"Our solidarity must be a solidarity of blood. That is the first demand. But what is blood? The question is at once simple and difficult, for within it lies the profound tension between knowledge and feeling...Blood speaks the kinship of man to man. In an overcrowded age we can scarcely grasp the joy that seizes a man when he discovers such kinship, for the relentless rationalization of mankind has dulled the sharpness of his instincts...A community in which this feeling is absent is already dead, whatever its outward appearance. A people without a bond of blood is only a mass, a body devoid of the power to summon the forces of higher life. Within such a collective there is no miracle; its brilliance cannot sustain a man in his hours of weakness, and only mechanical laws remain. It is not worth living for, not worth dying for, not worth bringing children into, not worth any exertion beyond the narrow orbit of the individual. It no longer bears destiny, nor the blood that affirms it." What more to say, but perhaps 'Amen.'
Junger is getting a lot of appreciation lately, which is nice. Yet I can't say I'm with him on this particular conception. Blood as a metaphysical property rather than a biological one seems too much of an abstraction for me; I don't "feel the blood" between myself and a foreigner because we have the same values as I perceive him to be saying. This is basically the American "melting pot" idea rephrased, and we all know how that has played out and continues to biologically damn our country. Hitler, too, admits as much in Mein Kampf where talks about how the values and language of a people being the same do not constitute a national people. Indians speaking English or German do not make them so. It certainly does not make them act like it either.
"We care nothing for chemical reactions, transfusions, cranial indices, or the other profanations by which this age flatters itself that it has fathomed the nature of man."
I appreciate the comment, but the interpretation you offer does not reflect what Jünger is doing in “Das Blut” or in his interwar work in general.
The text does not reject biological race. Jünger’s framework presupposes racial distinctions between groups of man, each producing its own type and its own character. This directness is one reason these writings remain untranslated, since they move in a register that modern liberalism cannot absorb on any level.
What Jünger rejects is the positivist impulse to treat measured data as the only reality available to man. Skull measurements and chemical tests are, for him, a superficial effort to grasp a reality that stands prior to the tools used to examine it. His critique is directed at the reduction of racial substance to data, not at the reality of race itself.
When Jünger speaks of blood, he is naming a deeper order of existence. Blood marks something primordial, a field where biological fact and metaphysical force meet. In the modern scientific view, man is flattened into an object without depth. In war, or in ordeals of similar severity such as Stanley’s long isolation in Africa, life is stripped to its essentials and man is forced into an elemental state where the racial foundation becomes visible. This is the level of reality Jünger is describing, not a cultural metaphor and never a claim that shared ideals or civic values can take the place of race.
I figured as much, but without the explicit mentioning that such was not the case, I was inclined to disagree. Perhaps that makes me normie-coded for not seeing the underlying message (which I did) but I've abandoned metaphysical-language for this exact cloudy reason.
Maybe he does see it that way. In reality they were psychotic killers and power hungry monsters spouting bogus nonsense incapable of anything other than destruction. His failure to denounce them here was an evil portent. Junger was way too enamoured of the French and their wretched "République." Evola was right. One cannot fight modernism with yet more modernism.
As the translator of this work, I can state plainly that Jünger did think in this register during the interwar years. Serious thinkers do not remain fixed in place, and Jünger’s development reflects the shifting pressures of the world in which he lived.
Since you invoked Evola, it is necessary to recall that in the 1920s his worldview stood in close proximity to Jünger’s. Before the full emergence of his metaphysical Traditionalism, Evola’s early writings, including “Essays on Magical Idealism” (“Saggi sull’Idealismo Magico”), “Man as Power” (“L’Uomo come Potenza”), and portions of “Pagan Imperialism” (“Imperialismo Pagano”), proceed from a vitalist and Nietzschean apprehension of force. In those years he sought the presence of heightened energies in men who bore a concentrated relation to fate, and his interest lay in the formation of a type that appears only under the weight of extreme conditions. Jünger is pursuing the same inquiry in this essay, tracing the emergence of men shaped by the demands of their moment.
Only with “Revolt Against the Modern World” does Evola erect a more austere metaphysical and thus transcendent hierarchical order, and in his later works, like “Ride the Tiger,” he returns to this vantage, one that approaches Jünger’s severity in diagnosing the epoch. His thought cannot be treated as a static emblem, for it moves with the internal logic of its own ascent.
Nothing in Jünger’s text suggests devotion to the French Revolution or affection for the horrors it unleashed. He is not raising Mirabeau or Robespierre to the level of moral exemplars. He is isolating a recurrent historical figure that rises in moments of convulsion and observing its appearance with the precision of one taking the measure of an age. The later Directory appears to him as a regime drained of strength, and in Barras he sees the figure of a nation that has burned through its vitality. The same pattern reappears in other eras under different names and different banners, yet the type does not change, for history produces such men whenever deeper forces need a vessel through which to work.
Expecting Jünger to denounce these figures in moralistic terms misses the nature of his method. His early writing views history as a field of formative powers that press their shape onto men who are exposed to necessity. He examines the conditions that bring these types into being and the consequences that follow from their arrival. The analysis carries no allegiance to their aims. It traces the movement of the forces that produced them and the possibility that a new order may take form through their emergence.
Well thank you for taking the time to make a very informative and interesting reply. I don't dipute Junger's main contention but given his former and later French connections I do think that he is writing positively of the worst of the worst of the hideous Jacobins. As reader in the 2020s this is alarming and I think that it should have also done so for people in the 1920s. I have a great deal of respect for Junger but this is a definite weak point for him and an indication of how the German radical right eventually failed so disastrously.
I want to be very clear: this is my original translation.
The other English version you are citing comes from the hastily thrown-together Wewelsburg Archives volume “Interwar Articles.” It is not reliable. Key terms are mistranslated into language Jünger never used, sentences are compressed to the point of distortion, and whole passages are recast in a flat modern idiom that drains his severity. The result is a text that blurs his argument and leaves the reader with an inaccurate sense of what “Das Blut” actually is.
This edition was produced directly from the German with attention to Jünger’s vocabulary, cadence, and structure. Nothing is softened and nothing is modernized for convenience.
At present, this is the most serious and substantial version available in English.
Yes it definitely sounds different than the translation of interwar articles but I can tell it’s the same subjects. I was asking for years in various groups for someone better to translate the interwar articles. I’m so happy you have! I love it. Thanks!
Thank you! I am stirred and humbled! The strength of his conviction and will so moved me, I had to stop reading and regain my orientation! This is a man I want to know! You write so well! The road to the stars is the road to glory!
Great translation, your output is truly prolific. I was stung by the relevance of this section "A community in which this feeling is absent is already dead, whatever its outward appearance.".
Your point is of course taken, however Jünger is not “celebrating” the French Revolution. The figures he names are invoked because they embodied a concentrated historical force, not because their aims were virtuous. He is isolating a phenomenon that recurs whenever history enters its elemental phase, when doctrine and the rational justifications that depend upon it fall away, and raw vitality presses to the surface.
In Mirabeau and Robespierre he sees men in whom vitality, and thus blood, surged with an energy capable of shaping events, just as he sees in Barras the moment when that force evaporates and politics sinks back into calculation and routine.
His argument is that vitality precedes doctrine, that history is moved by men who embody intensity, and that such intensity appears on every side of a conflict. With that being said, to read this as any form of moral endorsement is to miss the point. He is tracing the movement of destiny through the action, or the failure to act, of individual men, not praising the political outcomes of their deeds. This follows from the conception of history underlying his early writings, in which events are treated as organic processes animated by forces and types rather than by the programs later commentators try to impose upon them.
“Sturm aus Stahl” circulated in underground, unofficial copies in post-1945 Germany. The phrasing was intentionally slightly off; it was grammatically correct but not idiomatic German, which made it a subtle signal rather than a mistake. These samizdat-style versions drew on the earliest “Stahlgewittern” text, the one that still contained the nationalistic elements Jünger later removed. The original editions were suppressed under Allied censorship after the war and remained effectively banned from legal publication until 1960. As a result, the term survived mainly in that underground context. Full publication of the unedited early text appeared much later, in scholarly editions of the 1980s and 1990s.
There are dozens of Jünger’s early articles that remain difficult to locate, and many of the interwar pieces are still hard to obtain in any language. This essay, for example, received only one earlier English translation, and it was of such poor quality that most readers outside Germany possess only a fragmentary sense of Jünger’s formative work. Even the German record is incomplete. Jünger himself excluded a substantial portion of his postwar output from the 1965 “Gesammelte Werke,” and he did so for political reasons. He no longer wished the texts marked by nationalist and at times racialist elements, together with their stark affirmation of war and violent struggle, to shape the image he presented to a later age. By the 1960s he had fashioned the corpus by which he intended to be known, privileging the more polished and metaphysical writings and setting aside the earlier political contributions to journals such as “Die Standarte” and “Arminius.”
I will be publishing scholarly editions of many of these lesser-known works here, and preparing expanded and carefully annotated print versions that remain accessible without sacrificing academic rigor.
"Our solidarity must be a solidarity of blood. That is the first demand. But what is blood? The question is at once simple and difficult, for within it lies the profound tension between knowledge and feeling...Blood speaks the kinship of man to man. In an overcrowded age we can scarcely grasp the joy that seizes a man when he discovers such kinship, for the relentless rationalization of mankind has dulled the sharpness of his instincts...A community in which this feeling is absent is already dead, whatever its outward appearance. A people without a bond of blood is only a mass, a body devoid of the power to summon the forces of higher life. Within such a collective there is no miracle; its brilliance cannot sustain a man in his hours of weakness, and only mechanical laws remain. It is not worth living for, not worth dying for, not worth bringing children into, not worth any exertion beyond the narrow orbit of the individual. It no longer bears destiny, nor the blood that affirms it." What more to say, but perhaps 'Amen.'
I can't speak on the accuracy of the translation, but I can say it was a fantastic read. Thank you for your work
Junger is getting a lot of appreciation lately, which is nice. Yet I can't say I'm with him on this particular conception. Blood as a metaphysical property rather than a biological one seems too much of an abstraction for me; I don't "feel the blood" between myself and a foreigner because we have the same values as I perceive him to be saying. This is basically the American "melting pot" idea rephrased, and we all know how that has played out and continues to biologically damn our country. Hitler, too, admits as much in Mein Kampf where talks about how the values and language of a people being the same do not constitute a national people. Indians speaking English or German do not make them so. It certainly does not make them act like it either.
"We care nothing for chemical reactions, transfusions, cranial indices, or the other profanations by which this age flatters itself that it has fathomed the nature of man."
I appreciate the comment, but the interpretation you offer does not reflect what Jünger is doing in “Das Blut” or in his interwar work in general.
The text does not reject biological race. Jünger’s framework presupposes racial distinctions between groups of man, each producing its own type and its own character. This directness is one reason these writings remain untranslated, since they move in a register that modern liberalism cannot absorb on any level.
What Jünger rejects is the positivist impulse to treat measured data as the only reality available to man. Skull measurements and chemical tests are, for him, a superficial effort to grasp a reality that stands prior to the tools used to examine it. His critique is directed at the reduction of racial substance to data, not at the reality of race itself.
When Jünger speaks of blood, he is naming a deeper order of existence. Blood marks something primordial, a field where biological fact and metaphysical force meet. In the modern scientific view, man is flattened into an object without depth. In war, or in ordeals of similar severity such as Stanley’s long isolation in Africa, life is stripped to its essentials and man is forced into an elemental state where the racial foundation becomes visible. This is the level of reality Jünger is describing, not a cultural metaphor and never a claim that shared ideals or civic values can take the place of race.
I figured as much, but without the explicit mentioning that such was not the case, I was inclined to disagree. Perhaps that makes me normie-coded for not seeing the underlying message (which I did) but I've abandoned metaphysical-language for this exact cloudy reason.
Maybe he does see it that way. In reality they were psychotic killers and power hungry monsters spouting bogus nonsense incapable of anything other than destruction. His failure to denounce them here was an evil portent. Junger was way too enamoured of the French and their wretched "République." Evola was right. One cannot fight modernism with yet more modernism.
As the translator of this work, I can state plainly that Jünger did think in this register during the interwar years. Serious thinkers do not remain fixed in place, and Jünger’s development reflects the shifting pressures of the world in which he lived.
Since you invoked Evola, it is necessary to recall that in the 1920s his worldview stood in close proximity to Jünger’s. Before the full emergence of his metaphysical Traditionalism, Evola’s early writings, including “Essays on Magical Idealism” (“Saggi sull’Idealismo Magico”), “Man as Power” (“L’Uomo come Potenza”), and portions of “Pagan Imperialism” (“Imperialismo Pagano”), proceed from a vitalist and Nietzschean apprehension of force. In those years he sought the presence of heightened energies in men who bore a concentrated relation to fate, and his interest lay in the formation of a type that appears only under the weight of extreme conditions. Jünger is pursuing the same inquiry in this essay, tracing the emergence of men shaped by the demands of their moment.
Only with “Revolt Against the Modern World” does Evola erect a more austere metaphysical and thus transcendent hierarchical order, and in his later works, like “Ride the Tiger,” he returns to this vantage, one that approaches Jünger’s severity in diagnosing the epoch. His thought cannot be treated as a static emblem, for it moves with the internal logic of its own ascent.
Nothing in Jünger’s text suggests devotion to the French Revolution or affection for the horrors it unleashed. He is not raising Mirabeau or Robespierre to the level of moral exemplars. He is isolating a recurrent historical figure that rises in moments of convulsion and observing its appearance with the precision of one taking the measure of an age. The later Directory appears to him as a regime drained of strength, and in Barras he sees the figure of a nation that has burned through its vitality. The same pattern reappears in other eras under different names and different banners, yet the type does not change, for history produces such men whenever deeper forces need a vessel through which to work.
Expecting Jünger to denounce these figures in moralistic terms misses the nature of his method. His early writing views history as a field of formative powers that press their shape onto men who are exposed to necessity. He examines the conditions that bring these types into being and the consequences that follow from their arrival. The analysis carries no allegiance to their aims. It traces the movement of the forces that produced them and the possibility that a new order may take form through their emergence.
Well thank you for taking the time to make a very informative and interesting reply. I don't dipute Junger's main contention but given his former and later French connections I do think that he is writing positively of the worst of the worst of the hideous Jacobins. As reader in the 2020s this is alarming and I think that it should have also done so for people in the 1920s. I have a great deal of respect for Junger but this is a definite weak point for him and an indication of how the German radical right eventually failed so disastrously.
This was posted in his Interwar Articles, which are my absolute favorite of all his work.
Thank you for commenting.
I want to be very clear: this is my original translation.
The other English version you are citing comes from the hastily thrown-together Wewelsburg Archives volume “Interwar Articles.” It is not reliable. Key terms are mistranslated into language Jünger never used, sentences are compressed to the point of distortion, and whole passages are recast in a flat modern idiom that drains his severity. The result is a text that blurs his argument and leaves the reader with an inaccurate sense of what “Das Blut” actually is.
This edition was produced directly from the German with attention to Jünger’s vocabulary, cadence, and structure. Nothing is softened and nothing is modernized for convenience.
At present, this is the most serious and substantial version available in English.
Yes it definitely sounds different than the translation of interwar articles but I can tell it’s the same subjects. I was asking for years in various groups for someone better to translate the interwar articles. I’m so happy you have! I love it. Thanks!
Thank you! I am stirred and humbled! The strength of his conviction and will so moved me, I had to stop reading and regain my orientation! This is a man I want to know! You write so well! The road to the stars is the road to glory!
Great translation, your output is truly prolific. I was stung by the relevance of this section "A community in which this feeling is absent is already dead, whatever its outward appearance.".
Thank you for this! I am studying the 1920s, the substack algorithms work, apperently. Looking forward to having 20-30 min toplisten to this.
Subscribed!
Interesting, but his celebration of the wretched evil of the French Revolution and the Terror shows that they were already lost.
Your point is of course taken, however Jünger is not “celebrating” the French Revolution. The figures he names are invoked because they embodied a concentrated historical force, not because their aims were virtuous. He is isolating a phenomenon that recurs whenever history enters its elemental phase, when doctrine and the rational justifications that depend upon it fall away, and raw vitality presses to the surface.
In Mirabeau and Robespierre he sees men in whom vitality, and thus blood, surged with an energy capable of shaping events, just as he sees in Barras the moment when that force evaporates and politics sinks back into calculation and routine.
His argument is that vitality precedes doctrine, that history is moved by men who embody intensity, and that such intensity appears on every side of a conflict. With that being said, to read this as any form of moral endorsement is to miss the point. He is tracing the movement of destiny through the action, or the failure to act, of individual men, not praising the political outcomes of their deeds. This follows from the conception of history underlying his early writings, in which events are treated as organic processes animated by forces and types rather than by the programs later commentators try to impose upon them.
“Sturm aus Stahl” circulated in underground, unofficial copies in post-1945 Germany. The phrasing was intentionally slightly off; it was grammatically correct but not idiomatic German, which made it a subtle signal rather than a mistake. These samizdat-style versions drew on the earliest “Stahlgewittern” text, the one that still contained the nationalistic elements Jünger later removed. The original editions were suppressed under Allied censorship after the war and remained effectively banned from legal publication until 1960. As a result, the term survived mainly in that underground context. Full publication of the unedited early text appeared much later, in scholarly editions of the 1980s and 1990s.
There are dozens of Jünger’s early articles that remain difficult to locate, and many of the interwar pieces are still hard to obtain in any language. This essay, for example, received only one earlier English translation, and it was of such poor quality that most readers outside Germany possess only a fragmentary sense of Jünger’s formative work. Even the German record is incomplete. Jünger himself excluded a substantial portion of his postwar output from the 1965 “Gesammelte Werke,” and he did so for political reasons. He no longer wished the texts marked by nationalist and at times racialist elements, together with their stark affirmation of war and violent struggle, to shape the image he presented to a later age. By the 1960s he had fashioned the corpus by which he intended to be known, privileging the more polished and metaphysical writings and setting aside the earlier political contributions to journals such as “Die Standarte” and “Arminius.”
I will be publishing scholarly editions of many of these lesser-known works here, and preparing expanded and carefully annotated print versions that remain accessible without sacrificing academic rigor.