Translator’s Introduction

The essay translated here, Ernst Jünger’s Das Blut (“Blood”), was first published in Die Standarte on April 29, 1926. Die Standarte was a short-lived yet unmistakable organ of the postwar nationalist milieu in Germany, created by writers and veterans who had endured the fin de siècle collapse of the old European order after the First World War. For this generation, that collapse marked a rupture far deeper than military or political defeat. It signaled the exhaustion of the bourgeois age and exposed the hollowness of the old gods and idols that had governed the preceding century, revealing in its birth pangs the first stirrings of a new life seeking expression across a landscape increasingly unmoored. Jünger’s early writings belong to this unsettled interval, an interregnum in which Weimar Germany lived without inner bearings and confronted an upheaval that reached into the foundations of its being. Within this atmosphere he began creating a language capable of articulating the forces that shaped the men of his time and the deeper currents that were transforming the conditions of life.

Das Blut belongs to the moment in which Jünger no longer regarded his wartime experience as material for neutral recollection, but as an initiatory ordeal that opened into deeper strata of existence, where the collapse of inherited measures demanded a new metaphysics capable of bearing the weight of what had been revealed. In this climate he sought concepts adequate to that extremity, where the safeguards of civilian life dissolved and the hidden orders governing man’s relation to danger became perceptible. For Jünger, war revealed itself as a passage into regions where life is stripped to its foundations and the true measure of a man is laid bare. Unlike the vivid and often visceral immediacy of In Stahlgewittern (“Storm of Steel”) or Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (“War as Inner Experience”), Das Blut turns toward the metaphysical significance of the ordeal rather than its surface phenomena.

This development belongs to Jünger’s broader undertaking during the mid-1920s to establish the foundations of a new political and spiritual orientation. Das Blut was later included, with the essays Wille (“Will”) and Charakter (“Character”), in the cycle he intended as Grundlagen des Nationalismus (“Foundations of Nationalism”). These writings record his effort to form a disciplined conceptual vocabulary drawn from the energies released in the war and from the dissolution of the nineteenth-century liberal anthropology that had shaped the preceding century, at a moment when an emerging human type (Typus) no longer answered to the assumptions of the bourgeois age. During these years he contributed more than a hundred essays to periodicals of the Conservative-Revolutionary milieu, a corpus overshadowed by his later autobiographical and fictional works despite being central to his formation. He wrote regularly for journals associated with the Stahlhelm and other veterans’ organizations of the German right, addressing an audience shaped by the ordeals of the early century and attuned to the new order of values arising from them.

The intellectual climate in which these essays took form was shaped by the broader debates circulating within the German right, whose tendencies were varied and often divergent. Within this landscape Jünger developed his own interpretation of the upheavals of the age, turning increasingly toward the phenomenon he later named Totale Mobilmachung (“total mobilization”), a condition in which the structures governing ordinary existence lost coherence and the modern world disclosed itself as an immense apparatus of technical coordination. For Jünger this signaled a transformation operating beneath formal political arrangements and announcing the emergence of a figure tempered by the discipline of technique and the accelerating rhythm of modernity. His engagement with Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism deepened this interpretation, which he regarded as an opening in which new commands could arise while the older metaphysical assumptions of the West no longer retained binding force.

Amid these developments, the concrete setting in which Jünger’s early essays appeared remains essential for understanding their initial resonance. Die Standarte itself was edited by Franz Schauwecker, a veteran and prominent voice within the nationalist youth movements, whose earlier book Der feurige Weg (“The Fiery Way”) had crystallized the ethic that animated postwar activism. The journal became a gathering point for younger nationalist writers seeking to give expression to a new ethos tempered by hardship and marked by the experiences that had shaped their generation. Its brief existence reflects the tension that governed these circles, an intense intellectual energy joined to the fragility inherent in movements born from defeat and upheaval. Schauwecker later intended to publish Jünger’s Grundlagen des Nationalismus through his Aufmarsch publishing house, though the project lapsed before it reached its final form.

Taken together, Jünger’s interwar essays prepare the ground for the later architecture of Der Arbeiter (“The Worker”), where he advances the worker as a metaphysical and historical Gestalt through which the age understands itself. In that book he presents the worker as the organizing principle of a transformed world, a configuration forged by technical imperatives and the conditions of mobilized life, whose ascent signaled the dissolution of the earlier bourgeois image of man. The emerging order is characterized by a discipline attuned to the rhythm of modern life and by a heightened relation to form corresponding to the intensities of the epoch. Within Der Arbeiter, the forces first encountered in the crucible of the early twentieth century become the opening phase of a wider metamorphosis occurring under the accelerating pressures of the era. Read sequentially, these early essays reveal Jünger turning toward the ordeal of modernity as the moment in which inner rank comes into view and the lineaments of the new order begin to stand forth.

Seen from this perspective, the vocabulary of Das Blut belongs to the same intellectual horizon. Terms such as Blut (“blood”), Schicksal (“destiny”), Form (“form”), and Erlebnis (“experience”) constitute a coherent conceptual structure that resists reduction to casual English equivalents. In Jünger’s usage, blood denotes a field of fate and formative pressure in which a man or a people encounters its inner law. The meaning of these terms grows from his attempt to apprehend the convergence of biological reality, the impersonal forces that impose themselves upon it, and the tempering of consciousness at the point where existence is driven back to its primordial ground. In this setting, biological reality refers to the inherited dispositions through which a man confronts danger and destiny; metaphysical force names the pressures that descend when familiar structures fall away; and consciousness appears as something annealed in that encounter, fashioned by what becomes visible only when the veil of ordinary measures has been torn aside. In this translation these terms are rendered with consistency, and where English offers no precise analogue, the priority has been to preserve the internal discipline of the original rather than dilute it through modern phrasing.

End of Translator’s Introduction

Our solidarity must be a solidarity of blood. That is the first demand. But what is blood? The question is at once simple and difficult, for within it lies the profound tension between knowledge and feeling.

Whoever truly cherishes life senses what it is: blood held in common. He also knows how much harder it is to speak of those moments when this elemental fluid stirs in unrest. Blood does not reveal itself through words. Language is a net through whose mesh the richest and most vivid catch escapes as it is drawn from the depths into the light. Language contains meaning as a house contains light; only through the windows does the glow escape. The mysterious and the unspoken, once fixed in a word, turn pale and colorless. Even the richest language is only the ornate frame for hidden images visible to the inner eye alone.

Blood lies deeper than anything spoken or written. The movement of its bright and dark currents summons melodies that can plunge us into sorrow or lift us into joy. They draw us toward certain men, landscapes, and objects, or else cast us away from them. That unknown force which reveals itself in the contour of mountains, in the horizon of the plains, in the drifting of clouds, in the laughter of men, in the motion of beasts, in the colors of a painting whose master has long departed, in short, that singular accent life imparts to all things, flows from the uniqueness of blood.

Things stand before us, but only the strength and fullness of blood endow them with value, giving them meaning and symbol. Eyes may see, ears may hear, hands may touch, and the mind may follow the thoughts of others; yet blood alone decides whether what appears remains dead matter or enters into a living relation with us. Through nerves and senses we perceive what is; through blood its inner significance is disclosed. By the senses we know; through blood we grasp. Through blood we feel ourselves foreign or akin.

Blood speaks the kinship of man to man. In an overcrowded age we can scarcely grasp the joy that seizes a man when he discovers such kinship, for the relentless rationalization of mankind has dulled the sharpness of his instincts. Only in solitude, only in the stark encounter with racial contrast or the elemental forces of nature does this slumbering sense awaken again with power. Even the sober Stanley,1 after his long passage through the Congo and his years among ebony-black figures, confessed that the sight of the first white man he met filled him with a rapture that was overwhelming.

Yet even within modern civilization, even in a world rendered increasingly mechanical, the influence of blood does not release us. A handshake, the meeting of eyes, the timbre of a voice, the cadence of speech, gait, bearing, movement, and expression, through a thousand imperceptible signs apprehended before thought intervenes, we speak the language of blood. It speaks through us as well, summoning or repelling, drawing together or driving apart. Beneath every mask, I and You still understand one another through a secret tongue older than all articulated speech. And wherever such understanding is possible, something greater must exist, a medium embracing both, as the ether bears sunlight through the void. This is fate, binding solitary beings into kinship and a shared meaning.

Through our senses we grasp appearances only, never the true bonds, never the subterranean web of roots from which new life continually rises, before which the individual is almost nothing, for only these roots possess generative force. Blood grants us a premonition of this truth, awakening within us the affirmative sense of a deep inner belonging.

A community in which this feeling is absent is already dead, whatever its outward appearance. A people without a bond of blood is only a mass, a body devoid of the power to summon the forces of higher life. Within such a collective there is no miracle; its brilliance cannot sustain a man in his hours of weakness, and only mechanical laws remain. It is not worth living for, not worth dying for, not worth bringing children into, not worth any exertion beyond the narrow orbit of the individual. It no longer bears destiny, nor the blood that affirms it.

Only two elements confer upon life its intensity, its dignity, and its tragic depth: Destiny and Blood. The one is an unseen power, the other the natural force through which that power becomes manifest. Blood without destiny is an uncharged strength, a magnet without pull. Purity of blood, noble mixture, all the qualities men once revered, are nothing without a great destiny to test them. Destiny is the touchstone by which blood reveals its worth.

For this reason we reject every attempt to press race and blood into rational schemes. To demonstrate the worth of blood by means of intellect or modern science is to make the servant answer for the master. We care nothing for chemical reactions, transfusions, cranial indices, or the other profanations by which this age flatters itself that it has fathomed the nature of man. Such efforts slide inevitably into pedantry and decay, throwing open the gates for intellect to intrude upon a realm of values it can neither comprehend nor guard.

Blood asks for no certification. Least of all does it require proof of man’s distance from the ape. Blood is the fuel consumed by the metaphysical flame of destiny. Its chemical composition may be whatever it will; let the learned dispute beneath their microscopes. They cover pages with trivialities, while life fills the boundless sphere of destiny with something wholly other.

The magnetic force of blood demands no outward sign. Its value is symbolic rather than logical. Those who bear it recognize one another across distances, like two burning points in the night that sense each other long before their paths converge. They are attuned to their destined hour, as migratory birds feel the shift of the seasons long before any instrument devised by man gives warning. In all things they heed the inescapable summons of destiny, long before chroniclers commit its necessity to the page. Blood knows with unerring precision where danger lies and where kinship calls. It sees without light.

Blood-kinship emerges only where blood is bound by the threads of destiny. Where these bonds are absent, family, nobility, and peoplehood lose their substance, and the primordial ties become fodder for the mockery of emancipated minds and cynical pens. Everything is leveled and torn apart, spread thin across the surface; every living distinction is flattened, and the sense for the unique withers in the wasteland of abstractions, that lost sense for organic unity. The individual no longer feels an insult to his community as a strike upon his own face; great deeds cease to kindle pride in the whole; no one recognizes himself in his leaders, and that intoxicating unity which once filled cities with the highest jubilation of life fades into memory.

With the fading of the higher, timeless life there also disappears contempt for death, for that contempt rests upon the knowledge that the individual possesses worth only insofar as he stands within a greater, supra-personal existence. The will to sacrifice, that divine force which reconciles man to death, is extinguished.

For blood, movement stands higher than any goal. Blood knows nothing of the modern superstition of progress, for its will is turned always toward the Absolute, in every land and in every age. What counts is inwardness and an indestructible force. Therefore we honor the heroes of all epochs and all peoples. Our reverence for Rome does not diminish our esteem for Hannibal. In Napoleon we behold a sovereign eruption of living energy. We honor the great figures of the French Revolution in whom blood still surged with fullness, from Mirabeau2 to Robespierre,3 each standing rooted in his own center; and violence ceases to repel us only when the cold figure of Barras4 appears. Our own revolution, too, would have been worthy of veneration had it been borne by the fullness of blood.

We too shall not be judged by the goals we chased. Goals are reached, tasks accomplished, and quickly replaced by others, for such tasks are only the transient shell in which destiny takes momentary form. Destiny endures, and only new blood affirms it again and again in ever-renewed expression. We shall not be measured by success, but by whether we grew equal to the necessity laid upon us. Leonidas5 and his band were annihilated, yet in them the Absolute was realized more purely than in any triumph. Nowhere and by no means can life attain a higher consummation.

No, they will not ask whether we prevailed, but with what constancy we affirmed our “Yes,” and with what ardor our will burned. And we shall be able to say with pride that even to us it was granted to approach the Absolute along a new path of destiny. Every battleship that went down with its flag still aloft bears witness for us. From admiral to stoker, all who sank with it were heroes, bound by blood and lifted beyond fear of death. The men of the trenches bear this testimony as well, confronting the onrushing machines and falling beneath them, passing into a higher existence with fierce affirmation.

All this is inscribed in eternity. And yet we stand within a world transformed. Our blood reaches toward new aims, thirsts for ideas in which it may intoxicate itself, seeks movements through which it may expend its strength, and sacrifices through which it may transcend its limits. Blood longs to partake in the great love; it wills to live for it and to die for it.