Nietzsche famously said that “Homer would not have created an Achilles if Homer had been an Achilles.” There is some truth to this, but a singular work like Jünger’s “Storm of Steel” leaves room for doubt.

This vivid memoir of trench warfare in WWI, the most famous and accomplished of its kind (often contrasted with Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet On the Western Front”), is frequently criticized not only for being coldblooded in its description of nightmarish suffering and causalities, but for its disturbing suggestion that war can be not only traumatizing but exhilarating.

Yet to believe, as some have, that Jünger was callous and pro-war is to misunderstand him. He is in fact completely frank about the grief and regret he felt during his service, he simply doesn’t dwell on it. Far from being vicious, he frequently showed mercy to his enemies at his own risk, and constantly talks about his respect for them.

What people find unsettling about Jünger is exactly what makes his testament valuable: he, unlike Remarque, was a born warrior. To read “Storm of Steel” is to have a window into how a man with natural talent and enthusiasm for combat— an Achilles— thinks. Jünger is honest about the uncomfortable fact that the experience of war, while mostly hell, can also be darkly amusing, ecstatic, even mystical; that battle is a mystery cult into which one can be initiated, and that terror and bloodlust have their visionary qualities, sometimes reaching an intensity that feels sacramental; that in the midst of hellfire, the beauty of rockets at night, soldierly camaraderie, the natural world, and even literature can still be appreciated. Reading Jünger, one understands that warfare is not simply a tragic mistake that humanity keeps falling for— it is a primordial urge which calls to us, which answers to something essential in the human spirit, and which we must reckon with if we ever hope to legitimately overcome it.

Jünger lived an extraordinary life. He survived to the age of 102 years old, about five times the lifespan of most of his comrades, despite being injured fourteen times, with countless other close calls. He became not only one of Germany’s most decorated war heroes, but one of its most decorated literary figures. His concept of the “anarch” is the ancestor of what cringy Redditors nowadays call the “sigma male.” Despite being a lifelong conservative, he detested the Nazis, and later was one of the very first users and proponents of LSD, which he tripped with Albert Hoffman himself. Equipped with an exceedingly rare combination— the spirit of a killer yet the heart of a poet-mystic— Jünger was the man who, through an offering of blood, gave Achilles his voice.