Tradition - Ernst Jünger
Die Standarte, 8 November 1925
Tradition - a beautiful and proud word for a generation that wants to return the emphasis to the side of blood. That man does not live alone in space, but as a member of a community for which he must live and, if necessary, sacrifice himself, is a knowledge which every responsible person possesses and which he defends in his own way and by his own means. But man is connected with a higher community not only in space but also in an even more important, though invisible, way in time. The blood of his fathers resounds in his own, he lives in the realms and bonds which they created, supported, and protected. To create, support, and protect, so that he takes in his hand their work as his own and manages it with dignity. The present man is a focal point between what was and what will be. Life spreads like a burning flame from a wick through the bond of the sexes, burning out and at the same time creating a bond going from beginning to end. Soon the present man will also become a former man, but the thought that his act and deed will not disappear with him, but lay the foundation on which the future man, the heir, will stand, with his weapons and tools, gives him peace and security.
What makes the act historic is that it is not in itself or done for its own sake, but that it is structured into a meaningful effect, that it is guided by the actions of predecessors and that it is directed towards the mysterious world of the unborn. Darkness reigns on both sides of the story, its roots lost in the drabness of the past, its fruits falling in the land of heirs the author will never see, and yet it is defined and nurtured on both sides, and that is where its eternal splendour and supreme happiness lies. What distinguishes the hero and the warrior from the lansquenet and the adventurer is that he draws his strength from higher reserves than the personal, and that the burning torch of his actions is not a flickering gust but a sparkling fire in which the future is forged from the past. There is something casual in the greatness of the adventurer, a wild incursion into colourful landscapes, which also has its own beauty, but it is in the hero that what is necessary and conditioned by destiny is fulfilled; he is a true moral man who is important not only to himself, not just today, but to everyone and for all time. Whatever the battlefield and the seemingly lost position - where it is necessary to preserve the past and fight for the future - the opportunity to act must never be missed. A man may indeed lose himself, but his destiny, happiness and fulfilment are the ruins of a higher and more distant goal. The unattached man dies, and with him his work, because in its dimensions it was adapted only for himself; the hero dies, but his fall is like a blood-red sunset, promising a new and more beautiful tomorrow. So we must remember the great war as a fiery twilight, whose colours already define a more splendid tomorrow. That is how we should think of our fallen friends and see in their demise the signs of accomplishment, the sharpest affirmation of life itself. Away from the abominable filth we must move away from the mental awareness of the grocer that 'everything was in vain' if we are to find our happiness in living in the room of destiny and flowing in the mysterious stream of blood, if we are to act in a meaningful, significant landscape and not vegetate in the time and space into which the chance of birth has placed us.
No, birth must not be an accident to us! It is the act that moves us to our true earth and defines our place in the environment through a thousand symbolic threads. Through it we become members of a nation, a community of those who are bound by ancestral ties. It is from here that we enter life, from a fixed point, but in a movement that began long before us and will only end late after us. We pass only part of this enormous journey, but along the way we must not only carry with us the full legacy, but also meet all the demands of the times.
And yet terrible brains, rotting in the filth of our big cities, come forward with the wisdom to say that our birth is a game of chance and that "we might as well have been born French as Germans". For all those who think this way, it is certainly true. He is a man of chance, an outsider who does not know the happiness of feeling born of necessity into a great destiny, of feeling its tensions and struggles as his own, of rising with it – or sinking with it. Such brains always arise when misfortune befalls societies united by birth, and this is characteristic of them. (Here we should briefly draw attention to the last, very clever feature of intelligence, which is the parasitic and destructive infiltration and falsification of the blood community through intelligence, and this is done with the rather seductive, at first glance, notion of the 'community of destiny'. But the community of destiny also includes the Negro who was caught off guard by the outbreak of war in Germany and dragged into our ordeal from bread card to rutabaga. The passengers of a sinking passenger ship form in this sense a "community of destiny", unlike the blood community of the crew of a sinking warship who raise their flag in the wind).
The national man attaches great importance to the fact that he was born within clearly defined boundaries, he even considers it his greatest pride. If he transcends his boundaries, it is not because he floats along them without form, but because he extends them into the future and into the past. His strength lies in the fact that he has a direction and hence a more instinctive certainty, a basic orientation that is given by blood and that does not need the wavering and changing signals of complex concepts. It is in this way that life grows into a greater unity, and it is in this way that it becomes a unity, being meaningfully connected to every moment.
The life of a national people is sharply delineated by its boundaries, sacred rivers, formidable mountains, and boundless seas, and is thus fixed in space. It is based on tradition, oriented towards a distant future and thus fixed in time. Woe to him who cuts off his own roots, he becomes a worthless human being, a parasite. To deny the past is to deny the future and disappear with the fleeting waves of the present.
But for the national man there is just as great a danger, and that is that he forgets the present. To have a tradition is to have an obligation to live up to it. A nation is not a house in which each generation, like a generation of coral, must only lay a new floor, or in which it must exist, bad and good, only in a space defined once and for all. A castle, a solid bourgeois house that, once built, seems to stand forever. But soon a new generation, driven by new needs, sees the need for a major change. Either it burns down or it collapses, and a renovated, renewed building rises on the old foundations. The facades change, every stone is replaced, but it is still the same house, in a very special sense – as far as the genealogy is concerned. So was it just a perfect Renaissance or Baroque house, did it have a design language applicable to all times? No, but what it was then is also somehow hidden in what it is today.
Today it can be coldly structured as an expression of emotion in the judgement of a higher active energy, but this expression is only conceivable on the multi-layered floor of tradition. Each line and scale mysteriously reproduces what was, and yet it is the presence that defines the overall picture, so that it lifts us up, draws us into the feeling: this is who we are, this is who we are! This is the way it should be.
In the same way, the blood of the individual mingles with a thousand obscure streams of blood, and yet the individual is not merely the sum of his ancestors, not merely the bearer of their wills and qualities, but, in clear and limited concreteness, he himself. The same can be said of the most complete form of a nation, the state. Yesterday we had an empire, today a republic, tomorrow perhaps an empire again, and the day after tomorrow a dictatorship. Each of these structures also carries within itself, as an invisible legacy, more or less deeply hidden beneath its formal language, the content of the one that was, but each is obliged to be fully itself, because that is the only way to achieve the full exercise of power.
This also applies to each of us at this moment. To be an heir does not mean to be an epigone. Living in tradition does not mean limiting oneself to that tradition. Inheriting a house means committing to run the house, but not to make it a museum, but to leave the ancestral home intact. "The empire must remain for us," said Luther, who chopped down a church building with an axe; he knew that empire and building, power and its temporary expression are not the same thing. "The kingdom must remain with us," we say to ourselves, and it is in this desire to get to the bottom of things that lies our true tradition, which can be defended as resolutely under the roof of the republic as it is under the roof of the empire. What matters is that the great river of blood is used in all the means and institutions of the age. Whether the battle is fought by the means of the republic or by the means of the principal, it is the same thing - as long as it is won. In the age of the sword you must win with the sword, in the age of the machine you must win with machine guns, tanks, sappers, and gas attacks. In a patriarchal society, the army must believe that it is defending its king and lord.
In the age of the masses it may believe that it is ready to fight for some social progress or economic nature. The ideas, beliefs, and morals still flicker, and should flicker, in the coloured reflections of modern light, but it is not the ideas, issues, and goals that are important, but the realisation of all the power within the "realm".
For us, too, this realisation is a duty. We too must try to put the vast, connected energy of the modern state at the service of the kingdom, to wrest it from the tentacles of rational intelligence and subject it to the laws of blood down to the last flywheel, to the last piece of iron. Only then will we be able to live up to tradition. We are still a long way from that. The emphasis on the external form of tradition, typical of today's national youth, is precisely indicative of a lack of inner strength. We do not live in museums, but in an active and hostile world. It is not a living tradition that Old Fritz is painted on every cigar box, that every ashtray and every belt is decorated with his black, white, and red stamp. This is advertising in the worst sense of the word, just as most of our parades, commemorations, and days of honour are nothing more than bland advertising, cast-iron crap that only gains supporters.
Get ready for a new Roßbach in the most peculiar forms of our time, then the old man upstairs will be very pleased. Write not Fridericus novels, but a national novel of our time, with material as varied as life itself before your eyes. Do not live like dreamers in a distant age, but try to give the republic a fighting power and strength ruled by the river of blood, or divide it in two if it does not want to be harsh. Do not recall Frederick William's cane, which was very important in its time, but understand that social methods are time-dependent, and that it is very important today to find an issue which enables the worker to be also a member of the national front, as it has already happened in other countries.
Be fully who you are; then you will live the future and the past in the burning focus of the present, and in the happiness of personal action itself. Then you will have a real tradition, a living tradition, not just a flickering reflection of it that can be placed in any suburban cinema.
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