Ernst Junger - Storm of Steel

Ernst Junger was born in Heidelberg in 1895. He ran away from school to enlist in the Foreign Legion and in 1914 volunteered to join the German army. He fought throughout the war and recorded his experiences in several books, most famously in InStahlgewittern (Storm of Steel). While admired by the Nazis, he remained critical of them and through novels such as On the Marble Cliffs (1939) sought to understand the impasse into which Germany was heading. Throughout the Nazi period he was a controversial "inner emigrant," distanced from the regime yet only obliquely in opposition. His most famous later books include Heliopolis (1949), The Glass Bees (1957), Eumeswil (1977), Aladdin's Problem (1983), and A Dangerous Encounter (1985). He died in 1998.

Michael Hofmann has translated Joseph Roth, Herta Muller, Zoe Jenny, Wim Wenders, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Franz Kafka. His own books include Corona, Corona and Behind the Lines. He also coedited, with James Ladun, After Ovid.

ERNST JUNGER

Storm of Steel

Translated with an Introduction by

MICHAEL HOFMANN

PENGUIN BOOKS

In Stahlgewitten first published in german 1920

This final revsied edition first published 1961

This translation made from the edition prepared from the Saemtliche Werke, vol. I:Der Erste Weltkrieg. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1978

This translation first published in Great Britain by Allen Lane, an imprint of Pengin Books 2003

Published in Penguin Books 2004

Copyright 1920, 1961 J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart

Introduction and translation copyright Michael Hofmann, 2003

Contents

Introduction

Bibliography

Storm of Steel

In the Chalk Trenches of Champagne

From Bazancourt to Hattonchatel

Les Eparges

Douchy and Monchy

Daily Life in the Trenches

The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme

Guillemont

The Woods of St-Pierre-Vaast

Retreat from the Somme

In the Village of Fresnoy

Against Indian Opposition

Langemarck

Regnieville

Flanders Again

The Double Battle of Cambrai

At the Cojeul River

The Great Battle

British Gains

My Last Assault

We Fight Our Way Through

Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern is the original title) is one of the great books of World War I, if not the greatest. All sorts of trustworthy and unlikely people - and trustworthy often precisely because unlikely: cosmopolites, left-wingers, non-combatants -have stepped up to express their admiration, often in suitably embarrassed or bemused fashion: Boll and Borges, Enzensberger and Brecht, Gide and Moravia. In 1942, Gide wrote in his diary: 'Ernst Junger's book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith.'

Its contrast with most of the others is stark. It has no pacifist design. It makes no personal appeal. It is a notably unconstructed book. It does not set its author and his experience in any sort of context. It offers nothing in the way of hows and whys, it is pure where and when and of course, above all, what. There is nothing in it about the politics of the war - nothing even on its outcome - and very little on the wider strategy of its conduct. It begins the moment Private Ernst Junger first detrains in France, on 27 December 1914, at the age of nineteen, with (though we aren't told this) a rushed school-leaving certificate and a couple of months' training behind him, having volunteered on 1 August, the opening day of the war. (It is hard to imagine an English autobiographer or belletrist - a Graves or a Sassoon, amateur and holistic - wouldn't have included that, or indeed the fact that the year before, as a bored romantic youth full of wanderlust, he had run away to Algeria to join the French Foreign Legion!) It ends, in one of a bare handful of scenes that are away from the action, back in Germany four years later, when he is too badly hurt to carry on, a decorated lieutenant and the youngest-ever recipient of the pour le Merite. War is all - fighting is all -everything else is cropped away. And, from first to last, in the affirmative. It is the work of a man whom the war made - and who, in World War II, was to be again - a professional soldier. It was published long before the likes of Blunden, Graves, Remarque and Sassoon, all of which appeared in the late 1920s, at a classic ten-year distance from the events they describe, giving their public and themselves time to recover; only Barbusse's novel Le Feu (Under Fire), from 1917, came out much before Ernst Junger's account was first privately printed with a local firm (the family gardener, Robert Meier, was designated as the 'publisher') in 1920, at the instigation of Junger's father. The impressively cumbersome original title was In Storms of Steel: from theDiary of a Shock Troop Commander, Ernst jiinger, War Volunteer, and subsequentlyLieutenant in the Rifle Regiment of Prince Albrecht of Prussia (73rd HanoverianRegiment).

The initial print-run was 2,000, the intended readership presumably members of the regiment and other veterans, and the work, in literary terms, was undistinguished and at times, apparently - hardly a surprise, considering its author's repeated rush to get out of school - 'even fell short of the required standard for a sixth-form essay'. The 'diary' element, though never entirely suppressed later, was initially mostly all there was, closely following the sixteen notebooks Junger filled during the war. The book steadily sold through its small printings, but it wasn't the instant bestseller it is sometimes thought to have been. Junger was recruited by Mittler & Son, a noted publisher of militaria in Berlin, and wrote more books on the war, including the viscerally - as well as headily - unpleasant treatise On Battle as an InnerExperience (1922) - of which I could not bring myself to read more than the excerpts I read years ago in a book on German history - and a couple of spin-offs covering material from Storm of Steel in a more lingering and opinionated way: Copse 125 (1925) and Fire and Blood (1925). A shot at a novel, Sturm - after one of the characters, nomen est omen - was abandoned after a few installments. In the mid 1920s, then, Junger was already a prolific and established war writer before such a thing really existed. (His first non-war book, a memoir of his childhood, didn't appear until 1929.) Even so, acute observers were afraid they might lose Junger the soldier to literature. On balance, I suppose, that's what happened, but it's a close call. Junger has remained as much identified with World War I - or war in general - as with writing. I forget who it was who said they couldn't picture Junger the author at all except in uniform.

In the late 1920s, via Stahlhelm and the veterans' scene, he found himself as a publicist in nationalist politics. Because of the dearth of politics in Weimar, everything, paradoxically, was politicized; even the defeated generals, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, were rehabilitated as political figures. This is when Junger made his notorious remark that he 'hated democracy like the plague', but to some extent that was what one might call 'Weimar talk'. Junger was courted, not surprisingly, by the Nazis, and twice offered a seat in the Reichstag, but he wasn't interested. He didn't join the Deutsche Akademie der Dichtung (chaired for a year by the poet Gottfried Benn), nor was he ever a member of the Nazi Party. He and Hitler did exchange signed copies of their books, but even that seems like a mismatch: