Only, now we are in that future and all their prophecies have come to pass —  the Ice Age coming, the next world war, the four-minute warning, the tanks rolling in — Radiohead seem curiously out of sync. Having been vocally political for years, they have found themselves under attack for their position, or lack thereof, on Gaza and Israel. Last year, Yorke was heckled into briefly abandoning a solo live performance in Melbourne by a pro-Palestinian protester and has recently been taken to task by Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, for daring to play in Israel. The five members of Radiohead have meanwhile revealed that their differing stances on the conflict have nearly torn the band apart. Jonny Greenwood is married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan and has performed with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, though UK gigs were canceled after pressure from the BDS movement.

It’s possible to see the band’s determination to relive past glories as evidence of mature disagreement. But still, here’s another striking contrast. While the seemingly irreconcilable Gallagher brothers were able to put aside their differences earlier this summer, Radiohead’s lap of honor comes with rancor and sniping. As prophets of the disaffected, they have long evaded criticism. But nothing lasts forever.

It’s possible to see Radiohead’s current predicament as a mimetic crisis, to use René Girard’s term. This is when groups of people are faced with problems and contradictions that are insurmountable within the terms of their worldview. Rather than confront these realities, the group establishes consensus, catharsis and a purging of responsibility through the sacrifice of a scapegoat. Girard called this the “surrogate victim mechanism” (which already sounds like a great Radiohead B-side). Faced with apocalyptic horrors, unable to hold the perpetrators to account, we turn to surrogates to punish, which is a driving force of recent atrocities in the Middle East and the response in the West. It results in the transference of animus from the butchers onto, for example, musicians, writers and artists, complicit and supposedly equivalent in their silence. Without proportion, the lines of culpability are made to blur. Human beings operate according to mimetic desire in Girard’s view; they look to each other to find out what to believe and wish for. A generation had looked to Radiohead. Who better then to have as a scapegoat? The larger the sacrifice, the greater the coming harvest.

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When Radiohead first emerged in 1993, grunge was becoming a dead end, and a generation was searching for something more. Viewed as a one-hit wonder for their anthem “Creep”, Radiohead faced an existential crisis — but they had a crucial advantage over their American counterparts. Their focus was on disaffection rather than passive suffering or self-destruction. Disaffection was active, resistant, and could be approached with a much more complex musical palette. It could be used to create a portrait of an entire civilization rather than simply a tortured self.

The leap in quality from their underwhelming debut Pablo Honey (1993) to The Bends (1995) — via the abrasive, deliberately uncommercial My Iron Lung EP (1994) — was enormous. With The Bends, Radiohead ascended to a lofty plateau that they have occupied for almost 30 years, longer than just about any comparable rock band.

But Radiohead have never settled into a comfort zone in the manner of more well-adjusted bands, like U2 or Coldplay, say. The disaffection, which attracted hordes of No Logo-reading Gen Xers, was not a performance. The discomfort was real (see the 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy).

While mistrustful of the music industry, Radiohead trusted their fans to accompany them into weirder challenging territory, from OK Computer (1997), the perfect encapsulation of pre-Millennial anxiety, to the daring electronic ruptures of Kid A (2000) and the unfairly overshadowed Amnesiac (2001). These were not so much attempts to purge the normies accrued by The Bends as a conscious effort to kill the normie within. This was territory few fans expected or even knew existed.

In the years that followed, the only real musical misstep has been the curiously incomplete and claustrophobic The King of Limbs (2011). But with hindsight, it was the band’s most overtly political album, Hail to the Thief (2003), released in the shock and awe phase of the so-called War on Terror, its title an allusion to George W. Bush’s stolen election, that opened Pandora’s box.

Radiohead’s greatest lyrical strength has always been collage. While your Bonos and Bruce Springsteens were bogged down in glaringly inauthentic authenticity, hokey storytelling and self-righteous preaching, Radiohead found a way to be obliquely political, reflecting society back to itself like a fractured mirror. Collage was both the medium and the message, Yorke’s lyrical style anticipating the bombardments of disparate images and data that count now as daily life. It was also replicated in the art style Yorke developed with Stanley Donwood for Radiohead’s cover art (currently on display at the Ashmolean in Oxford).

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The use of collage meant Radiohead could avoid literalism and the moralism that often accompanies it. It also gave them a freedom to juxtapose divergent subjects and tones together. One of the clichés associated with the band is their focus on technology — the depressed airport tropes. But there are other lyrical tics that are just as prevalent. One is Yorke’s use of the archaic, whether from the religious past (“red crosses on wooden doors’” the Holy Roman Empire) or more recent ephemera (rag and bone men, toothpaste adverts). Medieval images recur, from “heads on sticks” to omens in the night skies, implying that for all our modern appearances we have not changed much from the days of the pillories and gallows. Fragments of bedtime stories and nursery rhymes are scattered throughout – the Cheshire Cat, Peter Pan, Henny Penny, the Boney King of Nowhere from Bagpuss — adding to the feeling of menace and stolen innocence. The distance from childhood dreams to “a pig in a cage on antibiotics” is damning.

Yorke is also adept at recontextualizing managerial speak to sinister effect: “Your services are not required,” “I will stop at nothing,” etc. On “Electioneering” from OK Computer, the juxtapositions of “Riot shields, voodoo economics / It’s just business, cattle prods, and the IMF” neatly encapsulate the anti-capitalism of that era. But it is still the poetic and enigmatic that truly stirs the heart, as in the anti-war anthem “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” inspired by one of Britain’s last surviving veterans from the First World War: “I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground…”

The cut-up style gave them space to be elusive and allusive and by critiquing everything, Radiohead may have felt immune to critique themselves. But the abyss has eyes too.

From its title onwards, Hail to the Thief felt too on the nose. It was partially understandable given the social context of the time — the invasion of Iraq was being launched despite widespread public opposition in the UK. It was not a time when subtlety felt appropriate and Yorke’s writing duly took on a more direct and overt approach. This resulted in powerful moments such as the Orwellian punk of “2+2 =5” and the later solo track “Harrowdown Hill” about the hounding and untimely death of the weapons expert David Kelly.

But the album’s most haunting moments are still notably indirect. “I Will” was inspired by the horrific massacre of hundreds of women and children by the US Air Force, whose stealth bombers directed two missiles down into the Amiriyah bomb shelter during the Gulf War, searing the images of victims onto the walls. “I will lay me down / In a bunker underground / I won’t let this happen to my children.” The song ends as a lullaby, chilling partly because of what it leaves out. It is one of their most delicate and devastating tracks and proof that you must first move the listener before you can convince them.

But one of the problems of assuming a political platform is that, like the Mafia, you can’t retire. You have to be perpetually engaged and anything less than constant, dutiful service can be interpreted as signs of callous indifference towards the world’s endless atrocities. With Hail to the Thief, there was more of a sense of the lyrics being cut-up lectures, with a distancing of the evildoer as “other”. But to be convinced of one’s own benevolence is to render oneself vulnerable, to blind oneself, and Radiohead have not been the only ones rattled by attacks from their own (see also Zadie Smith and Sleaford Mods, both pilloried for being insufficiently pro-Palestinian). At some point, all of us arrive at a moment when we feel like time travelers in our own lives, thrust into a future that makes little sense, still seeing the world in parameters that changed twenty years ago.

And these backlashes against our former righteous heroes are all taking place in the discourse chambers of the West, full of status-driven grift, bad faith, in-group policing, struggle sessions and stolen valor. Meanwhile the real victims of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Israel and elsewhere are buried in the earth or piecing their shattered lives back together.

Then again, in this sense, perhaps Radiohead never really did lose their ability to mirror the zeitgeist. That is both their gift and their curse. They predicted much of where we are today: the unwinnable trial of “Burn the Witch” (“if you float you burn”); the reflexive paranoia of “2+2=5” (“don’t question my authority or put me in a box”); even the mocking of the centrist in “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” (“I’m a reasonable man, get off my case”). The villain in Radiohead songs was always conveniently someone else. We never imagine that the problem might lie within us and those we elevate.

It is hard to imagine living through an apocalypse — but there are children in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Yemen who are afraid of the sky, and people mutilated in Cambodia, Vietnam and elsewhere, as a consequence of the decisions of our politicians. It is paralyzing to witness such obscene violence: “I have seen too much, you haven’t seen enough.”

Still, whatever knots Radiohead have tied themselves into, when I listen to “I Will”, I can hear an attempt to close the gap, however imperfect. There is a vital role for artists to speak truth to power, to advocate for those who cannot, and this is never easy. It carries a weight but equally so does not speaking. Living in exile, having fled the Third Reich, Bertolt Brecht wrote of the dark age in which he lived, when to speak of nature felt callous, even criminal. Such thoughts have not passed, nor should they while the dark ages still exist.

My own experiences as a child in Northern Ireland were slight compared to children in the 21st-century war zones of the Middle East, Sudan or Nigeria. But I did grow up surrounded by conflict, division and deprivation; I had a father who had been changed completely having been tortured as a child by the security services; and I was in an environment where “we know where you live” was not an idle threat. One of the things I sought from music was a place of escape, transcendence, sanctuary and renewal, beyond politics.

The moments I adore in Radiohead — and at times it really does feel like a secular form of worship — aren’t the most political. It’s when they transcend the rational: “Daydreaming”, “Reckoner”, “Pyramid Song”, “Lucky”, the out-of-body dissociative experience of “How to Disappear Completely”, the mothership of grief on “Decks Dark”.

For a moment, there is an existence outside politics, language, money, identity, anxiety, ego. The sound of a multitude of voices in a field in Glasgow in 2017, singing “Phew for a minute there I lost myself”. If recent concert footage is anything to go by, the O2 gigs will have such moments of transcendence. The utopian endgame of politics is an escape from politics. The rich know this and the rest of us glimpse it in moments — physical intimacy, nature, dance, silence, music, escape into something beyond the divisions of babel. A moment of communion with thousands of complete strangers instead of the orthodox path of dismantling one other. Radiohead are at an impasse, disaffected again, and it is no bad thing. If politics is the cultivation of false certainties, art is a thing built from doubt.

Explanations for this escalation in violence are framed in two distinct ways. The first sees it as a question of individual responsibility and free will. The perpetrator must assume sole culpability. If there are other factors at play, they are thought to be immediate ones: from bad parenting to the grooming cultures of gangs. There is no doubt some truth to this, especially the way gang culture promotes and glorifies violence, which is also inseparable from that of the drug economy. But most would also agree that when it comes to youth violence, given the age of the assailants, the account needs to factor in a wider question of blame. After all, can a child be held fully responsible for their actions?

The second approach focuses on those broader social conditions, or what sociologists would identify as embedded “structural factors”, which include various measures for deprivation. In this reading, insight is less concerned with dangerous individuals than with society more generally. This is the approach associated with Henry Giroux, whose focus on what he terms “the war on youth” addresses adolescent rage within a framework that considers social neglect and criminalisation. If we choose to emphasise not agency but social ecologies, if there is blood on our streets, it’s not just the perpetrators that should concern us.

To have a full sense of the problem, though, we must also factor in the conditions of austerity and the major cuts to youth services which once provided children with educated alternatives to gang lives. There is a clear correlation between cuts in funding after 2008 and the exponential rise in knife violence. Before the pandemic, an official Parliamentary report specifically highlighted the link. And since this hollowing-out of civil society began, there have been clear warning signs that something was being neglected, and was allowing violence to brew.

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Particularly instructive were the inner-city riots of 2011. Driven largely by youths in cities across the UK, these mindlessly destructive events demonstrated what the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall pointed to as revealing of nihilistic tendencies born of a real sense of alienation and a dispossessed future. The eminent sociological theorist Zygmunt Bauman concurred, referring to them as protests without aim, a causeless revolt for a post-political generation who no longer believe their future can collectively be steered in a different direction. As Hall wrote:

“Some kids at the bottom of the ladder are deeply alienated, they’ve taken the message of Thatcherism and Blairism and the coalition: what you have to do is hustle. Because nobody’s going to help you. And they’ve got no organised political voice, no organised black voice and no sympathetic voice on the left. That kind of anger, coupled with no political expression, leads to riots. It always has.”

Since then, some would claim that social alienation has found more genteel avenues to march along: there has been an exponential rise in youth protest, from concerns with ecology to the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet any close study reveals how the impetus and main participation of such movements remains a largely middle-class preoccupation. And too often, the lauding of this newly awakened generation affirms the wonders of digital activism, which has been a catalyst for a new kind of political community building. But digital technology isn’t solely a progressive catalyst — the same is directly responsible for compounding the violence we are seeing on the streets.

For middle-class youths, the internet allows them to advertise themselves as the new vanguard of digital activism, which from time to time sees them taking to the streets or damaging works of art without any real risk to their personal safety. For children from poor backgrounds, however, what social media exposes them to are glamorous lifestyles that will probably remain beyond all reach, while ensuring the visual records of their impoverished lives will continue to follow them around. Given their conditions of acute poverty, many young people prefer to live virtually, playing violent video games and scheming an escape from their surroundings. And when hit with the rub of the real world, these forces of brutality and social aspiration only merge and warp.

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That the digital revolution has diminished the wellbeing of children is now well-established. The addictive effects of technology and its impact on anxiety, mental health, attention spans, and general ability to navigate the world in a more tolerant and open way points to a generational problem which many would readily accept. And yet for too long we have treated the outlying social issues of our time as immune from this diagnosis.

While children, like the rest of us, have become forced witnesses to spectacles of violence and voyeurs to daily sufferings, they are also mirroring the brutalism and loneliness that fills digital landscapes. We live in an age defined by what I would call “hyper-primitivism”, occupying digital nervous systems of hyper-arousal, where everything is tethered to emotional reactions and responses in an excessively sensitised way. It smothers our genuine respect for others. And instead of bringing humans together, it propagates tribalism and division as creeds of hatred and intolerance. Individualism and rampant disregard becomes the norm. And emotion is liberated from responsibility.

The consequences are all too shocking. Online battles and disagreements that take place in virtual bubbles are finding their way into the material world: slashed bodies on digital screens make their way into the real world as bloodied corpses on our streets. And in a deeply tragic and symbolic way, one item has come to stand out as the symbol for this new reality. The weapon of choice, and perhaps the only kind of leveller on city streets: the zombie knife. Garishly coloured, unrealistically huge, they represent the merging of the artificial and the alienated.

The rise of the zombie genre in the violent virtual world is instructive. Born out of the Sixties concern with consumerist culture and the soul-destroying landscapes of the American shopping mall, it has also become one of the leading products defining the digital age for youth. Yet the zombie also evokes a particularly nihilistic sense of the world, where the only strategy is one of pure survival. As depicted in the “Men Against Fire” episode of Black Mirror, seeing humans as zombies facilitates dehumanisation, which makes the violence easier to afflict. We only need to look at popular games children are playing, from the Resident Evil franchise, The Last of Us, and Dead Island, onto other popular series like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto, to note the prevalence of slasher killings. The zombie knife brings this utter hopelessness into reality, a weapon for a place where children place no value on the lives of others.

Mindful of this, it’s hard not to see the current problem of youthful killings as a novel kind of nihilism, executed by children who no longer have any belief in the future. We know that the more we weaponise the world, the more we are likely to usher in its obliteration. That same logic should be applied to the streets. The fact that children carry knives is the surest indication that their means of navigating space is by being prepared for a violent ending, and taking another life should that eventuality arise.

So what can be done about this? It’s not enough to say we just need better regulation, and societies shouldn’t expect parents to carry the responsibility. When the young die, we only see the body lying in the street or on the hospital bed. But there are other forces putting them there. Knives have become more than a weapon. They cut open the illusions of a digital world.

Faced with this situation, it’s time that our society started taking seriously the desire for such violence. Hyper-primitivism is all about desire, creating emotional states on virtual spaces, which then leave us feeling helpless once we enter back into the real world. For young people who spend most of their lives feeling powerless, violence is attractive because it has real-world effects. Violence fills the void.

Perhaps it’s natural, then, that in later life, the sombre reflections of the middle-aged Jünger as expressed in his recently translated wartime diaries, a husband and father disenchanted with the modern world around him, now seem so compelling.

The diaries open in 1941, with the 46-year-old Jünger serving in an administrative capacity on the general staff of the German army occupying Paris. Initially féted by the Nazi party for the proto-fascist tone of his early works, Jünger publicly rejected the regime’s advances and came under suspicion as a result, his house searched by the Gestapo and the threat of persecution always hanging over him. A central figure in Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Jünger, who stated he “hated democracy like the plague”, had come to despise the Nazi regime at least as much. Ultimately, he was far too Right-wing to accept Nazism.

Jünger’s intellectual circle had aimed to transcend liberal democracy through fusing Soviet bolshevism with Prussian militarism, yet the illiberal regime that actually came to power was wholly repugnant to him. “The Munich version — the shallowest of them all — has now succeeded,” he wrote, “and it has done so in the shoddiest possible way,” filling him with dread that Hitler would drive Germany and Europe towards disaster and discredit radical alternatives to liberalism for generations to come.

Jünger’s two closest friends, the National Bolshevik Ernst Nieckish and the philosopher of law Carl Schmitt, each met different fates under the new Nazi order: Nieckish jailed as a dissident until his liberation by the Red Army in 1945, and Schmitt as the regime’s foremost legal theorist. Jünger remained friends with both. For Jünger, the internal exile, dissidence would come in the veiled form of his dreamlike novella On the Marble Cliffs, published on the cusp of war in 1939, in which he predicted the disaster and bloodshed the Nazis would bring in their train. Carefully monitored and shunted off to a desk job in France, Jünger spent his war as a flâneur along the quais of Paris, buying antiquarian books, conducting numerous love affairs, and recording his impressions of the city he loved.

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A fêted intellectual, and a lifelong francophile, he befriended the city’s cultural elite, socialising with Cocteau and Picasso as well as the collaborationist French leadership and literary figures such as the anti-semitic novelist Céline, a monster who “spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews — astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it”. For Jünger, Céline represented the very worst type of radical intellectual: “People with such natures could be recognised earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays they hide under the cloak of ideas.” 

While listening to Céline’s ravings about Jews with polite horror, Jünger was embroiled in an affair with Sophie Ravoux, a German-Jewish doctor, and helping to conceal other Jews in hiding, as well as warning the French resistance about imminent deportations. He records the first reports of mass executions in the east, shared among the army leadership, initially with disbelief and then with horror, disgust and shame. Generals back from the east recount meetings with figures like “a horrifying young man, formerly an art teacher, who boasted about commanding a death squad in Lithuania… where they butchered untold numbers of people”, or share third-hand rumours about “men who have single-handedly slain enough people to populate a midsize city. Such reports extinguish the colours of the day. You want to close your eyes to them, but it is important to view them like a physician examining a wound.” 

Yet Jünger’s detachment comes, at times, close to inhumanity. “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported,” he notes, immediately before examining antique engravings in an antiquarian bookshop: “Looking at pictures does me good when I’m upset.” He records, with genuine disappointment, the cold looks of hatred he is given by French shopgirls or diners in exclusive restaurants, yet feels their distaste is inappropriately applied to such a deep thinker such as himself, an  inward dissident after all. 

For Jünger, the real spiritual war is elsewhere: “I find myself entangled in very different conflicts from those of the hostile nations. The solution to those conflicts is secondary,” he writes with cool detachment, pondering his place in the catastrophe around him. “Ideologically, this Second World War is completely distinct from the first… And again the fronts have been drawn up completely differently from the way they look on the map.” 

What was the war about, then, for Jünger? During World War I, he declares, “We confronted the question of whether man was more powerful than machines”, but “we are now concerned with the problem of whether humans or automatons will dominate the earth”. 

By 1944 Jünger floated on the fringes of two army plots against Hitler, without ever committing himself. He had — correctly as it turns out — no faith in the capacity of the generals around him to bring their task to successful fruition. Flirting with the French and German resistance movements just as he served the regime he despised, Jünger lived his concept of the “anarch”, the internal exile who conforms outwardly to the spirit of the times while fostering his own inward, secret rebellion. As Cocteau later quipped, “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”

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A symbolist writer like the decadent Huysmans, Jünger experiences Allied air raids with the same distant, aesthete’s view, standing on a rooftop to observe the bombs fall. A lifetime experimenter with hallucinogens, he experiences the war as a vast trip: “When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theatre — pure power affirmed and magnified.” An entomologist and biologist by training, Jünger writes of his almost unnatural detachment that he needs to observe the war’s characters “as if these were creatures like fish in a coral reef or insects on a meadow”. 

But, then, insect and animal metaphors abound throughout the diaries. On almost every page, he records encounters with snakes, real or dreamed, seen in shops or museums or carved on statues. “The primal force of these creatures lies in the fact that they embody life and death, as well as good and evil,” he observes: “the serpent, a tellurian animal, is a powerful medicine.” Indeed, the snake appears as his daimon throughout the book, no doubt a reflection of his own cold-blooded, chthonic  nature. He literally basks in the sunlight reflected from Paris’ limestone walls, observing that its warmth “awakens a primeval little lizard’s soul in me”. 

Throughout the diaries, Jünger’s inner world appears richer and more meaningful than the war around him. Almost every entry begins with a summary of his latest dream, whether recorded as such or described in laconic terms as if it were a real event. He catalogues these dreams obsessively: “In the night, I dreamt of the trenches of World War I”; “Toward morning, dreams of earthquakes — I saw houses swallowed up”; “At night dreams of ancient cave systems on Crete, where soldiers were swarming like ants”; “Dreamed of being burdened with the corpse of a murdered man without being able to find a place to conceal it.” 

What is behind this obsession? Through dreams we communicate with the dead, he notes offhandedly, as well as our innermost self. Indeed, Jünger comes uncannily close to Jung throughout the book: he records strange omens and premonitions, claims that certain generals of his acquaintance are imbued with the power of prophecy, records strange synchronicities and deploys obscure alchemical metaphors. As the diaries go on and Germany’s fortunes worsen, the magical element begins to predominate. 

He discusses the esoteric writers Guénon and Eliade with Schmitt, debating the magic of the mandrake root and the symbolism of the moon, of the sea and of woman (to him a largely interchangeable category of person). Like Robert Graves, his English analogue, Jünger’s exultation with the First World War fruited into occult mysticism. He dreams of re-enchanting a world lost to technology and secular liberalism: “The ancient gods still stand before us with their magical presence, perhaps even in competition,” he observes, and he means this literally. 

Reading the Bible, he records his growing interest in Christianity over the course of the war. “What can one advise a man, especially a simple man, to do in order to extricate himself from the conformity that is constantly being produced by technology?” he asks himself: “Only prayer… In situations that can cause the cleverest of us to fail and the bravest of us to look for avenues of escape, we occasionally see someone who quietly recognises the right thing to do and does good. You can be sure that is a man who prays.”

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For Jünger, prayer is powerful magic, an efficacious antidote to modernity: “It possesses a conductive power.” Without prayer, “our freedom of will and powers of resistance diminish; the appeal of demonic powers becomes more compelling, and its imperatives more terrible.” 

Jünger’s reference to demonic power is here entirely literal. As the years pass, he begins to view Hitler — who he codenames “Kniébolo”— not as a malicious charlatan who has perverted his conservative revolution but as a genuinely demonic figure, possessing a “a certain diabolical greatness” that is “elemental, infernal” and who “feeds” on the forces unleashed by modernity in a way the “liberal intelligentsia” are incapable of understanding. “In their innermost inclinations,” Jünger observes, “minds like Kniébolo’s are bent on the most comprehensive homicide possible. They seem to belong to a world of corpses that they want to populate — they find the stench of the slain pleasant.” 

At the height of the war, while the Holocaust was a marginal concern of the Allies, Jünger would return again and again to “these atrocities perpetrated against the Jews, which enrage the cosmos against us”. The Nazi leadership are “demonic powers” channeling occult forces: “these people are probing the planet, and the fact that they choose the Jews as their primary victims cannot be a coincidence,” he writes, “Their highest-ranking executioners have a kind of uncanny clairvoyance that is not the product of intelligence but of demonic inspiration. At every crossroads, they will find the direction that leads to greater destruction.” Of Hitler, Junger writes that “I sometimes have the impression that the world spirit has chosen him in a subtle way. There are secrets here that other tribes will never comprehend.”

It is essential to remember that Jünger was an opponent of National Socialism from the far-Right: “Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.” For him, the Nazis were the worst embodiment of modernity, which turned humans into automata, mere machines without souls. His fear was that the Nazi interlude would discredit the search for a Right-wing escape route from modernity: “It is also Kniébolo’s role to discredit good ideas by carrying them aloft on his shield.” He writes that “when you have been party to such individual fates and begun to comprehend the statistics that apply to the wicked crimes carried out in the charnel houses, an enormity is exposed that makes you throw up your hands in despair”. An ultranationalist, Jünger writes that “I am aggrieved to feel such things beginning to influence my relationship, if not to my Fatherland, then to the German people”. 

As with the fatherland, so with war, whose seductive power captured the younger Jünger. On a trip to the Eastern Front, the 47-year-old Jünger is forced to duck for cover from Russian machine-gun fire: “I have long since passed the age,” he observes, relatably, “when I find such things amusing.” Awarded Germany’s highest military decoration by Ludendorrf at the age of 22, he reflects that the ancient general warned him “‘it is dangerous for one so young to be decorated with the highest honour.’ Back then I considered it pedantic, but today I know that it was right.” The older Jünger has lost his taste for battle’s glittering accoutrements: “I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much. Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” 

Eventually, Jünger’s eldest son, little Ernstel, is arrested by the Nazi regime for making defeatist comments about the war to his fellow sailors. He is later assigned to the Italian front on a dangerous anti-partisan mission. There, he was killed by a bullet to the head beneath Carrara’s marble cliffs; his father would never be certain  he was not secretly executed by the SS. “Such a good lad,” the heartbroken Jünger would write in his diary, “Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father. Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.” Whatever attraction war ever held for Jünger is now gone for good. Ordered back to Germany after the failure of the Stauffenberg plot, his superiors hanging from meathooks, he lived under constant threat of arrest and execution like the survivors of his elite Paris circle: “Some have been hanged, poisoned, imprisoned; others have been dispersed and surrounded by thugs.” 

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In his Saxon farmhouse, he reads and tends his garden as the war drives ever closer. The bombs he observed with cool detachment in Paris are less aesthetically appealing when they land on his own Hannover: “The places where I had lived as a child, as a schoolboy, as a young officer — all had been levelled.” Hurrying to the basement shelter with his young children under his arms as shrapnel whips around them, Jünger the warrior, who found liberation in its chaos, has been replaced by Jünger the husband and father, a helpless victim of war’s ever-spreading destruction.

In his farmhouse, he devotes himself to writing his Appeal to the Youth of Europe, an early call for the political unification of his beloved home continent as a potential fortress from the twin horrors of modernity and liberalism. His greatest fear is that with Germany defeated, Europe will succumb to liberalism, and its most soulless and destructive manifestation, Americanism. “America is conquering the places of ancient culture — I mean that aspect of America that has been more evident in modern Berliners with each advancing year.” He writes in horror “of American values, which will be further promoted by the obliteration of our old cities”, anticipating the postwar future, our present, with dread. 

Viewing the ruins of Dusseldorf, he fears that “this too is one of the stepping-stones to Americanism; in place of our old haunts, we shall have cities that are the brainchildren of engineers”. It was Jünger’s fate to command the detachment that surrendered to the first American tanks approaching his beloved Saxon village: “I sense the incursion of a mighty superpower into a completely crushed region… much of everything that used to motivate our deepest being perishes in this transition.”

For Jünger, America’s victory was Europe’s defeat, and that of any means of transcending liberal modernity. Like post-liberals today, he roots the horrors of the 20th century in modernity, observing that “the destruction of the Old World begins to manifest itself with the French Revolution… It is thus out of pure self-preservation that we might contemplate other systems of organisation than those established in 1789.” He dreams of transcendent modernities beyond the nation-state, “political systems in which progressive and conservative forces must be congruent”, where “conservative powers will no longer function as restraints, but rather as a driving force.”

This dream would not see reality in his lifetime. A dissident against the Nazis, Jünger refused to submit himself to denazification under British occupation, and found himself blacklisted as a result. Just as he did with Hitler’s regime, Jünger lived and died a dissident against the liberal regime that replaced it, outwardly conforming but never submitting. He despised democracy just as he despised the gullible and easily-swayed demos who had brought Hitler to power. And he despised the liberals who had given themselves over “completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”, setting in train the nightmares of the 20th century, just as he despised the “young conservatives who first support the demos because they sense its new elemental power, and then fall into the traces and are dragged to their deaths”. 

Yet over the decades, as the old warrior devoted himself to writing a series of dreamlike and prophetic novels, collecting insects and experimenting with LSD, his reputation soared. At the age of 101, in his penultimate year of life, Ernst Jünger converted to Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification, fêted by dignitaries like Kohl and Mitterand. The anarch died as he lived, both at odds with and celebrated by the disastrous century his life embodied, a dissident thinker of great esoteric power now thrust back to relevance by our own disordered times.