Telos Press Publishing is pleased to announce that Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil is now available for purchase. Order your copy today in our online store.
Eumeswil
by Ernst Jünger
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Edited and with an Introduction by Russell A. Berman
Eumeswil, ostensibly a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, is effectively a comprehensive synthesis of Ernst Jünger’s mature thought, with a particular focus on new and achievable forms of individual freedom in a technologically monitored and managed postmodern world. Here Jünger first fully develops his figure of the anarch, the inwardly liberated and outwardly pragmatic individual, who lives peacefully in the heart of Leviathan and is yet able to preserve his individuality and freedom. Composed of a series of short passages and fragments, Eumeswil follows the reflections of Martin Venator, a historian living in a futuristic city-state ruled by a dictator known as the Condor. Through Venator, the prototypical anarch, Jünger offers a broad and uniquely insightful analysis of history from the post-historic perspective and, at the same time, presents a vision of future technological developments, including astonishingly prescient descriptions of today’s internet (the luminar), smartphone (the phonophore), and genetic engineering. At once a study of accommodation to tyranny and a libertarian vision of individual freedom, Eumeswil continues to speak to the contradictions and possibilities inherent in our twenty-first-century condition.
The worldwide reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks can be seen as a welcome indication of a global consensus concerning freedom of speech, individual rights, and opposition to Islamic fundamentalism. However, left-wing critics such as Noam Chomsky have criticized the worldwide demonstrations against the attacks as hypocritical because they ignore the more serious massacres that have been conducted by Americans with drone strikes and in military activities in Iraq, Serbia, and Syria. 
In November 1939, gangs of German civilians and Nazi operatives stormed Jewish stores, synagogues, and homes, killing or arresting those who could not escape. The Nazi leadership had carefully planned the assault—Kristallnacht would become only one among many instances of unimaginable horror. In the coming years, the Nazis proceeded to murder thousands of disabled Germans; when Germany invaded Russia, groups of special units—known as Einsatzgruppen—followed closely behind the German army, liquidating Jews, Communists, and Roma.[1] By 1942, the Nazi death camps had initiated yet another gruesome and terrifying phase of the Reich’s program of anti-Semitism and racial purity.[2] 
The twentieth century was witness to no shortage of political violence and mass death perpetrated by the state. The two most well-known genocides of the century—those that occurred under the rule of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union—did not occur because the state broke down and lawlessness prevailed. Quite the contrary: both regimes had complete control over their citizenry, and the apparatus of government was used to make the butchery as efficient and as inescapable as possible. Both regimes were characterized by extreme violence and terror, key elements of the totalitarian system as defined by Hannah Arendt, so it seems only logical that totalitarianism increases the potential for genocide. 
Telos Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage, now available for purchase in our 
In “Saddam and Hitler: Rethinking Totalitarianism,” Russell A. Berman examines the limits of current efforts to understand totalitarianism in light of the juxtaposition of Nazi Germany and Baathist Iraq. He questions the “cultural approaches” often implemented when approaching the study of the Nazi years. Berman doubts whether the German people, under the increasingly violent and fanatical Nazi regime, were truly a Volksgemeinschaft, a happy population believing in every word of the leader, be it true or false, or as the Baathist regime in Iraq demonstrated, a regime of violence, with the party and the leader as the center node propagating terror throughout the state. The author examines three problems present in contemporary discussions of the Nazi regime that may be further elucidated through a juxtaposition of Hitler’s “movement” with the old Saddam regime. The first involves the futility of defining these regimes as either “Left” or “Right.” These types of distinctions do not allow for a full exploration of the effects of these regimes. The second problem is the aligning of Nazism with a sort of “cultural hegemony” rather than with an environment of coercion, violence, and politics. The third concern involves limiting the question of totalitarianism to a certain period history rather than examining its effects on the present. 
