A Critical Analysis of the Fronterlebnis

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

-

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

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If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!””

—Rudyard Kippling, If: A Father’s Advice to his Son

Manhood is and always has been of paramount importance to political life for a society and indeed a culture. Without that essential set of ingredients that manhood provides -a clear sense of identity for man, inherrited and cultivated through time and hardship- political life cannot be created. It is essential therefore to understand the social dimension of Kippling’s bold words, “if all men can count on one, but not too much,” then one may be indeed a man. To be a man, is to be a political entity as much as a social entity, capable of great things. And while manhood is an elusive concept in modern times it has not always been so. Politics center around the individual, man or woman, and the identity of man is important in the equation that produces politics. Masculine and feminine forms and their importance for a society are but a sidepoint here, the focal idea to be realized is that identity is essential for politics, not as a definitive aim and feature (modern identity politics), but as a model for the organization of a society. That is to say, hierarchy, and the principles around which identity is formed, organically, are what is essential also for the building of a proper society as well. The human condition, spiritually, socially, internally reflects society’s ideal state. What is politics if not the affairs of the polis which is itself a reflection of a community of men. Perversely, constructivism will claim that politics define social norms, that therefore there is nothing organic and inherrent in these norms and that therefore, there is nothing about them that is not replaceable. In that context, identity is a construct and nothing fixed about it exists as a product of divine and respectively natural law. If ever there was a more beautiful proof against these claims it may be found in the intellectual history of right wing movements in the 20th century.

The 20th century right wing movements, whether one looks at fascism, the conservative revolution, the reactionaries, volkists etc. all found themselves emerging as products, or rather responses to a general feeling of cultural despair. This may otherwise be translated as a crisis in identity that concerns a people. Spengler saw it as an irreversible decline of a Kultur, others as the death of political conservatism. De Lagarde as the racial erasure of the Europeans, whereas van der Bruck as a phenomenon that practically would end up destroying European legal, political and spiritual being. All of them, found the undeniable identitarian part in the problem facing them. I use the term identitarian purely as a descriptor of those things pertaining to identity, whether that that relates to race, gender, culture, language, religion or other such features, and not with the connotation relating to the New-Right European political movement. Identity shifted, and manhood as part of that identity for the political actors of the times, whether as the torchbearers of change, or the urns of conservatism, was affected also. Change in religious and philosophical terms, the unparalleled progress of the Belle Epoque and its consequences on man were utterly stupifying for identity which instead of being inherrited, was passed on through a constant process of updates. Progress was what forced the hand of these groups and intellectuals, who saw before them a misty conundrum in the ever changing face of manhood and therefore society. Unending revolt against inherrited identity resulted in an unending revolt against the very essence of community.

The modern world of the 21st century, particularly in Western Europe and America, is defined similarly, among other things, by its distinct change in and attack against these traditional social norms, the complete revolutionization of communication (which is a rather global phenomenon) and therefore the reimagining and recreating of society as a structure and as an entity. This is mostly due to the technological advances of the age, which have so utterly corrupted public life in its most expressive sides. Similarly to how the airplane and the tank revolutionized the trenches of the Great War, the Internet and online communication, social media, mobile devices, VR, chat rooms and the rest all bring a new face to communication between humans and therefore forms of human relationships from friendships to dating. Naturally, communication affects the relationships of young people and the current generations more than anyone else; Gen Zs, Gen Xs and Millenials more than anyone else. Consequently, the entire face of the political reality of the age is also bound to change. Communication and the formation of communities translates partially in the political world as the foundation for the utopian vision that each party or given political ideology seeks to establish. That is to say, it is not merely political ideologies, like the rampant internationalism and woke-ism of the age that affect society and the idea of what a community is for the youth, but also conversely; it is society and its changes in how communities are naturally formed and upheld -through different modes of communication and expression- that define how political ideologies will evolve.

The roots of this divide are found early in the 20th century, which saw the words “community” and “society” being fundamentally distinguished and applied outside the avant-garde setting in politics across the ideological spectrum. Gemeinschaft, or community, is in the German political-right-context, and particularly in its philosophical use, an organic whole which is defined and connected by something spiritual, somethng intangible. Examples of this may be found in the racially-based society within the volkist utopia and other such organic, nigh esoteric conceptions of human communities. On the other hand, Gesellschaft is the respective word for society; a far more technical, and inorganic entity that in its rigidity lacks the connective links of the Gemeinschaft and therefore enjoys less praise by the Conservative Revolutionaries (CR), who significantly distinguished between the two notions amd found the organic counterpart to be far superior. This distinction played an important role in the development of a political vision for both the CR and the fascists that inherrited the German nation after 1933. For the conservative revolutionaries the distinction was drawn after the realization of cultural decline and decadence, a quintessential example of which idea is found in Spengler’s magnum opus. Simply put, cultural decline allowed for the inorganic Gesellschaft to step forth and over the organic communities of the West. The inorganic organization of the Gesellschaft, which may only be allowed at the highest echelon of state-craft at worst, rose to utterly corrupt and dethrone the primacy of the Gemeinschaft in the Western world through a series of mechanisms and machinations of different interest groups and forces. This unnatural ordering of society prevented the Conservative Revolutionaries from accepting terms of peace with their contemporary world, particularly the early 20th century Germany and the Weimar Republic.

After World War I, a very tangible example of the results of this divide came forward. An entire generation of young men who had never had the time and opportunity to experience the beauty of their native Gemeinschaft in Germany -but also across Europe though often less quoted- as well as its results on the human individual, did so for the first time in the trenches of the Great War. This shared Fronterlebnis, the experience of the Front, created for these men a society in which they experienced comradery, manhood, violence, friendship, justice, injustice and the challenging of beliefs and cultural givens that they had barely been able to fully incorporate. Quite simply for hundreds of thousands of young men, their first lessons in masculinity were given to them on the Front. These lessons came in stark contrast with the society which took these men in, later at the end of the War and which was developed in the salons of the Versailles (an undeniable Gesellschaft as per Spengler and the CRs). The question of the importance of this Fronterlebnis for the formation of later political movements, therefore, primarily fascism in Italy and Germany, is rather redundant, especially given the importance of manhood and masculine identity itself for the core of those movements. Political movements such as these were formed or reformed from previous political organizations in order to recreate that front experience on a mass scale. Whether that was due to a lack of proper virile and masculine forms in their respective societies, or whether those forms were under assault by the increasingly dominant political powers is a different discussion. Regardless, a replication of the front community and an application of its virtues as decanters of a unique Gemeinschaft was the ultimate point for both the Italian and the German fascists, who found discord between these retrospectively ideal communities and their current status. The idea of social purge, through war, of contemporary society’s degenerate aspects; complacency, economic predominance over pure political life, feminine democratic elements and the lack of values once held in high esteem in masculine societies- and their replacement with manly and virile alternatives -militarism, violence, culture- functions also in tangent with the Frontgemeinschaft, as a way of implementing values and systems that may come in place through war. War being the Father of the Front, is both necessary to destroy the degenerate bourgeois society as well as to establish a system that is endemic in its way which can uphold the new order of things. This militant socialism that sought in a very revolutionary fashion to remodel European society is entirely rooted in the idea of the Kriegselrebnis-Frontgemeinschaft link demonstrated above.

However the Great War, and the experience of the war in particular was of the utmost of importance in the individual level other than the social as well. The experience of the war is a personal thing, this being underlined in the term Kriegserlebnis, but also a social one, as found in the term Fronterlebnis. The personal side of the War is the one that defined and created the identity of the soldier -an identity that became one and the same with the identity of the man- for the young men that being too young and never exposed to a proper masculine society, never exposed to a Gemeinschaft that could impart on them elements of these identities. A lack of personal identity, and an inherrited one at that, at the most basic level of manhood, left in these men a void both internal and external. This could easily be seen as an ideological void, as the major critics of the producers of that void were found in the reactionary and fascist intellectual circles. The militant socialism of the soldier, was the easy answer to these problems, as it presented a direct solution to the lack of masculine teaching, and a direct answer to the question of social reorganization that had occured in the age of Progress. The War became the example and case study for both.

It is well-known what resulted of these answers and what followed those results, but today, modern society is met again with a problem that concerns identity and a problem that concerns Western Gemeinschaft as a whole. Masculine identity is heavily, biologically, philosophically, politically and socially undergoing violent and aggressive change. Young men today however lack a Fronterlebnis. They have no access to that socialism of the soldier which once presented a troubled generation with a genuine response to its concerns. They have also, an entirely new of way of forming Gemeinschafts at large; technology has revolutionalized that aspect of society for them. This leaves the audience and the actors both confused. The audience, that is the young men in search of a Gemeinschaft in which they can grow as men and in which the can form and rediscover their original identities, is in need of a way to do so that cannot be found easily in past examples. Too distant is the past to draw from it practical examples. The political parties that once helped their contemporary generations of young men in their quest, are now lacking the shared experience that allowed for an authentic Gemeinschaft to be formed and replicated in the firstplace. Where does this then leave the situation for our societies and the men that lead them?

Both the forces that revolt and the forces that resist social reform in the modern age are in one way or another reliant on a form of socialism; this is the curse of the political bipolarity found in the age of mass politics in the West. The socialism of the Worker has enforced economic forms upon a naturally political Gemeinschaft. The socialism of the Soldier has sought to enforce political forma upon an in inorganically transformed Gesellschaft. The identity of man is found in the middle of this conflict, and is claimed by both contestants. Is however socialism in either of these two abstract forms agreeable with the original and organic identity of man? Socialism is a product of modernity more than anything else, and in this aspect it is undeniably inorganic. There are those, particularly in the circle of the Jungkonservativen, such as Ernst Junger, who would defend the organic nature of this aspect of modernity against the corrupt and overgrown traditional bourgeois society. Fascism tried to apply that socialism to solve the issues that arose once, and so did the Soviet Union. It is has been seen that this socialism, whether of the worker or of the soldier has failed to uphold its utopian vision. Is this proof of socialism’s uselessness in this situation, or is it rather a demonstration of its inorganic nature which renders it unfit to mend the human spiritual and political issues?

Evola speaks of universality and the pretentiousness of socialism in attempting to reach universality through demagogy. The concept of universality here refers simply to the far-reaching notion that unites a society through the elevation of the individual from its lower state to those ideals and qualities that allow for a conquering of the self.

“Universality is a purely spiritual reality: it is reached by rising, through a species of ‘ascesis’, from sensibility to passionality -the dominion of the particular- to pure intellectuality and, more generally, to a disinterested form of activity.”

— Julius Evola, Imperial Universalism and Nationalistic Particularism

Universality is similar to the meaning of the word ‘here’, only applied to a broad social setting. Socialism attempts to forego the achieving of universality, which itself Evola defines as a process of intense and ‘virile’ ascesis, by assuming it already present in class structures. The socialism of the soldier differs somewhat in this, and is closer to Evola’s idea however, it lacks the strength of Evola’s understanding of the term, which rather refers to a nigh esoteric process that elevates man and attempts to firstly reach a perfect state within, and then export that state on the social order around the individual. This is where the values that are organic and innate in man, emerge from and are to become enshrined in the social code of a given culture. The baron diagnoses the same problem from his own perspective but similarly to our own analysis.

“With the epoch of the revolutions, there began in Europe a mighty assault against everything which conserved the semblance of a ‘Mannerbunden’; this was an assault against the very political principle itself, against the principle of every true sovereignty, proceeding so far as to complete inversion of values and ideals.

— Julius Evola, The Crisis of Modernity

Ultimately, the answer has to come from within. Like the ascesis that Evola proposes, a long and difficult process of self realization, awakening, and correction must take place, so that the new caste of those that have achieved individual exceptionality may export universality. Evola supports that this happens naturally through the rise of a new ‘caste’ of nobles, a warrior aristocracy so to speak, that is able to lead and embody the very principles of the individual that elevate society to the correct path for a Gemeinschaft, tied under divine law. The way that this solution of Evola’s ties into identity can only be made by explaining how identity is understood differently by modern and tradition standards alike. Evola, the traditionalist, understands identity as an inherritance that is cultivated through generations of exploration of the natural and organic gift, offered to humanity through the divine. Through this exploration and always with the goal of reconnecting those roots to their divine origins, identity becomes a vessel that carries with it the potential for self-actualization and the pursuit of higher virtue through a form of ascesis. The modern understanding of identity, that is largely what our societies work through today is entirely different. According to Evola, this modern identity relates entirely to an obsession with lesser goals, mere descriptors of identity which are drawn out to larger proportions, thus consuming themselves in materialism and receding from spiritual and thus higher targets for the self and thus for society at large.

Societies rise and fall. No society will last forever, and there always comes a point of decay. Usually preceded by internal decay and the corruption of social bonds, societal collapse teaches us that the age of the mass is linked with the age of the false identity. Universality which is found in the highest and healthiest points of a society’s life, is the product of ascesis which is the cultivation of identity, as the provider of purpose and a healthy vision for the members of a society and her leaders. On the other hand, socialism, which represents the diametric opposite of universality, that is collectivism, takes those points of identity that act in universality as the fundamentals, and makes them instead stuck in an eternally self-destructive process of deconstruction. This only leads to obsession with the physical reality and detaches the members of a society from the higher ideas that may arise from self-introspection.