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

Visit from Wepler, who is passing through. We spoke together about the death of Feuerblume. [154] See Second Paris Journal , Paris, 25 June 1943. The older and the younger friend of one deceased. Her death brings us closer.

Departed very early for Sissonne. I had not been in this place since 1917. In Laon I found the area around the railroad station destroyed by recent bombing, but the cathedral and upper part of the town were almost unscathed. Those cities and paths, so central to our destiny—the ones we keep returning to—what form does our transformation inscribe itself upon the earth? Perhaps that of garlands and blossoms of some miraculous kind.

We had work to do on the parade ground because irregularities had emerged in one of the battalions from the Caucasus. For the trip, we used a vehicle that burned wood gas from a stove mounted in the rear. We had to stop and stoke it occasionally with more wood, which we did under dense cover to elude the dive-bombers. The burned-out vehicles by the side of the road made us all the more wary. The machine guns that we now hold between our knees when we take such trips are evidence that things are less pleasant.

I must change my rules of conduct; my moral relations with my fellow man have become too strained. That’s how it stands with the battalion commander, who stated that he would have the first deserter who was caught brought before the company where he would “dispatch” him with his own hands. When I hear such hostility, I get sick to my stomach. I have to reach a plane from which I can view things the way a doctor examines patients, as if these were creatures like fish in a coral reef or insects on a meadow. It’s especially obvious that these things apply to the lower ranks. My disgust still betrays weakness and too great an identification with the “red world.” [155] This image evokes “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson) and is E. J.’s metaphor for the Darwinian struggle for existence. We have to see through the logic of violence and beware of euphemism in the style of Millet or Renan. We also have to guard against the disgraceful role of those citizens who moralize about people who have made terrible bargains while looking down from the safety of their own roofs. Anyone not swallowed up by the conflict should thank God, but that does not give him license to judge.

This occupied my thoughts as I stood beside Reese while he addressed the foreign soldiers. They stood around us in an open square formation wearing German uniforms with badges of their ethnicity emblazoned on their sleeves—things like a mosque with two minarets encircled by the words “ Biz alla Bilen, Turkestan .” Reese spoke slowly and in short sentences, which were translated by an interpreter.

Our position in the center of this quadrangle seemed bizarre, as if we were on a chess board planning intelligent moves, including ones involving ethnographic finesse.

We ate with the German officers, who gave the impression of being composed half of technicians and half mercenary leaders—the eighteenth and twentieth centuries merge into pseudo-forms that are difficult to classify. Wherever theory flakes off, it reveals pure force underneath. There is no military tribunal; the commanders have the power of life and death. On the other hand, they have to count on being murdered along with their officers should their troops desert in the night.

In Boncourt we then drank a mug of vodka with the Russian company commander, while the Turkomans and Armenians joined together around us in a wide circle. They huddled on the ground for hours, singing their droning chants. Every now and then dancers would leap into the circle and exert themselves either individually or in pairs to the point of exhaustion.

In the occasional hiatus, I was able to slip away for a brief half hour to go hunting for subtiles . In doing so, I came upon the blue-green Drypta dentata [ground beetle] in the wild for the first time; it is a creature of exquisite elegance. The Italian Rossi, who was a doctor in Pisa, first named it in 1790.

Air-raid sirens, planes overhead. From the roof of the Raphael, I watched two enormous detonation clouds billow upward in the region of Saint-Germain while the high-altitude formations cleared off. They were targeting the river bridges. The method and sequence of the tactics aimed at our supply lines imply a subtle mind. When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theater—pure power affirmed and magnified by suffering. [156] E. J. admitted that he sometimes conflates experiences. It has been determined that the last bombing raid on Paris ended on 27 May 1944 at 13.45. By the evening then, the roof of the Raphael was indeed a safe place, and there were no squadrons overhead that evening. See Tobias Wimbauer, “Kelche sind Körper. Der Hintergrund der ‘Erdbeeren in Burgunder’–Szene,” in Anarch im Widerspruch. Neue Beiträge zu Werk und Leben der Brüder Ernst und Friedrich Georg Jünger, 2nd ed . (Hagen-Berchum: Eisenhut Verlag, 2010), 25–76.

Pentecost Sunday. I finished reading the Apocalypse after breakfast and with that, my first complete reading of the Bible begun on 3 September 1941. Previously I had read only portions, including the New Testament. Commendable is what I would call this effort, especially since it was the result of my own decision, and I prevailed despite some opposition. My upbringing ran in the contrary direction. Since my early youth my thinking had been directed by my father’s rigorous realism and positivism, and every important teacher I had abetted his endeavors. The religion teachers were for the most part boring; some of them gave me the impression that they were embarrassed by the material. Holle, the brightest among them, encouraged insights by explaining the appearance of Christ on the water as an optical illusion. He said that that region was well known for its ground fog. My more intelligent classmates and the books I loved all took the same line. It was necessary to have gone through this period, and its vestiges will always stay with me—particularly the need for logical evidence, by which I mean bearing witness to truth rather than relying on confirmation, and the immediacy of reason, which must always light our way. Such goals must remain before us. This sets me apart from the romantics and lights my journeys through this world of the living and the netherworld in my spaceship, which lets me dive, swim, fly as I speed through realms of fire and dreamscapes, accompanied by instrumentation that is the product of science.

Excursion to the Trois Vallées. A glaring, hot day. How beautiful it was in the silent thicket beneath the leafy bushes with the bright cloudless sky overhead: pure presence. “ Verweile doch —” [Tarry a while…]. [157] Fragment of a famous line in Goethe’s Faust in which Faust addresses the moment, saying, “Tarry a while, thou art so fair.”

The wisteria and the way its woody, winding vines curve around the bars of the garden fence. A single glance reveals to the eye the chemical substance they have been depositing there for decades.

The emerald wasp Chrysis against a gray wall—its iridescent, silky green thorax and garish raspberry-red abdomen. A tiny creature like this seems to collect the rays of the sun like the focal point of a magnifying glass. It lives cloaked in finely woven embers.