Extraordinary Examples of Fortitude

[LuisP]

Rose
Thanks. Many. And yes, given that clarification I think maybe you really are right.
You were very lucky then, in having seen the power of that mysterious and beautiful gift that Grace is. Am sure you will not forget it. I believe no one does, once experienced, even indirectly. Keep looking for it, I’d beg.


That said, sorry to burden you with a personal case in point, but it is quite relevant to me :

- I truly hope I’m not going across as having perspectives on “moral”. I don’t do Morals. I abhor moralists. Maybe that was, like, an over simplification from you ? Sure hope so for, I mean, I really detest moralists and their lectures. One of the worst kind of fools, from my view of things !

I strongly believe that Ethics without morals is Unethical and Morals without ethics is Immoral.

Maybe that's confusing (it isn't really) but that is why I only emphasize Ethics, which is about one’s Actions. Never Morals, which is about one’s Beliefs.

I’m a sinner. No Morals to speak of.
That is why I only do Ethics.

I trust you can see the abysmal conceptual difference, Rose.

[re-rose]

Maybe that was, like, an over simplification from you ?

Yes,it was. The word should have been Virtues!

rose

[LuisP]

Ernst Jünger
This man doesn’t fit stereotypes, and not just because of his uncommon Fortitude.


To me, in these times of plastic values and of everything being subjected to relative perspectives, compromises, utilitarianism and “microwave morals”, he appears as an example of almost, well, superhuman capabilities.

Nevertheless, he was just flesh and blood like the rest of us.
The difference - I believe - was in his Mind. And in his Spirit.

And yes, in his Genes too, or DNA or whatever it was that he had in his body that allowed it not only to sustain more damage than several men put together could withstand and would have succumbed to, but that also enabled it to extend its longevity for more than a century.

Ernst has so many angles to him that he defies comprehension.

He started carving his own path very young, joining the French Foreign Legion at just 16 years of age. Seemed like many a youngster, recklessly seeking adventure in faraway lands, and nothing more to it.

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Since that didn’t happen and he instead became one of the most Strangely Formidable men of modern history, one then could say - looking for rational explanations - that he was fortunate to have lived in a time when Challenges of present day unimaginable exertion had the effect of awakening in him otherwise extraordinarily unimaginable dormant qualities.
Then again, I for one would prefer to remain forever asleep if ever asked to pay the Price he was called to meet.

You read on, and then say if you wouldn’t too.

It is an extensive Reading for he is no small exemple, since Ernst Jünger was both a warrior and a pacifist, a bloodthirsty soldier and a thoughtful philosopher, a hailed hero and an ostracized pariah.

He defied the undefiable, and refused the unrefusable. He shunned attention, but was the object of permanent glare. He suffered greatly, but never whined about it. He loved intensely, but was hated even more strongly. He wrote, but was forbidden to be read. He was silent, but people flocked to hear him. He was a commoner, but was accused of being an aristocrat. He had many followers, but refused to lead them.

He walked 4 years through a Valley of Death where millions perished and many millions more were forever maimed in body, mind and soul, but he thrived instead and came out of it alive and covered in military Glory.

By age 24, he was no longer a youngster but an old man. Still, he would live beyond 102 years of age.

He drank, smoked and used LSD (with its inventor), but did not ever let himself get addicted to any of those vices. He was a member of an oppressive occupying power, but fraternized with some of the more intellectual members of the oppressed occupied nation. He took up arms twice to fight as a soldier but then took up a pen fifty times to write books. He killed with bullets in war, and then spent the rest of his time alive defending Life with ink. He sired children, but came to see them die and watch them buried.

He was a man with Vertebrae of steel and a Will of iron. Who lead a Life of great solitude and incomprehension, for these are characteristics but of few and as such shunned by the majority.

He was born in 1895, under the Kaiser’s Imperial Germany. Coming of age inside the XX century and after being dragged by his neck out of the Foreign Legion by his horrified father, he then Volunteered twice to the bloodiest fights Man has known, the I and the II World Wars, and witnessed emerging Communism, then Nazism and later, Democracy.

He lived to see his country first quartered and then reunified with The Wall being erected and then felled, shook hands with Hitler and then Presidents, Chancellors and Prime Ministers, received not only the highest Military Medals but also the highest Civil Honors his country could award a Soldier and a Citizen, while being also bestowed with Gifts and Prizes from the Enemy he had twice fought, and killed from.

He was, one could say, a great Geometrist. For he followed only himself and what he believed, and that is why he was the object of both the most passionate Love and profound Hate by successive generations of his fellow countrymen while, at the same time, being shown respect and admiration from his wartime enemies who, having failed to kill him, came to praise him.

This enemy, in 1945, he also confused and embarrassed by refusing to submit to Allied “denazification treatment” because he would rather go to prison than prove something he had never been. He embarrassed and confused them because from the ranks of that enemy came public endorsement of his stance by the banner-waver communist Bertolt Brecht, who had a profound respect for this Individualistic and unblemished person in a time of Collective herds sharing blemishes and guilt.

Amazing, to say the least, since Hitler had done the same years before, when his minions Himmler and Goebbels had wanted to charge Junger as a communist and begged for his head in 1939, on the wake of Ernst’s novel “On Marble Cliffs” which they (correctly) saw as a disguised manifesto against national-socialism. Then, also to the confusion and embarrassment of these Nazi purifiers, Hitler had just said “Leave him alone”. For he too had walked that same Valley of Death for the duration of the First War and had been one the few to survive it, and knew – or perhaps feared - that if Wrath Unleashed hadn’t been able to kill Jünger, it might just be too much for him to defy Providence, as he was fond of calling God, by doing it himself.

Whichever the reason, fact remains that Ernst resisted and did not bend to both Nazi seduction and threats, or to Allied revenge disguised as purity and citizen cleansing. And that he did it not by asking or invoking privileges, but by simply saying “No”, whatever the consequences.

The Allies had left him alone, lacking alternatives besides having him shot. But Hitler had tried instead to charm and capture him. He invited Jünger to his court – not once, but twice – by asking him to become a “Deutsche Volk” Parliament member. Jünger refused … and did it at a time when no one in Germany dared say “no” to the Führer. He then invited him to head the German Academy of Literature, which Jünger also refused. And then, as a further rebuke and a definitive sign of his distance, he simply left Berlin to live in the countryside with his family, this at a time when everyone who wanted to be someone went to the Reich’s capital so as to be near the Chief.

But there’s more.
For this man’s extraordinary Mental strength was matched by his unbelievable Physical resilience.

He was one of extremely few soldiers to survive the entire length of the 1914 -1918 murderous slaughterhouse. When those long and bloody four years of fighting ended, he was not yet 25 years old but had risen from Private to Lieutenant of the Prussian Army, had accredited to him more than 200 prisoners captured in battle, had received the Second and then the First Class Iron Cross, and had went on even further to receive the coveted “Pour Le Mérite”, known informally as “Blue Max”, at an age even inferior to that of his famous contemporary and WW I top-scoring Air ace, Baron Von Richthofen, thus setting him as the youngest ever recipient – dead or alive – of that most scarce medal awarded strictly as a recognition of extraordinary personal achievement and valor in combat.
Ernst was an Infantry warrior, always at the Front. He fought in the squalor of the trenches, and in the later stages of WW I was a co-founder of the suicidal shock and assault teams called Sturmtruppe – Stormtroopers – who would infiltrate enemy trench lines to capture prisoners and spearhead attacks, unassisted and unsupported.

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He later wrote that he had done it just to “break down boredom”, and nothing more adventurous or daring than that should be sought as an explanation.

Allow me, for the record, to say that between 1914-18 Germany mobilized 11 Million men of which 5 million were casualties, including 1,75 million dead. These, though, are conservative estimates, for some historians place those numbers more energetically.

What is undisputable is the fact that the Prussians awarded to only 52 men the “Pour le Mérite” during the entire WW I conflict, meaning, a 0,0004 % ratio. The Navy sailors got 10, the Air Force’s men 23 and the Army’s troopers 19.

Of those nineteen Army soldiers thus praised as National Heroes, 3 were field-marshals, 9 were generals and 5 were superior officers.
Only 2 were Junior Officers (Lieutenants). One was Jünger .Other one was Erwin Rommel, who some twenty odd years later would be known as the “Desert Fox” commanding Hitler’s Afrika Korps, and after that as the man responsible for manning the defenses along the doomed beaches of Normandy, fated to be theater of the Allied “Overlord” operation.

Ernst Jünger, in the meantime, had willingly sidestepped from a military career, only volunteering - once again ! - to fight WW II as a plain Army captain at age 45, and would live on to see Field-Marshall Rommel commit state sponsored suicide while - as things always incredibly go with him – live on to be the last living holder of the “Blue Max” and among the last 5 WW I veterans still alive in the last decade of the 20th century !

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Not only that ….for in 1984, when Chancellor Helmut Kohl met the French president François Mitterrand at Verdun for the Franco-German reconciliation, they invited Ernst to be there with them, a frail 89 year old soldier bearing testimony to past hatred and present friendship.

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True, he had survived that gruesome bloodbath. But not unscathed. For he was wounded not once or twice, but 14 times (“leaving out triflets such as scratches from ricochets and grazes”) suffering the first wound in 1915 and last in 1918. It is recorded that this man was directly shot five times and hit by two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenades splinters, and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, he noted, “left me an even twenty scars”, for some of those bullets and splinters had entered, crossed and exited his body, thereby being responsible for not just one, but two flesh scars.

I might add (for he didn’t like to publicize it) that it also left him with two partially lost fingers on his left hand, a perforated right lung (his last and almost deadly wound) and a double entry/exit shot to head by a bullet that penetrated and half circled his cranium without - against every possible odd ! - touching the brain.

And all of these severe wounds overcome inside makeshift campaign hospitals with no antibiotics or penicillin to help him and with rows of men rotting away left and right of his bed !

One can only, if possible, wonder at his unbreakable Spirit and Body resilience.

Ernst Jünger lived till 41 days short of 103 years old, and a mere 2 years before the dawn of our XXI century. He died in 1998.
And he never once recanted anything he did or wrote throughout his long life.

Quite the opposite, really. To the stupefied admiration and hatred of many.

He wrote his first book shortly after WW I, which was published in 1920 and initiated the genre of “war memoirs”, namely predating Graves’s and Sassoon’s books by a decade. It was his personal, first-hand account of trench warfare. Its final title is “Stahlgewittern” – or “Storm of Steel” – and is as powerful and simple a title as it can be imagined over a subject such as War. It is an even more powerful read. For it contains no poetry, no victimization and no justification. Just plain observation and naked recording. Utterly honest, devoid of judgment.

And he dedicated it …. with a tremendous and succinct dedicatory - “For the Fallen”.
All of them. Without choosing sides.

After that, he never stopped writing and would go on to write, and publish, another 49 books, from novels to essays, ranging from social and philosophical to political themes. He would see his books first forbidden by the German Federal Republic and later published in several languages and the object of literary prizes and academic conferences. He looked inward, into his soul, and philosophed about a new form of sovereign individual which he called “Anarch” and defined as “the positive counterpart of the insurrectional anarchist”, saying “Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.”

He did knew. And he rejected it.
That didn’t stop him from giving his opinions. And from Britain, France (among other European countries) came television crews wanting to interview and hear what he had to say. To some he agreed to, to others he did not. It came down to his disposition to play the role of the Old Wise Man.

By the way, this book of his, “Storm of Steel”, was like “Mona Lisa” was to Da Vinci. He never looked at it as a finished work. For he revised it eight times over 40 years, last time in 1961. He thought it could never be finished because it could always be perfected since it was a book alive by its own traumatic right, which age and wisdom could understand in different ways according to increasing experience. As he said "Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."

Among his fifty works, one other book of his I read was his essay “On Pain”, which is a very troublesome piece of thought (I found) by reason of its sheer crudeness, cruelty and harsh objectivity on Man’s shortcomings and frailties, postulating a society of strictly hardened and empty headed members as the future for all well succeeded societies, where liberty, security, ease, and comfort were rejected in favor of a capacity to withstand pain and sacrifice (ring a bell ? to me, it does).

Remember, Orwell’s “Animal Farm” saw light in 1945 and his famous “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was only published in 1949.
Jünger’s “On Pain” was written in 1934, and some say it was inspirational to George.

I believe it was, so similar are, in essence, the underlying questions. But Jünger was German, so he was cursed after 1918 and then burned after 1945.

To top this all, he had no worldly cravings, either. So much so that after WW II, when Ernst Jünger was presented by the Stauffenberg family (yes, that of the man who attempted to kill Hitler in July 1944) with a castle to live in, he only, after insistence, accepted to inhabit the estate gamekeeper’s house, where he would live till he died collecting thousands of beetles inside neatly organized shelves, becoming a renowned entomologist (a species of beetles, go figure, is named after him).

Lastly – but not in the least (to me, that is) – I should point out that a year before his death, aged 102, Ernst converted to Catholicism.

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Some said he was finally seeking the Peace and Forgiveness he had never asked for. Some said that he, at long last, had broken down.

I’m quite sure it was neither.

But that’s open to debate.


I wish him well.
And thank him for his uncompromising, unforgiving and unexculpatory example of Fortitude and Honesty, regardless of perspective.

He was a Giant, who walked among increasing multitudes of Dwarfs.

[Mikado14]

Nice post, Luis

Mikado