Storm of Steel is by no means a celebration of war. He served as a German Army officer in occupied France, maintained a distance from the Nazis (an ‘inner immigrant’ from the regime) and became a respected literary figure in the post war era, dying in 1998 age 103. … I understood, as in a flash of lightning, the true inner purpose and form of my life.” … As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. The white ball of a shrapnel shell melted far off, suffusing the grey December sky.” At the very end of the book, Jünger contemplated his twentieth battlefield wound: “I felt the bullet taking away my life. Jünger cannot write a dull sentence and the Penguin translation by Michael Hoffman conveys the experience of war with a sharp, at times perhaps too poetic, acuity.Īrriving at the front in late 1914 Jünger writes: “We listened to the slow, grinding pulse of the front, a rhythm we were to become mighty familiar with over the years. Based on his diary of the time, the book covers Jünger’s experience from recruitment in 1914 through to the allied offensive in the Spring of 1918 and Germany’s ultimate defeat. ‘That was the last of them!’ ‘Let’s go!’.”įirst published in its original German in 1920 Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern, Storm of Steel, is surely the best account of trench warfare along the western front in the First World War. Hands darted to release the pins on bombs. ‘Boom!’ ‘Good God!’ ‘A light, a light! ‘Get everything ready.’ Everyone’s hearts were in their mouths. Blue smoke streamed in through the entrances, and earth crumbled off the ceiling.

We stood fully armed on the shelter steps, while the light of our little candle stumps reflected glitteringly off the wet, mildewed walls. A hail of heavy shells struck all round my dugout. In particular, one concentration of fire at quarter past two outdid anything there had been up to that point. “The night was still wilder than the last.

Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger