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

Capua: a city in Italy 25 kilometers north of Naples, synonymous with brutality in many European minds because of the Roman gladiatorial training center there.

Here E. J. quotes a famous adage found in Montaigne and Rabelais: “ Fais ce que voudras ” [Do as you wish].

César Biroteau (1837): novel by Honoré de Balzac.

E. J. here infers hidden meanings from language. Vokale means vowels; Pokale means chalices, goblets.

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

Cayenne: the French penal colony known as Devil’s Island.

The mayfly’s brief life span of a single day provides the metaphor for humans in the sight of God.

E. J. seems to misidentify this church. Whereas there is no church named Saint-Pierre Charron, he might mean Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, although that is not a small building. The “gate of death” [ Todestor ], in addition to its metaphorical association, is also the portal to the crypt.

The book is later identified as Maurice Alhoy, Les Bagnes (Paris, 1845). Bagnes ( bagnos ) were prisons where inmates were subjected to hard labor.

Abbé Sabatier was one of several clerics murdered by mobs during the Paris Commune in May 1871.

Cythera: Greek island off the Peloponnesus, said to be the birthplace of Aphrodite and, thus, the isle of love.

Schwarze Front : a splinter party during the Weimar Republic formed in 1930 by Otto Strasser after he was expelled from the NSDAP. The group, which opposed the National Socialists and desired a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, was dissolved after a few months.

Gospel of Luke 12:48.

E. J.’s Gärten und Strassen. Aus den Tagebüchern von 1939 und 1940 (1942) [ Gardens and Streets. Excerpts from the Journals, 1939–1940 ] was published in French in 1942.

See First Paris Journal , Paris, 28 July 1942.

See note to Second Paris Journal , Paris, 12 May 1943.

Guelph (Ger. Welf) : a German princely family and European dynasty; they were dukes of Saxony and rivals to the House of Hohenstaufen for the imperial crown.

Gross-Deutscher : literally, “greater German,” an adherent of the nineteenth-century policy in support of the unification of all German states, including Austria.

Not an actual word.

The final raid on Hamburg during so-called Operation Gomorrah took place on 3 August, killing approximately forty-three thousand people and injuring thirty-seven thousand more. A million civilians were forced to flee. Hamburg experienced sixty-nine more air raids during the war.

Westwall : series of fortifications built between 1938 and 1940 along the western frontier between the Netherlands and Switzerland, called the Siegfried Line by the Allies.

Schiller’s poem “ Drei Worte des Glaubens ” [“Three Words of Faith”] names “free,” “virtue,” and “God” as watchwords at the core of human values. Goethe’s “Urworte. Orphisch” [“Primal Words”] is a cycle of five short poems on metaphysical and mythological questions of human life.

Urpflanze : the archetypal plant, reference to Goethe’s theory of a basic, hypothetical botanical form from which other plants descend.

Wallenstein : drama by Friedrich Schiller.

Sadowa: “Revenge for Sadowa” was a slogan heard in Austria after the Prussian defeat of the Austrian forces at Konigggrätz (Czech, Sadowa) on 3 July 1866, during the Austro-Prussian War.

Levasseur was the deputy representing Sarthe at the National Convention from 1792 to 1795.

Allusion to E. J.’s own novel, On the Marble Cliffs (1939). There the Mauritanians seek a nihilistic despotism founded on the theory of the superman that represents a negation of Western values.

George Bernard Shaw’s fourth novel, published in 1882.

Pre-Lenten season known in some places as Mardi Gras , is called Karneval in the area of the Rhineland.

Nigromontanus: a fictional character of E. J.’s private mythology who first appears in Das abenteuerliche Herz (1938). He interprets the world as a conundrum that reveals its mysteries to fine-tuned vision capable of perceiving simultaneous incongruities.

Hottentot Venus: reference is to Sara “Saartjie” Baartmann (c. 1790–1815), a woman of the Khoikhoi tribe, whose effigy and skeleton were exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe for her physical anomalies. In 2002, her remains were returned to her hometown in South Africa.

E. J. views “Fire on the Kent,” which was first exhibited in 1827. This ship of the British East India Company burned in the Bay of Biscay on 1 March 1825. Eighty-one people on board died, while five hundred and fifty survivors were rescued by the Cambria .

Lares and penates were Roman household gods, frequently represented in house altars or wall paintings.

See note to First Paris Journal , Paris, 22 February 1942.

In this passage, E. J. avoids his customary euphemism, Schinderhütte —in these journals translated as “charnel house”—and uses “concentration camp.”

Priapus: a Greek god of fertility whose symbol was the phallus.

Decline of the West : the reference is to Oswald Spengler’s two-volume Untergang des Abenlandes , published in 1918 (vol. 1) and 1923 (vol. 2), an influential work that contributed the cultural pessimism of the 1920s and 1930s.

Benito Cereno (1855): novella by Herman Melville.

Ecclesiastes, 10:1: “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honor.”

Rue du Roi Doré, literally Street of the Golden King, got its name from a street sign showing Louis XIII; Rue du Petit Musc, from “Put-y-Musse,” designated a street habituated by prostitutes.

The French Resistance sent miniature coffins to compatriots they identified as collaborators.

E. J. here resorts to the metaphysics of his symbolic color system to interpret and predict historical events. In this scheme, the color white represents political opposition to the regime; red, his favorite color, represents the elemental life force in nature as well as violence and revolutionary extremism; blue, on the other hand, while it is a color of calm nature, water, and air, also represents the rational and, by extension, the forces of reasoned conservatism. See Gisbert Kranz, Ernst Jüngers symbolische Weltschau (Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1968), 105–22.