Reassessing Junger's war aesthetic

A prominent popular intellectual is publicly reappraising Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel as possibly the greatest war book, separating its literary power from the author’s politics and prompting a debate about whether vivid, attractive depictions of combat should be canonized. This reappraisal forces readers and institutions to choose how to treat works that aestheticize violence when the author’s biography is politically fraught. — If influential commentators reframe such books as masterpieces, that can shift the literary canon, alter how war is culturally remembered, and make aestheticized accounts of violence more acceptable in public debate.