The son of a successful businessman and chemist, Jünger rebelled against an affluent upbringing and sought adventure in the Wandervogel German youth movement, before running away to briefly serve in the French Foreign Legion, which was an illegal act in Germany.

During World War II Jünger served as an army captain in occupied Paris, but by 1943 he had turned decisively against Nazi totalitarianism, a change manifested in his work "Der Friede" (The Peace).

By the later stages of the Cold War, his unorthodox writings about the impact of materialism in modern society were widely seen as conservative rather than radical nationalist, and his philosophical works came to be highly regarded in mainstream German circles.

Jünger ended life as an honoured literary figure, although critics continued to charge him with the glorification of war as a transcendental experience in some of his early works.

[5] On 1 August 1914, shortly after the start of World War I, Jünger enlisted as a one year volunteer and joined the 73rd Hannoverian Fusilier Regiment of the 19th Division, and, after training, was transported to the Champagne front in December.

During the Battle of the Somme near the obliterated remains of the village of Guillemont his platoon took up a front line position in a defile that had been shelled until it consisted of little more than a dip strewn with the rotting corpses of predecessors.

Transferred to Langemarck in July, Jünger's actions against the advancing British included forcing retreating soldiers to join his resistance line at gunpoint.

In the Battle of Cambrai (1917) Jünger sustained two wounds, by a bullet passing through his helmet at the back of the head, and another by a shell fragment on the forehead.

On 25 August, he was wounded for the seventh and final time near Favreuil, being shot through the lung while leading his company in an advance that was quickly overwhelmed by a British counter-attack.

While he was treated in a Hannover hospital, on 22 September he received notice of being awarded the Pour le Mérite on the recommendation of division commander Johannes von Busse.

[10] His war experiences described in Storm of Steel (German title: In Stahlgewittern), which Jünger self-published in 1920, gradually made him famous.

[17] In the 22 October 1932 edition of Völkischer Beobachter (the official Nazi newspaper), the article "Das endlose dialektische Gespräch" ("the never-ending dialectical debate") attacked Jünger for his rejection of the "blood and soil" doctrine, accusing him of being an "intellectualist" and a liberal.

He and his brother Friedrich Georg quit the "Traditionsverein der 73er" (veteran's organization of the Hanoverian regiment they had served during World War I) when its Jewish members were expelled.

[20] On the Marble Cliffs (1939, German title: Auf den Marmorklippen), a short novel in the form of a parable, uses metaphor to describe Jünger's negative perceptions of the situation in Hitler's Germany.

[22] Assigned to an administrative position as intelligence officer and mail censor in Paris, he socialized (often at the Georges V hotel or at Maxim's) with prominent artists of the day such as Picasso and Jean Cocteau.

He noted in his Parisian diary (Strahlungen [de]) that Céline on that occasion "spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews".

In his Parisian diaries, the writer wrote on 7 June 1942 that he had encountered for the first time the yellow star carried by three little girls who were passing by in the Rue Royale, and that he considered that day as fundamental in his personal history, because he said he was ashamed at that moment of wearing a German officer's uniform.

Jünger considered avoiding the assignment but eventually attended to oversee the execution in, as he claimed in his journal, "the spirit of higher curiosity".

He was clearly an inspiration to anti-Nazi conservatives in the German Army,[28] and while in Paris he was close to the old, mostly Prussian, officers who carried out the assassination attempt against Hitler.

Transferred to Penal Unit 999 as Frontbewährung, i.e. probation trough frontline service, after his parents had spoken to the presiding judge Admiral Ernst Scheurlen, he was killed near Carrara in occupied Italy on 29 November 1944 (though Jünger was never sure whether he had been shot by the enemy or by the SS).

[32][33] After the war, Jünger was initially under some suspicion for his nationalist past, and he was banned from publishing in Germany for four years by the British occupying forces because he refused to submit to the denazification procedures.

[14] His work The Peace (German title: Der Friede), written in 1943 and published abroad in 1948, marked the end of his involvement in politics.

This made Jünger one of just four German authors to see two subsequent editions of their collected works published during their lifetime, alongside Goethe, Klopstock and Wieland.

His vision in The Glass Bees (1957, German title: Gläserne Bienen), of a future in which an automated machine-driven world threatens individualism, could be seen as a story within the science fiction genre.

A sensitive poet with training in botany and zoology, as well as a soldier, his works in general are infused with tremendous details of the natural world.

Although he had been cleared of the accusation of Nazi collaboration since the 1950s, Jünger's national conservatism and his ongoing role as conservative philosopher and icon made him a controversial figure, and Huyssen (1993) argued that nevertheless "his conservative literature made Nazism highly attractive",[46] and that "the ontology of war depicted in Storm of Steel could be interpreted as a model for a new, hierarchically ordered society beyond democracy, beyond the security of bourgeois society and ennui".

[47] Walter Benjamin wrote "Theories of German Fascism" (1930) as a review of War and Warrior, a collection of essays edited by Jünger.

Jünger came from a mixed Christian Protestant, agnostic family and did not profess any particular denominational belief, but shortly before he died he converted to Roman Catholicism.

Jünger also edited a collection of essays, Krieg und Krieger (War and Warriors, 1930, 1933) and wrote the foreword for a photo anthology of airplanes and flying called Luftfahrt ist Not!

Klett-Cotta edited Jünger's correspondence with Rudolf Schlichter, Carl Schmitt, Gerhard Nebel, Friedrich Hielscher, Gottfried Benn, Stefan Andres and Martin Heidegger in seven separate volumes during 1997–2008.