FEW GERMAN WRITERS have prompted such conflicting views among commentators as Ernst Jünger. Often the controversies surrounding him were linked to differing political and ideological stances, although it speaks volumes for the contradictory nature of a good deal of his work that support was not always from conservative quarters and opposition not always from the political Left. For his critics, he was a cold, unfeeling fascist who gloried in violence, had limited sympathy for human suffering, “cleared the way” for National Socialism, and was an embarrassment to postwar Germany as it sought to come to terms with the Nazi past. For his supporters and apologists, he was more an apolitical, at times humanitarian visionary, a modernist steeped in classical mythology, whose writings of the 1920s were a reflection and measure of the forces that shook and ultimately destroyed the Weimar Republic. Of all the writers discussed in part 2 of this book, Jünger's status as a nonconformist is thus the most disputed. Despite his withdrawal to an apolitical standpoint and the embracing of an intellectual and aesthetic elitism, he did not regard himself as an inner emigrant, believing his publications, especially the novel Auf den Marmorklippen (1939, English translation On the Marble Cliffs, 1947), were not a reflection of passivity or withdrawal but rather evidenced a clear anti-Nazi stance. However, his writings and associations up to 1933 had marked him out as a significant right-wing voice in Germany and he was certainly seen in Nazi circles as an important writer favorably disposed to the principles of the movement. His diverse writings stretched over more than seventy years and the complete works run to twenty-two volumes plus a substantial supplementary collection of political publicist contributions. The body of secondary literature is correspondingly large; the Marbach catalogue, for example, records 1,036 items on the writer and his work.

The Defiant Nationalist

More than a quarter of the collected works consist of diaries, and several essays in other volumes are based on sketches and extracts from diaries. There is thus no shortage of autobiographical material, but a lot of the information Jünger provides serves to build a certain image of himself, is highly selective, and lacks personal details. In view of this material's partly controversial nature and the writer's literary longevity, the existence of so many biographies is no surprise.