Historical and Literary Context
The Glass Bees, first published in 1957 and translated into English in 1961, is classified as one of Jünger's later works, published long after his better-known works from the Weimar period such as Storm of Steel (1920), Jünger's autobiographical book about his war experience, and Der Arbeiter (The Worker, 1932). Jünger's ambiguous position vis-à-vis National Socialism has been the subject of much dispute, with various critics emphasizing both his affinity to fascism, totalitarianism, and Nazism and his criticism of the Nazi dictatorship in later works such as On the Marble Cliffs (1939), The Peace (1948), and his war diaries Strahlungen (1949). The Glass Bees, with its simultaneous nostalgia for militaristic order and deep suspicion of technocratic modernity, is exemplary of this ambiguity in Jünger's work.
The Glass Bees, like another of Jünger's novels, Heliopolis, thematizes the altered relationship between technology, society, and nature which was central to many of Jünger's contemporaries such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin; set in a futuristic world in which the distinction between war and peace has been largely effaced, The novel's setting has been variously characterized as "an unspecified future" and a "dystopia." While some aspects of the novel's geography (like Treptow) and history (the mechanization of warfare, for example) have real-world referents, others, such as the "Asturian civil war," do not. Jünger uses dystopian settings "to show that by heroic exertion humankind can live on the dreadful terms technology shall dictate". Jünger's radical conservative conceptualization of technology is markedly different from that of his Marxist contemporaries. As Thomas Nevin explains, "Marxists preached that technological advances entail ideological changes. For Jünger technology is its own ideology, superseding all others." However, despite the pointed differences between Jünger and the theorists of the Frankfurt School, at least one critic has pointed out commonalities the The Glass Bees' critique of technological modernity shares with both the enlightenment critique of Adorno and Horkheimer, and Benjamin's critique in "Theories of German Fascism" (1930) of Jünger's earlier work.
The Glass Bees contains numerous instances of intertextuality, such as the frequent allusions to E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale The Sandman, a work which also explores the themes of automation and vision.
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