The letters exchanged between the III Reich’s jurist Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger are remarkable documents of a pedagogical engagement with Modernism. Denouncing the performativity of the avant-garde, they were, as Jünger famously stated in the late 1930’s, trying to “stem the tide” of intellectual debate, engaging in discussions about the political and literary modernity in ways that were both conservative and revolutionary. Beginning in 1930, the letters span over 53 years of Germany’s cultural life and present a view of Modernism that whilst reflecting what Jeffrey Herf named “reactionary Modernism”, an aesthetic engagement that rejected the critical impulse and the cosmopolitanism of the German Bildung tradition, aporetically followed that same critical push in the intense intellectual letter exchange and in the discussions about intellectual mentors of modernity such as Nietzsche, Simmel, Gramsci and many others. As members of the so-called “conservative revolution” movement, both believed that the revolutionary modernity of contemporary avant-garde movements was dangerous in a societal project, where, as Thomas Mann had already stated in “Von deutscher Republik”(1922), the natural thing to do was to “preserve not destroy”.

By focussing on the intellectual exchange between Schmitt and Jünger, I will discuss first the ideological implications of concepts such as “reactionary Modernism,” second the structural anxiety before the idea of the modern, and third the kind of newness that enters the world in Jünger’s and Schmitt’s project of the modern.