The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger

Author:Ernst Jünger
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780914386582
Publisher: Telos Press Publishing
Published: 2016-01-09T22:00:00+00:00

Notes

Translator’s Preface

1. Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1993), pp. 145–46.

2. Ibid., p. 147.

The Forest Passage

1. Almost certainly intended in the Heideggerian sense. Tr.

2. A remarkable foreshadowing from the 1950s of the viral, almost instantaneous dissemination of news (and fear) around the planet via the internet today. Something similar may be said for the foreshadowing of twentieth-century terrorism in the paragraph that follows this one. Tr.

3. Black and red flags: likely an illusion to the NSDAP, since including these colors seems otherwise superfluous to the meaning of the sentence. The described transformation would also correspond to pre–World War II Germany: to the choice of the groups for persecution (Jews, gypsies, communists, etc.), to the new well-being that ultimately heralded war and catastrophe. Tr.

4. Polycarp (69–155) was a second-century Christian bishop of Smyrna. He died a martyr, burned at the stake for refusing to burn incense to the emperor. Tr.

5. Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630) was a French nobleman, militant Protestant, and chronicler. His epic poem Les Tragiques (1616) is regarded as his masterpiece. He served Henry IV of France (Henry of Navarre) in the religious wars of the time between Catholics and Protestants. In reaction to the king’s opportunistic conversion to Catholicism, he retreated to his landed estates. Tr.

6. Petter Moen, a conventional middle-class Norwegian who worked as an insurance agent, joined the Norwegian resistance when the Germans invaded his country. He became the editor of an underground newspaper in Oslo until his arrest in 1944 by the Gestapo. They detained him for 214 days, 75 of them in solitary confinement, and tortured him. Without writing materials, he used a pin to prick out words and sentences on toilet paper. Regarding his complete lack also of reading materials, he noted in this laboriously produced diary: “It’s very useful to be without reference books. I must find the solution myself.” Though apparently without previous interest in theology or metaphysics, he found faith “for one second or two” on his thirty-second day of confinement, but he lost it some days later when other prisoners joined him in his cell. He died in September 1944 with the sinking of the transport ship SS Westfalen. His diary was translated into English in 1951. Tr.

7. Helmut James Graf von Moltke was an aristocratic German jurist and devout Christian who was involved in subversive activities against German human rights abuses in German-occuppied territories. He later founded the Kreisau Circle resistance group, which acted against the government of Adolf Hitler. The Gestapo convicted von Moltke on invented evidence of conspiracy and executed him in January 1945. His Kreisau Circle discussed primarily the development of moral and democratic principles for a post-Hitler Germany, in some respects enacting the ground-preparing role for new freedoms that Jünger also describes in this work for the forest rebel. The letters Jünger refers to are presumably those secretly written to his wife Freya, also a member of the Kreisau Circle, while he was imprisoned in Berlin. English translation: Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya: 1939–1945, trans.

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