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

On the moor. The golden crowns of the woods gleam in the distance accentuated by blue shadows. The autumn sun produces an abundance of blue. The same applies to the spirit. Autumn brings out metaphysics and also melancholy.

I need a lot of sleep, long nights. The brain is like the liver of Prometheus: plucked from his body by the eagle, it must regenerate in darkness.

Fruits of my reading: Arbeiten über morphologische und taxonomische Entomologie [ Essays on Morphological and Taxonomic Entomology ].

Here I find mentioned an article on the honeybee in ancient India, published in 1886 by Professor Ferdinand Karsch, and what is more, under the pseudonym “Canus.”

A similar pseudonym was the one used by J. Ch. F. Haug, who signed himself “Hophthalmos.”

After a period of great fasting, the German was led to the mountaintop by Kniébolo and shown dominion over the world. It did not take much urging before he was worshipping his tempter.

Dreamed about my father last night. We were playing chess in two different rooms; I was in the outer room, but we could see each other through a sliding door that gradually opened as the game progressed.

Afterward, was standing before a building that held memories for me. At first it seemed to be the demolished and then reconstructed house of my grandmother. Then it was the one belonging to Florence on Avenue de Malakoff; then it was on Rue du Cherche-Midi. That is the tremendous thing about dreams: they echo the archetypes—here, the one of “the lost house.” In light of such imagery, individual experience becomes indistinct. Only the deeper sorrow remains intact. Something similar happens at dusk when individual traits are blurred and general ones become more distinct. At the threshold of that night of death, we will finally recognize the identity of such experiences and the illusion of the world of numbers. There exists but one number, just as there is but one human being. Eros strains to reach him.

Dreamed about my father again last night. We were together on a stairway; he was bringing me wine from the cellar to drink on my journey. Then I was back in Paris.

Air-raid sirens in the morning, just the way they gradually wear down the populations in the cities.

Schenk encouraged me to assemble a collection of seed specimens from plants. The result would not just be a formidable archive of tangible objects, but one that also included their powers, poisons, medicinal, and hallucinogenic properties. Fields of flowers, forests, and flower gardens also would be concentrated in that vial.

Worked further on “The Path of Masirah.” Working in a new area may be too different, too strenuous for this day and age. I am now using an ink that flows blue from my pen but turns a deep, dark color overnight. This feature clearly differentiates the new work; I can now see the freshly plowed furrows in the field.

Squadrons overhead during the night. A great fire blazed over toward Braunschweig. Low-flying aircraft circled the region at breakfast. The house shook under the bombardment.

Worked more on “The Path of Masirah” despite the huge hardships these days. It’s strange how difficult it is to come up with names for characters in such stories, even though we have the whole alphabet at our disposal. It’s no less strange that they can seldom be changed once the text has been developed past the beginning. The characters that bear them have then achieved their own life, their own reality.

The use of the past perfect tense over the course of long paragraphs makes a text wooden. It is preferable to use the imperfect [simple past] at the cost of grammatical precision and just let the past perfect be audible on occasion. The reader then remains in the temporal dimension of the narrative. Style permits carelessness, but not outright mistakes.

Went to the Oldhorst Moor with Ernstel in the afternoon. The pale pink plant with waxy blossoms that I collected for my moor herbarium turned out to be bog rosemary. At eight o’clock in the evening as I sat at my microscope, warnings of enemy aircraft came through. The planes themselves followed shortly thereafter. We could see red and green Christmas trees [10] See note to Second Paris Journal , Paris, 5 October 1943. over the city where the southern section was being transformed into a boiling cauldron of explosions. A farm in Neuwarmbüchen went up in flames.

Kniébolo’s radio appeal for the formation of Volkssturm [civil defense; home guard] battalions makes it easier to institute new policies of annihilation that are directed against the populace as a whole. All his ideas turn out to be experiments that are then applied to the Germans on a large scale. I am thinking of the bombing of the synagogues, the destruction of the Jews, the bombardment of London, the flying bombs, et cetera. He demonstrates primarily that such deeds are imaginable and possible; he destroys all safeguards and gives the masses a chance to show their approval. The frenetic acclaim that accompanied his rise to power was essentially the approval of self-destruction, a deeply nihilistic act. My horror stems from the fact that, from the start, I could sense the terrifying cheering for the Pied Piper. Of course, Kniébolo is a European phenomenon as well. Germany’s central location will always make it the place where such things appear first and most distinctly.

I heard from Army High Command that my discharge has gone through. People in Berlin even seem to have been in a hurry to get rid of me by this method. Now I can work here a little bit, as if I were on a sinking ship or in a city under siege, where one presents the wave offering [11] The wave offering [Ger. Webopfer ] derives its name from the Old Testament ritual in which the priests held up the offering and waved it back and forth before the altar. before deserted altars. A good thing that the whole publishing business is collapsing. That makes my work more meaningful and more futile. By the same token, we might engrave chalices to offer to the sun and then cast them into the sea.

In the city, I discovered that the attack that happened the day before yesterday took many lives. Most were crushed by the crowds in front of the bunker doors. Some bunkers have flights of steps leading down; some individuals jump over the railing onto the people crowded together below. When they land, they break people’s cervical vertebrae. Harry witnessed one of these entrances to the inferno; the wailing and moaning from the dark shaft penetrated far and wide through the night.

Afterward went with Schenk to the studio of Grethe Jürgens, where we chatted about plant life on the moors and the small islands.

Return trip via Bothfeld. I visited the cemetery and, among the graves noticed that of W., a man with whom my father went to court over land disputes. Now both are lying in the same earth and returning to it. What is left to us from this life if we do not accumulate worth that can be exchanged for gold at the tollgate to death’s realm, to be exchanged for eternity?

In my dream I was dining with the commander-in-chief in the evening, and while doing so I thought, “So the reports of his death were wrong.” But I could see the pale scar of the pistol shot on his temple.

In the afternoon, I took Ernstel to the station in Burgdorf. He is still debilitated from his time in prison; his feet are also still sore from the marching. Yet he didn’t want his comrades, who are ready to head out, to leave without him. We embraced each other in the small chilly passageway that leads to the platform.