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

To add to the flood of repugnant things that oppress me comes the order to be present at the execution of a soldier sentenced to death for desertion. My first inclination was to report in sick, but that seemed cheap to me. Furthermore, I thought to myself: maybe it is better that you are present rather than someone else. And in truth, I was able to accomplish many things much more humanely than could have been expected.

Basically, it was exaggerated curiosity that was the deciding factor. I have seen many people die, but never at a predetermined moment. How will the situation present itself that today threatens every one of us and spreads and spreads its shadow over his existence? And how should we act in this situation?

Therefore, I looked at the records that culminated in his sentencing. The matter concerns a corporal who left his unit nine months ago to disappear into the city where a French woman gave him shelter. He moved around, sometimes in civilian clothing and sometimes in the uniform of a naval officer as he went about his affairs. It seems that he felt a false sense of security and not only made his lover jealous but also beat her. She took her revenge by reporting him to the police, who turned him in to the German authorities.

Yesterday after this, I accompanied the judge to a little spot in the forest near Robinson, the appointed location. In a clearing, an ash tree, its trunk splintered by previous executions. Two groups of bullet holes are visible—a higher one for the head and a lower one for shots to the heart. In among the delicate filaments of the exploded fibers of the tree’s heartwood layer, some dark blowflies are resting. They objectify the feeling that I brought with me to this spot: no place of execution can be sufficiently sanitized to efface all vestiges of the knacker’s yard. [7] Knacker’s yard: a slaughterhouse for old or injured horses.

We drove a long distance today to reach this spot in the forest. The staff doctor and a first lieutenant who was in command were in the car. During the journey. conversations had a particular quality of closeness and intimacy characterized by things like “imagine being in a fix like this.”

In the clearing we meet the detail. We form a sort of corridor of two rows in front of the ash tree. The sun is shining after the rain that fell on our way here; drops of water glisten on the green grass. We wait a while until shortly before five o’clock. Then a car pulls up the narrow forest road. We watch the condemned man get out, followed by two prison guards and the clergyman. Behind them a truck appears, driving the burial detail and military issue coffin: “cheapest model, standard size.”

The man is led between the two rows; at that moment, I am overcome with a feeling of trepidation, as if it were suddenly difficult to breathe. He is placed before the military judge, who stands beside me: I note that his arms have been secured behind his back with handcuffs. He is wearing gray trousers made of good material, a gray silk shirt, and an open military tunic that has been draped over his shoulders. He stands erect and is well built, and his face bears pleasant features of the sort that attract women.

The sentence is read aloud. The condemned man follows the procedure with the highest degree of attention, and yet I still have the impression that he doesn’t understand the text. His eyes are open wide, as though drinking it all in, large, as if his body were suspended from them; he moves his full lips as if he were spelling. His gaze falls on me and stays there for a second on my face with a penetrating, questioning tension. I can tell that the agitation lends him an air of something confused, florid, even childlike.

A tiny fly plays about his left cheek and alights several times close to his ear. He shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head. The reading takes barely a minute, but the time seems extraordinarily long to me. The pendulum becomes long and heavy. Then the guards lead the condemned man to the ash tree; the clergyman accompanies him. Heaviness increases in this moment. There is something staggering about it, as if heavy weights had been lowered. I remember that I am supposed to ask whether he wants a blindfold. The clergyman answers yes for him while the guards tie him to the tree with white ropes. The clergyman softly asks him a few questions; I hear him answer them with jawohl [yes sir]. Then he kisses a small silver cross while the doctor pins a piece of red cardboard the size of a playing card onto his shirt over his heart.

In the meantime, the firing squad has followed a signal from the first lieutenant and has taken up their positions standing behind the clergyman, who still blocks the condemned man. He now steps back after running his hand down the prisoner’s side once more. The commands follow, and with them I again awaken into consciousness. I want to look away, but I force myself to watch. I catch the moment when the salvo produces five little dark holes in the cardboard, as though drops of dew had landed upon it. Their target is still standing against the tree; his expression shows extraordinary surprise. I see his mouth opening and closing as if he wanted to form vowels and express something with great effort. This situation has something confusing about it, and again time seems attenuated. It also seems that the man is now becoming menacing. Finally, his knees give out. The ropes are loosened and now at last the pallor of death quickly comes over his face, as if a bucket of whitewash had been poured over it. The doctor rushes up and reports, “The man is dead.” One of the two guards unlocks the handcuffs and wipes the glistening metal clean of blood with a cloth. The corpse is placed in the coffin. It looks as if the little fly were playing around him in a beam of sunlight.

Return trip in a new, more powerful state of depression. The staff doctor explains to me that the gestures of the dying are only empty reflexes. He did not see what was most gruesomely clear to me.

At the Ritz this noon with Colonel Speidel, Grüninger, and Clemens Podewils. I have counted Grüninger among my most insightful readers, and probably pupils as well, and it was his idea that I would be in a better position here in Paris than I would be elsewhere. In truth, it’s quite possible that this city has not only special gifts but also inspirations for work and other influences for me. Almost more important is the sense that earlier it was always a capital, symbol and fortress of an ancient tradition of heightened life and unifying ideas, which nations especially lack nowadays. Perhaps I’m doing the right thing if I take advantage of the possibility of establishing myself here. The opportunity presented itself without my instigation.

In the evening, I was visited by the two sisters who were acquaintances from my lodgings in Noisy [Noisy-le-Grand]. The three of us chatted together. The older one is getting divorced from her husband, who squandered her dowry. She speaks of his misconduct and of her lawsuit with Gallic certainty, using the phrases of a canny notary. I gather that there are no insoluble problems here. It seems that she is not obsessed with enmity toward men, but just toward marriage, and that in her own way she wants to introduce the younger woman, who looks like an Amazon, to life. In all this there is a remarkable contrast between pedagogical dignity and epicurean subject matter.

In the afternoon, went to the little patisserie of Ladurée on Rue Royale to say goodbye to the Amazon. Her red leather jacket, the green shoulder bag on its long strap. The mole over the left corner of her mouth rises nervously, appealingly, when she smiles and exposes her canine tooth. On Sunday she will be eighteen years old.