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

Back to my tendency to introduce sentences with conjunctions and particles. It is not from the sentence per se that we can expect the words to acquire a necessary relationship to one another. It helps when the connection among the sentences is explicit: the logical sequence, the contradiction, the symmetry, the amplification, the introduction of an unexpected viewpoint. Introductory words accomplish this. They resemble clefs that announce tonal value, or the mood of the movement to follow. Words may live in sentences, but sentences, by contrast, live in a broader context.

I consider it the duty of the author to ponder these things; that is the least bit of technical tidiness that can be expected of him. The only objection worth responding to here would be: Is not language too worthy of our veneration to be approached with such techniques? Don’t they tend to damage the dark and unconscious aspects that dwell in it too easily?

By contrast, one could expound further: language itself is not worthy of veneration, but rather the inexpressible alone is. It is not churches that are to be venerated, but rather the invisible quality of what dwells within them. The author approaches this with words without ever attaining it. His goal lies beyond language and can never be contained by it. With words, he invokes silence. Words are his tool, and it is to be expected that he keep this tool in good repair by constantly staying in practice with it. He must not let a syllable pass that does not satisfy him, but he must also never imagine that he possesses mastery. He must always be dissatisfied with himself. He also must get used to the fact that he will surely provoke displeasure.

Very threatening raids in the morning and evening; bombs fell not far from here.

In the afternoon received a visit from Cramer von Laue, who was wounded for a second time in Italy and is walking on crutches. Conversation about the assassination attempt, and in particular, Kniébolo’s health, which they say has declined markedly. His distress at not having recognized his enemy, that he hadn’t perceived him, seems to have overshadowed all other considerations. That would correlate with details [General] Kleist told me in Stavropol and is also the reason why I always avoided a meeting with him. It is said that he has introduced a new instrument, a kind of garrote, for exterminating his opponents. The charnel house, this our reality.

The mail brought a letter from Ernstel, who is anticipating his first military encounter. In addition, The Illusions of Technology by Friedrich Georg, which he has given a new title: The Perfection of Technology . He sent me one of the few author’s copies that had been distributed before the great fire in Freiburg.

And unto Adam he said, “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:17).

The passage corresponds to the sentence in Hesiod describing how the gods reduced man’s crops, for previously the work of a single day was sufficient to provide for an entire year.

True profusion, Edenic abundance, exists outside the realm of time. There lies the landscape of great, immediate harvests such as myth describes and Genesis illustrates. Nor does death exist there. In the lovers’ embrace, we have retained a small spark of the great light of the world of creation—we fly beyond time as though shot from a crossbow. In myth, this primeval power is halted by the victory of Kronos. Kronos, who mutilates the primeval father with his diamond sickle, makes the race of gods incapable of further procreation. The role of Gaia is allied to that of the serpent.

Then Genesis, 3 and 24. The expulsion from Paradise happens less as punishment than as a means to prevent man from reaching for the Tree of Life and living forever. This is why the cherubim, with their slashing swords drawn, block the approach to the Tree of Life.

What does this mean? Man in a state of sin, and at the same time immortal, would become a demon of immense power. Should he then want to approach the Tree of Life, he will be cut down by the steel of the Angel of Death and, as a creature of earth, laid low before the gates. Yet he returns to eternity in his other form, as God’s breath.

In the afternoon went into Hannover; it has been burning since yesterday morning. The streets were covered with debris and shrapnel, also with vehicles and streetcars that had been hit. They were crowded with people rushing everywhere as in a Chinese catastrophe. I saw a woman walk past me; tears glistened as they fell from her face like rain. I also saw people carrying on their shoulders lovely old pieces of furniture covered by a layer of plaster dust. An elegant gentleman, gray at the temples, was pushing a cart on which there stood a small rococo cabinet.

Went to the address of my parents-in-law on Stephansplatz. Windows and doors had been recently blown in again when a cluster of bombs devastated the area. Anyone located in the fan-shaped target area of this kind of bombing pattern hears the rumbling growing frighteningly louder and changing to a whistling sound just before impact. It does not seem to be true, as is often claimed, that you can’t hear the bomb that is targeting you. A heavy layer of mortar dust filled the space in which the people in the houses waited for the end as they lay on the ground. I had someone show me the cellar: a bare, white-washed corridor where seven chairs stood as if in a waiting room. This is what modern torture chambers look like.

Returned through the streets as night fell. I was repeating a portion of my way to school from the year 1906—but not going past illuminated, well-stocked shop windows as in the old days, but instead past ruins of Piranesian bleakness. From the cellars came the red glow of the winter coal supplies. There were still crowds of people. Now and then, they would pass by a house where fire was still flickering on the walls and ceilings inside—but no one paid any attention.

In a subterranean department store the rooms had been built deep into the cliffs. Among them was a butcher’s stall carved from a vein of white-streaked red marble. It was very clean. The scraps were rinsed away by a mountain torrent that gushed down out of the chasms.

Back in Hannover in the afternoon where clouds of steam still rise from the ruins. I saw men and women sorting through the debris and pulling objects from it. Furniture lined the pavement as it began to rain. It is strangely affecting to see that the streets are perfectly clean and meticulously swept. Such a surviving trait of orderliness could be taken in different ways. I found it half repugnant and half admirable.

Mixed in with the bomb payloads are some with time-release fuses that don’t explode for hours, or sometimes even days. Est modus in rebus [moderation in all things]—in the context of the world of aerial bombing, this embodies a comic element. The comedy may be magnified: for last year’s attack on Berlin on Christmas Eve, the fuses were timed to go off at the hour when presents were being exchanged.

Visited Grethe Jürgens in her studio. Today, people visit others they know, not to see how they’re doing but to see whether they still exist.

Continued reading in Genesis. Lamech, who boasts to his wives Adah and Zillah that he has slain a man for wounding him and a boy for bruising him, says that he shall be avenged, not seven times like Cain, but seventy-seven times. It is a stroke of genius on Herder’s part to connect mankind’s earliest song of triumph with the invention of the sword that had been referred to in a passage shortly before. Lamech is the father of Tubalcain, the first master of all mining and ironwork who thus has tremendous superiority.