Jünger, Ernst

Jünger, Ernst ĕrnst yüngˈər [key], 1895–1998, German writer. Jünger's early war novels were based on arduous army experience. Strongly influenced by Nietzsche, they glorified war and its sacrifice as the greatest physical and mental stimulants. Among these works are Storm of Steel (1920, tr. 1929), Feuer und Blut (1924), and Copse 125 (1925, tr. 1930). Later he opposed Hitler and rejected his own militarism in a mystical plea for peace, expressed in his diaries of the war years and in the futuristic novels On the Marble Cliffs (1939, tr. 1947), an allegorical attack on Nazism; Gärten und Strassen (1942); and Heliopolis (1949). His later works include The Glass Bees (1957, tr. 1961) and Aladdin's Problem (1983, tr. 1992).

See studies by J. P. Stern (1953), G. Loose (1974), and R. Woods (1982).

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