Here is what the New York Times wrote on the passing of Junger:
Denis Wall
ERNST JUNGER, CONTRADICTORY GERMAN AUTHOR WHO WROTE ABOUT WAR, IS DEAD AT
102
By: David Binder
In: The New York Times, February 18, 1998
Ernst Junger, an aloof warrior-author regarded as one of Germany's most
controversial and contradictory writers, died yesterday in Wilflingen, in
southwestern Germany, where he had lived for nearly 50 years. He was 102.
Mr. Junger was so well regarded that Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President
Roman Herzog defied snow and freezing spring winds to attend his 100th
birthday in Wilflingen, a village in Upper Swabia. But he also was
so disliked that at the same time he was being extolled as a master stylist,
he was being denounced by others as a warmonger and Nazi apologist.
For Mr. Junger, war and writing were often indivisible. At 19 he
volunteered for army duty the day Kaiser Wilhelm ordered mobilization that
led to World War I in August 1914. Soon he was at the Western front with
the 73d Fusiliers. Regimental histories spoke repeatedly of his daring and
valor. He was wounded for the first time in April 1915 in Lorraine and was
subsequently wounded at least six more times. In 1917 he was awarded the
Knights Cross of the House of Hohenzollern, and eight months later, his
commanding general, commenting on his "ruthless bravery," secured for him
imperial Germany's highest medal, the Pour le Merite. He was believed to
have been the last man alive to hold the imperial medal.
Mr. Junger published his first work "Stahlgewittern" ("Storm of Steel: From
the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front."), privately
in 1920; subsequent editions became a commercial and critical success and
appeared in other countries. Based on the diaries he kept in the trenches
from 1915 through 1918, "Stahlgewittern" is a memeorial to fallen comrades
and an attempt to make sense of his war experiences, but it also revels in
the glory of combat.
Many critics in Germany and abroad praised Mr. Junger's work because it did
not censor events or thoughts but presented them as they occurred. His
subsequent books included "Combat as an Internal Experience," "Storm," "The
Copse" and "Fire and Blood." These books filled with what one critic later
called "bombastic pathos," made him the darling of radical nationalist
movements, including Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party.
Indeed, Mr. Junger contributed an article in 1923 to its newspaper,
Volkischer Beobachter, advocating revolutionary nationalism and a
dictatorship. But he declined to join the Nazis, gravitating instead to
other extremist fringe groups, ranging from the right-wing Stahlhelm to the
left-wing National Bolshevists. Despite this, some literary historians
regard him as primarily a loner who paid homage to an aristocratic ideal
and was imbued with a kind of Germanic fatalism. Like earlier German
writers, among them Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hebbel, he was
fascinated with death and heroism. He was influenced by the nihilist streak
of Friedrich Nietzsche, the end-of-the-world ideas of Oswald Spengler and
the formalistic philosophy of Hegel.
His writings in the 1920's, with their attacks on bourgeois culture and
"civility," played into the prejudices of the Nazis. But he rebuffed
repeated wooing by Hitler's party, refusing the offer of a seat in the
Reichstag in 1927 and, after Hitler seized power in 1933, membership in
the Nazified German Academy. A frequent criticism of Mr. Junger was that he
registered events only at a cool distance, never passing judgment or
injecting an emotional note. "The more the panic grows," he wrote," the
more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror."
Writing on the occassion of Mr. Junger's 100th birthday, the historian
Joachim Fest said it was frustrating to try to discern the difference
between Mr. Junger's early and later writing because his style prevented the
reader from discovering what moved him, frightened him or allowed him to
hope. He described this style as "an odd mixture of elevatedness, precision
and the rudiments of a German out of the General Staff schooled in Spartan
brevity." A passage from his novella "On the Marble Cliffs" may serve as a
sample: "Fish scales gleamed, a gull wing cut through the salt air,
jellyfish stretched and loosened their umbrellas, the fronds, of a coconut
palm waved in the wind, oysters opened to the light. In the sea garden the
brown and green seaweed and purple forms of the water lilies swayed. The
fine crystal sand of dunes whirled up." The "Marble Cliffs," published in
the year World War II began, became a seminal Junger work, pitting a
high-minded teacher against the "senior forester," a brutal and demonic
totalitarian who is hungry for power. The forester orders his underlings to
strip the bones out of human corpses and to tan their skins. In the end,
the hero escapes, saying, "So I swear to myself in the future to fall alone
in freedom rather than to accompany the servants on the path to triumph."
The book was quickly recognized as anti-Nazi, but no steps were taken
against the author, who was back in uniform, loyally serving the Third
Reich.
Ernst Junger was born March 29, 1895, in Heidelberg. His father was Ernst
Georg Junger, a pharmacist and mine owner. He was sent to private schools
in Upper and later Lower Saxony whose stuffiness and severe discipline
sparked a desire for escape to adventure. At 18 he slipped away to France
and enlisted in the Foreign Legion, which sent him to Algeria for basic
training. His father was not as enamored of the military as his son and
prevailed on Germany's Foreign Office to secure the boy's return. Young
Ernst remained rebellious, but the outbreak of war in July 1914 provided him
with a legitimate release from "the dominion of comfort." He remained in
the army for five years after World War I ended. He then returned to his
studies, first at the University of Leipzig in Saxony and then in Naples,
concentrating on entomology, a boyhood hobby.
The observation of nature became a passion that stayed with him for the rest
of his life. He traveled to Africa, the Middle East and Asia assembling a
collection of beetles and insects that would number 40,000. His admirers
saw in his focus on observation a key to his spiritual core, an insistence
that "thought must proceed from observation," as Fest wrote. He also
participated in radical politics, looking forward to the rise of a new man,
as he wrote in "the Worker" in 1932, a man of industry who would restore
order to a chaotic world. From Mr. Junger, democracy was incapable of
maintaining order. Mr. Junger spent World War II as a captain serving in
headquarters, mostly in occupied Paris. There he made friends with such
leading cultural figures as Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry, Celine, Picasso,
Georges Braque and Henri de Motherlant. He wrote about his encounters with
them and others in "Gardens and Roads," which was published in French and
German in 1942.
In Paris he was close to German officers who participated in the July 20,
1944, plot to kill Hitler, but he was not involved in the conspiracy.
His punishment was summary dismissal from the Wehrmacht. Four months later
he was informed that his son, Ernst, had been killed in action in Italy
while on duty with a penal battalion after being courtmartialed for
"subversive" talk. He wrote, "Often I have the impression that I am
writing on paper that is already browning in the licks of the flames."
After the war, Allied forces branded Mr. Junger a militarist and barred him
from publishing for four years. He did not help his cause by his lofty
refusal to fill out the questionnaire used to determine whether a German had
been a Nazi.
In 1949 his war diaries were published under the title "Radiations." In one
passage he described hearing a report on the "monstrous shameful actions" of
a branch of the SS during the conquest of Kiev in 1941, and noting, "I was
seized by disgust in front of the uniforms, the shoulder boards, the
medals, the weapons whose brilliance I had once so loved." That same year
he published a utopian novel, "Helioplis," involving two rival factions,
one populist "with the instincts of the dull masses," and the other
favoring an enlightened absolutism carried out by an elite. Critics
concluded that the novel dealt with the struggle between the Nazi Party
and the Wehrmacht. He withdrew to a sort of self-imposed exile in 1950 to
his home in a forester's house on a baronial estate near Wilflingen, where
he continued to write into his 90's, producing more than 50 books. He
remained able to surprise. In 1970 he published "Approaches, Drugs and the
Buzz," about his experiences taking LSD and mescaline, and a widely
praised detective story, "Dangerous Encounters," in 1985. His works were
acclaimed by Heinrich Boll, the Nobel laureate in literature known for his
pacifism.
His first wife, Gretha von Jeinsen, died in 1960. Their second son,
Alexander, a physician, committed suicide in 1993. Mr. Junger's younger
brother, Friedrich, also a writer, died in 1977. He is survived by his
second wife, Liselotte. Mr. Junger's renaissance began in the 1980's, when
the city of Frankfurt awarded him its Goethe Prize -- after much protest --
and he joined Chancellor Kohl and President Francois Mitterrand of France at
a 1984 Franco-German reconciliation ceremony at the World War I battlefield
of Verdun in France. At Verdun, the setting for the worst slaughter of the
war, he sought to make amends for his youthful bellicosity, saying that the
"ideology of war" pervading Germany before and after that conflict was "a
calamitous mistake."
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.