Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger (Heidelberg, 1895 – Riedlingen, 1998) was a German novelist, philosopher, soldier and entomologist, and one of the most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He first gained public attention with his memoir of the First World War, Storm of Steel (1920), and his long life spanned most of the century, which makes his career difficult to separate from the political history of Germany.

He was the son of a chemist who had made a fortune in business, and he rejected the comfortable upbringing that his family offered. He joined the Wandervogel youth movement and, in 1913, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, an illegal step in Germany; his father's efforts kept him from prosecution. When war broke out he volunteered for the Imperial Army. He was wounded several times, seven according to most accounts, and in 1918 received the Pour le Mérite, the highest military decoration of the empire, which was usually given to senior officers. He had kept a diary throughout the war, and it became the basis of his first book.

After the war he stayed in the army of the Weimar Republic until 1923 and studied natural sciences. He became a respected entomologist, and a German entomological prize still bears his name. His writings of the 1920s described war as an almost mystical experience that exposed the true nature of existence, and they were hostile to parliamentary democracy and bourgeois capitalism. He hoped for a hierarchical, militarily prepared state led by an intellectual elite drawn from the trenches. In 1932 he published The Worker, which argued that modern economic life extended the logic of total wartime mobilisation, and in 1934 the essay On Pain, which set the liberal ideals of security and comfort against the capacity to endure sacrifice.

The Nazis courted him as a natural ally, but he never joined the party and turned down their offers. During the Second World War he served as a captain in occupied Paris, yet by 1943 he had turned decisively against totalitarianism, a shift reflected in his work The Peace. In 1944 he was dismissed from the army because of his indirect links with officers who had plotted against Hitler, and a few months later his son died in combat in Italy. After the war he was regarded with suspicion, but his withdrawal from politics allowed him to regain respect in German intellectual circles, where his philosophical work was widely admired during the Cold War.

His influence reaches into debates about technology, nihilism and the individual facing the masses. He died as an honoured figure in German literature, although his early books remain controversial for the way they glorify war.