Storm of Steel
Presenting the desperate conflict of the First World War through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is translated by Michael Hofmann in Penguin Modern Classics. 'As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest.' A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger's experience of combat on the front line - leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, and simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart. One of the greatest books to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War, it illuminates like no other book not only the horrors but also the fascination of a war that made men keep fighting for four long years. Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) the son of a wealthy chemist, ran away from home to join the Foreign Legion. His father dragged him back, but he returned to military service when he joined the German army on the outbreak of the First World War. Storm of Steel (Stahlgewittern) was Jünger's first book, published in 1920. Greatly admired by the Nazis, Jünger remained at a distance from the regime, with books such as his allegorical work On the Marble Cliffs (1939) functioning as a covert criticism of Nazi ideology and methods.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
17mentions
13people
2013–2026years
76% recommend24% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- “Storm of Steel” by Ernst Jünger, for one view from the German side. It has been variously perceived as pro- and anti-war.
- I'd strongly recommend his war memoir "Storm of Steel", essentially the war viewed through the eyes of an Imperial German officer.
It provides a stark contrast to "All Quiet on the Western Front" - a more well-known novel on WW1 from a German perspective.
- >Where does such suicidal bravery come from?
If that is something you're interested in, you would probably enjoy reading Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. Make sure to read the 1929 version. I believe there is only one english translation, by Basil Creighton.
All the other editions available in the market are subsequent edits the author made, each one with a more pacifist tone, as the author got older.
- This a very personal opinion based on some popular classic book lists like those found on 4chan /lit/ etc. (Note: All books are new and I calculated the price from Book Depository [0], you might be able to purchase more from Better World Books [1]):
- The Holy Bible - Moby Dick by Melville - The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky - The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - The Iliad by Homer - The Odyssey by Homer - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas - The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler - The Qur'an - The Prince by Machiavelli - The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky - The Confessions by Saint Augustine - Les Miserables by Victor Hugo - We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi - The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric - Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andric - Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun - Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger - All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque - The Divine Comedy by Dante
--- This list totals out at 311.14EUR and has 23 books. [0] - https://www.bookdepository.com/ [1] - https://www.betterworldbooks.com/
- It's funny, the author has made a decent case for why pop science/non-fiction books are useless (I agree) despite pitching a book on an obvious nonsense subject about imaginary computers unlikely to ever exist (or, if you're an optimist; to exist in our lifetimes). Imagine wanting to master a field less realistic than phlogiston theory or medieval demonology to the extent that it "also means repeating those quick memory tests in expanding intervals over the following days, weeks, and months." I suppose indoctrination is necessary since this form of anti-knowledge is unlikely to ever be actually used -unlike actual knowledge, say, such as linear algebra or obscure tree data structures relating to metric spaces.
Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they're for reviewing the subject after you already know something, and expanding your knowledge after you have the basics. There are many things I know, and can recall with effort, as they're in long term memory, but can easily recall and apply if I pick up a book and thumb through it for a few minutes. Yeah, I can cook up a nice boeuf bourguignon or pumpernickel bread from memory, but it's gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.
Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it's going to stick with you a lot more clearly than some recitation of dry facts. Storm of Steel sticks with me better than the official British History of the Great War. Similarly, "Darwinian Fairytales," which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than "The Selfish Gene" -which I've paid considerably more attention to.
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger is a WW1 classic that unabashedly explores the primal excitement of war.
