Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger, Germany’s writer-warrior, died on February 17th, aged 102



WHEN Ernst Jünger became improbably old, his fame could be measured by the quality of his visitors, among them Chancellor Kohl and President Roman Herzog. What were their expectations as they approached Mr Jünger's pleasant home in Wilflingen, southern Germany? Should they praise his 100 or so books (“Ever read any, Helmut?”), or his bravery as a soldier, or ask to see his famous collection of 40,000 beetles? The visitors' wise advisers said that, in consideration of Mr Jünger's age, a firm handshake would be enough.

The advisers knew that, despite his age, Mr Jünger could be fearsomely articulate. When he was 90 he told an interviewer that the “reality” for him was not the federal republic, but “the German Reich”. The leaders of today's determinedly peaceable country needed to be spared any embarrassing talk of the Reich (empire), whether it be the first, the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806); the second (1871-1918), of Kaiser Wilhelm; or the third (1933-45), of Adolf Hitler.

Writers of obituaries in German newspapers have agonised in their efforts to be honest about Mr Jünger. Some have looked at his long life covering the blackest period of German history, in which Europe narrowly escaped enslavement, and note that he never lost his contempt for democracy. For those who still retained fears of Germany, Mr Jünger seemed to provide the justification for their foreboding. Others say he was simply a patriotic German trying to make the best of the times. The important thing, say his defenders, is that he was one of the finest writers of the century, a great stylist, a master of German, and don't writers make their own rules?

With Hitler

So what of his writing? After the slaughter of the first world war, most writers with experience of the trenches wrote of the pointless wastefulness of battle. Robert Graves's “Goodbye to All That” was an example of the genre. Ernst Jünger, though, took a different view. His “Storms of Steel”, published in 1920, offered a surgically precise view of battle. He looked at death on the battlefield with the same detachment that he gave to his collection of beetles: “Caught between two fires, the English tried to escape across the open and were gunned down like game.” But there was more. Battle was glorious and those who survived were an elite. Mr Jünger came through four years of this fighting, collecting, it is said, 14 wounds, which suggests a touch of masochism as well as bravery, and numerous medals.

Hitler, to whom Mr Jünger sent a signed copy, admired the book. The two men shared the view that Germany had lost the war because its soldiers had been betrayed by decadent politicians. Neither approved of Germany's new pacifist government in Weimar, and both wanted it replaced by a nationalistic-minded regime with military values. Mr Jünger wrote articles for a Nazi newspaper but although he held Hitler in regard as a fellow former soldier, he could not stand the Nazi gang. He, after all, was from an upper-class family in Heidelberg; not quite aristocracy, but his father, a chemist, also owned a coal mine. In any case, the Nazis, with their appeal to the “masses”, seemed too far to the left for Mr Jünger. He politely declined Hitler's offer of a safe Nazi seat in the German parliament.

In 1934, after the Nazi party had taken power, the Dachau concentration camp had been built, and Hitler had murdered his Nazi rivals in the “night of the long knives”, Mr Jünger prepared to watch a different sort of battle. In a reference to his beetles, he wrote that he was content to “watch people eat each other up like insects”.

He spent part of the 1930s travelling the world in search of beetles and other insects, and in the second world war returned to the army. After the fall of France he was posted to Paris. In what seems like a rare example of Nazi humour, Captain Jünger the writer was given the job of censoring mail. As visitors to Paris are, he was besotted by the city, hardly able to believe that it now belonged to Germany. He lived in a grand hotel and walked the streets, guidebook in hand. He was a tourist, but not quite. Dining on lobster in the Tour d'Argent, he wrote in his diary of looking out at the roofs of Paris which sheltered the hungry. “In such times, to eat, and to eat well, gives one a sensation of power.”

Was he merely a gifted monster? Perhaps as a gesture of redemption, he credits himself in reference books with being in the 1944 plot to murder Hitler. But there is doubt about this, though he knew some of the conspirators who were hanged. His 1939 novel “On the Marble Cliffs” is seen by some critics as an attack on the Nazis, but not by others. After the war there was talk of putting him on trial, but there were more obvious villains to deal with, and Mr Jünger was merely told not to publish anything for four years. In his later writings he condemned the “shameful actions” of the SS; not so much out of pity for the victims as because the SS lacked honour. War was no longer the grim, but gentlemanly, shooting party of his youth.

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