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

Arras. I wonder if it has been noticed that this is the town that gave birth to two regicides, namely Damiens and Robespierre. I assume so. By way of redress, two peace treaties have also been signed there.

In 1493 when Arras fell to the Austrians, they carved this verse above one of the gates:

[When the French capture Arras, / The mice will eat the cats.]

In 1640, when the French captured the city, however, they chiseled the “p” off the inscription. [28] Thereby changing prendront (will capture) to rendront (give up, return).

This is an example of a retort that has a more concise and also wittier effect than the initial insolent challenge. I noticed this about the propaganda in France as well. The huge posters showing a French worker standing at a machine in Germany and showing all the signs of contentment is an example of this. By contrast, the nocturnal counterpropaganda was limited to a simple nose ring drawn in chalk on the poster figure.

Fortifications are hastily being built near the village. The goal is to set up two dozen anti-aircraft emplacements. This is going to draw heavier attacks closer to us, not to mention the chaos from the planes they will shoot down.

Raid and bombardment in the evening. Advent: a green Christmas tree hung in the air. A heavy bomb flew over the town with a hellish roar, only to detonate in the distance, perhaps over by the autobahn. The shockwave tore all the windows open and ripped off our blackout material.

Aboard sinking ships and floating wrecks. First the supplies are rationed, then the planks begin to loosen, and the struggle for places begins. Finally, the sinking amidst debris, corpses, and sharks.

Burckhardt was right when he expressed his fear of a “rapid decay.” He suspected something shady.

I am reading the Thankless Beggar by Léon Bloy, in which a poor man in disguise left behind a great wealth of consolation.

Words. Désobligeant (disagreeable, unpleasant) is generally translated as “discourteous,” which is actually a sort of inverted expression, since it describes the condition that discourtesy creates in another person.

Dreams about examinations. This kind of fright is too precise, too narrowly confined to be the result of memory alone. By contrast, why do impressions that are so much more powerful, like those of battle, return so seldom and so vaguely?

The test-taking dream must be connected with death; it conceals a warning that life’s tasks, its allotted time, are not yet completed. The final school examination, as my father used to tell me, reappears regularly as an apparition of terror.

“Oh God, I’ll soon turn fifty, and have been to university and I still haven’t done my final exams.”

This is the dream of the foolish virgins, [29] See Gospel of Matthew, 25:7. In this parable, the five wise virgins went out to meet the bridegroom with oil in their lamps, while the lamps of the foolish virgins had gone out. of the wicked husbandmen, [30] Wicked husbandman, recte: husbandmen or tenants. See Gospel of Matthew 21:33–46; Mark 12:1–12; Luke 20:9–19. and of the man who buried his talents. [31] Gospel of Matthew 25:14–30, parable of the servant who buried his master’s talents (unit of currency), rather than increase his fortune through commerce. The feeling that one will never pass the test is a horrible one, and it’s marvelous to awaken from this of all dreams.

In another dream, I was counting money when Friedrich Georg was present. The popular interpretation of this has it that one will encounter hardship to be surmounted. Such explanations are, by the way, usually inadequate, even though they derive partially from experience or from insight into the secret nature of matter. Primers of dream imagery treat symbolism like translation, like dictionaries, by offering subordinated lists, as Huysmans does in his novel The Cathedral .

Léon Bloy’s nice comment about the occultists of this type occurs to me. In order to conjure evil, they need rituals, books of magic, and forays into the strangest and most esoteric regions, while at the same time, they completely miss the obvious Satanism of their grocer living on the next street corner.

It’s a rare thing when our mail doesn’t bring bad news. Our little postmistress approaches in the morning like a bird swooping through the garden, spreading tidings of disaster. Today, she brought the information that Edmond, whose sister and children are living with us, is missing in action, but it is probable that he’s been taken prisoner.

Friedrich Georg writes that, during the raid that destroyed the beautiful old city of Freiburg in twenty minutes, his book, The Illusions of Technology , which was being stored in a warehouse before publication, also went up in flames. It almost seems as if technology wanted to suppress the book. Twice now, the cast type has been melted in Hamburg after it was set.

I helped dig up a huge termite nest. It took a lot of work. Cranes were employed for the excavations, which were as big as a significant gravel pit. Deep in the middle of the steep yellow slope, the dark spherical structure glowed. Hosts of termites marched out in military formation. Among them I saw Termitophiles and Symbiotes like the many-legged wood louse with its black leathery carapace as it scrabbled away. My participation was that of an expert, a connoisseur of such political systems.

Construction of the batteries at the edge of the moor. The first families are leaving town. Mutterings precede the impending catastrophe, of the sort Defoe so ably describes in his book about the plague in London, or Hebbel in his [drama] Judith . It is the little details that produce panic. For example, here, word is going around that people should “remove the pictures from the walls.”

Went to the doctor in Burgdorf in the morning. I am overcome by a strange feeling of embarrassment when people ask me about the books I write. This is probably due to my difficulty in expressing in words the meaning of the things I do. Seen from an absolute perspective, it is insignificant that I am even writing at all—I could achieve as much by different means, for example, by meditation. Books are shavings, detritus of existence. A clandestine quality, related to the erotic, ultimately informs this feeling. On the one hand, you can present your children in public, but on the other, you don’t expound on the details of their procreation.

Rested in the little Beinhorn Woods, which is one of my spiritual haunts, something like the Place des Ternes in Paris. It was here that I decided to undertake a second complete reading of the Bible, in particular Luther’s translation with scholarly apparatus. I am hoping that these different readings will make the network of passages meaningful to me, and that in the course of time, I shall develop an exegesis for my personal use.

While I was tidying my files, I came upon a review of the Marble Cliffs by Näf that appeared years ago in a Swiss newspaper. When a neutral critic, who can be in no doubt about the situation in Germany, connects the content of the book with our political conditions, then carelessness, if not malice, must be at work. He criticized my style for starting a sentence with the particle “so” on almost every page, while pointing out that one of the greatest masters of language, Mallarmé, struck the word from his dictionary. For me that is not authoritative. It is important in my attitude toward life as a relationship to something higher, and a power that proves discernible in objects and their context.