War Novels And Memoirs
The First World War spawned a great variety of war novels and memoirs. German novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front and British memoirs by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden helped to create a mythology of "disillusionment."
I will survey several German and British memoirs in this essay, making comparisons between them with a view to drawing some conclusions as to how German and British soldiers sustained morale.
Ernst Jünger's The Storm of Steel is a unique and interesting book. Jünger's view of the war was a violent one and he did not hesitate to describe horrible wounds in great detail. Unlike other memoir writers, however, Jünger did not feel revulsion at the violence of war.
To him, war was primarily a beneficial experience that left soldiers with a positive legacy of friends made and lessons learned: "Time only strengthens my conviction that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."
This attitude has caused many scholars to condemn Jünger as a bloodthirsty German nationalist. In an ambivalent introduction to the first English edition of this book, the English veteran and novelist R.H. Mottram indicts Jünger for creating "a sort of Nietzschean-Wagnerian atmosphere of heroics," and wonders whether "blows from great pieces of metal" had affected Jünger's sanity; but he also commended the German for his "sterling honesty."
The modern writer Martin Travers complains that Jünger failed to "engage with either the human or the historical tragedy" of the war, and that therefore he was somehow dishonest compared to anti-war writers.
The Storm of Steel There is no doubt that Jünger's motives in writing The Storm of Steel were political. He was a nationalist who believed in the resurrection and rearmament of Germany; one of his goals was to perpetuate the myth of an unbeaten German army.
Jünger claimed that the German soldiers fought with undiminished morale to the bitter end of the war
I will survey several German and British memoirs in this essay, making comparisons between them with a view to drawing some conclusions as to how German and British soldiers sustained morale.
Ernst Jünger's The Storm of Steel is a unique and interesting book. Jünger's view of the war was a violent one and he did not hesitate to describe horrible wounds in great detail. Unlike other memoir writers, however, Jünger did not feel revulsion at the violence of war.
To him, war was primarily a beneficial experience that left soldiers with a positive legacy of friends made and lessons learned: "Time only strengthens my conviction that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."
This attitude has caused many scholars to condemn Jünger as a bloodthirsty German nationalist. In an ambivalent introduction to the first English edition of this book, the English veteran and novelist R.H. Mottram indicts Jünger for creating "a sort of Nietzschean-Wagnerian atmosphere of heroics," and wonders whether "blows from great pieces of metal" had affected Jünger's sanity; but he also commended the German for his "sterling honesty."
The modern writer Martin Travers complains that Jünger failed to "engage with either the human or the historical tragedy" of the war, and that therefore he was somehow dishonest compared to anti-war writers.
The Storm of Steel There is no doubt that Jünger's motives in writing The Storm of Steel were political. He was a nationalist who believed in the resurrection and rearmament of Germany; one of his goals was to perpetuate the myth of an unbeaten German army.
Jünger claimed that the German soldiers fought with undiminished morale to the bitter end of the war