REVIEW: The Storm of Steel – Ernst Jünger (1929; Mystery Grove, 2020)
I first read The Storm of Steel several years ago. It was the Hofmann translation done in 2003, currently available as a Penguin Classics release. Although I was familiar, distantly, with its revision and translation history—a rundown of which was offered by Hofmann in his forward to that edition—my general belief was that any alterations to the very first 1920 edition were insignificant or, ultimately, for the better. When I filed these assumptions away and actually read the book, it left an indelible mark upon my conscience and became one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read.
For those who haven’t read it before, its reputation should already be somewhat familiar. Considered, along with All Quiet on the Western Front, the authoritative book on the experience of World War I’s trench warfare, it was compiled from the wartime diaries of Iron Cross 1st Class and Pour de Mérite recipient Ernst Jünger. The book’s 1920 publication puts it within two years of the Armistice, and by the end of the decade, it had catapulted Jünger into the national spotlight further than his decorations already had. It would be another nine years before the book was first translated into English, this time by the well-renowned translator, Basil Creighton.
Several editions of Storm of Steel were published. Jünger himself revisited the manuscript multiple times over his long life, particularly after the experiences of the Second World War, where he served in an administrative position in Paris for the German forces. When the First World War broke out between the Allies and the Central Powers, Jünger enlisted the very day it was declared first saw combat about three months later. He served all four years of the war, surviving several fronts of the Somme, Passchenaele, and Cambrai. He was injured six times, as Storm of Steel documents, all but the last of which being little more than flesh wounds. Call it luck or a vigilant guardian angel, Jünger’s skill as a soldier was, by his own admission, well behind those other factors that man has no control over.
The book depicts the Great War in all of its calamity and brutality, leaving very little to the imagination. Jünger’s prose is concise and to the point, particularly in this edition, though there is some exception that we’ll touch on a little later. The book reads like few other memoirs. Parts of it are drawn directly from wartime diaries, other pieces are clearly recreated from memory into brief narratives. Jünger’s own personal life, as well as those of his immediate comrades, is almost entirely absent; very little is mentioned of where he came from, what his home was like, or his family. Even his brother’s injury reveals little of their relationship beyond that of elder and younger brothers, and this is a scene that Jünger takes pains to detail in the midst of the Langemarck engagement.
The Storm of Steel is not a story about survival. In a certain sense, it is not a story at all. There is no central conflict, at least in a narrative, personable sense. There’s no great climax the book builds up to. And likewise, there’s no singular theme running the course of the chapters. While this could be said, in varying degrees, about most war memoirs—Peter Kemp’s recently reprinted editions come to mind—there’s a specificity of violence in Jünger’s work that others tend to lack.
The easiest example of this is the chapter entitled “Trench Warfare Day by Day.” It consists of excerpts from his diary such as this:
2.11.—I took an entrenching party from the Altenburg Redoubt to C sector. One of them, Landstrumsman Diener, climbed on to a ledge in the side of the trench to shovel earth over the top. He was scarce up when a shot fired from the sap got him in the skull and laid him dead on the floor of the trench. He was married and had four children. His comrades lay in wait a long while behind the parapet to take vengeance. They sobbed with rage. It is remarkable how little they grasp the war as an objective thing. They seemed to regard the Englishman who fired the fatal shot as a personal enemy. I can understand it.1
“War as an objective thing.” This is the first time in print that Jünger refers to such an idea, although Storm of Steel is written entirely with it in mind. In 1915, when this entry was made, Jünger had turned twenty years old; already a certain seemingly contradictory detachment-intensification of the war had found its way into how Jünger understood it. He had found the war requiring a detachment of personal enmity, of ego, while simultaneously requiring an intensification of present experience. For Jünger, life required both of these things, and war, a storm of splinters and vigilance which distills life to its finest point, most of all.
And yet despite this mentality, he could sympathize with those men who found no greater meaning to the carnage and who sought only to deliver vengeful retribution across the trenches. In spite of his seemingly autistic-yet-sensible means of framing the violence, he did not lose his humanity. Although, at the very cutting edge of such an indescribable experience, it’s difficult to define what humanity really is. As he elaborates on the experience of going over the top in a charged assault against enemy lines toward the end of the book:
The atmosphere of intense excitement was amazing. Officers stood upright and shouted chaff nervously to each other. Often a heavy trench-mortar fired short and scattered us with its foundations of earth; and no one even bent his head. The roar of battle had become so terrific that we were scarcely in our right senses. The nerves could register fear no longer. Every one was made and beyond reckoning; we had gone over the edge of the world into superhuman perspectives. Death had lost its meaning and the will to live was made over to the country; and hence every one was blind and regardless of his personal fate.2
One suspects that the entire written output of Jünger’s life was an effort to understand what his experiences in the First World War were all about—not in any political or social sense, but in a very fundamental, even metaphysical sense. What answers he reached found their ways into his philosophical musings later in life, appearing in print first in this Storm of Steel, as well as numerous subsequent essays—War as Interior Experience (Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, still untranslated), On Pain, Copse 125, and many others. Like much of Jünger’s work, most of it remains unavailable outside of his native German, but enough has reached foreign audiences to get a glimpse of his general ideas.
As Storm of Steel was published with about two years of the guns being quiet, little of his philosophy is even developed, much less made clear in this work. Subsequent revisions would trim a fair amount of material, most of which consisted of rudimentary attempts to articulate some of this idea. While some scholars, such as Michael Hofmann, have remarked that this early edition of the book is “aggressively Nationalist”3, the truth is that there’s no more nationalism in a war memoir than is to be expected.
Jünger’s pride in his Prussian troops, as well as his own interest in holding the crown in esteem, is somewhat toned down compared to what someone might expect of an infantryman who voluntarily enlisted. While some of this, too, was edited out in subsequent editions, that likely had more to do with two factors: first, the utter erasure of Prussia even as an ethnic identity during the interwar years; and second, the dismantling of German politics, society, and culture in the wake of the Second World War.
Most of Jünger’s asides focus on the interior disposition of leadership in the midst of abject chaos. His leadership capacity is beyond the ability of anyone to judge based on the framework provided by Storm of Steel; not only weren’t we there, nor do are we familiar with the operations and tactical background of trench warfare, we’re also dealing with firsthand accounts of the events from a (mostly) retrospective analysis. But judging his abilities isn’t the point. Near Montbrehain, in the middle of a chaotic engagement, Jünger has this much to say about leading men into battle:
I have always observed that the ordinary man whose sole preoccupation is his own danger is surprised by what seems to him an undivided attention to the matter in hand on the part of the officer in command, who among a thousand and one unnerving incidents of battle yet keeps his eye fixed upon the execution of his duty. This surprise makes an officer excel himself and spurs him on to always greater achievements. In this way officers and men call out energies in each other which would otherwise lie dormant. Indeed the moral factor is everything.4
He inserts this into the middle of the action, and you can almost hear the bombs, shells, and bullets flying around his company amid a lethal fog of smoke, splinters and shrapnel. Again, the beginning of his philosophy is forming under his steel helmet and in the midst of absurd trenches in northern France.
In the interests of brevity, I’ve refrained from touching on the horrors of war he documents and the brutalities which visited upon Jünger over the course of Storm of Steel. It could be worthwhile to include segments of Guillemont, where Jünger found himself holding a line that had no communication, no defenses, and no sense of direction, sequestered in shell holes on the tip of the Somme, surrounded by the un-burried corpses of those defenders that had come before them, and enduring shelling hitherto unimaginable by the human senses. Likewise at Regiénville, where the trenches themselves became impenetrable mazes, and raid after raid resulted in as many casualties as survivors. Or Flanders, during the Passchendaele assault, where the death was beyond measure. At every turn, there is violence. Violence, violence, violence.
These are things for which no excerpt is really good enough, and indeed, barely a page goes by that doesn’t include another violent scene for which an average person would have no frame of reference to properly understand. And this is probably the point of the book: war cannot be characterized, it cannot be explained. War is a singularly unique experience that crystalizes human experience like a bug gets preserved in amber. The First World War, being the maximum characterization of war to date in history, exemplifies this perfectly, and Jünger recognized this as he loosed grenades, sheltered from bombardments, fired his rifle, and climbed once again over the top.
War sharpens a man like a spear, filing down his person on both sides—interiorly and exteriorly—until he stands like a bloodied point in the midst of carnage. He is either sharpened, or he is ground down; he either triumphs, or he dies. The Great War, named for its magnitude, filed men in such manner as had never been seen before or since. Jünger’s sense of regimented, authority-driven individualism, which he developed later in life into the concept of the Anarch, starts with this in mind: there is you, and there are many ‘yous’ all around, and there is shrapnel blowing like a whirlwind and shells falling like rain, there is death lurking after every second and behind every motion, and you must act.
For Jünger, life was a tight trench carved out between opposing forces of death on one side and death on the other—a narrow way, as it turns out, between the calamities of exterior violence and the errors of interior suffering. It is fitting, then, that near his later years, his individualist philosophy of the Anarch ended up nearly indistinguishable, for all practical considerations, from what Catholicism demands of the Faithful. More fitting still, in fact, that he converted to the Faith and died with the Sacraments.
Although drawing from the anarchic and atheistic traditions of German idealism, Jünger’s philosophy was one that strove for the transcendental until it harmonized indistinguishably with the Truth, and as any honest man must do when this harmonization occurs, he accepted the Truth and converted. It’s possible that his own momento mori spurred on this conversion, as the man lived to the ripe age of 102; nonetheless, he went to his grave Catholic, and this is by no means indicts his philosophy as wholly in error. If anything, it emphasizes the struggle of those who seek the Truth incessantly, of those who build systems of thought in order to come to terms with the rawness of the world, and that they who find themselves sharpened by that struggle will inevitably seek—whether they realize it or not—eternal life in Christ.
Creighton’s 1929 translation of Storm of Steel presents the rawest, most unpolished version of it in English. It’s available now for the first time in decades, and it’s well worth the look. It contains the retrospective writings of a twenty-five year old veteran who endured the most incomprehensible warfare waged by man. I recommend reading both this and the later edition for those interested in getting a clearer picture of Jünger as he aged and reflected on the experience, but I recommend this one specifically for those interested in the war memoir itself. The later edition’s edits put into context how Jünger distilled his philosophy into what it became, but this comes at the expense of more modern—and less congenial—translations, hindered no doubt by the shadow left by the Second World War. This earlier edition, however, is even more raw than the later edition because it lacks these factors. His philosophy is undefined but still present in an intuitive sense, which given the circumstances, makes all the more sense.
This isn’t a book that leaves you the same when you put it down as when you first picked it up. Jünger made sure of that. He puts you there, next to him, in the trenches, the shell holes, amid the artillery fire, so suddenly that the feeling of his descriptions are hard to shake off.
Highly recommended.
127.
2142.
3Michael Hofmann, Introduction to Storm of Steel, Penguin Classics, 2003, xiii.
485.
