Abstract
The article provides a comparison of two intellectual accounts of experiences in the First World War—From the Letters of an Artillery Ensign (1918) by the Russian philosopher and writer Fjodor Stepun and The Storm of Steel by the German essayist Ernst Jünger. The aim of this article is to reveal similarities and differences between the “optics” of Jünger and Stepun who are reporting one and the same event but deal with two different images of the Great War.
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Notes
In addition to Stepun’s letters the book included notes by B. Savinkov (under the pen name V. Ropšin) “Iz dejstvujuščej armii (leto 1917 g.)” (see: Stepun 1918). The second Russian edition came out in Odessa (1919) and the third and last one in Prague (1926). The first edition in German was titled Wie war es möglich? (Stepun 1929); the second edition was published two years after the author’s death under a different title Als ich russischer Offizier war (Stepun 1963). The quotations in this article are drawn from the last Russian publication (Stepun 2000a).
That Jünger fought in France and Stepun in Galicia is immaterial. I think that we can also “bracket” the age and social differences. They are not relevant for our purposes.
The first edition of the diary came out in 1920 with the subtitle “From a Diary of a Storm Group Commander.” New amended and reworked editions came out every several years so that by 1960, when the first collected works by Ernst Jünger were published, their number reached 26. This article uses the latest critical edition: (Jünger 2013).
Scholars have discovered seven editions of the book. On the work on the editions of The Storm of Steel see (Kunicki 1993).
Cf. the final lines of the novel in letters Nikolaj Pereslegin (the letter dated 22 December 1914): “The war is becoming more sinister and cruel by the day. We are all in it like on Doomsday. Nobody finds it easy to face death. I do not expect any particular mercy for myself. And yet I feel that with everything that weighs on my conscience, it would be harder for me to be any place other than here” (Stepun 1997, 224).
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Acknowledgments
This study (Research Grant No 14-01-0058) was supported by The National Research University-Higher School of Economics’ Academic Fund Program in 2014/2015.
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Mikhailovsky, A. Fjodor Stepun and Ernst Jünger: intellectuals at war. Stud East Eur Thought 66, 77–87 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9202-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9202-5