What do you think?
Rate this book
Storm of Steel
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, 'Storm of Steel' illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier.
Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Jünger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict, but more importantly as a unique personal struggle.
Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, Jünger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will mark his failure.
Published shortly after the war's end, 'Storm of Steel' was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann's brilliant new translation.
Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Jünger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict, but more importantly as a unique personal struggle.
Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, Jünger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will mark his failure.
Published shortly after the war's end, 'Storm of Steel' was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann's brilliant new translation.
289 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1920
About the author
Ernst Jünger
226 books703 followersErnst Jünger was a decorated German soldier and author who became famous for his World War I memoir Storm of Steel. The son of a successful businessman and chemist, Jünger rebelled against an affluent upbringing and sought adventure in the Wandervogel, before running away to briefly serve in the French Foreign Legion, an illegal act. Because he escaped prosecution in Germany due to his father's efforts, Junger was able to enlist on the outbreak of war. A fearless leader who admired bravery above all else, he enthusiastically participated in actions in which his units were sometimes virtually annihilated. During an ill-fated German offensive in 1918 Junger's WW1 career ended with the last and most serious of his many woundings, and he was awarded the Pour le Mérite, a rare decoration for one of his rank.
Junger served in World War II as captain in the German Army. Assigned to an administrative position in Paris, he socialized with prominent artists of the day such as Picasso and Jean Cocteau. His early time in France is described in his diary Gärten und Straßen (1942, Gardens and Streets). He was also in charge of executing younger German soldiers who had deserted. In his book Un Allemand à Paris , the writer Gerhard Heller states that he had been interested in learning how a person reacts to death under such circumstances and had a morbid fascination for the subject.
Jünger appears on the fringes of the Stauffenberg bomb plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler (July 20, 1944). He was clearly an inspiration to anti-Nazi conservatives in the German Army, and while in Paris he was close to the old, mostly Prussian, officers who carried out the assassination attempt against Hitler. He was only peripherally involved in the events however, and in the aftermath suffered only dismissal from the army in the summer of 1944, rather than execution.
In the aftermath of WW2 he was treated with some suspicion as a closet Nazi. By the latter stages of the Cold War his unorthodox writings about the impact of materialism in modern society were widely seen as conservative rather than radical nationalist, and his philosophical works came to be highly regarded in mainstream German circles. Junger ended his extremely long life as a honoured establishment figure, although critics continued to charge him with the glorification of war as a transcending experience.
Junger served in World War II as captain in the German Army. Assigned to an administrative position in Paris, he socialized with prominent artists of the day such as Picasso and Jean Cocteau. His early time in France is described in his diary Gärten und Straßen (1942, Gardens and Streets). He was also in charge of executing younger German soldiers who had deserted. In his book Un Allemand à Paris , the writer Gerhard Heller states that he had been interested in learning how a person reacts to death under such circumstances and had a morbid fascination for the subject.
Jünger appears on the fringes of the Stauffenberg bomb plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler (July 20, 1944). He was clearly an inspiration to anti-Nazi conservatives in the German Army, and while in Paris he was close to the old, mostly Prussian, officers who carried out the assassination attempt against Hitler. He was only peripherally involved in the events however, and in the aftermath suffered only dismissal from the army in the summer of 1944, rather than execution.
In the aftermath of WW2 he was treated with some suspicion as a closet Nazi. By the latter stages of the Cold War his unorthodox writings about the impact of materialism in modern society were widely seen as conservative rather than radical nationalist, and his philosophical works came to be highly regarded in mainstream German circles. Junger ended his extremely long life as a honoured establishment figure, although critics continued to charge him with the glorification of war as a transcending experience.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,385 reviews
January 6, 2009
Ernst Jünger is an insurance actuary’s worst nightmare — he smoked, drank, experimented with drugs, served in two world wars, sustained multiple injuries, and yet died only one month shy of 103. And his exploits on the front! You couldn’t make this stuff up. I confess to not knowing many Germans, but the national stereotypes (organized, efficient, not a lot of laughs) were more than born out in his memoir.
One of the things that struck me the most about the book was how different it was from British memoirs of the Great War. To begin with, Storm of Steel was published in 1920, a good ten years before most people had recovered enough to write their memoirs. But Ernst Jünger was a born soldier, and therein rests the core of the book’s particular power. Absent are the self-deprecating humor, the overwhelming sense of loss and the bitter ironies of English memoirs. Jünger was a man of duty, focus, and extraordinary resilience. He didn’t write to condemn the war and shock future generations into pacifism, nor did he write to glorify war — he merely recorded his experience with a descriptive power unhampered by lengthy reflections and commentary. When he discovers that his younger brother had been deployed nearby he does show some real fear, but for the most part he’s remarkably objective about the four years of brutal, relentless slaughter.
That’s not to say the slaughter doesn’t play a starring role. The mud, the rats, the screeching shells, the gas, the horrific injuries, and the driving rain of bullets and shrapnel are clinically, even ruthlessly described. You get a clear picture of the battlefield’s inexorable and indiscriminate danger. But he describes horrors, such as layers of corpses from previous offensives being turned up by new shelling and entire towns being obliterated, with the sort of detachment that, combined with his apparent indestructibility, makes for the ultimate soldier. For Jünger, war didn’t destroy young men — it strengthened them, albeit at a steep price. He seemed to relish the chance to prove himself by volunteering for every daring reconnaissance mission, savoring the danger, the heightened senses, the high stakes of success or failure — even though many of his comrades were blown to smithereens during these missions.
Yet in spite of the years of bloodshed that could easily have destroyed or dehumanized him, he never lost the simple joys of smoking his pipe or discovering tins of jam in a British dugout. I couldn’t help thinking that if you had enough Jüngers in your country, the idea of a super race would seem pretty reasonable. At the end of the war he calculates, “Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me an even twenty scars.” Who calls being grazed by a bullet a "trifle"?! I guess someone who's been through the Great War. After one double wound (shot in the head and leg), he walked two miles to a casualty clearing station. Compare that to my recent brush with Crest white strips, which made my teeth hurt so much after only a few minutes that I had to take three Aleve and go to bed. I doubt Ernst would have had much patience with me.
This isn’t an easy read — by the end you sort of feel as though you’ve been through the war yourself — but it’s unbelievably compelling.
One of the things that struck me the most about the book was how different it was from British memoirs of the Great War. To begin with, Storm of Steel was published in 1920, a good ten years before most people had recovered enough to write their memoirs. But Ernst Jünger was a born soldier, and therein rests the core of the book’s particular power. Absent are the self-deprecating humor, the overwhelming sense of loss and the bitter ironies of English memoirs. Jünger was a man of duty, focus, and extraordinary resilience. He didn’t write to condemn the war and shock future generations into pacifism, nor did he write to glorify war — he merely recorded his experience with a descriptive power unhampered by lengthy reflections and commentary. When he discovers that his younger brother had been deployed nearby he does show some real fear, but for the most part he’s remarkably objective about the four years of brutal, relentless slaughter.
That’s not to say the slaughter doesn’t play a starring role. The mud, the rats, the screeching shells, the gas, the horrific injuries, and the driving rain of bullets and shrapnel are clinically, even ruthlessly described. You get a clear picture of the battlefield’s inexorable and indiscriminate danger. But he describes horrors, such as layers of corpses from previous offensives being turned up by new shelling and entire towns being obliterated, with the sort of detachment that, combined with his apparent indestructibility, makes for the ultimate soldier. For Jünger, war didn’t destroy young men — it strengthened them, albeit at a steep price. He seemed to relish the chance to prove himself by volunteering for every daring reconnaissance mission, savoring the danger, the heightened senses, the high stakes of success or failure — even though many of his comrades were blown to smithereens during these missions.
Yet in spite of the years of bloodshed that could easily have destroyed or dehumanized him, he never lost the simple joys of smoking his pipe or discovering tins of jam in a British dugout. I couldn’t help thinking that if you had enough Jüngers in your country, the idea of a super race would seem pretty reasonable. At the end of the war he calculates, “Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me an even twenty scars.” Who calls being grazed by a bullet a "trifle"?! I guess someone who's been through the Great War. After one double wound (shot in the head and leg), he walked two miles to a casualty clearing station. Compare that to my recent brush with Crest white strips, which made my teeth hurt so much after only a few minutes that I had to take three Aleve and go to bed. I doubt Ernst would have had much patience with me.
This isn’t an easy read — by the end you sort of feel as though you’ve been through the war yourself — but it’s unbelievably compelling.
December 6, 2017
I have often lamented the lack of German World War I perspectives. Erich Maria Remarque aside, I usually read works by British and French scholars, memoirists, diarists, and novelists. Fortunately here is a fine memoir translated from the German by the esteemed Michael Hofmann. I like its very flat spare prose. Everything is simply allowed to stand for itself: bravery, death, corpses, blood, shrapnel, friendship, dreams. Plainly declarative, there is no unnecessary coloration, no prolixity, no subtext, little in the way of moral judgement.
After reading Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That about the efficiency of the German trenches, I found it fascinating to get a sense of how those fortifications were built and how they functioned. Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War goes on at some length about the greater efficiency of German soldiers than their opponents. Jünger has here provided at least one example: the Germans simply didn't have the resources--munitions, for example--that the Entente Powers had. They had to do more with less, and did so:
Author Ernst Jünger was nineteen, the proverbial ephebe, when he went to the front. He was at first an enlisted man in the infantry who after a brief convalescence was commissioned an ensign and given responsibility for a platoon. He was frequently on the frontlines during the early years, responsible for his short stretch of the line, his poor comrades dropping all around him like flies. I suppose the oddest moments are when the tone becomes madcap, devil may care, despite the storm of steel..
Jünger was wounded with varying degrees of severity fourteen times by his count, except for the last time he was afterward always sent back to the front. Such travails you would think might sour a man, yet the attitude he evinced toward the British, which his soldiers shared, was anything but ungentlemanly:
In the Introduction to the book translator Michael Hofmann quotes Gide who wrote in his diary: "Ernst Jünger's book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith." I would agree. It is the finest book on World War I from the German perspective that I know. It also represents an utterly obsolete means of statecraft. War's elimination will only happen by way of the collective will of all of us. I ask you therefore to please sign the Charter for Compassion. Thank you.
After reading Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That about the efficiency of the German trenches, I found it fascinating to get a sense of how those fortifications were built and how they functioned. Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War goes on at some length about the greater efficiency of German soldiers than their opponents. Jünger has here provided at least one example: the Germans simply didn't have the resources--munitions, for example--that the Entente Powers had. They had to do more with less, and did so:
Hundreds of British soldiers were running forward through a flat communications trench, little troubled by the weak gunfire we were able to direct at them. The scene was indicative of the inequality of resources with which we had to fight. Had we essayed the same thing, our units would have been shot to pieces in a matter of minutes.
Author Ernst Jünger was nineteen, the proverbial ephebe, when he went to the front. He was at first an enlisted man in the infantry who after a brief convalescence was commissioned an ensign and given responsibility for a platoon. He was frequently on the frontlines during the early years, responsible for his short stretch of the line, his poor comrades dropping all around him like flies. I suppose the oddest moments are when the tone becomes madcap, devil may care, despite the storm of steel..
Jünger was wounded with varying degrees of severity fourteen times by his count, except for the last time he was afterward always sent back to the front. Such travails you would think might sour a man, yet the attitude he evinced toward the British, which his soldiers shared, was anything but ungentlemanly:
The [British] sargeant practically had both legs sheered off by hand-grenade splinters; even so, with stoical calm, he kept his pipe clenched between his teeth to the end. This incident, like all our other encounters with the Britishers, left us pleasantly impressed by their bravery and manliness.
In the Introduction to the book translator Michael Hofmann quotes Gide who wrote in his diary: "Ernst Jünger's book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith." I would agree. It is the finest book on World War I from the German perspective that I know. It also represents an utterly obsolete means of statecraft. War's elimination will only happen by way of the collective will of all of us. I ask you therefore to please sign the Charter for Compassion. Thank you.
March 23, 2024
carnage and courage
🔥 Jünger’s memoir of WW1 moves far more rapidly than a memoir such as Goodbye To All That by Graves. Both are excellent works, but with Jünger there is far more warfare, more description of bombardments and the destruction of villages and towns, more detail of what bullets and shrapnel and artillery shells did to soldiers and civilians.
There is with Jünger, far more action, more “you are there and the bullets are coming at you.” Where Graves will say he was gassed, Jünger will tell you explicitly about the burning pain of chlorine gas and how men die in agony. With Jünger, nothing is avoided or hidden. This is what a field of mass casualties looks like, this is what a stomach wound is like, this is what the very suddenness of sudden death is like.
His memoir is far more aggressive and violent than Goodbye To All That or Remarque’s fiction, All Quiet on the Western Front, which is based on Remarque’s own combat experience in WW1.
🔥 Powerfully written yet not without its moments of reflection or its quiet meditations on the meaning of life and fate in the midst of enormous suffering and destruction.
🔥 Jünger’s memoir of WW1 moves far more rapidly than a memoir such as Goodbye To All That by Graves. Both are excellent works, but with Jünger there is far more warfare, more description of bombardments and the destruction of villages and towns, more detail of what bullets and shrapnel and artillery shells did to soldiers and civilians.
There is with Jünger, far more action, more “you are there and the bullets are coming at you.” Where Graves will say he was gassed, Jünger will tell you explicitly about the burning pain of chlorine gas and how men die in agony. With Jünger, nothing is avoided or hidden. This is what a field of mass casualties looks like, this is what a stomach wound is like, this is what the very suddenness of sudden death is like.
His memoir is far more aggressive and violent than Goodbye To All That or Remarque’s fiction, All Quiet on the Western Front, which is based on Remarque’s own combat experience in WW1.
🔥 Powerfully written yet not without its moments of reflection or its quiet meditations on the meaning of life and fate in the midst of enormous suffering and destruction.
May 2, 2021
I thoroughly enjoyed this personal account of war. Ernst Jünger compiled this book from diary entries while he served in the German army during World War I. The narration starts at the end of 1914 and goes through 1918. Ernst Jünger started out lower enlisted but ended the war a highly decorated officer. He wrote with an underlying sense of patriotism and duty without getting political nor ideological.
The narration was written with honesty and nothing out left out. He tells brutal tale of the ugliness only found in war. He endlessly describes trench warfare and the trench system, artillery barrages, nighttime raids, patrols, and the overall confusion common throughout the Western Front. Jünger sometimes wrote as if Death was a character, haunting and stalking throughout the war. He even describes the death of civilians, destroyed town and villages, and the mass carnage inflicted relentlessly.
Ironically, it is written almost poetically with colorful description and imagery:
"We were marching along a wide road, which ran in the moonlight like a white ribbon across the dark countryside, towards the thunder of guns.", pg. 92
"It was a group of infantry with their leader, who had just been killed by a direct hit. The comrades looked like peaceful sleepers as they lay together in death.", pgs. 115-6
"Towards morning, the machine-gun suddenly started rattling away, as some dark figures were approaching. It was a patrol [from a friendly unit] come to get in touch with us, and one of them was left dead. Mistakes like that happened quite frequently at that time, and one didn't spend too much time anguishing over them.", pg. 165
Overall I enjoyed this very much. It read quickly with little to no dialogue because they are diary entries over the four year war. I would recommend this to anyone interested in WWI or first-person accounts in wartime. Thanks!
The narration was written with honesty and nothing out left out. He tells brutal tale of the ugliness only found in war. He endlessly describes trench warfare and the trench system, artillery barrages, nighttime raids, patrols, and the overall confusion common throughout the Western Front. Jünger sometimes wrote as if Death was a character, haunting and stalking throughout the war. He even describes the death of civilians, destroyed town and villages, and the mass carnage inflicted relentlessly.
Ironically, it is written almost poetically with colorful description and imagery:
"We were marching along a wide road, which ran in the moonlight like a white ribbon across the dark countryside, towards the thunder of guns.", pg. 92
"It was a group of infantry with their leader, who had just been killed by a direct hit. The comrades looked like peaceful sleepers as they lay together in death.", pgs. 115-6
"Towards morning, the machine-gun suddenly started rattling away, as some dark figures were approaching. It was a patrol [from a friendly unit] come to get in touch with us, and one of them was left dead. Mistakes like that happened quite frequently at that time, and one didn't spend too much time anguishing over them.", pg. 165
Overall I enjoyed this very much. It read quickly with little to no dialogue because they are diary entries over the four year war. I would recommend this to anyone interested in WWI or first-person accounts in wartime. Thanks!
June 26, 2017
This is probably the cheeriest war memoir ever. While Jünger occasionally remembers to throw in the the requisite "oh the horrors of war" comment, most of the time it is clear he is having a blast. Based on his other hobbies (travel, hunting, joining the French Foreign Legion, dangerous political conversation, taking all available drugs) he seems to have quite the adrenaline junkie. Kind of amazing that he lived to over a hundred.
Appearances can be deceiving: this man is totally stealing your hash and LSD if you don't keep an eye on him. And then possibly your car, which he may crash while trying to hunt mountain lions without a license.
Appearances can be deceiving: this man is totally stealing your hash and LSD if you don't keep an eye on him. And then possibly your car, which he may crash while trying to hunt mountain lions without a license.
March 30, 2011
Expecting a Marinetti-like vociferation, an avant-garde hymn to mechanical war, I initially found Jünger’s narrative a little flat. In The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell makes Jünger sound entertainingly gauche, a gas-goggled steampunk berserker with a will-to-power prose style. I was bored by the 100 pages preceding “chapter” 7, “Guillemont,” whose evocation of the Battle of the Somme finally hooked me:
That Jünger sees the runner as one of the men “you need for fighting” instead of a pitiable hollow man is pretty characteristic. Storm of Steel may not be a Futurist manifesto, but neither is it a rueful anti-war meditation, with the Western Front as a stereotyped literary inferno where Europe is dying and no one is right. Jünger is far from elated by the infernal engines plowing the landscape and vaporizing whole platoons—
—but he doesn’t think they cancel his chivalric-gymnastic idea of soldiering. His war remains an arena of individual dash, a tournament of gallants:
Storm of Steel was published in 1920 and retained, through numerous revisions (this translation uses the final, 1961 edition), much of Lt. Jünger’s apolitical, athletic euphoria in battle, his consummately personal drive to win. His enemy isn’t the British Empire or the French Republic; he seeks out and kills the men in the opposite trench, the opposing team (a year before war broke out, Jünger was in the French army—he ran away from school, from the straitened routine of well-to-do bourgeois, and joined the Foreign Legion).
Bruce Chatwin called Jünger’s persona “an aesthete in the center of a tornado, quoting Stendahl” (another soldier-writer-adventurer). To that I would add: a teenage Quixote pursuing a private errand through the battle royale of empires, an incarnation of bardic archaisms amid industrial global war. Storm of Steel is shaped as a saga. Jünger consistently favors legendary parallels. Lobbing grenades while storming British trenches is just updated swordplay, really:
He says his personal attendant, Vinke, “followed me into battle like the squires of yore” (he also scraped Jünger clean after he stumbled into a puddle of someone else's panic diarrhea). Strolling about in the “radiant and narcotic” lush-blooming May of 1917 Jünger reflects mystically:
With sacks of grenades strapped across his chest, he led one of the teams of storm troops that stove in the British lines in March 1918, as part of Ludendorff’s last-ditch gamble to defeat the Allies before fast-arriving fresh American troops could tip the balance. Jünger gestures only vaguely at the strategic momentousness of the Michael Offensive and gives it a more fabulous title: “The Great Battle.” Storm of Steel stops in September 1918—not with Germany’s impending defeat, but with Jünger’s own apotheosis as a warrior. The last line of the book is the text of a telegram he received in hospital: “His Majesty the Kaiser has bestowed on you the order pour le Mérite. In the name of the whole division, I congratulate you.” The Kaiser, who is two months from abdication and exile; the Croix pour le Mérite, established by Frederick the Great, and the highest award available to servants of the dying Kaiserreich (Jünger was one of the last to win it, and when he died in 1998, the latest-surviving recipient).
The first 100 pages of Storm of Steel bored me, hence the 3 stars, but the remainder is thrilling. I wasn’t surprised to read that the bookish half-blind young Borges, with his cult of gaucho knife fights and macabre tangos, adored Jünger’s stylish, violent, essentially cold-blooded testament.
Of course, Jünger gives off a strong whiff of Fascism. Walter Benjamin dismissed his nationalist writings of the 1920s as “sinister runic humbug.” Jünger’s archaic airs bear a family resemblance to the programmatic primitivism of the nuttier avant-garde and the Nazis, and Hitler craved his prestigious endorsement—but the same solipsism that allowed Jünger to fight the Great War as a personal quest kept him out of mass politics, however much he condemned the Weimar Republic and dreamt of a rearmed Germany; also, he was not an anti-Semite. With the profits of the bestselling Storm of Steel he bought a rural retreat and pursued entomological researches (he was fond of armored beetles). His situation in the 1930s was that of an “internal émigré.” We’re more comfortable with the Soviet version. Oblique and private opposition to Hitler we read as cowardice, especially in someone with Jünger’s untouchable prestige...and access to Hitler, and skill with weapons. From 1938 he was vaguely associated with plots against Hitler, though Clive James says he was “never an active conspirator, he thought he was doing his duty to civilized values merely by despising Hitler. The thought of killing him did not occur.” In 1939 he published an allegorical attack on Nazism, On the Marble Cliffs, which was suppressed. In 1940 he rejoined the army, and was dismissed 1944 for his closeness to the ringleaders of the Stauffenberg plot. He spent most of the war years in Occupied Paris, indulging his biblio- and oenophilia, dining with André Gide and composing the diaries that in Chatwin’s judgment combine “acute observation and an anesthetized sensibility” in “the strangest literary production of the Second World War, stranger by far”—get this—“than anything by Céline or Malaparte.” If that weren’t enough to pique my interest—AC and Chris Sastre have given me some idea of the strangeness of Céline and Malaparte—Jünger’s prewar notebooks of secret dissent and war diaries recur throughout James’s Cultural Amnesia, as loci classici of the crisis of humanism:
A runner from a Württemberg regiment reported to me to guide my platoon to the famous town of Combles, where we were to be held in reserve for the time being. He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as a denizen of a new and far harsher world. Sitting next to him in a roadside ditch, I questioned him avidly about the state of the position, and got from him a grey tale of days hunkered in craters, with no outside contact or communications lines, of incessant attacks, fields of corpses and crazy thirst, of the wounded left to die, and more of the same. The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us. A few days had put their stamp on the runner, who was to escort us into the realm of flame, setting him inexpressibly apart from us.
“If a man falls, he is left to die. No one can help. No one knows if he’ll return alive. Every day we’re attacked, but they won’t get through. Everyone knows this is about life and death.”
Nothing was left in his voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It’s men like that you need for fighting.
That Jünger sees the runner as one of the men “you need for fighting” instead of a pitiable hollow man is pretty characteristic. Storm of Steel may not be a Futurist manifesto, but neither is it a rueful anti-war meditation, with the Western Front as a stereotyped literary inferno where Europe is dying and no one is right. Jünger is far from elated by the infernal engines plowing the landscape and vaporizing whole platoons—
—but he doesn’t think they cancel his chivalric-gymnastic idea of soldiering. His war remains an arena of individual dash, a tournament of gallants:
Even in these frightful moments, something droll could happen. A man next to me pulled his rifle to his cheek and pretended to shoot at a rabbit that suddenly came bounding through our lines. It all happened so abruptly, I had to laugh. Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can’t trump it.
Storm of Steel was published in 1920 and retained, through numerous revisions (this translation uses the final, 1961 edition), much of Lt. Jünger’s apolitical, athletic euphoria in battle, his consummately personal drive to win. His enemy isn’t the British Empire or the French Republic; he seeks out and kills the men in the opposite trench, the opposing team (a year before war broke out, Jünger was in the French army—he ran away from school, from the straitened routine of well-to-do bourgeois, and joined the Foreign Legion).
Bruce Chatwin called Jünger’s persona “an aesthete in the center of a tornado, quoting Stendahl” (another soldier-writer-adventurer). To that I would add: a teenage Quixote pursuing a private errand through the battle royale of empires, an incarnation of bardic archaisms amid industrial global war. Storm of Steel is shaped as a saga. Jünger consistently favors legendary parallels. Lobbing grenades while storming British trenches is just updated swordplay, really:
Then you hurled your own bomb, and leaped forward. One barely glanced at the crumpled body of one’s opponent; he was finished, and a new duel was commencing. The exchange of hand-grenades reminded me of fencing with foils; you need to jump and stretch, almost as in ballet. It’s the deadliest of duels, as it variably ends with one or other of the participants being blown to smithereens. Or both.
He says his personal attendant, Vinke, “followed me into battle like the squires of yore” (he also scraped Jünger clean after he stumbled into a puddle of someone else's panic diarrhea). Strolling about in the “radiant and narcotic” lush-blooming May of 1917 Jünger reflects mystically:
It’s easier to go into battle against such a setting than in cold wintry weather. The simple soul is convinced here that his life is deeply embedded in nature, and that his death is no end.
With sacks of grenades strapped across his chest, he led one of the teams of storm troops that stove in the British lines in March 1918, as part of Ludendorff’s last-ditch gamble to defeat the Allies before fast-arriving fresh American troops could tip the balance. Jünger gestures only vaguely at the strategic momentousness of the Michael Offensive and gives it a more fabulous title: “The Great Battle.” Storm of Steel stops in September 1918—not with Germany’s impending defeat, but with Jünger’s own apotheosis as a warrior. The last line of the book is the text of a telegram he received in hospital: “His Majesty the Kaiser has bestowed on you the order pour le Mérite. In the name of the whole division, I congratulate you.” The Kaiser, who is two months from abdication and exile; the Croix pour le Mérite, established by Frederick the Great, and the highest award available to servants of the dying Kaiserreich (Jünger was one of the last to win it, and when he died in 1998, the latest-surviving recipient).
The first 100 pages of Storm of Steel bored me, hence the 3 stars, but the remainder is thrilling. I wasn’t surprised to read that the bookish half-blind young Borges, with his cult of gaucho knife fights and macabre tangos, adored Jünger’s stylish, violent, essentially cold-blooded testament.
In the afternoons, the village was under bombardment from all sorts of weapons and calibers. In spite of the danger, I was always loath to leave the attic window of the house, because it was an exciting sight, watching units and individual messengers hurrying across the field of fire, often hurling themselves to the ground, while the earth whirled and spat to the left and right of them. Peeping over destiny’s shoulder like that to see her hand, it’s easy to become negligent and risk one’s own life.
Of course, Jünger gives off a strong whiff of Fascism. Walter Benjamin dismissed his nationalist writings of the 1920s as “sinister runic humbug.” Jünger’s archaic airs bear a family resemblance to the programmatic primitivism of the nuttier avant-garde and the Nazis, and Hitler craved his prestigious endorsement—but the same solipsism that allowed Jünger to fight the Great War as a personal quest kept him out of mass politics, however much he condemned the Weimar Republic and dreamt of a rearmed Germany; also, he was not an anti-Semite. With the profits of the bestselling Storm of Steel he bought a rural retreat and pursued entomological researches (he was fond of armored beetles). His situation in the 1930s was that of an “internal émigré.” We’re more comfortable with the Soviet version. Oblique and private opposition to Hitler we read as cowardice, especially in someone with Jünger’s untouchable prestige...and access to Hitler, and skill with weapons. From 1938 he was vaguely associated with plots against Hitler, though Clive James says he was “never an active conspirator, he thought he was doing his duty to civilized values merely by despising Hitler. The thought of killing him did not occur.” In 1939 he published an allegorical attack on Nazism, On the Marble Cliffs, which was suppressed. In 1940 he rejoined the army, and was dismissed 1944 for his closeness to the ringleaders of the Stauffenberg plot. He spent most of the war years in Occupied Paris, indulging his biblio- and oenophilia, dining with André Gide and composing the diaries that in Chatwin’s judgment combine “acute observation and an anesthetized sensibility” in “the strangest literary production of the Second World War, stranger by far”—get this—“than anything by Céline or Malaparte.” If that weren’t enough to pique my interest—AC and Chris Sastre have given me some idea of the strangeness of Céline and Malaparte—Jünger’s prewar notebooks of secret dissent and war diaries recur throughout James’s Cultural Amnesia, as loci classici of the crisis of humanism:
When intellectuals conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favour of a refined dream, it might seem unfair to condemn them for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller, though outstandingly qualified, was only one among many. But there were too many: that was the point. Too many well-read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking scruples, for being a drum of nature. Among the revolutionary conservative intellectuals, Jünger is the real tragic figure. He saw the light, but too late. In his notebooks he gradually de-emphasized his call for conservative revolution led by men who had been “transformed in their being” by the experience of World War I. In 1943, in Paris, he was told the news about the extermination camps, and finally reached the conclusion that he had been staving off since the collapse of the Weimar Republic he had helped to undermine: one of the men whose being had been transformed by their experience of the Great War was Adolf Hitler. The quality Jünger valued most had turned out to be the only one he shared with the man he most despised.
July 12, 2014
An oddly jaunty memoir of the Western Front, characterised by what Jünger describes somewhere as his ‘strange mood of melancholy exultation’. I am surprised so many people have found his prose ‘clean’, ‘sparse’, ‘unemotional’ – I thought the opposite, that it was rather over-literary in many places; not overwritten exactly, but with touches of a grand Romantic sensibility that I haven't found in English or French writers of the First World War:
In the heat of battle, where Barbusse and Genevoix feel a nauseated horror, Jünger instead feels ‘an almost visionary excitement’ – even ‘a twinge of arousal’. Where Sassoon and Manning lament the loss or corruption of their entire generation, Jünger merely comments with apparent approbation that ‘over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood’.
It's all very slightly off-putting; and the tone is quite hard to judge, despite the newness of this translation from Michael Hofmann. He (Hofmann) spends a lot of time in his introduction denigrating his predecessor Basil Creighton's version of 1929; this is not a classy move, particularly when I wouldn't call his own translation especially fluent (though I'm sure there are fewer direct errors). There are many odd word choices – like ‘grunt’ for soldier, which to my ears is very American and anyway wasn't used before the 1960s; and repeatedly using ‘splinter’ to describe a huge piece of shrapnel that can pierce a man's chest gives, I think, the wrong impression. Most of all, there is a lot of that awkward juxtaposition between high and low register that is the hallmark of ‘translationese’:
Hofmann knows his subject, though, and his introductory essay has some interesting comments that contextualise Storm of Steel (what an appropriately George-RR-Martinesque title that is!). He makes the intriguing and, I think, convincing suggestion that Jünger's book has a ‘natural epic form’, as opposed to comparable accounts in English which are ‘lyrical or dramatic’. There are indeed many moments here that you might fairly call Homeric, not least in their tone of gung-ho excitement – and considering this helped me clarify what it was I disliked about the book.
Because isn't it the case that the epic form, with its tendency to revel in the ‘glory’ of war, is in some sense fundamentally dishonest – and, more to the point, isn't that precisely one of the lessons that the First World War taught us?
The white ball of a shrapnel shell melted far off, suffusing the grey December sky. The breath of battle blew across to us, and we shuddered. Did we sense that almost all of us – some sooner, some later – were to be consumed by it, on days when the dark grumbling yonder would crash over our heads like an incessant thunder?
In the heat of battle, where Barbusse and Genevoix feel a nauseated horror, Jünger instead feels ‘an almost visionary excitement’ – even ‘a twinge of arousal’. Where Sassoon and Manning lament the loss or corruption of their entire generation, Jünger merely comments with apparent approbation that ‘over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood’.
It's all very slightly off-putting; and the tone is quite hard to judge, despite the newness of this translation from Michael Hofmann. He (Hofmann) spends a lot of time in his introduction denigrating his predecessor Basil Creighton's version of 1929; this is not a classy move, particularly when I wouldn't call his own translation especially fluent (though I'm sure there are fewer direct errors). There are many odd word choices – like ‘grunt’ for soldier, which to my ears is very American and anyway wasn't used before the 1960s; and repeatedly using ‘splinter’ to describe a huge piece of shrapnel that can pierce a man's chest gives, I think, the wrong impression. Most of all, there is a lot of that awkward juxtaposition between high and low register that is the hallmark of ‘translationese’:
A lark ascends; its trilling gets on my wick.
Hofmann knows his subject, though, and his introductory essay has some interesting comments that contextualise Storm of Steel (what an appropriately George-RR-Martinesque title that is!). He makes the intriguing and, I think, convincing suggestion that Jünger's book has a ‘natural epic form’, as opposed to comparable accounts in English which are ‘lyrical or dramatic’. There are indeed many moments here that you might fairly call Homeric, not least in their tone of gung-ho excitement – and considering this helped me clarify what it was I disliked about the book.
Because isn't it the case that the epic form, with its tendency to revel in the ‘glory’ of war, is in some sense fundamentally dishonest – and, more to the point, isn't that precisely one of the lessons that the First World War taught us?
October 23, 2019
I've read so much on WW2 over the years, and seemed to have forgotten there was another major European war in the 20th century, of which I've hardly read anything. That simply had to change, and in reading this apocalyptic front-line view of the Great war I will certainty have to read more, maybe next time from a British or French perspective. Translator Michael Hofmann in his introduction makes the case for Storm of Steel being one of the best accounts of World War I ever written, and for now (until I've read more) I'd agree. The first version of Storm of Steel appeared in 1920, and is an unflinching memoir of the four years Ernst Jünger spent on the Western Front. It reads very much like a journal told in a clear and spare prose, with Jünger writing with great intensity of the hellish atmosphere of the world around him. While not stinting on its horrors, he also found the experience of war exciting, even enjoyable, almost like a mystical adventure, so it's easy to see why the Nazis would have loved him, as I got the sense that every time he loaded a round into the chamber of his weapon he got more of a thrill from it than say getting his leg over. Storm of Steel was simply a fascinating read, and a reminder that there are always individuals who are enamoured of war. The book had little background, hardly touched on politics, home life, or love (apart from comradeship), it's simply about what war is like for a soldier staring it right in the face.
March 8, 2018
This has to be the best bit of WW1 writing I've experienced so far. I've often maintained that the Great War was the last major conflict in which the combatants regarded the foe with a certain amount of respect and chivalrous conduct. They were equals at arms, with neither side having an ungodly edge in technology, as we see today. Junger was typical of young officers of the time, whether they wore the grey or khaki: he was keen to fight, and did so energetically. His aggressive nature can be deduced from the way he kitted himself out for battle (P.168):
I had got together some kit appropriate to the sort of work I meant to be doing: across my chest, two sandbags, each containing four stick-bombs, impact fuses on the left, delay on the right, in my right tunic pocket an 08 pistol on a long cord, in my right trouser pocket a little Mauser pistol, in my left tunic pocket five egg hand grenades, in the left trouser pocket luminous compass and whistle, in my belt spring hooks for pulling out the pins, plus bowie knife and wire-cutters. in my inside tunic pocket I carried a full wallet with my home address, in my right back pocket, a flat flask of cherry brandy."
Junger is not all business, however, and is quick to note humorous or ironical situations. Many passages are tinged with a bit of sardonic humour. I'm sure his colleagues and underlings were somewhat chagrined to find Junger did not mind calling them by name, as in the case of this unfortunate fellow:
"In the platoon left of us, Sergeant Hock, the unfortunate rat-catcher of Monchy, aimed to discharge a white flare, picked up the wrong flare, and instead sent up a red barrage light, which was taken up in all quarters. Straight away our own artillery opened up, and it was a joy to behold. One shell after another came yowling down out of the sky and showered the field ahead of us in a fountain of shards and sparks on impact. A mixture of dust, stale gases and the reek of flung carcasses brewed up from the craters.
After this orgy of destruction, the shelling quickly flooded back to its previous levels. One man's slip of the hand had got the whole titanic machinery of war rolling."
During his days in the trenches, Junger and his troops would face French, Indian, and Scots regiments at various times. Prisoners were usually treated humanely, and often troops did not fire on stretcher bearers from the other side. With all that amiable co-operation going around, one wonders why they didn't just drop the guns and go for a beer. Junger ponders that himself, in regarding a Brit soldier he had killed (p.219):
Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn't a cae of "you or me" any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams."
I am happy to enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone, not only war buffs. Junger is an excellent writer and this book is one I will read over and over again, it's just that good.
I had got together some kit appropriate to the sort of work I meant to be doing: across my chest, two sandbags, each containing four stick-bombs, impact fuses on the left, delay on the right, in my right tunic pocket an 08 pistol on a long cord, in my right trouser pocket a little Mauser pistol, in my left tunic pocket five egg hand grenades, in the left trouser pocket luminous compass and whistle, in my belt spring hooks for pulling out the pins, plus bowie knife and wire-cutters. in my inside tunic pocket I carried a full wallet with my home address, in my right back pocket, a flat flask of cherry brandy."
Junger is not all business, however, and is quick to note humorous or ironical situations. Many passages are tinged with a bit of sardonic humour. I'm sure his colleagues and underlings were somewhat chagrined to find Junger did not mind calling them by name, as in the case of this unfortunate fellow:
"In the platoon left of us, Sergeant Hock, the unfortunate rat-catcher of Monchy, aimed to discharge a white flare, picked up the wrong flare, and instead sent up a red barrage light, which was taken up in all quarters. Straight away our own artillery opened up, and it was a joy to behold. One shell after another came yowling down out of the sky and showered the field ahead of us in a fountain of shards and sparks on impact. A mixture of dust, stale gases and the reek of flung carcasses brewed up from the craters.
After this orgy of destruction, the shelling quickly flooded back to its previous levels. One man's slip of the hand had got the whole titanic machinery of war rolling."
During his days in the trenches, Junger and his troops would face French, Indian, and Scots regiments at various times. Prisoners were usually treated humanely, and often troops did not fire on stretcher bearers from the other side. With all that amiable co-operation going around, one wonders why they didn't just drop the guns and go for a beer. Junger ponders that himself, in regarding a Brit soldier he had killed (p.219):
Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn't a cae of "you or me" any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams."
I am happy to enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone, not only war buffs. Junger is an excellent writer and this book is one I will read over and over again, it's just that good.
October 23, 2017
War means the destruction of the enemy without scruple and by any means. War is the harshest of all trades, and the masters of it can only entertain humane feelings so long as they do no harm.
Ernst Jünger was a born soldier: neither risk-averse nor foolhardy, able to command the loyalty of others and to follow orders without question, able to fight without malice and kill without scruple. These are his captivating memoirs of his service in the First World War.
The consensus of posterity regarding this war is that it was bloody, tragic, and ultimately inconclusive—the exemplar of a brutal, pointless war. Erich Maria Remarque, who fought on the same side and on the same front as Jünger—albeit far more briefly—writes of his experience with trauma and disgust. Yet Jünger’s memoirs, equally as bloody as All Quiet on the Western Front, are strangely warm and cheery. A born soldier, he felt right at home.
As regards the basic experiences of the war, Jünger’s memoirs cover all the bases: bloody hand-to-hand combat, endless artillery shelling, taking cover in shell-holes and scrambling to put on one’s gas-mask, swarms of flying shrapnel and bullets, and death forever prowling. But out of this basic fabric of experiences Jünger weaves a heroic and even jaunty tale, a battle narrative of gallantry and daring. Each soldier, in Jünger’s archaizing eyes, is a knight locked in a gentlemanly joust with an enemy, motivated by duty and honor. I often wondered whether this quaint way of viewing the war was some kind of subtle psychological defense mechanism, shutting out its horrors with a chivalrous fantasy; but Jünger seems to have carried this perspective with him before the fight even began.
In many ways Jünger reminds me of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Both war heroes, both adrenaline junkies, both of a seemingly inexhaustible vitality—Leigh Fermor lived to 96, Jünger to 104—and both obscenely well-educated, these two authors tend to see life as a legend. Jünger's prose has none of Remarque's cinematographic immediacy. By comparison his writing is highly stylized, like a Byzantine mosaic or Homeric verse. Admittedly, this is more true of the first half than the second, which becomes quite thrilling. In any case it takes a special kind of person to compare an artillery bombardment to “a witch’s cauldron,” or to motivate oneself in battle by quoting a verse from Ariosto.
The ending of the book contains, in brief, some of Jünger’s thoughts on the significance of the war. Clausewitz’s famous aphorism, that war is “politics by other means,” seems to have been lost on Jünger. For him the war’s value was not in accomplishing any concrete objective—which was, in any case, foiled for Germany—but in hardening the fighting men. You might say that, for Jünger, the war was valuable for its own sake. The extreme circumstances of war roused in the soldiers an equally extreme dedication to an ideal beyond themselves, the ability to yield themselves completely to their Fatherland; and he thought that future generations would look on the soldiers much as saints:
And so, strange as it may sound, I learned from these very four years of schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of material warfare, that life has no depth of meaning except when it is pledged for an ideal, and that there are ideals in comparison with which the life of an individual and even of a people has no weight.
Personally I find this view disturbing, as I’m sure many do. The nationalistic dreams of Kaisers are nothing in comparison with even one life. In any case I think history has amply proven Jünger mistaken; in just a few years, the very hardening anvil of war he praised led to another, even more deadly war—under a regime which Jünger himself despised. And whatever we may think of the heroism displayed by individual soldiers, it is outweighed by the sheer horror of it all. I also must say that I am incredulous that someone who lost so many friends and comrades—and who himself narrowly escaped death, getting wounded 14 times—could talk in such fanciful, romantic, and vague terms about the lessons of the war—and again I wonder, was this some kind of defense mechanism?
In sum, this must be one of the oddest war memoirs ever published, equal parts exciting, off-putting, and exacerbating. For those interested in the First World War, certainly it is required reading.
October 10, 2020
Funny how everyone has heard of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, but hardly anyone recognizes that other major German-language battlefield novel literary work of the First World War, STORM OF STEEL, in German In Stahlgewittern (1920). Of course, ALL QUIET is resolutely pacifist while STORM is not -- it's an in-your-face battle story, not unlike Norman Mailer's breakthrough novel The Naked and the Dead twenty-six years later. It is relatively apolitical, unlike author Ernst Jünger's later leanings: in the late Twenties, when Germany's Weimar Republik was obviously struggling, he opined that he hated Democracy "like the plague" and remained an ardent Nationalist.
There is that to consider if latent political factors are enough to put you off. On the other hand STORM OF STEEL is gripping, with only brief breathers from the emotional and physical brutality of war. A plus for intermediate students of German is that, since the novel is short and not rife in Modernist technique in the way of, say, Thomas Mann's MAGIC MOUNTAIN, it makes a fairly accessible read in its original language.
It is worth noting that the real Ernst Jünger must have made his peace with Democracy on some level, because he lived in the Federal Republic of Germany (Western Germany) until his death at age 102.
Photos: The author as a young man --
and in later years --
There is that to consider if latent political factors are enough to put you off. On the other hand STORM OF STEEL is gripping, with only brief breathers from the emotional and physical brutality of war. A plus for intermediate students of German is that, since the novel is short and not rife in Modernist technique in the way of, say, Thomas Mann's MAGIC MOUNTAIN, it makes a fairly accessible read in its original language.
It is worth noting that the real Ernst Jünger must have made his peace with Democracy on some level, because he lived in the Federal Republic of Germany (Western Germany) until his death at age 102.
Photos: The author as a young man --
and in later years --
August 20, 2018
Tevfik Turan çevirisiyle sonbaharda yayımlıyoruz. Müthiş bir kitap!
May 1, 2021
Excellent combat memoir of the First World War. Mr Junger has a great talent for putting the absurdity and madness of combat into words.
February 22, 2024
All quiet on the western front is the story of a conscript experiencing the terrible brutality of World War I. How modern industrial war replaces the romantic picture of glory and heroism with fear, meaninglessness, and butchery.
Storm of steel is the story of someone who volunteered and enjoyed it.
Jünger could clearly see the war was insane. And he wasn’t necessarily against it, either. Indeed, throughout the book, one gets a sense of him as a strongly patriotic, who fought bravely for his country:
“[T]here is someone within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells: Duty and Honor. You know that this is your place in the battle, and that a whole people relies on you to do your job. You feel, ‘If I leave my post, I am a coward in my own eyes, a wretch who will ever blush at every word of praise.'”
It begins with Jünger’s initial deployment in 1915 and finishes with him being severely wounded 1918, which ended his military career. Jünger's philosophy is disturbing, seeing war as the way to assert his individualism, lacking pathos at the horrors of brutality. His writing is realistic, neither pro- or anti- war, just the facts which he sees as disappointing.
One of the most vivid parts was when he describes bodies and body parts slowly emerging from deep in the mud as if the dead were digging themselves out a trench.
Jünger in many ways is an almost machine-like German soldier, indifferent to pain and death until he's alone in his trench or cot. Describing not just how he changed , but the army has a whole warped with the mounting brutality. There is little sentimentality in his reports, and almost no questioning of his duty, save the occasional gripes about senior officers out of touch with the front line reality.
Biographies let you “meet” people, strange controversial people, people to whom you can barely relate. If you read this, it is insightful to as yourself, what would you have done, in Jünger’s world? What would he make of mine, if he could see it?
Note: the book is built of first-person descriptions from the authors perspective, which is repetitive accounts of artillery bombardments, attacks and counterattack replayed on end. The events do not build towards a climax and resolution. He rarely gives any other details about the person and moves on immediately to another subject without reflecting or expressing grief or anger.
An acquired taste.
3.5/5
Storm of steel is the story of someone who volunteered and enjoyed it.
Jünger could clearly see the war was insane. And he wasn’t necessarily against it, either. Indeed, throughout the book, one gets a sense of him as a strongly patriotic, who fought bravely for his country:
“[T]here is someone within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells: Duty and Honor. You know that this is your place in the battle, and that a whole people relies on you to do your job. You feel, ‘If I leave my post, I am a coward in my own eyes, a wretch who will ever blush at every word of praise.'”
It begins with Jünger’s initial deployment in 1915 and finishes with him being severely wounded 1918, which ended his military career. Jünger's philosophy is disturbing, seeing war as the way to assert his individualism, lacking pathos at the horrors of brutality. His writing is realistic, neither pro- or anti- war, just the facts which he sees as disappointing.
One of the most vivid parts was when he describes bodies and body parts slowly emerging from deep in the mud as if the dead were digging themselves out a trench.
Jünger in many ways is an almost machine-like German soldier, indifferent to pain and death until he's alone in his trench or cot. Describing not just how he changed , but the army has a whole warped with the mounting brutality. There is little sentimentality in his reports, and almost no questioning of his duty, save the occasional gripes about senior officers out of touch with the front line reality.
Biographies let you “meet” people, strange controversial people, people to whom you can barely relate. If you read this, it is insightful to as yourself, what would you have done, in Jünger’s world? What would he make of mine, if he could see it?
Note: the book is built of first-person descriptions from the authors perspective, which is repetitive accounts of artillery bombardments, attacks and counterattack replayed on end. The events do not build towards a climax and resolution. He rarely gives any other details about the person and moves on immediately to another subject without reflecting or expressing grief or anger.
An acquired taste.
3.5/5
June 12, 2022
I'm very well aware of the dubious reputation of this book. Without doubt this is an impressive document about the First World War, seen through the eyes of a German soldier. All classic ingredients are incorporated: the enthusiasm at the start of the war, the horror of the combat scenes in the trenches, the 'Materialschlacht', etc. It's all there, described in a very chilling or maybe rather 'undercooled' way.
But Jünger adds his own pigment: he stresses the formidable dynamics of mechanical warfare, with its own aesthetics, and he focusses on the individual that tries to stay upright in this chaos, culminating in vitalistic heroics. War doesn't seem senseless, but a form of intensive living. This comes very near to what 'futurism' (Marinetti and consorts) stood for, and I know this can be read as an ode to war, as it was done by the nazi's, though I don't think that was the real message of the author, at least not unequivocally.
Ernst Jünger (1895-1998, he just missed his 103st birthday!) has quite a reputation. Lots of studies have tried to place him within the most diverse directions (nazism, futurism, anti-modernism, etc), but without getting a real grip on him. That's perhaps because he's one of those aristocratic thinkers that can't be placed in a concrete frame, always searching for an adequate view on chaotic reality. As can be expected, in recent times his very divergent analyses of man in an ever changing world is getting new attention.
This book is one of his first ones, published n 1920 and based on his personal experiences in the war. And - while reading - you can sense him looking for the meaning of what he experienced, shocked but also fascinated. 'In Stahlgewittern' sends chills down the spine, but still, as a literary document it's definitely resonating. Man is a very perverse creature indeed. (2.5 stars)
But Jünger adds his own pigment: he stresses the formidable dynamics of mechanical warfare, with its own aesthetics, and he focusses on the individual that tries to stay upright in this chaos, culminating in vitalistic heroics. War doesn't seem senseless, but a form of intensive living. This comes very near to what 'futurism' (Marinetti and consorts) stood for, and I know this can be read as an ode to war, as it was done by the nazi's, though I don't think that was the real message of the author, at least not unequivocally.
Ernst Jünger (1895-1998, he just missed his 103st birthday!) has quite a reputation. Lots of studies have tried to place him within the most diverse directions (nazism, futurism, anti-modernism, etc), but without getting a real grip on him. That's perhaps because he's one of those aristocratic thinkers that can't be placed in a concrete frame, always searching for an adequate view on chaotic reality. As can be expected, in recent times his very divergent analyses of man in an ever changing world is getting new attention.
This book is one of his first ones, published n 1920 and based on his personal experiences in the war. And - while reading - you can sense him looking for the meaning of what he experienced, shocked but also fascinated. 'In Stahlgewittern' sends chills down the spine, but still, as a literary document it's definitely resonating. Man is a very perverse creature indeed. (2.5 stars)
November 30, 2020
As the son of a Second World War combat veteran, there is something about November 11th that resonates deep within me. That day brings into sharp relief the sacrifices made by the veterans of the First World War. For that reason, while scanning my library a few days ago, I resolved to read an eyewitness account of the war --- from the German side.
For the author, Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), the war was a long one, spanning from 1915 to 1918. During those years, he saw a considerable amount of action, which is detailed in this book. From the Champagne, the Somme, Arras, Flanders, Cambrai, and back to Flanders for the great Ludendorff offensives of 1918, Jünger proved himself a resourceful officer and a soldier who did not shrink back from any assignment he was given. (For his service, he was awarded Imperial Germany's highest award for bravery, the Ordre Pour le Mérite - better known as the "Blue Max.")
Jünger's story is somewhat analogous to Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. But unlike Paul Baumer, Ernst Jünger's story is not anti-war. For him, the war is the defining event of his life. The bonds formed between him and his men in the squalor of the trenches are symbolic of the sacredness of the values of Duty, Honor, Country.
Jünger also expresses his admiration for the British soldier, whom he fought against on the Somme, at Cambrai, and in Flanders. Furthermore, the vignettes he provides of life in the areas behind the front in France where his unit was occasionally billeted are stark and perceptive. They show that, in some cases, the Germans were able to establish cordial relations with the civilian population, whom Jünger recognized as the ones who suffered the most from the effects of the war.
This year marks the second year since 1918 that there are no living veterans of the First World War to observe the day on which it was ended. "The Storm of Steel" is one of those war memoirs that helps the reader to connect vicariously with a generation whose sacrifices from 1914 to 1918 helped re-define the way in which we see ourselves and the world in which we live.
For the author, Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), the war was a long one, spanning from 1915 to 1918. During those years, he saw a considerable amount of action, which is detailed in this book. From the Champagne, the Somme, Arras, Flanders, Cambrai, and back to Flanders for the great Ludendorff offensives of 1918, Jünger proved himself a resourceful officer and a soldier who did not shrink back from any assignment he was given. (For his service, he was awarded Imperial Germany's highest award for bravery, the Ordre Pour le Mérite - better known as the "Blue Max.")
Jünger's story is somewhat analogous to Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. But unlike Paul Baumer, Ernst Jünger's story is not anti-war. For him, the war is the defining event of his life. The bonds formed between him and his men in the squalor of the trenches are symbolic of the sacredness of the values of Duty, Honor, Country.
Jünger also expresses his admiration for the British soldier, whom he fought against on the Somme, at Cambrai, and in Flanders. Furthermore, the vignettes he provides of life in the areas behind the front in France where his unit was occasionally billeted are stark and perceptive. They show that, in some cases, the Germans were able to establish cordial relations with the civilian population, whom Jünger recognized as the ones who suffered the most from the effects of the war.
This year marks the second year since 1918 that there are no living veterans of the First World War to observe the day on which it was ended. "The Storm of Steel" is one of those war memoirs that helps the reader to connect vicariously with a generation whose sacrifices from 1914 to 1918 helped re-define the way in which we see ourselves and the world in which we live.
September 14, 2023
Storm of Steel is a WWI memoir from a German soldier’s perspective. I had been told and read reviews before reading the memoir that Jünger was a bloodthirsty killer, a nationalist, and loved war. I didn't come away with the same thoughts. I will agree that Jünger was a warrior; 14 separate injuries during the war prove this. I will also say, what soldier doesn't have some pride in their country? I see Jünger as an infantryman in his element, and he exceeds in the war, albeit on the losing side. I wouldn't compare All Quiet on the Western Front, or Johnny Got His Gun to Storm of Steel. It's not a pro-war or anti-war. Jünger lacks philosophical prose. He presents things as he saw them. Well worth a read.
"Throughout the war, it was always my endeavor to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try to seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him."
"The breath of battle blew across to us, and we shuddered. Did we sense that almost all of us - some sooner, some later - were to be consumed by it, on days when the dark grumbling yonder would crash over our heads like an incessant thunder?"
"We had entered the battle-tramped realm of the infantryman."
"This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time."
"The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape."
"These short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There's nothing worse for a soldier than boredom."
"In the neglected gardens, the berries were ripe, and tasted all the sweeter because of the bullets flying around us as we ate them."
"We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered."
"Several times I murmured a phrase of Ariosto's: 'A great heart feels no dread of approaching death, whenever it may come, so long as it be honorable.'"
"In war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high."
—Ernst Jünger
"Throughout the war, it was always my endeavor to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try to seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him."
"The breath of battle blew across to us, and we shuddered. Did we sense that almost all of us - some sooner, some later - were to be consumed by it, on days when the dark grumbling yonder would crash over our heads like an incessant thunder?"
"We had entered the battle-tramped realm of the infantryman."
"This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time."
"The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape."
"These short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There's nothing worse for a soldier than boredom."
"In the neglected gardens, the berries were ripe, and tasted all the sweeter because of the bullets flying around us as we ate them."
"We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered."
"Several times I murmured a phrase of Ariosto's: 'A great heart feels no dread of approaching death, whenever it may come, so long as it be honorable.'"
"In war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high."
—Ernst Jünger
November 9, 2014
“Storm of Steel” was published in 1920 and has been revised a total of six times, the last being with the 1961 re-publication. The structure of the book parallels the structure of the war. The book was a copy of his diary he kept during the war. There is no information about his life prior to 1914. He was 18 when he volunteers for the Army in 1914 and starts his diary. The book is his first person descriptions and features no other person other than Junger. Junger writes a straight forward account of what he did and where he was without very much in the way of soul-searching. The only thing he complains about was that the rations got worse as the war went on. He provides vivid descriptions of the experience of combat. He describes what it was like to undergo an artillery barrage. This is primarily an uncensored account of what war was like for a German soldier on the Western Front.
Junger was deployed in the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment, also called the Rifle Regiment of Price Albrecht of Prussia. In 1915 he deployed to the Champagne region of France. He received many wounds the first in 1915. Following his recovery of this first wound he was redeployed to the Arras region of Northern France and participated in the battle of the Somme in 1916. He defended the City of Guillemot from attack and later fought in the battles of Arras, Ypres, and Cambrai. During the German Spring Offensive of 1918 he suffered the most serious of his wounds, a shot to the chest that ended the war for him. He ended the war as a lieutenant and was one of the most decorated soldiers in the German Army; he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, the Knight Cross, the Ritterkreuz and the Pour le Merite (the German equivalent to the Medal of Honor or the British Victoria Cross)
This book provides the reader with what is was like on day by day bases to be a German soldier during WWI. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Charlton Griffin did a good job narrating the book.
Junger was deployed in the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment, also called the Rifle Regiment of Price Albrecht of Prussia. In 1915 he deployed to the Champagne region of France. He received many wounds the first in 1915. Following his recovery of this first wound he was redeployed to the Arras region of Northern France and participated in the battle of the Somme in 1916. He defended the City of Guillemot from attack and later fought in the battles of Arras, Ypres, and Cambrai. During the German Spring Offensive of 1918 he suffered the most serious of his wounds, a shot to the chest that ended the war for him. He ended the war as a lieutenant and was one of the most decorated soldiers in the German Army; he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, the Knight Cross, the Ritterkreuz and the Pour le Merite (the German equivalent to the Medal of Honor or the British Victoria Cross)
This book provides the reader with what is was like on day by day bases to be a German soldier during WWI. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Charlton Griffin did a good job narrating the book.
March 1, 2020
Ernst Jünger’in terazisinin gerçeklikten yana ağır bastığı bu anlatıda, I. Dünya Savaşı’nın filmlerde rastladığımız imgeleri kayboluyor. Gerçeklik, ağırlıklı olarak gündelik hayatın izleriyle ortaya çıkıyor. Kurşun, çamur, topraktan oluşmuş, bir cepheden başka cepheye kayan görüntüler kalıyor kitaptan geriye. Vahşetin tablosu şaşaa, görsel şölen veya duygularla çizilmiyor. Duygulardan arınmış Jünger, cesetleri, vahşeti olağan karşılıyor. Bellekle temas yok, durmak yok. Rastlanabilecek tek duygu, bulunan alkolle gelen neşe sayılabilir.
Boğucu savaşın bu biçimde olağanlaştırılması bana 2666’n��n dördüncü kısmını hatırlattı. Biraz da yıllar önce okuduğum Susan Sontag’ın savaş fotoğrafları ile olan ikircikli ilişkimizi aktardığı Başkalarının Acılarına Bakmak’ı.
Birbirine benzer betimlemelerle ilerleyen anlatıdaki bu durum benim için bazen yorucu olsa da, tarihi belgeleme açısından oldukça önemli. Auschwitz’e gitmekle, Auschwitz’te geçen bir filmi izlemek arasında dokunan hattın bir benzeri de burada var.
Çelik Fırtınalarında aynı zamanda savaşın zamansız-mekansız halini yüze çarpıyor. Belki de bundan ötürü ait olmadığı topraklarda iki geri bir ileri ilerleyen Ernst Jünger’in uğradığı her yere bakmaya çalıştım. Çoğu köy veya ormanlık arazi olan bu yerlerin bir kısmında irili ufaklı savaş anıtları, mezarlıklar ve hendekler, birkaçında savaş ekipmanlarının sergilendiği küçük mekanlar bulunmakta. Eksik parçalar olsa da, geriye kalanlarla geçmiş bu şekilde zihnimde bir araya geldi. Yine bu anlamda kitabın çevirisindeki yaklaşımda benzerlik var. Kelime dağarcığıma bir hayli eski kelime girdi böylelikle.
Ernst Jünger’in savaş süresince uğradığı yerler için:
Ernst Jünger'in Uğradığı Yerler
Boğucu savaşın bu biçimde olağanlaştırılması bana 2666’n��n dördüncü kısmını hatırlattı. Biraz da yıllar önce okuduğum Susan Sontag’ın savaş fotoğrafları ile olan ikircikli ilişkimizi aktardığı Başkalarının Acılarına Bakmak’ı.
Birbirine benzer betimlemelerle ilerleyen anlatıdaki bu durum benim için bazen yorucu olsa da, tarihi belgeleme açısından oldukça önemli. Auschwitz’e gitmekle, Auschwitz’te geçen bir filmi izlemek arasında dokunan hattın bir benzeri de burada var.
Çelik Fırtınalarında aynı zamanda savaşın zamansız-mekansız halini yüze çarpıyor. Belki de bundan ötürü ait olmadığı topraklarda iki geri bir ileri ilerleyen Ernst Jünger’in uğradığı her yere bakmaya çalıştım. Çoğu köy veya ormanlık arazi olan bu yerlerin bir kısmında irili ufaklı savaş anıtları, mezarlıklar ve hendekler, birkaçında savaş ekipmanlarının sergilendiği küçük mekanlar bulunmakta. Eksik parçalar olsa da, geriye kalanlarla geçmiş bu şekilde zihnimde bir araya geldi. Yine bu anlamda kitabın çevirisindeki yaklaşımda benzerlik var. Kelime dağarcığıma bir hayli eski kelime girdi böylelikle.
Ernst Jünger’in savaş süresince uğradığı yerler için:
Ernst Jünger'in Uğradığı Yerler
February 24, 2016
This is an excellent and unusual World War I novel.* It's unusual in that most WWI fiction and memoires are anti-war, dark and furious at the appalling human waste.** Ernst Jünger, in contrast, had a grand time.
Well, that's a bit flip. Storm of Steel is full of savagery, physical suffering, squalor, and an ultimate sense of frustration. But the narrator also exults in war. He delights in daredevil acts, charging the enemy, organizing his troops, and appreciating details of life in the rear. Jünger is repeatedly wounded (16 times for 20 punctures, he claims (314-5)), but keeps coming back for more. He learns a great deal, grows as a person, and ultimately looks ahead to a non-hideous future. What a light, Nietzschean spirit.
The plot is that of a war diary, following Jünger from the struggle's outbreak in 1914 through the failure of the Central Powers in late 1918. We don't get details of grand strategy or the big picture; instead, the text focuses on the immediate experience of life and death on the Western Front.
The novel excels at this detail. We watch troops deal with boredom, fighting off rats, coming up with nicknames for bad food. We see minute aspects of billets, gear, and personal details. There are few persistent characters, and none realized in any serious depth, but they create an impression of the armed forces around the narrator.
The sensual details and psychological aspects are quite clear.
We can see certain famous historical details of the war through the narrator's eyes. Gas is frequently used and very frightening. Machine guns sweep fields. Air power is unremarkable, and not idolized, as we hear in some accounts. Artillery is the very worst, the god of war, utterly terrifying, and worse when experienced in the form of too-frequent friendly fire. Tanks rarely appear, and the one confrontation with some we see is pathetic:
This reads like science fiction, when humans encounter artifacts of powerful aliens from another world or time.
When not describing the combat zone Jünger reminds us of his excellent taste. He reads Tristram Shandy during leave, criticizes or celebrates taste in furniture, analyzes paintings, and reflects on the human condition. The war never degrades his sensibility.
Again and again Jünger celebrates the fighting prowess of his men. We don't get a sense of decay and social breakdown as we find in some French, Russian, and British accounts. No, Storm's German soldiers are infused with patriotism, well drilled, and fierce in battle right through the end.
Prussian military traditions are singled out for praise. Again, this is so different from other WWI accounts, which emphasize military futility and decay.
Horror and gore are present throughout, as befits the subject.
Ultimately Storm of Steel lauds the generation of German fighters as having successfully passed through the ultimate test. The final chapter describes not the fall of the German empire in revolution, humiliation, and economic ruin, but points to new careers for veterans, who seem likely to triumph in whatever they do. This is an uplifting ending - again, how strange for a WWI novel!
I recommend this for anyone interested in the history, or in memoires/autobiographical fiction about experiences of enormous stress. Its non-tragic perspective is rare.
*I'm reading the 1929 English language translation. I don't know how different subsequent versions are.
**with the exception of American Willa Cather's strange One of Ours (1923), where our hero finds purpose and satisfaction in the trenches. The only bad part about the war is that the Treaty of Versailles isn't as good as it could have been. Yes, an odd book.
Well, that's a bit flip. Storm of Steel is full of savagery, physical suffering, squalor, and an ultimate sense of frustration. But the narrator also exults in war. He delights in daredevil acts, charging the enemy, organizing his troops, and appreciating details of life in the rear. Jünger is repeatedly wounded (16 times for 20 punctures, he claims (314-5)), but keeps coming back for more. He learns a great deal, grows as a person, and ultimately looks ahead to a non-hideous future. What a light, Nietzschean spirit.
The plot is that of a war diary, following Jünger from the struggle's outbreak in 1914 through the failure of the Central Powers in late 1918. We don't get details of grand strategy or the big picture; instead, the text focuses on the immediate experience of life and death on the Western Front.
The novel excels at this detail. We watch troops deal with boredom, fighting off rats, coming up with nicknames for bad food. We see minute aspects of billets, gear, and personal details. There are few persistent characters, and none realized in any serious depth, but they create an impression of the armed forces around the narrator.
The sensual details and psychological aspects are quite clear.
Weak natures are prone to the atavistic impulse to destroy; and it takes hold of the trench fighter in his desolate existence when any one appears above ground. I have felt it myself only too often. (219)
I was in full array: two sandbags in front of my chest, each with four stick bombs, the left-hand one having instantaneous, the right-hand with time fuses; in the right-hand pocket of my tunic I had an 08 revolver on a long cord, in my right trouser pocket a small Mauser pistol; in my left tunic pocket five egg bombs; in the left trouser pocket a phosphorescent compass and a policeman's whistle; in my belt spring hooks for pulling out the bomb pins, a dagger, and wire-cutters. There was a pocket-book in my breast pocket and my home address, and n the pocket of the back of my tunic a flat flask of cherry-brandy. (196-7)
I believe I have found a comparison that exactly conveys what I, in common with all the rest who went through the war, experienced in situations like this. It is as if one were tied tight to a post and threatened by a fellow swinging a sledge-hammer. Now the hammer is swung back for the blow, now it whirls forward, till, just missing your skull, it sends the splinters flying from the post once more. (81)
We can see certain famous historical details of the war through the narrator's eyes. Gas is frequently used and very frightening. Machine guns sweep fields. Air power is unremarkable, and not idolized, as we hear in some accounts. Artillery is the very worst, the god of war, utterly terrifying, and worse when experienced in the form of too-frequent friendly fire. Tanks rarely appear, and the one confrontation with some we see is pathetic:
There was a cluster of shell-shot tanks quite close to the embankment, and I often went to look at them. They bore names that were sometimes humorous, sometimes defiant, and sometimes affectionate, and they were camouflaged with paint; but they were all in a pitiable plight. The little cabin of armored plate, now shot to pieces, with its maze of pipes, rods, and wires, must have been an extremely uncomfortable crib during an attack, when the monsters, hoping to baffle the aim of our guns, took a tortuous course over the battlefield like gigantic helpless cockchafers. I thought more than once of the men in these fiery furnaces. (286-7)
This reads like science fiction, when humans encounter artifacts of powerful aliens from another world or time.
When not describing the combat zone Jünger reminds us of his excellent taste. He reads Tristram Shandy during leave, criticizes or celebrates taste in furniture, analyzes paintings, and reflects on the human condition. The war never degrades his sensibility.
Again and again Jünger celebrates the fighting prowess of his men. We don't get a sense of decay and social breakdown as we find in some French, Russian, and British accounts. No, Storm's German soldiers are infused with patriotism, well drilled, and fierce in battle right through the end.
What is more sublime than to face death at the head of a hundred men? Such a one will never find obedience fail him, for courage runs through the ranks like wine. (27)
Prussian military traditions are singled out for praise. Again, this is so different from other WWI accounts, which emphasize military futility and decay.
Horror and gore are present throughout, as befits the subject.
[O]ur gunner, the volunteer Motullo, was killed by a shot through the head. Though his brain fell over his face to his chin, his mind was still clear when we took him to the nearest dugout. (231)
Ultimately Storm of Steel lauds the generation of German fighters as having successfully passed through the ultimate test. The final chapter describes not the fall of the German empire in revolution, humiliation, and economic ruin, but points to new careers for veterans, who seem likely to triumph in whatever they do. This is an uplifting ending - again, how strange for a WWI novel!
I recommend this for anyone interested in the history, or in memoires/autobiographical fiction about experiences of enormous stress. Its non-tragic perspective is rare.
Again the carnival of carnage beckoned. (308)
*I'm reading the 1929 English language translation. I don't know how different subsequent versions are.
**with the exception of American Willa Cather's strange One of Ours (1923), where our hero finds purpose and satisfaction in the trenches. The only bad part about the war is that the Treaty of Versailles isn't as good as it could have been. Yes, an odd book.
August 21, 2023
The book is recounted from Junger’s journal and covers his time in the German army from 1915 to being invalided out from a chest wound in 1918. In between he suffers many ‘minor’ injuries. Graphic tales of death, heroism and gallows humour. He doesn’t make any real judgments on the war as such. It’s more a descriptive summary of what he saw and experienced. Can feel a bit repetitive at times but certainly never boring. A ‘Birdsong’ it is not. But still a frightening account of trench warfare.
Some interesting observations:
Shouts are exchanged (across the trenches) often with an edge of rough humour.
‘Hey, Tommy, you still there?’
‘Yup!’
‘Then get your head down, I’m about to start shooting at you.’
Detailed descriptions of the different types of ordinance. From ‘English Toffee Apples’ - like a 50kg dumbbell with one set of weights missing. To ‘coal boxes’ and trench mortars.
Crawling out into no man’s land to tie a bell in the wire to pull with a string to wind up the British sentries.
He covers daily life in the trenches and recounts a selection of diary entries. Deaths from snipers or bombs. Hunting rats with clubs while they run dragging their traps. Shooting mice with paper bullets ( emptying most of the powder from a bullet and fitting a rolled piece of paper). I was reminded of the stories of rats and lice in Beevor’s Stalingrad.
Promoted to Lieutenant he calls out a British officer after one of his men is shot by a sniper. ‘I reproached him for the fact that one of our men had been killed by a treacherous shot, to which he replied that hadn’t been his company, but the one adjacent, ‘ there are some unscrupulous bastards on your side too…!’
‘But I don’t even have a gun!’
‘Then wait till someone gets shot, and use his!’
After shooting and killing a young British soldier Junger reflects:
‘The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it.’
Some interesting observations:
Shouts are exchanged (across the trenches) often with an edge of rough humour.
‘Hey, Tommy, you still there?’
‘Yup!’
‘Then get your head down, I’m about to start shooting at you.’
Detailed descriptions of the different types of ordinance. From ‘English Toffee Apples’ - like a 50kg dumbbell with one set of weights missing. To ‘coal boxes’ and trench mortars.
Crawling out into no man’s land to tie a bell in the wire to pull with a string to wind up the British sentries.
He covers daily life in the trenches and recounts a selection of diary entries. Deaths from snipers or bombs. Hunting rats with clubs while they run dragging their traps. Shooting mice with paper bullets ( emptying most of the powder from a bullet and fitting a rolled piece of paper). I was reminded of the stories of rats and lice in Beevor’s Stalingrad.
Promoted to Lieutenant he calls out a British officer after one of his men is shot by a sniper. ‘I reproached him for the fact that one of our men had been killed by a treacherous shot, to which he replied that hadn’t been his company, but the one adjacent, ‘ there are some unscrupulous bastards on your side too…!’
‘But I don’t even have a gun!’
‘Then wait till someone gets shot, and use his!’
After shooting and killing a young British soldier Junger reflects:
‘The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it.’
October 1, 2020
Certainly one of the most astonishing memoirs I've read, whether about war or not. Ernst Jünger was a young soldier swept up in the horror of World War I, but, unlike most, he did not seem to find it merely an unmitigated horror and misery. As what you might call a practical Nietzschean he embraced the nightmare with gusto, viewing it as a great adventure and opportunity to die a glorious death for noble cause. He did not hate his enemies, at least not worthy ones like the British, but admired them. Jünger was something like a modern knight. Amid what seemed like a supremely unchivalrous war like WWI (technological war is generally hostile to any idea of martial virtue) he continued to think and act in high-minded terms. In this he was atypical, perhaps, as he laments at times the reactions of more delicate souls to this maelstrom.
Jünger remains a strong influence among segments of the Right, which is why I was interested in reading his famous memoir. He never became a Nazi and was indeed opposed to them in later decades, but for reasons more conservative than liberal. You cannot help but be impressed by his life, including his performance in the war, in which he never hated and gave his enemy their chivalrous due even as his comrades were ghastly slaughtered around him and he himself was grievously wounded at least a dozen times. He was simply un-killable. Indeed, he ended up living more than a century. That said, I don't think anyone could stomach a worldview built on the thoughts and behavior of such a person. World War I, as this book even depicts, was not an "adventure," it was a nightmare such that we would never want to repeat.
There's something to be said for meeting even life's worst hardships with equanimity. We also tend to ignore death too much today, while Jünger admirably confronts it head on. But his level of zeal to embrace of death and physical suffering may go beyond the point of being constructive. Nonetheless this is a remarkable and unique account from a type of person clearly rare in the world.
Jünger remains a strong influence among segments of the Right, which is why I was interested in reading his famous memoir. He never became a Nazi and was indeed opposed to them in later decades, but for reasons more conservative than liberal. You cannot help but be impressed by his life, including his performance in the war, in which he never hated and gave his enemy their chivalrous due even as his comrades were ghastly slaughtered around him and he himself was grievously wounded at least a dozen times. He was simply un-killable. Indeed, he ended up living more than a century. That said, I don't think anyone could stomach a worldview built on the thoughts and behavior of such a person. World War I, as this book even depicts, was not an "adventure," it was a nightmare such that we would never want to repeat.
There's something to be said for meeting even life's worst hardships with equanimity. We also tend to ignore death too much today, while Jünger admirably confronts it head on. But his level of zeal to embrace of death and physical suffering may go beyond the point of being constructive. Nonetheless this is a remarkable and unique account from a type of person clearly rare in the world.
June 16, 2022
This is a fantastic story of war that shows the dignity amongst enemies. I can't tell you about the numerous friends that Ernst lost along the way, as there were many. Also, everything is chaotic and you're dragged from one place to the next very swiftly just like in war. There were times going through the gas you could feel the difficulty breathing or the grit covering everyone from a bomb going off creating a pit in the earth.
I feel like we forget that our enemies are human too and it's good to read books like this to remember that. This was an intense experience with no hope in sight, the soldiers knew it even as they fought and died. People lose parts all over the place and fellow soldiers drop bombs on people from their own country for nothing. I don't know if I recommend this to everyone but sometimes it's good to be humbled. It's very well written and I had to pull out the old Oxford to look up a few things. Be pondering on this one for a long time.
There it is and there you have it.
I feel like we forget that our enemies are human too and it's good to read books like this to remember that. This was an intense experience with no hope in sight, the soldiers knew it even as they fought and died. People lose parts all over the place and fellow soldiers drop bombs on people from their own country for nothing. I don't know if I recommend this to everyone but sometimes it's good to be humbled. It's very well written and I had to pull out the old Oxford to look up a few things. Be pondering on this one for a long time.
There it is and there you have it.
March 14, 2022
12/03/2022 (*****)
Libro celeberrimo, uno dei grandi affreschi letterari della Grande Guerra.
Il paragone, che nasce spontaneo, è con Niente di nuovo sul fronte occidentale, sia per quel che riguarda il punto di vista che il contenuto. Entrambi di autori che hanno combattuto sul fronte occidentale, entrambi tedeschi, ma con impostazioni diametralmente opposte.
Remarque racconta e fa cronaca, realistica, dei fatti inserendoli sempre all'interno di una cornice, costruita su annotazioni e pensieri coerenti con quello che è l'obiettivo dell'autore, ossia mostrare come l'oscena futilità e insensibilità di aver mandato a morire in quei modi tremendi milioni di uomini sia il manifesto massimo dell'insensatezza e dell'orrenda natura delle guerre (di tutte, in generale, e di questa, la più grande e spaventosa di tutte, in particolare).
La cronaca, insomma, anche autobiografica, lì come anche in Lussu (Un anno sull'altipiano) e in Trumbo (E Johnny prese il fucile), diventa un mezzo per fare analisi sociale e, soprattutto, considerazioni politiche fondate su encomiabili ideali pacifisti.
In Junger non c'è nulla di tutto questo. Mancano quasi del tutto gli slanci emotivi verso gli affetti, non c'è traccia di idee o analisi politiche né si contesta mai la realtà terrificante che sta sotto gli occhi di chi racconta. Non ci sono accuse verso i comandi e i loro ottusi ordini ma d'altra parte non ci sono nemmeno tracce di idee nazionaliste, suprematiste, antipacifiste (o antisocialiste, che in quegli anni era come dire la stessa cosa).
Il romanzo è un continuo, tesissimo racconto di fatti bellici, descrizioni di scenari infernali, intervallati solo da brevi paragrafi di lirismo, utili a riprendere il fiato per un'altra apnea, per seguire d'un fiato l'assalto che seguirà nel prossimo paragrafo.
Così, fra le pagine, scorrono personaggi e nomi, tutti o quasi inevitabilmente destinati a diventar parte del terrificante carnaio in corso d'opera, dove l'unico legame è rappresentato dal protagonista, Junger stesso, tenente del 73° reggimento dell'Hannover, arruolatosi volontario nel 1914 e sopravvissuto - incredibilmente - fino alla fine della guerra. L'avverbio, credetemi, non è esagerato: si stenta a credere che qualcuno che abbia partecipato in prima linea a molte delle principali battaglie del fronte occidentale (Somme; Arras; terza battaglia di Ypres, ossia l'inferno di fango di Passchendaele; Cambrai; offensive di primavera del '18) ne sia uscito sano e salvo, anche se non del tutto indenne. D'altra parte, la carriera militare e gli encomi di Junger sono lì, a dimostrarlo.
Non è un caso che questo combattente e i suoi racconti abbiano affascinato tutta la gioventù tedesca uscita viva dalle trincee e umiliata da Versailles e non è un caso che il nazismo fece di tutto affinché Junger aderisse al regime, incontrando sempre rifiuti.
Uomo assai particolare, difficilmente incasellabile a livello politico (nazionalista e conservatore, ma alieno a idee suprematiste), di Junger non si può in ogni caso non ammirare la prosa, cristallina e chiarissima, fredda e essenziale nel suo sviluppo. Il libro, che assembla quanto trascritto a caldo da Junger nei suoi diari di guerra, è insomma un lucido e analitico resoconto, senza filtri o infingimenti, di quello che fu la Grande Guerra, al netto di ideologie politiche e al lordo di tutte le sue terrificanti miserie, dei suoi orrori e delle sue drammatiche grandezze.
Insomma, è l'autopsia definitiva della Prima Guerra Mondiale e sotto questo aspetto è un modello insuperato, anche perché in quei limiti Junger decide di rimanere e restare: nulla c'è, ad esempio, riguardo il collasso tedesco e l'eredità della sconfitta né riguardo le motivazioni che hanno portato la Germania a perdere in maniera fragorosa (se non la presa d'atto dell'inesauribile quantità di risorse degli alleati dell'Intesa). Sotto questo aspetto, il romanzo si differenzia molto da un altro, molto meno noto ma splendido, racconto iper-realistico della guerra, ossia Bollettino di guerra di Koppen, che consiglio.
L'opera è di livello assoluto. Può disturbare la freddezza del narratore nel raccontare gli eventi, senza però dimenticare che questo è quello che avvenne e che la guerra, orrenda, fu anche cameratismo, amicizia, rispetto per amici e nemici.
Anche questi aspetti finiscono sempre nei racconti dei reduci di ogni ideologia, dopotutto.
Libro celeberrimo, uno dei grandi affreschi letterari della Grande Guerra.
Il paragone, che nasce spontaneo, è con Niente di nuovo sul fronte occidentale, sia per quel che riguarda il punto di vista che il contenuto. Entrambi di autori che hanno combattuto sul fronte occidentale, entrambi tedeschi, ma con impostazioni diametralmente opposte.
Remarque racconta e fa cronaca, realistica, dei fatti inserendoli sempre all'interno di una cornice, costruita su annotazioni e pensieri coerenti con quello che è l'obiettivo dell'autore, ossia mostrare come l'oscena futilità e insensibilità di aver mandato a morire in quei modi tremendi milioni di uomini sia il manifesto massimo dell'insensatezza e dell'orrenda natura delle guerre (di tutte, in generale, e di questa, la più grande e spaventosa di tutte, in particolare).
La cronaca, insomma, anche autobiografica, lì come anche in Lussu (Un anno sull'altipiano) e in Trumbo (E Johnny prese il fucile), diventa un mezzo per fare analisi sociale e, soprattutto, considerazioni politiche fondate su encomiabili ideali pacifisti.
In Junger non c'è nulla di tutto questo. Mancano quasi del tutto gli slanci emotivi verso gli affetti, non c'è traccia di idee o analisi politiche né si contesta mai la realtà terrificante che sta sotto gli occhi di chi racconta. Non ci sono accuse verso i comandi e i loro ottusi ordini ma d'altra parte non ci sono nemmeno tracce di idee nazionaliste, suprematiste, antipacifiste (o antisocialiste, che in quegli anni era come dire la stessa cosa).
Il romanzo è un continuo, tesissimo racconto di fatti bellici, descrizioni di scenari infernali, intervallati solo da brevi paragrafi di lirismo, utili a riprendere il fiato per un'altra apnea, per seguire d'un fiato l'assalto che seguirà nel prossimo paragrafo.
Così, fra le pagine, scorrono personaggi e nomi, tutti o quasi inevitabilmente destinati a diventar parte del terrificante carnaio in corso d'opera, dove l'unico legame è rappresentato dal protagonista, Junger stesso, tenente del 73° reggimento dell'Hannover, arruolatosi volontario nel 1914 e sopravvissuto - incredibilmente - fino alla fine della guerra. L'avverbio, credetemi, non è esagerato: si stenta a credere che qualcuno che abbia partecipato in prima linea a molte delle principali battaglie del fronte occidentale (Somme; Arras; terza battaglia di Ypres, ossia l'inferno di fango di Passchendaele; Cambrai; offensive di primavera del '18) ne sia uscito sano e salvo, anche se non del tutto indenne. D'altra parte, la carriera militare e gli encomi di Junger sono lì, a dimostrarlo.
Non è un caso che questo combattente e i suoi racconti abbiano affascinato tutta la gioventù tedesca uscita viva dalle trincee e umiliata da Versailles e non è un caso che il nazismo fece di tutto affinché Junger aderisse al regime, incontrando sempre rifiuti.
Uomo assai particolare, difficilmente incasellabile a livello politico (nazionalista e conservatore, ma alieno a idee suprematiste), di Junger non si può in ogni caso non ammirare la prosa, cristallina e chiarissima, fredda e essenziale nel suo sviluppo. Il libro, che assembla quanto trascritto a caldo da Junger nei suoi diari di guerra, è insomma un lucido e analitico resoconto, senza filtri o infingimenti, di quello che fu la Grande Guerra, al netto di ideologie politiche e al lordo di tutte le sue terrificanti miserie, dei suoi orrori e delle sue drammatiche grandezze.
Insomma, è l'autopsia definitiva della Prima Guerra Mondiale e sotto questo aspetto è un modello insuperato, anche perché in quei limiti Junger decide di rimanere e restare: nulla c'è, ad esempio, riguardo il collasso tedesco e l'eredità della sconfitta né riguardo le motivazioni che hanno portato la Germania a perdere in maniera fragorosa (se non la presa d'atto dell'inesauribile quantità di risorse degli alleati dell'Intesa). Sotto questo aspetto, il romanzo si differenzia molto da un altro, molto meno noto ma splendido, racconto iper-realistico della guerra, ossia Bollettino di guerra di Koppen, che consiglio.
L'opera è di livello assoluto. Può disturbare la freddezza del narratore nel raccontare gli eventi, senza però dimenticare che questo è quello che avvenne e che la guerra, orrenda, fu anche cameratismo, amicizia, rispetto per amici e nemici.
Anche questi aspetti finiscono sempre nei racconti dei reduci di ogni ideologia, dopotutto.
February 16, 2009
Ernst Junger's memoir of his time on the Western Front (1914-1918) is a powerful glimpse at what it's like to be a soldier, made all the more powerful because it's unadorned with philosophical introspection or politics. The reader joins Junger as he joins his unit in Champagne and leaves him during his final convalescence in a Hanover hospital. In between, we vicariously experience the daily life of a German officer and his men - and "vicarious" is about as close as any rational person would want to get to war.
Junger is not a pacifist. He did not enter the war an eager, young idealist only to have reality turn him into a burnt-out cynic or ardent pacifist as often seems to happen in other, perhaps better-known memoirs. He entered the war an ardent nationalist and patriot, and came out no less so. He is not, however, blind to the horrors and rampant stupidity and the capricious fortune that makes one man a hero and another a coward (or dead). A couple of examples: In the final months of the war, Junger's company (about 80 men) is ordered to advance againt the British lines. They enter the maze of trenches, quickly losing their way and stumble upon an equally confused group of British (New Zealand) soldiers (about 200). The surprise is so complete, the "fog of war" so dense, that, without a melee, Junger's men capture them all. In another engagement, Junger is ordered to take 14 men across the no-man's zone in a reconnaissance mission and to capture some soldiers for interrogation. Almost from the beginning, the patrol goes awry and 10 of the 14 never return. Needless to say, the mission objectives remained unfulfilled. But that appears to be par for the course - little exercises designed to keep the men occupied but with little or no tactical value.
Reading Storm of Steel, I'm reminded of Christopher Hedge's War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Paperback, where that author argues the allure of war - the feeling of ultimate power and aliveness - is what draws (mostly) men into an army. Junger was the living example of Hedge's theoretical recruit (he died in 1998).
A few of the more affecting passages and observations follow:
The chapter titled "Guillemont" is a nice snapshot of the war. Endless days in the trenches, the filth and physical misery, interrupted by pointless forays against enemy positions. Here and all through the book, Junger's emotional distance strikes the reader (or at least this reader). Colleagues and soldiers drift in and out of the narrative, often with little or no introduction and (perhaps) the briefest of leave takings.
In that same chapter, Junger defines what makes the "good soldier": "Nothing was left in this voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It's men like that that you need for fighting" (p. 92).
There are flashes of sardonic wit, as when the author describes the travails he encounters trying to protect his bicycles from shellfire: "To this unpleasant bit of target-practice I lost four bicycles.... They were comprehensively remodelled and cast to the four winds" (p. 139).
In that same chapter ("In the Village of Fresnoy") we get another glimpse into Junger's idolization of war and the soldier: "There was in these men a quality that both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevalieresque urge to prevail in battle. Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood" (p. 140).
The hypocrisy and lying in war (regarding the write-up of an action): "Then we discussed the most important aspect of the affair: the report. We wrote it in such a way that we were both satisfied" (p. 155).
Evidence that even a "warrior" need to psych himself up to kill: "...I chewed my pipe and tried to talk myself into feeling brave.... Several times I murmured a phrase of Ariosto's: `A great heart feels no dreadof approaching death, whenever it may come, so long as it be honourable'" (p. 171).
And finally, a troubling sentiment that's excused all sorts of atrocities: "The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse..." (p. 241).
Junger is not a pacifist. He did not enter the war an eager, young idealist only to have reality turn him into a burnt-out cynic or ardent pacifist as often seems to happen in other, perhaps better-known memoirs. He entered the war an ardent nationalist and patriot, and came out no less so. He is not, however, blind to the horrors and rampant stupidity and the capricious fortune that makes one man a hero and another a coward (or dead). A couple of examples: In the final months of the war, Junger's company (about 80 men) is ordered to advance againt the British lines. They enter the maze of trenches, quickly losing their way and stumble upon an equally confused group of British (New Zealand) soldiers (about 200). The surprise is so complete, the "fog of war" so dense, that, without a melee, Junger's men capture them all. In another engagement, Junger is ordered to take 14 men across the no-man's zone in a reconnaissance mission and to capture some soldiers for interrogation. Almost from the beginning, the patrol goes awry and 10 of the 14 never return. Needless to say, the mission objectives remained unfulfilled. But that appears to be par for the course - little exercises designed to keep the men occupied but with little or no tactical value.
Reading Storm of Steel, I'm reminded of Christopher Hedge's War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Paperback, where that author argues the allure of war - the feeling of ultimate power and aliveness - is what draws (mostly) men into an army. Junger was the living example of Hedge's theoretical recruit (he died in 1998).
A few of the more affecting passages and observations follow:
The chapter titled "Guillemont" is a nice snapshot of the war. Endless days in the trenches, the filth and physical misery, interrupted by pointless forays against enemy positions. Here and all through the book, Junger's emotional distance strikes the reader (or at least this reader). Colleagues and soldiers drift in and out of the narrative, often with little or no introduction and (perhaps) the briefest of leave takings.
In that same chapter, Junger defines what makes the "good soldier": "Nothing was left in this voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It's men like that that you need for fighting" (p. 92).
There are flashes of sardonic wit, as when the author describes the travails he encounters trying to protect his bicycles from shellfire: "To this unpleasant bit of target-practice I lost four bicycles.... They were comprehensively remodelled and cast to the four winds" (p. 139).
In that same chapter ("In the Village of Fresnoy") we get another glimpse into Junger's idolization of war and the soldier: "There was in these men a quality that both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevalieresque urge to prevail in battle. Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood" (p. 140).
The hypocrisy and lying in war (regarding the write-up of an action): "Then we discussed the most important aspect of the affair: the report. We wrote it in such a way that we were both satisfied" (p. 155).
Evidence that even a "warrior" need to psych himself up to kill: "...I chewed my pipe and tried to talk myself into feeling brave.... Several times I murmured a phrase of Ariosto's: `A great heart feels no dreadof approaching death, whenever it may come, so long as it be honourable'" (p. 171).
And finally, a troubling sentiment that's excused all sorts of atrocities: "The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse..." (p. 241).
September 25, 2017
I couldn't help associating this WWI memoir with what I've read recently, particularly Speedboat and Sleepless Nights, that wouldn't seem related at all on the surface but definitely shared a sense of fragmented cohesion, or cohesive fragmentation. This one and those two novels by late-'70s NYC intellectual women offer minimal to zero plot and characterization but excel thanks to unique voice, setting, and perception/vibe. Storms of Steel is just as fractured as "Speedboat," with just as many fleeting human encounters but this is differentiated of course by the ever-present possibility of a bullet in the eye, shrapnel severing an essential artery, excessive inhalation of chlorine gas, on and on. Also, as far as I know, Renata Adler never shot an enemy soldier about to capture her as she lay on her back, bleeding, after a bullet punctured her lung. Junger was mentioned a few times in the fifth part of 2666 and last year I read and loved All Quiet on the Western Front and also earlier this year read some Imre Kertész Holocaust-related books -- those were the forces at play before reading. After reading, the single lingering impression (beyond "war is hell") is luck. In a concentration camp or in the trenches, death is always there, horrors unimaginable in peacetime are everywhere out in the open, and there's really no way to ensure survival. He's developed elevated anticipation for incoming bombs and makes many of the right moves at the right time but so often the same move a minute later would've meant death. Junger is wounded six times and comes away with twenty serious scars (entry and exit wounds) and each one, if his body contorted another way or if the trajectory of the shell or bullet had been just a little different this book never would've been written, let alone read 100 years later. A century later, it's still read because it's gripping, so clearly describes the storms and stresses of battle and the times of quiet in-between, and it does so without much theorizing or hand-wringing or editorializing about humanity. For the most part, it's a feat of dramatization. He shows courage, mercy, passion, suffering, cowardliness, rage, companionship, sympathy, on and on. His respect for the enemy is remarkable and his impressions of near-death moments, when he thought that death was finally upon him and felt something like lightness and happiness and harmony with the world, noticed how all the pebbles on the ground around him were perfectly and intricately patterned, are reassuring somehow. And when he does generalize about humanity it's always welcomed and well-phrased. Michael Hofmann is a top translator of course (loved his The Radetzky March). Sometimes the language seemed to carry excessive British slang, a few times to the point of not making sense or seeming like a word was missing, but as with Berlin Alexanderplatz, I'm sure Hofmann was accurately rendering or at least relaying a sense of old-timey German slang in the original. As with Holocaust novel/memoirs, books like this are good for your perspective -- the general takeaway, despite the daily "fresh hell" of the news, is that things could be worse these days. Imagine everything devastated, every church steeple razed so not to help enemy artillery set its sights, every old tree shattered, little girls in pools of their own blood laid out on the front steps of well-to-do houses, rats everywhere, and the air more or less at all times alive with deadly projectiles. I'm sure if the current president were to read this (or have it read to him), he'd come away with bloodlust more than hunger for ever-lasting peace.
March 21, 2017
Beautifully written. Junger has extraordinary gifts as a writer. The one thing that makes it harder to connect with his accounts was his cool detachment in his presentation of events and experiences. Beneath the surface is a bit of soft nationalism which is obnoxious but not completely blind or extreme, at least not as blind or extreme as one would expect from a French or German citizen/soldier who was constantly indoctrinated with this nationalistic state propaganda of the times. It really is pretty much unavoidable in this time period except for a small sliver of exceptional individuals who somehow managed to defy this conformity to nationalism (of which there are examples in all of the WWI countries). I don't mean to be unfair by judging Junger via the prism of our contemporary standards, I mean, we are all products of our own time and that should be taken into consideration. But it does seem like Junger embraced a deeper more radical nationalism at certain points in his life, but in this book it isn't too bad, at least from what I can tell. Nationalism is just the worst though, I really have a hard time standing it at any level...
Another quibble against Junger is he does seem to find some primeval enjoyment in war, there is a joy and celebration of war that is a bit scary/crazy to me. It is a bit hard to swallow such sentiments... but overall he crafts an amazing memoir which captures the essence of the times. The writing is too good, and I do like how he presents things, overall he is a very good nuanced thinker and writer (in spite of the critiques I make), so well worth the read if you are interested in this history.
I'm curious to learn more about Junger, read more of his works, he seems to have been a complex figure.
I'd like to keep reading more memoirs from the war, would like to read memoirs from various participants. I don't know much about the Eastern front, would be nice to read some Russian memoirs of this experience. There is something about WWI, it is the ultimate testament to how far human folly can go, one of the grandest most pointless operatic human tragedies. Maybe reading about it helps me, helps me to contextualize modern suffering and modern problems. But it serves as a reminder as to the horrors and idiotic mistakes humanity is capable of, and why we should always remain vigilant. Even moreso nowadays, with the technological prowess we have we can destroy ourselves much more easily, which is why it is more important than ever to buttress systems of international cooperation and avoid war. Given our destructive capabilities we have less margin for error than 100 years back, with hot-headed ethnonationalists coming to power who view foreign policy as a zero-sum game, there are reasons to worry.
Nationalism in my eyes is the bane of the human species, we will accomplish so much more and improve human welfare by leaps and bounds if we can ever transcend this pernicious ideology. But it is so seductive, and exquisitely wielded by those in power to control and trick us into blindly following and serving their narrow interests no matter the ultimate costs.
Another quibble against Junger is he does seem to find some primeval enjoyment in war, there is a joy and celebration of war that is a bit scary/crazy to me. It is a bit hard to swallow such sentiments... but overall he crafts an amazing memoir which captures the essence of the times. The writing is too good, and I do like how he presents things, overall he is a very good nuanced thinker and writer (in spite of the critiques I make), so well worth the read if you are interested in this history.
I'm curious to learn more about Junger, read more of his works, he seems to have been a complex figure.
I'd like to keep reading more memoirs from the war, would like to read memoirs from various participants. I don't know much about the Eastern front, would be nice to read some Russian memoirs of this experience. There is something about WWI, it is the ultimate testament to how far human folly can go, one of the grandest most pointless operatic human tragedies. Maybe reading about it helps me, helps me to contextualize modern suffering and modern problems. But it serves as a reminder as to the horrors and idiotic mistakes humanity is capable of, and why we should always remain vigilant. Even moreso nowadays, with the technological prowess we have we can destroy ourselves much more easily, which is why it is more important than ever to buttress systems of international cooperation and avoid war. Given our destructive capabilities we have less margin for error than 100 years back, with hot-headed ethnonationalists coming to power who view foreign policy as a zero-sum game, there are reasons to worry.
Nationalism in my eyes is the bane of the human species, we will accomplish so much more and improve human welfare by leaps and bounds if we can ever transcend this pernicious ideology. But it is so seductive, and exquisitely wielded by those in power to control and trick us into blindly following and serving their narrow interests no matter the ultimate costs.
March 14, 2019
I don’t think I’ve read a memoir of WW1 written by a German. It was therefore interesting, to say the very least. It is extremely well written. He is intelligent, well read a very fine warrior and leader of men at such a young age.
The pages are heaped with carnage which starts to numb after a while. Each side respects the other’s prowess which does not dilute the hatred needed to fuel the fight but there is generally a shared code of honour between them. Each side indulges in the dirtiness of chemical warfare. The conditions these men were fighting in are incomprehensibly shocking and reading Ernst Junger’s experiences filled me with feelings of sheer inadequacy.
Reading of the settlements in Belgium and France where the fighting was taking place and where Ernst and his comrades were frequently based was something of an eye opener. Here too we see great carnage and humanity.
I want to read more by him.
“These moments of nocturnal prowling...Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably memorable thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing...The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the
huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.”
The pages are heaped with carnage which starts to numb after a while. Each side respects the other’s prowess which does not dilute the hatred needed to fuel the fight but there is generally a shared code of honour between them. Each side indulges in the dirtiness of chemical warfare. The conditions these men were fighting in are incomprehensibly shocking and reading Ernst Junger’s experiences filled me with feelings of sheer inadequacy.
Reading of the settlements in Belgium and France where the fighting was taking place and where Ernst and his comrades were frequently based was something of an eye opener. Here too we see great carnage and humanity.
I want to read more by him.
“These moments of nocturnal prowling...Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably memorable thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing...The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the
huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.”
October 22, 2023
As far as First World War accounts go, this one should be top of anyone’s list. As I, unfortunately, have no such list, Storm of Steel is at the top by default. I am placing it along Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, although Jünger’s memoir is a different kind of beast.
It is an extremely cold account of trench warfare. There are no meditations, lamentations, no melancholy whatsoever, just a cold description of the facts. Jünger does not think of why he is at the frontline, of the people responsible, of the necessity of war, or lack thereof. He is a soldier. He does what he is ordered to. So, in about 300 pages, we accompany a young German officer in his four years of war, in training or combat missions, in reconnaissance or intelligence gathering pursuits. We get shot at countless times as he does, we get hurt and we see death with our eyes (death around and within us) just as he does. Young Jünger is injured a lot, at some point I stopped counting, because he is a talented and courageous officer, who leads his subordinates into battle. He is the first into battle and the last from it. For his determination and his ingenious tactics he is appreciated by his men and his superiors. He is decorated. But in these four long dreadful years, there is much more to war than heroism. For an hour or day of battle, there are weeks of preparation, of boredom, of senseless bloodshed, of dead young men and boys. There is poor food, poor conditions, cold, disease and lost hope. All part of war. Part of trench warfare.
I can’t say I read all this with enjoyment. There is no pleasure in war. War is a terrible, awful thing. But young Jünger makes his notes with a certain literary talent. I am happy he lived to tell his stories, for at times, after reading of hundreds and thousands of men dying in front of him and of the injuries he sustained, I was afraid he would not survive (I knew he did, but still, the description is gripping and frightening).
Because of its matter-of-fact approach, Storm of Steel can be read from multiple perspectives. I, for one, see it as an anti-war memoir, because I don’t feel that anyone reading should ever think of war as a legitimate way of solving or gaining anything.
Whenever I will hear someone gratifying war, I will slap them with this book.
It is an extremely cold account of trench warfare. There are no meditations, lamentations, no melancholy whatsoever, just a cold description of the facts. Jünger does not think of why he is at the frontline, of the people responsible, of the necessity of war, or lack thereof. He is a soldier. He does what he is ordered to. So, in about 300 pages, we accompany a young German officer in his four years of war, in training or combat missions, in reconnaissance or intelligence gathering pursuits. We get shot at countless times as he does, we get hurt and we see death with our eyes (death around and within us) just as he does. Young Jünger is injured a lot, at some point I stopped counting, because he is a talented and courageous officer, who leads his subordinates into battle. He is the first into battle and the last from it. For his determination and his ingenious tactics he is appreciated by his men and his superiors. He is decorated. But in these four long dreadful years, there is much more to war than heroism. For an hour or day of battle, there are weeks of preparation, of boredom, of senseless bloodshed, of dead young men and boys. There is poor food, poor conditions, cold, disease and lost hope. All part of war. Part of trench warfare.
I can’t say I read all this with enjoyment. There is no pleasure in war. War is a terrible, awful thing. But young Jünger makes his notes with a certain literary talent. I am happy he lived to tell his stories, for at times, after reading of hundreds and thousands of men dying in front of him and of the injuries he sustained, I was afraid he would not survive (I knew he did, but still, the description is gripping and frightening).
Because of its matter-of-fact approach, Storm of Steel can be read from multiple perspectives. I, for one, see it as an anti-war memoir, because I don’t feel that anyone reading should ever think of war as a legitimate way of solving or gaining anything.
Whenever I will hear someone gratifying war, I will slap them with this book.
“The defile and the land behind was strewn with German dead, the field ahead with British. Arms and legs and heads stuck out of the slopes; in front of our holes were severed limbs and bodies, some of which had had coats or tarpaulins thrown over them, to save us the sight of the disfigured faces. In spite of the heat, no one thought of covering the bodies with earth.
The village of Guillemont seemed to have disappeared without trace; just a whitish stain on the cratered field indicated where one of the limestone houses had been pulverized. In front of us lay the station, crumpled like a child's toy; further to the rear the woods of Delville, ripped to splinters.”
“We were taken to Tourcoing, a pleasant sister town of Lille, for a few days. For the first and last time in the entire war, every man of the 7th Company slept on a feather bed. I was put up in a magnificent room in the house of a rich manufacturer on the Rue de Lille. I greatly enjoyed my first evening on a leather armchair in front of an open fire in a marble fireplace.
Those few days were used by all of us to enjoy the life that we'd had to fight so hard to cling on to. We still couldn't quite grasp that for the time being we'd given death the slip, and we wanted to feel the possession of this new lease of life, by enjoying it in every way possible.”
“A bullet shot from some distance had punched through my helmet and only brushed my skull. Half unconscious, I reeled back with a hurriedly applied bandage, to remove myself from the eye of the storm. No sooner had I passed the nearest traverse than a man ran up behind me and told me that Tebbe had just been killed in the same place, by a shot in the head.
That news floored me. A friend of mine with noble qualities, with whom I had shared joy, sorrow and danger for years now, who only a few moments ago had called out some pleasantry to me, taken from life by a tiny piece of lead! I could not grasp the fact; unfortunately, it was all too true.”
September 2, 2022
"Let our funeral dirge be the staccato of the machine gun." ---Che' Guevara, MESSAGE TO THE TRICONTINENTAL
"La guerre...que connerie!"---Jorge Amado
Ernst Junger, who served on the Western Front during World War I, wrote this novel as a hymn to the generation that pulled through a baptism of fire. Do not come here looking for another ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Unlike Erich Maria Remarque Junger wants to convince his readers that war is where the steel that makes a nation, and its heroes, is forged, or as the Japanese Kamikaze pilots swore in their oaths "pain and the gods will make us men." STORM OF STEEL is artillery duels, infantry charges and, above all, the rattle of the machine gun. Junger does not deny the horrors of war but unlike the liberals and socialists who made the Weimar Republic, whose constitution "bans war as an instrument of foreign policy", he accepts and to a great degree welcomes conflict. The politics that emerges from such a world view, as the quotes above attest, are neither of the right or the left but a savage critique of the modern bourgeois liberal world. Civilization without conflict is unthinkable and unwise; peace leads to stupor. Junger served under Hitler yet also gave philosophical, though not material, support to the July 20 plot to kill the Fuhrer. He lived to almost 100, and received his nation's highest civilian honor from Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Perhaps the Germans still long for that old Grosse Reich.
"La guerre...que connerie!"---Jorge Amado
Ernst Junger, who served on the Western Front during World War I, wrote this novel as a hymn to the generation that pulled through a baptism of fire. Do not come here looking for another ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Unlike Erich Maria Remarque Junger wants to convince his readers that war is where the steel that makes a nation, and its heroes, is forged, or as the Japanese Kamikaze pilots swore in their oaths "pain and the gods will make us men." STORM OF STEEL is artillery duels, infantry charges and, above all, the rattle of the machine gun. Junger does not deny the horrors of war but unlike the liberals and socialists who made the Weimar Republic, whose constitution "bans war as an instrument of foreign policy", he accepts and to a great degree welcomes conflict. The politics that emerges from such a world view, as the quotes above attest, are neither of the right or the left but a savage critique of the modern bourgeois liberal world. Civilization without conflict is unthinkable and unwise; peace leads to stupor. Junger served under Hitler yet also gave philosophical, though not material, support to the July 20 plot to kill the Fuhrer. He lived to almost 100, and received his nation's highest civilian honor from Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Perhaps the Germans still long for that old Grosse Reich.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,385 reviews