Early life Ernst Jünger was born in
Heidelberg as the eldest of six children of the chemical engineer 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
Hanover 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 enlisted in the
French Foreign Legion for a five-year term, but with the intention of getting to North Africa. 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).
World War I On 1 August 1914, shortly after the start of
World War I, Jünger enlisted as a
one year volunteer and joined the 73rd Hannoverian Fusilier Regiment of the
19th Division, and, after training, was transported to the
Champagne front in December. He was wounded for the first time in April 1915. While on convalescent leave he took up a position his father arranged for him to become an
officer aspirant (). Jünger was commissioned a
Leutnant 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 remains of the village of Guillemont his platoon took up a front line 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: 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. Throughout the rest of the war, Jünger was frequently assigned as a company commander, most often with the 7th Company. Transferred to
Langemarck in July 1917, Jünger's actions against the advancing British included 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 Order of Hohenzollern. While advancing to take up positions just before
Ludendorff's
Operation Michael on 19 March 1918, Jünger was forced to call 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 part of a successful advance but was wounded twice towards the end of the action, being shot in the chest and less seriously across the head. After convalescing, he returned 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 and final time near
Favreuil, being shot through the lung while leading his company in an advance that was quickly overwhelmed by a British counter-attack. Becoming aware the position where he was lying wounded was about to fall to advancing British forces, Jünger rose and as he did his lung drained of fluids through the wound in his chest, allowing him to recover enough to escape. He made 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 only making it a few yards, but another soldier was able to do so. 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 who received the order. Throughout the war, Jünger kept a diary, which became the basis of his 1920 self-published memoir
Storm of Steel (). He spent his free time reading the works of
Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer,
Ariosto and
Kubin, as well as 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 title of
Fauna coleopterologica douchyensis ("
Coleopterological fauna of the
Douchy region"). His war experiences described in
Storm of Steel gradually made him famous. He married in 1925. They had two children, Ernst Jr. (1926–44) and Alexander (1934–93). He criticized the fragile and unstable democracy of the
Weimar Republic, stating that he "hated democracy like the plague." More explicitly than in
Storm of Steel, he portrayed war as a mystical experience that revealed the nature of existence. According to Jünger, the essence of the modern was found in total mobilisation for military effectiveness, which tested the capacity of the human senses. In 1932, he published
The Worker (), which called for the creation of an activist society run by warrior-worker-scholars. In the essay
On Pain () 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."
Third Reich As a famous war hero and prominent nationalist critic of the Weimar Republic, the ascendant
Nazi Party (NSDAP) courted Jünger as a natural ally, but Jünger rejected such advances. When Jünger moved to Berlin in 1927, he rejected an offer of a seat in the
Reichstag for the NSDAP. In 1930, he openly denounced Hitler's suppression of the
Rural People's Movement. In the 22 October 1932 edition of the
Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party's official newspaper, the article 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 following the
Nazi Party's
ascension to power in January 1933, and he refused the invitation to head the
Reich Chamber of Literature. 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.
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
World War II as an
army captain. On the Western Front in 1939, he rescued a wounded soldier and was again awarded the
Iron Cross Second Class. Assigned to an administrative position as intelligence officer and mail censor in Paris, he socialized (often at the
Georges V hotel or at
Maxim's) with prominent artists of the day such 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. Jünger also met the latter at the German Institute on 7 December 1941. He noted in his Parisian diary ('''') that Céline on that occasion "spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews". He passed on information about upcoming transports "at an acceptable level of risk" which saved Jewish lives. His office was in the Hotel Majestic and he was billeted at the Hotel Raphael. The character of Werner von Ebrennac in
Jean Bruller's wartime novel
Le Silence de la mer is modelled on Jünger. Jünger found his countrymen's discriminatory treatment of
French Jews unacceptable. In his Parisian diaries, the writer wrote on 7 June 1942 that he had encountered for the first time the
yellow star carried by three little girls who were passing by in the
Rue Royale, and that he considered that day as fundamental in his personal history, because he said he was ashamed at that moment of wearing a German officer's uniform. 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 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 late at about 9 PM as the bridge at Mantes was down. Present were Rommel's chief-of-staff
Hans Speidel, General
Wagener, Colonel
Linstow, Embassy Counsellor , reporter Major 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 given 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 the Paris HQ Jünger was stunned by the news of the
Normandy landings. 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 writings on sensitive matters from 1933. One source (
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, i.e. probation through frontline service, after his parents had spoken to the presiding judge Admiral
Ernst 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).
Post-war period 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." West German publisher Klett put 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 ''
(1948, Radiations''). In the 1950s and 1960s, Jünger travelled extensively. His first wife, Gretha, died in 1960, and in 1962 he married . 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 not regard Jünger as a philosopher. Heidegger's interpretation of Jünger's work is compiled in volume 90 of his complete 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
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 with LSD discoverer
Albert Hofmann and they took LSD together several times. Hofmann's memoir
LSD, My Problem Child describes some of these meetings.
Later life ,
Philipp Jenninger in 1986 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 conception of the
Waldgänger, or "Forest Fleer" by influence of
Max Stirner's conception of the Unique (
der Einzige). 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". In France he remains a near idol of the identitarian and Europeanist far-right (in the works of philosopher
Alain de Benoist). 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 model 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 many quarters, including the socialist French president
François Mitterrand.
Death Jünger came from a mixed Christian Protestant, agnostic family and did not profess any particular denominational belief, but shortly before he died he converted to Roman Catholicism. A year before his death, Jünger was received into the
Catholic Church and began to receive the
Sacraments. Jünger died on 17 February 1998 in
Riedlingen,
Upper Swabia, aged 102. He was the last living bearer of the military version of the order
Pour le Mérite. Jünger's last home in Wilflingen,
Jünger-Haus Wilflingen, is now a museum. ==Photography==