Ernst Junger

Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg in 1895. He ran away from school to enlist in the Foreign Legion and in 1914 volunteered to join the German army. He fought throughout the war and recorded his experiences in several books, most famously in Im Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel).

While admired by the Nazis, he remained critical of them and through novels such as On the Marble Cliffs (1939) sought to understand the impasse into which he saw Germany heading. Throughout the Nazi period he was a controversial ‘inner emigrant’, distanced from the regime yet only obliquely critical. His most famous later books include Heliopolis (1944) and The Glass Bees (1957). He died in 1998.