Ernst Jünger - A Look to the Future

Interview with Julien Hervier, 1985

A continuation of a series of conversations with Julien Hervier. You may find previous sections here, here, here, here, and here.

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JH: If one considers the two utopias that make up your great novels "Heliopolis" and "Eumeswil", the first from 1949 and the second from 1977, your view of the world seems to have become much gloomier.

Yes, but I would like to express the wish that this is not interpreted as a prophecy about the future. At the moment, part of what is at stake has to do with everything Nietzsche says about the last man. For me, the last man is above all a specter: the man who lives in the midst of comfort, as Nietzsche describes him in "Zarathustra," is only the penultimate one, and he will soon be replaced by another. Such a thought crosses one's mind in the twilight, and then one broods over it. But "Eumeswil" does not stop there. And as for the time of "Uber die Linie", about which Heidegger said that the problems had to be approached quite differently, at that time I played on the side of optimism. This does not mean that I am contradicting myself, but that I am revealing facts that contradict themselves. That is something completely different.

Above all, I want to avoid being forced into a rigid mindset. Perhaps tomorrow I will come to completely different conclusions. Despite everything, continuing to develop your thinking remains extremely instructive; it's like a court case: "How? Had you intended this? What would have happened if this or that...etc?" Complete decay is certainly possible. But it remains inevitable that man will intervene and make use of his freedom. You can always change anything. Take the Thirty Years' War, for example: the German language was in a state of decay. And then came men like Opitz and, much later, Klopstock. I would say the same for the decline of language in our time.

JH: Do you think that the Americanization of Europe and the infiltration of English into its languages is partly responsible for this?

Léautaud, for example, preferred a German victory to an American victory for cultural reasons. But some circumstances have the opposite effect. There are excellent novelists in America, better than here: Hemingway, Faulkner and many others. Their works have relevance because of the importance of their themes and the excellence of their style. Even if our language loses much of its syntactic richness when it comes into contact with English, one can still wonder why the English have such remarkable lyrical poetry.

JH: The partition of Germany has taken us a long way from the world state you once dreamed of. What do you think about it today?

I also once wrote a utopia about peace. The idea is exactly that of today's united Europe. But you can see how things stand in Brussels and Strasbourg right now; people argue about butter, milk, eggs or potatoes, but it's never about common government or the abolition of borders.

It's absurd: countries that you can fly over in less than five minutes still want to keep their borders! That is primitive and even reactionary, and in that respect I am disenchanted. What future does the world state have if not even a handful of Europeans can come to an understanding? Everything is global, the telegraph and airplane connections, but we still don't have a global order. That is precisely Aladdin's problem, which is not pure fiction. It seems that the state is moving further and further backwards. This is a general phenomenon: thoughts move at a different speed than actual events. Kant had already written about world peace, but we are just as far away from it as we were then.

JH: So it's not a progressive or circular movement of history? Our present situation and the fact that the world state is not emerging are more a matter of chance?