Dispassionate suggests itself, though Jünger describes plenty of high emotion, from elation to terror, and even describes himself weeping on multiple occasions. These are flatly wrong, and critics who describe the book this way are usually assuming something about Jünger personally and projecting that onto the book. I’ve seen people describe it as cold or inhuman. That’s where his remarkable tone comes in. Neither opinion is based on any overt statement in the book, because Jünger never raises political questions and has nothing to say about the causes of the war or the justness of the techniques with which it was waged.Īnd so readers have to fall back on what he describes and how he describes it. You’ll find people accusing it of being pro-war or jingoistic and others describing it as clearly antiwar. Google Ernst Jünger or Storm of Steel and take a few minutes looking at the jarring difference of opinions on his work. I say striking because it takes hold of the reader immediately and strongly affects him all the way through-and yet it is difficult to describe. The most striking thing about Storm of Steel is its tone. The following isn’t exactly a review, more a series of notes or observations as I reread it all the way through for the first time in ten years. So the day I ran across this, I got exactly that edition* off my shelf and started reading. And yet they always end up responding strongly to the long excerpt I have them read from the chapter on Guillemont.īut beyond being amusing, this meme got me wanting to reread Storm of Steel, something I’ve been intending to do for years. They’ve all gotten the canned antiwar messaging of high school reading lists ( All Quiet being one of the books that created the template for a genre that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years), and have absorbed the structure or arc of any basic antiwar story without even realizing it.īut here’s a memoir, I tell them, in which the author essentially spends 300 pages telling you: The war was a continuous, 24/7, 365-day-a-year horror show. The “this” being the fundamental mismatch between what they expect thematically, didactically, from a harrowing war story and what they actually get from Storm of Steel.

I laughed, of course, and gleefully reshared it with the caption “I never get tired of recommending Jünger to students precisely because they aren’t prepared for this.”

Ernst jünger storm of steel