Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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.