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

Imagism: reference to literary movement of the early twentieth century that emphasized the precision of concrete pictorial symbols.

Gerhardt Nebel’s two-page essay, “Auf dem Fliegerhorst” [“On the Military Airbase”], appeared in the Neue Rundschau (October 1941) and compared fighter airplanes to insects. This was interpreted as a criticism of the Luftwaffe and led to his demotion.

Reference to flamboyant Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who loved to hunt and often appeared in elaborate hunting garb. E. J.’s fictional character of the Head Forester appears in Auf den Marmorklippen [ On the Marble Cliffs , 1939].

Manfred, Graf [Count] von Keyserling.

Cauldron: refers to the German Kesselschlacht or cauldron-battle, a military maneuver involving encirclement, in which an enemy is surrounded, as if in a soup kettle.

Conditions in the bone mills of the Industrial Revolution were particularly noxious. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) describes the plight of workers in Manchester, England.

E. J. refers to Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands (1896) in English.

Cheka: Russian secret police.

For E. J., the Greek demos (common people) connotes mob, rabble.

Line from Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “An Zimmern” (1812).

Creed: refers to the phrase in the Nicene Creed, “and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.”

Köppelsbleek: The old Germanic name E. J. gives to the equivalent of a concentration camp in On the Marble Cliffs . That place has all the attributes of a gothic horror tale, including a torture chamber where a dwarf flays and dismembers corpses.

E. J. coins the euphemism Schinderhütte for concentration camp to evoke a shack where victims are tortured. Meanings of schinden include “to flay,” “to skin,” “to overwork,” “to mistreat.” This translation uses “charnel house” for the concept.

Ad patres , “to my fathers,” that is, die.

Reference to Francisco Goya’s Desastros de la Guerra ( Disasters of War ), a series of prints depicting gruesome scenes from the Peninsular War (1808–1814).

Cousin of Otto, the former commander-in-chief.

Reference to apocalyptic visions of violent social disruption In Grillparzer’s tragedy Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (1848) [ Family Strife in Habsburg ].

E. J. refers to the folk superstition that one should always have money in one’s pocket upon hearing the first cry of the cuckoo, for then one’s pockets will always have money.

Affectionate nickname for Frederick the Great, King of Prussia (1740–1786).

Reference to Goethe’s last words.

E. J.’s own Gärten und Strassen [ Gardens and Streets ] had recently appeared in French.

Parc de Bagatelle is an arboretum on the grounds of Chateau Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne in the western suburbs of Paris. E. J. often refers to this favorite spot simply as Bagatelle.

Chouans : refers to members of the Royalist uprising against the French Revolution.

Lines from the poem “Patmos” by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).

From Fleurs du Mal: Amis de la science et de la volupté / Ils cherchent le silence et l’horreur des ténèbres; / L’Erèbe les eût pris pour ses coursiers funèbres, /S’ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierté . “Friends of learning and sensual pleasure / They seek the silence and the horror of darkness; / Erebus would have used them as his gloomy steeds / If their pride had let them stoop to bondage” (William Aggeler, trans., The Flowers of Evil [Fresno, California, 1954]).

Presumably for astrological implications.

See First Paris Journal , Kirchhorst, 18 May 1942.

Sédan: French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870). After his superiors had surrendered, General Wimpffen negotiated the French capitulation of eighty-two thousand troops.

Reference to a 1926 German film, Die Strasse des Vergessens [ The Street of Forgetting ].

Reference to Hamlet’s thought that he “could be bounded in a nutshell” and still count himself a king of infinite space.

Biedenhorn: character in E. J.’s novel, On the Marble Cliffs .

OC: “Organization Consul,” an ultra-nationalist paramilitary group during the Weimar Republic.

Landsknecht: fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German mercenary soldiers connoting toughness and raw strength.

Battle of the Teutoburg Forest: 9 CE, in which Germanic tribes under Arminius [Hermann] defeated three Roman legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus.

Figure of the worker: refers to an essay by E. J. entitled Der Arbeiter [ The Worker ] (1932).

Septembriseurs carried out widespread murders of prisoners during the French Revolution (September 1792), as called for by Marat.

E. J. refers to Robert Dodsley, The Oeconomy of Human Life (1750), which was a collection of moral observations attributed to ancient Indian authors and an anonymous translator.

Peter Schlemihl: refers to the novella by Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814) [ Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story ] in which the protagonist sells his shadow to the devil and leads a life of fear and concealment ever after.

Thebais : also Thebaid , a Latin epic poem by Publius Statius (45–95 CE) that includes a vision of the underworld.

See entry for Paris, 28 June 1942, in which E. J. refers to a book with the same description, which suggests an occasionally erratic chronology of personal material.

Reference to a publication by E. J., Myrdun. Briefe aus Norwegen [ Myrdun. Letters from Norway ] (Oslo, 1943), a special soldiers’ edition produced by the German Military Command in Norway to be distributed to the troops.

Veil of Maya: in Indian philosophy this concept signifies the world as illusion and appearance.

Reference to Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts [ The Myth of the Twentieth Century ], an ideologically biased history of the human race based on fallacious theories of biological determinism.