A Reflection on Storm of Steel

After perusing through my family's collection of books looking for a piece of literature that was instantly appealing, I had located a non-fiction title that caught my eye. I picked it up and dusted it off, and this book was 'Storm of Steel' by Ernst Junger. I normally like these types of war novels, and so I selected it to be my book. This novel is a sort of memoir of Junger's life, and it follows his experiences throughout his strife for the German Army in World War I.

Personally, I felt this novel to be a bit dry, as a majority non-fiction novels tend to be. It was dry mostly because the book was very nondescript of the things that were going on around him. He focused in mostly on his experiences. In fact, he was so nondescript that he rarely mentions any specific characters in depth. This made the book a bit hard to contemplate. At points, Junger would just write about death after death after death. Without any background, this was hard to understand. I theorized, after a bit of outside research, that Junger did this to signify just how monotonous and horrible this war was. Being stuck in a stalemate (as Junger was trying to prevent by being a stormtrooper) would have been as repetitive as parts of this book.

On another note, I believe that Junger wrote this book to signify the German cause at the time. After yet more background research, I learned that the author was a Nationalist in his country. He tries to glorify this in his book through attempting to focus more on the German part of the war through more description and devotion towards certain moments.

In all, the only thing that I really gained from this book was how to tolerate the reading of a non-fiction book. This book's blandness and devotion to German Nationalism really shut me down. Someone who could easily tolerate and understand those topics would find it a good read, but not I.