The Ernst Junger Bundle

Soldier, Novelist, Centenarian

Ernst Junger (1895-1998) lived long enough to see the twentieth century from end to end. He fought as a stormtrooper in the trenches of World War I, wrote the memoir that made him famous, survived World War II as an ambivalent insider of the German officer corps, and died at 102 having outlasted every political system that tried to claim or condemn him. This bundle collects three books that cover the essential Junger.

What's Included

Storm of Steel (1920, Michael Hofmann translation) is Junger's World War I memoir, written from the notebooks he kept in the trenches. Unlike the anti-war memoirs of Remarque or Sassoon, Junger writes without pacifist sentiment. The book records combat as an experience of intensity, danger, and transformation. The Hofmann translation, published by Penguin Classics, is widely regarded as the definitive English rendering and preserves the cold, precise, almost scientific quality of Junger's prose.

On the Marble Cliffs (1939) is Junger's allegorical novella about a scholar living in an idyllic landscape that is gradually overtaken by a brutal tyrant called the Head Ranger. Written and published under the Nazi regime, the book was widely read as a veiled critique of Hitler, though Junger always denied that it was intended as a simple allegory. The prose is ornate, symbolic, and layered in a way that sets it apart from the lean style of Storm of Steel.

Ernst Junger: A Different European Destiny by Dominique Venner is the French historian's final published work, a critical biography that reads Junger as the key to understanding an alternative European trajectory: one defined by aristocratic individualism, warrior ethics, and a refusal to submit to mass politics of any kind.

About This Edition

Authors: Ernst Junger, Dominique Venner
Publishers: Penguin Classics, New York Review Books, Arktos Media
Format: Three-volume paperback set