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

Feast Days of the lemures , including the murder of men, women, and children. The gruesome spoils are hurriedly buried. Now there come other lemures to claw them out of the ground. They film the dismembered and half-decayed patch of land with macabre gusto. Then they show these films to others.

What bizarre forces develop in carrion.

Tristitia . Took a walk this afternoon with Charmille along Avenue du Maine to Rue Maison-Dieu, then back across the Montparnasse Cemetery. There we stumbled upon the graves of Dumont-d’Urville and the aviator Pégoud.

After a bowl of soup, to the Comédie Française. Le Misanthrope . During the intermission, I went to take another look at Houdon’s Voltaire. This time I was struck by its combination of malicious and childlike qualities.

A hairdresser talking with the Doctoresse about the bombing:

“I’m not afraid of it. The dead are better off than we are.”

“But you don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. I’m sure of it because a not a single one of them has ever returned.”

Took a walk with Armand in the Bois [de Boulogne] in the beautiful sunshine. I waited for him under the Arc de Triomphe beside the tomb surrounded with yellow narcissus and purple anemones. Bees were ducking into their blossoms. Thought: in this sea of stone, do they survive on nothing but cut flowers?

I now regard the human being as a “man of sorrows” who has been crushed by the gears and rollers of a machine that has broken him rib from rib and limb from limb. But that does not kill him as a human being—maybe it even does him good.

Colonel Speidel came to my room in the evening. He brought me an essay that Sternberger had published about me in the Frankfurter [ Allgemeine Zeitung ]. He also let me have a look at orders. Kniébolo’s shift from Diabolus to Satanas is now more obvious.

It is miraculous that the motion of the atom’s nucleus spins in every stone, every crumb, and every scrap of paper. All matter is alive, and even when we think things are inert, we simply aren’t comprehending their true state. We see only shadows of the absolute, of the undivided light.

In the evening, paid a visit to Madame Gould in the Bristol; also present were Heller and Jouhandeau, whose Chronique Maritales I had read years ago.

Air-raid alarm. We were sitting together by daylight drinking a champagne from 1911 when the airplanes began to roar and the thunder of the artillery shook the city. As tiny as ants. Conversed about death during all this. Madame Gould had some good observations on this subject, namely that the experience of death is one of the few that no one can take from us. And also that it is one that often enriches us, even though it means us the greatest harm. Fate, she went on, can deprive us of all great encounters, but never of the one with death.

She mentioned the fundamental premise of any correct political attitude: “Have no fear.” On a tropical evening, she once saw a butterfly land on the back of a gecko in the light of a garden lamp. For her that symbolized great safety.

Then we talked of Mirbeau. I had the impression that this landscape of terror had an attraction for her—a certain appeal that is still potent after all other pleasures of luxury are exhausted.

I talked with Jouhandeau about Bernanos and Malraux and then about the features of civil war in general. He said that nothing makes it more comprehensible than Cicero’s biography. He stimulated my desire to go back and focus on that historical period again.

The images surface that surface within us: I often see myself on the edge of the Überlingen Forest on a lonely, foggy evening; then again in early spring in Stralau, or as a boy in Braunschweig staring at patterns on the wall. I have the feeling that I have made some significant decisions while I was just dreaming or brooding.

It may be possible now and then, though far from all activity, to perceive the rhythms of life’s melody. They only emerge in the silences. In them we can then sense the composition, the whole that is the foundation of our existence. This explains the power of memory.

It also seems to me that the totality of life does not dawn on us sequentially, but rather as a puzzle that reveals its meaning here and there. Some fantasies of childhood are worthy of old age; on the other hand, some phenomena of old age tap directly into childhood.

Perhaps our constitution is at its strongest when we encounter ourselves in the tranquil dreams of solitude—nothing enters; and yet we enter into a new house.

Klaus Valentiner returned from Berlin. He described a horrifying young man, formerly an art teacher, who boasted about commanding a death squad in Lithuania and other border territories where they butchered untold numbers of people. After the victims were rounded up, they were first forced to dig mass graves and then lie down in them, where they were shot from above in layers. Before that they were robbed of their last possessions and the rags they were wearing, right down to their shirts.

Grotesque pictures of famine in Athens. At the climax of a large Wagner concert, the trombones gave out because the weakened brass players ran out of breath.

Walked through the Élysée Gardens, where a first gentle breath of blossoms and young greenery permeated the darkness. The pods of the chestnut buds were especially aromatic.

Dropped in at Valentiner’s studio in the afternoon to take my mind off things for a while. The former studio of Ingres is off the courtyard, and a tall, slender ash grows beside it, struggling upward to the light as if from out of a mineshaft.

Klaus recounted that his father, the old Viking, had once promised him 500 marks if he would gratify him by producing a grandchild with the beautiful Frenchwoman who lived with them.

Visited Valentiner with Heller and Podewils, where we also met Rantzau. Conversation focused on whether the war would be over by the autumn, as many augurs predict. In the evening, a spring storm brought hail over the high roof ridges. Then a double rainbow on a blue-gray background arched over the ancient roofs and church spires.

A fierce bombardment raged during the night or early morning. At breakfast, I discovered that the attack had caused many fires, among them one at the rubber factory of Asnières.

Conversation with Kossmann, the new chief of the General Staff. He briefed us on the frightening details from the forests of the lemures in the East. We are now in the midst of the bestiality that Grillparzer foresaw. [51] Reference to apocalyptic visions of violent social disruption In Grillparzer’s tragedy Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (1848) [ Family Strife in Habsburg ].

Said farewell to the Paris Committee on the Quai Voltaire. Drieu la Rochelle, Cocteau, Wiemer, Heller, Drescher, Rantzau, Princess Bariatinski, two German lieutenants, and a young French soldier who distinguished himself during the last campaign. Madeleine Boudot-Lamotte, who is from Mauritania, wore a hat with black-red-black cockerel feathers. I would like to have seen Poupet, but unfortunately he is ill.

These people make it clear to me the way many and varied branches of my life flow into this city as if into a bay.

Dinner at the home of Lapeyrouse with Epting and Gros-Meunier, whose face has taken on a powerfully demonic aspect that has replaced joy with the dark, brooding strength of Lucifer. He explained that blood would soon have to flow in France like the bloodletting that revives a patient. One would have to consider carefully whom these measures would apply to. As far as he was concerned, he had no doubt about the parties in question. I certainly had that impression as well.