Storm of Steel

Description

To read this extraordinary book is to gain a unique insight into the compelling nature of organized, industrialized violence. Michael Hofmann's superlative translation retains all the coruscating vitality of the original' Niall Ferguson '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 ...' Storm of Steel is one of the greatest works to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War. A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, it illuminates like no other book the horrors but also the fascination of total war, presenting the conflict through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. As an account of the terrors of the Western Front and of the sickening allure that made men keep fighting on for four long years, Storm of Steel has no equal.

Ernst Junger, the son of a wealthy chemist, ran away from home to join the Foreign Legion. His father dragged him back, but he returned to military service when he joined the German army on the outbreak of the First World War. Storm of Steel was Junger's first book, published in 1920. Junger died in 1998.

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 Junger 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 *