|
|
Categories: 1895 births | 1998 deaths | German writers | German philosophers | National Bolshevism | Conservative Revolutionary movement | German World War I people | Centenarians Ernst Jünger
Life and workHe was born in Heidelberg and grew up in Hanover as the son of a pharmacist. Jünger went to school between the years of 1901 and 1913 and was member of the "Wandervogel"-movement. He ran away from home to join the French Foreign Legion where he served in North Africa. During World War I he served in the German Army on the Western Front. This time of war is described in The Storm of Steel (German: In Stahlgewittern) which was published in 1920. The novel has been seen as somewhat war-glorifying, especially in comparison to the other major German WWI novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues), by Remarque. Jünger served as a lieutenant in the army of the Weimar Republic until his demobilisation in 1923. He studied marine biology, zoology, botany and philosophy and became a well-known Entomologist. He married Gretha von Jeinsen in 1925; they had two children. In the 1920s Jünger published articles in several right-wing nationalist journals. In Storm of Steel and Feuer und Blut (eng: Fire and Blood) Jünger glorified war as an internal event. He criticized the Democracy of the Weimar Republic, but he did not actively support the National Socialist movement around Hitler. Jünger refused the offer to head the Nazi Writer's Union . In 1927 he moved to Berlin. He was a soldier as well as a sensitive poet with extraordinary knowledge about plants, nature and insects. The Adventurous Heart (German: Das abenteuerliche Herz) (1929). In Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage (1930, eng: On Nationalism and the Jewish Question) Jünger describes "the Jews" as a threat for the Germans. In 1932 he published The Worker (German: Der Arbeiter), which called for the creation of a totally mobilized society run by warrior-worker-scholars. Jünger left Berlin in 1933, his house was searched by the Gestapo, secret-police, and from 1938 he was forbidden to write. On the Marble Cliffs (German: Auf den Marmorklippen) uses metaphor to describe Jünger's perceptions of the situation in Hitler's Germany. He served in World War II as an Army Captain. His time in France is described in his diary Gärten und Straßen 1942. Jünger was involved in the fringes of the Stauffenberg bomb plot - not directly but as a figure of intellectual inspiration. After the war his books were forbidden for a few years. Jünger's The Peace (German: Der Friede), written in 1943 and published in 1947, marked the end of his involvement in Politics. Jünger refused to appear at a "Denazification"-tribunal. His diaries from 1939 to 1949 were published under the title Strahlungen (1948). In the 1950s and 1960s Jünger travelled extensively. His first wife, Gretha, died in 1960, and in 1962 he married Liselotte Lohrer. Ernst Jünger has been among the forerunners of "Magic Realism". Jünger's future-visions of an overmechanized world threatens individualism described in The Glass Bees (German: Gläserne Bienen) (1957) could be seen as "Science Fiction". Throughout his whole life he had experimented with drugs as: ether, cocaine, and hashish; thirty years later he used mescaline and LSD. This experiments were recorded comprehensively in Annäherungen (1970). The novel Besuch auf Goldenholm (1952) is clearly influenced by his early experiments with mescaline and LSD. He met several times with LSD inventor Albert Hofmann and they took LSD together. Hofmann's memoir LSD, My Problem Child describes some of these meetings. His 100th birthday on March 29, 1995, was met with praises from various individuals and fans, including François Mitterrand. Jünger was a close friend of Martin Heidegger. Jünger was admired by Julius Evola who published a book called L'Operaio nel pensiero di Ernst Juenger (Rome, 1960), in which he summarized The Worker . Ernst Jünger died on February 17, 1998 in Wilflingen , Swabia. He was also the only German who received the military Pour le Mérite of the Kaiserreich and the civil version of the Federal Republic of Germany. With his death the last bearer of the military version died. Ernst's brother Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898 - 1977) was a poet and essayist. Bibliography
Selected works
Books about Jünger
External links
Categories: 1895 births | 1998 deaths | German writers | German philosophers | National Bolshevism | Conservative Revolutionary movement | German World War I people | Centenarians |
|
The contents of this article are licensed from Wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. How to see transparent copy
|
BiologyDaily.com 2005. Legal info Privacy |