Fantasies of Friendship: Ernst Jünger and the German Right's Search for Community in Modernity

This dissertation argues that ideas and experiences of friendship were central to the thinking of German radical conservatives in the twentieth century, from the pre-WWI years to the emergence, beginning in the 1970s, of the New Right./nI approach this issue by examining the role of friendship in the circle around the writer Ernst Jünger (1895-1998). Like many in his generation, Jünger's youthful alienation from a "cold" bourgeois society was felt via a contrast to the intimacy of personal friendship. A WWI soldier, Jünger penned memoirs of the trenches that revealed similar desires for mutual understanding, glorifying wartime comradeship as a bond deeper than words and a return to the "tacit accord" that supposedly marked traditional communities. After 1933, Jünger turned from a right-wing opponent of democracy into a voice of "spiritual resistance" to the Nazi regime. For Jünger and other non-Nazi Germans, friendship was a crucial space of candid communication and nonconformity to the norms of the Third Reich. Jünger's writings from these years also issued coded signals to sympathetic readers to keep alive conservative values for a post-Nazi future. After WWII, Jünger became one of Germany's most controversial figures, a critic of modernity who was at the center of a friendship network that joined the veterans and heirs of Weimar's radical right into a counterculture opposed to what they believed was the decadence of German life. In Jünger's later works, he portrayed friendship as the last true site of community, an idea that shaped the elitist attitudes of new members of the German right./nI use published texts and letters alongside new archival material to make two broad contributions. First, by investigating friendship among twentieth-century German radical conservatives, I bring to light the important work that friendship has done for those facing quintessentially modern problems like alienation and social fragmentation. I argue that the work of friendship for figures like Ernst Jünger has primarily been the provision of needs for affirmation, communication, and mutual understanding. Recognizing these needs helps us see that anxieties about being understood, longings for fellowship, and concerns for the quality of interpersonal relationships have often underlain radical conservatism's explicit ideas about, say, the virtues of "organic" community or the perils of democratic leveling. I show how these needs and anxieties were closely bound up with the radical conservative critique of modernity, including its elitism, ultra-nationalism, and disdain for mass society and mass culture. It is through friendship, I argue, that German radical conservatives have understood the shortcomings of modern life and envisioned ways to overcome or cope with modernity./nMy second contribution is methodological. The study of friendship, I argue, can uncover emotional needs and intimate states of mind that are otherwise difficult for the historian to bring to light. Examining friendship among twentieth-century radical conservatives provides fundamental insights into motives, helping us understand why certain emotional demands were felt at certain moments in German history, and how these emotions in turn drove the decision for particular ideological positions. Asking these questions of the German radical right offers a fresh angle on a group usually dealt with through a reductive focus on cultural pathologies and formal ideology. Taking Ernst Jünger and his many friends and interlocutors as a case study, I provide a rich biographical historicization of German radical conservative thinking as it developed over multiple stages throughout the twentieth century. Stressing recurring needs for communication and mutual understanding, I locate new motives for radical conservative ideas.

Advisor: Jay, Martin E.