The Forest Passage

The Forest Passage is an essay by Ernst Jünger published in 1951, in the early years of postwar Germany. Its central question is how people behave before and within catastrophe. To answer it, Jünger introduces the figure of the «forest walker», or «man in the forest»: someone who keeps a mental independence from the society around them and who is able to resist when the state becomes or turns criminal. The work belongs to a series of texts in which the author reflected, during the 1950s, on the political situation of his time.

The starting point is a critique of elections so managed that they no longer offer a real alternative and reach an approval of 98 percent. Uniformed election workers, state propaganda and suggestive ballots recall the sham votes of dictatorships, although Jünger does not explicitly confine his description to that case. The two percent who vote «no» represent, in his reading, the pool of possible forest walkers. He places them alongside the worker and the unknown soldier among the great figures of our time.

The author acknowledges that under normal conditions institutions and their rules form a workable basis, even if abuses occur. Nevertheless, the man in the forest must be prepared from the outset for the possibility of a criminal system, and cannot be content with recognizing truth and good on the upper floor while injustice spreads in the cellar. In a dictatorship, open objection leads to prison, yet the uniformity of political life makes any dissenting gesture stand out, such as a «no» painted on a wall. When resistance becomes necessary, it may take the form of a partisan war with raids and sabotage. Whoever resists, however, stands outside the prevailing legal order, so that their actions can be justified only on ethical grounds.

The philosopher Thea Dorn noted that the figure of the forest walker is rooted in the myth of the German forest and that the book forges the most radical link between forest and freedom in German literature. Golo Mann, critically distant from Jünger, saw in the book a deliberate withdrawal from conventional politics and a call for the cultivation of an elite.