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The memoir widely viewed as the best account ever written of fighting in WW1
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, J�nger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict but—more importantly—as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, J�nger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will mark his failure. Published shortly after the war’s end, Storm of Steel was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann’s brilliant new translation.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500�titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the�series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date�translations by award-winning translators.
- Sales Rank: #9685 in Books
- Brand: Junger, Ernst/ Hofmann, Michael (TRN)/ Hofmann, Michael (INT)/ Hofmann, Michael
- Published on: 2004-05-04
- Released on: 2004-05-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.71" h x .52" w x 5.02" l, .47 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
“The definitive World War I account from the German point of view.” —Margaret Atwood,�Entertainment Weekly
“Storm of Steel�is what so many books claim to be but are not: a classic account of war.”�—London Evening Standard
�
“Extraordinary . . . Michael Hofmann’s superlative translation retains all the coruscating vitality of the original.”�—Niall Ferguson, author of�Civilization,Colossus,�and�The Ascent of Money
About the Author
Ernst J�nger (1895–1998) was born in Heidelberg. He ran away from school and volunteered to join the German army. Fighting throughout the war, he recorded his experiences in several books, most famously in In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel).
From The Washington Post
On the day Germany declared war in 1914, 19-year-old Ernst J�nger enlisted. He fought with an infantry company -- the 73rd Hanoverians -- for the next four years and participated in some of the most famous and bloody battles of all time: the Somme, Cambrai, Passchendaele. He also carried out reconnaissance missions, trained commandos and nearly every day saw his comrades die. He was either shot or severely wounded by shrapnel a half-dozen times but always recovered to fight again. By the end of the war J�nger had risen to the rank of captain and had been given, among other honors, the Iron Cross, First Class. Finally, on Sept. 22, 1918, the Kaiser bestowed on him the order of "pour le M�rite." Despite its French name, this is Germany's highest award for valor, and J�nger was (and still is) the youngest man ever to receive it.
As it happens, though, J�nger was more than just a warrior. He was also sensitive to nature, enjoyed reading Ariosto and Tristram Shandy while on leave or in hospital, and later became both an entomologist and a distinguished novelist. Yet throughout a very long life -- he lived, amazingly, to the age of 102, dying in 1998 -- he was always a strong nationalist, a man of the right. At first he seemingly welcomed Hitler -- the F�hrer actually sent him an inscribed copy of Mein Kampf -- but he never joined the National Socialist Party and his best-known novel, On the Marble Cliffs, is partly an allegorical warning against Nazism.
Still, J�nger's most lasting work is this memoir -- based on extensive diaries and first published in 1920 -- of his four years of hard combat during World War I. In an especially fine introduction, translator Michael Hofmann notes that this stark reportorial account of battle has been deeply admired by literary masters as different as Borges and Brecht, Alberto Moravia and Andre Gide. This last wrote that Storm of Steel "is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith."
Like many people, I have absolutely no love for the martial spirit, detest all forms of nationalism and feel queasy at the sight of blood. Yet I can't remember when I've read a book as thrilling and hypnotic, as perversely magnificent as Storm of Steel. Hofmann likens it, with justice, to The Iliad. It is dedicated, simply, apolitically: "For the fallen."
Inevitably, page after page depicts almost unimaginable horror:
"We went on, eyes implacably on the man in front, through a knee-high trench formed from a chain of enormous craters, one dead man after another. At moments, we felt our feet settling on soft, yielding corpses, whose form we couldn't make out on account of the darkness. The wounded man collapsing on the path suffered the same fate; he was trampled underfoot by the boots of those hurrying ever onwards . . . .
"The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors' place. And now it was our turn."
For the most part, J�nger simply records his war. He doesn't analyze the justice of the conflict or wonder about its outcome. He doesn't dwell on the sudden death of noble comrades or the seemingly pointless waste of men's lives or the futility of a lost cause. Instead, day by day, he performs his duty as a soldier, and he tells us, with clinical honesty, what he does and what he sees.
During the retreat from the Somme the army was ordered to destroy everything in its path:
"The villages we passed through on our way had the look of vast lunatic asylums. Whole companies were set to knocking or pulling down walls, or sitting on rooftops, uprooting the tiles. Trees were cut down, windows smashed; wherever you looked, clouds of smoke and dust rose from vast piles of debris. We saw men dashing about wearing suits and dresses left behind by the inhabitants, with top hats on their heads. . . . As far back as the Siegfried Line, every village was reduced to rubble, every tree chopped down, every road undermined, every well poisoned, every basement blown up or booby-trapped, every rail unscrewed, every telephone wire rolled up, everything burnable burned; in a word, we were turning the country that our advancing opponents would occupy into a wasteland."
As Storm of Steel progresses, J�nger records gas attacks, the eerie confusion of battle, the nightly drinking to bring on dreamless sleep. In particular he emphasizes the never-ending possibility of sudden unexpected death, whether from the constant artillery barrages or from bombs or from exploding shells that send deadly slivers of metal flying everywhere. The pounding of war never lets up:
"It's an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death, and so I huddled in my hole in the ground with my hand in front of my face, imagining all the possible variants on being hit. I think I have found a comparison that captures the situation in which I and all the other soldiers who took part in this war so often found ourselves: you must imagine you are securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer. Now the hammer has been taken back over his head, ready to be swung, now it's cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull, then it's struck the post, and the splinters are flying -- that's what it's like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position."
Repeatedly, too, J�nger shows us the ghostly confusions of battle. During one gas attack his fellow soldiers, after donning their primitive breathing apparatus, suddenly resembled lost demons. "We were all roving around in an enormous dump somewhere off the edge of the chartered world." Several times German soldiers were cut down accidentally by friendly fire, from their own regiments or from misdirected artillery volleys. J�nger himself once lobbed a grenade at a figure who suddenly rose up out of the grass -- and who turned out to be a comrade (the grenade proved a dud). Several men blew themselves up by tinkering with explosives or hamfistedly playing with unfamiliar weapons.
Ultimately, bravery has nothing to do with survival; it's just a matter of luck, of chance. Most of the field operations end disastrously. At Regnieville J�nger led a night-commando operation:
"I had got together some kit appropriate to the sort of work I meant to be doing: across my chest, two sandbags, each containing four stick-bombs, impact fuses on the left, delay on the right, in my right tunic pocket an 08 revolver on a long cord, in my right trouser pocket a little Mauser pistol, in my left tunic pocket five egg hand-grenades, in the left trouser pocket luminous compass and whistle, in my belt spring hooks for pulling out the pins, plus bowie knife and wire cutters." J�nger used up his Rambo-like armaments, but the mission proved an utter fiasco; the men wandered through English trenches in darkness, lost their way, fought and died for nothing: "Of the fourteen who had set out, only four returned."
On page after page J�nger sets down death after death. Friends bleed unstoppably when shrapnel slices through their carotid arteries. They are shot when standing sentry. Earthworks or houses collapse and bury them alive. Some bizarre scenes call to mind that other great picture gallery of military carnage and grotesquerie, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories. A German machine-gunner accidentally shoots the commander of another regiment right out of his saddle while the officer is reviewing his troops. We learn that "Captain von Brixen's horse impaled itself on a metalled axle and had to be put down." Far worse, at one point J�nger heads into battle with a company of 150 men; their guide loses the way; heavy shelling rains down; and, less than 30 minutes after starting out, more than half the soldiers are dead or dying.
Little wonder that when J�nger does fight it is often in a berserker rage. Once he encountered a lone English soldier, separated from his own lines:
"It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of the pistol at the man's temple -- he was too frightened to move -- while my other fist grabbed his tunic, feeling medals and badges of rank. An officer; he must have held some command post in these trenches. With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace.
"It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all often appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again."
In general, J�nger shows no hatred of his enemies. "It was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them." During the course of Storm of Steel J�nger does kill many men -- with rifle, pistol, stick-bomb, grenade -- but he notes the cost. Once he shot a young British soldier, "little more than a boy":
"I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn't a case of 'you or me' any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams."
This is as close to introspection as J�nger gets in Storm of Steel. At least, that is, until the final chapters. There his tone finally grows weary, fatalistic; "The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war." The purpose, he writes, "with which I had gone out to fight had been used up." And yet the conflict went on, until:
"It was our last storm. How many times over the last few years we had advanced into the setting sun in a similar frame of mind! Les Eparges, Guillemont, St-Pierre-Vaast, Langemarck, Passchendaele, Moeuvres, Vraucourt, Mory! Another gory carnival beckoned."
One closes Storm of Steel with a heavy heart. So many men dead! And, really, for what? Moreover, these were the Huns, the supposedly evil, ruthless enemy, men who in normal life were schoolteachers, factory workers and artists, as well as husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Yet each faithfully undertook his obligation as a soldier, and each died heroically or foolishly or unfairly. J�nger's great book matter-of-factly conveys the mysterious glamour of war, the exhilaration of its excess and intensity and, not least, the undeniable glory of men bravely preparing for battle as for "some terrible silent ceremonial that portends human sacrifice."
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
558 of 601 people found the following review helpful.
They don't want you to read it....
By M. G Watson
I already wrote a review of "The Storm of Steel" under its full title ("From The Diary of a German Stormtroop Officer on the Western Front"), but I felt compelled to take up a sword here not only on behalf of Ernst Juenger but also against many who deliberately misinterpret his work.
Political cenorship is a fascinating subject and it operates on many levels, both subtle and gross. In a democractic society it generally is practiced in the former manner, so that the majority of people do not even know that it is happening, much less object to its imposition. You would be hard-pressed, for example, to find someone in Western civilization who has not either read, seen a televised adaptation of, or at least heard of Klaus Maria Remarque's seminal "All Quiet on the Western Front." On the other hand, you could blast a fire hose on the Mall on the Fourth of July and not splash a person who has ever heard of Juenger's "Storm of Steel." Were you in fact to do so, you would probably find that the person in question describes it as "war-glorifying" or even "neo-Nazi"; only later would you discover that they have never read it.
Like most people, I was forced to read Remarque's touching "novel" (based of course on his own experiences as a "Frontkaempfer" in WWI) when I was in school, and like everybody else, I coughed up the expected book report denouncing war as a stupid and futile exercise in mass misery and mindless slaughter. Looking back, I can see that every "war" novel and book I was ever assigned in school at any level, even in college, was essentially of the same stripe: war is the most vile, the most disgusting, the most pointless exercise in the category of human endeavor; war solves nothing, and represents absolute evil.
Juenger's "Storm of Steel" does not glorify war; nor (despite its ferocious nationalism, best described in the book as "the ideals of 1870") does it point towards the most extreme form of Fascism -- Nazism. It merely states that war is the ultimate experience, a potentially (but not necessarily) ennobiling one; a crucible which burns away the impurities of civilian (especially burgeois) life to temper a man like iron is tempered in a furnace -- or otherwise break him. Juenger deliberately excluded inner reflections and soul-searching from his book, contenting himself to bring to the audience war as an outward (that is to say, a physical) experience. This is not because he lacked the capacity for inner feeling but because he chose to deal with it as an entirely separate book ("War as an Inward Experience" which I believe was published in English as "Copse 125").
"Storm" has been continually denounced for the last 80-odd years as rightist propaganda precisely because it does NOT come to the conclusion of Remarque, Hemingway, P.J. Caputo or any of the other combat literati who escaped their own slaughterous wartime experiences to write antiwar novels. It says -- if I may presume to paraphrase Juenger -- that war destroys civilian hypocrisy and, if it makes a man's boot come down grimly and harshly, at least makes it come down clean. Juenger's unforgivable sin was, apparently, to conclude that it "was a good and strenuous life, and that war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."
Those who sought to eradicate Juenger's way of thinking ensured that his works were banned following WW II and continue to make reading some of them difficult. Professor Louis B. Snyder asserted that the Third Reich produced no great works of literature, yet Juenger's (anti-Nazi!) novel "On the Marble Cliffs" was written during WWII and is considered by many to be the best novel penned in Germany between 1933 - 1945. The official line, however, insists that no true art could exist under the Nazi system, and so "On the Marble Cliffs" remains impossible to obtain in English, unless you are willing to shell out fifty bucks. Coincidence? Call me Agent Mulder, but I don't think so.
No professor ever assigned me "Storm of Steel" to read (the only one who ever mentioned it did so with a smirk) and no bookstore around me carried it. It remains one one of the great pieces of war-writing ever penned, yet at the same time it is smothered in a weird conspiracy of silence. It is only one man's opinion, yet apparently it is too frightening of an opinion to be allowed full voice. That alone is reason to read it.
146 of 154 people found the following review helpful.
The best memoir of WWI
By isala
Ernst Junger was there for the duration. He was wounded sixteen times, he lost his brother. He experienced the trench war in all its hellish glory. That's the difference between Storm of Steel and other WWI memoires like Farewll to All That, Memoires of an Infantry Officer, No News from the Western Front, etc: Junger is not anti-war; he loved it! Do not expect some dreaming idealist though. Junger was a harsh realist. Nothing is to horrifying for him to tell (and believe me - there are a lot of horrifying detail!). He took part in the major combats on the western front, so we get a rare first hand glimpse of the war, The style is vivd, yet sober. He comes across as a Prussian gentleman, not cruel, but he does what he has to do to survive.
Junger later became one of the finest authors of the twentieth century. He is sadly unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, in much due to his refusal to distance himself from Hitler (he did not embrace nazism though either). He lived an interesting life; he stopped doing LSD when he turned seventy, and he wrote a major treaty on the role of bugs in heraldry. More of his work deserves to be recognized.
114 of 128 people found the following review helpful.
I was appalled
By Schrodinger's cat
Since this is the centennial of WWI I thought I would read a few books relating to it this summer. I had heard that this was a good book. I therefore ordered it and in anticipation of its arrival I read the reviews of it here on Amazon (This is the BEST feature of Amazon and will keep its stock selling for multiples above its P/E for decades) in more depth. I realized that some of this great novel had been expunged because of parts that cast a favorable light on the National Socialist. I then searched another book purveyor and ordered an earlier translation which was a reprint of a 1929 edition by Howard Fertig publishers, no attribution given to translation.
The Amazon edition, translated by Michael Hofmann and published by Penguin arrived first. I began to read it and enjoyed it. The translation is good, crisp, and has a nice flow and rhythm to it. I was on the 3rd chapter when the 1929 edition arrived. At this point I began to read the 1929 edition. By the time I had gotten to where I was with the Michael Hofmann edition I was stunned! The narrator, Ernst Junger, portrayed in both books were totally different. The narrator of the 1929 edition was a classically educated man that was strongly patriotic. The Hofmann translation was of a faceless, unthinking, soldier.
At this point I read them in parallel. It left me profoundly depressed to think that anyone would have the temerity to boldly blot out entire pages of a priceless autobiography. Whatever you may think of German nationalism and the German character, no one, not Hofmann, nor penguin has the right to butcher and slant a great work of literature. If you are a student of military history you want the 1929 edition as Junger takes the time to explain military tactics and the necessity for discipline and practice, practice, practice in the military arts. Hofmann has deemed this not fit for our enlighten.
After reading both of these translations I am left with a deep feeling of alienation and angst. How many "translations" have I read that have completely edited out the meat of the book? As an American, born free, and will live free or die, I regard as enemies of mankind those who take it upon themselves to tell us what to think. I just want an unedited text. Let me draw the conclusion.
For the above reasons I pronounce an anathema upon the Hofmann translation. Seekers of truth and authenticity I must wave you off; regard this translation as radioactive.
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