Storm of Steel: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Jünger's World War I memoir. He went into the trenches at twenty, came out four years later with fourteen wounds and Germany's highest military decoration, the Pour le Mérite. What he wrote down afterwards wasn't an anti-war novel. It wasn't a pro-war novel either. It was something harder to categorize: a precise, almost entomological record of what industrial combat does to a landscape, a body, and a mind that refuses to break.

The Anti-Remarque

If All Quiet on the Western Front is the Western Front as horror story, Storm of Steel is the Western Front as field report. Jünger doesn't moralize. He doesn't beg for sympathy. He describes the arc of a bullet, the texture of mud, the strange exhilaration of a night raid, and leaves you to sort out what it means. That refusal to interpret is exactly what makes readers either love or despise this book. There is no middle ground with Jünger.

About This Edition

The Penguin Classics Deluxe, Michael Hofmann's English translation, widely considered the definitive one. Hofmann stripped out the stiffness of earlier translations and let Jünger's cold, observational prose come through clean. If you're going to read it, read this version.

Author: Ernst Jünger
Translator: Michael Hofmann
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Format: Paperback (Deluxe Edition)