Nebel, Gerhard

Gerhard Nebel (1903–1974) was a German writer and cultural critic. Nebel studied philosophy and classical philology in Freiburg, Marburg and Heidelberg from 1923 to 1927, under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. He worked as a teacher in the Ruhr for a short time but was suspended for "socialist agitation", being a member of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. He resumed teaching in 1933, and was again suspended within a year. He then travelled to Egypt, where he worked as a private tutor, intermittently working in Germany in 1937 before travelling in East Africa during 1938/9. Nebel was drafted into the Luftwaffe and worked as a translator in Paris in 1941, where he met Ernst Jünger. After comparing fighter airplanes with insects in an essay, he was demoted and transferred as a construction soldier to Alderney. After the war, he worked again as a teacher. He published his diaries, and the essay collections Von den Elementen and Tyrannis und Freiheit. He retired in 1955, working as an independent author, his last book Hamann appearing in 1973. Nebel switched his ideological alignment several times during his life; he identified as a social democrat, a marxist, a nihilist, an atheist, a reactionary and after World War II he developed his own idiosyncratic form of conservativism. His temper was choleric, and his style often polemic and zealous.