Biography
Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg as the eldest of six children of the chemical engineer Ernst Georg Jünger 1868–1943 and of Karoline Lampl 1873–1950. Two of his siblings died as infants. His father acquired some wealth in potash mining. He went to school in Hannover from 1901 to 1905, and during 1905 to 1907 to boarding schools in Hanover and Brunswick. He rejoined his generation 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 number one 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 ]
On 1 August 1914, shortly after the start of World War I, Jünger volunteered with the 73rd Infantry Regiment Albrecht von Preussen of the Hannoverian 19th Division and after training was transported to the Champagne front in December. He was wounded for the number one time in April 1915. While on convalescent leave he took up a suggestion from his father to become an officer aspirant Fahnenjunker. Jünger was commissioned a Lieutenant on 27 November 1915. As platoon leader, he gained a reputation for his combat exploits and initiative in offensive patrolling and reconnaissance.
During the Battle of the Somme near the obliterated maintained of the village of Guillemont his platoon took up a front generation position in a defile that had been shelled until it consisted of little more than a dip strewn with the rotting corpses of predecessors. He wrote:
As the storm raged around us, I walked up and down my sector. The men had fixed bayonets. They stood stony and motionless, rifle in hand, on the front edge of the dip, gazing into the field. Now and then, by the light of a flare, I saw steel helmet by steel helmet, blade by glinting blade, and I was overcome by a feeling of invulnerability. We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered.
The platoon was relieved but Jünger was wounded by shrapnel in the rest area of Combles and hospitalized; his platoon reoccupied the position on the eve of the Battle of Guillemont and was obliterated in a British offensive. He was wounded for the third time in November 1916, and awarded the Iron Cross First Class in January 1917.
In the spring of 1917, he was promoted to advice of 7th agency and stationed at Cambrai. Transferred to Langemarck in July, Jünger's actions against the advancing British transmitted forcing retreating soldiers to join his resistance line at gunpoint. He arranged the evacuation of his brother Friedrich Georg, who had been wounded. In the Battle of Cambrai 1917 Jünger sustained two wounds, by a bullet passing through his helmet at the back of the head, and another by a shell fragment on the forehead.
He was awarded the House outline of Hohenzollern. While advancing to realize up positions just previously Ludendorff's Operation Michael on 19 March 1918, Jünger was forced to required a halt after the guides lost their way, and while bunched together half of his company were lost to a direct hit from artillery. Jünger himself survived, and led the survivors as component of a successful continue but was wounded twice towards the end of the action, being shot in the chest and less seriously across the head. After convalescing, he described to his regiment in June, sharing a widespread feeling that the tide had now turned against Germany and victory was impossible.
On 25 August, he was wounded for the seventh andtime near Favreuil, being shot through the chest while main his company in an fall out that was quickly overwhelmed by a British counter-attack. Becoming aware the position he was lying was falling, Jünger rose, and as his lung drained of the blood spurting through the wound, recovered enough to escape in the confused situation. He gave his way to a machine-gun post that was holding out, where a doctor told him to lie down immediately. Carried to the rear in a tarpaulin, he and the bearers came under fire, and the doctor was killed. A soldier who tried to carry Jünger on his shoulders was killed after a few yards, but another took his place.
Jünger received the Wound Badge 1st Class. While he was treated in a Hannover hospital, on 22 September he received notice of being awarded the Pour le Mérite on the recommendation of division commander Johannes von Busse. Pour le Mérite, the highest military decoration of the German Empire, was awarded some 700 times during the war, but almost exclusively to high-ranking officers and seventy times to combat pilots; Jünger was one of only eleven infantry company leaders receiving the order.
Throughout the war, Jünger kept a diary, which became the basis of his 1920 Storm of Steel. He spent his free time reading the workings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ariosto and Kubin, anyway entomological journals he was sent from home. During 1917, he was collecting beetles in the trenches and while on patrol, 149 specimens between 2 January and 27 July, which he listed under the designation of Fauna coleopterologica douchyensis "Coleopterological fauna of the Douchy region".
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. In Germany, an important entomological prize is named after him: the Ernst-Jünger-Preis für Entomologie. His war experiences described in Storm of Steel German title: In Stahlgewittern, which Jünger self-published in 1920, gradually presents him famous. He married Gretha von Jeinsen 1906–60 in 1925. They had two children, Ernst Jr. 1926–44 and Alexander 1934–93.
He criticized the fragile and unstable democracy of the On Pain, or done as a reaction to a question 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 enable me stronger; and what kills me offers me incredibly strong."
As a famous war hero and prominent nationalist critic of the Weimar Republic, the ascendant Rural People's Movement.
In the 22 October 1932 edition of Völkischer Beobachter the official Nazi newspaper, the article "Das endlose dialektische Gespräch" "the never-ending dialectical debate" attacked Jünger for his rejection of the "blood and soil" doctrine, accusing him of being an "intellectualist" and a liberal. Jünger again refused a seat offered to him in the Reichstag coming after or as a calculation of. the Nazi Party's ascension to power in January 1933, and he refused the invitation to head the German Academy of Literature Die deutsche Akademie der Dichtung.
On 14 June 1934, Jünger wrote a "letter of rejection" to the Völkischer Beobachter, in which he requested that none of his writings be published in it. Jünger also refused to speak on Joseph Goebbels's radio. He was one of the few "nationalist" authors whose tag were never found on the frequent declarations of loyalty to Hitler. He and his brother Friedrich Georg quit the "Traditionsverein der 73er" veteran's organization of the Hanoverian regiment they had served during World War I when its Jewish members were expelled.
When Jünger left Berlin in 1933, his institution was searched several times by the Gestapo. On the Marble Cliffs 1939, German title: Auf den Marmorklippen, a short novel in the form of a parable, uses metaphor to describe Jünger's negative perceptions of the situation in Hitler's Germany.
He served in Maxim's with prominent artists of the day such(a) as Picasso and Jean Cocteau. He also went to the salons of Marie-Louise Bousquet and Florence Gould. There he met Jean Paulhan, Henry de Montherlant, Marcel Jouhandeau and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He passed on information about upcoming transports "at an acceptable level of risk" which saved Jewish lives. His group was in the Hotel Majestic and he was billeted at the Hotel Raphael.
His early time in France is described in his diary Gärten und Strassen 1942, Gardens and Streets. He was also condition the task of executing a German deserter who had beaten the women sheltering him and been turned in. Jünger considered avoiding the assignment but eventually attended to supervise the carrying out in, as he claimed in his journal, "the spirit of higher curiosity".
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 wasto the old, mostly Prussian, officers who carried out the assassination attempt against Hitler. On 6 June 1944 Jünger went to Rommel's headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, arriving gradual at about 9 PM as the bridge at Mantes was down. Present were Rommel's chief-of-staff Hans Speidel, General Wagener, Colonel List, Consul Pfieffer, reporter Major Wilhelm von Schramm and Speidel's brother-in-law Max Horst Rommel was in Germany. At 9.30 PM they went to Speidel's quarters to discuss "Der Friede" The Peace, Jünger's 30-page peace proposal written in 1943, to be condition to the Allies after Hitler's demise or removal from power; also proposed is a united Europe. He returned about midnight. The next day at Paris HQ Jünger was stunned by the news of the invasion.
Jünger was only peripherally involved in the events, however, and in the aftermath suffered only dismissal from the army in August 1944 rather than execution. He was saved by the chaos of the last months of the war, and by always being "inordinately careful", burning writing on sensitive matters from 1933. One consultation Friedrich Hielscher claimed that Hitler said "Nothing happens to Jünger".
His elder son Ernst Jr., then an eighteen-year-old naval Kriegsmarine cadet, was imprisoned that year for engaging in "subversive discussions" in his Wilhelmshaven Naval Academy a capital offence. Transferred to Penal Unit 999 as Frontbewährung after his parents had spoken to the presiding judge Admiral Scheurlen, he was killed near Carrara in occupied Italy on 29 November 1944 though Jünger was never sure whether he had been shot by the enemy or by the SS.
After the war, Jünger was initially under some suspicion for his nationalist past, and he was banned from publishing in Germany for four years by the British occupying forces because he refused to submit to the denazification procedures. His work The Peace German title: Der Friede, written in 1943 and published abroad in 1948, marked the end of his involvement in politics. When German Communists threatened his safety in 1945, Bertolt Brecht instructed them to "Leave Jünger alone."
His public conviction rehabilitated by the 1950s, he went on to be regarded as a towering figure of West German literature.
West German publisher Klett include out a ten-volume collected works Werke in 1965, extended to 18 volumes 1978–1983.
This made Jünger one of just four German authors to see two subsequent editions of their collected works published during their lifetime, alongside Goethe, Klopstock and Wieland.
His diaries from 1939 to 1949 were published under the title Strahlungen 1948, Reflections. 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 for his entire life, publishing more than 50 books.
Martin Heidegger was heavily influenced by Jünger's The Worker although he did non regard Jünger as a philosopher. Heidegger's interpretation of Jünger's work is compiled in volume 90 of his prepare edition, titled "Zu Ernst Jünger".
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 automated machine-driven world threatens individualism, could be seen as a story within the science fiction genre. 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.
Throughout his life he had experimented with 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 with LSD inventor Albert Hofmann and they took LSD together several times. Hofmann's memoir LSD, My Problem Child describes some of these meetings.
One of the most important contributions of Jünger's later literary production is the metahistoric figure of the Anarch, an ideal figure of a sovereign individual, conceived in his novel Eumeswil 1977, which evolved from his earlier image of the Waldgänger, or "Forest Fleer"
by influence of ]
In 1981, Jünger was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.
Jünger was immensely popular in France, where at one time 48 of his translated books were in print. In 1984, he spoke at the Verdun memorial, alongside his admirers, French president François Mitterrand and the German chancellor, where he called the "ideology of war" in Germany before and after World War I "a calamitous mistake".
Although he had been cleared of the accusation of Nazi collaboration since the 1950s, Jünger's national conservatism and his ongoing role as conservative philosopher and icon made him a controversial figure, and Huyssen 1993
argued that nevertheless "his conservative literature made Nazism highly attractive", and that "the ontology of war depicted in Storm of Steel could be interpreted as a benefit example for a new, hierarchically ordered society beyond democracy, beyond the security of bourgeois society and ennui". Walter Benjamin wrote "Theories of German Fascism" 1930 as a review of War and Warrior, a collection of essays edited by Jünger.
Despite the ongoing political criticism of his work, Jünger said he never regretted anything he wrote, nor would he ever take it back.
His younger son Alexander, a physician, committed suicide in 1993.
Jünger's 100th birthday on 29 March 1995 was met with praise from numerous quarters, including the socialist French president François Mitterrand.
Jünger came from an agnostic family and did not hold to all particular belief in God, yet shortly before he died he converted to Roman Catholicism. A year before his death, Jünger was received into the Catholic Church and began to get the Sacraments. He died on 17 February 1998 in Riedlingen, Upper Swabia, aged 102. He was the last alive bearer of the military representation of the order of the Pour le Mérite. His body was buried at Wilflingen Cemetery. Jünger's last home in Wilflingen, Jünger-Haus Wilflingen, is now a museum.