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

In the afternoon at Poupet’s on Rue Garancière. In these narrow streets around Saint-Sulpice with their antiquarian bookshops, book dealers, and old workshops, I feel so at home, it’s as though I had lived among them for five hundred years.

When I entered the building, I recalled that I had first crossed this threshold in the summer of 1938 coming from the Palais du Luxembourg just as today via Rue de Tournon. And so, the circle of years gone by has closed like the clasp of a belt.

When I entered I tried to convey this feeling to Poupet, the feeling that overwhelms me so often when I glimpse old familiar things and people—this feeling from the past, bounteous as a net full of fish, becomes clear when we encounter it again. Even though this was difficult to express in a foreign language, I had the impression that he understood me.

Charmille. We talked about Proust, and Poupet gave me one of his letters. Then about acquaintances whom she characterized in acerbic detail. Also about the influence of Eros upon physical development. Related to this, the word souplesse [flexibility], like désinvolture [detachment], seems untranslatable.

The first letter from Perpetua. As I had sensed, after they had brought me to the station, the two of them continued talking about me for a long time on their way home through the dark streets. She might buy a house for us near Uelze, that region in the heart of the [Lüneburg] Heath would be just right for the solitary life we both long for.

In addition, a letter from Wolfgang, who—the third of us four brothers—has been called up. As a corporal, he has been put in charge of a prison camp in Züllichau. The prisoners will be in good hands there. He writes this curiosity: “Yesterday I was sent on official business to Sorau in the Lausitz [area], where I had to deliver a prisoner to the field hospital. While there, I also had to pay a visit to the asylum. There I encountered a woman whose only tic consisted of continuously murmuring ‘Heil Hitler.’ At least it’s a fitting, topical form of insanity.”

Even when viewed tactically, exaggerated prudence increases danger. People listen most carefully to those who disguise their voices. There is, incidentally, an aristocratic as well as a Jacobin instinct for anyone not party to this. There are degrees of subtlety and simplicity that are dissembled, and ultimately, what is prudence without providence?

In the evening, another bottle of Beaune with Weinstock, who is going to Angers. In him, as well as in Nebel and Friedrich Georg, [31] Friedrich Georg Jünger, E. J.’s younger brother. I can observe the powerfully formative influence that ancient Greek culture still exerts upon modern Germans. Their language, history, art, and philosophy will always remain indispensable for the training of elites.

I was thinking again with great animation about The Marble Cliffs . The book is open-ended, unfinished; it finds its continuation in events. On the other hand, the events harken back and change the book. In this sense, it resembles an ellipse with two foci. One of these marks the author’s place; the other, the place of facts. Filaments connect these two as in nuclear fission. Thus, it can change fate, but it’s also possible for it to determine the fate of the author. This indicates that he had been working in other realms than language—for example, where dream imagery is powerful.

Tea with the Doctoresse. In the evening we went to a small cellar restaurant on Rue de Montpensier to meet Poupet and Cocteau. Cocteau was delightful, ailing, ironic, fastidious. He complained that people were sabotaging his plays, letting rats loose, and throwing teargas bombs onto the stage.

Among the anecdotes he recounted, I found the one about the bad-tempered coachman especially good. When he was a student in school, he had taken a cab home in the pouring rain after seeing a play in the theater. Unfamiliar with the standard rates of tipping, he gave the coachman too little and then approached the door of the building where the family, who were friends of his parents, was standing in the rain because the lock was difficult to open. As he greeted them, the coachman called after him: “What kind of tip is this—what if I were to tell them where I picked you up?”

Read a little more back in the Raphael. I finished the novel by Countess Podewils, then started Confession by Kanne. It is a significant work, recommended to me by Carl Schmitt, its editor. Kanne’s experiences at prayer. He feels it when his prayers “get through.” His own little cog of destiny turns in conformity with the course of the universe.

Woke up at five o’clock. I had dreamed that my father had died. Then I thought about Perpetua for a long time.

In the morning, Maurice Betz came and brought his translation. We looked through a series of questionable passages and normalized some of the less common words, particularly names of animals and plants. In such cases it is best to go back to the Latin of Linnaeus’s system. That logical, conceptual system makes it possible to elucidate philosophical and poetic differences.

Birthday party at the Raphael. It dawned on me for the first time that the inhabitants of this hotel are trustworthy. That kind of thing is only possible today when the circle is the result of an unspoken self-selection. A vicious joke that Phillipps told about Kniébolo gave the signal for candid conversation. Coercion and caution separate people like masks; when these are stripped off, exuberant merriment breaks out. I got into a serious conversation with Merz and Hattingen and explained the main ideas of my manuscript about peace to them.

Conversation with Luther about surveillance. He said it had been difficult to recruit Englishmen for the job, yet before the war, he had succeeded in recruiting a man of good social position whom they equipped with a shortwave radio that he still uses to transmit weather reports from London. He said this was crucial for the aerial attacks. This Englishman had recently given shelter to an agent who had broken his leg in a parachute landing. For weeks he had to hide and care for the man in his apartment. The first time this agent went out, he was arrested and later executed without ever having betrayed his host.

These things have an almost demonic nature, especially when we consider the terrible loneliness such people endure in the midst of a population of millions. For this reason, I can’t commit any details to these pages.

Charmille. There are conversations that can only be compared to smoking opium together. Part of this is the lighthearted, effortless back and forth, like the gracefully coordinated movements of acrobats. She, incidentally, praises something in my own conversation that others have criticized: that I am almost always thinking of other things and often reply to sentences after my partner makes some good observation—once they have long since dissolved into the greater context.

In the mail, a letter from Feuerblume with a note about the Hippopotamus: [32] Prose piece by E. J., which appeared in the collection Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1938).

“I think that your princess has been a bit influenced by ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ but she also shows the path to healing. That is good. Poe showed only the decline.”

The fact is, when I conceived of this story in a dream before visiting Kubin, I experienced a powerful longing to emerge from the maelstrom. We have to view such things as prognostication, for these imagined figures begin the circle dance of destiny, keeping it going, sometimes smiling and sometimes terrified. And literature is invisible history, as yet unlived—but also its corrective.