ERNST JUENGER
455
does not have, indirectly at least, military significance. . . . The arche–
type of organization is military order and not the social contract.
Germany must break out of the Versailles encirclement; but this
cannot
be
done by the conventional nationalist ideologies that are so
much romantic ballast, but only by realizing the new style of life:
identification of man with the machine. All ideologies-including the
concept of progress and the idealization of the individual-must be
abandoned as residues of a bourgeois culture now in its death throes.
"For a long time we have been marching toward a zero point. Only
those can march beyond it who have other, more invisible, sources
of strength." We must arrive at "that high degree of abstraction
which enables a modem artilleryman to look upon a cathedral as
nothing more than a sight for his cannon."
The bourgeois attempts to flee from a dangerous present into a utopian
security. He continues to live in the past, but only as, during inflation,
the old coins are exchanged without retaining their old value. The weak–
ness behind slogans like "Law and Order," "Popular Community," "Pacif–
ism," "Economic Peace," "Reconciliation"-in a word, behind these last
appeals to the rationality of the nineteenth century-becomes obvious:
these values belong to the vocabulary of the bourgeois restoration.
The postwar years are distasteful because they still contain a medley of
values:
They are characterized by a curious combination of barbarism and hu–
manitarianism, like an archipelago where the island of the cannibals lies next
that of the vegetarians. Extreme pacifism and tremendous increase in
armaments, luxurious prisons and the hovels of the unemployed, abolition
of the death sentence while at night the Whites and Reds cut each others'
throats-all this has a fantastic quality and reflects a vicious world where
the appearance of security has been maintained only in certain hotel lob·
hies.
This picture (should one call it utopia?) is frightening. The in–
dividual, creation of Christian and liberal ages, vanishes in the era
now on the horizon. All values have been transvalued, and we begin
to live now not in an anti-Christian but a post-Christian world. The
bourgeois, handicapped by his addiction to the old values and ideo–
logies, cannot cope with the machine. Only those in harmony with
the tool, the
worker type,
can survive into the future. This new type
can be observed
in
the millions of soldiers, all looking alike under
their steel helmets, in the industrial worker, anonymous behind his
goggles and protective shield, in the pedestrian directed by traffic
lights. The machine, impressing its style on men, makes life mathe–
matical and precise, and man himself but an element
in
the field of
energy in which he moves. The climate of the new age also reject:':!
the old value of free inquiry:
