Ernst Juenger, 102; Controversial German Author

Ernst Juenger, a decorated soldier and controversial author whose works were considered to attack both democracy and Nazism, has died. He was 102.

Juenger died Tuesday at home in the southern German city of Wilflingen, officials there said.

He was best known for his 1939 anti-Nazi novel, “On the Marble Cliffs,” which depicted the annihilation of a peaceful people by “barbarian hordes.” The story’s allegorical meaning escaped Nazi censors, and the book was widely circulated and read before officials in Adolf Hitler’s regime caught on. But Juenger, a soldier in the German army at the time, was still considered loyal.

His 100th birthday party in 1995 was attended by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Left-wing students picketed a ceremony honoring Juenger the next day in Heidelberg, where he was born in 1895.

Fascinated with the military life, Juenger joined the French Foreign Legion at 18 and the German army the next year. He was wounded 14 times during World War I, earning decorations from the kaiser.

He gained early fame with the 1920 wartime novel “Storms of Steel,” celebrating his experiences in the trenches. Battle was “the greatest high,” he wrote. His works in the 1920s and 1930s mocked the wobbly democracy of the Weimar republic and predicted the rise of totalitarianism. Supporters called him a fiery patriot; critics a fascist.

Juenger wrote anti-Semitic and warlike tracts in the 1930s, but he disliked Hitler and never joined the Nazi Party.

Times reviewer Michael Harris said of an English translation of Juenger’s “Aladdin’s Problem” in 1992 that the author “shows an unusual grasp of the thought processes of people in power.”