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

Mountainous areas are generally regarded as places of refuge, strongholds of freedom, where the collapsing national character survives. Here we find the opposite: The Israelites penetrate the mountains and cannot establish themselves on the plains, the home to peoples who possess “chariots of iron.” Perhaps the rule is that mountains are favorable to the weaker but more determined power.

A beautiful day. The tall hazel bush by my study has adorned itself overnight with woolly, greenish-yellow ribbons of blooms. The terrible destruction continues; in addition to Dresden, Vienna has also been heavily bombed. One gets the feeling that these are blows aimed at a cadaver. It seems that the cup of agony is not yet full.

Worked more in the garden and at my desk. Thought: whether this activity resembles that of those insects that we sometimes find along footpaths, their heads continuing to eat and their antennae moving, while their bodies have been stepped on.

This is only one side of the process; the other is allegorical, sacramental. One sows one’s seed without expectation of ever reaping a harvest. Such activity is either completely senseless or transcendental. Which of the two: it lies in our hands to determine that.

Discourse at the garden gate:

I: “Things are lively in the air today.”

Neighbor: “Yes, they say Osnabrück and Chemnitz have been destroyed.”

But I was talking about the mosquitoes that were buzzing around for the first time.

Manfred [Schwarz] was here for a few days of furlough and departed today. He was recently made commander of a tank unit and is wearing the Iron Cross. Nor does he lack for wounds: His left hand is crippled, the arm shattered by an explosion and rendered useless. During all this time of ferment, his thoughts have become clearer in a horrible distillation. These are the youths I have watched grow up over the years.

I was pleased by the way he judged the situation and showed him my essay on peace, making him one of its very few readers. We discussed it and later also talked about the books by Schubart and Tocqueville, as well as about Russia in particular.

We live in a state of nearly constant air-raid alerts. I was out on the Winkelwiese [meadow], partly to supervise the felling of trees and partly to do a little hunting for subtiles . While I was there, dense formations of aircraft overhead. Shrapnel whistled down; a dud struck some marshy terrain with huge force.

In the garden in the afternoon, still breaking up the soil, when I dug out a mandrake root. It had a slender twisted waist and hermaphroditic gender, a female that was also male. In flowers, the structure that people are more apt to take for a masculine than a feminine feature is formed similarly. I view this as a conundrum with sometimes the one and sometimes the other characteristic predominating.

Formations overhead while I worked on revising my Brazilian journal. They put down three “carpets.” [45] The strategy of carpet-bombing, or saturation bombing, was used by both sides in Europe. The goal was to inflict maximum destruction within a specific target area. From the window, I again watched black smoke clouds rise over Misburg but heard later that a dummy factory had been set on fire. Burgdorf was hit; church and parsonage are destroyed. It is now the turn of the small towns, those last abodes of the old times. Swarms of low-flying aircraft accompany the squadrons in order to “go for the villages.”

During the day there is, incidentally, less incentive to head for the air-raid shelter. That says something about the role our imagination plays during these attacks.

Two Russians who cut wood for us told Perpetua in the kitchen that after three years of captivity, this was the first time that they had been fed inside a house they worked for. That is more troubling than the cruelty itself. Of course, Rozanov was already seeing things like this in Russia after World War I. This is generalized suffering.

An age that possesses such understanding of the physics of energy transfer has lost contact with the immense power contained in the offer of a little piece of bread.

Read further in the Old Testament. Anyone who wants to shape policy, like Kniébolo, should avoid lazy slogans and use the language of Nahash the Ammonite (I Samuel, 11:2).

Saul and Samuel, the first emperor and the first Pope.

Thought about Carus. [46] Carus is E. J.’s imaginary son. See First Paris Journal , Paris, 18 January 1942. I wish him a beautiful physique and a great intellect. On this point: the first is always there to vouch for us. The second we must reveal ourselves: presence of mind. This explains the preference of Aphrodite over Athena; the Judgment of Paris incorporates astrological justice. Eventually, of course, the more intellectual power triumphs, and therefore Troy had to be destroyed

Pondered the naming of colors, always a vague and uncertain venture. Take weinrot [wine red]—red wine has dozens of shades. It would seem that the some spirit of speech bases the connections on vowel sounds. Hence the visual impression is stimulated less by comparisons than by direct experience.

It is inherent in the sound that purpurn [purple] must glow more darkly than scharlachrot [scarlet]. Bordeaux is brighter then Burgunderrot [Burgundy red]—and not just in view of the substances being compared, but also “synaesthetically,” meaning by sound magic. Without an instinctive control of these laws, good style is not possible.

The word is that Überlingen has been bombed, that magnificent old city. I am worried about Friedrich Georg.

We hear that Poland is to be compensated for those territories it will have to cede to Russia by being given Upper Silesia and East Prussia. This means that the other side does not plan to do things any better than Kniébolo would have. Human blindness to everything that has shown us the fiery omens for years fills me with horror.

Current reading: have picked up Huysmans’s Là Bas [ The Damned ] after many years. This book exerted particular influence on me after World War I, awakened an inclination toward expressionist Catholicism, which was then suppressed. Certain texts work like vaccinations.

Also reading Pitcairn, the Island, the People, and the Pastor by Rev. Thomas Boyles Murray (London, 1860) as a follow-up to my reading about shipwrecks. A passage about the Fiji Islanders asserts: “Their horrible habit of feeding on human flesh is the more remarkable, as they exceed their neighbors in talent and ingenuity,” as one of those not infrequent indications that cannibalism and higher culture are not mutually exclusive. I first became aware of this when reading Stucken’s Die Weissen Götter [ The Great White Gods (1934)].

In the afternoon was at the fence that borders the churchyard; its stones and inscribed marble slabs peer over it. I have fallen behind with my digging, partly because of the general situation and also because of Ernstel’s death. This morning after snowstorms alternated with dense bomber formations, the sun broke through around the edges of the white cloud banks now and again. There was already warmth in the earth; I ran my fingers through it to pull out the roots of weeds among the currant bushes. In the loose, previously cultivated soil, my hand grabs hold of the still-hidden plants and gently pulls them out like creatures of the sea caught in a net. Under the thin covering things are sprouting vigorously, such as the nettles that shoot their green splendor from the yellowed root crown in a star pattern. This is true power, more real than a thousand airplanes.