Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger, 1920 (2017)
The author wearing the “Pour le Merit” medal. (Wikimedia image.)
Ernst Jünger was a highly-decorated officer in the German army during the First World War. He became a controversial and complex figure in the German literary and political worlds. The young Ernst was a poet and adventurer – in 1913 he briefly joined the French Foreign Legion – who joined a Hanoverian regiment when war started in Europe. Storm of Steel is Jünger’s memoir of the brutal and deadly experiences which followed.
This work has been criticized as a glorification of war, but I think that’s only true on a very superficial level. Jünger was undoubtedly all in on his duty as a soldier—this comes through very clearly. Indeed, he embraces it to excess and without apparent appreciation for the larger lessons his experience might teach. Storm of Steel is no All Quiet On The Western Front.
At the same time he writes unsparingly about war. He does revel in feats of physical and moral courage under fire, not least his own. This is always leavened with unstinting reality: the list of friends and comrades he left behind dead or mangled and in horrible pain is long, and his description of the devastation war leaves behind on the landscape and those living in it is brutal.
“Right up to the defensive Siegfried Line (aka the Hindenburg Line), each village was a heap of ruins...
The moral justification for this destruction is much disputed. However, it seems to me that the chauvinistic howls of rage then supporting it, is best interpreted as the satisfied cheers of armchair soldiers and newspaper writers. When thousands of peaceful people living in these areas were robbed of their homes, one has to mention the selfish pleasure of power.”
Overall, I took this as a cautionary tale – although written clearly from pre-contemporary sensibilities, Storm of Steel is a comment on the unchanging nature of war. It looks at it through a lens few of us would use ourselves because we’ve compartmentalized war and the sacrifices it imposes. We’ve reduced our conflicts of the last two decades to up or down votes. A war is good and righteous, or it’s not. It’s glorious or evil. And the burdens are largely borne by others.
Storm of Steel can be read as a challenge to this, a first-hand warning to us that war’s effects exist independently from its justification or lack of it. There is no glory without evil, suffering and horror—and vice-versa. These aspects are intertwined and can’t be separated. The most justified war brings suffering, and even those who fight for “unclean” causes can do so with honor and bravery. Jünger’s views may be antediluvian but worth pondering because he expresses something earlier generations might have understood to be universal. There are no clean and simple wars. We seem to want to elide this.
Jünger would probably both understand and at least in his younger years, disapproved of this tendency. He sits in an uncomfortable place historically. After the war he rejected both the liberal sensibilities of the Weimar Republic and the excesses of the Third Reich. Although he served the latter in uniform and participated in the occupation of France, he was dismissed in 1944 for his association with anti-Hitler elements. Surprisingly, he escaped execution. A son of his died in a penal battalion for expressing “unapproved” views.
“As a necessity of fact, I am, as a Prussian officer, naturally without a moment of doubt (and follow orders)...The conduct of war calls for seeking to destroy the opponent by varied uses of power without regards to consequences. War is the hardest of crafts; its master may be humane morality only so long as the heart is open to it...”
At the same time, criticism of him for militarism are spot-on. Celebrating following orders “without a moment of doubt” in the good Prussian tradition, as Jünger and millions more did, led Germany and the world into even greater tragedy and horror. That the First World War’s lessons went unlearned, or at least unheeded, is by now an axiom. It’s striking that Jünger himself needed a couple of decades to absorb and internalize the lessons that lay before him when he wrote Storm of Steel. Sometimes we are too close to things to fully appreciate them in time — certainly another way in which his writing should stand as a cautionary note in our contemporary world.
Over the course of his long life (he lived to 102) his views evolved and moderated. He ultimately became a prolific and revered author, counting French socialist prime minister Francois Mitterand among his friends and admirers. This complexity and nuance doesn’t sit well with the contemporary urge to manically oversimplify. If the French, who he fought twice, could give time and space to Jünger’s work, perhaps so should we.
A note on the actual text: I read the 2017 “American English” translation of the original work and found it both approachable and (maybe ironically) in some places annoyingly oversimplified. The text is littered with parenthetical explanations of the author’s terminology. Some are useful, as when an approach 45 degrees to the side of an objective is explained as a flank attack — this is something that’s not necessarily second-nature to all readers. But at the same time, explaining that vermouth is “French wine with herbs and spices” strikes me as oversimplifying. Maybe that’s what the market demands, but I’d certainly hope we could do a little bit better.
Nonfiction. 8/10 (4 stars)