What am I in for?

A young German lad having a blast during WW1.

try to find an unexpurgated version. A lot of the English translations leave out the parts about how much pleasure he takes in killing English soldiers.

>English is the language of the free world
Kek

It's not so much that they're expurgated but that Jünger went back and revised it a few times.

Jünger and Remarque aren't as different necessarily in their approach as is often thought. Of course their work differs greatly, but popular reception paints Jünger as a sort of proto-fascist war-monger and Remarque as a wise anti-war writer. That's of course not true, because Remarque wasn't necessarily unwilling to see quite a lot of appealing things in war and combat, and Jünger's politics are much more complicated.

I prefer Jünger by far. Jünger is an adherent to a weird, very raw archaic *ethos*. He starts out as a bored school boy and has a huge desire for the festival of war as a kind of rite de passage and a searching for his primordial, unadulterated warlikeness. It amounts to a glorification of war and warlike virtues, but in contrast to at least a good deal of WWI literature, this is not under the banner of some ideology (nationalisms or whatever) but a mystical quest for true humanity. This is of course far out as fuck and not always explicitely stated, but Jünger would later go to some lenghts to formulate that worldview.

The writing style is outdated, but it is fair to say that this way of writing was very far from being innovative even in Jünger's day. In a weird way he reactivates a style that was even outdated back then, and more reminiscent of idyllic post-romanticism in Germany. He thus achieves - probably unintentionally - a kind of tension between that writing style and the apocalyptic subject matter.

Just read Beppe Fenoglio, it's better

Not sure if this will help, but I was recommended a version that leaves in insults Junger gives towards the french. Howard Fertig's translation is from 1929, and being a pre-WWII translation I would assume it is the cleanest english translation there is. I am not completely sure if they expurgate the supposed of killing englishmen.

Jünger was never really bloodthirsty in his recollection of the war. At most he just recounted the rush he got from anticipating going on a few night raids and even that was uneventful. He just captured a couple of confused Indian draftees.

The guy waas hugely decorated though.

Which insults were they. The edition I read only had mentions of the French being barbaric for abandoning their dead in no man's land when he was a fresh recruit but after that Jünger realizes the realities of war and shrugs that off.

I'm not doubting his war record but compared to Audy Murphy, Jünger was quite tame in his temperament.

Penguin version still good?

No, it has expurgations and revisions that differ from the original text.

Well shit. Is there a kindle version out there at least with an older translation.

There's this part about one of the soldiers who's a little kid and gets bullied cause he's too weak to carry the ammo box, later on they are in battle and under heavy shelling and he sees the kid running around carrying two ammo boxes at once. I've always found that very touching.

The best part of the book is when he puts it in that German thot in the cabin.