A review by bookishwendy
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger

3.0

This is sort of the antidote to Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and while both books center on the horrors of trench warfare during WWI as seen through a German Soldier's eyes, the similarities stop there. To be fair, these two books should not really be compared. While Remarque created an emotionally moving novel with an anti-war theme, Storm of Steel is the author's memoir of his lieutenancy on the Western Front. The 3 year memoir covers 1916 to 1918 and much was pulled directly from Junger's diary entries. As such, it is not a novel. Eventually the battle scenes seem to merge into one indistinguishable swirling mass of mustard gas and explosions that it can be a struggle to get through. There is no story arc as such, and the secondary characters pop up only to be killed off in the space of a page. Some are introduced in passing a statistics of the carnage Junger seems to have grown numb to, a terse report of death, as in "Corporal H fell today from a bullet wound from the neck. Junger himself, however, does change rapidly over the course of his journaling, quickly adapting to his minute-to-minute life in the trench. A fresh recruit in the early pages, he soon takes an officer's commission, and by the final offensive doesn't even bother wearing a helmet anymore unless the situation "gets really dicey"( he leads ambushes with his head uncovered).

While the battle images, brutality and climbing body counts will likewise numb the reader before the end of this book, Junger's vivid, cinematic evocation of war is worth it. It's possible to see, in Junger's emotionally distant, hardened narrative voice, how this book has been considered a war-mongering work inspirational to German soldiers of the second World War, but Junger doesn't preach politics, gloss over or romanticize his experience. Stoic as he presents himself, even he admits to breaking down in tears on the field before his men and needing days to recover. That's realism.