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." 

All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque  304 pages

Eighteen-year-old Erich Paul Remark was draft into the German Army to fight in World War I. He was sent to the Western Front in July 1917. There he experienced the horrors of war, as did many thousands of other young men on both sides. On July 31 he was wounded (shrapnel in the left leg, right arm, neck) and sent to an Army hospital where he spent the rest of the war.

Afterward he became a teacher until he took a leave of absence in 1920 to begin a literary life. He changed his name to Erich Maria Remarque. Maria in honor of his mother and Remarque, the traditional German spelling of his name

In 1929, he published his third novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. In the novel, eighteen-year-old Paul Baumer is a young German soldier fighting in the trenches in France. Like the Southerners in Gone With the Wind, Paul and his buddies head for the front with glorious ideas of quickly over-running the French. Instead, they are horrified by the blood-drenched trenches, the constant shelling, the mud, and the general misery of life at the Front.

When Paul returns home on leave, he is disgusted by the inaccuracies that people have of the battle---much like the American troops endured during Vietnam.

I first read this novel over summer break as a teen. Considered the greatest war novel of all time, I have to concur. Remarque takes readers into the trenches with him and, through his eyes, readers can experience the tragedy of war. One of things that make it stand out is that the point of view is from a German solider.

Remarque probably suffered from shell shock, or PTSD, as we know it today. I believe that he wrote to try to exorcize the demons that haunted him. He wrote nine other novels, all concerning war, but All Quiet on the Western Front is the one for which he is most remembered.

6 out of 5 stars.