Kindle Price: $18.98

Save $2.97 (14%)

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

eBook features:
  • Highlight, take notes, and search in the book
Read with our free app
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Buy for others

Give as a gift or purchase for a team or group.
Learn more

Buying and sending eBooks to others

  1. Select quantity
  2. Buy and send eBooks
  3. Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs

Follow the author

Ernst Jünger
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

On Pain Kindle Edition

by Ernst Jünger (Author), Russell A. Berman (Preface), David C. Durst (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 91 ratings
See all formats and editions
Written and published in 1934, a year after Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Ernst Juenger's On Pain is an astonishing essay that announces the rise of a new metaphysics of pain in a totalitarian age. One of the most controversial authors of twentieth-century Germany, Juenger rejects the liberal values of liberty, security, ease, and comfort, and seeks instead the measure of man in the capacity to withstand pain and sacrifice. Juenger heralds the rise of a breed of men who--equipped with an unmatched ability to treat themselves and others in a cold and detached way--become one with new, terrorizing machines of death and destruction in human-guided torpedoes and manned airborne missiles, and whose "peculiarly cruel way of seeing," resembling the insensitive lens of a camera, anticipates the horrors of World War II. With a preface by Russell A. Berman and an introduction by translator David C. Durst, this remarkable essay not only provides valuable insights into the cult of courage and death in Nazi Germany, but also throws light on the ideology of terrorism today.
Previous page
  1. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  2. Publication date
    March 8, 2016
  3. Language
    English
  4. File size
    1712 KB
  5. See all details
Next page

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ernst Juenger (1895-1998) was born in Heidelberg, Germany. He was a shock troop commander in the German Army during World War I, and for his service was awarded the Pour Le Merite, the highest Prussian military order. Juenger's memoir of the war, Storm of Steel, offers a gripping account of his experiences. During the Weimar Republic, Juenger was an outspoken conservative critic of the first German democracy, but never joined the Nazi party. In 1939, Juenger's novel On the Marble Cliffs provided an allegorical critique of the Hitler regime. One of the most controversial writers of twentieth-century Germany, Juenger received many literary prizes. He died at the age of 102 in Riedlingen.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01CR1PSC4
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Telos Press Publishing (March 8, 2016)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 8, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1712 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 91 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
91 global ratings
A boring stream of consciousness about everything between 1918 and 1934
2 Stars
A boring stream of consciousness about everything between 1918 and 1934
An excruciatingly boring short book from the excellent author of “The storm of steel”. Where is the energy and wit and power of his first novel? Here you are hearing the voice of the most boring, disengaged social philosopher you can imagine. And he was not yet even 40 when he wrote it!You can say that the book briefly touches everything that can be somehow related to the European zeitgeist between the end of WW1 and 1934 (when the book was published). It speaks very little about the subject of the book - pain - and when it does it is at best unoriginal and at times contradictory: he says that the level of tolerance to pain is mostly in your genes (to use a modern word), and the best way to train the resistance to pain is through formal discipline, but using only self-will for the same purpose is futile. He also says that modern man is sensitive to pain because he lives in a world where the body is of the highest value and thus must be protected against pain at all costs (pp. 16-17 attached). But at a different place he says that his contemporary men had higher tolerance to pain compared to the previous generations because of “the progressive objectification of life” (p. 41).I am attaching a page from the middle where his main ideas on pain are written, and also the last two pages of the book. See for yourself if you’d like to read more of it.
Hide
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry, there was an error
Sorry we couldn't load the review

Top reviews from the United States

Rockwell
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2024
Verified Purchase
An excellent read
Helpful
 Report
Mike Santa Rita
5.0 out of 5 stars Structures of Command
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2018
Verified Purchase
Pain does not care about your values. Pain will not be sidelined by complacent bourgeois attempts to eliminate it. The only measure of a man is his ability to become equal to or surpass pain. The only true conservative philosophy is one that stays close to pain. Discipline and a hard objective view of oneself are the tools to master pain. This new man, close to pain, objective and soulless create new opportunities for command.
Ernst Junger who won Germany's highest award for valor as a storm trooper in World War I masterfully recounted his experiences in that war in Storm of Steel, the Iliad of the industrialized age. Here in a slim volume of less than 50 pages he tries to outline the new man that industrialized civilization (or lack thereof) has wrought.
While assiduously courted by the Nazis, Junger never went over to their camp thought he would win another Iron Cross in World War II. Unlike Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt who sold out their intellectual patrimony by joining the Nazi party Junger remained a much more dangerous force: a writer who sees his era with clarity and lack of compassion and implicitly prophesies the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of World War II and the terrorists of 9/11 where machine, death, terror and violence are thoroughly intertwined.
In this complex, thought provoking volume Junger earns his kudos among Germany's greatest and most controversial writers.
4 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Josner
5.0 out of 5 stars Probably the best English edition you will ever get
Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2014
Verified Purchase
Telos Press has done a good job of printing this little booklet into a sleek, slender eye-catcher, if not for its cheesy ZOOM LENS graphic on the front. This translation was meticulously done and cuts to the chase quickly, affording the English-speaking audience Jünger's prose in fluent and readable style. As a work, it not only gives insight into the mind of one of the greatest and popular German authors of the past century, but into the spirit of the age following the greatest catastrophe that mankind had ever known until that point. He literally captures the feelings of starkly being forced to face the reality of violence and mayhem, as well as the great factor that technology multiplies it by in the modern age, and triumphantly accepts what many of the sheltered and privileged people of the time had had the luxury of isolating themselves from. The only annoying part about this edition was the introduction, in which a sociologist attempt to put his own slant on the writing, but it's not a big enough deal to take a star away. The Translator's Notes are also a good read and give the context of Jünger's literary activity.
7 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
M. G Watson
4.0 out of 5 stars Pain will show you who you are
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2010
Verified Purchase
Ernst Jünger requires two translations. One from German to English, the second from English to understandable English. I mean this literally. E.J. was without a doubt one of the most brilliant literary minds of the 20th century (which he lived through in its entirety): he was capable not only of compressing enormously complex thoughts and ideas into arresting single sentences, but occasionally of writing prose so beautiful it took on the quality of poetry. However, he was also frequently turgid, opaque, digressive and vague, so that reading his works often required great concentration and patience, not to mention a willingness to sift through those flaws to find what might be called the ores of his meaning. It is possible to read a Jünger book through without actually grasping just what the author wanted to say (Aladdin's Problem confounds me to this day), and this explains partially why "On Pain", a 47 page essay, has 47 pages of forwards and introductions in its vanguard. It is a great and important read, but it is not an easy one.

I say "partially explains" because the other reason Jünger's essays are always prefaced with massive introductions by academics is that he is considered one of the most dangerous writers ever to pick up a pen. His reputation as "the intellectual Godfather of Fascism" demands that legions of scholars feel obligated to hurl their twopenny bits of disclaimer before he is allowed to speak. Jünger's works are presumed, by those who presume to be smarter than you, to be something unreadable unless you've been told how to feel about them beforehand. I remember reading a forward to On the Marble Cliffs which violently attacked E.J. because he admittedly "lacked the capacity for hatred", by far the strangest criticism I've ever heard. It is precisely Jünger's incapacity for ordinary human emotions which allowed him to write the way he did...but I guess that's the problem. His ideas, his conclusions about existence, his particular way of viewing the world, are regarded by a great many people as simply too dangerous to be tolerated, which goes a long way to explaining why most of his works have never been translated, and why the few that have are always so unreasonably expensive or hard to lay ahold of.

"On Pain" is a deceptive title, and here again we come to the issue of translation, which is noted by the translator himself in his forward. This is not a book about the sensation of physical pain, but rather a metaphysical analysis of the changing relationship between human beings and suffering in the broadest sense of that word. In "On Pain", Jünger, who was writing in 1934, and whose outlook was shaped by his combat experiences as a storm trooper in the First World War, posits that mankind is turning away from the values of burgeois morality - saftey, security, ease, comfort, individualism - and becoming harder, more disciplined, and less individual. The new man defines himself via struggle, self-sacrifice, and the ability to withstand pain in all its forms, physical, emotional and otherwise. Jünger likens this evolving consciousness of man to a photographic lens, which gazes upon the most gut-wrenching horror in total objectivity, unmoved by pity or emotion of any kind. He also maintains that his mentality, the conservative mentality, is born out of an acceptance that pain is unavoidable and, in certain mediums, beneficial. Discipline, for example, is "the way man maintains contact with pain." He notes that during the "enlightened" i.e. liberal era, a "good" face was "nervois, pliant, changing, and open to the most diverse kind of influences and impulses." In '34, however (with the Nazis in power in Germany, Communists in Russia, Fasicts in Italy, etc.) the human face is undergoing a "hardening" which brings to mind soldiers of the old Prussian Army, that "stronghold of heroic virtues." What causes this physical manifestation of the inner hardening of the human soul, Jünger writes, is "the imposition of firm and impersonal rules and regulations." Humanity, he believes, has galvanized itself in imitation of the unfeeling, destructive machines he has created, and thus taken a step to become more machine than man.

At the heart of "On Pain" is Jünger's rejection of what we today would call "Western values." America is the stronghold of the pleasure-loving super-individual, who no longer feels much in the way of responsibility, and whose main purpose in life, other than experiencing pleasure, is in the acquisition of money and objects. But it is not the only country to hold these "values", and they are precisely what Jünger wanted to destroy. "On Pain" is, in essence, a gleeful ringing-in of what he thought was a new era, one which shovels dirt over the corpse of bourgeois liberalism. And indeed, as an indictment of "moderate" and "liberal" thinking it is devastating, the moreso because Jünger was not a Nazi. (Indeed, he saw with remarkable prescience that a society founded on the values of the machine could lead to ruin. "One graps how an enormous organizational capacity can exist alongside a complete blindness vis-à-vis values, belief without meaning, discipline without legitimacy.") Rather, it he is simply unwilling to accept that a fat belly, a full wallet and a silk cushion are the highest ideals of human existence. Just as The Storm of Steel committed the ultimate academic sin in refusing to view war as an unqualified evil, finding in it "an incomparable schooling of the heart", "On Pain" compounds that sin by maintaining that the measure of a man lays in his capacity to withstand pain.

Viewed as prophecy, "On Pain" is faulty as of now, but one can already see in certain places in the world a deep-seated rejection of "Western values" and a desire to define life in terms of the acceptance of suffering rather than in its avoidance. Radical Islam, for example, views the individual as of no consequence except in his relation to the struggle, the struggle itself as waged without mercy or restraint, and death as simply the price of devotion to the faith. Terrorism is a cult of pain as Jünger defines the word, and if we see it in those terms the magnitude of the task of defeating it becomes clear: one of many reasons why "On Pain" remains relevant after 76 years.
126 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
jon l karmazin
5.0 out of 5 stars The Bedrock of reality
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2021
Verified Purchase
Straight talk about the reality of emotional as well as physical pain in life. Written by a man who lived by these words. He's not just some theorist up in an ivory tower. This tome is not for the faint of heart, or for someone with a low IQ, or that has not been educated in the classics. Before ordering this book I suggest you do a Wikipedia search of Ernst Junger, to know what you're getting yourself into. Having said that, for me, this book was like a breath of fresh air. Enjoy!
One person found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Mark T. Winter
3.0 out of 5 stars Does Pain Ennoble People?
Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2013
Verified Purchase
A concise treatment on how an easier life can dehumanize people. Outlines one mindset in a period if transition from monarchy to liberal secular democracy. The author views pain as a catalyst to live life well. The avoidance of pain ironically, leads to atrocities. Interesting from a historical perspective, but not an entertaining subject. Thought-provoking, but not a political manifesto.
3 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

Szilard
3.0 out of 5 stars Great insight
Reviewed in Germany on May 21, 2021
Verified Purchase
More than half of this book is not actually written by Jünger himself, a lot of intro and foreplay... But the other half is great.
Report
Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting because contemporary
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2020
Verified Purchase
It’s interesting to read what Germans were reading just before Nazis got in power. The sentiments that brought Hitler to power were not all blind hatred towards Jews and mesmerized stupidity at the sound of the Fürer’s voice. Mixed with those, and perhaps even more dominant was the same “malaise of modernity,” the same suspicion towards technology, and the same boredom at the promise of a Liberal Utopia promised by Socialism. In short, they were very much like us.
One person found this helpful
 Report
Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report