Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 16, 2019

The Long and Fruitful Literary Career of a Nazi Sympathizer

Ernst Jünger and the Jews.

From the publication of his World War I memoir, Storm of Steel, in 1920 until his death in 1998, Ernst Jünger was a significant part of the German literary scene. But Storm of Steel also attracted criticism for its aestheticization of violence and romanticization of warfare—and praise from, among others, Josef Goebbels. Jünger served as an officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II, spending most of the war in occupied Paris, where he had a chance to socialize with the likes of Pablo Picasso. Reviewing Jünger’s memoirs from that period, recently published in English translation, Andrew Stuttaford describes his disturbingly ambiguous relationship to Nazism:

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