War as Inner Experience

In his war diaries "In Stahlgewittern" (1920) and "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis" (1926), J nger glorified the war as a mythical natural event, from which he saw a "new steel-hard blow of man entering the present". From the horror of the trenches to the sound and fury of the battlefields on the Western front, J nger celebrates war as a total event belonging to our nature. For him, Man is not destroyed but created by war; he is measured by his capacity to endure pain and sacrifice - if war brings cruel death, it also brings the re-birth of a new Man and of a new world.