Assignment to Armageddon: Ernst Jünger and Curzio Malaparte on the Russian Front, 1941–43

Abstract

Close contemporaries, heroes of the Great War for which they volunteered in their teens, both becoming officers when they were barely twenty, then gravely wounded and decorated for outstanding valor, Ernst Jünger (1895– ) and Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) spent the period of “l'entre deux guerres” in roughly the same circumstances. Malaparte began as a combat observer with the Italian legation in Poland where he saw Trotsky's army lay siege to Warsaw in 1920, Jünger as a Reichswehr officer moving between Hanover and Berlin during the deep unrest of the immediate postwar years; both men at this time wrote books based on their war experiences which excited attention, Jünger's memoir, In Stahlgewittern (1920), and Malaparte's polemic account of the retreat from Caporetto, La Rivolta dei santi maledetti (1921); the Italian became an early and militant Fascist, no stranger to the hooliganism of Mussolini's squadristi; the German a national bolshevist, militarist, and a friend of such street fighters as Ernst von Salomon and Otto Strasser. Jünger like Malaparte was, for a time, a journalist, and his editing of the weekly Standarte, with its strong nationalist ideology, found its parallel in Malaparte's editorship of the radical Fascist Conquisto dello stato.