New York
I’m in the middle of rereading Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger’s account of his first world war experience, which was published in 1920 and immediately made him famous. No writer has ever claimed to have had Jünger’s experience of warfare, and no soldier has ever written with such sincerity, nobility and grace about the business of war. ‘Jünger experienced, acted out, articulated, and then attempted to remedy the destruction of chivalry and the arrival of totalitarian violence in Germany,’ wrote William Pfaff. In other words, Jünger tried to re-establish the chivalric ethic of his ancestors and German knights of old, believing in a new aristocracy of warriors whose ordeal had made them superior beings. He obviously failed, but not for lack of trying. Jünger sustained 14 wounds in all during the ‘good’ war, and invaded France twice, in 1914 and in 1939. Nevertheless, in September of 1984, François Mitterrand, as president of that country, made him part of the 70th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Verdun, and two months later he was Mitterrand’s guest at the Elysée in Paris. Jünger died in 1998, aged 103. Alas, he had seen his son die in Italy in 1944, had become thoroughly disillusioned by Hitler and the Nazis, but so great was his reputation among warriors that even Hitler and his gruesome bunch did not dare touch him when it became obvious he had been involved in the July 20th plot.
While reading the warrior, a friend, Annette de la Renta, gave me A Stranger to Myself, by Willy Peter Reese, a young German soldier on the Russian front during the second world war who was killed in 1944 at the age of 23.
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