Eumeswil & Forrest Passage

Book Review

Editorial Note:

This piece was commissioned for my zine, pero like, I did not mind my irmão publishing it on his site first, about a week ago.

Written by: Future Canceled Knowledge

Eumeswil (Ernst Jünger; 1977.)

It makes no difference to me whether Eumeswil is ruled by tyrants or demagogues. Any man who swears allegiance to a political change is a fool, a facchino for services that are not his business. The most rudimentary step toward freedom is to free oneself from all that. Basically each person senses it, and yet he keeps voting.

Eumeswil tells the story of Martin Venator (aka ‘Manuel’ as he is called by Eumeswil’s dictator, the Condor) a historian who does research at the university by day, and by night serves drinks in the Condor’s palace, the Casbah. Eumeswil is a city state located on the coast of North Africa, possibly Morocco, and is home to a diverse population that seems to be of Italian, French, Arabic, and Chinese origins. The story takes place sometime after a nuclear war, which has genetically warped both the flora and fauna found in the desert and forest outskirts of Eumeswil. 

While working at the Casbah, Martin has a front row seat into the interactions of both the Condor’s powerful entourage and his foreign dignitary visitors, most notably, the Yellow Khan. Martin’s brother and father are also historians, and neither approves of Martin’s working so intimately within the Condor’s regime; the Venators had a far closer relationship with the regime preceding the Condor, the rule of the tribunes. To conduct his historical research, Martin and Ingrid, a woman Martin is in a relationship with, both engage the use of luminars – technological devices similar to VR machines, which allow the viewer to access any time and event within history. Oddly enough, the luminar may indeed exist stashed away in the vaults of the Vatican.

Martin has built a secure and fully supplied forest hideout as he foresees the coming collapse of the Condor’s regime. Who exactly will be responsible for the regime’s collapse is never revealed; within the Condor’s circle there is a certain amount of paranoia about the opposition as well as talks of it possibly fomenting dissent in what is simply referred to as the catacombs. While setting up his forest retreat, Martin works diligently at setting it up and covering his tracks. His allegiance is not to the regime or to any regimes but solely to himself, and here Jünger introduces the concept of the anarch. The anarch, and this is stressed throughout the book, is not an anarchist. The anarchist wants to get rid of the state; the anarch needs the state and strives to exist freely within it. The anarchist is always filthy and violent; the anarch is meticulous and can be violent but only to secure himself and not for a cause or party, which would invariably enslave the mind of the anarchist. The anarchist despises faith; the anarch, on the other hand, is a sovereign individual who feels he must believe in something worthwhile in order to carry on. 

Jünger, having lived through both the Kaiser’s reign and Hitler’s Third Reich, and having witnessed the communist dictatorship across the border in East Germany, foresaw a new kind of tyranny on the horizon. Martin as an exemplary figure of the anarch is set up as a role model for surviving times of political upheaval. He is a practical man, skilled in the use of weapons as he is expected to defend a tactical position within the Casbah, should the need arise, and also skilled as a survivalist, as seen in his construction of his forest getaway. But he is also intellectually curious as a historian, whose main takeaway from history is that one should refrain from the political constraints which entrap the minds of the masses.

Martin’s plan is simple: in the event of a collapse, to retreat into the forest, and once the chaos has come to pass and a new inevitable ruler is established, to simply resurface in the city. Although having some allegiance to his preferred history professors, Martin is not concerned with bringing them or anyone else into his forest hideout. Ingrid is not quite his girlfriend, and the only other woman in his life is Latifa, a prostitute who works by the harbor whom he sometimes frequents; both of them are kept out of his plans. His political divergencies with his father are not the only barrier to his relationship; Martin discovers a stash of correspondence his father and mother exchanged while she was pregnant, revealing that his father attempted to have Martin aborted. This fact may have been at the genesis of Martin’s conception of the anarch as he also makes no attempt to reveal his forest hideout to his family.

The Forrest Passage (Ernst Jünger; 1951.)

None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the state props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction.

Of all the Jünger books I’ve read, this is certainly the most difficult to get through. Each chapter is so dense with concepts and insights into Jünger’s ideas that the reader is forced to pause often, consider them, and ruminate on their practical applications. I do recommend reading The Forest Passage before reading Eumeswil, to better understand the narrator, Martin Venator. However, I do not recommend starting your journey into Jünger’s oeuvre here -- better to begin with his famous World War I memoir, The Storm of Steel, as The Forest Passage is a much slower read. 

The Forest Passage introduces the concept of the forest rebel, much like Eumeswil introduces the idea of the anarch. The forest rebel’s ideas of retreating into nature both physically and mentally at the time of great upheaval is reflected in the character of Martin Venator in Eumeswil. A sharp contrast between the two books is the type of dictatorship Jünger had it in mind when writing them. The Forest Passage is a guide for surviving the kind of dictatorship Jünger saw across the divide in his native Germany looking into the communist controlled East; it was written in 1952 and is clearly reflective of its time. Eumeswil, however, was written in 1977 – and it shows the main character attempting to apply the lesson of The Forest Passage to the kind of technocratic all-state Jünger foresaw beginning to take shape in the late twentieth century. 

How can a free man defend his mind and soul against the manipulation and propaganda of the state? What is the role of nature and human nature in this resistance? How does banishing the fear of death make free individuals extremely powerful even in very small groups? Jünger takes your mind and soul on a swift journey to prepare you for the forest, where the overbearing and ever-encroaching State can be resisted. It's the thinking man’s gird-your-loins manual for tyranny.