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

Furthermore, abstentions could also be mobilized by counting them as votes for the incumbent government, because it may be logically assumed that a voter who is too lazy to make it to the polls is not dissatisfied with prevailing conditions. The nonvoters represent a passive element of value.

Speeches in our parliaments would have to be read aloud, as in Mirabeau’s age. That would lend weight to the arguments and reduce the amount of empty rhetoric. The unalterable—not the intellectual—composition of the people should also be mirrored in the parliaments. Insofar as practice comes into its own at the expense of theory, the influence of unpredictable figures is also kept in check.

I am reading Petronius in Heinse’s pleasant translation. Of all the characters that appear in the novel, that of Trimalchio is the most convincing. He is one of those great hits of world literature and has all their unmistakable attributes: validity for every age and every place. When and wherever speculation thrives under diminished authority, figures like Trimalchio will emerge, as they most probably will after this war. Just as Homer described the topos of the returning hero, Petronius described the topos of the war profiteer. This is his great achievement. He is the author of a s pecies nova [new species] of a “good” sort.

This morning Alexander, who is in bed with a cold, showed me a fairytale he had written. In it, five apprentices were transformed into frogs.

Perpetua, Hanne Wickenberg, and I were at the table together around noon because it was laundry day. I told a few witticisms in a mood that Hanne described with the Lower Saxon adjective wählig , a word that connotes a kind of relaxed comfort with an added dash of the erotic.

Later in the garden, attending to the business of weeds. Because their roots and shoots are so fragile, they have to be pulled out more carefully than a Guinea worm, [47] Guinea worm: parasite ingested by drinking water infested with water fleas. so that they don’t tear.

During the night, Kniébolo appeared to me again; I was setting up a room for him to be used for a conference with the English. The result was the proclamation of the gas war. I realized that whatever was going to happen, it meant profit for him, for he had attained a level of nihilism that excluded him from the participants. For him every single death, no matter on which side, signified profit. I thought to myself: “yes, that’s why you also had all those hostages shot; now you’ll get back interest a thousandfold at the expense of the innocent.”

And finally this: “soon you will have achieved almost everything you have craved from the outset.”

All this was in a tone of almost noncommittal disgust, for my roof had been shot to pieces, and I was annoyed that it was raining on my South American insects. This, of course, made them soft and flexible; it even seemed to me as if life had returned to them.

When a March evening arrives after one of the first warm days, an amazingly pungent vapor rises from the plowed furrows that were fertilized a few weeks earlier. Its elements comprise highly concentrated animal fumes underscored by decay and combined with pulsing fecundity from the ferment of life in its legions of microbes. This is a smell in which melancholy and high spirits merge—enough to make you go weak in the knees. This is the radical estrus of the Earth and her womb, of the terra cruda nuda [raw naked earth]—the source of every flower’s scent. Health and vital energy also dwell in it, and the ancient doctors were not wrong when they prescribed sleeping in stables to cure wasting diseases.

Snowdrops and crocus are wilting, but for all that, the thimbleweed, violets, and yellow narcissus are starting to bloom.

I am reading Johann Christian Günther’s poems in a beautiful old Breslau edition I have had among my books for a long time. This is hearty fare, sort of a ginseng root of the baroque. They include observations like the following:

[And suddenly her head lay in my lap. / And Zephyr out of envy, her breast did half reveal, / where Philomen at once, as far as she allowed him, / With gentle fingers stroked her beauty’s rosy bud.]

“ J’espère que les chose s’arrangeront .” [I hope things will work out.] [48] See Second Paris Journal , Paris, 5 August 1944.

Parting words of my Parisian barber last August. Even if not quite right for this situation, nonetheless well meant and, when taken in the right spirit, an example of the best of French rationality.

Radiant Sunday morning until huge bomber formations appeared and hit an oil or rubber depot in Hannover, producing fire clouds that obscured the sky like an eclipse of the sun.

Letters that come to us from regions farther to the West carry warnings about the low-flying aircraft. When they appear, children in particular are threatened.

Novalis writes in his Hymns to the Night:

[Love is given freely / And there is no more separation / Life surges in its fullness / Like an infinite sea—]

With the elimination of the subdivisions of lands, earthly conflicts will decline. Separation and jealousy. Note here the superior answer Jesus gives to the question asked by the Sadducees about whom the woman who had known many men would be reunited with after death. [49] Gospel of Luke 20:27–36. We advance to the highest spiritual component of love. All earthly contact is a mere metaphor of this.

Cum enim a mortuis ressurexerint, neque nubent, neque nubentur, sed sunt sicut angeli in caelis (Mark 12:25).

[For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven…]

English and American troops are positioned in Limburg, Giessen, Aschaffenburg, and in the outer precincts of Frankfurt.

Squadrons overhead in the morning, during which I worked partly in the garden and partly at my desk, thinking all the while that with each of the resounding booms that follow the screaming of the bombs, dozens and perhaps hundreds of people have been annihilated. And this is going on in a terrain of pure horror that lacks any mountain peak where one could receive the absolutio in articulo mortis [absolution at the moment of death].

We have to keep in mind that this carnage elicits satisfaction in the world. The situation of the German is now like what the Jews experienced inside Germany. Yet it is still better than seeing the Germans with their illegitimate power. Now one can share their misery.

Fiftieth birthday. This is the midpoint of life, when it is measured with the scale rather than the yardstick. Yet in this century, it is also an advanced age, considering the long, dangerous climb, especially of someone who never shirked his duties and was always put into harm’s way in both great wars—in the first one, into the frenzy of the war of attrition, and in the second, into the dark perils of the demonic world.