Jünger always stayed within his perspective of inner freedom to evaluate current goings-on from an unbiased position. Although no history-writing is ever objective, Jünger’s attitude certainly comes close to maximum potential. History is a puzzle in which the pieces shift with time. Both Jünger and Venator seem to say that one needs to keep an eye on the totality as much as on the pieces themselves. If one loses that overview, there can be no accuracy based in human vision, analysis and endeavour. If one stares too closely at the pieces themselves, the magnetic, demagogic forces that pull them around under the surface will no longer be noticed (which, of course, is what they always strive for). To retain the overview, one needs to be up there and lofty – detached.
Eumeswil is an ideas novel only barely camouflaged to cover its “master’s voice”. But it still works. One doesn’t need the historical background of Jünger’s own adventures in 20th century Europe to enjoy the novel. It is fanciful, intriguing, intelligent and well written. Eumeswil convincingly conveys the problematic situation and dilemma of someone being trapped in between movements and powers he can’t control. The only way to survive in a morally justifiable way is to remain on the outside, yet in essence always firmly rooted on the inside. Vice versa works quite well too.
Ernst Jünger: Eumeswil. Telos Press, Candor, 2015. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Edited and with an introduction by Russell A. Berman.
