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

Simplification corresponds to complication—weight and counterweight in the clock of destiny. Just as there is a second religiosity, there is a second brutality, more pallid and neurotic than the original.

I always work hard at such conversations—you have to be less focused on the individual than on the hundreds of thousands of people he represents.

In the morning Lieutenant Rahmelow showed me the castle.

Charmille. Concerning dreams of flying. She told me that she often thinks she can fly, and demonstrated this with a graceful sweep of both arms. Yet when she does so, she has the feeling of being anchored by a weight hanging from her body. She calls the compulsion to fly a persecution that is always a variety of fear. That could apply to many situations, even to our contemporary one.

The upswing that she described with her arms was less that of a bird than one of a delicate dinosaur. Or maybe the gesture contained a hint of both. It makes me think of the winged rowing motion of the Archaeopteryx.

In the Madeleine Theater in the afternoon to see a play by Sacha Guitry. Enthusiastic applause: “ C’est tout à fait Sacha .” [That’s pure Sacha.] Cosmopolitan taste is always a matter of perspective and delights in scene changes, mistaken identity, and unexpected characters, as in a house of mirrors. The complications are so intricate that they are already forgotten on the staircase. Who did what to whom seems irrelevant. The nuances are pursued to such an extreme that nothing is spared.

A painting of Eleanora Duse in the foyer. It’s only in recent years that I seem to have gained an appreciation for this kind of beauty. Her otherworldliness surrounds her like an impenetrable aura. The reason for this may be that we sense a kinship, a relationship in such beings; incest is part of it. It is easier to approach Aphrodite than Athena. When Paris handed over the apple, he created great desire and great suffering by speaking with the natural appetite of the shepherd, the warrior. At a more mature level, he might have discovered that an embrace can also bestow power and wisdom.

As always, before turning out the light, I read the Bible, where I have gotten to the end of the books of Moses. There I read the horrible curse that reminds me of Russia: “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron” [Deuteronomy 28:23].

My brother-in-law Kurt [von Jeinsen] laments in a letter that his nose and ears have almost frozen. Young recruits whose feet have frozen get dragged along. For all that, he had originally set out in a huge column of vehicles. In their last dispatch, the Russians claim that the week’s fighting has cost us seventeen thousand dead and several hundred prisoners. And who would not prefer to be among the dead?

In a letter, Feuerblume writes about her reactions to reading my Gardens and Streets and particularly to passages she has noted. For example, “that one must read the prose as if through latticework.” To that, a female friend commented, “You have to be able to see the lions behind the bars.”

It’s curious that such images often produce concepts quite contrary to those intended. I meant, namely, that words form a lattice as they yield a glimpse of the unutterable. They engrave the setting for the gem, but the stone itself remains invisible. But I too shall adopt the image of the lion. Refraction produces one of the errors, but also the advantages of style imagé . [35] Imagism: reference to literary movement of the early twentieth century that emphasized the precision of concrete pictorial symbols.

Reading through a text, my personal sensations and thoughts are always at work like an aura imparting a luster to this strange light.

In some sentences or images thoughts come to my consciousness in profusion. I then deal with the first one and leave the others out in the waiting room, but occasionally I open the door, just to see if they’re still standing around. All the while, I continue reading.

While I’m reading, I always have the feeling that I am essentially dealing with my own material. This is what an author is supposed to produce. In doing so, he serves himself first, and only then, others.

The mail included a letter from Schlichter containing nine drawings for One Thousand and One Nights . An image of the City of Bronze is wonderfully successful—full of mourning for death and glory. The sight awakened in me the desire to possess the piece; I’d like to have it to complement his Atlantis Before Its Destruction , which has hung in my study for years. Early on my father developed a sharp eye for the magic of the tale of the City of Bronze, which is among the most beautiful in this wonderful book. Emir Musa is a man of profound spirit, a connoisseur of the melancholy of ruins, of the bitter pride that goes before a fall, which in our culture is at the heart of all archaeological effort. Musa considers this to be pure and contemplative.

Wrote to Schlichter concerning the picture of the bronze city. In doing so, I thought of other tales from One Thousand and One Nights , especially the one about Peri Banu. That tale has always seemed like a description of an exalted love affair that makes people willing to foreswear or sacrifice inherited royal prerogative for its sake. It is beautiful the way the young prince disappears in this realm, as though into a more spiritual world. In this fairytale work, he and Musa stand out as princes from ancient Indo-European empires, far superior to the Oriental despots and quite comprehensible to us. Right at the beginning the archery competition with the bow is beautiful—the bow, a life symbol with metaphysical tension for Prince Achmed. His arrow thus flies incomparably far into the unknown and beyond all the others.

The castle of Peri Banu is the spiritualized Mountain of Venus. The invisible flame is everlasting, but the visible one consumes.

Today’s mail brought a letter from Friedrich Georg, who in reference to Gardens and Streets , quotes the sentence of Quintilian: “ Ratio pedum in oratione est multo quam in versu difficilior .” [The principles governing metrical feet are much more difficult in prose than in verse.] Here he touches upon a question that has occupied me in recent years, namely how to take prose a step further, give it a new dynamic that unites both strength and grace. We must find new keys to unlock the enormous legacy that lies concealed there.

Nebel visited me this morning to discuss an incident that occurred at his listening post. He certainly could not say that nobody had warned him. After he had incurred suspicion through his essay about the insect people (published by Suhrkamp), he now provoked denunciation. [36] 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. In the hallways during the New Year’s Eve festivities, they had made fun of the “Head Forester.” [37] 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]. Nebel has to disappear for a while, but the departure of such a clever mind from this city saddens me.