What transformed the extreme nationalist scene was not the war itself, but the experience of defeat, revolution and armed conflict at the war’s end. A powerful role was played here by the myth of the ‘front generation’ of 1914-18, soldiers bound together in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice in a heroic cause which overcame all political, regional, social and religious differences. Writers such as Ernst Jünger, whose book Storm of Steel became a best-seller, celebrated the experience of the fighting man and cultivated the rapid growth of nostalgia for the unity of the wartime years.138
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