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There are several books - memoirs - written by soldiers about their experiences in the
First World War, but a couple really stand out.
One such book is “Storm of Steel” by Ernst Jünger.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about Ernst Jünger.
He was born March 29, 1895 in Heidelberg.
His father was a chemist, and young Ernst enjoyed botany and zoology, especially the
lives of insects, and was also an avid reader, reading adventurous travelogues long into
the nights about the African deserts and jungles.
However, in school, he was a terrible student, scoring the worst marks in the entire school,
and even being expelled.
So in 1913, he took his school money, bought a revolver, and went to Verdun where he joined
the French Foreign Legion.
While he’s en route to Algeria, his father is talking to the German Foreign Office to
try and get him back, since it was actually illegal for him to enter the Legion, and Dad
thought it would destroy Ernst’s future.
By the time the Foreign Office got him back to Germany, Ernst had served time in a military
prison, since he himself had already tried to flee the Legion.
And so he returned to his life of scholarly failure.
Then the war broke out and joining the army seemed like salvation.
On August 6, 1914, Ernst Jünger was accepted into the Hanoverian Fusilier Regiment number
73.
This was known as an elite infantry regiment, but while it was storming Namur and Luttich,
Ernst was drilling and training.
He actively joined the regiment in January 1915, and as he was heading toward Champagne
to do so, he wrote his first diary entry into his little notebook.
He would fill many notebooks.
Writing would become very important to him, mostly as escapism, but also as a means of
self-assertion in a world where the individual was swallowed by the collective.
As his company rests in a French village, shells begin to fall, and soldiers and civilians
alike begin to die.
But while all around him was shock and confusion, Jünger felt a thrilling curiosity toward
the violence that came from a still hidden enemy.
He is not a model soldier, and has issues with discipline and authority.
He follows his father’s advice and applies for the officers’ course, so he can not
only move up in rank and make a name for himself, but also escape life in the winter trenches.
As an officer candidate, he returns to the front to fight at Les Eparges in late April.
As he walks over the bombed out battlefield, he feels a morbid fascination for the mutilated
dead.
While others shy away from fear or self-preservation, Jünger remains and writes down his observations.
“Then the warning call of death slid through the ranks, “Medics to the front!”...
Right and left, the shells stomped the soft ground...
We moved into the battle-ridden empire of the infantry... a young man lays in a shell
hole, the yellowish color of death on his cheeks.
Our starring seemed uncomfortable to him, and with indifference, he moved his coat over
his head and fell silent.”
Jünger’s writing style is without pathos, and is quite prosaic and authentic.
He notes his own absence of disgust as he walks among the mutilated dead.
He watches with fascination as a German officer walks upright through a rain of fire while
the cowering soldier beside the officer is killed by shrapnel.
Jünger is astonished by the fortunes of war and his writing is mercilessly realistic.
“From all sides the wounded poured toward the trench.
The passage was horribly blocked by the seriously wounded and the dying.
And always new impacts.
I want to confess that my nerves failed me completely.
I was simply scared, pale and senseless.
Later, I would often look back on those moments and shake my head.”
Jünger became Leutnant in November and realized that now, as an officer, he could never shy
away from danger without losing his men’s respect.
He describes not only how he changes as a man, but how the whole army changes over the
course of the war, as death and killing become routine, especially for the assault teams,
and Jünger steels himself in an armor of indifference to pain and death.
However, his entries from his leave time away from the front show another side of Ernst
Jünger.
He laments the devastation of France, and the wall of blood and grief that would stand
between France and Germany in future.
He also writes about his liaison with a French woman named Jeanne, his confrontations with
his superiors, and even his fear of infections from brothels.
These sort of personal memories from his diaries would not be included in their actual publication.
In the summer of 1916, his regiment is fighting the British at the Somme.
By this time, Jünger has made a name for himself as a daredevil, leading combat patrols
into enemy trenches.
He writes that with a pistol in his left hand, a grenade in his right, and a knife clenched
between his teeth, he yearns for the fever of the hunt.
Adrenalin and the rush of battle drive him again and again into danger.
“Either I will be richer of another invaluable experience, or I will be dead.”
The absence of fear during the rush of battle is the very essence of freedom to Jünger.
His diary entries from the Somme are full of gruesome details.
The reality of battle is the sweetish smell of rotting flesh in the summer heat, of broken
bodies frozen in their final moments, of the screams of the dying in the cellars of the
medical corps.
Jünger himself was seriously wounded six times, and then we see his veneer of invulnerability
crack and he panics, for he is still just a man.
You can read of his excitement watching the Red Baron’s squadron at the Battle of Arras,
of close combat with Canadian shock troops, of how he won regimental honors by withstanding
a huge British attack with only 24 men.
At the Third Battle of Ypres he saved his brother’s life after randomly coming across
him lying wounded in a trench; only his officer’s status got the brother to the medics in time.
His diaries will become the adventurous literature for a whole new generation of would be soldiers.
“Now an indescribable annihilation began.
Hand grenades flew like snowballs through the air... shouts of fear and anger mingled.
With fire in our eyes, we jumped screaming over the edge of the trench.”
In the spring of 1918, most of his company is killed by a British shell and he unleashes
his stormtroops in retaliation.
“Forwards.
No mercy.
Anger.
Shots from the trenches, hand grenades in!
Howling.
Grab one by the neck.
Hands up!
Explosion, jumping in...
Behind me a man falls; I shoot the gunner in the eye...
Others fall.
Two men are running back.
Headshot.
Stomach shot.
I’m grim; Englishmen flee from the barracks, one falls.
Direct hit.
Loss.
Forward!”
Jünger was shot the day after writing that, and would learn of the failure of the spring
offensives from his father’s home.
He returned to the front for the final time in July, his company now down to just 15 men,
but still they are sent out on assault missions.
Jünger is shot twice in the chest one day, but manages to fight his way back close to
German lines.
The two men who carry him to the medic are shot.
Jünger survives, but his war is over.
He leaves the war with the Pour le Merite, Germany’s highest award for bravery.
Many soldiers of the war would write their memoirs and in fact, during the 20s there
was a craze for authentic frontline experiences.
Jünger highly edited, shortened, and commented on his diaries, and only a fraction of the
material made its way into the first edition of “In Stahlgewittern” - “Storm of Steel”
in English, but it became one of the most important books on the war ever written.
Today it is often seen as the anti-Remarque, and as war mongering.
Back in the 20s though, it was seen by many as soft and unpatriotic, because of the descriptions
of fear and failure.
It is a personal account, with no literary ambition, and open to interpretation.
In terms of life in postwar Germany, Jünger had no sympathy with the German Revolution,
nor the Weimar Republic or pacifism.
He also strongly rejected Nazi ideology.
Ernst Jünger is perhaps Germany’s most discussed and most controversial 20th century
author still to this day.
He died in 1998, nearly 103 years old.
Storm of Steel is quite provocative, but since the original diaries became available, we
can now know even more about his time in
the war.