Ernst Jünger  

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Ernst Jünger (29 March 1895 – 17 February 1998) was a highly-decorated German soldier, author, and entomologist who became publicly 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. 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 an ill-fated offensive in 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 honoured establishment figure, although critics continued to charge him with the glorification of war as a transcendental experience.

Biography

Postwar 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.Template:Sfn His work The Peace (German title: Der Friede), written in 1943 and published abroad in 1947, 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 image rehabilitated by the 1950s, he went on to be regarded as a towering figure of West German literature.

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.Template:Sfn

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.

thumb|Ernst Jünger House in Wilflingen Jünger was a friend of Martin Heidegger. Jünger was admired by Julius Evola who published a book called L'Operaio nel pensiero di Ernst Juenger (1960), in which he summarized The Worker.

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 science fiction. 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 inventor Albert Hofmann and they took LSD together several times. Hofmann's memoir LSD, My Problem Child describes some of these meetings.

Photography

Ernst Jünger's photobooks are visual accompaniments to his writings on technology and modernity. The seven books of photography Jünger published between 1928 and 1934 are representative of the most militaristic and radically right wing period in his writing. Jünger's first photobooks, Die Unvergessenen (The Unforgotten, 1929) and Der Kampf um das Reich (The Battle for the Reich, 1929) are collections of photographs of fallen World War I soldiers and the World War front, many that he took himself. He also contributed six essays on the relationship between war and photography in a photobook of war images called Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges: Fronterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten (The Face of the World War: Front Experiences of German Soldiers, 1930) and edited a volume of photographs dealing with the first world war, Hier spricht der Feind: Kriegserlebnisse unserer Gegner (The Voice of the Enemy: War Experiences of our Adversaries, 1931). Jünger also edited a collection of essays, Krieg und Krieger (War and Warriors, 1930, 1933) and wrote the foreword for a photo anthology of airplanes and flying called Luftfahrt ist Not! (Flying is imperative! [i.e., a necessity], 1928).

Bibliography

Collected works

Jünger's works were edited in ten volumes in 1960–1965 by Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart, and again in 18 volumes by Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart in 1978–1983, with four supplement volumes added posthumously, 1999–2003. The Sämtliche Werke edition is now partially out of print (out of print Template:As of: vols. 6, 7, 10, 15–18), and was re-issued in 2015 in paperback (Template:ISBN) and epub (ISBN epub: 978-3-608-10923-8) formats. A selection from the full collected works in five volumes was published in 1995 (4th ed. 2012, Template:ISBN).

Books

The following is a list of Jünger's original publications in book form (not including journal articles or correspondence). Template:Refbegin

• 1920, In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel)
• 1922, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis
• 1923, Sturm
• 1925, Feuer und Blut
• 1925, Das Wäldchen 125 (Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918)
• 1929, Das abenteuerliche Herz. Aufzeichnungen bei Tag und Nacht
• 1932, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt
• 1934, Blätter und Steine
• 1936, Akfrikanische Spiele (African Diversions)
• 1938, Das abenteuerliche Herz. Figuren und Capricios (The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios)
• 1939, Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs)
• 1942, Gärten und Straßen
• 1943, Myrdun. Briefe aus Norwegen
• 1945, Der Friede. Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas und an die Jugend der Welt
• 1947, Atlantische Fahrt
• 1947, Sprache und Körperbau
• 1948, Ein Inselfrühling
• 1949, Heliopolis. Rückblick auf eine Stadt (Heliopolis)
• 1949, Strahlungen
• 1951, Am Kieselstrand
• 1951, Über die Linie
• 1951, Der Waldgang (The Forest Passage)
• 1952, Besuch auf Godenholm (Visit to Godenholm)
• 1953, Der gordische Knoten
• 1954, Das Sanduhrbuch
• 1955, Am Sarazenturm
• 1956, Rivarol
• 1957, Gläserne Bienen (The Glass Bees)
• 1958, Jahre der Okkupation
• 1959, An der Zeitmauer
• 1960, Der Weltstaat
• 1963, Typus, Name, Gestalt
• 1966, Grenzgänge. Essays. Reden. Träume
• 1967, Subtile Jagden
• 1969, Sgraffiti
• 1970, Ad hoc
• 1970, Annäherungen. Drogen und Rausch
• 1973, Die Zwille
• 1974, Zahlen und Götter. Philemon und Baucis. Zwei Essays
• 1977, Eumeswil
• 1980, Siebzig verweht I
• 1981, Siebzig verweht II
• 1983, Aladins Problem (Aladdin's Problem)
• 1983, Maxima – Minima, Adnoten zum 'Arbeiter'
• 1984, Template:Lang
• 1985, Eine gefährliche Begegnung (A Dangerous Encounter)
• 1987, Zwei Mal Halley
• 1990, Die Schere
• 1993, Prognosen
• 1993, Siebzig verweht III
• 1995, Siebzig verweht IV
• 1997, Siebzig verweht V

Template:Refend

Correspondence

Klett-Cotta edited Jünger's correspondence with Rudolf Schlichter, Carl Schmitt, Gerhard Nebel, Friedrich Hielscher, Gottfried Benn, Stefan Andres and Martin Heidegger in seven separate volumes during 1997–2008.

• Ernst Jünger, Rudolf Schlichter: Briefe 1935–1955, ed. Dirk Heißerer. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997, Template:ISBN.
• Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt: Briefe 1930–1983, ed. Helmuth Kiesel. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1999, Template:ISBN.
• Ernst Jünger, Gerhard Nebel: Briefe 1938–1974, eds. Ulrich Fröschle and Michael Neumann. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2003, Template:ISBN.
• Ernst Jünger, Friedrich Hielscher: Briefe 1927–1985, eds. Ina Schmidt and Stefan Breuer. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2005, Template:ISBN.
• Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger: Briefwechsel 1949–1956, ed. Holger Hof. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2006, Template:ISBN.
• Ernst Jünger, Stefan Andres: Briefe 1937–1970, ed. Günther Nicolin. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 2007, Template:ISBN.
• Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger: Briefwechsel 1949–1975. eds. Simone Maier, Günter Figal. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 2008, Template:ISBN.
• Alfred Baeumler und Ernst Jünger: Mit einem Anhang der überlieferten Korrespondenz und weiterem Material. eds. Ulrich Fröschle und Thomas Kuzias. Thelem Universitätsverlag, Dresden 2008, Template:ISBN.
• Ernst Jünger – Albert Renger-Patzsch. Briefwechsel 1943–1966 und weitere Dokumente. eds. Matthias Schöning, Bernd Stiegler, Ann and Jürgen Wilde. Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn/München 2010, Template:ISBN.
• Ernst Jünger, Dolf Sternberger: Briefwechsel 1941–1942 und 1973–1980. eds. Detlev Schöttker and Anja S. Hübner. In: Sinn und Form, 4/2011, S. 448–473
• Luise Rinser und Ernst Jünger Briefwechsel 1939 - 1944, mit einem einleitenden Essay von Benedikt Maria Trappen Aufgang Verlag, Augsburg 2016, Template:ISBN

English translations

The bulk of Jünger's publications remains untranslated, but some of his major novels have appeared in English translation.

• In Stahlgewittern: Basil Creighton, The Storm of Steel. From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front. London: Chatto & Windus (1929).
• Das Wäldchen 125: Basil Creighton, Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918. London: Chatto & Windus (1930).
• Auf den Marmorklippen: Stuart Hood, On the Marble Cliffs. London: John Lehmann (1947).
• Der Friede: Stuart Hood, The Peace. Hinsdale, IL: Henry Regnery Company (1948).
• Afrikanische Spiele, Stuart Hood, African Diversions. London: John Lehmann (1954).
• Gläserne Bienen: Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer, The Glass Bees. New York: Noonday Press (1960).
• Annäherungen. Drogen Und Rausch: 'Drugs and Ecstasy' in: Myths and Symbols. Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade, eds. Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press (1969), pp. 327–42.
• Aladdins Problem: Joachim Neugroschel, Aladdin's Problem. New York: Marsilio (1992).
• Eumeswil: Joachim Neugroschel, Eumeswil. New York: Marsilio (1993).
• Eine gefährliche Begegnung: Hilary Barr, A Dangerous Encounter. New York: Marsilio (1993).
• Über den Schmerz: David C. Durst, On Pain. New York: Telos Press Publishing (2008).
• Das abenteuerliche Herz. Figuren und Capricios: Thomas Friese, The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios. Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing (2012).
• Der Waldgang: Thomas Friese, The Forest Passage. Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing (2013).
• Besuch auf Godenholm: Annabel Moynihan, Visit to Godenholm. Stockholm: Edda Publishing (2015).
• Sturm: Alexis P. Walker, Sturm. Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing (2015).

Filmography

• La Guerre d'un seul homme (One Man's War) (1981). Film directed by Edgardo Cozarinsky juxtaposing excerpts from Jünger's World War II diaries during his years in Paris with French propaganda films of the same period.
• 102 Years in the Heart of Europe: A Portrait of Ernst Jünger (102 år i hjärtat av Europa) (1998), Swedish documentary film by Jesper Wachtmeister and Björn Cederberg