Ernst Jünger (German: [ɛʁnst ˈjʏŋɐ] ; 29 March 1895 – 17 February 1998) was a German author, soldier, philosopher, and entomologist who became publicly known for his World War I memoir Storm of Steel. A prolific writer of over forty books, Jünger wrote particularly in the furtherance of conservatism and against what he perceived as the spiritual oppression of man.
The son of a successful businessman and chemist, Jünger rebelled against an affluent upbringing and sought adventure in the Wandervogel German youth movement, before running away to briefly serve in the French Foreign Legion, which was an illegal act in Germany. However, he escaped prosecution due to his father's efforts and was able to enlist in the Imperial German Army on the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During an ill-fated offensive in 1918 Jünger was badly wounded and was awarded the Pour le Mérite, a rare decoration for one of his rank and was the last living recipient when he died in 1998.
Jünger wrote against liberal values, democracy, and the Weimar Republic, but rejected the advances of the Nazis who were rising to power. During World War II Jünger served as an army captain in occupied Paris, but by 1943, he had turned decisively against Nazi totalitarianism, a change manifested in his work The Peace. Jünger was dismissed from the army in 1944 after he was indirectly implicated with fellow officers who had plotted to assassinate Hitler. A few months later, his son died in combat in Italy after having been sentenced to a penal battalion for political reasons.
Immediately after the war, Jünger was punished as a possible fellow traveller of the Nazis but his disengagement from politics in the following years meant his relationship with the radical right remained ambiguous. Jünger died an honoured figure in German literature; although critics continued to charge him with the glorification of war as a transcendental experience in some of his early works.
Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg as the eldest of six children of the chemical engineer Ernst Georg Jünger and of Karoline Lampl (1873–1950). Two of his siblings died as infants. His father acquired some wealth in potash mining. He was raised in Hanover and went to school there from 1901 to 1905, and during 1905 to 1907 to boarding schools in Hanover and Brunswick. He rejoined his family in 1907, in Rehburg, and went to school in Wunstorf with his siblings from 1907 to 1912. During this time, he developed his passion for adventure novels and for entomology.
He spent some time as an exchange student in Buironfosse, Saint-Quentin, France, in September 1909. With his younger brother Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898–1977) he joined the Wandervogel movement in 1911. His first poem was published with the Gaublatt für Hannoverland in November 1911. By this time, Jünger had a reputation as a budding bohemian poet.
In 1913, Jünger was a student at the Hamelin gymnasium. In November, he travelled to Verdun and then Marseilles enlisted in the French Foreign Legion for a five-year term, but with the intention of getting to North Africa. This was an illegal act in Germany. Stationed in a training camp at Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, he deserted and travelled to Morocco, but was captured and returned to camp. Six weeks later, he was dismissed from the Legion due to the intervention of the German Foreign Office, and escaped prosecution. On the return journey he was told by his father that the cost of representations to the authorities had amounted to a vast sum. Jünger was sent to a boarding school in Hanover, where fellow pupils included future communist leader Werner Scholem (1895–1940).
On 1 August 1914, the day Germany entered the First World War, Jünger, who as a student wasn't caught under the Imperial German conscription system, volunteered for military service. He had to wait for three days in the recruiting office and obtain an emergency school-leaving certificate in order to enlist as a one-year volunteer initially in the 44th Reserve Division. He had transferred to the 73rd Hanoverian Fusilier Regiment by the time he was deployed and after training was posted to the Champagne front in December 1914. After recovering from his first wound, he underwent officer training and was commissioned as a Leutnant in 1915.
As a platoon leader, and later acting company commander, he gained a reputation for aggressive leadership during patrols and reconnaissance missions, a Stoßtruppführer and a pioneer of stormtrooper tactics. Jünger fought in many of the major campaigns on the Western Front, including the Battles of the Somme, Langemarck and Cambrai as well as leading a stormtroop in Operation Michael, reaching the rank of temporary company commander. During the war he had been hit a total of fourteen times was wounded on seven occasions that required evacuation, and received a number of decorations including the Iron Cross and Imperial Germany's highest military decoration, the Pour le Mérite.
He spent his free time reading the works of Ariosto, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kubin. Throughout the war he kept detailed diaries that formed the basis of his first published books starting with the Storm of Steel.
After the war Jünger continued to serve as a lieutenant in the army of the Weimar Republic revising infantry training techniques. In 1920 at the suggestion of his father he self-published Storm of Steel based on some of his war diaries and was afterwards signed up by the publisher E.S. Mittler & Sohn. He left the army in 1923. He enrolled in the University of Leipzig to study natural sciences which he continued in Naples while combining this with paid writing although he left university in 1926. He joined the Freikorps and Stahlhelm. His war experiences described in Storm of Steel gradually made him famous and the success of the book enabled him to become a professional writer. He married Gretha von Jeinsen in 1925 with whom he had two children, Ernst Jr. (1926–44) and Alexander (1934–93).
In later writings in the 1920s such as War as an Inner Experience, Copse 125 and Fire and Blood as well as his heavily edited 1924 version of Storm of Steel he more explicitly than in the first release of Storm of Steel portrayed war as a mystical experience that revealed the nature of existence painting trench soldiers as modern day heros, and these books together with the Storm of Steel he would call his "Old Testament". According to Jünger, the essence of the modern was found in total mobilisation for military effectiveness, which tested the capacity of the human senses.
By now an ardent militarist Jünger became a nationalist publicist and criticized the fragile and unstable democracy of the Weimar Republic, stating that he "hated democracy like the plague." He supported a "state of the front-line soldiers" brought about through the emergence of a young intellectual elite that would spring out from the trenches of WWI, ready to oppose bourgeois capitalism and to embody a new nationalist revolutionary spirit. In the 1920s, he wrote more than 130 articles in various nationalist magazines, mostly as editor in the Stahlhelm newspaper Die Standarte. He was also editor of the journal Arminius which aimed to unite nationalist movements and contributed to Ernst Niekisch's National-Bolshevik publication Widerstand. However, the historian Louis Dupeux argues that Jünger wanted to use nationalism as an "explosive" and not as an "absolute", to eventually let the new order arise by itself and the association of Jünger to the Conservative Revolutionaries is still a matter of debate among scholars.
In 1932, he published The Worker, which argued that modern econonomic life was an extension of wartime total monbilisation meaning that the bourgeois order brought in by the Enlightenment was giving way to a new society organised around the figure of the Worker. In the essay On Pain (German: Über den Schmerz) written and published in 1934, Jünger rejects the liberal values of liberty, security, ease, and comfort, and seeks instead the measure of man in the capacity to withstand pain and sacrifice. Around this time his writing included the aphorism "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger; and what kills me makes me incredibly strong."