Storm of Steel

Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern in German) is the memoir of German officer Ernst Jünger's experiences on the Western Front during the First World War, from December 1914 to August 1918. Privately printed in 1920, it was one of the first personal accounts of the war to be published and, together with Henri Barbusse's Under Fire (1916), is considered among the earliest literary accounts of the Great War. The first edition was essentially Jünger's unedited wartime diary, written from fourteen notebooks shortly after the fighting it describes.

The book gives a graphic account of trench warfare. Jünger enters the line as a private with the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment in Champagne. His first wound came at Les Éparges in April 1915; after recovering he took an officers' course and rose to the rank of lieutenant. In 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, his regiment was sent to the Combles and Guillemont sector, where he was wounded again. Fighting at Arras, Langemarck and Cambrai followed in 1917, and in March 1918, during the German offensive, a direct artillery hit destroyed half of his company. Wounded seven times over the course of the war, he received the Iron Cross and, in 1918, the Pour le Mérite, the highest military decoration of the German Empire.

The style is detached, chronological and largely uninterested in introspection. Jünger focuses on what happens at the front and says little about his personal life or feelings. His refusal to offer an explicit moral judgement on the war has led critics to read the book in very different ways: as a celebration of combat and heroic masculinity, as nationalist writing, or as an anti-war work. This ambivalence is central to its reception.

The book was revised repeatedly, in 1924, 1934, and again up to the 1961 version included in his collected works. The 1924 edition, completely rewritten for a new publisher, adopts a more reflective tone and nationalist slogans that glorify the trench soldier. The 1934 version softens these elements and mutes the most violent descriptions, carrying the dedication "For the fallen", in an attempt to prevent its use as Nazi propaganda, although Joseph Goebbels had praised it. Sales were considerable: in the 1930s they exceeded six figures, and by 1945 about a quarter of a million copies had been sold. The work established Jünger's fame as a writer during the 1920s.