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

Jünger frequented the Thursday salon of Paris editor for Harper’s Bazaar , Marie-Louise Bousquet, who was married to the playwright Jacques Bousquet. Pablo Picasso and Aldous Huxley frequented the meetings, as well as the pro-Nazi Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Henry de Montherlant. Drieu La Rochelle was editor of the collaborationist journal Novelle Revue Française and hoped that a uniquely French form of fascism would contribute to an international fascist order. He had already befriended the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz, before the war. [20] On Jünger’s relationship to La Rochelle, see Julien Hervier, Deux individus contre l’Histoire: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle et Ernst Jünger (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978). Montherlant was deeply Catholic, hated the former French Third Republic, and was pro-German but not overtly fascist. However, he did write for the reactionary Catholic journal La Gerbe , which tried to synthesize Catholicism and racism and was subsidized by the Nazis through Otto Abetz. Through the ambassador to Bucharest, Paul Morand, Jünger met Benoist Méchin, who was a member of the Vichy government, and Ferdinand Céline, the fascist sympathizer who Jünger calls Merline in the Paris journals. [21] “At the German Institute this afternoon. Among those there was Merline. Tall, raw-boned, strong, a bit ungainly, but lively during the discussion—or more accurately, during his monologue” (Jünger, First Paris Journal , 7 December 1941). The German Institute was headed by Karl Epting, an anti-Semitic and anti-French novelist. The Nazis hoped to use the Institute to undermine French culture and indoctrinate the French with German culture and language along National Socialist lines. The Institute was not collaborationist because the goal was to prepare the French for their diminution to an agrarian state and submission to the German yoke. Jünger did not share those goals in the least, but he had a soft spot for Catholic French writers. Céline was a vicious anti-Semite, and Jünger judged the brutality of his character harshly. But he was quite friendly with another more sympathetic writer, Marcel Jouhandeau, whom he visited often in these pages. Jouhandeau was a repressed homosexual and observant Catholic who wrote a number of anti-Semitic diatribes for the journal Le Péril Juif ( The Jewish Peril ). In 1938 Jouhandeau had accepted an invitation from Josef Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, to visit Germany. [22] David M. Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 71.

Another key contact in Paris for Jünger was the salon of Florence Gould (Lady Orphington in the journals), [23] Florence Gould had various pseudonyms; see Mitchell, The Devil’s Captain , 82–84. where he rubbed shoulders with Braque, Picasso, Sacha Guitry, Julien Gracq, Paul Léautaud, and Jean Paulhan, one of the founders of the resistance newspaper Lettres Françaises . [24] See Neaman, A Dubious Past , 143–44. Paulhan was arrested and jailed by the Gestapo during the war.

Jünger frequented the luxury hotel George V, where a roundtable of exclusive French and German intellectuals met, including the writers Morand, Cocteau, Montherlant as well as the publisher Gaston Gallimard. The renowned legal scholar (and early exponent of the Nazi regime) Carl Schmitt often attended, as did Speidel and the Paris correspondent of a Frankfurt newspaper, Friedrich Sieburg, who had written a bestseller about France in the interwar years, Like a God in France . Jünger operated on the edge of politics in Paris, rather like a butterfly fluttering among both resistors and collaborators. He didn’t trust the generals, who had taken a personal oath to Hitler, to be able to carry out a coup. Jean Cocteau later quipped: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” [25] Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany , 169.

Cocteau’s witticism notwithstanding, the accusation was not entirely fair. When Jünger saw an opportunity to help save Jews at an acceptable level of risk, he did act. He passed on information, for example, through intermediaries to the French Resistance about upcoming transports and thus saved Jewish lives. The German playwright and novelist Joseph Breitbach, who lived in Paris from 1931 through the end of the occupation, was one of them. He publicized this fact after the war. [26] See Horst Mühleisen, “Im Bauch des Leviathan: Ernst Jünger, Paris und der militärische Widerstand,” in Aufstand des Gewissens, ed . Thomas Vogel (Hamburg: Mittler, 2000), 454. In the correspondence between Gershom Sholem and Jünger, the latter inquires whether Jünger had tried to help Walter Benjamin be released from a French internment camp. After so many years he couldn’t remember, but it is possible, he responds. See Ernst Jünger and Gershom Scholem, “Briefwechsel 1975–1981” Sinn und Form 61 (2009): 293–302. See also Scholem’s letter of 17 May 1982.

In addition to the secret diaries, Jünger also worked during the war on an essay that was published after the war (in Amsterdam, after being denied publication rights by the occupation authorities). It was called The Peace . In this unapologetic, religiously infused essay, Jünger conceived of the period from 1918 to 1945 as a long European civil war. He discussed the explosion of technology that had brought with it an exponential increase in the ability to create destruction. He described the failure of the League of Nations and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The victors, he warned, should not take revenge on the vanquished. The war was won by one side, he intoned, but the peace must be won by all. History was represented as a vale of tears and all of mankind as equal subjects of suffering (the line between victim and victimizer thereby diminished). Jünger had read the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, from beginning to end twice during the war years. The Peace was imbued with a Christian sense that the new world must be accompanied by a religious revival, the only means to conquer the nihilism of the previous decades. Jünger divided his own work into Old Testament writings of his nationalist phase followed by a new gospel of religiosity and humanism.

Beginning in the spring of 1941, Jünger complained in his journals of insomnia, depression, and general exhaustion. When he started losing weight in early 1942, a physician “friend,” the Doctoresse , ordered various cures for his ills. Despite his weakened condition, he was ordered to tour the eastern front in October 1942 and decided he had no viable grounds to back out. The mood in the Caucasus was grim, as the Russian army began to encircle the German Sixth Army in the city of Stalingrad (today Volgograd). Hitler had taken over tactical planning on the eastern front and began making dilettantish and fatal mistakes, such as prohibiting his generals from undertaking strategic retreats. Clausewitz must be turning over in his grave, Jünger thought to himself. Death, human and animal suffering, and devastation littered the military landscape, more like the Thirty Years’ War, Jünger mused, than World War I.

At a New Year’s Eve party at staff headquarters, Jünger heard direct confirmation that Jews were being exterminated in trains that carried them into tunnels filled with poison gas. [27] Ernst Jünger, Notes from the Caucasus , Kutais, 31 December 1942. Jünger mentioned the harsh treatment of Jews in Paris several times and the shame he felt about being in uniform, when he noticed three young girls wearing yellow stars. [28] Jünger, First Paris Journal , Paris, 7 June 1942. On 27 March 1942, the first transport of Jews left Compiégne for Auschwitz. In July, thousands of French police were seen rounding up Jews on the streets of Paris. He noted on 18 July,