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

A detail reminds me of one of Joseph Conrad’s novels. An English ship, the Fattysalam , a troop transport vessel, sprang a leak in 1761 off the Coromandel Coast. It was so serious that it seemed inevitable the ship would sink in no time. Before the crew found out about the disaster, the captain and the officers secretly boarded the dinghy that was in tow and abandoned ship. From their safe distance, they watched as panic broke out aboard the Fattysalam . But soon the signal was given that the damage had been repaired. The captain was in favor of returning to the ship but was cautioned against it by his officers. Shortly thereafter, they saw the ship go down. The signal had just been an attempt to coax the dinghy back.

The collection is rich in similar examples of rational bestiality. The study of shipwrecks gives us a key to our age. The sinking of the Titanic is its most portentous omen.

An example of Wilhelmine baroque style: “It is in my opinion subject to no doubt at all…”

This example from Bürgermeister Mönckeberg, Briefe [ Mayor Monckeberg, Letters ] (Stuttgart, 1918). On the same page, he uses unbedingter [more absolute] as a comparative.

During the church service, the gun emplacements in Stelle were booming—a spotter plane circled low over the village, probably to take photographs. Since the Misburg oil works have been operational again, we’ve had to expect new raids close by. In Burgdorf a low-flying aircraft strafed a passenger train. Twenty fatalities.

Letters still come every day regarding Ernstel’s death, and with them, many a comforting word. Today, for example, the thought that our life presupposes another side; the effort [to see it] is too great for our physical existence.

Verses from Friedrich Georg that reminded me of Ernstel’s childhood in Goslar and Überlingen.

[On Ernstel’s Death / The winds are asking for their playmate: / “Where are you?” And the echo comes back. / Spring is now coming, soon spring will arrive. / “Where are you, Ernstel? Won’t you return?” // The Harz [region] is about to erupt in green. And on the meadows / The songs resound in the dense hedges. / The blackbird calls you from the thicket: / “Where are you Ernstel? Won’t you return?” // He is at peace now. Oh, you call him in vain / At the cool waters and in the groves. / To him was granted an early peace. / But we stayed behind to mourn him.]

Despite his youth, he left behind a definite impression, was also loved by many. Today the photo of his grave arrived from Carrara. Thus, every day brings an echo of him.

Ziegler writes to me from Hamburg that by special order of the Grandgoschier [Goebbels], the press will print no mention of my fiftieth birthday. That happens to be the only honor that I prize.

Restless night. The English have adopted a strategy of demoralization by sending a single aircraft to circle over the landscape and just drop a bomb now and then to keep tensions high.

During the day, one air-raid alert follows the next. We hear that Dresden has been heavily hit. With that, the last untouched city was probably reduced to rubble. Apparently hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs were dropped, and countless refugees died in the open spaces.

I worked in the garden. Yesterday, I got an early glimpse of the red shoot of a peony. Turned over the compost underneath the large elm. The way that all things there decay and return to earth has something instructive and comforting about it.

Read in the small dual language edition of Heraclitus that Carl Schmitt gave me on 23 March 1933. Also read in Louis Réau’s monograph on Houdon, who has interested me ever since I saw his bust of Voltaire in the foyer of the Comédie Française. [43] Houdon; see First Paris Journal , Paris, 9 March 1942 and 14 March 1942. This sculptor of the rococo period achieves an extraordinary degree of physiognomic truth. One feels that here the inner truth of the age itself finds its expression: namely its mathematical-musical core. A chisel of Mozartian precision. A comparative study on him and Anton Graff would be instructive.

Heraclitus: “Sleepers are active participants in the events of the world.”

Their successes were the worst thing for the Germans—in any reckless match, a victory at the outset is most dangerous. That is the bait, the barbed hook that ensnares greed. Winning also seduces the player into showing his cards. He removes the mask.

After the victory over France, the middle classes were convinced that everything was fine. They no longer heard the voices of the unfortunates and their De Profundis . [44] De Profundis , see Psalm 130: De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine [From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord].

Incidentally, the Western powers are entering a similar phase. Success is making them ruthless. Just as their weapons become superior, their broadcasts also change from praising justice to threatening vengeance. The language of reason is displaced by violence. The willingness to make peace stands under the sign of Libra, the scales: one of the pans rises as the other falls. That has remained unchanged since the time of Brennus.

Who will stand by us after these spectacles have finished? Not the ones we shared our pleasures with at the banquet table, but rather those who shared the pain with us. This applies to the friends, the women, and to the relationships among us Germans in general. We are now finding a new, firmer ground for our commonality.

At my desk in the morning while the anti-aircraft guns fired and dense formations roared over the house. The windowpanes, the doors, the glasses in the cupboards, the pictures on the walls dance and shake like a ship on rough seas.

In the afternoon, I took Alexander along on my subterranean studies in order to train his eye a bit. We dug up a mole’s burrow and a nest of wood ants, and also visited a rabbit warren. The wood ants’ nest was located in the heart of a dead fir tree; its chambers, passages, and galleries followed the tree’s grain and had created recesses by leaving paper-thin walls that had perforated the wooden block like a honeycomb. The bleached-out structure possessed a certain delicate stability, so that if a hand were to grab a piece of it, one would have to strain in order to break it into dry fragments. The sight of all this made me think of the great story about my adventures with the ants, which I used when I was fifteen years old to keep my brothers and sisters spellbound until late at night. If this kind of innocence in storytelling were ever to come back to me, it would overflow like the contents of a krater .

Read further in the Old Testament. Deborah’s song of victory (Judges, 5): that terrible, joyous celebration over steaming blood. Verses 28–30, ironic enjoyment at the pain of Sisera’s mother, who waits for her son in an anguished state, still unaware that he will not return, because a nail has been driven through his skull. Abimelech also appears as a man of unbelievable violence in this book.