Mars in Aries

Last year I discovered the work of Alexander Lernet-Holenia, an Austrian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and soldier. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War and as an Austrian reservist in the Wehrmacht, Austria having been consumed by the Third Reich in the Anschluß, in the Second. His work—at least what I’ve read so far, and I’m always looking for more—is atmospheric and uncanny, with his protagonists descending or arriving unexpectedly in worlds in which the invisible is made manifest and layered over the day-to-day.

Baron Bagge, the novella I reviewed for Miller’s Book Review last summer, does this with an Austrian cavalryman in the First World War. Count Luna, about an Austrian businessman convinced that a former rival who died in the concentration camps is haunting him, does this in the aftermath of the Second World War. Mars in Aries not only takes place during the Second World War, it was written and published—and banned—while it was yet ongoing.

Mars in Aries tells the story of Lieutenant Wallmoden who, we learn on the first page, is not the novel’s hero, simply its main character. The story takes place over a month or so in the late summer of 1939 as Wallmoden, an Austrian reservist, volunteers to join his unit rather than wait to be called up for mobilization by the Germans. He whiles away this peacetime service talking to his brother officers, conducting training exercises, and—occasionally—experiencing visions.

In an especially vivid one that occurs during training, Wallmoden is leading troops across a field near a village when he finds himself surrounded by ghosts. An army doctor assures him he is in good health, but it unsettles Wallmoden to have experienced this after conversations with another officer, a man of a mystical bent and with an interest in spiritualism, about whether or not one can tell if another person is an apparition.

Being of a well-off background and an officer, Wallmoden also makes social calls. It is during one of these that he meets Baroness Pistohlkors. She claims to have been born in the United States and briefly married there before being dumped—all the result of a misunderstanding—and remarrying a consumptive nobleman who moved her back to Europe and promptly died. Still young and breathtakingly beautiful, she is a titled and wealthy widow. An old man who is, strangely, often in her company, insinuates to Wallmoden that despite the two marriages the Baroness is still a virgin.

Wallmoden finds the old man offputting, the Baroness’s foreign friends strange, and her behavior stranger still—why, for instance, does she sometimes speak to only one other person at parties? or disappear before the parties end? and why do the handful of people who know her warn him of her bad reputation?—but he is smitten.

In just a few weeks, heedless of whatever she has earned a reputation for, he develops a passion for her, but the Baroness plays hard to get. Only after Wallmoden’s dogged pursuit does she, one day, agree to meet him for a tryst. They set a date and time for their rendezvous and Wallmoden returns to his camp.

That night the army deploys.

Wallmoden’s unit drives from Vienna to the Slovakian border with Poland preparatory to the German invasion. Wallmoden is unaware of the geopolitical maneuvers by the higher powers, never named, who control world politics, and is preoccupied with letting Baroness Pistohlkors know why he missed their meeting and with scheduling a belated one. He also continues to have visions or waking dreams, like a crawfish migration across the road leading over the Polish border or a ghostly encounter with two bathing girls from some past time, an encounter invisible to everyone else and that leaves no sign behind except a pair of wet footprints.

I don’t want to reveal anything further. I’ve already worked to conceal a lot about the plot. Wallmoden eagerly awaits word from the Baroness, the invasion comes and his unit strikes into Poland, he gets some surprising bad news, and has a yet more surprising encounter after being wounded. The story ends with a stunning reversal, with Wallmoden content but—both literally and metaphorically—nowhere near where he wanted to be.

Mars in Aries may well be my favorite of Lernet-Holenia’s books so far. It has the atmosphere of Baron Bagge and the absorbing ambiguity of Count Luna, as well as a satisfying streak of mystery. It works as both a romance and a war novel. The first half, in which we follow Wallmoden on his desperate bid for Baroness Pistohlkors’s heart, should prove especially poignant to anyone who ever felt unrequited love, and the second half, covering the invasion of Poland, utterly swamps the first. Lernet-Holenia, basing the book on his own experiences in the Wehrmacht, makes the invasion viscerally real—hot, dusty, exhausting, a parade of destruction and casual violence. The harsh reality of these scenes—to which I’ll return momentarily—make the reversal at the end that much more surprising.

The title, an astrological sign, does not reflect any actual celestial alignments during the invasion but apparently does suggest passion and aggressive desire. This is thematically appropriate, but the novel’s original title, The Blue Hour (Die blaue Stunde), a slang term used within the story for brief romantic trysts, works well on several levels, too.

As an additional layer of interest, Mars in Aries was published in 1941 and immediately banned by the Nazis. Actually banned, as in: sale was legally prohibited and the print run put in storage and destroyed. Reading it now, its apparent inoffensiveness—a love story with some mystical elements—may obscure what the Propaganda Ministry objected to. While the novel portrays German victory in Poland, it shows soldiering as unromantic, unheroic, and laborious; some of Wallmoden’s fellow officers openly talk about annihilating civilian settlements; the Poles, though rarely seen by Wallmoden, accordingly have an tone of underdog heroism; and some of the strange social gatherings in the first half of the novel suggest criminal activity—as a few other characters point out to Wallmoden—including Resistance work.

Fortunately, Lernet-Holenia had kept his publisher’s proofs and used them to republish the book after the war. I’m glad he did, and that the combined might of real censorship and Allied bombing couldn’t erase Mars in Aries.

This is an unusual novel, with a unique combination of romance, the uncanny or even gothic, and realistic warfare, and its climax is a suspenseful and moving surprise. Mars in Aries is beautifully written, exceptionally well-crafted, and, at about 200 pages, compact and powerful. I look forward to rereading it soon.

Weimar notes

Militants of the Communist Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, January 1919

When I finished Frank McDonough’s book The Weimar Years last month I had hoped to write a full review, but time, sickness, and a host of other complications meant I had to be content with a long paragraph in my non-fiction reading year-in-review. Unfortunately, the single-paragraph summation I hold myself to for those posts meant I could only raise a few issues that I had a lot of thoughts about, gesture toward them, and move on.

Here are two—both more or less about terminology or rhetoric—that I’ve been mulling anew under the influence of McDonough’s book and a few unrelated factors.

Right and left

After finishing The Weimar Years and celebrating Christmas, I caught up on some club episode of The Rest is History. The one I was most excited for was a live show Holland and Sandbrook presented at Royal Albert Hall last spring. The subject: Wagner.

Holland and Sandbrook begin their discussion by asking the audience to reconsider what they think they know about Wagner—a smart move. But this problem of terminology popped up immediately. You have heard it said, they essentially say, that Wagner is a right-wing figure, but I say unto you… he’s more of a left-winger. In their actual words, “a hippie.” But Wagner had “some right-wing opinions,” namely anti-Semitism. So: a leftie who is right-wing à la carte?

There’s an argument to be made for Wagner’s place on the left, given his role in the 1848 revolutions and his support for the overthrow of the Saxon monarchy as well as his generally bohemian lifestyle. But what precisely makes his anti-Semitism right-wing? And, from a certain kind of chest-thumping American view, supporting the overthrow of monarchies and seeking to create an all-encompassing national artform out of national myth could be spun as right-wing.

This was a great episode—and I especially appreciated Holland’s argument that Wagner’s music is not in itself anti-Semitic—but that left-right business neatly encapsulated much of my problem with this political frame.

Back to McDonough’s book. McDonough uses the language of left and right throughout but also, importantly, makes it clear what each of the dozen or so major German political parties of the 1920s wanted and stood for. Focusing on 1) goals, 2) methods, and 3) how these changed depending on circumstances explains much more, especially when it comes to the elephant in the room: the National Socialists—and yes, the Socialist part absolutely matters—who were themselves starkly divided along several political axes throughout the Weimar period. This is also considerably more helpful than a simple left-right spectrum when one reads of instances in which supposed opposites like the Nazis and the German Communist Party collaborated against the national government.

The terminology of right and left is rooted in a specific historical moment and the specific problems parties in that place and time argued and fought over. Unmoored from those specifics, I find it unserious. It’s a time-honored way to argue about vibes. I avoid it as much as possible when I teach modern history, invoking it only to give the point of view of people within the narrative I’m telling but not as neutral description.

“Democracy” vs this democracy

I didn’t get into the left-right thing in my paragraph on The Weimar Years but I did raise this question. Here’s what I wrote there:

But the epilogue, in which McDonough specifically blames Paul von Hindenburg for the death of “Weimar democracy,” is a bit of a fumble, as it is abundantly clear from McDonough’s own narrative—and even the earlier parts of the epilogue—that the Weimar Constitution had built-in weaknesses that were bound to weaken and undermine it. McDonough essentially faults Hindenburg for not believing in democracy hard enough. But if “democracy” in the abstract gave Germany this democracy in concrete, stubborn reality, it deserved to go.

Since finishing McDonough’s book I’ve browsed two new histories of Weimar from German historians: Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, by Harald Jähner and Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, by Volker Ullrich. (In the course of writing this I’ve also learned of a history of Weimar by Katja Hoyer, due out this summer.)

All of these (minus Hoyer’s book, for obvious reasons) do a bit of two-step around the concept of democracy: when the authors write about “democracy,” they sometimes mean the specific constitutional arrangements of the Weimar Republic—who voted, how, under what circumstances, how the Reichstag was constituted, who became chancellor and what authority they had, etc—and sometimes the concept of Democracy, in the abstract. The defeat and destruction of Weimar democracy is a tragedy for them because it means a defeat of Democracy.

But to paraphrase Burke, abstract democracy is not to be found; it inheres in sensible objects. It is useless to talk about Democracy without talking about the specifics of a given democracy, and a given democracy is only as valuable as its institutions and—one ought to add—the people who are using it. And as I wrote above, Weimar democracy was flawed from its inception because of the specifics of how it was designed and functioned and what options it made possible. Unstable, ineffective, hamstrung both by the outcome of a war it wasn’t responsible for and diplomatic agreements to which it consented, and—in the hands of feckless and corrupt politicians of all parties including the supposedly egalitarian socialists—unable to represent the people, it was a failure as a democracy long before Hitler seized power.

As I finished reading McDonough’s account and looked through those two other books—one more obviously leftist-oriented but both moaning and lamenting for Democracy throughout—I had a strange realization. The effect of switching from the collapse of actual Weimar democracy to a lament or apologia for Democracy in the abstract is suspiciously similar to “Real socialism has never been tried.” Democracy attracts the same mulish defensiveness as socialism. Both are the object of unwarranted faith. Neither can be blamed when they fail.

A confession

I started The Weimar Years shortly after the Charlie Kirk murder. Political violence openly celebrated by one side of the culture seemed like a good reason to familiarize myself with the broader narrative of Weimar.

That was a mistake, as looking for a useable, “relevant” past almost always is. Unfortunately historians of Weimar are just as prone to it. In both Jähner’s and Ullrich’s books I did a quick search for “Trump, Donald” in the index and guess what I found? Dumb parallels to the present, mentions of a specific political bugbear that will date their books as badly as a book I have on Mussolini that keeps bringing up George W Bush.

But McDonough doesn’t make this mistake, which is one of the great values of The Weimar Years. Throughout he emphasizes contingency and particularity: that things could have turned out other than how they did, something he makes clear through his detailed political narrative, and that Weimar Germany was a unique time and place offering no easy comparisons to our own. Pretending that Weimar tells us something or gives us insight into our enemies because there was political violence and politicians said mean things about their opponents is glib and misleading—for both the past and the present. The specifics matter.

So I confess to beginning McDonough’s book for the wrong reasons, but am glad I read it and for the sensibility of his approach, which brought me back to my senses. The closer I looked at Weimar, the less I saw of us, now. Which is as it should be. Not that we can’t learn anything from it, but we won’t until we understand it on its own terms.

More to come

I’m still trying to strengthen my grasp of Weimar. Of the two other books I’ve looked at, I may read Ullrich’s on the basis of his two-volume Hitler biography. He intones the ritual laments for Democracy in the portions I’ve read but his treatment of some of the specific topics and people I looked up struck me as more balanced than Jähner’s, which celebrates the hedonism and decay of the time. I may end up holding out for Hoyer this summer, as her book on the German Empire, Blood and Iron, was exceptionally good.

Erzberger

After recent events I decided it was time I finally read up specifically on Weimar Germany. I started Frank McDonough’s recent year-by-year history The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933. It’s good so far. Night before last I read through McDonough’s account of 1921, one of the most famous and disturbing events of which was the murder of Matthias Erzberger.

Erzberger was a politician of the Catholic party Zentrum and had the dubious distinction, following revolution on the homefront and the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918, of signing the armistice with France. This was a thankless and humiliating role that earned him the hatred of German nationalists, militarists, and anyone else upset by the outcome of the war. Erzberger soldiered on, embracing the new Republic and taking an active role in trying to help it survive. For this—and for being the man who signed the armistice—he was targeted by the Organisation Consul, a group of former military officers dedicated to avenging their defeat by killing off the men they held responsible.

On August 26, 1921, two members of the OC approached Erzberger while he was on a walk with a colleague. They “fired two shots at Erzberger’s head and back. He fell down an embankment, and the assassins followed him, finishing him off with two head shots.” They afterward fled to Hungary.

McDonough turns to the response to the murder with a damningly succinct introduction:

“Such was the toxic nature of Weimar politics that the brutal assassination of Erzberger produced a mixed reaction.”

As if assassination is not enough, the response itself is proof of the rot in the body politic. Read McDonough’s summary of the “mixed reaction” and see if it is not reminiscent of recent events:

On the centre left, there was a tremendous outcry. Numerous protest rallies were organised by the Social Democrats, the USPD and the Communists. In Berlin, 100,000 people turned out to express their outrage. Among the other mainstream parties, the murder was also unambiguously condemned. On the Right, however, a substantial minority greeted the murder with shameless glee. Hitler gave a tasteless speech in Munich in September which, identifying Erzberger as a November Criminal, essentially saying he got what he deserved. The Magdeburgische Zeitung (Magdeburg News) expressed ‘abhorrence’ for the murder, but added that Erzberger had been a ‘political racketeer and gambler’ who had made numerous political enemies.

Outcry on one side, glee on the other, and, in between, a certain amount of mealy-mouthed hemming and hawing about politically-motivated murder.

Weimar Germany is not 2025 America and 2025 America is not Weimar Germany. One could point to a thousand specific differences. But human nature, being unchanging at its core and bent toward evil, falls into familiar ruts whenever it finds sufficient excuse or opportunity to do so. According to the old saw, variously attributed but which I repeat often in class: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Erzberger wasn’t the first and was by no means the last victim of such political violence in the Weimar era. (Less than a year later, the OC would assassinate Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, an event you can read about from inside the conspiracy in Ernst von Salomon’s novel/memoir The Outlaws.) It’s worth considering, for all the people rightly shocked and grieved by such acts, what it will take to break the rhyme scheme.

The Magic of Silence

As I’ve previously noted, since reading Rembrandt is in the Wind late last year I’ve been making an effort to learn about some of my favorite artists more deliberately. Having grown up with an artist grandmother, surrounded by her art and that of the artists who inspired her, and learning from an early age to love and appreciate it, I discovered through that book how much I’ve taken for granted through simple complacency.

This book by Florian Illies, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, came my way at exactly the right time. Recently translated from German, this is a study of the great German Romantic landscape artist.

A native of the Baltic port city of Greifswald, Friedrich was the son of a candlemaker and only slowly achieved success as a painter. He unsuccessfully sought the patronage of Goethe, who apparently found him annoying, but eventually sold paintings to the Prussian and Russian royal families. Quiet, deeply religious, and a staid creature of habit, he spent most of his life in Dresden, from which he traveled back and forth to his hometown on the Baltic coast and such islands as Rügen, and married late. By the time he died in 1840 he left behind a widow and three children as well as hundreds of sketches and canvases.

Friedrich was then, for over sixty years, almost totally forgotten.

Illies approaches Friedrich’s life and work thematically, through the four classical elements: fire, earth, water, and air. This proves a stimulating and surprising approach. “Fire,” quite movingly, opens with the loss of hundreds of German Romantic paintings in a gallery fire in Munich, and Illies provides numerous other examples of Friedrich works lost to fire, whether an accidental housefire at his family’s tallow rendering shop back home in Greifswald or in the RAF bombing of Dresden. “Water” examines this Baltic coast native’s use of the sea, especially at dusk—or is it morning?—and “Earth” the power of his landscapes, which pieced together landmarks from real places to create imaginary forests, ruins, and mountain ranges more real than their antecedents.

Certain themes recur: loss, faith, nature, the melancholy of Friedrich’s work, which features so many stark landscapes, cemeteries, and ruins, and his place in the nascent German nationalism of the time, for which he later, unwittingly, became the posterboy. The personal stories are especially moving, such as a childhood incident related in “Water”; one winter as a child, Friedrich fell through the ice on a frozen river. His brother jumped in to save him and, despite hauling Friedrich to safety, was himself drowned beneath the ice.

What can this have done to Friedrich the boy? How did it affect Friedrich the man? Illies speculates cautiously, but makes it always clear that there is much about the reticent, closed off Friedrich that we cannot know. But knowing about this incident affects us—read Illies’s account of Friedrich’s near-drowning and his brother’s death and then look at The Sea of Ice or a pensive later seascape like Stages of Life.

What also proves moving is the story, told piecemeal throughout the book, of how Friedrich’s work was rediscovered, which we can credit to the enthusiasm and hard work of a handful of art historians and collectors. Thanks to their efforts, within the first twenty years of the 20th century a forgotten artist had become a sought-after icon. The many stories of lost Friedrichs surfacing here and there—a gallery, a country house, the retirement home bedroom of an elderly noblewoman—many of them initially misidentified or simply anonymous, are an important part of the book’s appeal. Even recent history enriches the story, as in a years-long case involving stolen Friedrich canvases hidden in a stack of tires and a mafia lawyer’s legally dubious negotiations to return them.

While The Magic of Silence says much about Friedrich’s life, work, rediscovery, and legacy, it does not focus as much on composition or interpretation. Only a few major works like Friedrich’s early altarpiece Cross in the Mountains, which became surprisingly controversial on its exhibition, or The Monk by the Sea, which has been interpreted variously as a nihilistic image of a hopeless, godless world or the first great abstract painting, or the magnificent, justly famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog receive in-depth attention. Illies’s subject is Friedrich’s life and mind and the afterlife of his work, not the mechanics of how he executed them.

My only real complaints are that the thematic organization broke up Friedrich’s life story so totally and that only four of his paintings were included in the book. The former problem is not insurmountable, and reading the book quickly created a powerful cumulative effect that suggests the shape of Friedrich’s life without sticking to it chronologically.

The latter is a bigger problem. Illies names and describes many of Friedrich’s works—whether as he completed them or as they were rediscovered in the early 1900s—but most of them are not available to look at in the book itself. I ended up mentally noting a lot of titles and browsing Wikipedia’s impressive (if still incomplete) collection of articles on them later, as well as ordering this more thoroughly illustrated book. This does not detract from the value of Illies’s study, but it is a curious oversight in a book about art.

Those two quibbles aside, this was a strong place to start in my project to give more proper attention to art. The Magic of Silence is a deeply researched, engrossing, insightful, and beautiful read. I especially appreciated occasional insights into Friedrich’s theological view of his art as well as the picture of the artist’s personality that emerges over the course of the book. I’m glad to recommend it to anyone interested in Romanticism, German culture and history, or art generally.

Eisensteinian historical montage

Today Medievalists.net shared a good summary of a 2006 article by Donald Ostrowski in which he examines the actual historical evidence for the Battle of Lake Peipus and finds that the one fact everyone “knows” about the battle is almost certainly made up.

The Battle of Lake Peipus was fought in April 1242 between a Crusader coalition led by a suborder of the Teutonic Knights and a Russian force from Novgorod led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. After an initial cavalry assault by the Knights, Alexander drove them back, winning the battle and thwarting the attempt to conquer Novgorod and bring the Orthodox Christians there under the authority of the Latin or Catholic Church.

The “one fact everyone ‘knows’” that I mentioned above concerns the way Alexander was able to win and the fate of the Teutonic Knights. Look the Battle of Lake Peipus up and you’ll certainly find descriptions of the way the Knights, charging across and even fighting on the frozen lake, drowned in large numbers when the overstressed late spring ice broke up beneath them in the latter stages of the battle. Hence the battle’s better-known name: “The Battle on the Ice.”

But it turns out that most of the details related to the frozen lake date from much later than the battle itself, with—in a process that will be familiar to anyone who has had to work with medieval chronicles—more and more detailed and elaborate accounts being recorded later, often much later. And the breaking up of the ice specifically originates not in any historical source but in a movie: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 propaganda epic Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein was a Russian filmmaker who worked for decades making historical dramas for the Stalinist Soviet state. He was also a film theorist, experimenting with intellectual montage techniques to convey story and meaning and—most importantly for a propagandist—evoke emotional reactions. He had a good eye for an exciting sequence, and Alexander Nevsky’s battle on a frozen lake and the wicked Germans’ plunge into the icy depths is among his best. But not his most famous.

That Eisenstein invented this vision of the battle is isn’t exactly news, at least to anyone who has studied this region and period. Note that Ostrowski’s Russian History article dates from 2006. William Urban, in The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, first published in 2003, is also circumspect about anything ice-related, and quotes part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle which describes the dead and dying lying “on the grass” after the battle. No frozen sinking corpses here.

But there’s another dimension of the gradual elaboration and fabrication of the story. Urban:

The battle has become undeservedly famous, having been endowed—for twentieth-century political considerations—with much more significance than it merited in itself, through Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, and the stirring music of Sergei Prokofiev. Indeed, although this movie is a reasonably accurate portrayal of some aspects of the battle, especially the costumes and tactics, and gives us an impressive sense of the drama of medieval combat, other aspects are pure propaganda. Certainly the ancestors of today’s Estonians and Latvians were not dwarfs, as the movie suggests, nor were they serfs. Master Andreas was in Riga, and thus could not have been taken prisoner by Alexander himself and ransomed for soap. The Russian forces were mainly professionals, not pre-Lenin Communist peasants and workers facing the equivalent of German armoured columns; the Germans were not proto-Nazis, blonde giants who burned babies alive. In short, many scenes in Alexander Nevsky tell us much more about the Soviet Union just before Hitler’s invasion than about medieval history.

Alexander Nevsky is a great movie, though, and, as Urban notes, Prokofiev’s score is fantastic. I have it on CD. Here’s a sample from the scene in question.

But this isn’t the only historical myth created by Eisenstein and spread with the imprimatur of the Comintern. By far his most famous film, the silent propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin, which depicts a 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors in the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a proto-Soviet uprising crushed by the cold-blooded Tsarists, features as its climactic sequence a massacre of newly liberated and class-conscious proles on a long elegant staircase. “The Odessa Steps” is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, a continuous series of stunning, unforgettable images, and has been imitated and alluded to many, many times.

But the massacre never happened. Per Roger Ebert, in a “Great Movies” essay on Battleship Potemkin:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

Both of these myths—the breakup of the ice under the Teutonic Knights and the massacre on the Odessa Steps—illustrate the unique power and danger of historical cinema. These are inventions by a director following the rule of cool which, as Ebert notes, is a director’s job. But as Urban suggests above there is plenty of shady ideology working alongside those artistic considerations. More importantly, these made up stories are now the entire story for many people. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve shared here before, “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

Medievalists.net’s summary post caught my eye not only because I love the subject and period as well as Eisenstein, but because matters of historical truth in filmmaking are always on my mind. After all, think about the Battle on the Ice sequence in Alexander Nevsky and how influential it was, then watch—or perhaps rewatch—this scene from last year’s Napoleon.

Falsehood, if introduced through film, can have a very long life.

History must be written forward

From the introduction to the late Steven Ozment’s A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People, in which Ozment briefly recapitulates several conflicting approaches to the study of German history. Against one widespread approach that sees all of German history as preparation for the arrival of Hitler and explains everything with that destination in mind, historian Thomas Nipperdey

believed that reliable history must be written forward chronologically, from past to present, not from present to past, as so much postwar historiography was inclined to do. It is one thing to know the end of a story and to be moved by it to learn the whole story, and quite another to tell that story from its known outcome. “In the beginning was Napoleon,” Nipperdey deadpanned in the first line of a multivolume history of Germany. . . . If 1933 is taken as the first page of modern German history, it will most likely be the last word on it.

One could think of this German historiographical situation as a shadow form of Anglo-American “Whig history,” which views all of history as a providential march toward the democratic institutions, liberal laws, free markets, and individualism of Britain and the United States.

But as Herbert Butterfield pointed out almost a century ago in his critique of Whig history, the basic mistake to such an approach is to search for and synthesize only those historical elements that contribute to that linear, progressive narrative. It’s too tidy. The real picture is much, much more diffuse and contingent. Ozment, again summarizing Nipperdey:

The larger lesson of these critiques of post-World War II historiography is twofold. Reading history from present to past is reading into it rather than learning from it. And equally distorting is the belief that history can be read as black and white. It is, as Nipperdey described, “homogenous, ambivalent [and] filled with contradictions that can never be resolved. Reality is not a system in which everything is uniformly arranged [but is] moved along by conflicts other than those a ‘continuity perspective’ selects—conflicts that do not fall neatly into progressive/anti-progressive or democratic/undemocratic categories.” 

Or, as I constantly take pains to remind my students, “History is complicated.” Good stuff from a valuable introduction. I look forward to the rest of the book, especially since Ozment embraces “the Tacitus challenge” to provide a view of Germans and Germany that reaches back two millennia to their encounters with Rome.

I’ve written about Whig history here many times before, in the context of presentism here, on useable pasts and what historians are actually good for here, and most recently here.

What are you doing here?

I’m currently reading Thomas Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45. In his chapter on the Weimar Era, Nevin describes how, after several years of writing for nationalist military magazines and other right-wing outlets, Jünger branched out in the intellectual company he kept:

He was friendly to the national Bolshevist Ernst Nieckish, to the Bohemian anarchist Erich Mühsam, to the putschist Ernst von Salomon, to the national socialist Otto Strasser, to the communists Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. These men could get together in a room and talk in a civil way. It is facile to conclude they were united in opposing the republic. In fact, strong in intelligence, they were political weaklings.

One sympathizes.

This is a rich cross-section of Weimar political persuasions, with these men belonging to groups that were sometimes literally fighting each other in the streets. Indeed, the left-wing Nazi Otto Strasser and the anti-Nazi nationalist Ernst von Salomon were veterans of the Freikorps. (Von Salomon lightly fictionalized his experiences in The Outlaws, which I read two years ago.)

Nevin goes on to describe the regular salons Jünger and others would hold throughout 1929:

Regularly on Friday evenings . . . Jünger and brother Fritz met at the home of Friedrich Hielscher on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. These gatherings usually included von Salomon, the publisher Rowohlt, Otto Strasser, the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen, and Vormarsch illustrator Paul Weber, soon famous for his prophetic drawings depicting Nazism as a cult of death.

Again—so far, so Weimar, especially when you look into some of the lesser-known figures and find that peculiar cocktail of playwrights, businessmen, and neopagans that could only make sense in that time and place. But then, just before describing how Joseph Goebbels himself began attending these meetings with the express aim of winning Jünger over to the Nazis, Nevin casually tosses this in:

The American novelist Thomas Wolfe also attended.

I, like Jim Halpert, have just so many questions.

In all seriousness, this was a great surprise, and something unexpected and new to look into. I’ve already had this out-of-print Wolfe biography, which gives good coverage to the years he spent in Germany, where Look Homeward, Angel was apparently a huge hit, recommended by a co-worker and Wolfe relation.

A reminder that one of the purest and strangest delights of studying history is stumbling across connections between seemingly separate things you’re interested in, connections that throw both subjects suddenly into a strange new relief—in this case, Ernst Jünger and interwar Germany and the Southern literary world of the same period.

The world of the day after tomorrow

As we close out 2022, here’s Ernst Jünger in 1922:

We have become old and comfortable like the elderly. It has become a crime to be or to have more than others. Now, unaccustomed to the strong intoxicants, men and power have become an abomination to us; our new gods are the masses and equality. If the masses cannot become like the few, then let the few become like the masses. Politics, theater, artists, cafes, patent leather shoes, posters, newspapers, morals, the Europe of tomorrow, the world of the day after tomorrow: the thundering masses. Like a thousand-headed beast, crushing all that does not allow itself to be swallowed up, envious, parvenu-like, cruel. Once again, the individual was defeated, and didn’t his own representatives betray him? We live too close to each other, our great cities are grating millstones, rushing torrents that grind us against each other like pebbles. Too hard, the life; don’t we have our flickering life? Too hard, the heroes; aren’t these flickering screen heroes enough for us? And how beautifully they flow, smooth and silent, these stories. You sit in the cushion and all the nations, all the adventures of the world swim through your brain, as light and gestalt as an opium dream.

This comes from War as an Inner Experience, a short collection of essays elaborating on some of the themes latent in Storm of Steel, and it is striking how closely in anticipates the concerns and arguments of the longer and more sophisticated The Forest Passage, published almost thirty years later. It is also striking how closely this description of Jünger’s world before and after the war resembles the world of a century later with its angry levelling, its conformity, its politics of envy, its proud and corrupt urbanism, and most especially its retreat from the real and the difficult into the easy and imaginary. Excessive screentime is not a new problem.

This passage prompted a lot of thinking on my part, but I only have time for a little of it here. It occurs to me that one could respond a couple ways to what Jünger writes here:

• A person of one persuasion might—ignoring the present-tense in the passage—say, “How prophetic! Look at how bad things have gotten!”

• A person of the opposite persuasion might say, “Things haven’t gotten worse! That you perceive this as applying to 2022 just proves that some people will always be speaking doom no matter how good things get.”

To which I say You’re both right—things have gotten bad, and we have not fallen from a golden age—because a century is too short a perspective from which to be viewing the trends between Jünger’s time and our own. Things have been bad in many of the same ways for a very long time. The problems of 2022 are different from those of 1922 not in kind, but in degree.

The Forest Passage was the first book I finished reading in 2022, making this passage of War as an Inner Experience a nice thematic bookend. So that I don’t end this year of blogging on too dour a note, let me refer back to a post from January about The Forest Passage, where I quote Jünger’s 1951 prediction of what kind of men the modern world would produce—as well as the beginnings of a remedy:

[M]an is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence. . . . Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

I’ve returned to this line and meditated on it many times this year. Living so that the gray and hopeless modern man will feel “what has been taken from him”—let this be our hope, motto, and prayer for 2023.

Notes on rereading Storm of Steel

Ernst Jünger as a Private early in the war, as an Iron Cross recipient in 1916, as a highly decorated officer wearing his Pour-le-Merite postwar, in 1920

Last week I ran across the following meme. It perfectly captures the chief contrast between two of the great authors produced by the First World War—Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel—as well as the perspectives of their books:

I laughed, of course, and gleefully reshared it with the caption “I never get tired of recommending Jünger to students precisely because they aren’t prepared for this.”

The “this” being the fundamental mismatch between what they expect thematically, didactically, from a harrowing war story and what they actually get from Storm of Steel. They’ve all gotten the canned antiwar messaging of high school reading lists (All Quiet being one of the books that created the template for a genre that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years), and have absorbed the structure or arc of any basic antiwar story without even realizing it.

But here’s a memoir, I tell them, in which the author essentially spends 300 pages telling you: The war was a continuous, 24/7, 365-day-a-year horror show. It was terrible from beginning to end. It was hell. And I loved it.

They don’t know what to do with that. And yet they always end up responding strongly to the long excerpt I have them read from the chapter on Guillemont.

But beyond being amusing, this meme got me wanting to reread Storm of Steel, something I’ve been intending to do for years. So the day I ran across this, I got exactly that edition* off my shelf and started reading. Four days later, I had already finished.

The following isn’t exactly a review, more a series of notes or observations as I reread it all the way through for the first time in ten years.

Tone

The most striking thing about Storm of Steel is its tone. I say striking because it takes hold of the reader immediately and strongly affects him all the way through—and yet it is difficult to describe. Google Ernst Jünger or Storm of Steel and take a few minutes looking at the jarring difference of opinions on his work. You’ll find people accusing it of being pro-war or jingoistic and others describing it as clearly antiwar. Neither opinion is based on any overt statement in the book, because Jünger never raises political questions and has nothing to say about the causes of the war or the justness of the techniques with which it was waged.

And so readers have to fall back on what he describes and how he describes it. That’s where his remarkable tone comes in.

I struggle to describe it myself. There is no one word for it. I’ve seen people describe it as cold or inhuman. These are flatly wrong, and critics who describe the book this way are usually assuming something about Jünger personally and projecting that onto the book. Dispassionate suggests itself, though Jünger describes plenty of high emotion, from elation to terror, and even describes himself weeping on multiple occasions.

Perhaps the best word is forthright. Jünger’s narration and descriptions, analytically observed and cataloged with his entomologist’s eye,** are bracingly, disturbingly forthright. He tells but does not explain, much less praise or condemn. These concerns lie outside his purpose, which is to relate what he lived through and what it was like. And he narrates everything in the book with the same unflappable forthrightness, whether his rookie mistakes on sentry duty, the miserable conditions of trench life, the joy of finding an abandoned store of wine, the variety and effects of British and French grenades, the corpses of the dead, the death of a little girl killed by British shrapnel, the excitement of going over the top, the terror of hand-to-hand combat, the experience of being hit by shell fragments, caught in barbed wire, shot through the chest.

All of these are narrated so bluntly, so matter-of-factly, that they seem to need no literary adornment, though Jünger was a skilled craftsman and carefully worked over his diaries to produce this book. The result is uniquely horrifying—and thrilling.

That’s the subject of the meme above, in which Remarque reacts to the horror in the expected, clichéd way, and Jünger decidedly does not.*** I think that’s also why so many people interpret Jünger so differently. War described this unflinchingly shouldn’t be exciting… should it? What do we make of someone who finds that he enjoys and excels at something so horrible? Hence the accusations of coldness or inhumanity, or, further, of jingoism or fascism or social Darwinism or worse.

Sympathy

But actually reading the book, one finds enjoyment of danger and conflict without bloodlust. Jünger describes killing plenty of enemy soldiers—often point-blank, intimately—but just as often he passes up the chance to kill an enemy. Interestingly, this happens more often in the later, wilder, more violent passages of the book from Operation Michael (Spring 1918) onward, and, in one episode late in the war, Jünger explicitly contrasts himself with a ferocious stormtroop leader he joins in an attack. Jünger, you might be surprised to learn by this point of the book, is invigorated by someone yet more eager than himself.

Similarly, Jünger takes no joy in destruction for its own sake. While never editorializing or effusively emoting over it, it is clear that the destruction of whole towns and villages and the annihilation of landscapes is a bad thing. And every time he encounters his enemies outside combat, he looks upon them with sympathy and even respect. Likewise with the French or Flemish civilians in the rear—he shows no disdain, no exploitative greed, no animosity whatsoever, and always interacts politely and even familiarly. Most often the civilians appear as friendly or affectionate figures, and Jünger presents their evacuation when the war reaches their homes as unfortunate. Again, without explicitly saying so.

Thrilling or horrifying? Ja.

All of which only brings us back, again and again, like Jünger himself, to the combat. And it is thrilling. Seldom have I read a true story with as much continuous excitement as when Jünger goes into the line with his company, endures British and French bombardment, gets stranded far ahead of the German lines and shoots his way out, is surprised by but manages to defeat a British Indian colonial unit far larger than his own, or, especially, when he begins the breathtaking, overwhelming assaults in the Spring 1918 offensive, with his men rushing over battlefields that have sat immovable for three years.

It is also horrible, with the destruction of lives by shrapnel, bullets, gas, infection, artillery—powerful enough simply to vaporize some men—and dumb accident all presented bluntly, in unstinting detail, like a naturalist describing lions taking apart a zebra. It could provoke what some on the internet call mood whiplash, but somehow Jünger conveys all of this to the reader as a sensible, coherent, unified experience.

One suspects that it really could not be thrilling without being horrible—and vice versa. This is a tension Jünger clearly felt and that Storm of Steel makes the reader feel like no other book, all of which is part of Jünger’s forthrightness. Most other war novels and memoirs skew toward the horrible; a few, mostly from long ago, toward the thrilling or exciting or even the morally uplifting.

Jünger refuses easier understandings of what he lived through. His work suggests that the people horrified by war are right. And so are the people thrilled by it. Throughout Storm of Steel, Jünger is describing a state, a condition, and how do you rage against a state? War just is.

Philosophizing

One gets all of this from reading between the lines, from letting the Storm pass over you, so to speak, and listening to the lightning and feeling the wind and the pelting rain. Jünger describes bluntly but doesn’t preach, at least not most of the time. There are isolated passages of reflection in which Jünger drifts into what Mark Twain—brutally but, to be frank, accurately—described as “the sort of luminous intellectual fog” of German philosophizing,† but he avoids the world-historical opining of Remarque or other explicitly antiwar authors.

One thinks of Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun, which begins as a brilliant modernist stream-of-conscious story and ends as a straightforward Marxist sermon, or the unfortunate Willy Peter Reese, who was killed on the Eastern Front during World War II and left behind an unfinished memoir so densely packed with philosophical and poetical musings as to be almost unreadable for long stretches.‡

The edition of Storm of Steel I read this time includes a short foreword by Karl Marlantes, veteran of Vietnam and author of the brilliant novel Matterhorn based on his experiences as a Marine platoon commander. Marlantes is the perfect person to introduce Jünger. Like Storm of Steel, Matterhorn is vividly and painstakingly descriptive and avoids overt philosophizing or didactic messaging, deriving its power from the forcefulness with which it presents what happened. Both have an absorbing, dreamlike quality once they take hold of the reader. In some places, both are a fever-dream.

Marlantes’s verdict on Jünger, with whom he feels an affinity despite also being separated by a vast gulf: he was “a different breed of man: the born warrior.”

Conclusion

Like I said, this is more a grab-bag of notes, observations, and meditations than a straightforward review. Like the war Jünger fought in and wrote about, Storm of Steel is fundamentally impossible to summarize and can only be described, and is therefore prone to misinterpretation. One has to experience it. And I strongly recommend experiencing Storm of Steel to everyone.

Notes:

*I do not own any German edition of the original, In Stahlgewittern, though that is on my wish list. This edition is the Michael Hofmann translation of Jünger’s last revision of the book in 1961. There is an online fan culture for the “original” 1929 English translation of Jünger’s second revision, though that translation is rife with inaccuracies and most widely available in a print-on-demand reprint that is apparently loaded with typos.

**The memoir that I think offers the closest point of comparison in tone and style to Storm of Steel—while still being a very different book—is EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed. Tellingly, both men became zoologists after the war.

***A further contrast between the two books that I’ll just drop here: Linguistically, their titles also suggest a key difference in tone and perspective. Remarque’s book, in German, is Im Westen nichts neues, i.e. “Nothing new in the West.” Im Westen is in the dative case, suggesting stasis and therefore pointlessness. Nichts neues, nothing new, is the book’s central, bitter irony. But Jünger’s title, In Stahlgewittern (a Gewitter is a thunderstorm), is in the accusative case, which in German suggests movement (one stands in a room datively, but goes in[to] the room accusatively). Grammatically, the title could just as accurately be translated Into the Steel Storm. This is precisely Jünger’s journey in the book, and where he takes the reader.

†To see more of Jünger in this mode, read Copse 125, a memoir in which he expanded upon one specific monthlong stretch in the trenches in the summer of 1918. The contrast is striking. I read it this past spring.

‡I read Reese’s book A Stranger to Myself a few years ago, also in a translation by Hofmann. Interestingly, where Hofmann includes as footnotes passages from Reese’s diaries—which, like Jünger, he had used as the raw material to construct a memoir—they are much more vivid, direct, and concrete than the memoir he based on them.

Polarization

Chapter 8 of The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger describes how rivalries and warfare between the Empire’s members (most importantly Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, and Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, Habsburg rulers of Austria), philosophical trends like Enlightenment liberalism, and external events like the French Revolution fatally atrophied the Empire, turning its institutions sclerotic and captive to the ulterior interests of its own elite.

The chapter is called “Political Polarization.” Here’s Stollberg-Rilinger’s concluding paragraph:

With the deaths of Frederick II in 1786 and Joseph II in 1790, the political situation in the Holy Roman Empire became thoroughly polarized. The Austrian-Prussian dualism affected every aspect of the Imperial constitution, and its opposing gravitational pulls, combined with the cynical confessional politics of both sides, tore apart the Empire’s institutional fabric. The weaker Imperial members could not extricate themselves from this polarization and had to choose sides. The powerful Imperial members had long ceased to base their authority and legitimacy on the Empire and consequently had no interests in the Empire as such. Thus, when the continuing existence of the Empire served their particular goal, they supported it, but when it did not, they showed no qualms in attacking or abusing it. At the end of the eighteenth century, all that was needed for the ultimate collapse of the Empire was one final external push.

Let the reader understand.