[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
All Quiet on the Western Front ranks as the definitive anti-war novel of World War I, perhaps for all wars, and to some the most important war novel of all time. It was widely banned in the inter-war period yet went on to sell more than 20 million copies and has three film adaptations, the most recent the acclaimed 2022 version. It’s so famous, so prominent, so dominating, that the novel I think is the best war novel ever written can only point back at it from a ‘see also’ link on Wikipedia. That novel is Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger.
You may recognize that name from 2023’s ACX book review, * On the Marble Cliffs*. It was my first serious look at Jünger as well; he is described as a “serial killer” and a “sociopath,” the kind of modern psycho who nowadays would take glee in uploading videos of drones blowing people up, someone perhaps who sees war as the chance to visit death upon human beings with the state’s permission. I had
The Wikipedia page is light on details, but it’s beyond impressive1. Jünger fought throughout World War I in the thick of it, starting as a private and ending as a company-commanding Lieutenant. He saw action at the Somme and Cambrai, the Battle of Arras then the Third Battle of Ypres and finally the Ludendorff Offensive. He was wounded 14 times, sometimes quite severely, and came out of it with the Pour le Mérite (the most prestigious Prussian officer’s decoration) alongside numerous other awards. Storm of Steel is, basically, his diary of his time in the war. After the war he was a very famous writer, and if you want to know more about him you should read the previous ACX review which covers his story more and is interesting in its own right.
So there was nothing to do but read it myself. Storm of Steel is not a very long book by page count. What I will call it is dense. It is not a diary that Jünger used to explain his theories, his ideas or his politics except as cursory asides. It is a book about WAR, hundreds of pages of it, from the mundane to the bloody to the idyllic. Storm of Steel is, in my humble opinion, the best war novel ever written.
I did not say that it is the best _anti-_war novel; I also did not say that it is a _pro-_war novel, although in some places and versions Jünger claims war can be glorious or make someone stronger in a rising-to-the-challenge sense. It is at its core an account of a war, a war more bloody and terrible than any of us could imagine, written by someone intelligent and gifted in writing who happened to see much of it and survive to tell the tale. It is by turns harrowing, riveting, insightful, terrifying, humorous, disgusting and soul-shaking. I had read All Quiet and Storm of Steel years ago, and for this review I read both again, then got a different version and translation of Storm of Steel to read it yet again; I can say that it was all worth it. There is nothing like it, and I hope that nothing like it will come ever again.
If you will forgive me a meme, if I had a nickel for every German World War I war novel I read that featured a bug-collecting protagonist who drank oily machinegun water during an attack, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, let us truly begin. I opened with All Quiet on the Western Front for a reason: you probably know about it, and it’s also a German infantryman’s perspective of World War I. All Quiet also describes the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a veteran serving for years, of seeing death and destruction around every corner, breaks up its action with humor and levity, and ends with the war. The comparison is natural.
The truth is that All Quiet on the Western Front is a work of fiction with a thesis. It covers nearly three years, but Remarque was only on frontline duty for about five weeks. It’s unlikely that Remarque ever participated in the actual combat he describes: an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung describes his service as mostly rear-area construction work; certainly dangerous, he certainly lived through shelling and gas attacks, and it’s a matter of record that he was wounded, but he probably didn’t see the relentless action he describes in All Quiet.
Storm of Steel was first published in 1920, while All Quiet came in 1929. Remarque was aware of this other famous account of World War I in his own language. I open with the bug-collecting and drinking cooling water because it’s those sorts of shared details that popped out to me after reading them both2, but Jünger was an independently-famous entomologist and a stormtrooper commander and Remarque was not. He was on the periphery of such things, and between his time at the front and his time in the hospital, I’m sure he experienced enough and met those who did experience the combat he describes to create the agonizing story, but Remarque was justifiably reticent about discussing his own war experiences or explaining himself.
All Quiet intersperses brief periods of combat with long scenes of Paul returning home, of soldiers discussing how it’s really the leaders who should fight3, of how training is miserable4 and the food is lousy5 and so on. It pontificates about the causes and horrors of war, about the damage it does to one’s psyche and soul, about how it makes men who should be brothers into sincere enemies, how it alienates the soldier from the civilian; it crafts a story for you to do all that. But it is a craft, and I think that detracts from its power.
Storm of Steel is true. It really happened, and it reports those happenings with minimal commentary. Many books start with an idea and write a world around them; Atlas Shrugged is a vehicle for getting the reader to an 80-page monologue about Objectivism. All Quiet is in that vein; it wants you to be anti-war, to feel the horrors of it, to know the unfairness, the blundering and chaos and death. It starts with the conclusion and works its way backwards. Storm of Steel works the other way around, describing it as it happened and drawing conclusions from that, but it barely draws anything itself and instead lets you do it, with barely a suggestive nudge. If you want to be pro-war, Storm of Steel will satisfy you with heroism and duty and camaraderie in the face of noble adversity. If you want to be anti-war, it will satisfy you with horror and futility and bloodiness in the face of a cruel industrial war machine. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, banally, you will hear about tasteless food and unceasing work and moments of absurdity and silly training. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, notably, you will hear about impossible situations and near-misses then grievous wounds and feats of daring and moments of sheer, unadulterated terror tempered by steely courage. If you want a few jokes, it even has some of those6. But above all, Storm of Steel offers one man’s true and unflinching account of The Great War, and what an account it is!
One last, brief aside before diving into the novel. Although it was originally published in 1920, Jünger revised the book throughout his lifetime, with the last edition coming in 1961. Translations vary too; Creighton’s translation from 1929 of the 1924 version is certainly a worse job than Hofmann’s of 2003 (of the last 1961 version), but Creighton was an English World War I veteran writing much closer to Jünger while Hofmann is a German native writing with 80 years of history built up. The early version I think is more raw, but also contains more commentary by Jünger, more nationalism and militarism, than the later version after World War II that is more refined and reflective and muted. I recommend the 2003 Hofmann translation that is more generalist and polished but less assertive, but the 1929 one is certainly still good, just unpolished and unapologetic. I quote from Hofmann’s translation unless noted otherwise.
Storm of Steel
Jünger opens Storm of Steel as a naive private headed to Champagne in January 1915. He is wounded in action, sent back for officer training and becomes a lieutenant, and in 1916 he takes command of a platoon before the Battle of the Somme. Here, he is wounded again, recovers, and returns to duty. In January 1917, he attends a company-command course and takes over running a company for the retreat from the Somme. This is about 40% of the way through, so for the next 160 pages or so we cover two years of fighting on the Western Front until he is finally wounded in August 1918 and the war ends. The book, as a memoir, is basically without plot or structure, following his life and actions throughout the time with brief asides to give updates on surrounding events, but it is extremely focused. It is all concise and directly related to him; it’s not just a collection of war anecdotes7, but it doesn’t have a central theme or plot. It is life on the front from beginning to end. Jünger does not take chapters to describe his leave or training, it’s all centered on and around the campaign.
But it’s not all action, and Jünger digresses constantly. He says so himself: “Of course, I was telling you about trench duty. But one loves these digressions; it’s an easy matter to start nattering, to fill up a dark night and the slow hours. I would many times stop and listen to the tales of some character from the front, or a fellow NCO, and take in his chatter with rapt attention.” He goes to rear service sometimes, and gets called into drinking parties with sector commanders in mock royal courts. He is one of the first commanders to implement the Stoßtruppen (stormtrooper, in English) tactics which focused on small-scale unit attacks instead of mass infantry assaults to break the trench stalemate, then leads a raid that ends with most of his soldiers dead or captured. He goes on a wild escapade with his comrades in a stolen French carriage, until, without brakes, it crashes in the hills of Lorraine. He talks about his time in the military hospitals, and takes moments to discuss the character of the soil in different locales, a surprisingly critical detail when you’re digging trenches. In the middle of the assault, his medal falls off, and he searches for it in the grass with his assistant’s aid while under fire in the field. Interspersed with it all though is the combat, the unrelenting artillery and small-arms fire, the constant watching and circling by enemy airplanes, the occasional sortie into no-mans-land or a raid of the enemy trench. And the deaths; so many dead I think we have no modern conception to reckon with it.
Why is Storm of Steel the best? What makes it worth reading? What would someone not that interested in war or World War I get out of it?
It’s not a literary masterpiece
per se, but it is interesting, with well-written and pleasant prose.Jünger recorded the course of the war fairly faithfully; if you want to see what World War I was like, at least in one small area, there’s no better option.
It is mostly anti-polemic, focusing on the war itself rather than ideas around or about it.
He was at the tip of the spear for years, and we can watch the methods change throughout the course of the novel.
He fought in some of the most important battles of the Western Front.
He started as a private and moved up to company commander, giving us both the narrow- and wide-scope perspectives.
The Anglophones won both world wars, and this colors our perspective of them.
Storm of Steelgives us the other side of (one) war.
In short, Storm of Steel is the epitome of the “standard” war novel; there’s nothing so magical or ground-breaking in it, but it does everything and so well that it elevates it above any peer, like the Game of the Century using the same pieces as any other chess game to make a masterful performance. I want to emphasize that last point above. An American war novel, in context, is from the winning (or at least non-losing) side. E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed goes through the brutal Pacific island-hopping campaign, and ends with:
Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country–as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.
The context here is in 1981, with an America that had many issues but had survived and was still comparatively prosperous. The message was that the sacrifice had been worth it. But Jünger doesn’t get to do this. He watches Germany become the Weimar Republic; he is first revising in the 1920s, Germany has lost its empire and the Kaiser is exiled, communists are sprouting everywhere (the Bavarian Soviet Republic was just a few years ago), Germany is under humiliating peace terms (the Saarland was still occupied, then the Ruhr in 1923), and the economy is undergoing hyperinflation as he is revising it. How does he end Storm of Steel in 1924?
Now these too are over, and already we see once more in the dim light of the future the tumult of fresh ones [battles]. We–by this I mean those of the youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal–will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!
I can see why Hitler would like it and send him fan mail. After this, he watches the rise of the Nazis. He sees World War II. He participates, but only tangentially; he is disgusted by the Nazis, he sees how they treat Jews in occupied France and works to save some of them, he watches Germany destroyed and its remains split by the war and the Iron Curtain fall. He revises Storm of Steel in 1961, and this time he omits the nationalism; the book ends a few paragraphs earlier, with the notice that he receives the Pour le Mérite.
Jünger was a soldier who watched nearly everything he cared about destroyed. The Kaiserreich was killed, then the Weimar government danced on its grave, then what he so held dear was resurrected like a horrifying zombie to pervert the core of his ideals, wearing his conservatism like a skin suit in mockery, then he watched that get put down, cremated and the remains scattered. Jünger revising in 1961 is far more reserved, more limited in his diversions of honor and duty. But he still says, on his way to a hospital after his first injury:
At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives.
The Theme of Storm of Steel
Jünger saw war beyond our wildest nightmares. The experience occupied a central portion of his mind, and he carried it for the rest of his life; wha…
