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The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Stormtroop Officer on the Western Front

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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.

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.

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.

Ernst Jünger's memoirs of his service as a junior officer with the 73rd Hannoverian Fusilier Regiment on the Western Front are different than any other war memoirs I've read. Jünger provides a cold, insightful, yet evenhanded view of the war in the trenches. He respects the English soldiers he's up against, hears funny stories about pre-war Cambrai from the elderly French couple in whose house he's been quartered, and is invited along with his comrades to share bountiful suppers with Flemish farmers. While passionate about the honor he must uphold as a soldier and his support of the "idea", he refuses to demonize his enemy.

His descriptions of the fighting are horrific. At Guillemont, during the battle of the Somme as they are digging out their foxholes, he notices that the "earth" is composed of layers, representing each company that had been fed into the furnace, annihilated, ground to bits only to be replaced by the next company and the next. . . Whole units disappear without a trace. For Jünger the battlefield has its metaphysical element: Gas mask-clad pickets become demons that he converses with, fields of dead and dying exude a sweet smell that drives the living giddy, men disappear for no apparant reason and are never seen again.

Yet for Jünger even though 10 out of 12 soldiers fall, the desolation of war emphasizes and even spiritualizes the joy produced by the noble drive to endure and overcome battle. The fire of war produced over the four years of his service an ever purer and nobler warrior ethos. For this description alone is perhaps the book worth reading, since it provides us with a link to an aristrocratic/military ideal which put service to that ideal above everything else, even one's own survival. Not that such men were prepared to waste their lives, that is the view of today, but that they were prepared to sacrifice themselves in defense of an ideal, or even a sense of honor without which life would have been unbearable.

After reading the above comment on the ethos, on page 159 of the German edition, I noted "but at what cost?" in the margine. As in so many human endeavors, we are confronted with the unintended consequences of a chosen course of action. Jünger's generation offered themselves, their best and brightest in a cause that they believed in, resulting in two million war dead along with hundreds of thousands of maimed and broken bodies and spirits. Putting the economic argument aside for a moment, we can say that when the true crisis came, in 1933, there were too few men of honor left alive or conscious to withstand the onslaught of the refuse, of those without any sense of honor, of the haters, all to the great misfortune of not only the country they served, but of all of Europe.

Storm of Steel is one of those rare birds of literature, the war diary that doesn`t condemn war. Ernst Junger`s diary of his officer years in the Imperial German army during that slaughter that ironically came to be known as the Great War, stands alone among `war books.` Unlike Remarque, Graves or even Hemingway, Junger refuses to beat his reader over the head with an overtly edifying message. Ironically, Junger exposes the repellent nature of war by seeming to embrace its proported `virtue-building` properties.

Those looking for a pacifist tract or probing expose into man as killer, would best look elsewhere. Storm of Steel is one man`s existential journey through the unimaginable maelstorm of 1914--1918. Junger begins his story at the very beginning of that awful conflict when his proud unit---67th Hanoverian Fusiliers---marches across the fields of Champagne to meet the French during the autumn of 1914. Here, Junger`s diary gives the impression of boys off to a rugby match. Junger`s high-spirited warrior-athletes soon learn otherwise. Junger deftly and piercingly chronicles the devolution of the assumed football match` into the Boschian reality that would last for the next four years: trench warfare.

In deceptively simple descriptive sentences, Junger manages to paint a vibrant canvas of the world about him. Each chapter jockeys back and forth between brazen dawn attacks across no-man`s land, midnight reconnaissance forays into enemy trenches and the daily and nightly lot of the soldier`s worst nightmare: the artillery barrage. Most of SOS`s richest passages center around such barrages. Rightly so, as Junger`s diary records what was heard, seen, and felt by the Great War grunt. And constant shelling was the mainstay of trench life.

Shrapnel shells burst overhead spitting out their steely balls of destruction, high-explosive shells churn up the Artois farmland into sometimes geysers, sometimes volcanos. The world around Junger is in a constant state of upheaveal and change. Mother Earth violated by the hour, contorts herself around the bloodied figures who dive from crater to crater in search of momentary respite from fate. Junger seems to view the shells and whizzing bullets as messages from another world. Everybody is sentenced to one, it`s all a matter of when it will hit and what it`ll contain, instant death or a few more minutes, hours, days of life.

SOS covers the range of major Western front offensives, the Somme, Cambrai, the final German offensive of 1918, and ends with the Allied breakthrough of the summer of 1918. And through it all, Lieutenant Junger comes across as a man of daring, courage and noblesse oblige, a leader beloved by his underlings and one alternately ruthless and merciful towards his French and British opponents. Junger rarely reflects for long on his actions. As the sole voice of the book, Junger carries you from page to page as a man of action. Here leading a grenade attack across and through an enemy trench, there regrouping his dazed and decimated platoon after an especially virile bombardment. Moments of emotional or even mental interaction with the chaos that surrounds is minimal. SOS captures the moments in which one either lives or dies, kills or is killed. And Junger is supremely faithful to that experience. Post-experience editorializing is all but absent from SOS.

Yet, it is the lack of such emotional contact with the action that separates SOS from that other grand tome of war, the Iliad. When Achilles weeps over Patroclus` mangled body, we also weep, when Achilles stops his rage-driven chariot with Hector`s body tied to it, we, like Achilles, reflect on the bestial power of our anger. Storms of Steel has few such moments. When a dear friend is gunned down moments after sharing words with each other, Junger`s response appears prosaic. `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!` Yet, here like everywhere in SOS, Junger painstakingly documents. This isn`t war as Achilles and Hector knew it, face to face with one`s opponent. Here, death came from an invisible shell splinter or the yellow muzzle flash, a mile away. You rarely saw he you killed or who killed you. This conflict was altogether different. A war where the human took a back seat to steel. An eerie premonition hovers over SOS. Killing has now become more efficient and quicker, euphemisms soon to be used in the battlefields and death camps to come. Junger kills with similar detachment. Throwing a grenade into a British dugout, he describes the results as, `rough, but satisfactory.` Occasionally though, Junger also records the human element that can`t help but burst through the storm. His unit the recipient of a direct shell hit, Junger drops an innocuous sentence that rings with understatement. `One baby-faced fellow, who was mocked a few days ago by his comrades, and on exercises had wept under the weight of the big munitions boxes, was now loyally carrying them on our heavy way, having picked them up unasked in the crater. Seeing that did it for me. I threw myself to the ground, and sobbed hysterically...`

After killing a young British soldier, Junger makes an enlightening confession. `He lay there, looking quite relaxed...I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of the responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it.` Profound words as timely today as then.

Junger sweeps his reader across experiences that most readers will never taste. And in a langauge stripped of all moral posturing, preaching or correcting, Storm at times glances the heavy topics with a beauty approaching the poetic. Junger`s matter of fact and stolid Lower Saxon can surprise us with its unexpected layers. Junger describes his final wounding with such words. `As I fell, I saw the smooth, white pebbles in the muddy road; their arrangement made sense, it was as necessary as that of the stars, and certainly great wisdom was hidden in it.` And then the telling next sentence. `That concerned me, and mattered more than the slaughter that was going on all round me.` Such philosophical detachment from the human and moral swamp that surrounds him, separates Junger from other writers of war.

Reaching the final page, I felt as if I had been privy to something quite special. A peep show into another`s man`s harrowing experience. An experience I hope never to have. While Junger`s cavalier and sportsmanlike attitude to war left a bitter taste in my mouth, his struggle to portray war, warts and all, only strengthened my resolve to avoid and condemn it. Therein lays the grand irony of Storm of Steel; the least overtly moralizing of war texts makes the strongest plea for peace, that imaginary place about which the horribly wounded Junger muses,`Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.`

My first impression upon completion of this classic World War I memoir is one of amazement. I am amazed that Mr. Junger-or anyone in those trenches-survived the hellish onslaught of trench warfare. In gruesome yet elegant detail, the author recounts his experiences as a front-line German soldier in his battles against the French and English. As the book proceeds, it seems that virtually everyone around Junger is killed or critically wounded. He is wounded himself on a regular basis, and between the constant sniping and merciless artillery bombardments, it is a wonder that anyone survived. There is no discussion of politics or even the reasons behind the war. It is simply the story of a front-line soldier doing his duty. Junger writes about his experiences in war as an almost mystical event that at times transcends the physical senses and becomes almost spiritual. I personally found this fascinating. And while the details of the book are often gruesome, the author's writing is downright exquisite. So whatever you think of him, Mr. Junger certainly had a way with words, and this memoir is a masterpiece that deserves the title of "Classic."

Ernst Junger is somewhat of a controversial figure. His apparent glorification of war and his right-wing political views have led many to view him as a precursor to Naziism. And while the Nazi's certainly admired him, most accounts show that he did not return the favor. He did indeed go on to serve as an officer in the Wehrmacht under Hitler, but this was out of loyalty to his country, rather than loyalty to the Fuehrer. In fact, he seems to have indirectly opposed the Nazi's, as witnessed by such writings as `On the Marble Cliffs.' All in all, Ernst Junger was a fascinating man, and 'Storm of Steel' is a literary masterpiece that deserves its place in history.

Discover Ernst Juenger! Before you read Remarque's more famous "All Quiet on the Western Front" begin with Juenger's "Storm of Steel". The difference in perspective and the first hand account from a genuine German hero is a must read for the student or scholar of WWI. "Storm of Steel is based upon the personal diaries and experiences of Juenger as an officer in the 73rd Hannover Fussiliers. He was awarded Imperial Germany's highest decorations for valour in the face of the enemy and was the last living holder of the famous "Pour le Merite". His style and prose is classic literature at its best. Once finished, the reader will actively seek out other works of Juenger who is relatively unknown in the English speaking world. Read both "Storm of Steel" and Remarque's more famous work. Finish them off with chapters 1914-1918 in Guenther Grass's newest work "My Century". You'll get a great feel for who Ernst Juenger was. You won't be disappointed in anyway.

Juenger was 103 when he died in 1998. He almost lived in three centurys, and two millenia. A noble feat for a remarkable man. The the twentieth century was his.

Like all other Germans of his generation, Ernst Juenger grew up in an atmosphere of mild prosperity and stifling boredom. Germany hadn't fought a war since 1871, but in such a martial culture, soldiering was viewed as "the only worthwhile profession" and war as "the ultimate experience." It was with a feeling of enormous enthusiasm, even glee, that he and millions of others tramped off to get into the fight in 1914. "In each one of us," he wrote. "There was a yearning for a great experience, such as we had never known. The war had entered into us like wine. We had left in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes. The war was our dream of greatness, power, glory...."

Over the next four years, Juenger fought with the 57th Hannover Fusilers, in some of the biggest and most viciously-fought battles of the Great War, including the Somme, Flanders, and Cambrai. He was wounded fourteen times (shot, gassed, hit with shrapnel), served in the storm troops, awarded a field commission and decorated with the Iron Cross First Class, the Knight's Cross of the House of Hohenzollern, the Golden Decoration for Wounds and the "Orden Pour le Merite" -- the famous and much-coveted "Blue Max." It's safe to say, death of heroes aside, he got what he was looking for. Greatness, power and glory were all his. So were lice, trench foot, mud, influenza, poison gas, rotten food, and endless killing -- so much killing that it eventually took the death of his closest friends and comrades to provoke even a flicker of emotion from him. It would be a mistake to say, however, that it made him cruel. The "Storm of Steel" produced, in Juenger, not callousness but a kind of spiritual hardness which rendered him immune to pain, fear, hunger, discomfort, and remorse, yet in no way dulled his strong feelings of admiration for the enemy, or his pity for the French civilians trapped in the maelstrom of war. He was an honorable soldier in the old tradition, and he never failed to marvel at those who fought with hatred in their hearts. To him, war was an ideological sporting match, in which the loser paid with his life.

"Storm of Steel" is not your usual postwar piece of literature. It does not indulge in the kind of soul-searching that mark such American works as P.J. Caputo's "A Rumor of War" or Anthony Swafford's "Jarhead." In fact, Juenger deliberately ommitted his personal revelations, putting them in a separate book entitled "War as an Inward Experience." With "Storm" he wanted to stick to the externalities of war, the sights, sounds, and sensations that he and his fellow storm-troopers experienced, and to translate them to the reader. It's a combat memior, but also a memior of the day-to-day life of soldiers engaged in trench warfare -- where "a good day" is defined by not getting killed or wounded; not caring about anybody who did; and possibly getting a slug of "grog" and a hot meal before your daily two hours of sleep.

Juenger's writing style is surprisingly non-Germanic -- short, almost terse, marked here and there by occasional bursts of beautiful prose, and free of the repetition that plagues a lot of postwar German literature (see: Manstein and Hitler). Humor abounds -- Juenger was one of those people, absolutely determined to find something to laugh about even during the worst "drum-fire" shelling. Entrusted with so much responsibility, it's easy to forget you're reading the words of a "man" who was all of 19 when he commanded an infantry platoon. Juenger steals a touring car (which turns out to have no brakes), has rear-echelon troops hurled down steps when they won't surrender their comfy beds to troops directly from the front, and unceasingly prowls the wastelands looking for cherry brandy, "grog" and beer. He also makes liberal fun of the French -- especially their bathing habits.

After the war, "Storm of Steel" was championed by the right-wing German parties as a demonstration of the ennobling powers of war (unlike Klaus Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" which was hated). The Nazis in particular loved the book and courted Juenger, whose mild anti-Semetism, ardent German nationalism and war record appealed to them. He wasn't interested, being more of a conservative monarchist type, and had on-again, off-again problems with the regime, culminating in his dismissal from the army (in 1944) for his fringe association with the anti-Hitler movement. His books were briefly banned in Germany after the war and are often reviled (mostly by people who haven't read them) as "reactionary" and "war-glorifying." Certainly Juenger found war inspirational, but he never shied away from describing its horrors -- men blubbering for their mothers as they bleed to death, the sound of a death-rattle, the look of a through-and-through gunshot wound to the skull.

Juenger had an amazing life. He served in the French Foreign Legion, the Imperial German Army, the Republican Reichswehr, and the Nazi Wehrmacht. He lived to the astonishing age of 103 (!) finally dying in 1998, and was the last surviving holder of the Pour le Merite (he also was the only German citizen to hold both the military version of the PlM and its modern, Federal Republican equivalent, for public service). He studied botany, wrote numerous novels including "The Glass Bees," wrote poetry, and even produced a vaguely anti-Nazi book (during WWII, no less), called "On The Marble Cliffs." But "Storm of Steel" remains his best known, and most widely-read, work in English. Only Shakespeare could write his epitapth:

"Here was a man, take him all in all, we shall not see his like again."

This book really comes from a different perspective than mostwar novels. It is written by a man who actually felt his experiencesmade him stronger, rather than destroyed him. Alot of people today go on about how pointless war, citing WW1 as the best example, is. I always find this slightly patronising towards those who actually fought, and it makes me cringe. I have got the impression that many of the few surviving veterans do not share this perspective. Although their experiences were terrible, if they had thought it was pointless, they would have dropped their guns and deserted en masse. They actually stayed because, for all they endured, they felt a sense of duty and nationhood, and a feeling of pride at what they came through. This feeling is, rightly or wrongly, largely portrayed as a bad thing today. I think, out of respect, rather than patronising their memories and suggesting that we know better, people today should pay more heed to the reasons our grandfathers and great grandfathers endured what they did. This book provides a brilliant individual perspective on the feelings of patriotism and duty that all the belligerent societies were instilled with as part of their upbringing. Ernst Juenger was obviously an incredibly strong character. He counted 20 puncture wounds in his body at the war's end, was awarded the Pour Le Merite and Iron Cross, and died only 2 years ago aged 103. Whether you would jump into a trench and fight people yourself if called to is irrelevant, and whether you would share his obvious feelings of duty and pride is too. Respect should be paid to these sentiments, which are often rubbished by people today, but were commonly expressed by the men on all sides. Their ideals, whether you agree with them or not, helped them endure what they did, and serve as an inspiration to us all. READ THE BOOK!

After following Junger from one battle to another, and one close call to another, it's almost fitting that he lived another eighty years. Junger counts at least 14 wounds by his own reckoning, with a nearly unbelievable number of close calls besides those. Soldiers are killed with alarming frequency all about him. A few times his wounds probably saved Junger's life, as when his platoon was wiped out after he had gone to the rear for treatment. This is all described so matter-of-factly as to be disarming.

Junger is a very impressive young man, clearly highly intelligent, mature, well educated, brave, loyal, and with good leadership skills among fellow infantry. He knocks off literary references and English and French dialog as if they were a natural occurrence. He even hobnobs effectively with the natives.

The tremendous waste of human talent in the western front, in actions that in reality accomplish little but move lines back and forth, is the most depressing theme that runs through the journal. Junger is relatively upbeat most of the time, which is perhaps why the book has a reputation for being too militaristic. No doubt Junger had a taste for action and itched for many of the battles. I never felt he was a bloodthirsty fanatic, eager to die, although he was ready and willing to do so. He mourns the loss of individuals regularly and has no hate for his worthy foes.

The narrative's strength is the description of life on the western front among the trenches. I had little idea how much emphasis there was on artillery in the battles and in hassling the enemy between fights. One of the best chapters is "Daily Life in the Trenches", which is a break from the campaigns with a discussion of how the trenches were organized, how the soldiers lived, and the logistics. The trenches were effectively small villages with whatever amenities could be collected. Such a contrast to the western action in WW II with the early blitzkrieg and the action after D-Day where troops swept along.

What's missing is any perspective of what was going on in the big picture, either with the military strategy or the political scene. The participation of the Americans and the end of the war, for example, go unremarked. For a person of Junger's intellect, obviously he excluded those thoughts and supporting information deliberately. Perhaps he only wanted to show the low-level war through one person's life and stick to that microcosm, and he did that very well. I wanted to know more of what he thought about beyond the immediate circumstances. For me, the tight focus kept the book from being five stars.

The translation by Hofman reads superbly. The English is poetic at times, with impressive use of colorful terminology and slang. Of course, some of that is due to the literary skills and wit of Junger. Even so, the creativity required to come up with many of the words and phrases repeatedly surprised me.