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 tu…