Geoscience Reference
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fusion of soldiers and their weapons. such images have exemplified the
contested aesthetic category of “reactionary modernism.”
62
Yet like James,
Baelz, and Heim, Jünger was also a naturalist: the son of a well-off phar-
macist, he studied geology, zoology, and botany at university in the early
1920s. indeed, Andreas Huyssen describes Jünger's writerly gaze as “ento-
mological” in its sober attention to the smallest natural details in the midst
of human catastrophe. Wounded by a bullet, Jünger's vision recalls the
power of observation that Baelz had discovered through an earthquake:
i throw away my rifle and jump with one leap down into the middle of the
road. And though everything has gone well with me so far, not even the great-
est of luck, which i have come to take for granted, will now keep me out of
harm's way. While my knees are still bent from the impact of the jump, i re-
ceive a hard blow against my chest, which in a second makes me sober. in the
midst of the tumult, between both raging parties, i stop and recollect myself.
it was the left side, just on the heart, not much one can do about that. in a
moment i shall fall full length as i have seen so many fall. Now it's all over.
Curious, this: while I stare at the ground I see the stones on the yellowish soil of the
path, black chips of flint and white, polished pebbles. In this terrible confusion I see
each one of them sharply, separately, and the pattern they make is imprinted in my
mind as if this were now the most important thing of all.
63
At the moment of crisis, Jünger became what Huyssen calls an “armored
eye.” Or, perhaps, a mortal microscope, since the war, for Jünger, was equally
about the mechanization of men and the enchantment of machines. it was
a “storm of steel,” a catastrophe both cosmic and man-made. And the writer
it to record it was, of course, a seismograph, writing “in agitated phrases,
illegible, like the wavelines of a seismograph recording an earthquake, with
the ends of the words whipped out into long strokes by the rapidity of the
writing.”
64
The motif of the writer as seismograph reflected in part the modernist
fascination with graphology and automatic writing, understood as tech-
niques for the “objective study of human subjectivity.”
65
But it was also a
response to the question of the writer's responsibilities in the face of the
human catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. The seismo-
graphic trope claimed for the writer an exceptional sensitivity to foreshocks
and a cold-blooded acuity at the moment of crisis, even as it had the poten-
tial to divest him of moral responsibility for the ideas he expressed. At the
same time, it severed the notion of the human seismograph from its origins
in nineteenth-century natural scientific practice. seismic observation had
