Originally published in 1922, after the defeat of the German Empire, War as an Inner Experience (Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis) is Ernst Jünger's second book. In it, Jünger analyzes his experiences of the First World War in an abstract and reflective way. Written in touching, poetic prose, Jünger describes the material and spiritual consequences of the war, allowing us to understand the horror of trench warfare in its many facets. This is an English translation of Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, published by E. S. Mittler & Son, Berlin, Germany, 1922.
'The Inner Civil War', first published more than twenty-five years ago, is a classic that has influenced historians' views of the Civil War and American intellectual change in the nineteenth century. This edition includes a new preface in which the author demonstrates the continuing relevance of the work and updates its interpretations.
For most of his life, Ernst Jünger, one of Europe's leading twentieth-century writers, has been controversial. Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War, he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jünger in English, Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writer's first fifty years, from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler's Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jünger, a man who has been extolled, despised, denounced, and admired throughout his lifetime, Ernst Jünger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is, if uncomfortably, represented by him. Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany's conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler's assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger's untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger's profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism. Winner of Germany's highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.
Now in paperback, revised and redesigned: This is Thomas Merton's last book, in which he draws on both Eastern and Western traditions to explore the hot topic of contemplation/meditation in depth and to show how we can practice true contemplation in everyday life. Never before published except as a series of articles (one per chapter) in an academic journal, this book on contemplation was revised by Merton shortly before his untimely death. The material bridges Merton's early work on Catholic monasticism, mysticism, and contemplation with his later writing on Eastern, especially Buddhist, traditions of meditation and spirituality. This book thus provides a comprehensive understanding of contemplation that draws on the best of Western and Eastern traditions. Merton was still tinkering with this book when he died; it was the book he struggled with most during his career as a writer. But now the Merton Legacy Trust and experts have determined that the book makes such a valuable contribution as his major comprehensive presentation of contemplation that they have allowed its publication.
Both memoir and essay, Copse 125 is an engaging and philosophical meditation on the nature of modern warfare in the era of the First World War, through a sustained and unified account of one aspect and episode, the battle at Rossignol Wood in France. Written in the early 1920s, several years after his classic Storm of Steel, Copse 125 also contains the essence of Jünger's thoughts on nationalism and the forging of a people in the furnace of heroic struggle.
Histories of the German army on the Eastern Front generally focus on battlefield exploits on the war as it was fought in the front line. They tend to neglect other aspects of the armys experience, particularly its participation in the racial war demanded by the leadership of the Reich. This ground-breaking book aims to correct this incomplete, often misleading picture. Using a selection of revealing extracts from a wide range of wartime documents, it looks at the totality of the Wehrmachts war in the East. The documents have previously been unpublished or have never been translated into English, and they offer a fascinating inside view of the armys actions and attitudes. Combat is covered, and complicity in Hitlers war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. There are sections on the conduct of the war in the rear areas logistics, medical, judicial and the armys tactics, motivation and leadership. The entire text is informed by the latest research into the reality of the conflict as it was perceived and understood by those who took part.
“A precisely crafted and bracingly honest” memoir of war and its aftershocks from the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn (The Atlantic). In 1968, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. In his thirteen-month tour he saw intense combat, killing the enemy and watching friends die. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his experiences. In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes takes a candid look at these experiences and critically examines how we might better prepare young soldiers for war. In the past, warriors were prepared for battle by ritual, religion, and literature—which also helped bring them home. While contemplating ancient works from Homer to the Mahabharata, Marlantes writes of the daily contradictions modern warriors are subject to, of being haunted by the face of a young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters, and of how he finally found a way to make peace with his past. Through it all, he demonstrates just how poorly prepared our nineteen-year-old warriors are for the psychological and spiritual aspects of the journey. In this memoir, the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn offers “a well-crafted and forcefully argued work that contains fresh and important insights into what it’s like to be in a war and what it does to the human psyche” (The Washington Post).
'Undoubtedly the most powerful and immediate book to emerge from the Balkan horror of ethnic civil war' Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph In 1993, Anthony Loyd hitchhiked to the Balkans hoping to become a journalist. Leaving behind him the legends of a distinguished military family, he wanted to see 'a real war' for himself. In Bosnia he found one. The cruelty and chaos of the conflict both appalled and embraced him; the adrenalin lure of the action perhaps the loudest siren call of all. In the midst of the daily life-and-death struggle among Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Muslims, Loyd was inspired by the extraordinary human fortitude he discovered. But returning home he found the void of peacetime too painful to bear, and so began a longstanding personal battle with drug abuse. This harrowing account shows humanity at its worst and best. It is a breathtaking feat of reportage; an uncompromising look at the terrifyingly seductive power of war. 'As good as reporting gets. I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear and survival. Forget the strategic overview. All war is local' Martin Bell, The Times
Since his death in 1962, Georges Bataille has acquired the status of one of the most influential thinkers of the age. The fact that this reputation has been established by the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers appears to confirm Bataille as a precursor of the postmodernist condition. Few contemporary accounts of Bataille's thought have however engaged with those aspects of his thinking which are influenced by his interest in mysticism. This is an omission which is all the more striking given that Bataille considered his thought to be not only opposite to all philosophical traditions originating in the Enlightenment but also a form of speculation intricately related to the religious exigencies of the Christian Medieval period. This book presents the first major study in English of how Bataille's 'mystical' practices and texts interact with the outer worlds of politics, social relations and externalised discourse which Bataille sets up as the antipodes of his 'inner experience.' From this starting point, Andrew Hussey argues that the inner experience of limits in Bataille's work, the movement which he terms 'transgression', is, unlike the textual drams cherished by his postmodernist admirers, a non-metaphorical, even visceral event.
Originally published in 1925, Fire and Blood (Feuer und Blut) is Ernst Jünger's fourth book, where he further elaborates on his experiences in the First World War. In Fire and Blood, Jünger expands on the chapter The Great Battle from his first book, In Storms of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), where he leads a company of assault troops during the Spring Offensive in 1918, which was Germany's last attempt to defeat the British and French armies on the Western Front. Fire and Blood is over four times the size of The Great Battle, resulting in stylistic changes, as well as more detailed descriptions of the event. This is an English translation of Feuer und Blut, published by Stahlhelm-Verlag, Magdeburg, Germany, 1925.
