Ernst Jünger was a German novelist and cultural critic who, by embracing total war as an exemplary pattern of life, helped to prepare the ideology of the National Socialist revolution of 1933. He was born in Heidelberg and educated in Hanover. In 1913 he joined the French Foreign Legion in north Africa in search of "the extraordinary beyond the social and moral sphere … a zone in which the war of the forces of nature found its pure and aimless expression." This quest for an exotic life in artificially heightened experience revealed Jünger's metaphysical attitudes and anticipated his later pattern of life. Jünger joined the German army at the outbreak of World War I. He fought on the western front and was commissioned, repeatedly wounded, and highly decorated. To him the war appeared "a means for self-realization, a...