One of the most memorable takeaways from Storm of Steel is the staggering amount of suffering and death that Jünger describes, and not just that of people close to him. Because Storm of Steel is adapted from Jünger’s 16 volumes of wartime diaries, he obviously took great care to record these events in detail. Yet Jünger is restrained, not gratuitous, in his remembrance of death, and he often adds minimal, albeit powerful, comments on the effects such events had on him. Through his attentiveness to such details, Jünger suggests that proximity to suffering and death fundamentally changes a person, eventually pulling that person into its realm and making them a participant in it, not just a witness.
War transforms a person’s perceptions, making one react differently to ordinary things than they’ve done before. Reflecting on the first big scares in his early war experience, Jünger remarks, “This was something that was to accompany us all through the war, that habit of jumping at any sudden and unexpected noise. Whether it was a train clattering past, a book falling to the floor, or a shout in the night—on each occasion, the heart would stop with a sense of mortal dread. It bore out the fact that for four years we lived in the shadow of death. The experience hit so hard in that dark country beyond consciousness, that every time there was a break with the usual, the porter Death would leap to the gates with hand upraised, like the figure above the dial on certain clock towers[.]” In short, death transfigures the ordinary. Once someone becomes aware of their proximity to death, even everyday noises become potential threats.
Exposure to suffering and death even begins to alter a person’s typical reactions to the world around them. Jünger recalls that, on the way to the Battle of the Somme, “a driver split his thumb in the course of crank-starting his lorry. The sight of the wound almost made me ill, I have always been sensitive to such things. I mention this because it seems virtually unaccountable as I witnessed such terrible mutilation in the course of the following days. It’s an example of the way in which one’s response to an experience is actually largely determined by its context.” This passage is remarkable because every chapter of Storm of Steel is filled with Jünger’s stoic descriptions of horrifying injuries—yet the sight of a relatively mundane, non-critical injury sickens him, as he’s “sensitive to such things.” This passage suggests that the unique pressures of warfare really can have a transforming effect on an individual’s psyche, steeling him against traumatic horrors witnessed daily, even while lifelong squeamishness remains unchanged.
In altering a person’s view of the world, however, proximity to death actually goes on to fundamentally change a person’s makeup in some way. There is, in fact, a “devilish” power at work in suffering that changes a person, even if they’re merely witnessing it. The first time Jünger witnesses traumatic war injuries firsthand, he is momentarily undone: “This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. […] I lost my head completely. Ruthlessly, I barged past everyone on my path, before finally […] climbing out of the hellish crush of the trench […] Like a bolting horse, I rushed through dense undergrowth, across paths and clearings, till I collapsed in a copse by the [road].” Jünger isn’t ashamed to admit his terror in the face of extreme suffering (even that of others, not his own). It’s something beyond human comprehension—a realm of “devilish” gods, something that reduces even the bravest person to an almost animal-like, irrational flight.
After inhabiting this “realm” for long enough, a person becomes in some way “demonic” himself. By the time he has become seasoned in battle, Jünger experiences a unique battlefield “excitement” that he has experienced nowhere else in his life. The smell of corpses hangs in the air, and “this heavy sweetish atmosphere was not merely disgusting; it also […] brought about an almost visionary excitement, that otherwise only the extreme nearness of death is able to produce. Here, and really only here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country. In moments when I felt it, I experienced no fear as such but a kind of exalted, almost demoniacal lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress.” Jünger makes no effort to explain this “foreign” quality. Indeed, it seems to defy human explanation: it’s repugnant, “demoniacal,” and at the same time bizarrely joyful. It seems that, in Jünger’s view, a person’s proximity to death renders him something other than human, albeit briefly.
If its unshrinking depiction of violence is Storm of Steel’s most striking characteristic, then perhaps the second most striking is its reticence in evaluating said violence. Throughout the book, and even after he describes the strange hilarity that sometimes befalls soldiers, Jünger is mainly concerned with reporting his experiences, not philosophizing. Arguably, though, Jünger’s spare descriptions of death’s “demonic” power over people speak volumes. War undermines one’s humanity; perhaps he feels that little more needs to be said.
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Suffering and Death Quotes in Storm of Steel
The desolation and the profound silence, sporadically broken by the crump of shells, were heightened by the sorry impression of devastation. Ripped haversacks, broken rifles, scraps of cloth, counterpointed grotesquely with children’s toys, shell fuses, deep craters from explosions, bottles, harvest implements, shredded books, battered household gear, holes whose gaping darkness betrayed the presence of basements, where the bodies of the unlucky inhabitants of the houses were gnawed by the particularly assiduous swarms of rats; […] trenches dug through the ravaged gardens, in among sprouting bulbs of onions, wormwood, rhubarb, narcissus, buried under weeds; on the neighbouring fields grain barns, through whose roofs the grain was already sprouting; all that, with a half-buried communication trench running through it, and all suffused with the smell of burning and decay. Sad thoughts are apt to sneak up on the warrior in such a locale, when he thinks of those who only recently led their lives in tranquillity.
Over the ruins, as over all the most dangerous parts of the terrain, lay a heavy smell of death, because the fire was so intense that no one could bother with the corpses. You really did have to run for your life in these places, and when I caught the smell of it as I ran, I was hardly surprised - it belonged to there. Moreover, this heavy sweetish atmosphere 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.
Here, and really only here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country. In moments when I felt it, I experienced no fear as such but a kind of exalted, almost demoniacal lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress.
With weeping eyes, I stumbled back to the Vaux woods, plunging from one crater into the next, as I was unable to see anything through the misted visor of my gas mask. With the extent and inhospitableness of its spaces, it was a night of eerie solitude. Each time I blundered into sentries or troops who had lost their way, I had the icy sensation of conversing not with people, but with demons. We were all roving around in an enormous dump somewhere off the edge of the charted world.
Such libations after a successfully endured engagement are among the fondest memories an old warrior may have. Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences. There was in these men a quality that both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevalieresque urge to prevail in battle. Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood.
In the evenings, I took a stick out of the corner and strolled along narrow footpaths that went winding through the hilly landscape. The neglected fields were full of flowers, and the smell grew headier and wilder by the day. Occasional trees stood beside the paths, under which a farmworker might have taken his ease in peacetime, bearing white or pink or deep-red blossoms, magical apparitions in the solitude. Nature seemed to be pleasantly intact, and yet the war had given it a suggestion of heroism and melancholy; its almost excessive blooming was even more radiant and narcotic than usual.
It’s easier to go into battle against such a setting than in a cold and wintry scene. The simple soul is convinced here that his life is deeply embedded in nature, and that his death is no end.
My steel helmet pulled down over my brow, staring at the road, whose stones shot sparks when iron fragments flew off them, I chewed my pipe and tried to talk myself into feeling brave. Curious thoughts flashed through my brain. For instance, I thought hard about a French popular novel called Le vautour de la Sierra that had fallen into my hands in Cambrai. Several times I murmured a phrase of Ariosto’s: ‘A great heart feels no dread of approaching death, whenever it may come, so long as it be honourable.’ That produced a pleasant kind of intoxication, of the sort that one experiences, maybe, on a rollercoaster. When the shells briefly abated, I heard fragments of the lovely song of ‘The Black Whale at Askalon’ coming from the man next to me, and I thought my friend Kius must have gone mad. But everyone has his own particular idiosyncratic method.
In the evening, the town was once again bombed. I went down into the cellar, where the women were huddled trembling in a corner, and switched on my torch to settle the nerves of the little girl, who had been screaming ever since an explosion had knocked out the light. Here was proof again of man’s need for home. In spite of the huge fear these women had in the face of such danger, yet they clung fast to the ground which at any moment might bury them.
Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.
Suddenly there was a deafening crash on the edge of the trench. I got a blow on the skull, and fell forward unconscious. When I came round, I was dangling head down over the breech of a heavy machine-gun, staring down at a pool of blood that was growing alarmingly fast on the floor of the trench. The blood was running down so unstoppably that I lost all hope. As my escort assured me he could see no brains, I took courage, picked myself up, and trotted on. That was what I got for being so foolish as to go into battle without a steel helmet. In spite of my twofold haemorrhage, I was terribly excited, and told everyone I passed in the trench that they should hurry to the line, and join the battle.
