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

Judges at bloody assizes. When they cross the corridors and enter, they have a perfunctory aura about them, the erstwhile dignity of macabre marionettes. They are Duk-Duk dancers. [19] Duk-Duk dancers: males of the Tolai people of Papua New Guinea invoke the male spirit duk duk in their ritual dances with elaborate masks and costumes.

“That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” [20] Quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (1888). And what kills me makes me incredibly strong.

In history, ideas do not proceed in linear fashion. They create reactions like the falling weight of a clock as it moves not only the hands but its counterweight as well.

This establishes equilibrium. The ideas that correspond to forms are prevented from developing into monstrosities or from persisting within them. In the realm of free will, it’s the same kind of pruning that in zoology trims the developing tendrils.

Roland has returned from Russia and describes the hideous mechanism for executing prisoners. This is done under the pretext of wanting to measure and weigh them, for which they must strip. Then they are taken to the “measuring apparatus,” which in reality positions the air gun for delivering the coup de grace .

In every age, there are two theories of evolution. One of these seeks our origin above, and the other, below. Both are true; human beings may be categorized based on whether they accept one or the other.

Regarding illnesses. There are differences here in the way these affect the imagination that do not correlate with the severity of the malady. I feel that I tend to ignore disorders of the lungs and heart more than those of the stomach, liver, and lower body in general. Purely with regard to the flesh, it seems there are also qualities of dying. Flames are reserved for unbelievers; thus, not only is cremation increasing but also immolation of the living.

History is also made up of atoms, and it is impossible to imagine a single one different without changing the entire course of its progress. Marat would have made quite a different impression if his name had been something like Barat, or if when his assassin entered, he had been spending that hour at his desk instead of in the bath. It is precisely assassinations that often cause the greatest changes, and yet essentially they depend on such a concatenation of chance. Sarajevo provides us with a very good example here.

When we look back, it is hard to imagine a single pebble in a different position. Should we be able to draw conclusions from this about the future? Should we conclude that the intellect is only capable of finding such seamless progression intelligible if we see all of the future inexorably folded in upon itself? Or is it the present that causes a change in the aggregate condition of the age by monumentalizing and fossilizing everything it touches? The future is fluid; the past is fixed. The whole resembles a game of cards: we have to distinguish between the ones on the table and the others, which are still in play.

These observations form a mosaic. Yet we have to see those little pebbles of chance in a higher vision as Boëthius does, a vision that endures unchanged in his mind. Genuine morality lies outside of time.

In the afternoon, read the farewell letters of Count d’Estienne d’Orves, who was executed by firing squad. I received these from his defense attorney. They are reading matter of the highest order; I had the feeling that I was holding an enduring document in my hand.

Contrast between the graphs of morale and physical health: even in good physical condition we often may be depressed, whereas the opposite is also true. We experience an upsurge, a spring tide, when our whole potential comes into play.

It is good when an important date or significant meeting happens to fall on such days.

To the George V, in the evening. I brought the maxims of René Quinton for Colonel Speidel. When he asked me for an inscription, I chose, “ La récompense des hommes, c’est d’estimer leurs chefs ” [Men’s reward is to honor their leaders]. Under his aegis, here deep in the military machine, we formed a kind of cell of intellectual chivalry, meeting in the belly of the beast, trying to preserve regard and compassion for the weak and vulnerable.

Conversation with Grüninger about soldiers’ obedience and its relation to absolute, even constitutional, monarchy. After a while, this virtue resembles an instinct that continues to exert an influence, but can damage the man who possesses it by making him a tool of unscrupulous forces. This brings him into conflict with the second pillar of chivalry: honor. This, the more delicate virtue, is the first extinguished, leaving behind a kind of automaton, a servant without a real master, who is finally little more than a pimp.

In such times, the best characters founder upon the rocks, while more cunning intellects cross over into politics. In some lucky cases, a general from an old patrician family who finds himself in this situation laughs at those who try to command him, putting them in their place as the pourriture [rot] they are.

Visit from Dr. Göpel this morning; he brought me greetings from Carlo Schmid from Lille. Afterward, with Grüninger in the print collection of the Louvre, where we viewed lovely old pictures of flowers and snakes.

The hour of twilight—night announces its presence like a tide that, murmuring and barely noticed, sends forth its first waves. Strange beings arrive with it. This is the hour when owls ready their wings and lepers come out on the street.

We may demand of people no more than what is commensurate with their essence; from women love, not justice.

Invitation to the birthday party for Jacqueline, the milliner from the South. Quai Louis-Blériot. A narrow back staircase led to the fifth floor, and a warren of low garret rooms reminiscent of the catwalks of a theater. There was her apartment: a tiny bedroom almost completely filled by one of those large beds and as on small ships, a still smaller kitchen where her friend Jeannette—a tall, gaunt, slightly demonic person—prepared the feast. She conjured up seven courses. In addition, there was Bordeaux, Chianti, café au rhum .

In the corner, there hung one of those wooden stakes overgrown with the interlocking coils of a hardy vine. The wood was the sort that carpenters’ apprentices at home traditionally use to cut walking sticks for themselves. This had also been trained to curl around the trunk so that the vine resembled a snake. The dimensions of the body, created by the play of muscles, worked well, probably because there are similar forces at work in the plant. The color was also very natural, a yellowish brown, speckled with black of the sort found in swamp-dwelling species.

In this vein, there was a conversation about snakes in general. Her friend said that when she was a child a noste in the Béarnaise region, she was once sitting in the garden with her mother who was nursing her little sister. Because the smell of milk attracts snakes, a gigantic adder slithered slowly and unnoticed out of a nearby hedge, up to the chair, and frightened her. Her father came out and killed the creature.

She recounted that quite graphically in a mythical way.

Concerning this journal. It captures only a certain layer of events that take place in the intellectual and physical spheres. Things that concern our innermost being resist communication, almost resist our own perception.