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

It’s also wonderful to watch the drama of the old liberals, Dadaists, and freethinkers, as they begin to moralize at the end of a life devoted completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order. Dostoevsky, who knew this whole aquarium from the bottom up, depicted it in the mollusk form of Stepan Trofimovich. [21] Stepan Trofimovich is a character is Dostoevsky’s novel, The Demons (1872). His sons are encouraged to scorn anything that had formerly been considered fundamental. Finally, it is said of the all-too-eager master: “Well, old boy, you’ve blathered on long enough. Now it’s time to boil you down for soap.” Then the wailing starts. Once the conservatives have also been bumped off, the chaos is over. And so in The Demons the matter rests with the German governor (Lemke, I think), who is not up to the task. Lemke’s situation is remarkably similar to that of the old Hindenburg. Add to this the young conservatives who first support the demos [22] See note to Second Paris Journal , Paris , 1 September 1943. because they sense its new elemental power, and then fall into the traces and are dragged to their deaths. In this chaos, only the nihilist retains his fearsome power, and anyone who thinks he can mount a counteroffensive must have learned how to do so from him.

Air-raid sirens at midnight, and right afterward while we were dressing the children, four bombs hit with a roar. The same thing happened at half past three this morning. After the all-clear signal, the shells with time-delay fuses exploded. Rain poured down on the garden, and from the old Hanoverian city center, the red glow of detonations flamed up through the steamy air.

During the alarm, even during the raid and the defensive fire, a certain order prevails. But once the first bombs begin to whistle, everyone—more or less dressed—piles into the shelter. Even then, the children are led by the hand; our concern focuses especially on them.

In the mail a card from Ernstel who is on his way to Italy as a Panzergrenadier [infantryman in a heavy-armor division]. In addition a letter from Ruth Speidel, from which we can see, to our great joy, that the general is still alive. I have thought about him, as well as Ernstel, every evening and every morning.

A raid just now—it is nine o’clock in the evening—which reddened the rain-soaked western sky with fires and powerful explosions. A bomb also fell in the area; the shockwave smashed a windowpane in my study that was already cracked, as well as the transom over the front door.

Current reading: Grundzüge einer Ökologie der chinesischen Reptilien [ General Outline of an Ecology of Chinese Reptiles ] by Mell. In certain sea snakes with paddle-shaped tails, only one ovary functions, while the other produces immature eggs. This prevents interference with the creature’s swimming while gravid. It also safeguards the fully developed capacity to search for food during this period, when nourishment is most crucial. In some species, the gums seem to be adapted for the absorption of oxygen and are thus capable of breathing. During long dives, these substitute for lungs, like oxygen canisters aboard submarines. There is one of the strangest cases ever attested in which snakes attack human beings: A Chinese woman on an island near Hong Kong was busy cutting grass. She laid her little child on the earth where it was devoured by a python that darted from the bushes. It was impossible to get help. Of course, infants left unguarded are prey to attacks from almost all animals, right down to the ants.

Here too I find the opinion (as I did recently in Sachot’s book about Ceylon) that certain people in regions where snakes proliferate possess a distinct ability to handle the creatures. A particular affinity exists in such places. I assume that, when seized by its captors, the snake perceives a sort of neutrality or even sympathy, rather like the touch of one of its own species.

The book is good because of its underlying passion for the observation of animals, the frisson of the magical and totemic encounter, without which all zoology becomes merely an arid summary of data.

In this context, I again pondered Darwinism. His main weakness lies in his lack of metaphysics. This finds its expression in the methodology, in that only one of the forms of observation—namely time—predominates.

By contrast, we have to see that animals have a relationship to their environment and to each other that resembles a bundle that is intricately knotted and intertwined. Their abundance requires less a chronological than a synoptic approach. The immense simultaneity—the parallel coexistence—becomes broken up by Darwinism into a succession: the bundle uncoils into a roll. This diminishes the grandeur of creation, the miracle of the genesis, as it emerges at a single stroke or in mighty cycles and eons, such as in the seven days of Moses, or in Hesiod’s hierarchy of the cosmos, or in Chinese natural philosophy.

From a theological perspective, Lamarck’s views are more significant. But it was, however, predictable that the more mechanistic theory would carry the day. After a certain point in time, selection takes place based on the greatest capacity for destruction.

After writing last night’s entry, I read Goethe’s [comedy] Die Mitschuldigen [ Partners in Crime , 1787]. The work skillfully captures the milieu of a small inn, yet the ending is abrupt, and it is annoying that Sophie remains under the control of the wicked Söller. On the other hand, one could argue that the title announces the moral of the tale.

After midnight—it had turned into a clear, starry night—then came a second attack with countless aircraft. One of them, pinned like an insect by the beams of the searchlights, was pitching from side to side from the impacts of the shells that zigzagged around it like little red stars shooting off an anvil. The presence of the children made the events more intense, more human, than anything familiar to me from the bunkers of World War I. Perpetua holds our little boy on her lap, bends over him completely, almost embracing him with her shoulders so that no harm can come to him that would not first touch her. This is Niobe’s posture when confronting Apollo’s arrow. [23] Apollo and Artemis killed Niobe’s children because she boasted that, as the mother of so many children, she was thus the equal of Leto.

Then fell asleep and dreamed of animals. I was engrossed in the observation of birds in an ornithological cabinet, particularly a large, speckled hawfinch. I was surprised that the bird’s mottled coloration also extended to its beak, and pondered the reasons for this. Then there was a Javanese magpie that looks just like ours. “What makes this Javanese?”—I see, like some birds-of-paradise, it had a clump of red plumage under its open display of tail feathers.

The air-raid alarms sometimes yank us out of deep sleep. When this happens, I am again made aware that there are unknown regions of dreams, nethermost depths of the sea where no ray of light penetrates. Just as the organisms that respond to light and sun are accidentally caught down there in the net, the plasma of the deep dream state also changes in response to the consciousness of the moment. Only a few scales get stuck in the twine of the net. We descend into unfathomable, eyeless depths, down into the placenta of imagery.

Had an uninterrupted night. Read Goethe’s [play] Natürliche Tochter [ The Natural Daughter , 1803], a coldly artificial display of fireworks. It is like a creation still in its preliminary, Promethean phase. It is precisely the high level of its workmanlike quality that speaks for its ingenuity.