Ernst Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is a personal memoir of the author’s experience during the First World War while serving in the German Army, widely accepted as a pro-war piece of literature by readers and historians. The horrors of the war left few who were involved unaffected and the volumes of anti-war poetry and prose written during that time are a testament to that fact. Much of the historical and fictional writing on this conflict emphasize the loneliness of the trenches and No Man’s Land, the massacres resulting from unnecessary frontal assaults, the pointless deaths of millions, and the sacrifice of a generation for a few yards of mud. Jünger’s book is an exception to the general attitude of World War I literature, though not alone. The Storm of Steel was a favourite of the nationalist right in Germany after its publication because of its glorification of the Great War and the sacrifices the German people made in a vain attempt to end it victoriously. Though The Storm of Steel is a glorifying and nationalistic account of the First World War strikingly at odds with the majority of Great War literature, there is a subtle element to the work that is undoubtedly anti-war.

The Storm of Steel is a personal account of one man’s experiences during the First World War. Like several other books of this nature it is very useful as it supplies historians with the individual aspect of a war of masses. Ernst Jünger depicted the war as both gallant and terrible. A patriot to the core, Jünger saw the war as a duty and felt himself fortunate to play a part in such an important time in Germany’s history. The Storm of Steel is written in an informal style which uses Jünger’s own diary entries and memories as a source. The book is separated into chapters spanning the time spent in one particular location and is thus simple to follow while being very detailed. Although not a brilliant writer, Jünger’s ideas are clearly expressed and at times in brilliant form but his own perspective infiltrates the work as he does not give much thought to the dissension within the ranks that became more and more prevalent as the war went on. Nevertheless, it is an excellent personal account of the experiences of the German soldier in many of the major events of the war including the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Cambrai, and the German offensive at the beginning of 1918.

In times of peace Jünger nevertheless searched for the adventure of war. In 1912 he left his home in Germany to join the French Foreign Legion but was soon retrieved by his father. When war broke out in 1914 not even Jünger’s father could prevent him from volunteering. Jünger went to war believing in a cause and in the gloriousness of battle and this left a lasting impression on him when he sat down to write The Storm of Steel. It is rife with passages glorifying the fighting in the trenches.
Jünger believed in the strength of the German soldiery. After experiencing the horrors of the Battle of the Somme he wrote that
“after this battle the German soldier wore the steel helmet, and in his features there were chiselled the lines of an energy stretched to the utmost, lines that future generations will perhaps find as fascinating and imposing as those of many heads of classical or Renaissance times.”
Jünger realized the sacrifices made by the German Army during the battle, and the entire war, and truly thought that these sacrifices would be remembered for centuries later as an example of real men and real heroes. No doubt he would not allow himself to think any less of his comrades who fought and died beside him.
The importance of the concept of duty played a large role in influencing Jünger during the war and in his writing after the war. Explaining his rationale for staying during terrifying artillery barrages, Jünger wrote that “unknown perhaps to yourself, there is some one within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells: Duty and Honour.” It was the duty of a soldier that kept the German Army in the trenches of Flanders and France, according to Jünger. In a passage which almost seems to exhort future generations to maintain this sense of duty and honour at times when the need to take flight during a battle becomes unbearable he writes “you feel, ‘If I leave my post, I am a coward in my own eyes, a wretch who will ever after blush at every word of praise.” It is difficult to imagine how future soldier-readers of The Storm of Steel, taking this to heart, could conceive of running. But duty would at times call for self-sacrifice and Jünger believed nothing greater existed than to answer that call. “However cleverly people may talk and write,” Jünger said in a criticism of other Great War writers, “there is nothing to set against self-sacrifice that is not pale, insipid, and miserable.” Self-sacrifice was the ultimate fulfilment of duty in war and this was again and again hammered into the reader by the author. But this fulfilment of duty was not always to one’s country. It could also be to one’s fellow soldiers. After his company had been wiped out in a battle in which Jünger was not present, he wrote
“I was no doubt glad of the chance shot that withdrew me as if by a miracle from certain death on the very eve of the engagement. At the same time, strange as it may sound, I would willingly have shared the fate of my comrades and stood with them shoulder to shoulder while the iron dice of war rolled over us.”

The brotherhood felt between men at war has been written about often as one of the strongest feelings experienced by soldiers. Jünger here demonstrates how strong such an attachment to one’s fellows could be. Duty, whether to a country or to the men beside you, was an all important aspect of the war made clear in The Storm of Steel.
While duty and the power of the German soldier was an ever-present element in the book, Jünger’s glorification of battle and death is the most striking impression the reader gets from Jünger’s writing. His frequent use of the words “fallen” or “fell” instead of “dead” and “killed” is one instance of the rhetoric used by pro-war authors. A soldier who has fallen has died a more glorious death than a soldier who has been killed. The difference is subtle but nevertheless important. Jünger would not even shy away from the use of the word “glorious” to describe a death and one such example of this usage was when he spoke of a fellow soldier: “His fighting spirit was never behindhand and it brought him at last a glorious death.” These “glorious” deaths would at times result from the unexpected shot of a sniper or the explosion of an artillery shell while huddled in a narrow trench. But glorious death in battle could not be surpassed, according to Jünger. “What is more sublime,” he asks, “than to face death at the head of a hundred men?” Jünger’s proclamations of the awesomeness of death in battle could at times reach a poetic resonance. Once again when writing about a comrade-in-arms, he said
“He had met his heroic death in the shell hole area to the right of the Nordhof...He was one of those few who were encircled by a nimbus of romance, even in the most material of wars, owing to their insatiable daredevilry.”

Passages like the one above occur throughout the work. While at other times death is spoken of in passing and without much fanfare, Jünger always finds the words for the right men who died gloriously. The vast majority of the men deserving of Jünger’s praise in death in The Storm of Steel are officers, revealing an underlying sense of elitism in Jünger’s Prussian thinking which is best left for another discussion. But his glorifying of the Great War is what is most remembered from this book.
In sharp contrast to a book like The Storm of Steel is the writing of many other World War I veterans, such as Siegfried Sassoon. The following poem shows the other horrifying side of the war seen by the majority of soldiers.
“I’m back again from hell
With loathsome secrets to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.”

Passages similar to this Sassoon poem are glaringly missing from The Storm of Steel. Either this anti-war sentiment did not occur in the German trenches in which Jünger was present, which is highly unlikely, or Jünger would not allow his thoughts to drift to such terrifying lows and in so doing denigrate the deaths of his soldier-heroes.
That The Storm of Steel glorifies the war and the experiences of the frontline soldier is well known and makes the work an interesting departure from most Great War literature. The importance of duty, heroic death, and self-sacrifice are prevalent throughout the 319 pages of The Storm of Steel. What is also present is a German nationalism that would make Jünger a hero in post-war and Nazi Germany.

Early on in The Storm of Steel Jünger wrote that he wished to omit all commentary from his book. Although much of the work is a simple re-telling of his experiences during the war he nevertheless injected nationalistic passages praising the greatness of Germany and the worthiness of her cause.
Jünger loved his native land. When returning to Germany after being wounded, Jünger wrote that he “was gripped by the sad and proud feeling of being more closely bound to my country because of the blood shed for her greatness.” In addition to a proclamation of Jünger’s love for Germany, this passage also sets him and other soldiers apart from those who did not fight and those who will not fight in future wars. Fittingly, Jünger’s greatest words written about Germany come at the end of the book when he writes “...yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!” Words like this ingratiated Jünger and The Storm of Steel with the nationalist right garnering him an invitation to the Nazi Party.
The sacrifices made by German soldiers during the First World War required more than duty and love of country. They required a cause. Jünger believed in the righteous cause of this war. He wrote that “the consciousness of the importance of one’s own nation ought to reside as a matter of course and unobtrusively in everybody.” Men on both sides, according to Jünger, fought because the importance of their own nation was a worthy cause for which to give their lives. And the common soldier understood the importance of his role in the conflict as Jünger believed that war was what changed the course of a nation’s history. Men fought and died for an ideal, for “life has no depth of measure except when it is pledged for an ideal.” The German people were in their element when they were giving their lives for the ideal of a free and powerful Germany and “not one of that countless number who fell in our attacks fell for nothing.” This is in striking opposition to the widespread feeling of the soldiers of all nations during the First World War. For example, in a French wartime song translated here into English, the uselessness of the deaths for acres of mud is clearly expressed:
Adieu, life
Adieu, love
Adieu, all the women
It’s all over
It’s for good
This ghastly war
At Craonne
On the plateau
We had to lose our hides
Because we are the condemned
We are the sacrificed

In The Storm of Steel Jünger believed that each life lost was for a purpose. Yet here that sentiment is not repeated. Jünger was in a small group of writers who believed in the nationalistic cause of fighting the Great War.

While The Storm of Steel has been accepted as a war-glorifying and nationalistic piece of literature, it nevertheless has many passages that are anti-war. Setting aside the rare instances where Jünger describes events in which other soldiers express their anti-war feelings, Jünger includes many passages in which the illusions of glorious war are dispelled, the sad effects of the war are told, the callousness of the soldiers are described, and the general ingloriousness, helplessness, and pointlessness of war are expressed.
Many works on the First World War show how the illusions of war were quickly destroyed after a soldier’s first experience of battle. The Storm of Steel is one of them. After witnessing his first death, he wrote “what was all this then? The war had shown its claws and torn off its pleasant mask,” and that “after a short while with the regiment we had pretty well lost the illusion with which we had set out.” War would not be the frolicking adventure he and his friends had imagined when volunteering. Indeed, it would be a sad and terrible affair to witness the destructiveness of battle.
With battles between millions of men and artillery barrages which could last for days, the countryside was quickly devastated. Much of the fighting on the western front took place in the northeast corner of France which was heavily populated. Although many of the civilians had left, villages and towns were destroyed. After both a town and Jünger had experienced battle and barrage he observed that “the soldier who walks among the ruins of a place like this and thinks of those who lately lived their peaceful lives there may well be overtaken by sad reflections.” Jünger had realized the terrible effects of the war on civilians and their homes and many times throughout The Storm of Steel reflected on this. But while the destruction of the landscape may cause “sad reflections” the experience of death, so often described by Jünger as glorious, caused callousness.
It has been shown that words of glory have been parcelled out to certain soldiers by Jünger in The Storm of Steel but the majority of deaths are dealt with hardly an afterthought. The hundreds of deaths Jünger himself witnessed caused callousness among himself and others which seemed to go against what he thought was supposed to be the sublime death in battle. For example, after one death in the trench “somebody throws a shovelful of soil over the red patch and everyone goes about his business. One has got callous.” Where is the glory for this young man’s death? Surely the well-aimed shot of a sniper is no less a glorious way to die than at the head of a hundred men. In another instance where the death of a few are given no glory Jünger writes that “while we were eating, a shell hit the house and three fell close by. But we paid little attention, for the surfeit of such sensations had blunted us.” Young readers must have given a second thought to death in battle after reading how quickly and purposelessly many were killed. In an amazing contradiction of Jünger’s belief that no man died for nothing, as shown above, he later writes “it comes to one quite simply that one’s existence is part of an eternal circuit, and that the death of a single individual is no such great matter.” In classical Greek literature heroes die with much fanfare and are buried ceremoniously. Yet here the “heroic” death of a soldier is “no such great matter.” Such a fatalistic attitude seems much more in line with the poetry of Sassoon and the depressing French war songs, not with a champion of the German nationalist right.
These inglorious deaths are again and again recited in The Storm of Steel and one wonders why anyone would want to fight and die in such a way after reading the book. Many ghastly wounds are described by Jünger and the dismal fate of those terribly wounded is not something to strive for in battle. “What I found particularly painful,” Jünger writes, “was that the wounded man could not say a word and only starred with helpless eyes like a tortured beast at those who tried to help him.” This is not the fate of a hero and this is not a glorious death. This is a poignant account of a man’s final moments. And after the “glorious” death of a soldier, there was little heed paid him as “thousands sleep like that, without one token of love to mark the unknown grave.” This is not the description of a glorious war. Jünger describes a cold, lonely, and terrible war.
Jünger also expressed the helplessness of a soldier in battle who can do nothing to save himself. “With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics become utterly meaningless and absurd.” The discipline, training, sense of duty, and love of country Jünger at times believes so necessary and important to a soldier is here denigrated to nothing but an absurdity by Jünger himself. Jünger contradicts himself often throughout the book. “What was a man’s life in this wilderness whose vapour was laden with the stench of thousands upon thousands of decaying bodies?” This is not the expression of the feeling of a pro-war writer.
By the end of the war, Jünger becomes so disillusioned that not even he can prevent feelings of war-weariness.
“There crept over me a mood I had never known before: a certain falling-off of the fighting spirit, a war-weariness occasioned by the length of time I had been exposed to the war’s excitements. Nothing but war and danger...The seasons succeeded each other. Winter came and then summer, and one was always in the war. Tired of it and used to it, one was all the more dispirited and fed up with it just because one was used to it...The war had raised deeper problems of its own.”

Finally, Jünger clearly and openly expresses a small amount of what soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land had been writing since the trenches were first dug.

The Storm of Steel is a book with mixed messages. At times Jünger speaks of the gloriousness of war, heroic death, self-sacrifice, love of country, and the need to fight and die for a national cause. At other times Jünger expresses disillusionment, sad expressions of destruction, and callousness. He describes deaths that can be described as nothing but inglorious. He writes of the helplessness of soldiers in battle and the pointlessness of lives lost. And finally, he expresses a war-weariness that had long before his acknowledgement reached the German lines. Was Jünger confused or was he trying to bury his own feelings which he did not want to let surface? One can only reach the conclusion that Jünger is like many other soldiers of the Great War. Many went to war with a sense of the adventure awaiting them and were quickly disillusioned. Jünger was a patriot and though this disillusionment did begin to become a part of his thoughts during and after the war he could not let his 4 years of war and the deaths of his friends be for nothing. The Storm of Steel is thus an interesting and important piece of German First World War literature that acknowledges both an anti-war stance and a sense of glorious national cause, a mixture that would become a defining element of the post-war Weimar Republic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baggett, Blaine and Jay Winter. The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century. London: Penguin Studio, 1996.

Jünger, Ernst. The Storm of Steel, reprint of 1929 ed. New York: Howard Fertig, 1996.