Apocalypse in Germany Between the World Wars (Part I)

During the 1920s Johannes R. Becher and many other expressionists attempted to give shape to the new man by modeling him after the Marxist doctrine of “socialist man.”¹ They acquired the principles of Marxism in order to solidify the goal of apocalyptic transformation after all those dreams of death and destruction that lacked an escape [a residue of the WW I era], and after the vague and confused visions of the new man.

They followed the party line of Communism in order to participate in the realization of this goal. As Becher admitted in 1924 in the new edition of his drama Arbeiter, Bauern, Soldaten:

Behold:

From worlds above I have sung

Blessed songs,

I have feasted on dreams, visions, raptures–

Now I march along in the march.²

Becoming part of the march of the Communist Internationale did not mean the renunciation of apocalyptic hopes; Becher held tightly to his aspirations:Who am I ?

I am a fighter,

Born to struggle for the redemption of all mankind.³

Becher had a particularly good sense for the apocalyptic essence of Marx’s doctrine that claimed “to change the world radically.”⁴

What possibilities for aesthetic shaping were available when the vision of the new man was tied to Marxist doctrine? Becher’s voluminous 1931 work Der grosse Plan: Epos des sozialistischen Aufbaus (“The Grand Plan: Epic of Socialist Reconstruction”), which celebrates the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union, provides information.

Here Becher presents the construction of socialist society as a new creation that brings forth a new society after the destruction of the old one; in his introductory poem he deliberately compares the founding of the Soviet Union to Genesis:

The land looked about

And saw that it was empty and desolate.

And Lenin designed a plan,

And the masses agreed to it:

Let there be

Electricity!⁵

Erasing Individuality: The Man Who Falls in Line

In accordance with the doctrine that socialist man, who would take the place of the bourgeois individual, is an element of the societal collective, Becher characterizes the new man as the “man who falls in line.” This “falling in line,” integration into the collective, appears as the most important characteristic of the new man. Not avoiding redundant for­mulations, but actually seeking them out, Becher repeatedly places it in the foreground:

But man falls in line,

The man who falls in line,

Goes his way,

And his way is the ascent of the masses

Ceaselessly–⁶

Thereby a functional aspect is stressed that absorbs the individual in the function of the whole. “The man who falls in line” is thus presented as a type, not as an individual. This is indeed what is intended. Only the collective counts. Thus the individual, should he die, can continue to live in the collective, since others participate in the same function and continue it:

A man died

Who fell in line.

The man

Falls in line.⁷

The form of Becher’s work corresponds to the abstraction of the new man in the collective. It is a “choral poem” (Chorische Dichtung), a work for several speakers and choruses that is designed for performance and was actually performed several times. The genre designation “epic” in the subtitle of the work, however, makes it clear that Becher did not want his work understood and realized as a drama in the traditional sense.

Like Bertolt Brecht, he uses epic elements in order to make “objective” what is presented–enumerations, reports, epic repetitions. He even includes statistics that otherwise make party congress speeches an epic matter:

Report of the deeds of the nineteen!

Report of the deeds of the two hundred young Communists!

Report of the twenty-five girls,

Led by Sosulja!

Report of the work of the party cell!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

You open up the inspection book

With the inspection figures

December to February:

4,240,916 tiles laid

2,788,886 square meters glazed

18,067 cubic meters of concrete poured.⁸

This form of choral poetry aesthetically realizes the apocalyptic renewal through destruction of the old in a manner similar to Brecht’s didactic plays.⁹ What is ideologically expressed in the presentation of the Schachty trial in 1930, in which alleged saboteurs of the building of socialism were convicted and sentenced, is formally expressed in the aesthetic elimination of individuality.

Becher does not allow identification with an individually designed hero; the persons that appear are thoroughly typified, not only “the man who falls inline” but also “red soldier,” “a farmer,” or “GPU.” Even Stalin, whose praise must not be omitted, becomes an abstraction:

There are names,

They no longer belong to the one

Who bears them:

Each one took it on

And passes it on

And transfers it–

In front of all deeds

It is carried–

No longer

The name

Of one man–

Name of millions

Name of an entire country

Name of an era.

So also this:

STALIN.¹⁰

Only the representatives of the old world that must be destroyed, the leaders of the kulaks and of the industry party, are clearly indicated by name in the list of dramatis personae. Thus, identification with individuals is prevented by formal as well as ideological means. Instead, the performance practice of choral poetry suggests to the individual identification with the collective. The identification figure is “the man who falls inline;” his path leads to the “chorus for the building of socialism” that represents the collective, and, at decisive points, proclaims the truth of the new world.

Attempting to Give Aesthetic Form to the Functional Man

The aesthetic practice of choral play has the liturgical character of a mystery-play even more than Brecht’s didactic plays. Its closeness to a mystery play is shown even in its content. The model for the “man who falls in line” is the “unknown soldier,” who in the First World War had been forced into the wrong file and remained on the battlefield. Becher has him rise from his grave and invite those now living to integrate themselves into the right file:

The unknown soldier

Goes ahead of the file

As a standard.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Unknown man,

Go to the front line!¹¹

All these factors–mystification regarding content, the liturgical form, aesthetic representation of the collective in the choir–cannot give the new man a definite shape beyond his function. The dry pathos of agitation of class struggle that has taken the place of expressionist pathos cannot obscure that fact; it fills the 114 hymns of this “epic,” which extends over two hundred pages, with infatuating boredom.

At the end, in a “Hymn to the Beginning of a New History of Mankind” that formally transforms the apocalyptic inversion of beginning and end in this work, Becher once again conjures the new man in pathetic words. But although he claims to create the new man together with his apocalyptic comrades, he must at the same time admit that he cannot even give its form aesthetic contours:

But man will yet

Be discovered,

And man will we

Create

In a form,

More powerful than all

Dreams and predictions,

And in a tempo

That leaves far behind

All reachable speeds–

But today we can

Only guess it,

Without forming a picture of it

And speechless–¹²

Attempts like that of Becher to design the new man as part of a superindividual unity, of the collective, and to give a new aesthetic form to this design, are typical for the period around 1930. As mentioned, during these years Brecht undertook similar attempts with his didactic plays, but he, too, was not able to prevent the aesthetic shaping of the new man in the collective from “coarsening and abstractions.”¹³

Both Left and Right Share Apocalyptic Visions

But the collectivization of the new man did not occur only from the Left. David Roberts has noted that toward the end of the Weimar Republic, Brecht as well as Ernst Jünger defended the abrogation of the individual in the collective.¹⁴ The additional comparison with Becher makes the similarities even more striking.

Although Jünger was doubtless not a Marxist, the conception of the world that he developed in 1932 in his book Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (“The Worker: Dominion and Form”) was neither conservative nor nationalistic. With good reason one could even call it socialist and revolutionary, were these designations not to mislead us into thinking exclusively in categories of ideology and party politics.

And in the spectrum of political movements in the Weimar Republic, Jünger’s position lay of course far from that of Brecht and Becher. What connected them to each other was the apocalyptic character of their reactions to the crisis of the time and the similarity of the form of their apocalyptic attempts at solving it.

If one looks at this form, the problem of drawing lines between conservative-revolutionary, national-Bolshevist, proletarian-revolutionary, Marxist and non-Marxist socialist positions becomes insignificant.¹⁵ To direct attention to the “form” of apocalyptic designs means to take into consideration the equivalences of aesthetic phenomena as well.

Although Jünger’s book is not a poetic work, but a treatise, an essay, the aesthetic dimension of its design is nevertheless of decisive significance. Jüngers Arbeiter is an apocalyptic vision although the book is presented as a sober diagnosis of the age. At first glance the author seems to convey dispassionately and thoroughly fittingly the political, societal, and cultural trends of his era. These are the most important phenomena that Jünger observes:

1. The world of the nineteenth century has collapsed, and the bourgeois society is “condemned to death.” Individualism, with its values, morals, its liberal concept of freedom, has become obsolete. The reverse side of deindividualization is the typification of life circumstances. In place of the individual, which found its identity in the peculiarity and uniqueness of its existence, appears a new figure, the “type” that endeavors to “find the features that are situated outside of individual existence.”¹⁶

2. The “triumphal march of technology” corresponds to the typification of the circumstances of life. Technology has become the dominant creative tool in the modern world. It pervades and alters all aspects of work and life; even the “famous distinction between city and country” exists in view of agricultural machines and chemical fertilizers “only in romantic space.”¹⁷

3. Hand in hand with these developments a new concept of work has taken shape that differs fundamentally from that of the nineteenth century. The new concept of work is total–it knows “no opposite outside of itself.” There is no longer a condition that could not be conceived of as work; even sports and leisure time are merely extensions of the world of work, no longer its opposite. The “worker,” who moves in this new world, is neither professionally nor economically nor socially defined, but rather a new type of human, who uses technology as a “tool for total revolution” and in this manner seeks a new order: the “realization of work as the total character” of the world.¹⁸

4. The above-mentioned developments necessarily result in the destruc­tion of traditional values and ways of life. The destructive element of these developments, and the increasing speed with which they take place, lead to a loss of security. The world becomes increasingly more dangerous; at any time, irruptions of violence are to be expected that appear like incalculable forces of nature and are thus seen by Jünger as “the elemental.” The First World War was for him the most obvious instance.¹⁹

Completing the Work of Destruction of the World War

That this apparently factual inventory has an apocalyptic character is betrayed by the structure of the universal “worldview” that Jünger con­structs from his observations. He views the replacement of the bourgeois world by other societal circumstances and ways of life as a “planetary” pro­cess in which a fundamental contrast is expressed, that is, the “difference in nature of two ages, in which a rising one devours a declining one.”

He sees himself and his world at the turning point from the old to the new world. The current crisis that already hides the new in itself has been introduced in his view as well as for all his apocalyptic contemporaries by the First World War.

The war is his crucial experience; in the experience of war the phenomena observed by him are concentrated as though in a focal point: the First World War set a work of destruction in motion that continues beyond the end of the war and takes on global meaning: “The globe is covered with the debris of smashed images. We are participating in the drama of a destruction that may only be compared with geological catastrophes.”²⁰

The First World War accelerated the “triumphal march of technology” in a murderous manner. It robbed the soldiers of their individuality and made them into a type. It turned fighting man against man into a technological “work” of impersonal destruction. Therefore Jünger in his book returns to war again and again in order to illustrate his “worldview.”

Ernst Jünger

The apocalyptic character of Ernst Jünger’s world view becomes even clearer when Jünger’s assessments and intentions are revealed. Although he claims to strike a sober balance, and although he stresses “that our task lies in seeing, not in evaluating,” he is thereby deceiving the reader. In fact he sees the destruction of the bourgeois age not objectively and unemotionally but with satisfaction. He welcomes it as all apocalypticists welcome the destruction of the old world. In the act of destruction he finds “the fiery source of a new feeling for life.”

The intention to complete the work of destruction and to extend it to the intellectual foundations, to the values and the entire work of education of the bourgeois age, is just as pleasure-loving as were the destructive fantasies of the early expressionists: “It is a part of the high and savage pleasures of our time to be involved in this work of demolition.”²¹ The motif for Jünger’s will to destruction is likewise of an apocalyptic nature. He desires the destruction of the old as a “preparation for a new and more daring life.”

There is no doubt that Jünger himself experiences the loss of meaning that he observes in his contemporaries:

“Entire libraries could be collected in which man’s complaint resounds in a thousandfold variations that he sees himself attacked from unseen regions and sees himself robbed of his meaning and his ability in every respect. This is the great, the only theme of the literature of destruction of our days.”

Jünger also reacts with an apocalyptic vision, with the vision of a “new humanity.” The perfection of the new man is reflected in his power: he appears “as the lord and administrator of the world, as a commanding figure in possession of a previously only dimly sensed absolute power.”²²

But what other attributes is the new man entitled to besides the dimly sensed–and that would mean secretly coveted–omnipotence? Jünger, too, has difficulties giving shape to the new man, although he makes this task the subject of his book, apart from the claim to power, as the subtitle of his book makes clear. It stands in harmony with his condemnation of all previous norms and values that he places the term form outside of science, morals, and aesthetics.

But how can one give body to form, that is, content and substance? Jünger hates illusions too much to portray the new man as an easygoing resident of an earthly paradise; he achieves his image of a new world and of the new man by getting involved with the developments observed by him, by accepting them as “historically commanding,” and by carrying them to the extreme: the world of the nineteenth century collapsed in the First World War; the spirit and morals of the past are thus obsolete and must be completely destroyed.

The “Total Work State” and Doctor Faustus

The workaday world tends to enter all areas of life, so Jünger sketches out the picture of a future “total work state.” Technological civilization leads to deindividualization, so Jünger approves the “attack on individual existence” and the “type” as the form of the new man.

In this manner Jünger is able to give the impression that he is only objectively claiming what is and drawing the logical conclusions; still he can sketch out an apocalyptic vision. With the claim “to increase the weight and the speed of the processes in which we are involved,”²³ he can even declare the impulse of apocalyptic activism and still pretend that he is merely arguing in the sense of developments dominating history.

In Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann described and analyzed the discussion of intellectuals critical of contemporary civilization; his analysis also covers Jünger’s position:

“Very strongly felt and objectively confirmed was the enormous loss of value which the individual had sustained, the ruthlessness which made life today stride away over the single person and precipitate itself as a general indifference to the sufferings and destruction of human beings.”

This carelessness, this indifference to the individual fate, might appear to be the result of the four years’ carnival of blood just behind us; but appearances were deceptive. As in many another respect here too the war only completed, defined, and drastically put in practice a process that had been on the way long before, and had made itself the basis of a new feeling about life. This was not a matter for praise or blame, rather of objective perception and statement.

However, the least passionate recognition of the actual, just out of sheer pleasure in recognition, always contains some shade of approbation; so why should one not accompany such objective perceptions of the time with a many-sided, yes, all-embracing critique of the bourgeois tradition?

“By the bourgeois tradition I mean the values of culture, enlightenment, humanity, in short of such dreams as the uplifting of the people through scientific civilization. They who practiced this critique were men of education, culture, science. . . . They might have said: Unhappily it looks as though things would follow this and this course. Consequently one must take steps to warn people of what is coming and do one’s best to prevent it.”

“But what in a way they were saying was: It is coming, it is coming, and when it is here it will find us on the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is even good, simply by virtue of being what is inevitably going to be, and to recognize it is sufficient of an achievement and satisfaction. It is not our affair to go on to do anything against it.”²⁴

The seamless transition from recognition to acceptance of what ap­parently commands history meant the renunciation of an independent, critical, responsible point of view and debased the putatively objective recognition. According to Thomas Mann: “It was however a fraud that carried with it the satisfaction of recognizing it as such. They sympathized with what they recognized; without this sympathy they could not have recognized it.”

The Exchangeable Nameless Soldier

In 1963, in a foreword of the new edition of his book Arbeiter, Ernst Jünger wrote about the book: “It represented and represents the attempt to reach a standpoint from which the events in their multiplicity and contrasts are not merely to be understood but also–although dangerous–to be welcomed.”²⁵

The will not merely to recognize the trends of the age, but also to accept them and even to place oneself in the forefront was in Jüngers view “heroic realism.” The heroic element in this attitude may be seen in the readiness to subject oneself to apparently history-commanding developments. Jünger saw this readiness, which must also include readiness to sacrifice, represented in outstanding fashion in the “unknown soldier.”²⁶

It is interesting that Jünger, like Becher, takes the “unknown soldier” as a model of the new man. Although Jünger and Becher may have evaluated the First World War differently from a political and ideological point of view, they both outline the shape of the new man from the virtue of “falling into line.” Because they raise the mere function to a model, they come–despite ideological differences–to the same conclusion: to an abstraction.²⁷

Like Becher, Jünger can outline the new man only as a “type,” as a category; the individual must be absorbed in the collective as an exchangeable nameless soldier: “Its virtue lies in its being replaceable, and that behind every fallen soldier a replacement stands in reserve.” Although this is merely an instrumental virtue, a virtue of replacement parts, for Jünger the heroism of the new man lies in that very fact: that he renounces contents, morals, and values and accepts mere function as his form.

Only in passing does Jünger consider the possibility of developing a new “work ethic,” but “in this case work concepts are applied to ethical concepts, not the other way around.”²⁸ Jünger’s work concept is purely functional: “Its standard is that of practical performance, performance without empty phrases.” That the work is done in a manner suitable for its function, whether on the battlefield or in production, and not what it is done for, is decisive.

The Pitiless Aesthetic of Technocratic Samurais

It is quite understandable that Jünger demands again and again to see the new man as “form.” But because this new man possesses no primary virtues such as justice and love, because for him it does not matter “whether something is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or false,” its functionality is put in the foreground.

Although Jünger rejects aesthetic evaluation of the new man–besides scientific and economic evaluations, that is, evaluations according to the traditional criteria of “beautiful” and “ugly”– the form of his “worker” ultimately becomes an aesthetic phenomenon by being reduced to its functional manifestation.

Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner’s judgment is correct: “profoundly formal, in a strict sense aesthetic values are essential–although it is the pitiless aesthetic of technocratic samurais. Opinions, ideologies, programs are mere smoke and sham; form, shape, attitude is everything.” The aesthetics of “shape,” beyond beautiful and ugly, good and evil, can develop only in celebration of functionality. In his choral poem, Becher raised “falling into line” to a liturgical act; Jünger propagates the “cultic status of work.”²⁹

The Face of the Worker

A form that only appears as function is fluid. It is thus no wonder that the qualities of Jünger’s new man may be found in various incarnations. For instance, the Trotzkyist Karl Radek, who until Lenin’s death had been a representative of the executive committee of the Communist Internationale in Germany, discovered, behind the “worker,” Lenin’s face.³⁰

The physiognomy of the worker, which Jünger shaped according to the image of the unknown soldier, reminds the German reader of other figures:

“The face that meets the viewer under the steel helmet or the pilot’s cap has also changed. In the range of its representations, as it may be seen in a meeting or in group photographs, it has lost its diversity and individuality, while it has gained in sharpness and definiteness of form.”

It has become more metallic, galvanized on its surface, the bone structure has become clearly defined, the features are singled out and tensed up. His gaze is still and fixed, schooled in looking for objects that have to be grabbed at high speed. This is the face of a race that is beginning to develop under the peculiar challenges of a new landscape and which the single figure represents not as a person or an individual, but as a type.³¹

The Aesthetic Form Realized by the Nazis

In the Third Reich, Jünger did not see his vision of the future realized, and the individual SA-man [member of Nazi Brown Shirts] did not in reality correspond to the image that Jünger had outlined. However, the aesthetic manifestation of the type that was presented by Nazi art and literature, and that acquired corporate form in the parade of brown, black, and gray battalions, resembled precisely Jünger’s “worker,” since the instrumental virtues of the “worker”–in fulfilling unconditionally a function, to integrate himself and even to sacrifice himself if necessary–were also the virtues of the new Nazi man: they inevitably produced the same aesthetic form.

We stand like brazen walls:

Worker Farmer Soldier.

The proud work will last.

We gather to the state.

On thundering machines

The heavy fist at the plow

We are all permitted to serve.

And that is enough for us.³²

These verses, by the Nazi poet Gerhard Schumann, are part of a choral poem, Feier der Arbeit (“Celebration of Labor”), that was originally performed in Stuttgart on May 1, 1936, the “Day of National Labor.”

Liturgical Celebration

As with Becher, the practice of choral speaking serves to realize aesthetically the virtues that are pronounced in words. Here, too, it is primarily the aesthetic representation of a function that comes into view; it corresponds to the character of a choral poem, as the literary critic Langenbucher stressed in 1935, that “the individual as an individual completely recedes, has meaning only as speaker of the group, while the group itself is portrayed through choruses.”³³

In Schumann’s Feier der Arbeit and in similar Nazi poems, it becomes even more clear than in Becher’s Der große Plan that the aesthetic repre­sentation of the merely functional is moving to liturgical celebration. The integration of the individual into the collective, “falling into line,” may best be realized as a ritual act. In this point, too, Jünger rightly foresaw the aesthetic practice of the “total labor state” when he stressed the “cultic status of work.” The aesthetic shape of the shapeless, of the new man without substance and without existential virtues, of the new man as mere function, is cultic ritual.

This is the reason so many marches, parades, and other celebrations of a ritualistic character played such an important role in the Third Reich: “From the struggle and commitment of the life of the brown battalions of the Nazi movement arise today the great common celebrations and solemnities in which the new German man is formed and shaped.”³⁴

Notes