Ernst Junger’s ‘Sturm’

Ernst Junger is best known for his 1920 memoir, Storm of Steel, but he wrote a good deal besides. The publishing firm Telos is issuing translations of several of his works, and the latest, published today, is Sturm, a novella of 1923. Telos kindly let me read the text before publication, and here is my review:
Alexis Walker’s very readable translation gives us a chance to read a subtle novella about an intellectual in the trenches who sees the age of industrial-scale war as deeply dehumanising, yet recognises that this war has given him a sense of identity, and of community with others, which no peacetime experience could match.
Lieutenant Sturm may be a partial self-portrait of the author. His story begins when the third company are expecting a British bombardment and assault. Tension is high, and it is not unusual for some soldiers to be transformed by terror, as though they had seen ghosts. One morning the comrades found one of these quiet men dead on the latrine, swimming in blood. His right foot was bare; it seemed that he had pointed the weapon at his heart and pulled the trigger with his toes.
Sturm does not succumb to despair, but keenly analyses the war in which he is trapped. Before the war he had been a biologist, and he decides that modern warfare (or perhaps modernity itself) has created a disruption in the Darwinian natural processes: ‘Since the invention of morality and gunpowder, the phrase “the selection of the fittest” has lost ever more meaning for the individual.’ In a war of long-range mass slaughter, individual actions count for nothing. A soldier may resent ‘the slaveholding of the modern state’, but he is powerless to do anything about it.
Despite this analysis it is war, paradoxically, that has given meaning to Sturm’s life. Before enlisting, he had been ‘the man of books and coffee houses, the intellectual with the nervous appearance.’ He aspires to be a novelist, and we read the fictional vignettes that he shares with his fellow platoon leaders. They are all about men like his peacetime self, alienated from society and unable to make a meaningful connection with the rest of life. War, on the other hand, has brought Sturm close friendships; he feels that he and the other platoon commanders share a ‘profound spiritual union’ impossible in peacetime. The war may be terrible, and it may be mechanised and impersonal, but it allows him to glimpse possibilities of authenticity.
This authenticity is the touchstone by which he finds the war’s official rhetoric wanting. Those in command try to motivate soldiers by using fine language and glorifying ‘a hero’s death’. Such words have lost their meaning, and in contrast, Sturm remembers a sergeant who truly knew his men. Before an assault he told them: ‘Kids, we’re going over there now to gobble up the Englishmen’s rations.’ This, decides Sturm was ‘the best battle address’ that had ever heard, because it spoke about something real.
Many of the themes of this novella also appear in British fiction of the twenties, but the German military defeat has concentrated Junger’s mind, and has denied him the consolation that the end has justified the horrors. The ending of the book brings Sturm up against military reality, and he has to face a decision about the terms on which life is worth living. His choice is a grim one.
Junger is a remarkable writer. In this novella he comes across as a romantic with a loathing of modernity, especially as characterised by the overbearing state. The book is grim, and deeply pessimistic – but exceptionally interesting, and well worth reading.