SOURCE: "Wrestling with an Old Trauma: Ernst Jünger's Changing Perception of Destructiveness," in AUMLA, No. 81, May, 1994, pp. 21-31.

In the following essay, Keller discusses the place of destructiveness and compassion in Jünger's work.

Destructiveness is one theme which is ever present in the work of Ernst Jünger from In Stahlgewittern to Eine gefährliche Begegnung. It dominates the first of these texts and is critically assessed in the latter, indicating that division in Jünger's work at which he had hinted in his diary entry of 16 September 1942. There he had made the less than modest remark that he considered his books on the First World War, Die totale Mobilmachung, Der Arbeiter and sections of his essay Über den Schmerz, as his 'Old Testament'. It was that part of his work which was dominated by the theme of aggressiveness and which had made his name notorious...