Storm of Steel
Ernst Jünger
* * *
Storm of Steel
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Contents
Introduction
In the Chalk Trenches of Champagne
From Bazancourt to Hattonchâtel
Les Eparges
Douchy and Monchy
Daily Life in the Trenches
The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme
Guillemont
The Woods of St-Pierre-Vaast
Retreat from the Somme
In the Village of Fresnoy
Against Indian Opposition
Langemarck
Regniéville
Flanders Again
The Double Battle of Cambrai
At the Cojeul River
The Great Battle
British Gains
My Last Assault
We Fight Our Way Through
Bibliography
Follow Penguin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelburg in 1895. He ran away from school to enlist in the Foreign Legion and in 1914 volunteered to join the German army. He fought throughout the war and recorded his experiences in several books, most famously in Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel). While admired by the Nazis, he remained critical of them and through novels such as On the Marble Cliffs (1939) sought to understand the impasse into which he saw Germany heading. Throughout the Nazi period he was a controversial ‘inner emigrant’, distanced from the regime yet only obliquely in opposition. His most famous later books include Heliopolis (1949), The Glass Bees (1957), Eumeswil (1977), Aladdin’s Problem (1983) and A Dangerous Encounter (1985). He died in 1998.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Michael Hofmann, the son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann, was born in Freiburg in 1957 and came to England at the age of four. He went to schools in Edinburgh and Winchester, and studied English at Cambridge. He lives in London.
To date, he has published four books of poems and a collection of criticism, Behind the Lines, all with Faber and Faber, who also brought out a book of contemporary versions of the Metamorphoses, co-edited with James Lasdun, called After Ovid. He has made selections of the poetry of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and edited a small anthology of German twentieth-century poetry. At present, he is working on a selection of Rilke in English, for Penguin, who also publish his translation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika/The Man Who Disappeared. He has translated many outstanding works of German twentieth-century fiction and nonfiction, among them works by Bertolt Brecht, Gert Hofmann, Wolfgang Koeppen and Joseph Roth (nine titles, including The Radetzky March), available from Granta.
PENGUIN BOOKS
STORM OF STEEL
‘Without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith’ André Gide
‘Michael Hofmann’s excellent new translation revitalizes a text indispensable for understanding the impact of the First World War on German mentalities’ Ian Kershaw, BBC History Magazine, Books of the Year
‘A classic of war literature … Michael Hofmann’s translation is a masterpiece of its art’ Ron Butlin, Sunday Herald (Glasgow)
‘A fascinating counterpart to Graves and Sassoon … Ernst Jünger is arguably an original’ Tibor Fischer, Sunday Telegraph
‘The most complete picture of the realities of industrially organized warfare … evokes the strange fascination that lay at the heart of the horrors of the Western Front … an outstanding new translation by Michael Hofmann … simple, precise and elegant’ Henning Hoff, Independent
‘Shows a keen eye for the detail of combat … Some passages freeze the experience of combat more vividly than any camera’ Richard Holmes, Evening Standard
‘A brilliantly vivid conjuration of the immediacy and intensity of battle … What raises Jünger to the level of epic is the grandeur of the prose, which is sublime but never sentimental’ Daniel Johnson, Daily Telegraph
‘Unique among the many works that deal with life and death in Flanders during the First World War’ Paul Bailey, Sunday Times
For the fallen
Introduction
Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern is the original title) is one of the great books of World War I, if not the greatest. All sorts of trustworthy and unlikely people – and trustworthy often precisely because unlikely: cosmopolites, left-wingers, non-combatants – have stepped up to express their admiration, often in suitably embarrassed or bemused fashion: Böll and Borges, Enzensberger and Brecht, Gide and Moravia. In 1942, Gide wrote in his diary: ‘Ernst Jünger’s book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith.’
Its contrast with most of the others is stark. It has no pacifist design. It makes no personal appeal. It is a notably unconstructed book. It does not set its author and his experience in any sort of context. It offers nothing in the way of hows and whys, it is pure where and when and of course, above all, what. There is nothing in it about the politics of the war – nothing even on its outcome – and very little on the wider strategy of its conduct. It begins the moment Private Ernst Jünger first detrains in France, on 27 December 1914, at the age of nineteen, with (though we aren’t told this) a rushed school-leaving certificate and a couple of months’ training behind him, having volunteered on 1 August, the opening day of the war. (It is hard to imagine an English autobiographer or belletrist – a Graves or a Sassoon, amateur and holistic – wouldn’t have included that, or indeed the fact that the year before, as a bored romantic youth full of wanderlust, he had run away to Algeria to join the French Foreign Legion!) It ends, in one of a bare handful of scenes that are away from the action, back in Germany four years later, when he is too badly hurt to carry on, a decorated lieutenant and the youngest-ever recipient of the pour le Mérite. War is all – fighting is all – everything else is cropped away. And, from first to last, in the affirmative. It is the work of a man whom the war made – and who, in World War II, was to be again – a professional soldier. It was published long before the likes of Blunden, Graves, Remarque and Sassoon, all of which appeared in the late 1920s, at a classic ten-year distance from the events they describe, giving their public and themselves time to recover; only Barbusse’s novel Le Feu (Under Fire), from 1917, came out much before Ernst Jünger’s account was first privately printed with a local firm (the family gardener, Robert Meier, was designated as the ‘publisher’) in 1920, at the instigation of Jünger’s father. The impressively cumbersome original title was In Storms of Steel: from the Diary of a Shock Troop Commander, Ernst Jünger, War Volunteer, and subsequently Lieutenant in the Rifle Regiment of Prince Albrecht of Prussia (73rd Hanoverian Regiment).
The initial print-run was 2,000, the intended readership presumably members of the regiment and other veterans, and the work, in literary terms, was undistinguished and at times, apparently – hardly a surprise, considering its author’s repeated rush to get out of school – ‘even fell short of the required standard for a sixth-form essay’. The ‘diary’ element, though never entirely suppressed later, was initially mostly all there was, closely following the sixteen notebooks Jünger filled during the war. The book steadily sold through its small printings, but it wasn’t the instant bestseller it is sometimes thought to have been. Jünger was recruited by Mittler & Son, a noted publisher of militaria in Berlin, and wrote more books on the war, including the viscerally – as well as headily – unpleasant treatise On Battle as an Inner Experience (1922) – of which I could not bring myself to read more than the excerpts I read years ago in a book on German history – and a couple of spin-offs covering material from Storm of Steel in a more lingering and opinionated way: Copse 125 (1925) and Fire and Blood (19
25). A shot at a novel, Sturm – after one of the characters, nomen est omen – was abandoned after a few instalments. In the mid 1920s, then, Jünger was already a prolific and established war writer before such a thing really existed. (His first non-war book, a memoir of his childhood, didn’t appear until 1929.) Even so, acute observers were afraid they might lose Jünger the soldier to literature. On balance, I suppose, that’s what happened, but it’s a close call. Jünger has remained as much identified with World War I – or war in general – as with writing. I forget who it was who said they couldn’t picture Jünger the author at all except in uniform.
In the late 1920s, via Stahlhelm and the veterans’ scene, he found himself as a publicist in nationalist politics. Because of the dearth of politics in Weimar, everything, paradoxically, was politicized; even the defeated generals, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, were rehabilitated as political figures. This is when Jünger made his notorious remark that he ‘hated democracy like the plague’, but to some extent that was what one might call ‘Weimar talk’. Jünger was courted, not surprisingly, by the Nazis, and twice offered a seat in the Reichstag, but he wasn’t interested. He didn’t join the Deutsche Akademie der Dichtung (chaired for a year by the poet Gottfried Benn), nor was he ever a member of the Nazi Party. He and Hitler did exchange signed copies of their books, but even that seems like a mismatch: My Struggle for Fire and Blood. There was always something aloof and solipsistic about Jünger – the word ‘aristocratic’ is often misapplied to him – that meant that as a soldier and a writer and even an ideologue he was in it for himself, and never quite, at that. He was not a novelist or a politician or a penseur, though with elements of all three. He may have described himself as ‘a field marshal of ideas’, but, as Thomas Nevin drily remarks, ‘he calls no philosophical system to attention’. It is hugely to Jünger’s credit (though it is as much a matter of temperament as of choice) that he was never an opportunist – if anything, rather the opposite. The 1930s were a boom time for him – sales of Storm of Steel shot into six figures – but he retired from the public eye: left Berlin, wrote essays that – irritatingly for the Nazis – were aimed always beyond the present and the immediate future, wrote on entomology (the other passion of his life), travelled widely in Europe and further afield, lived quietly with his family in rural seclusion.
In 1939, he was back in uniform, and promoted to captain. He spent most of World War II with the German occupation in Paris, consorting with French intellectuals, eating and drinking and buying old books – and keeping a record of all these activities, and of a discreet political dissent, in his diaries, later published as Strahlungen (Irradiations might be the best English equivalent). These confirm (along with Storm of Steel, of course) that his gifts as a writer are primarily those of a diarist: descriptiveness and an ear for speech, attention to detail, mobility of perspective, intellectual stamina and disjunctiveness, at his best over medium distances, as a writer of passages rather than of books or sentences. After the war, Jünger’s stock was predictably lower, and for a time he was not allowed to publish in Germany. But as early as 1955 he was (for the first time in his life) winning literary prizes, and in 1957 he began his association with the German publisher Klett that saw not one but two editions of his Collected Works, one completed in ten volumes in 1965, the second in eighteen in 1983. (Along with Wieland, Klopstock and Goethe, Jünger is one of only four German authors prolific and important and long-lived enough to see their own ‘second edition’.) By the time of his death in 1998, at the age of a hundred and two, he had been heaped with virtually all the literary and civic honours Germany – and indeed Europe – had to bestow. He enjoyed a particularly devoted following in France, where one critic reckoned up an astonishing forty-eight of his works in print.
Age both softened and exacerbated Jünger’s provocativeness. On the one hand, it provided him with distractions and luxuries, made him venerable and respectable (he was an incarnation of Yeats’s senatorial ‘smiling public man’); on the other, his mere continued existence was enough to goad to fury a wide band of literary and political enemies in Germany. Whether he wanted to or not – and he was often travelling the globe, researching unusual life-forms in remote settings – he remained a rallying-point and an object of fascination for the Fascist Right, and of horror and embarrassment for the Left. Honorific occasions involving Jünger, like the award of the Goethe Prize in 1982 – which at the time was compared to something that might have happened in Weimar – would invariably degenerate into typisch deutsch literary-political showdowns – very ugly and terribly principled. As an instance of the unbridled hatred felt for Jünger in certain quarters, in the 1990s, in Berlin – only in Berlin! – a gay musical version of Storm of Steel played to appreciative houses: a multiple and systematic persiflage of an experience and values that to him were sacred. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
A very long life, like Jünger’s (the name, by the way, does indeed mean ‘younger’), brings with it a preoccupation with its form, with its meaning, with its straightness. This is something one sees as well in such survivor figures as the Norwegian Knut Hamsun (who lived to ninety-three), Ezra Pound (eighty-seven), or Boris Pasternak (a stripling seventy). Where Richard II says, ‘Arm, my name,’ Jünger seems to say, ‘Arm, my age.’ He refers, I don’t know how humorously, to his early – pre-1930? – writing as his ‘Old Testament’. He quotes Ranke on the desirability for historians of attaining a great age. It must be tempting – perhaps especially if one happens to be a diarist as well – to look down on younger people and say: what do they know? According to Octavio Paz, the claim to be the father of one’s antagonist is a serious snub in Mexico. In 1984, a very old and spry Jünger turned out at Verdun with Helmut Kohl (whose favourite author he was) and François Mitterand (another admirer) to celebrate Franco-German reconciliation. Book titles underline his authority: Siebzig verweht (Seventy Gone, his journals of the 1970s), Zwei Mal Halley (Halley Two Times, a reference to the comet, which he saw in 1910, and again in 1986). Jünger made the claim that he had never regretted anything he had written, or taken anything back. In fact, his literary output and profile were subject to minute supervision and protection, by the author, his family, his publishers, his estate. (Cocteau observed pricelessly that Jünger ‘didn’t have dirty hands, he had no hands’.) Nothing resembling a biography appeared before the late 1980s. Some books of his were retired, others promoted. One of the English studies on him, by Elliot Neaman, has a section heading lapidarily called: ‘Jünger revididus’; it may not be good Latin, but it’s a good joke.
The most revised of his books was the earliest of them, precisely Storm of Steel. Typically, there is as yet no full-length study of the changes that were made – though there is no shortage of adversarial and defensive and specialist writing on Jünger – but it seems there were as many as eight different published versions of the book: the earliest in 1920, for first publication, the latest in 1961, for the first edition of the Collected Works. No Jünger text, one critic groused, has ever been called definitive. (Even the copy I worked from seemed not to carry a date or ascription, although I’m sure it was the newest version.) In between, the most substantively different texts were those of 1924 and 1934. It is because of this that, even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have left out of my introduction all mention of Jünger’s remaining eighty-odd years. Storm of Steel accompanied Jünger through most of his extremely long life, and he tinkered with it, one would have to say, obsessively. It was often tempting to put away the discussions of him once they got past the war, and pretend that Jünger had died, or disappeared into obscurity or uncontentiousness, but because the later ideas and contexts have some influence, to say the least, on a kind of text-fleuve that evolved over the best part of sixty years, I had at least to allude to them in passing. As well as being one of the earliest books on World War I, Storm of Steel is also one of the newest, and it seems likely that it gained in both respects. If one might put it like this, in add
ition to outflanking the competition by getting in ahead of them, Storm of Steel also outlasted them: the experience it offers the reader is both more immediate and more considered, more naively open-ended and more artistically complex, more Sartre-ish and more – what shall I say? – Paterian.
The first revision was in 1924, when Jünger completely rewrote his book for his new publisher. This first revised edition has been called the first ‘literary’ version of Storm of Steel. It was also a vigorously, even aggressively, Nationalist version, which may have played well with the domestic audience of that time, but perhaps less well abroad. It was, as luck would have it, this version that was translated into English in 1929, and French in 1930. In the copy of Basil Creighton’s English translation that I have, there is a somewhat ingratiating ‘Author’s Preface to the English Edition’, with references to Gibraltar and Waterloo, where Jünger’s Hanoverian regiment – or, rather, their predecessors – had made common cause with the English against the French, and careful compliments on the bravery and manliness of the British: ‘Of all the troops who were opposed to the Germans on the great battlefields the English were not only the most formidable but the manliest and the most chivalrous.’ But, once into the book, for instance in the chapter ‘The Great Offensive’, there are passages like this:
It [the trench] seethed with English. I fired off my cartridges so fiercely that I pressed [sic] the trigger ten times at least after the last shot. […] Only a few got away. A NCO was standing near me gaping at this spectacle with mouth agog. I snatched the rifle from his hands in an uncontrollable need to shoot. My first victim was an Englishman whom I shot between two Germans at 150 metres. He snapped shut like the blade of a knife and lay still.