Ernst Jünger

Storm of Steel is Jünger's diary of the Western Front, where he was wounded fourteen times and given the Pour le Merite, and it is unusual for describing the war without either horror or regret, as an intensity worth having lived. That made him a hero to the German right in the twenties, and he wrote nationalist essays attacking the Weimar republic. He refused to join the ruling party, refused a seat in its Reichstag, and served as a Wehrmacht officer in occupied Paris, where he moved among the conspirators of the July 1944 plot without ever being charged. How much distance any of that amounts to is still argued over. He lived to a hundred and two, dying in 1998. In Stahlgewittern is the same book under its German title.