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

Reference to the murder-suicide of the writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) and his friend Henriette Vogel. He suffered from depression, and she was terminally ill.

Alcor and Mizar are double stars in the handle of Ursa Major and together are called the “horse and rider.”

Reference to the asylum granted Martin Luther in Wartburg Castle in 1521 by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. Here he translated the New Testament from Greek into German.

E. J. reproduces the local dialect of Lower Saxony.

Reference to Johannes von Popitz.

Reference to Hans Otto Jünger, E. J.’s brother, a physicist.

Region in northern Poland, formerly East Prussia.

Boyen Fortress: nineteenth-century military fortification in the Masurian Lake district of northeastern Poland.

Stalino: city in eastern Ukraine, known as Donetsk since 1961.

Kuban steppe: region in southern Russia around the Kuban River.

GPU: State Political Directorate, the Russian state security organization.

Kleist’s rank as Generaloberst , literally, general colonel, corresponds roughly to the rank of four-star or brigadier general in the U.S. military.

Taurus Mountain range in Turkey near the Taurus River.

Cauldron: for this concept, see note to entry in First Paris Journal , Paris, 2 March 1942.

Polyphemus: Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey , whom Odysseus slays to save himself and his men.

The term Siamese for conjoined twins derives from Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), Thai-American brothers who gained fame in P. T. Barnum’s Circus.

See First Paris Journal , Kirchhorst, 18 May 1942, for the source of this plot.

Reference to Alfred Kubin’s surrealist novel, Die andere Seite [ The Other Side , 1909].

Small, hardy horses originating in Poland, used by indigenous troops allied with the Germans.

Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan (1819) is a collection of poetry (Persian diwan ) inspired by the poet Hafez.

Acts of the Apostles, chap. 10.

Wandsbecker Bote [ The Wandsbeck Messenger ] is the title of the main body of work by Matthias Claudius (1740–1815).

Meister Anton: character in drama by Christian Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863), Maria Magdalena (premier 1846).

Pshish, a tributary of the Kuban River in the Stavropol region, North Caucasus.

Swabian emigrants: German emigration to Russian territories dates back to the sixteenth century; by the nineteenth century, there were five separate colonies of German speakers in the Caucasus.

Kulaks were a class of peasant successful enough to own property and hire labor. They were exterminated by Stalin in the 1930s.

S-mine: shrapnel mine, a class of bounding mines known as the Bouncing Betty.

German, Stalinorgel [Stalin Organs], military slang for the Katyusha [multiple rocket launchers].

Reference to the siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855) in the Crimean War. The city was again besieged in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1901), which ended in defeat for Russia.

Verdun, the Somme, and Flanders: places of intense fighting and heavy casualties in World War I.

Persian Wars: the Graeco-Persian Wars of the fifth century BC; Greece was victorious.

Rostov-on-Don was occupied by the Germans from November 1941 to February 1943.

The title of this war novel, Der Wehrwolf (1910), contains a pun that evokes the words for “defense” and “wolf.” It is usually translated into English as War Wolf .

Nomos : Greek for “law” or “custom,” relating to problems of political authority and the rights of citizens.

Ecstasis (Greek), to be or to stand outside oneself; a condition of rapture.

Jünger adds a humorous tone by recording the driver’s local Swabian (south German) dialect.

Limes (Latin), reference to the fortified borders of the Roman Empire.

See First Paris Journal , Paris, 28 July 1942.

On E. J.’s euphemism for concentration camp ( Schinderhütte ), see First Paris Journal , Paris, 6 March 1942.

Raskolnikov: the fictional protagonist in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment .

Fieseler Storch [stork], a small, maneuverable airplane for personnel transport.

Eichhof meeting: In 1929, E. J. participated in a meeting of nationalist leaders and journalists at the Eichhof near Mönchen-Gladbach. He recalled his contacts with conservative political circles and nationalist writers with frustration, considering this period a missed opportunity to fuel a conservative revolution in Germany. See Helmuth Kiesel, Ernst Jünger: Die Biographie (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2007).

Der deutsche Gruss , a salute that appropriated the outstretched arm of the Italian Fascists accompanied by the words “Heil Hitler.” At first its use was a declaration of one’s personal ideology, but after the plot against Hitler in July 1944, this salute was imposed on the military as a show of loyalty.

Electrophorus: an electrostatic generator.

Residential section of Berlin.

Reference to Friedrich Georg Jünger’s work, Perfektion der Technik (1946) [ The Perfection of Technology ], which was originally to have been entitled Illusionen der Technik [ The Illusions of Technology ]. It is a pessimistic critique of contemporary notions of progress.

Axel is the hero of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s novel of the same name.

Reference to E. J.’s Sizilischer Brief an den Mann im Mond (1930) [ Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon ].

Original: “ Wem Gott ein Amt gibt, dem gibt er auch den Verstand dazu .” A popular saying.

In ancient Rome, (nonmilitary) tribunes swore their allegiance to the plebs , from whom they derived power.

From a poem by Goethe in his cycle “Wilhelm Tischbeins Idyllen” [“Wilhelm Tischbein’s Idylls”], philosophical meditations on art.

The year 1918 marked the German surrender and the end of World War I; the imminent German defeat at Stalingrad was now widely evident.