In his controversial first book In Stahlgewittern (1920) Ernst Jünger ascribes meaning to World War I not explicitly in ideological terms, as much as indirectly by using a highly metaphorical language. Jünger codes war in 32 image sequences in the fields of nature, human practice, culture, and anthropomorphism. Jünger's metaphors can be differentiated into various categories and characterized by their density, their relation, their interference and their variation. When two warring fractions, then, are described by the same iconic motifs, their oppositions seem to vanish. And when metaphors are confronted with their real referents, with signifying names and stereotyped jargons, their artificial character and epistemological function come to light. The implicit meanings these metaphors generate should not be simplified as celebratory aestheticising, nor refuted as fascist ideology. The individual codes are unequally subtle, they generate different semantics and they connote deviating political positions; they intersect and conflict. In Stahlgewittern they are both an expression of an ideological attitude as well as a symptom of profound unsettlement.
Ernst Jünger; War; Metaphor; Ideology