Ernst Jünger e i media della guerra

Abstract

From radio to television and computer, military necessities determined the rise of the new technical media in the first decades of the 20th Century. In the trenches of World War I the new forms of cultural industry were experimented: the first radio broadcasts were transmitted; 900 field cinemas were established by the Germans. Starting from the reconstruction of this background, the paper concentrates on Ernst Jünger’s reflections on the emerging importance of the new technical media during the war. In the essays Über den Schmerz and Der Arbeiter, in the photo-albums Die Veränderte Welt and Das Antlitz Krieges Jünger identified not only the political values of the new media, but also understood their anthropological transformative potential, their ability in changing radically fields of perception (minds and bodies) of the subjects. Moreover the essay explores the ways by which the rise of the new technical media influenced Jünger's writing and his methods of description, for instance, In Stahlgewittern and in Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis.