Living In Eumeswil

Junger became a more gloomy and defeated man as he aged. This novel was written when he was an old man, and the tone reflects that. But he does a very good job describing what life is like in the post-war West; people are simultaneously dreary and anxious, horizons have fallen but life is more dreamlike and surprise laden than ever before. I think we are just now ‘re-entering’ historical time with our current crisis. Are we waking up from a dream or dreaming even more forcefully than before?

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I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.

I therefore would not resent my genitor for merely believing in a fallacy; no one can help that. What disturbs me is not error but triteness, the rehashing of bromides that once moved the world as grand utterances. 

Errors can shake the political world to its very core; yet they are like diseases: in a crisis, they can accomplish a great deal, and even effect a cure—as hearts are tested in a fever. An acute illness: that is the waterfall with new energies. A chronic illness: sickliness, morass. Such is Eumeswil: we are wasting away—of course, only for lack of ideas; otherwise, infamy may be worthwhile.

The lack of ideas or—put more simply—of gods causes an inexplicable moroseness, almost like a fog that the sun fails to penetrate. The world turns colorless; words loose substance, especially when they are to transcend mere communication. 

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This was an idea that vividly haunted me, too—albeit in a different way—since in Eumeswil we live in a city where nothing seems real anymore and anything seems possible. This levels distinctions and promotes a chiaroscuro in which day and dream blend into each other. Society is no longer taken so seriously—this adds a new touch to dictatorships; it is no accident that Vigo so frequently points to echoes of The Thousand and One Nights.

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The linguistic decay that the professor was talking about occurred during the final period of the wars between nations, a time that heralded great coalitions. First the regional gods had to be disempowered worldwide; the fact that the father was also afflicted indicated a planetary agitation.

The disempowering of the father endangers the heavens and the great forests; when Aphrodite bids farewell, the ocean goes dim; once Ares is no longer in charge of wars, the shacks of flayers multiply, the sword becomes a slaughterer’s knife.

In a period of decline, when it was considered glorious to have helped destroy one’s own nation, the roots of language were, not surprisingly, likewise pruned, above all in Eumeswil…The assault on evolved language and on grammar, on script and signs, is part of the simplification that has gone down in history as a cultural revolution. The first world-state cast its shadow. 

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Vigo describes the world-state as one of the permanent utopias that the stewards of history more or less succeed in depicting. 

“This is already inherent as a kind of hunger in natural history; say, in the formation of macromolecules. Of course, these are also more threatened with decay—perhaps they are even its portent. The further the state expands, the more it depends on equality; this occurs at the expense of substance.”

At the same time, Vigo sees the striving for maximum size and the inevitable following decadence as an overall pulsation: “Even a jellyfish moves by unfolding and then closing its umbrella. Thus, in the course of history, the desire for largeness alternates with the desire for smallness. Boutefeu already knew—and we, too, have learned—that the world-state both culminates and disintegrates overnight. The leviathan’s limits are not so much spatial as temporal.”

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Man is born violent but is kept in check by the people around him. If he nevertheless manages to throw off his fetters, he can count on applause, for everyone recognizes himself in him. Deeply ingrained, nay, buried dreams come true. The unlimited radiates its magic even upon crime, which, not coincidentally, is the main source of entertainment in Eumeswil.

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According to the classical scheme, the Condor is not one of the older tyrants, who attained power by fighting the aristocracy or murdering the king. In Eumeswil, this has been out of the question for some time now. The old tyrants, to be sure, did preliminary work as ‘blenders of the people’, not only by destroying the elites and egalitarianizing the demos into a mass, but also by deporting people and filling the gaps with foreign mercenaries and workers. From decade to decade, this reduces any domestic resistance that evinces quality. The upheavals become chronic but alter nothing. The types that follow one another are all alike, especially in their will to power. They also use the same big words, as a kind of fireworks that drowns out the live shooting.

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The best one can expect is a modest legality—legitimacy is out of the question. The coats of arms have been robbed of their insignia or replaced by flags. Incidentally, it is not that I am awaiting a return to the past, like Chateaubriand, or a recurrence, like Boutefeu; I leave those matters politically to the conservatives and cosmically to the stargazers. No, I hope for something equal, nay, stronger, and not just in the human domain. Naglfar, the ship of the apocalypse shifts into calculable position.