Ernst Jünger

Independent activity Nationalism 1895–1998 ○ Natural causes

Conservative Revolution writer who glorified war and total mobilisation in Storm of Steel and The Worker

He volunteered in the First World War, won the Pour le Mérite and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in the trenches. After Storm of Steel (1920) he wrote for nationalist journals and became a leading author of the Conservative Revolution, attacking parliamentary democracy. In The Worker (1932) he argued that modern economic life extended the total mobilisation of war and that the bourgeois order was giving way to a society organised around the figure of the Worker, a book that deeply influenced Heidegger. He rejected the Nazis' advances and never joined the party, and On the Marble Cliffs (1939) portrayed dictatorship as a parable. A captain at army headquarters in occupied Paris, he was dismissed in 1944 for his closeness to the plotters against Hitler.

Also known as: Ernst Junger · Ernst Juenger