Ernst Jünger

Born Mar. 29, 1895, in Heidelberg. German writer and thinker (Federal Republic of Germany).

An officer in World War I, Jünger became famous as the author of the diary Storms of Steel (1920). He depicted the horrors of war yet simultaneously presented war as an opportunity for “the most profound life experience.” In his pessimistic social utopia The Worker (1932), Jünger portrayed a society of “technological imperialism.” In his view the prototype of the man of the future was the worker-soldier who had renounced “bourgeois-romantic individuality” and achieved total self-mastery, including the ability to overcome pain and even to render himself completely insensible.

In 1933, Jünger refused to join the Prussian Academy of Arts, which had been reorganized by the Fascists. In the novel On the Marble Cliffs (1939) he criticized the Nazi dictatorship in a veiled allegory. After 1945, Jünger published his diaries of the war years, the Utopian novel Heliopolis, several collections of essays, and other works that criticized the modern society of “technological civilization” from an individualist standpoint.