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

Take yourself back in time to the summer of 1942, in Nazi-occupied Paris. A middle-age German officer in a gray uniform strolls down the Avenue Wagram, an army eagle insignia perched above his right breast pocket. The man is of medium height, of compact build, with chiseled thin features and graying hair around the temples. He turns to follow the Right Bank and inspect the bouquinistes , whose antiquarian books, cards, journals, and prints overflow from small well-worn shacks. Walking north, past the Arc de Triomphe , he stops at a stationery store on the Avenue Wagram and is jolted by the expression on the face of the girl behind the counter. Later he will write in his journal,

It was clear that she was staring at me with deep hatred. The pupils of her light blue eyes were like pinpoints; she met my gaze quite openly with a kind of relish—a relish with which the scorpion pierces his prey with the barb in his tail. [1] Ernst Jünger, First Paris Journal , Paris, 18 August 1942.

He leaves the shop in deep thought. The walk ends at the nearby Hôtel Majestic, the headquarters of the German High Command in Paris. Captain Jünger takes a seat at a table overflowing with mail written by German soldiers to friends and loved ones at home. He reads each piece carefully, marking out lines of sensitive information before placing the envelope in one pile or another bound for the home front. As a military censor, he is tasked with reading French newspapers and other publications for signs of insubordination. A not uninteresting assignment for a writer whose job it is to enter the minds of others.

Who was this man?

He was born in 1895 under the Wilhelmine empire, marched off to war in 1914, and ended service as a highly decorated hero. He worked as a writer in Berlin at the height of Weimar Germany’s cultural rebirth, beginning in 1927, and stayed in the capital just long enough to see Hitler seize power. He fought as a captain in World War II, spending much of his time in occupied Paris close to a resistance circle of aristocratic Prussian generals. He lived out much of the rest of his life in a small Swabian village through the period of the cold war and after the downfall of communism. He lived long enough to see Germany reunified and died in 1998, a celebrated centenarian and Olympian figure.

Jünger was the oldest of six children, two of whom did not survive infancy. From his father Ernst Georg, a chemist, he inherited the sharp analytical skills of a scientist, and from his mother Karoline Lampl, he received artistic capacities and an eye for natural beauty. [2] Of the many reliable biographies, see most recently Thomas Amos, Ernst Jünger (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2011); Allan Mitchell, The Devil’s Captain: Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2011); Heimo Schwilk, Ernst Jünger: Ein Jarhundertleben (Munich: Piper, 2007); Helmuth Kiesel, Ernst Jünger: die Biographie (Munich: Siedler, 2007); Steffen Martus, Ernst Jünger (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001). Also important from the 1990s are Paul Noack, Ernst Jünger: eine Biographie (Berlin: Fest, 1998); Thomas R. Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Martin Meyer, Ernst Jünger (Munich: Hanser, 1990). Of earlier biographies, see Gerhard Loose, Ernst Jünger, Gestalt und Werk (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957). Jünger’s family moved from place to place, partly in search of a good school for Ernst, who got into trouble and received poor grades. His father went in search of a stable income, abandoning ambitions to work as a scientist and opening an apothecary in a small town in the Erzgebirge, near the eastern border of today’s Czech Republic. Jünger retained fond memories of the pristine landscape of forests and meadows in the surrounding area that he remembered as enigmatic and magical. The family did not enjoy the idyll very long. Between 1905 and 1913, the boy was sent to various educational institutions, including boarding schools, which rendered him even more alienated from adults and their rules. He and his brother joined the Wandervogel movement in 1911, one of the many prewar youth groups that had sprung up across Germany, offering adolescents an escape from the benevolent tyranny of regimented life in late imperial Germany. [3] See Walter Z. Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 66–73.

In 1913 Jünger realized his first youthful desire for actual adventure. He crossed the French border, fibbed about his age, and joined the Foreign Legion. He was shipped off to Algeria but had no desire to become a legionnaire. Escaping from the camp in Oran, he darted off to discover Africa on his own. Quickly captured by Foreign Legion soldiers, he was held until his father arranged for his release through the German Foreign Office. The furtively proud father instructed the boy to have a photograph taken before departing. The adventure , as we will see, will come to play a central role in his life experiences, then distilled into ice-clear form in his writings.

Jünger’s father promised the precocious young man an adventure excursion to Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, as long he finished school. Then came the war fever of August 1914. Jünger rushed to Hanover and volunteered for the Seventy-Third Regiment of General Field Marshal Prince Albrecht von Preussen. After hurrying through an alternative high school degree, he shipped out at year’s end and was in battle by early January 1915 on the western front. Promoted the following autumn to lieutenant, in the latter stages of the war he was part of a new group of assault troops, sent in small numbers to infiltrate enemy trenches. This innovative “shock” strategy was more effective than mass lines of infantry, which were chewed up by the enemy’s machine guns, but required more skill and individual initiative. After suffering fourteen battle wounds, Jünger received the Pour le Mérite on 22 September 1918, the highest honor awarded by the Prussian military, rarely given either to soldiers of the infantry or to warriors of his tender age.

The venturesome boy was exhilarated by the war experience. He carried a copy of Homer in his pocket and imagined himself a Greek hero of the Trojan War. The copious notes he took of these battle experiences were self-published in 1920 as In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) . The work was picked up by various publishers in the decades that followed and, along with several other essays from the 1920s, established Jünger’s reputation as one of Germany’s foremost authors of the war generation. He was recognized as a leader of the New Nationalists, intellectual veterans of the postwar period who inflated the memory of the war into mythic proportions and pitted themselves against the liberal tendencies of the Weimar Republic, especially against its fulfillment policies such as the payment of reparations, downsizing the army, and regaining good standing among the nations of Europe.