The bloody side of the war is made clear but portrayed at the same time as the unavoidable cost of the battles being fought for the continued existence and aggrandizement of the fatherland, and thus no regrets are uttered or morally required. The realistic narratives of the deaths of uninvolved French civilians or the successful killing of enemy soldiers are followed by casual descriptions of the German soldiers getting together in comradeship for good meals, drinking, smoking and the telling of dirty jokes. Today's reader will find it hard to accept the dispassionate matter-of-fact way in which the writer describes death and destruction as unfortunate consequences of war.

The book contains vivid recollections of his life in the trenches and his experiences in combat as a company commander. It seems that he could not wait to pursue his ideal of manhood, which he felt was embodied mainly in the military.Īlready on August 1, 1914, just four days after the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered for the army and fought (incidentally in the same regiment as Hermann Löns, who died in combat on September 26 th, 1914) up to the end of the war – from 1915 onward as a lieutenant – on the Western Front and was wounded at least seven times.Ĭonspicuous for his bravery, he was awarded the Pour le Mérite medal, Germany's (originally Prussia's) highest military decoration, in 1918.ĭuring the war he kept a diary, which was to become the basis for his book 'In Stahlgewittern' (The Storm of Steel) (1920). Almost no other important artist reached his age of 103 years, a span that can only be called biblical.Īt 18 years old Jünger joined the French Foreign Legion, though his father had him brought back to Germany because of his youth.

It seems that anybody who utters an opinion about Ernst Jünger is not quite wrong, and the secondary literature on him contains contradictory assessments. We, who grew up in communist East Germany, had no access to Ernst Jünger's books what we could read of him we either found in the libraries of our fathers (as this author found Jünger's book 'Auf den Marmorklippen' (On the Marble Cliffs)) or got illegally from West Germany (as this author got hold of Jünger's 'In Stahlgewittern' (The Storm of Steel). Because he has cloaked his ideas in a philosophical garment and written in a brilliant style, he is a particularly dangerous enemy of political progress.'Īrno Schmidt, who Jünger called 'the Diderot from Lower Saxony', had little respect for him. “Meyers Neues Lexikon' published in East Germany in 1962 states that Jünger was an ideological precursor to German fascism, and through his works published in West Germany 'has become a prominent representative of the militarist and neo-fascist literature.

Thomas Mann called Ernst Jünger, who was the only 20 th century writer equal to him in mastery of style, 'an ice-cold apostle of barbarism'.

Auf den Marmorklippen by Ernst Jünger