Interwar Articles

Ernst Jünger (b. 1895) came to prominence during the 1920s as the foremost chronicler of the “front experience” (“Fronterlebnis”) of World War I. His well-nigh lyrical descriptions of trench warfare and the great” battles of materiel” (“Materialschlachten”) – that is, of those aspects which made this war unique in human history – in works such as In the Storm of Steel (1920) and War as Inner Experience (1922) earned him the reputation of a type of “aesthetician of carnage.” In this way, Jünger, who was deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of “European Nihilism,” viewed the energies unleashed by the Great War as a heroic countermovement to European world–weariness: as a proving ground for an entire series of masculinist warrior-virtues that seemed in danger of eclipse at the hands of an effete, decadent, and materialistic bourgeois Zivilisation.