Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945

For most of his life Ernst Jnger one of Europes leading twentieth-century writers has been controversial. Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jnger in English Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writers first fifty years from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitlers Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jnger a man who has been extolled despised denounced and admired throughout his lifetime Ernst Jnger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is if uncomfortably represented by him. Ernst Jnger is in many ways Germanys conscience and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests Jnger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitlers assassination in 1944 he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jngers untranslated work much of which has never been reprinted in Germany Nevin reveals Jngers profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing the chaos of Weimar and the sinister culture of Nazism. Winner of Germanys highest literary awards Ernst Jnger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings as this book indicates put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology whitewash nor vilification Ernst Jnger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.