ABSTRACT
We begin this chapter in what has long been thought of as a quintessentially male arena: the battlefield. Towards the close of The Storm of Steel (1929), the extraordinary memoir of his experiences as an officer in the First World War, the German writer Ernst Jünger recounts the story of how he escaped being captured, shooting enemy soldiers as he ran, even though his own body was riddled with bullets. Narrated with the surgical precision that was to become his trademark as a novelist – ‘continuous loss of blood gave me the lightness and airiness of intoxication’ he notes as he describes dodging and then returning enemy fire – Jünger’s recollections come to a halt in a military hospital where the tone of his writing abruptly and rather unpredictably changes (Jünger 1929 [1920]: 312). Declaring himself to be ‘no misogynist’, the author cannot help but confess that:
Only the ‘clear objectivity of the Catholic nursing sisterhoods’ offers an ambience that is at all ‘congenial to soldiering’, a blessed relief from the usual oppressively maternal regime (314).
