About this title: A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, "Storm of Steel" illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, JA1/4nger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict butamore importantlyaas a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, JA1/4nger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will ...
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Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Date Published: 2004-05-01
ISBN-13:9780142437902ISBN:0142437905
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780142437902. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780142437902ISBN:0142437905
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Allen Lane
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780713995947ISBN:0713995947
Description: Good. The dust cover of this book is missing. However, book in a very good condition **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: PENGUIN BOOKS LTD Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780141186917ISBN:0141186917
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 320 pages. (288 pages) a memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism that illuminates the horrors as well as the fascination of total first world war, presenting the conflict through the eyes of an ordinary german soldier. it provides an account of the terrors of the western front and of the sickening allure that made men keep fighting on for 4 long years. (Paperback) read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780142437902ISBN:0142437905
Description: New. A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, "Storm of Steel" illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly... read more
Description: New. DISPATCHED FROM UNITED KINGDOM. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Please note orders are confirmed immediately and may take 2-3 business days to ship. This processing time is in addition to the shipping time. Please allow 10-14 days for delivery. Brand new item. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: G20091107140200D. read more
"Junger does a great job at providing an objective view towards the happenings of world war one. At several poinnts in the book it's kind of dry for the reader that wouldn't find war as thrilling I think. I learned from this book that a person can come out of even the most horrific of happenings in war and still come out of it without drastically harming a persons sanity. His depth into the everyday actions with interest despite the repetition of artillery bombing considering how many friends he loses to it. Something I found really interesting was his ability to keep himself emotionally detatched from it all except perhaps three times in my view. I deeply enjoyed his description of what he went through and what made it four stars instead of five was his lack of concluding the war in his view."
"This is an interesting thing to read: a memoir of WWI from a German soldier. What struck me about this story is how much more comfortable and enthusiastic he sounds than the authors of any British or French memoirist of the war one reads. The darkness of war is there too, but it's all under the surface. Very interesting.
"A powerful first-person account of the World War I battlefield from the perspective of a German officer, Ernst Junger (1895-1998). Junger wrote this book at the age of twenty-five after surviving fourteen separate "hits" and battle after battle in which his comrades fell all around him. This might be the definitive first-person account of life and death in the trenches and will be read for centuries as one of the best inside accounts of a devastating and absurd war. So why not five stars? Non-fiction books on war inevitably provoke moral reflections and in this regard, "Storm and Steel" is problematic. Junger never became a Nazi, the record seems clear on that, but there is much in his writing that points forward toward Nazism and generally glorifies the "manliness" of warfare. "Storm and Steel" describes the externalities of war graphically, but it says little about inner emotions. Junger never really explains what it is he is fighting for, how he feels about the Kaiser, or how he explains his country's ultimate defeat. He has been asked to fight, and the warrior's manliness requires that he fight unhesitatingly and courageously. Death surrounds him, and he does mourn the violent death of friends, sometimes in moving passages, but he never contemplates the possibility, screaming from every page, that all this carnage might just be a grand stupidity. How are we supposed to feel, especially after the holocaust that comes twenty years after Junger writes this book, that a true man does his duty without questioning or apparently even contemplating the authority structures that have sent so many human beings into a meat-grinder. So, engrossing, brilliant . . . and deplorable."
"Ernst Jünger is an insurance actuary's worst nightmare - he smoked, drank, experimented with drugs, served in two world wars, sustained multiple injuries, and yet died only one month shy of 103. And his exploits on the front! You couldn't make this stuff up. I confess to not knowing many Germans, but the national stereotypes (organized, efficient, not a lot of laughs) were more than born out in his memoir.
One of the things that struck me the most about the book was how different it was from British memoirs of the Great War. To begin with, Storm of Steel was published in 1920, a good ten years before anyone else had recovered enough to write a memoir. But Ernst Jünger was a born soldier, and therein rests the core of the book's particular power. Absent are the self-deprecating humor, the overwhelming sense of loss and the bitter ironies of English memoirs. Jünger was a man of duty, focus, and extraordinary resilience. He didn't write to condemn the war and shock future generations into pacifism, nor did he write to glorify war - he merely recorded his experience with a descriptive power unhampered by lengthy reflections and commentary. When he discovers that his younger brother had been deployed nearby he does show some real fear, but for the most part he's remarkably objective about the four years of brutal, relentless slaughter.
That's not to say the slaughter doesn't play a starring role. The mud, the rats, the screeching shells, the gas, the horrific injuries, and the driving rain of bullets and shrapnel are clinically, even ruthlessly described. You get a clear picture of the battlefield's inexorable and indiscriminate danger. But he describes horrors, such as layers of corpses from previous offensives being turned up by new shelling and entire towns being obliterated, with the sort of detachment that, combined with his apparent indestructibility, makes for the ultimate soldier. For Jünger, war didn't destroy young men - it strengthened them, albeit at a steep price. He seemed to relish the chance to prove himself by volunteering for every daring reconnaissance mission, savoring the danger, the heightened senses, the high stakes of success or failure - even though many of his comrades were blown to smithereens during these missions.
Yet in spite of the years of bloodshed that could easily have destroyed or dehumanized him, he never lost the simple joys of smoking his pipe or discovering tins of jam in a British dugout. I couldn't help thinking that if you had enough Jüngers in your country, the idea of a super race would seem pretty reasonable. At the end of the war he calculates, "Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me an even twenty scars." Who calls being grazed by a bullet a "TRIFLE"?! I guess someone who's been through the Great War. After one double wound (shot in the head and leg), he walked two miles to a casualty clearing station. Compare that to my recent brush with Crest white strips, which made my teeth hurt so much after only a few minutes that I had to take three Aleve and go to bed. I doubt Ernst would have had much patience with me.
This isn't an easy read - by the end you sort of feel as though you've been through the war yourself - but it's unbelievably compelling."
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