Эрнст Юнгер - A German Officer in Occupied Paris - The War Journals, 1941-1945

Saturday and Sunday in Paris. Spent the evenings in the company of Lieutenant Colonel Andois in the Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque near the Saint-Lazare railroad station and, after that, in Tabarin. There, saw a floorshow of naked women before an audience of officers and bureaucrats of the occupying army seated in the front rows. They fired off a volley of champagne corks. The women’s bodies were well proportioned except for their feet, which had been deformed by their shoes. Perhaps a further thought: the foot as a kind of degraded hand. Performances like this are geared to the mechanism of the sex drive—the point is inescapable, although it is always one and the same. The rooster-like quality of the Gallic race was powerfully evident. Les poules [the sluts].

Then went to Monte Cristo, an establishment where patrons luxuriate on low cushions. Silver chalices, fruit bowls, and bottles glinted in the twilight as in an Orthodox chapel. Companionship provided by young girls, almost all of them born in France to Russian emigrés. They chattered away in several languages. I sat beside a small, melancholy twenty-year-old and, through the champagne haze, carried on conversations about Pushkin, Aksakov, and Andreyev, whose son [Daniel] had been a friend of hers.

Today, Sunday, uninterrupted rainfall. I went to the Madeleine twice; its steps were covered with fallen beech leaves. Was at Prunier at noon and in the evening. The city is like an old familiar garden that now lies desolate but where paths and passageways are still recognizable. Its state of preservation is remarkable, almost Hellenistic; clearly, special ploys of the High Command are at work. It is alienating to see the white signs on the signposts that the troops have placed throughout the city—gashes in an ancient, organic stand of timber.

New plans, new resolutions: “It is not yet too late.” During the night a beautiful woman appeared to me. She kissed me many times gently on my eyes, which I kept shut. Afterward, I went to a horrible place, where the door that I opened was bound with barbed wire. An ugly old woman was singing vulgar songs. When she turned her back on me, she lifted her skirts.

On the previous night, it was a journey to Tibet. The houses, rooms, and furniture didn’t seem to be original anymore. An influence of foreign forms was already discernible, yet the change was slight. I walked through the houses without noting the inhabitants, yet I felt their presence in rooms I did not enter. The dream was malevolent in that I was an invisible, demonic being. Czarist officers appeared as adversaries. We saw and recognized each other from a distance—there was a hierarchy of visibility.

Easter Day stroll. The brown fields, as yet unplowed, seem bare, but in some places, they are blanketed with delicate low-growing nettle blossoms—almost invisible, approaching ultraviolet—where bumblebees forage as if on a tissue of dreams.

The narrow, deeply rutted woodland paths. Even these possess northern and southern slopes where the different plant species grow at different rates.

Got up early for transport to Paris. The regiment has been ordered there for guard duty.

The reveille sounded during one of those dreams that are like living tableaux, posed groups full of tension. In them, the dreamer savors a first-rate insight, for he soon sinks into them, into the hopes and suffering of the figures; soon he emerges from their constituent parts and sees them integrated into one static image. Thus, the complexity of the content and the poverty of movement contradict each other; the actions remain under the spell of the meaning, and this repression unleashes a feeling of dizziness that often becomes a nightmare.

In this state, I saw José with the high-ranking doctor and his wife, along with me and four orderlies in a room where the furniture reminded me of a hospital. José was suffering from rabies and had sunk his teeth into the doctor’s wife’s neck to infect her, and without a doubt, he had succeeded. I saw his victim, who was being held down on a hospital bed by two orderlies and also saw the wounds from the bite; a slight film of pus was already forming on their red edges. The high-ranking doctor was about to give her an injection because she was nearly mad. As he tested the solution in the hypodermic, his glance fell upon José—serious, pained, yet in complete control of his passion. José was also being forcibly subdued by two orderlies, half in the twilight state that follows an attack and half in triumph because his assault had succeeded. I had both hands around his powerful neck, stroking him the way one pats a horse’s flanks. Yet at the same time, had he tried to escape, I could have choked him. The little room where we were suffering was so full of radiation that I comprehended his inner being like the text of a book. The remarkable thing about the attack was that after all the years of secret infidelity, José now wanted to unite with the high-ranking doctor’s wife in death. And in the husband’s eyes, I read that he completely understood the gravity of the deed. Although he felt he had been bitten by a viper, he remained conscious and maintained his medical objectivity. In this context, José’s vicious action was a sign of illness, a symptom of fury. The will to heal was the appropriate response. It struck me as great and wonderful that this master controlled himself calmly in the face of such an onslaught of passion.

And yet during this struggle, I felt myself on José’s side; I patted his broad neck as I would that of a good horse that I might watch streak across the finish line in a storm. I felt that his moral sense was still intact. Nonetheless, he seemed to be like one of those ancient chieftains who took everything of value—gold, weapons, slaves, and women—when they crossed into the realm of death. This body was already inhabited by death, but I sensed in it the immense power of life.

Once again, I was the observer of the image as a whole, constructed by my mind in contemplation out of sense and nonsense like a pattern in the wallpaper.

Departure from Saint-Michel; perhaps, we may eventually return to this place. The gentle willows will stay in my memory along with their hawthorn hedges, whose still-leafless thickets shelter green globes of mistletoe and dark magpies’ nests. The celandine and violets were already blooming among the dead leaves, and nettle shoots were beginning to sprout. This is an undulating landscape; here and there it conceals large farms with stables and barns. The shiny slate roofs reflect like mirrors from its valleys. My thoughts upon gazing at these farmsteads: the age of magic has past, yet we still possess the keys to bring it to life. But then there are stages when man loses the memory of goodness and truth. There he does not recognize the sources of his unhappiness.

In Laon by midday. We drove around the lower portion of the old city. It was with a sense of joy that I saw the cathedral again. From the distance, the perforated spires make an especially powerful impression. I imagine it is possible to grasp the internal structure of the work, the pillars and shafts of the shell, the intellectual aspect of the whole plan. It presents a wealth of kaleidoscopic variations to the eyes of those who drive past, as if the building were turning gently on its axis to the sound of a music box.

We reached Paris very late and then marched through dark and desolate streets to Fort Vincennes, where the troops will be billeted. After a walk through the quarters in the early morning hours, I took a room in the Hotel Moderne at the Porte de Vincennes. In the early light, a glimpse of the huge pillars on the Place de la Nation. Behind it, in the distance, a hazy view of the Eiffel Tower. Monumental traits become ever more exaggerated when they appear en masse .