The New Yorker Books:

A morally compromised writer can project a strange kind of honesty—especially when his society is compromised to the same degree.

By Alex Ross 

Ernst Jünger, the stylish supervillain of twentieth-century German literature, fit the profile of a war hero, however dubious the title may seem in retrospect. While serving in a Prussian infantry regiment during the First World War, he suffered seven major wounds, the last one almost fatal. At the Second Battle of Bapaume, in August, 1918, he was shot through his right lung and was on the verge of bleeding to death when a medic swaddled him in a tarpaulin. Moments later, the medic was killed by a bullet to the head. Another soldier hoisted Jünger onto his shoulders; that man, too, was shot dead. Finally, the company succeeded in hauling Jünger to a field hospital, where he was given a glass of lemonade and a dose of morphine. The next day, according to Jünger’s war memoir “In Storms of Steel,” he was “in the hands of the nurses and reading ‘Tristram Shandy’ from the point where I had been interrupted by the order to attack.”

This indestructible youth lived another eighty years, outlasting both the Weimar Republic, which he loudly opposed, and the Nazi regime, which he quietly disdained. Germany was split in two, then reunified; Jünger was still there. By the time he died, in 1998, at the age of a hundred and two, he had found a tenuous, solitary place in the German canon. He published more than a dozen volumes of empirically acute but emotionally distant diaries, starting in 1920 with “In Storms of Steel.” He wrote sci-fi-inflected novels, fashioning allegories of the terror state and spinning out prophecies of future technology. And he produced far-right political tracts that have inspired several generations of fascist rhapsodists, antimodern elegists, and élitist libertarians. (Peter Thiel is a fan.) All of this was filtered through a terse, chiselled literary voice—coolly handsome, like the man himself.

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