What are you reading this week thread

Assuming anyone here can actually read

I’m almost finished with Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger and it really is a great memoir. It’s almost darkly hilarious how frank the book is about everything from the violent to the mundane. The prose used to describe daily idle work and conversations with French civilians is little different than the descriptions of battles and mangled corpses. It’s a whole novel of “oh yeah and this happened”.

Another aspect that fascinated me was the author’s own views on the war. He fought for four years in the losing army of one of history’s most infamous wars, yet he never seemed to regret it. Never wished he was at home. Never lost his Prussian class and reserve. You could wonder if it’s biased since the author might have left out anything that would make him look bad, but even so it’s notable that the book is too neutral to have that “war is heck” message you see in almost every other instance of WWI material. When stereotypical military aristocrat characters show up in media, they almost always lose that demeanor or die to show how brutal and gritty things really are. But here was a real person who went through all that and still came out with the mindset of an Imperial German patriot. Patriotism is the first thing to go in most war stories, so I was intrigued to see a depiction of someone who suffered same as everyone else but never actually lost it. I suppose there’s no real universal standard on how different people will be effected by warfare.