by Ernst Jünger
Gerhard Loose, Ernst Jünger (Bloomington, 1974)
Steffen Martus, Ernst Jünger (Stuttgart, 2001)
Elliot Y. Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999)
Thomas Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 (Durham, NC, 1996)
Paul Noack, Ernst Jünger – Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1998)
Heimo Schwilk (ed.), Ernst Jünger – Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten (Stuttgart, 1988)
J. P. Stern, Ernst Jünger (New Haven, 1953)
Johannes Volmert, Ernst Jünger: ‘In Stahlgewittern’ (Munich, 1985)
THE BEGINNING
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In Stahlgewittern first published in German 1920
This final revised edition first published 1961
copyright © 1920, 1961 J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart
This translation made from the edition prepared from the Saemtliche Werke, vol. 1: Der Erste Weltkrieg. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1978
This translation first published by Allen Lane 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004
Introduction and translation copyright © Michael Hofmann, 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-90691-1
1 The birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941).
1 A debased version of a Renaissance man (1758–1822): theologian, drunkard, soldier and spy. He fought in the Prussian army against Napoleon, was captured in 1792, and in 1795 managed to escape and return to Germany.
2 ‘Why don’t you just cut his throat with it!’ … ‘If it’s all one to you, I’d just as soon hang on to it.’
3 Eponymous hero of the novel by Grimmelshausen (1622–1676), a picaresque set during the Thirty Years War.
1 I would hazard, derived from the German pronunciation of the French ‘Jean’.
2 German Wegerich: the weed plantain (etymologically derived from the French plante, ‘sole of the foot’) which flourishes along footpaths, rather than the tropical vegetable of the same name (from the Spanish platano, ‘banana’). Anna Akhmatova’s 1921 book of poems was called Plaintain in the same sense.
1 ‘A soft-nosed bullet (1897); f. Dum Dum, name of a military station and arsenal near Calcutta, India’ (Oxford Dictionary of Etymology). They have been, at different times, disapproved of and declared illegal.
2 ‘There are some unscrupulous bastards on your side too!’
1 ‘You’re so young, I wish I could have your future.’
2 German author and polygrapher (1842–1912), whose tendentious, patriotic, neo-colonialist tales were routinely read by generations of young Germans.
1 Town in the Sudan, and site of an Anglo-French colonial standoff in 1898 involving General Kitchener. The French climb-down paved the way for the Entente Cordiale. Rueful reading matter for a German officer in World War I.
2 ‘Books and bullets have their own destinies.’
1 This affair of honour is conducted in almost literally ‘earthy’ language, in which the essential item is a ‘mouldy potato’.
1 In accordance with the German proverb ‘Scherben bringen Glück’, shards or breakages are lucky.
1 A little gnomic, but I think we are to understand EJ shoots him. Hence, below, ‘my British soldier’. Earlier editions were much more explicit on this point and others similar.