Ernst Jünger

"Ernstel. When someone in a family dies, it can seem as if a forward scout has been sent ahead at the approach of great danger. For wisdom prevails there, but we do not know the situation."

"The great struggles of our age take place beneath the surface: that is where the contest between the technician and the artist occurs. We have good weapons for this, such as Friedrich Georg’s Titans, which I received today from Vittorio Klostermann."

"In man is the world with its history and prehistory; in him is the labyrinth and sphinx which ask him the riddles."

"The process that we call modernity consists above all in the dissolution of evil; all amoralists are therefore, for us, particularly modern, and it seems to me that the process accentuates colour more than form, as befits the nature of the process of decomposition."

"My father had already retired before his forty-fifth year. After that date, no one should work anymore – that was one of his sensible thoughts, which I agreed with wholeheartedly, and which, in secret, I had even surpassed: It would be better not to begin working at all." ~ Jünger

Ernst Jünger in front of the Omar Mosque in Jerusalem. (1961)

Ernst Jünger on technology, language, and the end of classical war.

Jünger argued that the principal struggle was not between social classes or political parties but between man and technology. He was not anti-technological in a Luddite sense, but regarded the technological apparatus of modernity to have achieved a position of superiority over mankind which needed to be reversed. He was concerned that the mechanized efficiency of modern life produced a corrosive effect on the human spirit...Junger espoused a “metropolitan nationalism” centered on the urban working class. Nationalism was the antidote to the anti-particularist materialism of the Marxists who, in Junger’s views, simply mirrored the liberals in their efforts to reduce the individual to a component of a mechanized mass society. The humanitarian rhetoric of the left Jünger dismissed as the hypocritical cant of power-seekers feigning benevolence.