Ernst Junger’s Phenomenon: Building “Beyond Oneself”

The article deals with the creative phenomenon of the German writer and thinker Ernst Junger and his literary works that have formed a special, monumental and heroic matrix of European culture. The essence of this matrix is shown through deducing its main task - that is, as the author proposes, to preserve the semantic bridgehead for depicting the heroic and the poetic, which is to confront the world of the simple nonspiritual demands of a consumer society. Contemporary European culture demands, as the author consistently proves, the monumental and heroic matrix. Since the second half of the 20th century, the European culture has found itself at a difficult civilizational crossroads: on the one hand, culture has been actively shaped by existentialism as an ideology of avoiding social transformation of the external world; on the other hand, European culture has been significantly pressed by the American culture of entertainment which invaded Europe even more after the end of World War II. As a result, Europe has more and more abandoned its heroic, monumental and historical heritage. The matrix of culture formed by Junger appears as a special edifice built on the notion of a person’s destiny and one’s spiritual capability revealed in a large-scale military confrontation, in the war of “spaces”. The article discloses the peculiarities of Junger’s monumental outlook on war as on a special cultural and historical landscape where an individual life is shaped into the destiny “beyond oneself”, into the fates of peoples and states. Junger’s creative phenomenon is considered on the example of his first and most famous book, Storm of Steel, which is essentially authentic to the monumental and heroic matrix of European culture. The unique and timeless value of this work is shown through its special historical and meta-cultural causality. The specific aspects of Junger’s literary philosophy are shown as an embodiment of a doctrine that provides spiritual exaltation for the one who has aspired to create. The cultural-philosophical analysis of Junger’s literary work undertaken in the article allows the author to draw to a conclusion about the heroic-monumental content of the European culture matrix, literally “encoded” in the compressed form of the novel Storm of Steel. As it follows from the research conducted by the author, there is a vital need in the culture for transforming the external world by the joint efforts of the heroes of one’s time, united by the task of a large-scale spiritual evolution of the humanity embodying their mission.

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