Ernst Jünger

The son of a successful chemist, Ernst Jünger ran from comfort to the French Foreign Legion as a teenager, an illegal move that his father's intervention reversed just in time for him to enlist in the Imperial German Army in 1914. Wounded badly in a 1918 offensive, he emerged with the Pour le Mérite and a manuscript that became Storm of Steel, a memoir stripped of sentiment. He wrote against Weimar liberalism through the 1920s but refused the Nazis when they came calling, serving instead as an army captain in occupied Paris during World War II. By 1943 he had written "The Peace," a decisive turn against totalitarianism that led to his dismissal in 1944 after indirect links to the plot against Hitler; months later his son died in a penal battalion. Postwar suspicion gave way, eventually, to recognition as philosophy and entomology consumed his later decades, and when he died in 1998 at 102 - the last living holder of his rare decoration - Germany had made an uneasy peace with a writer who never stopped arguing that modern materialism flattened the human spirit.