Storm of Steel Summary
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger is a 1920 memoir about the author's experiences as a German soldier and officer serving in World War I.
- At the start of the war, Jünger is a nineteen-year-old soldier. After his first brushes with combat, he trains as an officer.
- Jünger serves on the frontline in France and Belgium, where he faces French and British troops. He engages in combat ranging from small skirmishes to large-scale battles.
- For most of the war, Jünger senses that the two sides are making little progress, but eventually it becomes clear that the Germans are outmatched.
Summary
Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel is a memoir of a German field officer’s participation in World War I between 1914 and 1918. Jünger focuses on the unadorned happenings of war, in all their violence and ugliness, generally to the exclusion of philosophical or conceptual considerations. Even so, the deeper meanings behind the surface events are implicit in any real understanding of Jünger's account of this great cataclysm of the twentieth century.
The story begins in December, 1914, four months after the start of World War I, when Jünger, at this time nineteen years old, and other German recruits arrive by train in the Champagne region of France. Though Jünger tells us virtually nothing about his home life in Germany, his schooling, and his aspirations, he does indicate that he and most of the others in his group are basically city boys who are now being thrust into a rural environment: the various villages in France and Belgium where they will be quartered and fighting for the next four years.
As in most accounts of World War I, the system of trenches in which the soldiers live and from which they fight is described in detail. In the first four months of being stationed at the front, Jünger sees some action, but it is subdued in comparison with what is to come. The first major battle he experiences is Les Eparges, in April, 1915. The state of things on the field is often one of utter confusion. The sound of artillery fire is deafening, and often one cannot tell whether the fire is coming from the German or the French lines. Altogether it's a scene of horror which Jünger does not spare the reader from seeing in detail. There are graphic descriptions of men being blown up, corpses strewn all over the field, and mutilated and dying men everywhere. When Jünger is wounded by shrapnel in the thigh, it is his first significant injury of many, and he is taken back to Germany on a hospital train. His father encourages him to return to the front after officer training. He is first made a Fahnenjunker (aspirant officer or ensign) and then becomes a lieutenant, holding this rank as a field officer throughout most of the war.
In the year or so after his return to France, Jünger is involved in varying levels of action in places such as Douchy, Monchy, and Queant. The essential pattern of Jünger’s narrative is a constant alternation between intense but relatively brief engagements on the one hand and periods of inactivity and rest on the other. There is frequent drinking. The first five chapters, however, are a prelude to an enormous engagement Jünger takes part in—the Battle of the Somme—late in the summer of 1916. There are endless descriptions of heavy artillery bombings, attacks by airplanes, dozens and even hundreds of men being shot down in the field every day, and gas attacks. Throughout these accounts, Jünger gives the reader every detail but largely makes no commentary upon it. Nor does he offer any resistance to or criticism of the fact that men have been plunged by the millions into unrelieved and incredibly brutal violence. This sets Storm of Steel apart from the more often-read war memoirs and novels of the twentieth century such as All Quiet on the Western Front and, later, Catch-22 and Born on the Fourth of July.
At various times in the war, Jünger is given further training, both as an observation officer and a scouting officer. In the spring of 1917, there is heavy fighting around the village of Fresnoy. The...
(This entire section contains 1210 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
action shifts largely from France to Flanders, the Flemish-speaking region of Belgium. One cannot be sure if the Flemish, due to their Germanic background and the division which has historically existed between them and the French-speaking Walloons of Belgium, are sympathetic to the Germans, but Jünger portrays them in a positive light. He tends to bond with the locals and is impressed with their lack of formality and the closeness of their language (in which they use the familiar second-person “Du” even with strangers) to German. In the chapter titled “Langemarck” Jünger also describes the wounding of his brother, Fritz. It is one of the episodes inStorm of Steel where a familial connection replaces the ultra-objective style of Jünger's narrative, and the closeness with his brother is a reminder of the very human basis of his war story.
Even as the last year of the war begins in November, 1917, the fighting as Jünger portrays it shows little sign of change or development from what has occurred to that point. In the “Double Battle of Cambrai,” there is furious combat, and Jünger is wounded in the head. When he is recovering at home during Christmas break, he thinks about how the armies are attempting to break out of the static type of fighting dominating the war so far. But this, and other changes taking place, seem too little, too late.
In the opening months of the final year of the war, 1918, Jünger learns that the German higher command are planning an enormous offensive that will be a last-ditch effort for the Germans to make some headway and prevent their defeat, which is becoming increasingly likely. But even in the chapter titled “The Great Battle,” no qualitative change in the fighting is evident. On the same ground near Monchy where Jünger fought over two years earlier, there is furious combat, with massive artillery bombardments and machine-gun fire as Jünger's and other units attempt to storm a railway embankment. The Germans appear to have some success in the engagement but it all comes to nothing, and the advance fails. It is a turning-point for Jünger, since he realizes for the first time that Germany is likely to lose the war.
Up to this juncture there has been no discernible pattern, no actual development one way or the other in the progress of the war. But bow the denouement is relatively swift. The Germans clearly do not have the resources of the Allies, and although there is no decisive battle in which their forces are destroyed, the Germans lack the ability to continue the fighting indefinitely. In a final engagement in August, 1918, Jünger is wounded multiple times and senses that his own death is near. He has an epiphany of peace and resolution, but he survives, and an almost idyllic period of recovery ensues.
Jünger ends the book before the Armistice. The last event in Storm of Steel is his receipt of the ultimate German military honor, the Pour le Mérite, for his service. But one cannot interpret this as a sign of egoism or narcissism. Jünger sees himself, correctly, as an emblem of all the fighting men, in this war and any war. And he sees his wartime experience as representative of the universal human condition. Through the accumulation of unsparing detail, Storm of Steel implicitly is a work of profound meaning about the mystery of humanity’s innate violence as well as humanity’s ability to defy death and survive in the face of immense hardship.
