Analysis Of Ernst Jünger's Storm Of Steel

The original title of the book, Storm of Steel was “Im Stahlgewittern”, which means in the middle of steel storm. Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is written in a form of a diary that describes his life as a soldier of the First World War from January 1, 1915 to August 1918. In this book, Jünger described the horrors of war without any falsity and rarely wrote political reasons for the war or criticism of war. Jünger’s focus was on detailedly describing the daily life of the battlefield and expressing the ability of the soldiers to cope with the crisis and the saga of survival struggle. However, I discovered in this book that he had strong nationalism, believed in male-heroism, and had somewhat psychopathic mindset. In this paper, I analyzed Ernst

As a witness to the war, Ernst Jünger tried to express the image of the heroic fighter which he had idealized. It seems that he wanted to suggest a new type of elite soldier's image that confronts heroically without giving up the terrible power despite the violence of war. Jünger emphasized the morality of the soldiers through his records. Jünger’s description of brave and masculine soldier is shown in this quote, “In Lieutenant Brecht, who had hurried back from the United States at the outbreak of war, we had the very man to defend such a position. He loved danger”—he praises Lieutenant Brecht’s bravery. Moreover, Ernst Jünger’s literary style is somewhat classical. For example, with the belief that the hero never dies, Jünger describes his fellow soldiers’ deaths as ‘had fallen’, instead of ‘was killed’. Furthermore, Jünger states that Lieutenant Brecht who was described as

In fact, the “Strom of Steel” had been revised for seven times; therefore, it is unclear to count the differences between the first version and the latest version. However, judging from this direct quotation, his political stance was the revolutionary nationalism. Young people who experienced the First World War claimed nationalism and wanted Germany to become a more powerful nationalist state by criticizing the democratic system and political order of the Weimar Republic. As a revolutionary nationalist, Jünger's thought praised the war as a mythical natural event in which powerful new mankind can be appeared. Some argue that Furthermore, some argue that anti-democratic and revolutionary position taken by the revolutionary nationalists of the 1920s had participated in preparation the emergence of Nazism