Ernst Jünger

The Profile

German author and soldier (1895–1998), noted for his World War I memoir In Stahlgewittern (Nelle Tempeste d'Acciaio) and essays on technology, modernity and the figure of the rebel. He had an early nationalist orientation and a complex, contested relationship with Nazism; later he remained an influential and debated intellectual figure associated in part with Martin Heidegger's circle.

Born 29 March 1895; died 17 February 1998.

Reviews praise Jünger for vivid war writing and a provocative essayistic diagnosis of modernity. They note his early sympathy for nationalist ideas and later distancing from Nazism. Core themes: technology, the massified bourgeois world, solitude, myth, and confrontation with death.