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

Judar the fisherman. When he enters the subterranean regions to seek the ring of highest power, he meets a series of phantoms he must vanquish. At last he finds his own mother. So even here is the knowledge, as Boethius terms it, that defeated earth grants us the stars.

World conquest by men like Caesar or Alexander has to be understood symbolically. Purple is the symbol of victory, and the ivory scepter the symbol of the victor. The one betokens matriarchal lineage, the other, the patriarchal. Gold is the apotheosis of purple; it represents the concentration of earthly power.

In some unnamed metropolis, I was living in one of the many furnished rooms at my disposal in my dream life. Pons entered and took a seat on an easy chair so he could tell me about a love affair. He added that he was going to get married tomorrow. Upon awakening I thought; “look at that, the woman he described is better suited to him (given all the circumstances of their acquaintance) than the one he chose in reality.”

This is the way people can enter our dreams: not only in their historical guise but also in a way that embodies their potential. In our dream images we understand both their empirical and also their explicit character.

After having set aside the “Path of Masirah” several weeks ago, I am starting to revise my journal from Rhodes. The times are not conducive to such works. In the “Path of Masirah,” I wish to depict a survey of morality in historical, geographical, and physical scenes. The world of the spirit must shine through the natural one but also put its stamp on it like sealing wax.

Not a history, but a synopsis of philosophy presenting the philosopher’s stone with its facets polished by the guiding spirits of different ages and peoples.

Conversation with Alexander on how to keep a journal. I corresponded about this same topic with a Sergeant Müller, who sent me his own entries.

Going through my travel journals makes it clear how much they have been shaped by topical themes. The age we live in affects their content the way fermentation and aging affect wine in the depths of the cellar. Eventually, it must be carefully rebottled and have the yeasts poured off. At Florence’s apartment, I once had a long talk with Léautaud about this. He disapproves of this practice and declares that the word in its first version is inviolable and sacrosanct. That rule cannot be implemented in my case for technical reasons, because I intersperse much associative material as a sort of seal of memory. The best depiction of first impressions is the fruit of repeated exertion and intense rewriting.

Sunday morning. After hard rain over the past few days, dry weather and clear skies. Since we experienced two raids during the night, I put the Rhodes journals aside in order to organize Elateridae [click beetles]. Looking at them reminded me of walks in the woods of Saint-Cloud.

Then the report came through that massive bomber squadrons were getting nearer. I put on my coat to go into the garden, from which I could see a large number of aircraft crossing northern airspace. Then over five hundred planes approached from the direction of Celle in staggered formations of about forty planes each. After leaving jagged bands of white smoke signals over the southern part of the sky, they swung around in formation toward Misburg and dropped their payloads. We could hear the roaring and screaming noise drown out the anti-aircraft fire. Powerful explosions shook the earth far and wide. The attackers came in at low altitude below the little clouds of our defensive positions.

Two or three squadrons swerved straight toward the house, and opened their bomb bay doors above it in order to drop their payloads, as far as I could estimate, somewhere near Bothfeld. The defensive fire was stronger than before. The lead aircraft sustained a direct hit, and a long, pale red blazing flame trailed out behind it before it crashed nearby. The smoke clouds of the impact soon surrounded our house. It looked as though one of the aircraft parts, a large silver wing with an engine hanging from it, was spinning slowly and would crash onto us, yet it corkscrewed off toward the schoolteacher’s house making a hissing noise, disappearing behind it. Two parachutes also drifted over the garden; one was so low that the man hanging on it was as close as someone you’d meet on the street. Suddenly the air was thick with scraps and shavings, as if the airplane had been shredded into black confetti. The pageant was powerfully intoxicating; it staggered all reason. There comes a point in such events when one’s own safety starts to become secondary: the vivid elements become so intensified that they leave no room for reflective thought, not even for fear.

Without light, without water, without electricity since the power plant in Ahlten was hit. They say that six hundred planes flew over us with their white loops and trails. They looked like swarms of microbes romping about in an immense blue drop of water.

The wing came down in a nearby field; the aircraft hit the ground just behind Bothfeld and burned out. Near Grosshorst, they found a head and a hand. Two more shattered corpses were lying nearby; you could see that the parachutes had become tangled in each other and as a result failed to open.

One of the pilots landed in Stelle. We heard that an inhabitant of the village—none other than a Dutch refugee—went after him and hit him a couple of times with an axe. His neighbor, Rehbock, a soldier on furlough, was passing in his farm cart, got the wounded man out of his clutches and, in danger of his own life, brought him to safety.

The two Americans whose parachutes had become entangled were buried in the little cemetery today. General Loehning came by in the afternoon. He had heard the rumor that had been circulating for weeks that I had been captured or shot.

The task of the author is not to achieve absolute, but optimal precision. This is justified by the difference between logic and language. It is thus a prerequisite of good style that an author must be satisfied with the optimal expression. To seek the absolute leads him in the wrong direction.

Words are a mosaic; that is to say that cracks exist between them. When viewed logically, these are spaces. On the other hand, they reveal the earthly realm below for deeper speculation.

Perpetua dreamed she was having one of her eye teeth pulled.

Toward noon countless squadrons appeared under dense cloud cover and dropped their payloads. A gigantic carousel seemed to be revolving above our village, raining down steel as it turned. This fell in a circle around Kirchhorst, in Stelle, near Lohne, where from our garden I could watch thirty bombs explode. They hit Buchholz causing great damage, as well as in Misburg, where the corpses of fifty Women’s Auxiliary personnel were pulled out of the rubble.

The mail brought a telegram from Countess Podewils. Her husband writes from England—a happy report in the midst of so much dismal news.

In my dream, I paid a visit to my father and also found him, yet both of the columns at the entrance to his house had grown so closely together that it took great effort to force myself in between them.

Doing nighttime guard duty, which has been instituted here in our village because of the airplanes. The farmers are deep sleepers and usually don’t wake up until the bombs start falling. Luckily I had my neighbor Lahmann as my partner—a man with some brains in his head. Time is compressed by the presence of an intelligent or pleasant person. This noticeable effect goes so far that in intellectual or erotic encounters, time can completely lose its meaning. Pain, on the other hand, and mental dullness draw it out interminably. Anyone who wishes to comprehend the true power of death as the destroyer of time must come to terms with this thought. Death brings something that nothing else can.