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

Thilo von Throta, “Das endlose dialektische Gespräch,” Völkischer Beobachter , 22 October 1932.

Noack, Ernst Jünger , 126.

Elliot Yale Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature After Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 104.

Inge Jens, Dichter zwischen rechts und links (Munich: Pieper, 1971), 33–35.

Ernst Jünger, “Auf den Marmorklippen,” Sämtliche Werke , 18 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978–2003), 15:265.

“It was horrible to hear what [General Alfred] Jodl reported about Kniébolo’s [i.e., Hitler’s] objectives” (Jünger, First Paris Journal , 8 February 1942). See also 6 April 1942 and many other entries.

On Jünger’s relationship to La Rochelle, see Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre l’Histoire: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle et Ernst Jünger (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978).

“At the German Institute this afternoon. Among those there was Merline. Tall, raw-boned, strong, a bit ungainly, but lively during the discussion—or more accurately, during his monologue” (Jünger, First Paris Journal , 7 December 1941). The German Institute was headed by Karl Epting, an anti-Semitic and anti-French novelist. The Nazis hoped to use the Institute to undermine French culture and indoctrinate the French with German culture and language along National Socialist lines. The Institute was not collaborationist because the goal was to prepare the French for their diminution to an agrarian state and submission to the German yoke. Jünger did not share those goals in the least, but he had a soft spot for Catholic French writers.

David M. Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 71.

Florence Gould had various pseudonyms; see Mitchell, The Devil’s Captain , 82–84.

See Neaman, A Dubious Past , 143–44.

Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany , 169.

See Horst Mühleisen, “Im Bauch des Leviathan: Ernst Jünger, Paris und der militärische Widerstand,” in Aufstand des Gewissens, ed . Thomas Vogel (Hamburg: Mittler, 2000), 454. In the correspondence between Gershom Sholem and Jünger, the latter inquires whether Jünger had tried to help Walter Benjamin be released from a French internment camp. After so many years he couldn’t remember, but it is possible, he responds. See Ernst Jünger and Gershom Scholem, “Briefwechsel 1975–1981” Sinn und Form 61 (2009): 293–302. See also Scholem’s letter of 17 May 1982.

Ernst Jünger, Notes from the Caucasus , Kutais, 31 December 1942.

Jünger, First Paris Journal , Paris, 7 June 1942.

Ernst Jünger, Second Paris Journal , Paris, 22 June 1943.

Jünger, Notes from the Caucasus , Rostov, 22 November 1942.

Schwilk tracks down all various female relationships in Ernst Jünger: Ein Jarhundertleben , 373–405.

See Mitchell, The Devil’s Captain . Jünger finally ended the relationship sometime between 1946 and 1947. The correspondence between Jünger and Sophie Ravoux is held by the German Literature Archive at Marbach.

Jünger, Second Paris Journal , Paris, 6 March 1943.

Jünger, Second Paris Journal , Paris, 27 May 1944.

See Tobias Wimbauer, “Kelche sind Körper: Der Hintergrund der Erdbeeren in Burgunder-Szene,” Ernst Jünger in Paris: Ernst Jünger, Sophie Ravoux, die Burgunderszene und eine Hinrichtung (Hagen-Berchum: Eisenhut Verlag, 2011), 9–75. Another possibility is that Jünger did witness a bombing raid but simply wrote down the wrong date in the journal. He often wrote diary entries at later dates than the events described and constantly reworked the texts.

See Jünger, Second Paris Journal , Paris, 28 May 1944, upon the completion of his reading of the Apocalypse .

Neaman, A Dubious Past , 122–26.

See André Rousseaux, “Ernst Jünger a Paris,” Le Figaro littéraire , 13 October 1951.

Schwilk fills in the details Jünger leaves out in the journals in Ernst Jünger: Ein Jarhundertleben , 415–419.

Jünger, Second Paris Journal , Paris, 21 July 1944.

Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2008), 640.

His pseudonym in the journals is “Bogo.”

Schwilk, Ernst Jünger: Ein Jarhundertleben, 436 .

See especially Jünger, Second Paris Journal , Paris, 29 January 1944 and 21 July 1944. After World War I, General Ludendorff and other officers spread the theory that communists and Jews had conspired to rob the German army of victory in the last months of the war—had “stabbed the nation in the back.”

Ernst Jünger, Kirchhorst Diaries , Kirchhorst, 7 September 1944.

Jünger, Second Paris Journal , Kirchhorst, 13 April 1944.

Wolf Jobst Siedler, Ein Leben wird besichtigt: in der Welt der Eltern (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2000), 334. Ernstel’s body was later exhumed and returned to Jünger’s last domicile at Wilflingen, which provided evidence of the supposition that he had been executed.

Jünger, Kirchhorst Diaries , Kirchhorst, 14 January 1945.

Jünger, Kirchhorst Diaries , Kirchhorst, 29 March 1945.

Jünger, Kirchhorst Diaries , Kirchhorst, 11 April 1945.

See Neaman, A Dubious Past , chap. 7.

See Gerhard Nebel, Ernst Jünger: Abenteuer des Geistes (Wuppertal: Marées Verlag, 1949). Nebel is mentioned thirteen times in the war journals and was a trusted confidante. See Jünger, First Paris Journal , Paris, 11 October 1941, in which Jünger discusses with Nebel “the matter of the safe.”

See Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur: Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1983), 14.

See the introduction by Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman in Jünger, The Adventurous Heart , xiii–lii.

Ernst Jünger, Sämtliche Werke , 9:83.

See, for example, his descriptions from the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a park on the northern edge of the Bois de Boulogne, which until 1931 exhibited foreign peoples, mainly Africans, in a kind of “human zoo,” but by the time Jünger visited only animals were on display (Jünger, First Paris Journal , Paris, 16 September 1942).