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

Visit from Kohlberg in the morning; conversed with him about Löns and writers from Lower Saxony in general. Our dry soil is extremely unsuitable for the production of artistic types. “ Frisia non cantat .” [Frisia ( i.e ., Holland) does not sing]. [26] Popular saying attributed (probably falsely) to Tacitus.

Went to Burgdorf in the afternoon to pick up the Rhode Island Reds [poultry], a present from Hanne Menzel from Silesia.

Current reading: Origen’s On Prayer , in addition the diaries of Léon Bloy.

Bloy is eminently human in the way he is at home among sordid things: excrement, stench, aspects of hatred; and, yet at the same time, he recognizes the highest invisible law. That makes reading him distressing. Long passages can seem like festering splinters lodged under the skin. Yet I may say that I have exerted myself as a reader, and done so under challenging conditions. One cannot shrink from slights and insults. Only then can one sift the grains of gold from the froth.

Perhaps I shall include Bloy in the series of writers I am planning to cover in a study, just as an act of intellectual gratitude. I have been collecting material for such documentation for a long time. It will examine those people, books, and things that I have chanced upon along my way, people who have given me so much.

In the morning Ernstel’s favorite cat, the beautiful Persian named Hexe, was found dead in a nearby field. She was already stiff, and we assume she had eaten poison. She was the daughter of the old cat, Kissa, who spent many years in our house, and the mother of the young Kissa, who brings me such joy. In addition to her, the large white broad-headed angora tomcat Jacko and the Siamese princess Li-Ping still keep us company.

Air-raid sentry duty last night with my neighbor Lahmann while we discussed the way things are going and broke open a bottle of vermouth. The fire in Grosshorst, the blockbuster bomb near Stelle, those Sunday and Tuesday mornings last week that will forever be inscribed in the history of the village, and even grandchildren will tell their grandchildren about such matters—if they even still exist.

Dense bomber formations in the morning but no bombs dropped. I sensed that and just kept on turning the soil in the garden in Spartan fashion “in the shade.”

Kept reading in Mon Journal by Léon Bloy. There you can encounter passages, as I did this morning, like the following:

“Colding in Denmark. 8 April 1900. Palm Sunday. Terrible weather. Today is the birthday of stupid King Christian [IX], and it is a holiday all over Denmark. His reprehensible son-in-law, the Prince of Wales, has arrived in Copenhagen after escaping an assassination attempt at the Parisian Gare du Nord. A young Belgian fired at this pig but missed. It is better just to stab them. That is more reliable and is better for the sausage!”

It takes either incredible impertinence or manic confidence in one’s own judgment to write and even publish (Paris, 1904) such things. In truth, a decadent sense of security accumulated in the person of this Edward to an unrivalled extent. As a memorial to him, Paris preserves a device, a sort of orthopedic chair he had built to accommodate his fat paunch with the greatest possible comfort during intercourse. Travelers are shown this in one of the big lupinares [brothels] as a curiosity, and Morris, [27] See First Paris Journal , Paris , 5 July 1941. who seems to have thought it one of the wonders of the modern world, urged me to go see it. Although I otherwise do not avoid erotic curiosities, I could not bring myself to do so—the thoroughly mechanical and soullessly comfortable aspect of the concept is just too awful. Such machines would be at home in the great pictures by Hieronymus Bosch.

As I write this, I am watching several dogfights taking place in the gaps of blue sky in the area between my study and Isernhagen. These dramas are perhaps—no, certainly—connected magically and causally to the fact that there were monarchs like this Edward, Leopold of Belgium, and even Wilhelm II. They are not the final duels of western chivalry.

Through the keyhole I watched the new chickens I’m still keeping in the coop. The rooster stands majestically at the feed trough, summons a few hens and pecks others away. After their meal, one of them approaches him, perhaps his favorite, stretches up on her toes and touches him, pecking very gently at his pink wattles and his comb while the rooster struts. This is courtly.

The garden is coming along. Here they say of fertilizer that has been exposed to air too long that it “burns out.” That is graphic.

Concerning the distribution of intelligence. It matches the particular properties of the organisms, for it works logically only in combination with them. The duck, the frog, the pelican, the lily—each possesses a particular intelligence that matches its predisposition. And so they get by. Too much or too little would be equally detrimental.

The towering intelligence of human beings seems to transcend this proportional requirement. At the same time, the surplus can be explained as relegated to invisible organs. When these metaphysical organs are no longer stimulated, when they atrophy, a disruption of the balance appears of the sort we are now experiencing: large amounts of intelligence are freed up to be applied to annihilation.

In addition: Intellectual training of the artisan has reached the level that surpasses organic needs. This releases immense amounts of energy in society, with destructive results. There are two ways to counteract this—either reduction of spiritualization or the creation of new entities, and these can only be invisible ones. This is one of the reasons I am motivated to augment my book about the worker with a theological section.

Of all Weininger’s hypotheses, the one stating that few benefits can be seen in maternal love has generated the most powerful outrage. By the same token, one cannot say he is wrong when we look at the robin, the cat, the pelican with her brood. There is no differentiation in the animal world. The devotion of animals is just as wonderful as that of human beings. Qualities to be venerated lie in a realm beyond and presume an advance over the sexual, even over all temporal connections. Our consciousness of the final unity of matter that transcends any accidental contact: affinity in eternity.

The mail brought the long-awaited letter from Ernstel, who is camped in a town in northern Italy. I’m glad he has ended up on this front. He writes that he is reading The Charterhouse of Parma in a French edition. In the afternoon, Hanne Wickenberg came by, as she does every Friday. We talked about the female Air Force Auxiliary personnel who were killed last week in the big attack on Misburg. They were found without any signs of external injury, lying close beside one another in the communications trenches. They died when their lungs ruptured. Because the air pressure of the shockwave had stripped off all clothes and underwear from their bodies, they were completely naked. A farmer who helped bury them was quite overcome by this horrible indignity: “All such big, beautiful girls, and heavy as lead.”

Went to church and afterward visited the grave of the two Americans. Aside from a few flowers, it is decorated solely by their helmets.

Melancholy. Today metaphysical need is particularly worth our attention because our upbringing is aimed primarily at destroying, at eradicating the best in us. Yet perhaps quite new and unknown prospects reveal themselves as well, as they can to the climber who has ascended the mountain peak across a rock face that was thought to be unconquerable. We must fasten ourselves to the cliff with our own blood.