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Apr 03, 2011

Eric rated it:

Expecting a Marinetti-like vociferation, an avant-garde hymn to mechanical war, I initially found Jünger’s narrative a little flat. In The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell makes Jünger sound entertainingly gauche, a gas-goggled steampunk berserker with a will-to-power prose style. I was bored by the 100 pages preceding “chapter” 7, “Guillemont,” whose evocation of the Battle of the Somme finally hooked me:

A runner from a Württemberg regiment reported to me to guide my plato

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10 comments like (20 people liked it)

May 31, 2011

Laura rated it:

Ernst Jünger is an insurance actuary’s worst nightmare — he smoked, drank, experimented with drugs, served in two world wars, sustained multiple injuries, and yet died only one month shy of 103. And his exploits on the front! You couldn’t make this stuff up. I confess to not knowing many Germans, but the national stereotypes (organized, efficient, not a lot of laughs) were more than born out in his memoir.

One of the things that struck me the most about the book was how different it More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jul 23, 2008

Newengland rated it:

STORM OF STEEL offers WWI from a German soldier's point of view, but Erich Maria Remarque it ain't. All told, author Ernst Junger was shot multiple times, yet would live not only to write this book (and many others) but to celebrate his 103rd birthday (attended by an unusually patient Grim Reaper-in-Waiting). In the penultimate page of this book, he writes: "Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2008

Nat rated it:

Jünger's account of the brutal fighting on the western front in WWI makes an enlightening contrast with Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That. Graves's account is comic and ironic, while Jünger's writing is almost completely dispassionate, even while describing his friends being torn to shreds by British artillery and sniper fire--an example of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit applied to trench warfare. It's hard not to see the difference as an expression of a difference in national character betwe More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 28, 2007

Brian rated it:

Ernst Junger's account as a lieutenant in the German Imperial Army is as mind-blowing for its depictions of almost daily death as it is for its lack of moralizing and sentimentality. Even more amazing is the picture he paints of the innocent victims of war almost as backdrops to the overwhelming historical events unfolding. The detail of troop movements is amazing and I found myself reading with one hand and "Google-Mapping" with the other hand to see just where all this carnage had ta More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 16, 2009

Terence rated it:

Ernst Junger's memoir of his time on the Western Front (1914-1918) is a powerful glimpse at what it's like to be a soldier, made all the more powerful because it's unadorned with philosophical introspection or politics. The reader joins Junger as he joins his unit in Champagne and leaves him during his final convalescence in a Hanover hospital. In between, we vicariously experience the daily life of a German officer and his men - and "vicarious" is about as close as any rational person More...

4 comments like (4 people liked it)

Apr 10, 2008

Benjamin rated it:

"Disturbingly self-aware." Killing did not trouble Junger too much - his ability to move through absolute carnage on an industrial scale cannot but fascinate. The first World War was the charnel house of charnel houses, a maw consuming men and nations whose aftershocks reverberate today not only in Berlin but even in Baghdad. Junger stands in vivid contrast to the ranks of writers who rejected the war and everything it stood for; he found it a positive experience and did not agonize ov More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2008

Emily rated it:

Being generally anti-war as well as knowing - as anyone does - in which direction post-WWI Germany ultimately turned, this book was chilling for me to read. It is now used as an example of post-WWI militarism in Germany in direct opposition to the anti-war movement epitomized in "All Quiet On The Western Front" by Remarque and "War Against War" by Friedrich. So this book is indeed interesting and important to read, thus I gave it 2 stars, but I can't say I enjoyed the macho More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 25, 2011

Scott rated it:

Storm of Steel (1920) is Ernst Jünger's memoir of his four years as a trench warrior on the western front during the First World War. The storm referred to in the title isn't a boast so much as a badge. Though a commander of storm troops trained to spearhead an attack, Jünger spent most of the war driven to ground by an unrelenting tempest of high explosives, shrapnel, and flying lead. Caught in this cyclone of whirling iron shards, he and his men often could do little more than hunker down and More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 07, 2008

Sandra rated it:

This book is interesting to read, as I did, almost back-to-back with Barbusse's Le Feu. The experiences of the two authors are clearly very similar - you will find the same extremely disturbing imagery treated with what seems almost indifference, as exposure to horrors has worn away their susceptibility to shock. However, while Barbusse seems to refute the possibility of a 'right' or 'wrong' in the context of filth, decay and the unreasoning perpetuation of the conflict, Jünger takes most of the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2009

Stephen rated it:

A powerful first-person account of the World War I battlefield from the perspective of a German officer, Ernst Junger (1895-1998). Junger wrote this book at the age of twenty-five after surviving fourteen separate "hits" and battle after battle in which his comrades fell all around him. This might be the definitive first-person account of life and death in the trenches and will be read for centuries as one of the best inside accounts of a devastating and absurd war. So why not five More...

1 comment like

May 25, 2011

Tim rated it:

Heads up/advice: if it's on my "school reading" shelf, there's a good possibility I didn't like it. OK, maybe for the wrong reasons, like cramming last-minute, but mostly just because the darn book just doesn't suit me.
This one involves both of the aforementioned factors.
The journal of a soldier in the First World War, "Storm of Steel" paints an excellent portrait of the war, with all the gory or odd details any school textbook would leave untouched. I liked it fo More...

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Jul 16, 2011

Wendy rated it:

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 More...

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Jan 08, 2012

Nostromo rated it:

“Thank God you can only die once.”

This is a five-star war memoir equal to Eugene Sledge’s ‘With the Old Breed’, Robert Grave’s ‘Goodbye to All That’, Guy Sajer’s ‘The Forgotten Soldier’, and personal memoirs of Generals Grant and Sherman. ‘Storm of Steel’ merits inclusion into the Pantheon of these great warrior memoirs that so ably captured the very essence – the horror - of combat!

Ernst Junger’s ‘Storm of Steel’ is about a German soldier enduing four years of unrelen More...

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Jan 04, 2009

Simon rated it:

Brilliant book on life in the trenches in WW1 from the german point of view. Ernest Junger survived nearly 4 years, numerous wounds and received the Pour Le Merite (the Blue Max) for his efforts. He later went onto become one of Germany's most famous authors and lived to 103.

The book is detailed, fast paced and gives a real feel for what life was like in the trenches - the digging for survival, the mud, the shelling, the wounded, the randomness of death, the patrols, the clearing o More...

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Oct 31, 2011

Roger rated it:

World War I trench warfare from a German Soldier's perspective. The battle descriptions are mesmerizing, the amount of death disconcerting. The book is told in a tone that can only be described as "German Machismo", a sort of showy stoicism, as in "look, look everyone how implacably I do my duty". Rather than hurt the narrative, I think it gives a sort of unintentional psychological insight into the German soldier of WWI. Also, the honesty of the author regarding moments of More...

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Aug 28, 2011

Thomas rated it:

This is a battle memoir of World War I; Junger fought as a German infantryman and officer on the Western Front for almost the entire war.

It differs from Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" in that it was not fashioned as a statement about war. It's a depiction of the soldier's life at the front. He does record strong patriotic emotions he felt at various times, but it's just a record of what he felt, there's no sense that his emotions are presented for the sake of i More...

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Jan 24, 2009

Eric_W rated it:

Note added 1/24/09 I wonder how this relates to Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. I shall have to read that, too.

I think Junger is reflecting a lot of the duality or conflict that many soldiers in combat feel; an intense feeling of camaraderie and living on the edge that brings reality into sharper focus. Yet on page 260 (Penguin edition) he says: "...I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from this familiarity that I observed what was in fr More...

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May 12, 2011

Mike (the Paladin) rated it:

A book I recommend but with a caveat...I'd say be prepared for a memoir of day to day war. This is an interesting book. If you read the introduction (and I recommend you do) you'll find some insight and some commentary.

By the way. There are multiple editions of this book it has been released many times. The edition I read went with the author's words and Michael Hoffman translates and does an introduction. Mr. Hoffman notes (among other things) that at times Junger uses the wrong wo More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 08, 2009

Tyler rated it:

Junger does a great job at providing an objective view towards the happenings of world war one. At several poinnts in the book it's kind of dry for the reader that wouldn't find war as thrilling I think. I learned from this book that a person can come out of even the most horrific of happenings in war and still come out of it without drastically harming a persons sanity. His depth into the everyday actions with interest despite the repetition of artillery bombing considering how many friends he More...

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May 28, 2010

Dan rated it:

What a strange book for an English-speaker used to accounts like those in the vein of Graves' "Goodbye to All That." This is WWI where it does NOT shake the author to the core. As a matter of fact, it seems to only deepen his nationalist convictions. It often even sounds a bit Victorian?! (Could that have been mostly because of the translation I listened to?)

I have strong sympathies for Lt. Junger's basic argument that people need to live for a cause greater than themselves More...

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Dec 16, 2009

Sandra rated it:

This book is taken from Junger's diaries of his years fighting World War I (on the German side). It is clean, mostly (a few oblique references, no language), but graphic with the violence he experienced, though again, his narrative shares the early 20th Century sensitivity, so it's not really horrible as more contemporary accounts might have been. As a consequence, it's probably not as gripping as a more modern author might have made it, though he experiences EVERYTHING WWI had to offer, inclu More...

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Oct 29, 2010

Don rated it:

An eye-popping description of grunt warfare in the trenches of The Great War, aka WWI. Junger was a German officer who survived — though repeatedly riddled with holes — against ridiculous odds, over years of nearly continuous warfare. Again and again this highly civilized man, from a highly civilized culture, led his men over the top and into the Storm of Steel. For my money, that's insane (as was the war itself) but he ended up with some amazing tales to tell. Regrettably, however, they are les More...

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Dec 23, 2010

Johanneskim rated it:

It was a great book that was almost overwhelming in its depiction of trench warfare. Great insights into the structure of German society and how social boundaries persisted, even in this raw state of being. Due to the wrong sense of heroism it depicts and its overemphasis on comraderie, I would only give it 4 stars. I can see though how this book had such an impact on the generation of WW I veterans during the Weimar republic. Fascinating book. Next to read will be Juenger's war diaries, which h More...

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Dec 31, 2009

Shep rated it:

All Quiet of the Western Front this is not. Ernst Junger seems to have enjoyed his experiences as a German officer in the trenches of the First World War. It was certainly no picnic for him as he was seriously wounded on numerous occasions, but his account is fairly straight forward, sans the expected hand wringing angst one usually gets from memoirs and loosely autobiographical novels of this sort (Remarque, Hemingway, and Graves).Junger's pride in his collection of souvenirs taken from Allied More...

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Sep 10, 2011

Aaron rated it:

The first 60 pages held no interest for me. Then I was hooked for 20 pages, but unfortunately the book lapsed back into tedium as the noted experiences became more and more repetitive. I understand that the war must have been horribly repetitive, but the prose does nothing to soften the reader's feeling of monotony. The reader does not need to personally feel the repetition to understand that the soldier feels it. While it may sound odd to bitch that a book covering one of the most disgusting pe More...

4 comments like

Jul 24, 2011

Elizabeth rated it:

This book demonstrates the other side of being a solider: an unimaginable sense of camaraderie of war. Given that I was recommended this book following my disappointment with All Quiet on the Western Front, I find it impossible to talk about one book without referencing the other. Jünger's is a much truer book in the sense that it's an actual memoir, not a fictionalized memoir. Both books jump around in time, exploring a series of instances and battles, but it makes more sense in this book given More...

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Jul 11, 2011

Tamara rated it:

This is one of those books I never thought I'd actually enjoy. As a sworn pacifist, I did not expect to find a war book - written by a German, no less! - appealing.

But Junger's battlefield is not the typical setting about which one reads in history books. It is a place where Death dances (his capitalisation) and guns speak. Only the soldiers are the enemies, as he befriends and admires the civilian citizens of the nations he is fighting. Cities in which he fought and which he des More...

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Dec 14, 2010

Ian rated it:

An unapologetically enthusiastic account of Ernst Junger's time as an infantry officer in the trenches.

Junger is a remarkably brave man and his descriptions of attacking the British lines under heavy fire are gripping reading. For fans of infantry squad tactics, you really get a feel for how they rolled up an enemy trench and how these tactics evolved as the war went on.

One cannot help but be struck by the never-ending carnage and the growing list of comrades that fall in More...

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Nov 14, 2011

David rated it:

A well-read 10-hour two-part unabridged Audible download. An excellent book to listen to if you have to take a long drive with a teenager who is considering joining the military, because it portrays military life realistically, pluses and minuses, neither mindless glorification or goateed surrender-monkey.

For some odd reason I've recently read or listened to several works on the theme of war. I like this non-fiction work by a WWI German officer better than more-recent fiction works More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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