Storm of Steel

It's a fact, when talking on the subject of war, we presume that if the generals and country leaders didn't start them, they would by no means occur. In a book like Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger, though, there seems to be one more requirement, ready and enthusiastic soldiers. Junger would have probably preferred themselves "warriors" or barbarians. It's within this book that Ernst Junger tells the story of a man who describes and most likely believed that the battlefront of World War I was not a awful place to be, in fact that it was a quite magnificent place to be. Without a doubt, the reader can tell that Junger feels it was an honor to able to participate in Kaiser Wilhelm's war for the good of the Fatherland. Ernst Junger was simply an infantry fighter from World War I who never bent to the idea that the German army had been completely defeated and its crusade of conquest ending. He was injured numerous times, and still carried on and continued to fight armed and ready. Because of that perseverance in the name of the Fatherland and the glorification of his effort as portrayed in this book, it's obvious why it's a favorite in Nazi Germany.

We start off with the young soldier going off into the glory of battle, but with a twist as he reflects back on what he remembers and makes his memories unfold. We can see that he enters the war with an adolescent outset of it all. The beginning of the book, however gloomy, informs us of this. It's extremely amazing to know that Ernst Junger lived to be 102, being the definitive survivor that he was. Bearing in mind the odds that it seemed that he would have never reached 20 at the rate he was being wounded in the story. Hurt over and over again in combat, one can only wonder how close did a bullet or a metal shard almost miss a vital organ that could've killed him had it just been an inch or two over. It's amazing how his fellow soldiers died to the left and right of him, yet he lived on and continued to thrive on the glory of war. In the story he himself knew that he was only human, and he discloses that he was subject to the qualms of being human. "To be overcome by one's weakness is only human."(304) Other than by looking at the fight as something bigger than his individual story, he is able to undo his sense of being human, and is therefore able to contain his own craving for protection and well-being.

Ernst Junger established much more than significance for the war as a whole, but somewhat found meaning for his complete existence in his book, Storm of Steel and that alone is reason enough for those in Nazi Germany to embrace him as one of their own.

He was always placed in a situation that, it can be alleged that in order to stay alive, or at least survive emotionally sane, one has to think that there is a validation for war and that skirmishing in it is more than an responsibility, but an opportunity, chance, and a necessity. For the person it has to be mentally fulfilling and for a nation it means that it sharps one of its blades. Ernst informs us, "...all success springs from individual action, while the mass of troops give impetus and weight of fire."(301)

If bravery is doing something notwithstanding being scared, then anyone can dispute that Ernest Junger, apart from his politics and whether or not he supports Nazi Germany, was a courageous man. Nevertheless, regardless of how dignified the reason may be, ultimately the mind has to discover a way to handle all the carnage that he describes. You can either pretend it wasn't happening as his fellow soldiers were doing, or you can become packed with yearning the fight and finding the thrill of death exciting, being able to know somewhat how someone's life began and how it ended. Every hero is, at one point or another confronted by death, and it's a shame that for those fighters in WWI experienced that at such an early age. He states in the book once you've a witness to such a thing you begin to realize that the fighting and the war itself is not the horrible thing about it all. "It is not danger, however extreme it may be, that depresses the spirit of the men so much as over-fatigue and wretched conditions."(60) It's even been agreed upon by scholars that the situation on the Western Front during the war, where the modern warfare was born, submitted the fighters/ soldiers to the worst conditions imaginable. World War I wasn't your old typical war of two huge armies gathering together and meeting at a specific spot for battle, but rather involved trenches and weapons of mass destruction. The actual fighting, where the barrage of bullets never stopped and the typical soldier lived in the trench and small holes, where diseases could've been spawning, and where they battled alongside dead and rotting bodies, with barely