Summary Of Ernst Junger's Storm Of Steel

World War I was an extremely violent and traumatic time for soldiers on the fronts of the war, but even though it was a dramatic time for these men the memoirs from the war was varied on the western front within the German ranks. Two well known books written by the German men were Storm of Steel, written by Ernest Junger, and All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarsque which were written on the same frontier, yet were different on many basic levels. In Storm of Steel, Junger explains the war through his own personal journal that he had written while in the war and though very patriotic and nationalistic the events in the book were as they hapepned in history to the last detail that

Imagine you’re lying on the muddy, damp Earth and all around you can hear the screams of people you know dying. Shells explode, bullets race through the air, and poisonous gas seeps around you, all with the intent to harm you in some way. Yet, you willingly put yourself in that position day after day, year after year. The question surrounding this situation is, why? Who would be masochistic enough to choose to put their lives in danger and live in the most perilous environment possible? Two very different books give us insight into the thoughts of the soldiers who continuously put themselves in these environments. Your Death Would Be Mine by Martha Hanna and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque lets us into the minds of Paul Pireaud and Paul Baumer as they try to survive life as a soldier in the Great War. I argue that Pireaud and Baumer had very different reasons for continuing to fight despite having suffered beyond belief. In this paper I will analyze how the varying degrees of patriotism, brotherhood, family life at home, and age affected how these two men endured the treacherous life on the front of World War I.

In All Quiet on the Western Front author and World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque tells the story of a young soldier named Paul Bäumer who enlists in the German army with a group of his classmates. In the novel the reader comes discover the many horrors that Paul has to endure during his service before his untimely death in October 1918, only weeks before the war ended. The events that happen in the novel to Paul and his friends in his company during the war are very similar, if not identical, to what the German soldiers had to endure while World War I raged on in the real world. The way that the novel portrays the soldiers’ rations and reliance on food, their life on the front and in camp, how the young soldiers’ lives were destroyed before they even began, how the older generations pushed the younger ones to enlist, the death of soldiers in battle, and the refusal to surrender matches almost perfectly to how things were during World War I, particularly for the German soldiers.

This essay will try to answer the question: should Ernst Junger’s book “Storm of Steel” narrative describing his personal experiences during his service in German Army on Western Front of WW1 be consider anti or pro war?

Storm of Steel follows the author, Ernst Junger, as he navigates the different battlegrounds of World War 1. The story takes place from 1915 to 1918 and is primarily on the western front with France. The story begins with Ernst Junger’s initial deployment and tracks his time in the war using excerpts from his journal. Junger takes part in many famous battles across Europe including the battles of the Somme, Arras, Ypres, and Cambrai, and he helps repel invaders from Guillemont. He has many encounters that show the horrors of war but he depicts them in an non-attached or even unemotional way. Ernst steadily rises through the ranks until he is taken out of action in 1918 due to a shot to his chest. Even though many scenes show the horrors of war and the terrible things it does to people, the book as a whole never takes a stance on war. The authors true purpose for writing this book is not to make war look glorious, nor is it to make war seem like the worse thing that humans will ever do, it is to simply show war from the view of a soldier.

It’s no surprise that soldiers will more-than-likely never come home the same. Those who have not served do not often think of the torment and negative consequences that the soldiers who make it out of war face. Erich Remarque was someone who was able to take the torment that he faced after his experience in World War I and shed light on the brutality of war. Remarque was able to illustrate the psychological problems that was experienced by men in battle with his best-selling novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Hunt). The symbolism used in the classic anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front is significant not only for showing citizens the negative attributes of war, but also the mental, physical, and emotional impact that the vicious war had on the soldiers.

There is no doubt that when war occurs, every single human being is affected by it even if it is just a little. In the novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front” written by Erich Maria Remarque, a group of teenage men, who also appear to by classmates, are in the German army of World War I because they have chosen to leave their adolescence at home and school for grown up work at the army. Throughout this fictional novel, they face many challenges that result in them not seeing each other ever again because of death. War affects individuals by leaving behind necessities such as education or jobs, not being able to watch over others such as their health, and injuries that soldiers receive while they are at war.

Even though the soldiers join the war as naive youths, the war rapidly changes them and they develop into young men. Surrounded by death, the boys are bound to foresee the fragility of their own lives and are stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The dreadful horrors around the boys bound them to consider a world that does not accommodate to their childish and simplistic view. They want to only see a separation between what is right and what is wrong, they instead find moral doubt. Where they had wanted to see order and meaning, they only found senselessness and disorder. Where they wanted to find heroism, they only found the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroyed the innocence of the boys, maturing and thrusting them into their manhood.

Memoirs of war often reflect the positive or negative experiences endured throughout battle. Considered by many to be one of the best memoirs of World War I, Hervey Allen’s “Toward the Flame”, recalls his own experiences of battle. His recollection of events shows that he had a negative image of war and that there was nothing glorious about it. What started out looking like a man’s greatest adventure turned into a shell-shocking reality that war is actually horrible and trying. Allen’s experiences with consistent hunger, mustard gas, and artillery shellings led to his disillusionment with war, and left him with a permanent hatred of battle.

It is obvious from the opening chapter that this novel will center on the war and the effects it has on a young group of soldiers, none of them more than twenty years of age. They are all friends and former classmates of Paul Baumer, the narrator and protagonist of the book; they have enlisted in the German infantry because their teacher, Kantorek, had painted for them a glorious picture of fighting and saving the homeland from destruction during World War I. In this first chapter, Baumer and his friends are away from the front lines, relaxing a bit after two weeks of fierce fighting. As each of the young men is introduced, it is apparent that they are tired, hungry, angry, and disillusioned over the war.

The psychologist Sigmund Freud once said, “Because every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.” He initially stated this when he was corresponding with Albert Einstein via letter. This quote is also a great explanation of the events that take place during war that people chose to not recognise. War is terrible, and no matter how hard we try, nothing will change that. Erich Maria Remarque shows us that soldiers have endured dreadfully throughout World War I in his book “All Quiet on the Western Front”. The character in the book, Paul Baumer, endures through the tragedies of war with some of his old schoolmates as well as new comrades that he meets along the way. They survive through all of the tragedies together, but in the end, the war made them lose their friendships as well as their lives. The reality is that war comes with consequences while it destroys people, and there is nothing that will ever be able to change that. The book “All Quiet on the Western Front” shows how war comes destroys people's lives with its consequences through three of its themes: the importance of comradery, the loss of innocence, and the horrors and brutality of war.

War is always the worst tragedy of mankind in the world. We, as human beings, were experienced two most dolorous wars that were ever happened in our history: World War I and World War II. A young generation actually does not know how much hardship the predecessors, who joined and passed through the wars, undergo. We were taught about just how many people died in the wars, how much damage two participations in the wars suffered or just the general information about the wars. We absolutely do not know about the details, and that’s why we also do not know what the grief-stricken feeling of people joining in the wars really is. But we can somewhat understand that feeling through war novels, which describe the truthfulness of the soldiers’ lives, thoughts, feelings and experiences. All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque, which takes World War I as background, is the great war novel which talks about the German soldiers ' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the hopeless of these soldiers about the “future” – the time the war would have ended.

The Great War, also known as World War I, is a defining moment in Europe’s history. Its aftermath consists of the demolition of Germany’s economy, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the loss of an entire generation of young men who were sent into combat. All Quiet on the Western Front chronicles the experiences of Paul Baumer, a 19-year old student who volunteers for the military during World War I along with his classmates Muller and Kropp. They are compelled to enlist by Kantorek, their fiercely patriotic but misguided schoolmaster. Paul’s life in the military is told in short entries that reveal the reality of war: horrifying battles, violence, alienation, emotional indifference. His accounts of war are personal and emotional, and the bleak tone

War often has drastic and lasting effects on individuals; the violence and horror ages soldiers mentally and physically. World War I was a violent and distressing war; men came home with mental illnesses and never were fully able to sink back into society. Through these lasting effects common civilians with no affiliation were unaware to the consequences. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque investigates the damaging effects of war on an individual’s identity using Paul Bäumer as a representation for all soldiers; he draws specific attention to the continuing loss of purpose and ability to relate to the rest of society.

World War One, known by many as the “Great War”, lives in infamy as one of the harshest, brutal wars in history. While the high amount of casualties decimated populations, another huge factor was the toll the war had on the youth that served. The madness that was known as trench warfare was the stuff of nightmares, from the horrid living conditions, to the unpredictability of the opposing onslaught of artillery, soldiers were surrounded by death. This trauma and constant stress ruined countless lives, old and young. If the bullets did not get you, the stress would. The question was when, not how. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque told the story of a young man named Paul Bäumer, and how he and