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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
251 of 267 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
They don't want you to read it....,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
I already wrote a review of "The Storm of Steel" under its full title ("From The Diary of a German Stormtroop Officer on the Western Front"), but I felt compelled to take up a sword here not only on behalf of Ernst Juenger but also against many who deliberately misinterpret his work.
Political cenorship is a fascinating subject and it operates on many levels, both subtle and gross. In a democractic society it generally is practiced in the former manner, so that the majority of people do not even know that it is happening, much less object to its imposition. You would be hard-pressed, for example, to find someone in Western civilization who has not either read, seen a televised adaptation of, or at least heard of Klaus Maria Remarque's seminal "All Quiet on the Western Front." On the other hand, you could blast a fire hose on the Mall on the Fourth of July and not splash a person who has ever heard of Juenger's "Storm of Steel." Were you in fact to do so, you would probably find that the person in question describes it as "war-glorifying" or even "neo-Nazi"; only later would you discover that they have never read it. Like most people, I was forced to read Remarque's touching "novel" (based of course on his own experiences as a "Frontkaempfer" in WWI) when I was in school, and like everybody else, I coughed up the expected book report denouncing war as a stupid and futile exercise in mass misery and mindless slaughter. Looking back, I can see that every "war" novel and book I was ever assigned in school at any level, even in college, was essentially of the same stripe: war is the most vile, the most disgusting, the most pointless exercise in the category of human endeavor; war solves nothing, and represents absolute evil. Juenger's "Storm of Steel" does not glorify war; nor (despite its ferocious nationalism, best described in the book as "the ideals of 1870") does it point towards the most extreme form of Fascism -- Nazism. It merely states that war is the ultimate experience, a potentially (but not necessarily) ennobiling one; a crucible which burns away the impurities of civilian (especially burgeois) life to temper a man like iron is tempered in a furnace -- or otherwise break him. Juenger deliberately excluded inner reflections and soul-searching from his book, contenting himself to bring to the audience war as an outward (that is to say, a physical) experience. This is not because he lacked the capacity for inner feeling but because he chose to deal with it as an entirely separate book ("War as an Inward Experience" which I believe was published in English as "Copse 125"). "Storm" has been continually denounced for the last 80-odd years as rightist propaganda precisely because it does NOT come to the conclusion of Remarque, Hemingway, P.J. Caputo or any of the other combat literati who escaped their own slaughterous wartime experiences to write antiwar novels. It says -- if I may presume to paraphrase Juenger -- that war destroys civilian hypocrisy and, if it makes a man's boot come down grimly and harshly, at least makes it come down clean. Juenger's unforgivable sin was, apparently, to conclude that it "was a good and strenuous life, and that war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart." Those who sought to eradicate Juenger's way of thinking ensured that his works were banned following WW II and continue to make reading some of them difficult. Professor Louis B. Snyder asserted that the Third Reich produced no great works of literature, yet Juenger's (anti-Nazi!) novel "On the Marble Cliffs" was written during WWII and is considered by many to be the best novel penned in Germany between 1933 - 1945. The official line, however, insists that no true art could exist under the Nazi system, and so "On the Marble Cliffs" remains impossible to obtain in English, unless you are willing to shell out fifty bucks. Coincidence? Call me Agent Mulder, but I don't think so. No professor ever assigned me "Storm of Steel" to read (the only one who ever mentioned it did so with a smirk) and no bookstore around me carried it. It remains one one of the great pieces of war-writing ever penned, yet at the same time it is smothered in a weird conspiracy of silence. It is only one man's opinion, yet apparently it is too frightening of an opinion to be allowed full voice. That alone is reason to read it.
81 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best memoir of WWI,
By isala "Isabel and Lars" (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
Ernst Junger was there for the duration. He was wounded sixteen times, he lost his brother. He experienced the trench war in all its hellish glory. That's the difference between Storm of Steel and other WWI memoires like Farewll to All That, Memoires of an Infantry Officer, No News from the Western Front, etc: Junger is not anti-war; he loved it! Do not expect some dreaming idealist though. Junger was a harsh realist. Nothing is to horrifying for him to tell (and believe me - there are a lot of horrifying detail!). He took part in the major combats on the western front, so we get a rare first hand glimpse of the war, The style is vivd, yet sober. He comes across as a Prussian gentleman, not cruel, but he does what he has to do to survive. Junger later became one of the finest authors of the twentieth century. He is sadly unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, in much due to his refusal to distance himself from Hitler (he did not embrace nazism though either). He lived an interesting life; he stopped doing LSD when he turned seventy, and he wrote a major treaty on the role of bugs in heraldry. More of his work deserves to be recognized.
78 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An extraordinary book by a true hero,
By
This review is from: The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Stormtroop Officer on the Western Front (Paperback)
This book was practically impossible to find for many years, which is remarkable, given its high quality. It is an extraordinary account of personal combat experience from World War I, written by a truly heroic young soldier who was awarded the highest honor for outstanding valour, the Pour le Merite, or Blue Max.The author, Ernst Juenger, was also a gifted writer who created an incredibly vivid and gripping account of his experiences. The only memoir that deserves to be considered its peer is Erwin Rommel's memoirs of his service as a young officer in World War I , published in English as Infantry Attacks. Rommel also won the Blue Max. Unlike Rommel's book, which reads like a primer for fighting effectively as an infantry officer, "The Storm of Steel" incorporates an almost philosophical endorsement of the heroic life and its values. This sounds positive, but Juenger vividly portrays what a heroic life is really about: slaughtering other human beings, callousness, incredible courage, disregard for one's own life. In practice, a troubling collection of proficiencies and character traits. The culture that produced such a cool and talented soldier was also the culture that tragically curdled into the Nazi nightmare. No reader will have the answer to how the two phenemona are connected; no reader should avoid posing the question.
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