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Ernst Jünger

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The title of this article contains the character ü. Where it is unavailable or not desired, the name may be represented as Ernst Juenger.
Ernst Jünger as a soldier in World War I
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Ernst Jünger as a soldier in World War I

Ernst Jünger, (March 29, 1895 – February 17, 1998) was a German author of novels and accounts of his war experiences. Many regard him as one of Germany's greatest modern writers and a hero of the conservative revolutionary movement following World War I. Others dismiss him as a militarist and reactionary.

Contents

Life and work

He was born in Heidelberg and grew up in Hanover as the son of a pharmacist. Jünger went to school between the years of 1901 and 1913 and was member of the "Wandervogel" movement. He ran away from home to join the French Foreign Legion where he served in North Africa. During World War I he served with distinction in the German Army on the Western Front. This time of war is described in The Storm of Steel (German title: In Stahlgewittern) which was published in 1920. An autobiographical account of his adventures, it has been seen as somewhat war-glorifying, especially in comparison to the other major German WWI work, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque. Jünger served as a lieutenant in the army of the Weimar Republic until his demobilisation in 1923. He studied marine biology, zoology, botany and philosophy and became a well-known entomologist. He married Gretha von Jeinsen in 1925; they had two children, Ernst (1926-1944) and Alexander (1934-1993).

In the 1920s Jünger published articles in several right-wing nationalist journals, and further novels. As in Storm of Steel, in the book Feuer und Blut (1925, "Fire and Blood") Jünger glorified war as an internal event. He criticized the democracy of the Weimar Republic, but he did not actively support the National Socialist movement around Hitler. Jünger refused the offer to head the Nazi Writer's Union. In 1927 he moved to Berlin. The Adventurous Heart (1929, German title: Das abenteuerliche Herz). In Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage (1930, "On Nationalism and the Jewish Question") Jünger describes "the Jews" as a threat for the Germans. In 1932 he published The Worker (German title: Der Arbeiter), which called for the creation of a totally mobilized society run by warrior-worker-scholars. Jünger left Berlin in 1933, his house was searched by the Gestapo secret police, and from 1938 he was banned from writing. On the Marble Cliffs (1939, German title: Auf den Marmorklippen) uses metaphor to describe Jünger's perceptions of the situation in Hitler's Germany. He served in World War II as an army captain. Assigned to an administrative position in Paris, he socialized with prominent artists of the day such as Picasso and Jean Cocteau. His early time in France is described in his diary Gärten und Straßen (1942, "Gardens and Roads").

Jünger appears on the fringes of the Stauffenberg bomb plot. He was clearly an inspiration to anti-Nazi conservatives in the German Army, and while in Paris he was close to the officers who carried out the assassination attempt against Hitler. He was not directly involved in the events however, and in the aftermath suffered only dismissal from the army (summer 1944), rather than execution. His elder son Ernst, then a Kriegsmarine cadet, died later that year during internment in a military penal camp in Italy, which he had been sentenced to for engaging in subversive discussions in his Willhemshaven academy.

After the war, Junger was initially under some suspicion for his nationalist past, and he was banned from publishing in Germany for several years by the British occupying forces. His work The Peace (German title: Der Friede), written in 1943 and published abroad in 1947, marked the end of his involvement in politics. Rehabilitated by the 1950s, he went on to be regarded as a towering figure of German literature. He remained highly controversial though in the eyes of the German Left, both for his past, and his ongoing role as conservative philosopher and icon.

His diaries from 1939 to 1949 were published under the title Strahlungen (1948, "Radiations"). In the 1950s and 1960s Jünger travelled extensively. His first wife, Gretha, died in 1960, and in 1962 he married Liselotte Lohrer. He continued writing prodigiously his entire life, publishing more than 50 books.

Jünger was among the forerunners of magical realism. His vision in The Glass Bees (1957, German title: Gläserne Bienen), of a future in which an overmechanized world threatens individualism, could be seen as science fiction. A sensitive poet with training in botany and zoology, as well as a soldier, his works in general are infused with tremendous details of the natural world. His critics claim there is an excess of emotional control and precision in his writing.

Throughout his whole life he had experimented with drugs such as ether, cocaine, and hashish; and later in life he used mescaline and LSD. These experiments were recorded comprehensively in Annäherungen (1970, "Approaches"). The novel Besuch auf Godenholm (1952, "Visit to Godenholm") is clearly influenced by his early experiments with mescaline and LSD. He met several times with LSD inventor Albert Hofmann and they took LSD together. Hofmann's memoir LSD, My Problem Child describes some of these meetings.

Jünger's 100th birthday on March 29, 1995, was met with praise from many quarters, including the Socialist French president François Mitterrand.

Jünger was a friend of Martin Heidegger. Jünger was admired by Julius Evola who published a book called L'Operaio nel pensiero di Ernst Juenger (1960), in which he summarized The Worker.

Ernst Jünger died on February 17, 1998 in Riedlingen, Swabia, having been the last living bearer of military version of the order Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest military honor, which he was awarded in 1918.

His brother Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898-1977) was a poet and essayist. His younger son Alexander, a physician, committed suicide in 1993.

Bibliography

Selected works

Books about Jünger

External links

 

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