Ernst Jünger

Junger, Ernst (1895-1998), German soldier, writer, and scientist. Junger was considered a true Renaissance man in his lifetime. His literary output—over 60 books—covered a wide range of topics, from science to philosophy, politics, and fiction, but he first achieved fame as a WW I storm trooper. Enlisting in 1914, he served four years at the front: at Ypres, on the Somme, and in the March 1918 offensive. Wounded fourteen times, he was awarded the highest imperial decorations. In 1920 he published The Storm of Steel—an account of his war. In it, he glorified in the severity of battle, the comradeship of soldiering, and saw war as the true test of man, while describing combat scenes with an accurate, icy detachment. It is considered the most arresting personal account by anyone of WW I trench fighting, and a complete antithesis to the pacifism of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Later, similar works included The Battle as Inner Experience (1922), Fire and Blood (1925), and Copse 125 (1930). A German patriot, his positive attitude to WW I appealed to Hitler, who greatly admired his work. Although he avoided close contact with the Nazis, he served in the Wehrmacht in France, 1940-4. Close to the Stauffenberg conspirators, he was dismissed from the army in 1944 following the abortive July bomb plot. Under the Nazis, he developed an abhorrence of totalitarianism and in later years became a convinced European and was courted by Chancellor Kohl of Germany and President Mitterrand of France. Until his recent death at the age of 102, he was the last surviving holder of the imperial German Pour le Mérite.

Bibliography

• Nevin, Thomas, Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss 1914-1945 (London, 1997)

— Peter Caddick-Adams

The German author Ernst Jünger (born 1895) was one of the most original and influential German writers and intellectuals of the 20th century.

Ernst Jünger was born on March 29, 1895, in Heidelberg, the son of a druggist. At the age of 16 he ran away from school and enlisted in the Foreign Legion. Extricated by his family, he volunteered for war service in 1914; wounded 14 times, he was decorated in 1918. Subsequently Jünger studied botany and zoology at Leipzig and Naples. His war experience and his scientific experience are the two poles of his life, his subject matter, and his vocabulary and imagery.

Jünger first wrote a series of essentially autobiographical war diaries, In Stahlgewittern (1920; In Storms of Steel), Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922; Battle as Inner Experience), Das Wäldchen 125 (1925; Wood 125), and Feuer und Blut (1926; Fire and Blood). He blends stark realism - indeed brutality - of detail with a language that is often intoxicated, highly stylized, or apodictic; he glorifies the primacy of instinctual life and imputes to Western democracy "the metaphysics of the restaurant-car."

Involved in politics in the late 1920s, in 1931 Jünger published Die totale Mobilmachung (Total Mobilization) and in 1932 Der Arbeiter (The Worker). His concept of the total mobilization of society and his view of the worker as a mere integer in a technological world have an antihumanistic and indeed totalitarian cast. Analogies with fascistic doctrines may be easily discerned in these works that define freedom as total identification with the mass will. But Jünger was not a member of the Nazi party; a group with which he had connections, the National Bolsheviks, was broken up by the Gestapo in 1937. He himself, however, was protected by his high military friends.

Jünger's novel Auf den Marmorklippen (1939; On the Marble Cliffs), his best-known work, shows an evolution of attitude and is generally regarded as an allegorical critique of Hitlerism and of the totalitarian state. The book appeared in December 1939 and was suddenly banned in the spring of 1940. Auf den Marmorklippen portrays the violence with which a peaceful culture, reflected in the secluded lives of two practicing botanists, is overrun and destroyed by the hordes of a tyrant known as the Head Forester. The language is highly colored, recondite, strange, and brutal. The apostrophe of "Spirit," of science and humanism, which seems to be the message of the book, is perhaps somewhat belied by the exultancy with which the violence is described.

Jünger served in the German army once more, from 1939 to 1944. His subsequent novels, Heliopolis (1949) and Gläserne Bienen (1957; Glass Bees), restate the central issue of the conflict between reason and instinct, contemplation and action. He also published several volumes of essays and diaries.

Further Reading

Joseph Peter Stern, Ernst Jünger (1953), is an excellent, penetrating analysis of Jünger's strengths and weaknesses. Good short discussions may also be found in Jethro Bithell, Modern German Literature (1939; 3d ed. 1959), and in H. M. Waidson, The Modern German Novel (1959).

Jünger, Ernst (Heidelberg, 1895- ), son of a pharmacist, spent his youth in Hanover and at 18 enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, from which he was brought home. In 1914 he volunteered, and served as an officer throughout the war with intermissions to recover from his wounds. He received the highest Prussian award for bravery, the order Pour le mérite. After the war he served as an officer in the Reichswehr until 1923, undertook a short period of study, and then devoted himself to authorship until 1939, when he returned to the army as a captain, but, having sympathized with the officers who had planned Hitler's assassination, he was dismissed in 1944. From 1945 to 1949 he was banned from publishing in Germany and travelled widely. One of his numerous travel books, Atlantische Fahrt (1947), appeared in London, another, Ein Inselfrühling. Ein Tagebuch aus Rhodos (1948), in Zurich. In 1950 he settled in Wilflingen (Baden-Württemberg).

Jünger was able to adapt himself to war as an element, and the experience of the years 1914-18 preoccupied him throughout the following years, beginning with In Stahlgewittern (1920); written in diary form, the work anticipates by several years the spate of war recollections, and implicitly elevates the soldier's life, isolated from normal humanity, into a mystical experience. It was followed by the essays Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922), the story Sturm (1923), and the essays Das Wäldchen 125 (1925) and Feuer und Blut (1925). Subsequent works are concerned with Jünger's reactions, presented in changing styles, to the expansion of industrialism and the beginnings of the technological age. They include Das abenteuerliche Herz (1929, 2nd version with the subtitle Figuren und Capriccios, 1938), and the essays Der Arbeiter (1932, Maxima-Minima. Adnoten zum ‘Arbeiter’, 1983). The novel Afrikanische Spiele (1936) reflects on his experience in the Foreign Legion, but with Auf den Marmorklippen (1939) he produced a noteworthy allegorical and anti-totalitarian novel which aroused the suspicion of the National Socialist regime; as early as 1933 he had refused to become a member of the Academy of Art and, recognized as an anti-Hitler work, the novel became a text of the resistance (see Resistance Movements). After his war diary Gärten und Straßen (1942, but soon suppressed) appeared Strahlungen (1949), the diaries of his years in Paris as a member of the German occupation forces. Leading critics of this controversial volume included Peter de Mendelssohn, who was particularly concerned about Jünger's ill-timed nationalistic tendencies. Jünger's aloof intellectual élitism caused him to cultivate his position as an outsider, who in his remote habitat devoted his considerable gifts to utopian ideals of government, as in his novel Heliopolis. Rückblicke auf eine Stadt (1949), ignoring contemporary realities, except for his resistance to excessive materialism. Other novels include Gläserne Bienen (1957), Die Zwille (1973), which has been seen as a kind of Bildungsroman depicting Jünger's own generation, Eumeswil (1977), and Aladins Problem (1983). Eine gefährliche Begegnung (1985) ranks high among his stories of which a selection appeared as Ausgewählte Erzählungen (1985). Jünger's collections of essays include Der Weltstaat. Organismus und Organisation (1960) and his discourse on drug addiction, Annäherungen. Drogen und Rausch (1970), but attention is increasingly drawn to his contribution to the genre of the diary, notably in Siebzig verweht I (1980), Siebzig verweht II (1981), and Siebzig verweht III (1993). The recipient of numerous honours, Jünger has remained a controversial figure; his military and intellectual élitism obscures genuine humanity and empathy, his conception of the state and society that of enlightened democratic thought. The exceptional span of his life as a chronicler of 20th-c. historical developments has further divided opinions about his representative standing. Sämtliche Werke (18 vols.) appeared 1978-82.