Warfare/Eoin Bourke: The principal merit of Jünger's still controversial account of the first World War is that it confronts the reader relentlessly with the day-to-day realities of that most absurd of all wars by means of a cinematic technique of hectic pannings and detailed zooms.
It brings home the dreadful surprises of trench warfare, the constant barrage of deafening projectiles, "the chaos and vacuity of the battlefield", the eerie silences, the lunar landscapes and ravaged villages, the cramped conditions and tedium, the cold and muck, the mutilation and putrefaction.
The trouble with the book is that it is fundamentally uncritical of a war in which profiteers and industrialists made huge fortunes (Krupp supplied both sides with barbed wire) while generals sent millions of men as cannon fodder into a four-year-long bloodbath, "taking and retaking the same small area of mud" (David Thompson). Of this there is no reflection in Jünger's book, except to mention in passing "the perennial question [. . .]: Why does mankind have wars?", without addressing the question himself.
Rather than analysing the social consequences he lends war an aura of mystification in speaking nebulously of its "deeper puzzles", as if it were an ineffable numinous force. From the beginning he makes it all too obvious that he was very much in his element among those "real men" of an "ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood" who engaged in gunfights with their tobacco pipes clenched between their teeth. His later writings would refer back repeatedly to this one defining experience of his life, one that had a disturbingly erotic dimension, from the "little twinge of arousal" when first loading live ammunition into his rifle, the first "longed-for order" to attack, to his moving through dead scenery in a "strange mood of melancholy exaltation", as well as his being overcome by "ecstatic joy" at finding himself at last in a "proper battle" in Les Esparges. At this point, Michael Hofmann, an otherwise impeccable translator, has rendered the German phrase närrische Freude too literally as "foolish delight", implying a self-criticism on the part of Jünger of his initial naïvety about the sordid realities of war. But Jünger's exaltation endures throughout despite all the sordidness, even if it is mingled occasionally with other moods of shock, despair and horror. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that the horror is a contributory factor to the exaltation. Jünger goes into gratuitous detail about the forms of mutilation he encounters, and says of the all-pervasive smell of rotting corpses that the "heavy sweetish atmosphere" that it engendered "was not merely disgusting; it also, in association with the piercing fogs of gunpowder, brought about an almost visionary excitement, that otherwise only the extreme nearness of death is able to produce".
He reports, too, of the sound that putrefaction causes:
As I was making my way through a thicket once, on my own, I was dismayed by a quiet hissing and burbling sound. I stepped closer and encountered two bodies, which the heat had awakened to a ghostly type of life. The night was silent and humid; I stopped for a long time before this eerie scene.
Hofmann here chooses, perhaps for reasons of stylistic economy, to leave out the phrase wie gebannt, which means that Jünger was "fascinated" or "mesmerised" by the scene, suggesting a more than clinical interest in the process. Before this incident near the Siegfried Line, Jünger's troops had flushed out a company of Indian soldiers fighting on the British side. He finds three bodies, two Indians and a white officer, "a first lieutenant", as the rank-conscious author pedantically notes, who had been shot in the eye. "The bullet had exited through his temple and shattered the rim of his steel helmet, which", he adds cold-bloodedly, "I kept as a souvenir." Here again Hofmann decided not to use the more telling original German word Trophäe (trophy). But we know from a photographic illustration of the first edition of In Stahlgewittern that "trophy" is more apposite. It showed Jünger standing in triumphant posture over the dead bodies of the Indian soldiers from that same skirmish.
Jünger's own scrapes with death and the wounds which he proudly enumerates at the end of the book are also a source of warped pleasure. When, in his last assault of the war, he is shot in the chest and crashes to the bottom of the trench - fatally wounded, as he imagines and even hopes - it is, he says, one of the very few moments of his life when he was utterly happy. Endeavouring to elevate this pointless mischance to the level of a semi-mystical epiphany, he writes: "I understood, as in a flash of lightning, the true inner purpose and form of my life".
What that true inner purpose is, he makes no attempt to explain, but one suspects that one is witnessing the manifestation of a pathological syndrome rather than a mystical experience. As Klaus Theweleit's study, Male Fantasies, reveals, Jünger shared his militarist sang-froid, his unsavoury preoccupations, his reactionary mindset and even his style of diary writing with many other right-wing "Great War" veterans and Freikorps officers, symptoms of a widespread post- Wilhelminian malaise that was to become virulent in the Hitler period.
Ernst Jünger: Storm of Steel Translated by Michael Hofmann Allen Lane, 289pp. £14.99
Eoin Bourke is Professor of German at NUI Galway. His last book, The Austrian Anschluss in History and Literature, was published by Arlen House in 2000. He is preparing a publication, Poor Green Erin - German Travellers in Ireland in the Era of Daniel O'Connell.