First published in 1934, reading from the translation by David C. Durst, published in 2008 by Telos Press, NY, 47 pages

Ernst Junger was one of the leading flesh ciphers fed into the hellish ‘grist mill’ that was the trench war on the Western Front to survive, and of those he was among the most decorated, and arguably the one who garnered the deepest insight from his war experience. Junger experienced the physical death of most of those close to him in the most gruesome circumstances and by the most inhuman means, and himself experienced a spiritual death and rebirth.

Ernst Junger, who was born in the 19th Century, experienced the worst the 20th Century could throw at a person almost exactly 100 years ago, and died just before the advent of this dystopian century, has left an important literary legacy. This legacy is currently being mined by agenda driven minds on the left and the right in and out of academia, in order to justify or demystify our current societal woes. This seems a tragically infantile course of inquiry.

Rarely have I felt a closer connection to a voice from another time and culture expressed through the written word. It seems clear to me that Junger’s fascination with the life of the American Indians as expressed in his military jargon and the fact that he wrote westerns [he was a German], is linked to his experience in the trenches. While many a mind—and even Junger for a while—attempted to apply sectarian meaning to his farsighted revelations, I see Ernst in a different light, as the font of postmodern science-fiction.

Now that there is an Arуan noose being knotted with my name on it, permit me to continue for you science-fiction buffs and writers that have not yet clicked on that red X.

Junger eventually wrote science-fiction, some of it so farseeing that it was laughed at in the ignorant day of its composition. The novel The Glass Bees , written 20 years and a world war after the essay On Pain , places much of On Pain’s themes in a narrative context about a former soldier trying to remain obscurely relevant in the post atomic world.

If we read The Glass Bees and go back to read On Pain, we can see the genesis of not only the character, but the setting as well. What Junger experienced in the trenches of the Western Front included all of the elements of the Native American warrior’s vision quest of nutritive, social and sensory deprivation while alone in a hostile environment which waxes omnipotent and omnivorous without a shred of knowledge or a care for the tiny isolated thing seeking clarity in its starving and lonely state. Just like the primitive warrior, Junger went temporarily insane and returned to the temporal world with a far-sighted and deep-seeing clarity, only the wilderness in which Junger completed his vision quest was monstrous and manmade rather than wondrous and naturally wrought.

One morning he woke from the sound sleep that had claimed him in the master bed of a fine house, only he was buried beneath a pile of rubble. The house had been under artillery attack when he drifted off to sleep listening to the storm of steel that had become the roiling sky under which he lived his hellish life. Perhaps, after his men had dug him out expecting to find his dead body, that was his awakening. Or maybe it was drinking wine in a field under bombardment? Perhaps these and the many other hellish episodes on the front were simply components of the insane nightmare he emerged from in the end to see the industrial world of an increasingly objectified humanity for what it was, while the rest of mankind marched blindly on.

Readers with passionate political or ideological feelings will be prone to distort Junger’s insights, adopting a place for him in their mind’s eye that might have earned his contempt. However, writers and readers of fiction—speculative or not—may look into Ernst Junger’s essays to find a stark metaphoric sense of man’s cyclic descent into and ascent out of its collective madness. Ernst Junger was a postmodern shaman in a modern age, painfully out of sync with his world.

Below are a handful of quotes from On Pain:

“…the new race we have called the worker…”

“…pain; it resembles life’s inescapable shadow…”

“…Bosch’s paintings, with their nocturnal conflagrations and infernal flues, resemble industrial landscapes…”

“…pain repudiates our values…”

“The seeds of destruction are indifferent…”

“…man grows accustomed to the sight of future expanses of ruin…”

“…sectarians and statisticians poured into the city as a vanguard of the infernal wind.”

“…territorial struggles the safest and most pitiful method of killing.”

“[a] heroic worldview is granted to the hero solely…”

“it [a smart bomb] is no longer guided mechanically but by a human device…”

“We are now in an experimental stage.”

“..the worker is accompanied by the discovery of a third sex.”

“…that deep sense of delight which takes hold when an ignoble demon is unmasked.” [comment on the dispersal of a mob by three men under his command]

“…the masses have been left only one liberty, the liberty to consent...this manufacture of consent signifies nothing other than the transformation of the masses from a moral agent to an object.”

“This second and colder consciousness reveals itself in the ever-increasing ability to see oneself as an object.”

“Photography, then, is an expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing.”

“Such accidents [deadly automobile and plane crashes] lie not outside but inside the zone of a new kind of security.”

“The power must be enormous that is capable of subjecting man to demands one places on a machine.”

Junger’s most prescient point was in the difference between modern sports competition, which is obsessed with measuring the human body as an instrument, and the ancient Greek concept of athleticism which was a spiritual striving to achieve transcendence. His observation is something that I only came to realize through my extensive research into ancient athletics. He noticed it at a glance.

Such is the power of the vision quest and why it was so treasured by primitive men who lived in a world un-afflicted by the illusion that man could affect its course.