Jünger sous les Orages d'acier : Servitude et grandeur militaires

Abstract

Jünger under the storms of steel : military slavery and majesty ; In 1914 Ernst Jünger was 19 jears old and, like many other young men of his generation, believed that the war would provide an escape from the narrow-minded bourgeois society that was the legacy of the inward-looking and arrogant mentality of the 19th century. The illusion was short lived. The Great War, although idealised in the camaraderie between soldiers, left nothing but death, pain and suffering. Both French and German post-war literature attempted to glorify this terrible experience, but without success. In 1925, Ernst Jünger (who died in 1997 at the age of 103) captured in Copse 125 the totalitarianism that «mechanised » man. By 1932, in The Worker, his view was to have become extreme. A French intellectual such as Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) has adopted the same line of thought in relation to Hiroshima... Bringing together their points of view may be an important contribution to reflection on the experience of war.