If anything, Jünger’s writings, along with those of other thinkers of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, seem to foreshadow the political ferment and geopolitical fault lines of today. As Dugin observes in his rambling and only partly comprehensible essay, published last Friday, “if we turn to Jünger’s idea of total mobilisation in a Heideggerian manner, then we get an existential theory of mobilisation”, as “when death is before us and we don’t run away from it and we don’t turn our backs on it, that’s when we exist authentically. In a sense, this can be described both as a total mobilisation on an existential level and as what I would call an awakening.”

Just as, in The Worker, Junger foresaw the fusion of man and technology in the trenches of the First World War heralding the death of bourgeois liberal values and the birth of a new “age of Titans”, Dugin asserts that Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine is “awakening” Russian society, shifting it from a period of “inauthenticity” to one of “authenticity”. In Dugin’s assessment, Russia’s overt enemy, the Ukrainian people, barely count, now being something less than human. Instead, in a wild perversion of Schmitt’s thought, the war has revealed “the very real, absolute Enemy of the human race, to which only theological categories are supposed to be applied” — because “we thought we were fighting enemies in Ukraine, but we ended up in hell”.

That enemy, that hell, is us: “the current postmodern globalist West”, a society “degenerating as humans” where “transgender parades already hardly allow us to understand what kind of species we are dealing with”. Ultimately, “posthumanist formations, i.e., cyborgs, are to follow” because “Western globalist circles are the last transitional state from human being to algae”.

While Dugin’s work is often carried by Russia’s state propaganda channel RT, his influence within Putin’s regime has been vastly overstated. If anything, the apocalyptic rhetoric he applies to the Ukraine war has greater currency in the West, particularly among the American populist Right. Back in 2014, as noted by the Ukrainian scholar of Radical Right intellectual thought Anton Shekhovtsov, now an influential Twitter personality in the war’s online front, Dugin created a narrative which consisted of four major ideas: “first, that Atlanticists brought Nazis to power in Ukraine thus declaring a war on Russia; secondly, that the interim government was a Nazi junta and had no legitimacy; thirdly, that Ukraine did not exist anymore; and finally, that Russia must act decisively to prevent the Atlanticists from establishing control over the entire territory of former Ukraine”.

These arguments are now as wearily familiar to anyone who follows the war on English-language social media as they are to Russians themselves. When Tucker Carlson can describe, as he did last week, Zelenskyy not as the democratically elected leader of a nation fighting invasion, but instead as “sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock”, he has adopted, consciously or not, a Dugin-like framing of Russia’s aggression against some existential evil. If Dugin remains an outsider of sorts in Russia, then, he has nevertheless helped to shape both the contours of the war in Ukraine itself and international perceptions of it. For a marginal outsider, Dugin certainly seems influential.

In any case, as the editor of CodaStory Natalia Anteleva correctly observes, “the argument about whether or not Putin personally reads Dugin is somewhat irrelevant because Dugin is plenty relevant to the leaders of the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist movements, who consider him a teacher”. As Shekhovtsov notes, Dugin’s previously state-funded Eurasian Youth Union (or ESM) was prominently involved in the initial 2014 stages of the Ukraine war, and “strengthened the pro-Russian separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine, fuelled ethnic and social tensions, launched disinformation actions and declared alternative political centres”. Dugin’s ESM acolytes took up prominent positions in the new separatist republics: Aleksandr Proselkov, leader of the ESM’s cell in Russia’s Southern Federal District, became Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), before his mysterious death in 2014, while ESM activist Andriy Purhin became the DNR’s first Vice Prime Minister.

Other fringe political figures on the edges of Dugin’s circle achieved prominence in both stages of the Ukraine war: the Russian adventurer Igor Girkin or “Strelkov” is a familiar name to Ukraine-watchers, first as the DNR’s Minister of Defence, and latterly as a military analyst and harsh critic of Putin’s shambolic prosecution of the current invasion. But for Dugin, Girkin is something else entirely, the mystical embodiment of “the Russian myth”, a “fearless Russian Orthodox Warrior heading to a Sacred War on his own accord” who by seizing Slovyansk “like D’Annunzio in Fiume” appeared on history’s stage as “the ghost of a true Russia” to guide Russia into its glorious Eurasian future.

With his opaque political philosophy merging both the esoteric Traditionalism of René Guénon (whose acolytes include both our own King Charles and, seemingly, Ukraine’s chief of intelligence Kyrylo Budanov) and an interpretation of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution which tips more sharply into fascism than the original, Dugin embodies the strange ferment of ideas which attended the fall of the Soviet Union. As the scholar of Traditionalism Mark Sedgwick observes of the philosophy, “in the West, it has generally appealed to intellectuals whose understanding of modernity has led them to disenchantment with it and alienation from it”. This makes them marginal figures in a broader political scene, but “for those with experience of Soviet modernity, however, Traditionalism could very easily seem to present an entirely accurate analysis”. After all, “nowhere was the loss of the sacred more dramatic than in the officially atheist Soviet Union, and nowhere else were the two substitute cults of science and progress more assiduously advanced, and nowhere else was the cult of progress more obviously illusory.”

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Sedgwick’s insight is the key to understanding the influence of radical Right-wing, anti-modernist and Conservative Revolutionary thought on both sides in the Ukraine war, lost in the tiresome and intellectually sterile debate over which side contains the greater number of “fascists”. Kept isolated by Communism from the development of the post-war liberalism which still maintains a faltering hold on Western political discourse, as Communism discredited itself, radical intellectuals in the post-Soviet sphere turned their attention to the last great intellectual attempt to transcend liberal modernity, the Conservative Revolution, until recently discredited in the West by Germany’s subsequent, disastrous Nazi interlude.

In this story, Ukraine’s largely Russian-speaking second city of Kharkiv, birthplace of both Ukraine’s nationalist Azov movement and hometown of Dugin’s early patron, the Russian National Bolshevik provocateur Edvard Limonov, plays a significant role. Even now, Kharkiv functions as the organising base for the Azov-linked exiled Russian ultranationalists and neo-Nazis fighting Putin’s invasion through their incursions into Russia’s Belgorod. As the Kharkiv writer Anatoly Voronin observes, the city’s status as an ethnic and cultural borderland between Russia and Ukraine forged an unusual hybrid identity, and a form of nationalism quite distinct from that of western Ukraine, where both Russian and Ukrainian radical Right intellectuals interacted with each other in shaping their worldviews. As Voronin asks: “how do we explain the generally good relations between Dugin and various Ukrainian Right-wingers in the 2000s? No one in ‘Azov’ ever denied the profound influence Dugin had on young [Azov leader] Andriy Biletsky.”

Dugin’s influence, funded by Putin’s government, within the Ukrainian dissident political scene of the 2000s included cooperation with the poet and Right-wing activist Dmytro Korchynsky of the Orthodox fundamentalist Bratsvo party (whose militia is now fighting Russia in the east; as an aside, a young American volunteer with them I met in Kharkiv complained his fellow fighters dragged him to Orthodox mass early every morning). Dugin even found favour with the fascinating, complex Oleksey Arestovych, until recently Zelenskyy’s strategic advisor, but back then a Eurasianist opponent of Ukraine’s relationship with Nato and the West. Dugin’s original ambivalent stance on Ukrainian nationalism allowed for a degree of influence perhaps surprising now, broken only by his sudden, dramatic turn towards denial of Ukraine’s very existence. Nevertheless, though counterintuitive today, fringe Right-wing political ideas then possessed both unusual reach and strange, overlapping ambiguities.

The influence of both Dugin and of the German Conservative Revolution is perhaps best embodied in the fascinating political career of the Azov movement’s intellectual star, the Kharkiv native and “first lady of Ukrainian nationalism” Olena Semenyaka. Described by her professors at Kyiv-Mohyla University as “a brilliant student, reserved, and introverted but committed to her work”, Semenyaka’s PhD thesis — “The Transformation of the Conservative Revolutionary Subject in Ernst Jünger’s Work, from the Worker to Anarch in Ernst Jünger’s Creativity” — revolved around Jünger’s relevance to the new world she saw dawning in the 21st century. As the analyst Adrien Nonjon observes, “Semenyaka rose to popularity in the Duginian Traditionalist movement thanks to her article, ‘Conservative Revolution as Mythological Modernism’, published in volume 4 of Aleksandr Dugin’s anthology, In Search of the Dark Logos. She was invited to speak at the international conference Against the Post-Modern World, which was organised at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) in 2011 by the Tradition Center chaired by Dugin”.

While Semenyaka now dismisses her relationship with Dugin as merely a one-off meeting, her early work, such as 2011’s “Transformation of Ernst Junger’s alternative to the bourgeois individual”, approvingly cites Dugin’s definitions of Conservativism, just as her geopolitical worldview, like Dugin’s, derives from the British political theorist Halford Mackinder’s concept of the World Island, far more influential in Russian Eurasianist thought than it ever was in its homeland. Dugin’s shadow looms over Semenyaka’s writing and speeches, which can often be read as a conscious rejection of her former mentor following the two widely divergent paths each took as a result of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. Just as Ukrainian and Russian commentators battle to convince international observers that the other side are the real fascists, Dugin and Semenyaka compete to convince the European and American radical Right that the other side are the real liberals. Yet each, despite their two respective nationalist projects being locked in an existential war against each other, share many of the same reference points in the Conservative Revolution, particularly their use of Jünger’s The Worker as a lodestone.

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Often dismissed as a Nazi, Semenyaka more accurately occupies a far more interesting intellectual space as a Conservative Revolutionary whose concept of a pan-European political sphere distinct from an Asiatic Russia and a liberal American-led West derives directly from Jünger’s political thought. As Semenyaka writes, “the point of Ernst Jünger, who offered one of the earliest and most insightful descriptions of the coming totalitarian orders in his interwar classic treatise The Worker… is that the difference between the two regimes which rivalled for the planetary domination in the 20th century and the post-war neo-liberal order, in fact, is not so striking.” For Semenyaka, the value of Jünger in understanding the present is unparalleled: “it is his creativity that is considered the brightest example of the alternative of the Enlightenment project of modernisation and is widely known for its futuristic and even forecasting value”.

As she wrote in her intellectual autobiography published on the American White Nationalist website Countercurrents, the Azov movement offers a means to translate her academic interests into real-world politics: “I could say that what I studied in theory, I developed in practice. This is the Third Way, the Conservative Revolution, but revived for today. All of these theorists were also advocates of pan-Europeanism, and that is what our projects are all about.” As she remarks in an explicit rejection of Dugin’s work, “our goal is clear: it is the creation of the sovereign military and political Paneuropean bloc (confederation) which continues the classic tradition of the European third geopolitical way. That’s why Prof. Dugin is wrong by pretending by means of his Fourth Political Theory that the third geopolitical way is no longer possible and that all attempts to restore the European superpower, geopolitical subjectivity and the leading positions in the ‘unipolar’ world are ‘anti-Russian’ encroachments in the service of American imperialism.” For Semenyaka as for Dugin, as she observes in her essay on Black Metal, the goal of the Conservative Revolution is “to cancel not only the era of Enlightenment, but also that of Renaissance and Reformation. In other words, it aims at building the New Middle Ages”.

Mocking Girkin’s marginality, Semenyaka instead posits Azov’s National Corps as the engine of history, the “vanguard of the Ukrainian nationalism of the new generation which offers the alternative both to the West and Putin’s Russian Federation.” In Semenyaka’s assessment, “According to Jünger’s forecast, the titans will reign throughout the entire 21st century, but then the gods will return, casting the titans in the Tartarus again, but also completing the eventual decline of the anthropocentric history which began with WW1.” It is in this process that the Azov movement can play its historical role, she believes: “That’s why, on a global scale, as pompous and surreal as it may sound, we will feel a relief only when we hasten the coming of a new metahistorical aeon.”

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When I interviewed Semenyaka back in 2019, she had just published her own translated selection of Jünger’s writing to be distributed among soldiers at the front. At the time, I thought her prediction of a coming great war against Russia, in which the West would be embroiled and in which Ukraine would forge a deeper cultural and defence relationship with Poland and the Baltic states as part of her Intermarium project, was a wild and unlikely fantasy. But the Azov movement, though still politically marginal, has been significantly boosted by Russia’s invasion, in numbers, military power and in its reputation as dogged defenders of the Ukrainian homeland, as during the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal. Azov offshoots, such as Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade and Kharkiv’s Kraken Regiment, play prominent roles in the war, and can reasonably hope to trade it for political capital — however the war ends.

Whatever the strange ambiguities of their earlier relationship, Dugin and Ukraine’s nationalist intellectuals like Semenyaka are now bitter opponents, locked in an existential conflict against each other, in a sort of esoteric Rightist shadow war distinct from but embedded within the far greater Ukraine tragedy. When the Russian state accused Azov of assassinating Dugin’s daughter Dariya Dugina — a still unproven claim — it only highlighted the strange intertwining of Russian and Ukrainian radical Right-wing politics. On the one hand, these are wildly obscure intellectual currents on the fringes of Right-wing thought; on the other, Western liberals cheering on the Russian Volunteer Corps’s raids on Belgorod, like American Republicans regurgitating Dugin’s portrayal of Zelenskyy as an incarnation of evil, have each found their own political personas influenced by them, demonstrating the strange ability of fringe politics to shape the wider world.

While Dugin’s apocalyptic worldview is now worryingly indistinguishable from that of the Russian state as a whole, Semenyaka’s, while fascinating, remains marginal in Ukraine. Yet each embodies the unexpected resurgence of esoteric Rightist ideas from the early 20th century in a hypermodern war that looks set to define the contours of modern Europe. Far from obscure 20th century marginalia, Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution looks more relevant than ever: sometimes, history is written on the fringes.

Power politics was a barbarous relic of a rejected past; the world was destined to move towards harmonious free trade, in which Europe’s hard-won moral clarity would guide lesser civilisations, still trapped in history, towards the light. Timid, comfortable, fearful of change and obsessed with petty rules and regulations, once Europe reached middle age with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was happy to observe a changing world tutting from behind its net curtains, the parish council Nimby of continents. Half museum and half retirement home, Europe grew fat and complacent as history was made elsewhere. But from a cave in the depths of Asia something stirred, which would restart history: Covid fatally weakened the boomer continent, and now something new is straining to be born.

It is striking that it took a disease which primarily affects the elderly and unfit to finally make Europe’s leaders notice what had already been clearly apparent: that the continent’s willed deindustrialisation in favour of China had left it weak and helpless, entirely dependent on the charity and vigour of stronger empires. The conjunction of Covid with America’s worst period of internal political disorder since the Sixties also fed a perception among America’s rivals that the global hegemon was itself ailing in turn, fuelling Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Yet if Putin’s war has been markedly unsuccessful on the battlefield, in a pyrrhic sense it has proved the validity of the central assumption driving it: that the post-Cold War world is dead, and we already live in a multipolar order.

In the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia, even America’s allies remain happy to trade with Russia and submit their disputes to Chinese arbitration, viewing the Ukraine war as a distant European border skirmish irrelevant to their interests, and America’s role as global policeman lost to history. Only now are EU leaders, such as its chief diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles, able to face the dawning realisation that “many countries see the geopolitical influence of China as a counterweight to the West and therefore to Europe. They will seek to strengthen their own room for manoeuvre without picking sides”. The latest war in Europe thus helps mark the boundaries of a European civilisational space, delineated by solidarity with Ukraine. For decades, Europe’s leaders flattered themselves that their moral worldview was universal, fated by history to reshape the entire world. Instead, Europe’s values and its interests are revealed as utterly parochial: merely the customs and assumptions of one civilisation among many, and a weak one at that.

It took both crises, Covid and Ukraine, to awaken Europe from its post-war dream. Dependent on China for industry, Russia for energy and America for security, Europe suddenly realised its vulnerability within the new order. As Macron recently wrote in the Financial Times: “because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war Russia decided to inflict on Ukraine, we have acknowledged our strategic dependencies and decided to act to reduce them… We are no longer naive.” Rejecting the idealistic free-trade dogma that had dominated European thinking for decades, Macron further argued in a landmark speech that “we are not destined to become consumers of American industry”, nor is Europe’s relationship to China a choice between economic subjection and conflict: “Rather than trying to fight the Chinese, we are going to do the same as they do: defend our European sovereignty and produce what we need in Europe.”

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In a strange way, Macron’s civilisational dream of Europe’s role in a multipolar world echoes the foreign policy thinking of the two giants of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger. Writing from very different perspectives, just as Germany’s bloody attempt to unify the continent began to look doomed, the two friends tried to visualise a new place for Europe in the world. For Jünger, in his long essay “The Peace”, begun in 1941 and secretly circulated amongst the Wehrmacht generals plotting to assassinate the Führer he so despised, the historical result of the Second World War would not be a reversion to the pre-war order of squabbling nation states brought about by Versailles, but instead the consolidation of the earth’s continents into great civilisational power blocs: “For the first time, the earth as a globe, as a planet, has become a battlefield, and human history presses on towards a planetary order.”

This was a moment of great danger for Europe, Jünger warned: “Napoleon prophesied that in our day the world would become republican or Cossack. If he had foreseen our situation in detail he would have said ‘American or Russian'”, for “at the moment when Europe raises itself to the status of a continent, the gravitational pull of America will be­come more perceptible”. For Jünger as for Macron, history presented the mother continent with a great and fateful choice: vassalisation at the hands of one of the two great empires, or an autonomous civilisation state.

Instead, for Jünger, Germany’s defeat was also the moment for “Europe’s Declaration of Independence”, a time when “the old frontiers must be broken down by new alliances, and new, greater empires must unite the nations”. Here, Jünger does not sound markedly different to Macron in declaring that “Europe must become a partner in the great empires which are forming on this planet, and are striving towards their final form.”

Indeed, like Macron, the Francophile Jünger believed this should happen under French tutelage, as “for long the spirit of that country has been striving towards greater unity in which its labours too will be crowned”. Like Macron’s summoning of the Napoleonic spirit, Jünger celebrated the previous failed champion of a great continental empire: “For this reason secret shrines in honour of Napoleon have been maintained in all lands — for in that prince the old dream of one great monarchy had seemed to be realised.” No wonder Mitterand, meeting the Right-wing warhorse turned idealistic prophet of European unification in 1984, would remark that “Napoleon would have made you a marshal”.

Never quite rejecting his early Right-wing radicalism, the later Jünger directed it towards a pan-European identity and political Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification and the Franco-German alliance. Jünger’s ideal European union indeed prefigures our own, where “there should be uniformity of organisation in what­ever concerns technical matters, industry, commerce, com­munications, trade, weights and measures, and defence”, where “the state as supreme symbol of technical achievement takes the nations in its toils, yet they live in freedom under its protection”. Like his fellow Nietzchean, Macron, who views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the catalyst to reform Europe into a continent capable of defending itself and preserving its unique civilisation, Jünger observes that: “it is thus that nature fashions shellfish, with a hard, gleaming embossed shell and a delicate interior in which the pearls are hidden. In this differentiation lies the welfare of states and the happiness of individuals.”

Jünger’s vision of a new world order divided into great continental empires reflects the influence of his best friend, the jurist and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Unlike Jünger — a fierce and public opponent of Hitler’s regime — Schmitt famously attempted to find a starring role for himself under the National Socialist order, quietly rejecting it only when Germany’s defeat looked certain. It is ironic, and perhaps based on a cursory reading of Jünger’s earlier works, that while Jünger’s reputation is clouded (or among some fans today, enhanced) by his early Right-wing radicalism, Schmitt’s dalliance with the regime whose atrocities created the post-1945 order has only granted his work a certain transgressive glamour, particularly among the Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals who first revived his thought.

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In The Nomos of the Earth (1952), Schmitt observed that the decisive event in world history came at the end of the 16th century, when “the British island detached itself in ideal terms from the destinies of the continent to undertake its own adventure on the seas”. The result was the creation of great seaborne empires, finally culminating in the United States, with the power and will to impose their order on the entire planet, relegating the Europe from the engine of world history to the scene of pitiless and total wars. In detaching itself from the continent, Britain set in train a sequence of events that would lead to Europe’s subordination to Britain’s monstrous child, America.

Yet for Schmitt, in his later writings, there were alternate historical paths on the horizon. As perhaps his most famous modern acolyte, the post-Marxist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, observes, Schmitt looked beyond the bipolar Cold War order he would not outlive to a world where the likely end of bipolarity, American hegemony, would in turn be superseded by “a new global order based on the existence of several autonomous regional blocs”. For Mouffe, a multipolar landscape of civilisational blocs would likely be more stable and pacific than American unilateralism, by dividing the world into distinct but broadly amicable spheres of influence (Ukrainians and Taiwanese, both unwilling members of other empires’ chosen spheres of influence, are unlikely to share her enthusiasm).

A critic of the War on Terror (whose own Schmittian basis has famously been argued by Agamben), Mouffe argued that the potential for world peace brought about by a “a pluralistic world order” is why, “against the illusions of the universalist-humanitarians, it is urgent to listen to Schmitt when he reminds us that ‘the political world is a pluriverse, not a universe’”. Rejecting cosmopolitan idealism, Mouffe argues that we should abandon “the illusory hope for a political unification of the world”. Trying to turn the world into Europe is futile and dangerous: “instead of the vanguard in the unification of the world, the EU should be visualised as a regional pole in this multipolar world”.

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In this multipolar order, as Jünger observed of a united Europe acting as the shield of nations, the EU would, “instead of being seen as announcing the end of nation-states, [provide] the conditions for their survival in a globalised world”. The continent’s survival in this post-cosmopolitan order, Mouffe declares, would entail a rejection of the ideology of free trade, which has meant that “an increasing number of vernacular industries have been destroyed, as local producers are unable to compete with cheap imports” from China and other rival powers. Instead, it is necessary to “to defend a Left-wing form of European protectionism”, in which it is essential “to envisage economic development according to a regional perspective”. This vision, of a protectionist, reindustrialised Europe is precisely that now championed by Macron, who recently announced that “we cannot be the last remaining market without an industrial policy”. In the stirring conclusion to his Financial Times essay, he declared that:

“We have to take back control of our supply chains, energy and innovation. We need more factories and fewer dependencies. ‘Made in Europe’ should be our motto. We have no choice, as sovereignty is intertwined with the strength of our democracies… We Europeans can prove that our continent, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, can once again be the home of flourishing industry and shared progress.”

The post-1945 order, in the simplistic folk wisdom that only fully took shape with the fall of the Soviet Union, adopted the comforting myth that the Allied victory in the Second World War, like the Western victory in the Cold War, was a product of superior liberal-democratic forms. Shedding their overseas possessions in the decades following the war, Europeans flattered themselves that the age of empires was over, but that even as their physical power waned, their moral example would still guide the world.

Instead, the consolidation of the world into continental empires was only beginning. Political morality does not come into the picture: Europe’s conquest and post-war division into two rival spheres was simply the product of America and the Soviet Union’s vast industrial output, and the abundant raw materials, derived from ruthless territorial expansion and genocide in the preceding centuries, which enabled them to feed their factories.

Power flows through a million factory chimneys, and both Covid and the war in Ukraine have revealed to Europe’s feckless and misguided rulers how weak our continent has allowed itself to become. But both crises have also finally brought that fragile, complacent boomer, the world born in 1945, to a close: the entire worldview of its political avatar, Angela Merkel, now stands repudiated, even if no fully-formed replacement has yet arrived. First there were two rival empires, then one unchallenged hegemon, and now a series of potential challengers stand on history’s stage. Belatedly, European leaders are realising that unless it can defend itself, and provide for itself, then as Macron warned, “Europe will disappear.”

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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The death of the French intellectual

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

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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Why anarchy has come to America

By Mary Harrington

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.