Description
Book SynopsisPresenting the desperate conflict of the First World War through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier, Ernst Jünger''s Storm of Steel is translated by Michael Hofmann in Penguin Modern Classics.
''As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest.''
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger''s experience of combat on the front line - leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, and simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart. One of the greatest books to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War, it illuminates like no other book not only the horrors but also the fascination of a war that made men keep fighting for four long years.
Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) the son of a wealthy chemist, ran away from home to join the Foreign Legi
Trade Review
Undoubtedly the most powerful memoir of any war I have ever read ... Storm of Steel combines the most astonishing literary gifts with absorption with war in every detail. It has German loyalties and a German sensibility, but not a trace of propaganda. It is particular, yet universal ... What Jünger saw and recorded was, to use his own word, 'primordial'. It takes great art to convey that appalling simplicity -- Charles Moore * Telegraph *
Storm of Steel is what so many books claim to be but are not: a classic account of war * Evening Standard *
Hofmann's interpretation is superb * The Times *
Unique in the literature of this or any other war is its brilliantly vivid conjuration of the immediacy and intensity of battle * Telegraph *
