Storm of Steel

Storm of Steel, written by Ernst Jünger, is a memoir of World War I first published in German as In Stahlgewittern in 1920. The final revised edition came in 1961 and was translated into English in 1978. The book documents Jünger’s account as a German officer on the Western Front and begins the moment Jünger detrains in France, on December 27, 1914, at the age of 19. As the Introduction says: “It has no pacifist design. It makes no personal appeal. It is a notably unconstructed book. It does not set its author and his experience in any sort of context. It offers nothing in the way of hows and whys, it is pure where and when and of course, above all, what” (vii).

What Jünger’s memoir does offer is firsthand experience of life in wartime Europe as a solider: the battles, the barns used as barracks, the search for food, and—above all—the looming fear of death, whether from a bomb or a bullet. Jünger also recounts the brief rest and recovery periods between the fighting and details the French and Flemish civilians who were forced to house German soldiers.

The bulk of the book is made up of battles. Even as Jünger arrives near the front, the battles are ongoing. Within hours, Jünger sees his first death, when an artillery shell shears off the steeple of a church. Soon he is sent to the trenches, where he describes the daily life, the dugouts and communications networks, and the connecting trenches. He describes the conditions, like how soldiers often shoot rats to pass the time and keep the trenches clean, and how they try to make their tiny dugouts seem like home. He recounts the raids, the sniper fire, the hand-grenades, and the mortars that take men’s lives. He mentions the mud and the cold, explaining how it is often the conditions of discomfort that sap a soldier’s will to fight more so than the battles.

As Jünger becomes an officer and begins to lead men, the artillery falls constantly. Every battle begins with a barrage, oftentimes so loud men simply huddle and hope that it ends. The war has devastated the landscape. Every village is destroyed, especially toward the latter half of the book, as the war approaches its fourth year and the German army weakens further and further, until the British cannot be stopped. Civilians, living in their basements for the better part of those four years, evacuate, while some cities are so bombarded there is nothing left of them.

Through the course of the war Jünger loses friends, such as Tebbe, whom he meets early in 1915 at a training course, and who dies early in 1918 just moments after he and Jünger share a short conversation. He also loses Colonel von Oppen, who is Jünger’s commander throughout the war until he is sent to Palestine, where he dies of Asiatic cholera. Jünger describes the civilians he sees dead, too, like the little girl killed by a stray bomb while picking flowers in a garden, and hundreds of soldiers dead on battlefields that stink of rotting flesh. In a war of such magnitude, under such heavy firepower, neither side can safely remove the dead.

Jünger is repeatedly wounded and survives more than a dozen separate injuries. Despite receiving several medals for his bravery, he often thinks during his tour that he is going to die. Near the end, Jünger loses hope and is resigned to his fate: Germany cannot win the war. He knows his country has lost, but he continues fighting until a final wounding takes him out of the war and back to Germany, where he receives the Pour le Mérite, or Order of Merit. He does not describe the end of the war, either because for him the war is over as soon as he is taken out of it, or because for him the war will never be over.