Ernst Junger and the war experience of the Great War generation

The First World War was a global turning point in world history. Understanding the experience of the war, proposed by Ernst Junger, was a heroic chronicle of the fighting, describing the exploits and everyday life of hostilities and is a clear indication of the experiences of war. Ernst Junger acted as a seismograph of the war, capable of identifying the special features of the new war and their influence on the transformation of the soldier's worldview in the context of hostilities. The purpose of the article is to examine the influence of military experiences on the worldview of the military generation on the example of thinking about the war of Ernst Junger. Sources of research were the works of Ernst Junger on the First World War, his military diaries. The specifics of understanding the First World War in Germany was associated with the process of identifying participants in the war after its completion. The clash of the military and the revolutionary generation led to the condemnation of war as a phenomenon and leveling the significance of the activities of its participants. Ernst Junger in his writings on the war, including the famous book “In Steel Thunderstorms”, interprets war as not only destructive force, but also a creative phenomenon that shaped new values and forged character. Junger notes the key feature of the war - the role of technology in battles, which erases the value of the individual aspirations of soldiers. However, despite the technical face of the war, he claims that the resilience of the troops depended on the courage of the soldiers sitting in the trenches. Military experience has formed among the soldiers the values of front-line brotherhood based on loyalty, self-sacrifice, perseverance. A distinctive feature of the generation of the First World War, he considers determination and readiness for action, which the burghers lack. In his picture of war, there are no anti-war and pacifist elements, which he interpreted as manifestations of weakness. E. Junger does not consider the military generation to be a “lost generation”, seeing in it a willingness and determination to change the world on the basis of the values of duty and service. E. Junger discourse on the military generation, inscribed in the intellectual direction of the conservative revolution in Germany, served not only to criticize the revolutionary Weimar Republic, but also acted as a guide to the formation of the future German state. An important role of observation E. Junger played in the understanding of the image of a man in a war, the analysis of the everyday life of hostilities. Understanding of the military experiences, outlined by E. Junger, made a significant contribution to the understanding of the military generation of the First World War.

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