It’s the birthday of Ernst Jünger (1895-1998, #ridiculouslylonglife), a prominent and controversial German author who wrote more than 50 books in his 102 years. Jünger was highly decorated for his service to Germany during WWI, refused to be BFFs with Hitler or to join the Nazi party leading up to WWII, nonetheless served as a captain in the Third Reich in occupied Paris, and then was loosely associated with the German officers who plotted to kill Hitler. And near the end of his life, he denounced his youthful glorification of war. So: some cognitive dissonance there, but if anyone’s up to it, it’s the Germans.

Jünger was born in Heidelberg to a pharmacist father, attended some strict private schools, and at 18 ran off to join the Foreign Legion; Daddy pulled some strings and got him returned. The next year, he volunteered for the army the day that Kaiser Wilhelm started mobilization. As an officer on the Western Front, Jünger was wounded seven times (maybe he wasn’t brave: maybe he was just bad at not getting wounded) and received the prestigious Pour le Mérite medal, imperial Germany’s highest military decoration, which of course bears a French name. After the war, he published his first novel, The Storm of Steel (1920), acclaimed for its uncensored and objective account of the brutality of the Western Front. The story is told in diary form and was based on his actual diaries from the war.

Jünger left the army in 1923 to study entomology and traveled widely to collect, ultimately, more than 40,000 beetles and insects, like you do. He continued to publish both fiction and nonfiction that was bombastic and extremist and fatalistic and nihilistic, all of which “-istics” appealed to the rising Nazi party, but Jünger would have no truck with them. In fact, his novella On the Marble Cliffs (1939) was understood to be anti-Nazi even though by then Jünger was serving Germany in WWII. Adding to the confusion about Jünger is the fact that his writing was dispassionate to the point of never revealing where he stood emotionally with his material.

Jünger spent the last 50 years of his life secluded in West Germany, writing loads of books, including a science fiction novel called The Glass Bees (1957) that explored futuristic technology in an increasingly impersonal world. (I haven’t read any of Jünger’s books and am offering 20 life points to anyone who has.) As a fitting tribute to this complicated, brilliant, controversial author, the city of Frankfurt awarded him its Goethe Prize in 1982—but also protested doing so, sort of their way of saying, “You’re wonderful, you monster.”

Have a blessedly noncomplicated Friday, remember that Nazis are always the bad guys, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.