Storm (disciples)

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Sturm is a short story published in 1923 by Ernst Jünger . It was initially published as a sequel to the Hannoversche Kurier . The story was later published in book form. Sturm is one of Jünger's early stories in which he literarily processes his war experiences as a combatant in the First World War . Other books of the author's first creative period from 1920 to 1932 with a similar subject are In Stahlgewittern (1920), The Struggle as Inner Experience (1922), Wood 125 and Fire and Blood (1925), Fire and Movement (1930), Die totale Mobilization (1930) and The Worker (1932).

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The narrative begins with general reflections on the life of the troops at the front. This is followed by brief descriptions of the people involved, namely the three platoon leaders Döhring, Hugershoff and Sturm. The first two mentioned visit Lieutenant Sturm, the title character of the story, regularly in his dugout during breaks in combat and during their conversations they can read about his literary experiments.

A first prose sketch by Sturm takes place in the pre-war period and describes a dandy-like walker in an urban setting. The reading is interrupted by an artillery attack. The second excerpt quoted is about a war veteran who has become estranged from the bourgeois environment and visits a prostitute . An inspection tour of the train drivers through the trenches is then described. The third story, which offers a similar subject to the previous one, is interrupted by the long-feared assault by English troops. The story ends with the description of this battle, in the course of which the German trench is overrun and the protagonist falls.

Quotes

“I also know what assault and trench warfare means, but it's all child's play against a collision in the shaft. You have the feeling of being in your shoveled grave or already roasting in hell. The oppression of the vast masses of earth by which one is surrounded arouses a feeling of boundless abandonment and the thought that if one should fall one will never be found. ”P. 57

“[...] but when I walked through lonely avenues in a hospital gown, I only felt the delicate feeling of a convalescent. The monstrosity hadn't touched me, it was at the bottom of it as an inexplicable thing that had appeared and sunk like a fiery island. "P. 82

“When I talked to others about it, I noticed how little man is basically at home. Some sought to sanctify what had been done, others to excuse it, others condemned it, so to all of them it was not their feelings, but what they later thought about and put into it, the essential thing. What they said they had never experienced ... ”p. 82

Form and representation

In contrast to his first work In Stahlgewittern , which is also autobiographical, but reporting in the form of a diary and conceived entirely from the perspective of the subjective experience, Jünger chooses a much more distant and much more well-constructed narrative form in Sturm . Jünger abstracts his own war experiences here into an aesthetic art form.

Jünger was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's “ The Birth of Tragedy ”. In the story Sturm, the perspective shifts from reality to an aesthetic, irrational dream world. This shows the zeitgeist and the attitude towards life of the youth at Jüngers and his protagonists' time. It reflects the horror of the contingency of modernity. The portrayal in Sturm contains both moments that aestheticize the war and make it appear as a gruesomely ludicrous drama, as well as a criticism of the modern world as such, as the existence-threatening and terrifying expression of which war reveals itself. In this way, Jünger by no means (as he did in the steel thunderstorms ) only describes the events of war, but at the same time describes the senselessness of the individual in an engineered, "oversized" modern age:

"The same feeling of senselessness that sometimes jumped out of the bare blocks of houses in factory towns into sad minds, that feeling with which the crowd crushes the soul."

- Ernst Jünger : Sturm (p. 17)

Work editions

Translations

  • Sturm , translation into Dutch by Tinke Davids, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1984
  • Lieutenant Sturm , translation into French by Philippe Giraudon, Éditions Viviane Hamy, Paris 1991
  • Il tenente Sturm , translation into Italian by Alessandra Iadicicco, Guanda, Milano 2001
  • Sturm , translation into Swedish by Urban Lindström, Bokförlaget Augusti, Lund 2006
  • El teniente Sturm , translation into Spanish by Carmen Gauger, Tusquets Editores, Barcelona 2014
  • Sturm , translation into English by Alexis P. Walker, Telos Press Publishing, New York 2015
  • Sturm , translation into Ukrainian by Gleb Parfenov, Dipa, Kiev 2019