Storm of Steel

Storm of Steel: from the Diary of a German Storm-troop Officer on the Western Front by Ernst Junger, translated by Basil Creighton, 284 pages

Ernst Junger served in the German army, first as an enlisted man and later as an officer, throughout the First World War.  After the war, he published his diaries in book form, although he would revise the collection many times over the course of the following decades.  This is the first English translation, published in the fateful year of 1929.  Remarkably literary for a diary - even allowing for editing and revision by both author and translator - it is an open window to the legendary horrors - and lesser known heroics - of the Western Front.

The inevitable comparison is to All Quiet on the Western Front, but while that more famous work is a novel based on experience, this is an immediate, literal account.  Unlike Remarque, Junger does not end in despair but moves through it, or, as he says of one veteran early on, "One could see that the man had been through horror to the limit of despair and there had learned to despise it."  Like Remarque (and Henry Adams), Junger is brought face to face with the indifferent power of the inanimate world, but he casts the confrontation as a call to heroism, "It is in such moments that the human spirit triumphs over the mightiest demonstrations of material force."  The war leads him, not to nihilism, but to a renewed sense of collective purpose, "We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves intrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people."