Now that Europe is once again embroiled in war it seems a fitting moment to return to one of the most raw and immediate accounts of modern warfare from the soldier's perspective: Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger.
Ernst Jünger
Ernst Jünger was born in Germany in 1895 and volunteered for military service immediately after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. He was wounded fourteen times, awarded the Iron Cross First Class and the Pour le Mérite.
In 2003 Penguin Books published a new English translation by Michael Hofmann and I bought the hardback version the following year.
In those days I used to keep a notebook of quotations and I filled one leaf of it with quotations from Storm of Steel.
Here are the quotations:
"I sensed the weight of the hour, and I think everyone felt the individual in them dissolve, and fear depart." (p. 231)
"The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy." (p. 232)
"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 abrubtly, I had to laugh. Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can't trump it." (p. 237)
"In a few minutes, the intensity of our enthusiasm gave us the feeling we'd known each other for years. Then we leapt up, and never saw each other again." (p. 237)
Jünger neither glorifies war nor moralizes about it. What he achieves is as close to Homeric epic as modern warfare will permit. The problem he faced was a question, Hofmann notes in his introduction, that Marx had asked: "Is Achilles possible with gunpowder and lead?"
For four years Jünger steeled himself and did what he considered his duty.
He entered the war as a volunteer adventurer and left it a nationalist, but he was one German nationalist who was never seduced by the Nazis and remained as "hard as Krupp's steel" in rejecting their courtship.
Even so, his books continued to be published in Germany during the Third Reich, including one that can be read as an anti-Nazi allegory, "On the Marble Cliffs."
Ernst Jünger in World War Two
During the Second World War Jünger served as an army captain and spent a great deal of it as part of the occupation forces in Paris where he socialized with artists and writers such as Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Céline.
Jünger was also in contact with Rommel's staff and various Prussian officers who were involved with the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.
In spite of all that, he is often criticized for his passivity and his aestheticism, for the dandyish life he maintained in wartime Paris when the world was going up in flames and the storm of steel was engulfing not only front line soldiers, but murdering millions of innocent civilians.
In The Trenches Of History
There is an excellent German documentary about Ernst Jünger which dives into the complextiy and inspirational power of his character, life and work. I watched it with the English subtitles "on" and they were clear, without any gobbledigook or mistranslations.
David Hurley