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Shot in the head during the battle of Cambrai (1917).
On display at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. |
Is it wrong that seeing Ernst Jünger's damaged helmet was a high point in my trip to Europe? Is it wrong that my favorite piece of Great War literature is still Ernst Jünger's
Storm of Steel? Probably. Jünger was a darling of fascists everywhere, but his
Wikipedia biographer takes great pains to distance Jünger from the Nazis. Actually, based on everything I've read, it seems he had little patience for Nazi anti-intellectualism. Jünger himself was a serious intellectual and his work reflects an active, creative imagination (as in
The Glass Bees, a bizarre novella I read many years ago).
That said, I recently learned about Ernest Hemingway's claims that he killed as many as 122 German soldiers in WWII. He appears to have murdered at least one unarmed prisoner outright, but biographers won't take him at his word. I think his actions don't correspond to his myth, and so we choose to dismiss them. The same may be true about Jünger. Nobody wants to believe that such a prolific, creative author would throw his lot in with a mob of cretins.
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| A few of Jünger's Diaries |
I've read a wide selection of veteran fiction/memoir (many seem to be a combination of both) over the past few years. I probably average one each year. This summer I picked up Gabriel Chevallier's
Fear, which NYRB Classics just published. It was fantastic. Far more readable than Barbusse's
Under Fire (although lacking his powerful, nightmarish imagery). I attribute much of
Fear's power to the excellent work of translators Malcolm Imrie and John Berger. The language is fluid and accessible--it feels modern. One of my great complaints about Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front has been the archaic translation into British English. When I added some passages to the West Civ Reader I prepare for my students, I actually pulled out my German edition and polished up the language a bit. I won't pretend I could ever compete with A.W. Wheen's original translation, but the dialogue often feels like it was lifted directly from an episode of Downton Abbey.
My next Great War memoir will have to be Siegfried Sassoon's
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. Translation won't be an issue.
