Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)($13.30Value)

Description

The memoir widely viewed as the best account ever written of fighting in WW1 A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Jünger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict but—more importantly—as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, Jünger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will mark his failure. Published shortly after the war’s end, Storm of Steel was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann’s brilliant new translation. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. “The definitive World War I account from the German point of view.” — Margaret Atwood,  Entertainment Weekly “ Storm of Steel  is what so many books claim to be but are not: a classic account of war.” — London Evening Standard   “Extraordinary . . . Michael Hofmann’s superlative translation retains all the coruscating vitality of the original.” — Niall Ferguson, author of  Civilization,Colossus,  and  The Ascent of Money Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was born in Heidelberg. He ran away from school and volunteered to join the German army. Fighting throughout the war, he recorded his experiences in several books, most famously in In Stahlgewittern ( Storm of Steel ). On the day Germany declared war in 1914, 19-year-old Ernst Jünger enlisted. He fought with an infantry company -- the 73rd Hanoverians -- for the next four years and participated in some of the most famous and bloody battles of all time: the Somme, Cambrai, Passchendaele. He also carried out reconnaissance missions, trained commandos and nearly every day saw his comrades die. He was either shot or severely wounded by shrapnel a half-dozen times but always recovered to fight again. By the end of the war Jünger had risen to the rank of captain and had been given, among other honors, the Iron Cross, First Class. Finally, on Sept. 22, 1918, the Kaiser bestowed on him the order of "pour le Mérite." Despite its French name, this is Germany's highest award for valor, and Jünger was (and still is) the youngest man ever to receive it. As it happens, though, Jünger was more than just a warrior. He was also sensitive to nature, enjoyed reading Ariosto and Tristram Shandy while on leave or in hospital, and later became both an entomologist and a distinguished novelist. Yet throughout a very long life -- he lived, amazingly, to the age of 102, dying in 1998 -- he was always a strong nationalist, a man of the right. At first he seemingly welcomed Hitler -- the Führer actually sent him an inscribed copy of Mein Kampf -- but he never joined the National Socialist Party and his best-known novel, On the Marble Cliffs, is partly an allegorical warning against Nazism. Still, Jünger's most lasting work is this memoir -- based on extensive diaries and first published in 1920 -- of his four years of hard combat during World War I. In an especially fine introduction, translator Michael Hofmann notes that this stark reportorial account of battle has been deeply admired by literary masters as different as Borges and Brecht, Alberto Moravia and Andre Gide. This last wrote that Storm of Steel "is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith." Like many people, I have absolutely no love for the martial spirit, detest all forms of nationalism and feel queasy at the sight of blood. Yet I can't remember when I've read a book as thrilling and hypnotic, as perversely magnificent as Storm of Steel. Hofmann likens it, with justice, to The Iliad. It is dedicated, simply, apolitically: "For the fallen." Inevitably, page after page depicts almost unimaginable horror: "We went on, eyes implacably on the man in front, through a knee-high trench formed from a chain of enormous craters, one dead man after another. At moments, we felt our feet settling on soft, yielding corpses, whose form we couldn't make out on account of the darkness. The wounded man collapsing on the path suffered the same fate; he was trampled underfoot by the boots of those hurrying ever onwards . . . . "The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the