Existentialist motives in Ernst J"Unger's 'Storm of steel’

The interpretation of Ernst Jünger’s novel Storm of Steel offered here is aimed at an existentialist reading of the book, viewing it, first and foremost, as a special artistic space meeting the stylistic demands of Jünger as a writer. Thus, the formal characteristics of the novel prevail over its shocking content. Such a way of reading this Jünger’s work is not popular among Russian scholars studying the writer, for they mostly orient at exploring the ideological and sociological aspects of the book. It seems that Storm of Steel constitutes a special case of using proto-existentialist ideas when describing the phenomenon of war and at the same time presenting some basic existentialist notions, such as ‘anxiety’ (Angst) of Søren Kierkegaard; ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit), ‘fright’ (Entsetzen) and ‘nothing’ (Nichts) of Martin Heidegger; ‘limit situation’ (Grenzsituation) and ‘existence enlightenment’ (Existenzerhellung) of Karl Jaspers. Jünger’s book can be called unique for it renders a kind of existentialist experience not basing on the matching philosophical apparatus (nonexistent at the time of writing Storm of Steel). Thus, Jünger anticipates the main philosophical discoveries of the 20th century and joins the German version of existentialism. Jünger’s writing method reveals the core point of existentialist thinking, when Being opens itself to a human as an existentialist experience, not in an act of rational realizing its meaning, but in view of death, when the world appears both uncanny and dangerous. Jünger’s narrator experiences this when fighting, on the scout, getting close to nature when a battle stops. Jünger pays attention not only to what man feels, but to the environment, both natural and artificial, consisting of the ruined items of everyday bourgeois life, mixed chaotically with arms. Thus, the writer stresses the need to seek for the new foundations of defining the role of a human in the 20th century reality.