Storm Of Steel By Ernest Jünger: Literary Analysis

Ernest Jünger’s memoir Storm of Steel details his experiences as a German officer on the Western Front during World War I. Jünger eagerly volunteers for military service and is deployed in 1915 to a reserve unit in Champagne. Throughout the course of the war, Jünger works his way up through the ranks until he becomes an officer. He fought hard, was impressed only by soldiers’ bravery and in the end won an award for his efforts. His first person narrative painfully depicts the harsh realities of war and the horrors of trench warfare that I was perhaps not ready to come to terms with as my fiancee, who lost his life at the hands of the war, was in Jünger’s position only fighting for the allied side. Jünger’s narrative ends after the German …show more content…
Jünger 's writings intertwine descriptions of daily life with graphic depictions of war. Death is portrayed as a normality in the day to day activities on the front so one gets a true sense of what daily life for a solider was like. Most of the war was a stalemate and featured long periods of waiting broken up by brief but intense combat and readers get a true sense of what the war was really like because Jünger 's memoir parallels this. Day-to-day activities are broken up by fighting and loss and then day-to-day activities resume and the cycle continues. The sense of human life having little value is clear. No one gives death a second thought and it is apparent that little meaning comes from it. Roland 's death served no military purpose and was not heroic and I just hoped that this was not the case for all. In Storm of Steel death it is not portrayed as heroic but rather part of normal day to day events which is also evident in Jünger 's detached and to-the-point style. Jünger describes the soldiers who lose their lives on the front as, “men who answered the demands of the