The broken past: World War II in Ernst Junger's later work

This thesis examines the impact of World War II on the wartime and postwar works of Ernst Junger. It demonstrates how the destruction caused by the war convinced Junger of the immense danger of technological domination and was key to his conclusion that history had ended. Jungerls critique of the nihilistic postwar world is linked to similar claims made by prominent nineteenth and twentieth century French and German critics of modernity and his philosophy of history is traced back to the ideas of Vico, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Spengler. His interpretations of the causes and consequences of the war are placed into the larger context of the shifting interpretations of Germany's problematic past and linked to the ideas propounded by conservatives immediately after the war and those expressed by revisionists in more recent years.