PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE XVI: Ernst Jünger
Ernst Jünger (March 29, 1895 – February 17, 1998) was a highly-decorated German soldier, author, and entomologist who became well known for his World War I memoir, Storm of Steel.
The son of a successful businessman and chemist, Jünger rebelled against an affluent upbringing and sought adventure in the Wandervogel, before running away to briefly serve in the French Foreign Legion, an illegal act at the time! Because he escaped prosecution in Germany due to his father’s efforts, Jünger was able to enlist in the German Army on the outbreak of war. During the ill-fated offensive of 1918, Jünger’s World War I career ended with the last and most serious of his many woundings, and he was awarded the Pour le Mérite, a rare decoration for one of his rank.
In the aftermath of World War II, Jünger was treated with some suspicion as a possible fellow traveller of the Nazis. By the latter stages of the Cold War, his unorthodox writings about the impact of materialism in modern society were widely seen as conservative rather than radical nationalist, and his philosophical works came to be highly regarded in mainstream German circles. Jünger ended life as an honored establishment figure, although critics continued to charge him with the glorification of war as a transcendental experience.
Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg as the eldest of six children of the chemical engineer Ernst Georg Jünger and Karoline Lampl. Two of his siblings died as infants. His father acquired some wealth in potash mining.
Jünger went to school in Hannover from 1901 to 1905, and boarding schools in Hanover and Brunswick from 1905 to 1907. He then rejoined his family 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 younger brother Friedrich Georg Jünger, he joined the Wandervogel movement in 1911. His first poem was published with the Gaublatt für Hannoverland in November of that year. By this time, Jünger had a reputation as a budding bohemian poet.
In 1913, Jünger was a student at the Hamelin gymnasium. In November of that year, he travelled to Verdun and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion for five years. Stationed in a training camp at Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, Jünger deserted and travelled to Morocco, but he was captured and returned to camp. Six weeks later, he was dismissed from the Legion due to the intervention of the German Foreign Office, at the request of his father, on the grounds of being a minor. Jünger was now sent to a boarding school in Hannover, where he was seated next to the future communist leader Werner Scholem.
On August 1, 1914 (shortly after the start of World War I), Jünger volunteered with the 73rd Infantry Regiment Albrecht von Preussen of the Hannoverian 19th Division. After training, he was transported to the Champagne front in December of that year. He was wounded for the first time in April 1915.
During convalescence, Jünger decided to enlist as an officer aspirant (Fahnenjunker), and he was promoted to Leutnant on November 27, 1915. As a platoon leader, he gained a reputation for his combat exploits and initiative in offensive patrolling and reconnaissance.
In the 1916 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 his 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. Jünger was wounded for a third time in November 1916, and he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class in January 1917.
Later that spring, Jünger was promoted to command of 7th company and stationed at Cambrai. 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 also arranged the evacuation of his brother Friedrich Georg, who had been wounded. In the Battle of Cambrai (November 1917), Jünger sustained two wounds: (1) a bullet passing through his helmet at the back of the head, and (2) by a shell fragment on the forehead.
Jünger was also awarded the House Order of Hohenzollern. While advancing to take up positions just before Ludendorff’s Operation Michael on March 19, 1918, Jünger was forced to call a halt after the guides lost their way. While bunched together, half of his company were lost to a direct hit from artillery. Jünger himself survived, and he led the survivors as part of a successful advance. However, he was wounded twice towards the end of the action: (1) being shot in the chest and (2) less seriously across the head. After convalescing, Jünger returned to his regiment in June, sharing a widespread feeling that the tide had now turned against Germany and victory was impossible.
On August 25, 1918, he was wounded for the seventh and final time near Favreuil, being shot through the chest while leading his company in an advance that was quickly overwhelmed by a British counter-attack. Becoming aware his position was falling, Jünger rose… and as his lung drained of the blood spurting through the wound, he recovered enough to escape in the confused situation. Jünger 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 also killed after a few yards, but another took his place.
Jünger received the Wound Badge, First Class. While being treated in a Hannover hospital on September 22, 1918, he received notice of being awarded the Pour le Mérite on the recommendation of division commander, Johannes von Busse. The “Blue Max”, 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 to receive the order.
Throughout the war, Jünger kept a diary, which would become the basis of his 1920 work, Storm of Steel. He spent his free time reading Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ariosto, and Kubin. During 1917, Jünger collected beetles in the trenches, including nearly 150 specimens between January 2nd and July 27th… of which he listed under the title Fauna coleopterologica douchyensis (“Coleopterological fauna of the Douchy region”).
After the war he published In Stahlgewittern (1920; The Storm of Steel), a novel in the form of a diary. It contained vivid recollections of his life in the trenches and his experiences in combat as a company commander. In a dispassionate, matter-of-fact voice, Jünger describes the heroism and suffering displayed by himself and his fellow soldiers in the brutal fighting on the Western Front. The Storm of Steel was a success with critics and public alike in Germany and other countries. Two years later he published Der Kampf als Inneres Erlebnis (Combat as an Internal Experience).
Discharged from the German Army in 1923, Jünger studied zoology and botany at the Universities of Leipzig and Naples. He published further recollections and reflections on his war experiences in Das Wäldchen (1925; The Grove) and Feuer und Blut (1925; Fire and Blood).
Despite his militarism, his preference for authoritarian government, and his radical nationalist ideals, Jünger resisted Adolf Hitler’s offers of friendship in the late 1920s. He also declined to join the Nazi Party… even after the rise of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933. Indeed, during Hitler’s dictatorship, he wrote a daring allegory on the barbarian devastation of a peaceful land in the novel Auf den Marmorklippen (1939; On the Marble Cliffs), which, surprisingly, passed the censors and was published in Nazi Germany!
Jünger served as an army staff officer in Paris during the Second World War. However, by 1943, he had turned decisively against Nazi totalitarianism and its goal of world conquest, a change manifested in Der Friede (written in 1943, published in 1948; The Peace). Jünger was dismissed from the army in 1944 after he was indirectly implicated with fellow officers in the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler. A few months later, his son died while fighting in Italy after having been sentenced to a penal battalion for political reasons.
Jünger’s postwar novels included Heliopolis (1949) and Gläserne Bienen (1957; The Glass Bees), the latter a disturbing story of a jobless former soldier in an overmechanized world symbolized by artificial bees and marionettes.
After 1950, Jünger lived in self-imposed isolation in West Germany while continuing to publish brooding, introspective novels and essays on various topics. In such later books as Aladins Problem (1983), he tended to condemn the militaristic attitudes that had led to Germany’s disastrous participation in the World Wars. Jünger’s Sämtliche Werke (Complete Works) were published in eighteen volumes from 1978 to 1983.
Jünger came from an atheist family and did not have any belief in God before his conversion to Roman Catholicism. A year before his death, Jünger was received into the Catholic Church and began to receive the Sacraments.
Ernst Jünger died on February 17, 1998 in Riedlingen, Upper Swabia in his 103rd year. He was the last living bearer of the military version of the order of the Pour le Merite.