Ernst Junger, the German writer, died this week at the age of 102. He was a man of many parts. Won Germany's highest award for bravery, the Pour le Merite in the first World War, wrote a famous book about his experiences, Storm of Steel, and on the eve of the second World War published a novel, On the Marble Cliffs, a story, a parable against despotism, with two dreadful characters recognised by some as being Goering and Goebbels.
Junger was an authoritarian, but did not join the Nazis. There was pressure to have action taken against him, but possibly Hitler said, "Let him be." Junger was a military hero. But he was something more. For many, he is notable as a naturalist. Even in On the Marble Cliffs, the brutality and necrophilia does not obscure the natural life around the community which inhabited the Grand Marina: the vines and the birds that came to prey on them, the quail, the thrushes; and the chestnut and walnuts and, above all, the white truffles, the morel and the Emperor's sponge. Then the redstarts, the goldfinches, "the chirping zithers of the barn owls," the hoopoe, the woodpecker.
All this against the contrasting charnel-house, torture chamber or concentration camp which he calls Koppels-Bleek. An old barn: "Over the door, on the gable-end, a skull was nailed fast, showing its teeth and seeming to invite entry with its grin. . . it was the central link of a narrow gable frieze which appeared to be formed of brown spiders. Suddenly we guessed that it was fashioned of human hands fastened to the wall. ." Yet the brother has time to notice a greyteazle "which one finds on felling sites." And there was a small bush with flame-red berries.
On the cover of a biography by Thomas Nevin, reference is made to Junger's "profound ambiguities." Of his industry and persistence there can be no doubt. In 1965, at the age of three score years and ten, he began a series of diaries, wryly entitled Past Seventy (Siebzig Verweht). Four volumes, so far, between 500 and 600 pages each. Often a simple entry: "In the garden. Rain had fallen overnight: mist hanging in the shrubs. Alone with the greenery, the flowers, the fruit. . . some of them going off." Compare that with a cold description of an execution-squad of German soldiers carrying out the death penalty on a deserter, Junger the officer in charge, this in occupied Paris in 1941.