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

FOREWORD ^{ELIOT NEAMAN}

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,

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] 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]

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.

The Treaty of Versailles forced the German government to reduce its standing army to one hundred thousand troops. Although now under a republican government, it retained the imperial adjective to designate the Reichswehr and was filled with antidemocratic aristocrats. Jünger enthusiastically wrote treatises on storm trooper tactics, but he was put off by the empty socializing and boozing of the fraternizing officers. While studying the natural sciences in Leipzig, he joined the illegal paramilitary Freikorps and the legal veterans’ group Stahlhelm and began a career in journalism, writing for a score of right-wing newspapers, including the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter. He became a leading exponent of the young German intellectual right, which advocated for an authoritarian alternative to the Weimar democracy. These “Ideas of 1914” had been foreshadowed by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 bestseller, The Decline of the West and Moller van den Bruck’s The Third Reich, published in 1923. The young nationalist critique of parliamentary political systems followed in many ways the path laid out by Carl Schmitt in his seminal 1923 treatise, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.[4] They advocated a form of “Prussian Socialism,” as a new dictatorship, not monarchical, which would replace the nineteenth-century ideologies of liberalism, socialism, democracy, and anarchism. The new state would be run by steely-eyed workers and soldiers in full mobilization to restore Germany to its status as a world power. Jünger embraced these ideas in various forms, albeit often in a meta-historical and epochal rather than parochial German context, as one of three editors of the weekly Die Standarte (later Arminius), which included the writers Friedrich Hielscher, Franz Schauwecker, Hans Friedrich Blunck, and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger, all intellectuals who his secretary Armin Mohler would identify as proponents of a “Conservative Revolution” in Germany.[5]

In these years, Jünger worked to establish a Central Council that would unite workers and soldiers until a Führer could be found who could put the revolution into practice. This was a “National Bolshevik” strategy and explains his close friendship with Ernst Niekisch, a politician and writer from Saxony who founded the journal Widerstand, with the aim of grafting Soviet Bolshevism onto Prussian nationalism. In the War Journals, Niekisch is referred to twelve times under the pseudonym “Cellaris.” He was a key figure for understanding the ambiguous position Jünger held on the right-wing spectrum of pre-Nazi politics in Germany. Jünger was deeply concerned about Niekisch’s fate during World War II and received updates from military contacts who knew how he was being mistreated by the Nazis. (Niekisch was arrested in 1937 and spent the war years in a Gestapo jail, where he was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, a broken, nearly blind man).[6]

By 1927 Jünger became disillusioned with the various nationalist groups fighting one other as the Weimar government entered a relatively stable period, which lasted until the Great Depression doomed Germany’s first experiment with democracy. He decided to move to the bustling capital city.

In 1927 he took his wife and infant son to Berlin to settle down as a full-time writer. He had married Gretha von Jeinsen, ten years his junior, in 1925. With the Great War now almost a decade past, he became less focused on strident German nationalism and the battles of his youth. Residing in the humming metropolis, which began to eclipse Paris as the center of European cultural innovation, Jünger’s curiosity turned to more expansive themes of modernity, technology, and cultural disruption. As Marcus Bullock has noted, he was particularly fascinated by the pulsating sexuality of the city, the intoxication experienced by the breaking of taboos and bourgeois norms.[7] Here he wrote the first version of his surrealist work, The Adventurous Heart, “notes written down by day and night.”[8] The literary scholar Karl-Heinz Bohrer has strikingly labeled Jünger’s style an “aesthetics of shock” because this book contains a phantasmagoria of scientific and poetic vignettes, a collage of wild associations and ghostly images that recall the war-inspired art of painters of the era like René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst, as well as the expressionists Otto Dix and George Grosz.[9]

Jünger’s circle of friends and literary acquaintances expanded in Berlin as he moved beyond his ties to war veterans. On the left, he interacted with Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, and the anarchist Erich Mühsam. On the right, he associated with Gottfried Benn, Ernst von Salomon, and Arnolt Bronnen. Around this time, his intellectual infatuation with France and French culture began. He made frequent trips to Paris, making contact with French literary circles, facilitated by the well-connected German-French author Joseph Breitbach.

As the Nazis began their final ascent to power after winning 107 seats in the Reichstag in the elections of September 1930, Jünger distanced himself from the party. He simultaneously advocated his own political vision, which in some ways was a more radical version of the nationalist revolution: authoritarian and ruthless, but not racist. Despite Goebbels’s attempt to win him over to the Brown Revolution before and even after 1933, Jünger steadfastly declined any offers to become involved in Nazi politics and forbade the propaganda minister from using any of his works without permission. Although Goebbels transmitted the Führer’s avid wish to meet him, Jünger did not reciprocate.[10] Apart from one unfortunate essay on “Jews and the National Question,” in which he stressed the impossibility of Jews and Germans sharing the same national culture,[11] he resisted the Nazi “Blood and Soil” ideology.[12]

In 1932, the same year Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, Jünger’s The Worker appeared in print. As the war journals indicate, Huxley was one of the few modern authors Jünger prized. Huxley’s novel and Jünger’s social analysis shared a dystopian vision of the future resulting from economic and political breakdown. Whereas the former was read as a warning of the end of the liberal order in western societies, Jünger’s tract affirmed a Nietzschean reevaluation of and triumph over the liberal order. Nevertheless, the Nazis had little use for Jünger’s treatise because it lacked any connection to the German Volk community or racial hierarchies. The book heralded a collective new age of the laborer in epochal terms, while the Nazis concentrated on the specific situation of Germany’s supposed superior racial characteristics. National Socialism appeared to Jünger as a purely technical execution of the “total mobilization” (the title of another of his short treatises of this period). He later said that Nazism “lacked metaphysics.”[13] As a political platform The Worker was considered useless by the new regime. In fact, it was explicitly denounced in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party newspaper.[14]

Jünger was well aware of what could befall an opponent of the new regime, regardless of his war hero status. Around this time, he began burning many personal papers and letters. Because of his ties to the anarchist Erich Mühsam, the Gestapo searched Jünger’s apartment in early 1933. At the beginning of December 1933, Jünger’s family left Berlin for Goslar, in Lower Saxony on the slopes of the Harz Mountains. During the so-called Röhm Purge at the end of June 1934, in which the Schutzstaffel (SS) eradicated the leadership of the unruly Brown Shirts, as well as nearly one hundred political opponents of the regime, Jünger was vacationing on the island of Sylt but felt the threat palpably. The mood was ominous, wrote Jünger’s wife.[15]

Jünger now entered a period of “inner emigration,” a term possibly coined by Thomas Mann, but one Jünger never embraced.[16] He published a series of essays based on his travels, and revised The Adventurous Heart, removing large parts of the book that were political in nature. He rejected membership in the Nazified Prussian Academy of the Arts, which was “synchronized” (gleichgeschaltet) in the spring of 1933, forcing out many luminaries, including Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin. The Nazis filled the writing (Dichtung) section with party hacks, although the Academy was headed by Gottfried Benn, a major poet who was on friendly terms with Jünger.[17] In 1934 Jünger published a collection of his essays on philosophically esoteric topics, which stood in stark contrast to the “Blu-Bo” (a contraction for Blut und Boden, blood and soil) popular literature of the period. In 1936 he published the diversionary Afrikanische Spiele (African Games), a novel about his short adventure in the French Foreign Legion.

The Jünger family moved several times in the 1930s, once down to Überlingen, on the north shore of Lake Constance, to be near his brother Friedrich Georg. But Jünger didn’t like the mild climate there, and so they finally settled in Kirchhorst near Hanover in 1939, where Gretha had found a large, somewhat run-down old house with a large garden, which would be very useful since food would soon be rationed in Germany. Jünger would live there until 1948, although he was away for much of World War II. He had another reason for moving back to Lower Saxony: unit assignments were based on residence, and he wanted to be back in his old regiment if war broke out.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, Jünger published On the Marble Cliffs, which he began writing in February 1939 on the balmy shores of Lake Constance and finished quickly in Kirchhorst at the end of July. The book was written as an allegory on the abuse of power. A peaceful seaside agricultural people are threatened by a primitive nomadic tribe from the hinterland and by the followers of an unscrupulous tyrant named the Head Ranger, whose thugs torture their enemies in a ghostly camp called Köppelsbleek. Skulls and the flayed skins of the victims surround the site. Two brothers, modeled after Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg, are shaken from their peaceful existence and forced to flee their domicile, which the Head Ranger destroys in a violent Götterdämmerung. Jünger later denied that the novel was a cryptic assault on National Socialism, but the descriptions of the main characters in the novel are too suggestive to be pure coincidence. The Head Ranger dresses ostentatiously and throws lavish parties on his estates, just like Goering, who was in fact in charge of Germany’s forests during the Third Reich.[18] In the war journals, Jünger repeatedly ruminates on his novel, whose readers understood it as a contemporary allegory.

Jünger was conscripted as a lieutenant soon after the war broke out and reached the rank of captain. He participated in the invasion of France in the spring and summer of 1940. Then, in April 1941, his regiment was ordered to occupied Paris. Jünger was granted considerable privileges in his military posting, not the least of which was due to the fact that he did not face much physical danger apart from some English bombing raids over Paris. His office was at the Hôtel Majestic, under the command of General Otto von Stülpnagel and later his distant cousin Heinrich von Stülpnagel. He served there with Hans Speidel, a lieutenant general and later chief of staff to the famed General Erwin Rommel, as well as with Werner Best, an SS officer who was a deputy to Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.

Jünger had much free time to wander around the metropolis, often in civilian clothing, although he didn’t see his situation as without peril. “When I think about the difficulties of my situation compared with other people—especially those in the Majestic—I often get the feeling,” he wrote on 23 May 1942, “that you are not here for no reason; fate will untie the knots it has tied, so rise above worries and see them as patterns.” In other words, he was surrounded by opponents of the Hitler regime, who are named in the journals. With a tinge of guilt and self-reflection, he added, “thoughts like that seem almost irresponsible.” Almost but not quite irresponsible because he saw himself as part of the resistance to Hitler even though he believed that active opposition was pointless. Others around him were to pay dearly for their convictions, whereas Jünger managed to survive the war unscathed.

The lavish Hôtel Majestic is still situated on the Avenue Kléber, five minutes by foot from the Arc de Triomphe. Jünger was billeted nearby, at the luxury hotel Raphael on the Avenue des Portugais. He worked in Majestic’s Division Ic, responsible for gathering military intelligence on enemy and oppositional activities. Another of his assignments was to keep notes about the rivalry between the Nazi party and the army, which he kept, along with a diary and other writings, safely locked away in a vault at the Majestic. The diary entries formed the basis for his later published collected war journals Strahlungen (Emanations). The first World War II diaries, Gardens and Streets, were published in Germany in 1942 and were translated the same year into French, published by Plon, so that his fame in occupied France spread among readers in that country. The translated war diaries included in this current volume contain the two journals from his tour of duty in Paris, his sojourn in the Caucasus, and his visits and then homecoming to the house in Kirchhorst.

As a well-known author, Jünger was welcome in the best salons of the capital city. There he met with intellectuals and artists across the political spectrum. The First Paris Journal was written as the Third Reich reached the fullest extent of its continental expansion. Through reports passed on by Speidel, Jünger was privy to the brutal facts of the Russian campaign,[19] and the German army was still deep inside Soviet territory until well after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943. Not surprisingly, some conservative Parisian intellectuals greeted the Pax Germanica with cheers, hailing the demise of the disorganized and highly fractured French Third Republic. The sympathizers of the New Order included the dramatist Sasha Guitry and the writers Robert Brasillach, Marcel Jouhandeau, Henry de Montherlant, Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, Drieu la Rochelle, and Paul Léutaud. To call these intellectuals antirepublican “collaborators,” however, depends on the word’s definition and on whether or not they played any official role in cooperating with the German authorities. The word “collaborator” is thrown around too loosely, even by historians today. But that a Franco-German intellectual alliance between 1940 and 1944 was forged, can hardly be doubted. That the Germans often understood that relationship differently from their French counterparts must also be considered when reading these journals.

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] 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] 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]

Another key contact in Paris for Jünger was the salon of Florence Gould (Lady Orphington in the journals),[23] 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] 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]

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]

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] 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] 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,

To his credit, he never attempted to justify or explain away the Holocaust, even though the brutality of the eastern front did not affect Jews alone. But he did place these “wicked crimes” in a cosmic context that deprived individual actors of agency. “Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians,” he wrote. Two years to the day after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, he observed with bitterness that demagogues brought Germany into a war with the Soviets that could have been avoided, leading to atrocities against the Jews, which “enrage the cosmos against us.”[29] At the end of 1942, he made three New Year’s resolutions, the second of which reads, “Always have a care for unfortunate people.”

Jünger’s tour on the eastern front is notable for its sharp contrast to his privileged existence in Paris. There he was able to enjoy the luxury of French comforts, good food, and socializing among refined company, despite increased rationing of almost all commodities as the war progressed. But even on the eastern front, he discovered that his reputation as an author was a tremendous help:

On 11 January 1943, Jünger took the night train from Lötzen (today Giżycko in northeastern Poland), stopping in Leisnig, halfway between Leipzig and Dresden. He arrived home in Kirchorst on 9 February. He calls his wife “Perpetua” in the diaries, and she frequently appeared in his dreams while in Paris. But marital troubles dominated the visit in Kirchhorst. Many female accomplices are mentioned in the diaries, including Camillea, Charmille, Mme. d’Armenonville, Mme. Dancart, and most often the Doctoresse.[31] These were probably all the same person, Sophie Ravoux, with whom Jünger had an intimate affair.[32] The Russian writer Umm El-Banine, who opened many doors for him in Paris, was also probably a lover.

When he departed again for Paris on 18 February, he left behind letters and diary entries that his wife Gretha read with an eagle eye and sharp intuition. Gretha had already been upset about his pleasurable lifestyle in Paris while she had to manage a household and deal with Allied bombing raids. She might have forgiven his sexual escapades were it not for an emotional coldness she felt in his presence during his stay. “Perpetua” turns out to be an apt nickname because it recalls those women who did housekeeping chores in Catholic monasteries. She wrote him on 20 February 1943, threatening a divorce. Jünger managed to patch things up with her but not without many protestations of his love and devotion, as well as some soul-searching. She demanded that he completely cut off contact with the despised Sophie Ravoux, the relationship with whom, Jünger maintained, was entirely platonic.

All of this is barely mentioned in the war journals. One has to read between the lines, as in this diary entry:

Gretha was not the only observer to resent Jünger’s Nietzschean penchant for turning his life into a work of art. Although the war journals offer a unique perspective from “inside the Belly of the Leviathan” as Jünger put it, some critics have accused the writer of posing as a flâneur and dandy while others suffered. In one famous scene, Jünger climbed up to the roof of the Hotel Raphael and, holding a glass of red burgundy, observed bombers flying over Paris, as fires engulfed the city and "its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination.”[34] On 27 May 1943, however, there were no air strikes over Paris. The strawberry swimming in red burgundy may have been, as Tobias Wimbauer speculates, derived from an erotic impulse rather than an actual observation of events.[35]

Whatever moral judgment one wishes to make about the aesthetics of violence, which is evident in many places in the journals, Jünger’s account is an indispensable firsthand reflection of Paris under the German occupation and provides sharply observed portraits of contemporaries as they struggled with the destruction of Europe at the end of a second Thirty Years’ War.

In the winter of 1943–1944, Jünger’s reflections turned gloomy and often apocalyptic as he systematically studied the entire Old and New Testaments. Jünger viewed the war through the lens of God’s judgment for the evil perpetrated by mankind, as well as the promise, with the return of God through Christ, of everlasting grace and renewal. He was too sophisticated to take the gospels literally, and furthermore he had been brought up by his positivist, scientifically trained father to be skeptical.[36] Nevertheless, he viewed the period as if the two world wars were a test for mankind. He held out hopes for a renewal of Christianity after a descent into nihilism. His “Appeal to the Youth of the World,” The Peace treatise, was written in this spirit and was suffused with his Bible studies. Throughout 1944 he tinkered with the script, and the intended audience expanded beyond youth, to include a general appeal for a postwar metahistorical transformation of all nations.

In 1944 news of Allied armies conquering Italy and the Soviets pushing into Eastern Prussia and Poland confirmed his worst fears about Germany’s fate. He noted with deep sadness the destruction of German cities, of which he learned through letters from friends and saw firsthand during his travels by train from Paris back to Kirchhorst while on furlough.

On 27 March 1944, Jünger was visited in Paris by Lieutenant Colonel Cäsar von Hofacker, a liaison between Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel and the group of officers around Hofacker’s cousin, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who was the central figure in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. On that afternoon, Hofacker took a walk with Jünger on the Avenue Kléber and informed him that Stülpnagel was under observation and Jünger himself was viewed with suspicion. Hofacker suggested he leave Paris and go to Marseilles for a while. The young colonel also filled him in on many of the details of the plot, called Operation Valkyrie, and listed the main conspirators. On 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg brought a bomb in an attaché case into Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia. Stauffenberg left just before the explosion, which injured but did not kill Hitler, shielded as he was by a heavy concrete table.

Jünger had also came into contact with officers involved in the Rommel Plan to arrest and replace Hitler.[37] In fact, Rommel had been given Jünger’s treatise The Peace through an intermediary, was impressed by the ideas, and may have been spurred to act by them.[38] The Westlösung (or Western Solution) envisaged imprisoning Hitler sometime in May 1944, when he was inspecting the Atlantic Wall, an extensive system of fortifications built to defend against the expected Allied landing in the west. Inexplicably, Hitler continued to direct the war effort from Berchtesgaden, his outpost and home in the Bavarian Alps. After the invasion of Normandy, Hitler announced an unexpected visit for 19 June to Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, fifty-eight kilometers from Paris. Speidel and Rommel had an ideal opportunity to strike. But as so often in Hitler’s life, he was spared by a lucky intervention. The bombing of England with V-1 rockets had begun from French territory on 15 June. On 18 June, one of the rockets strayed off course and came down near Margival, nearly hitting the Führer’s headquarters Wolfschlucht II, where Hitler was meeting with General Rundstedt. Shaken by the near miss and depressed about the viability of his new wonder weapons, he returned abruptly to Bavaria.

The failed Rommel plan to arrest Hitler was now replaced by the Stauffenberg plot to kill the dictator. On the early evening of 20 July, Hofacker called Stülpnagel and reported that Hitler was dead.[39] Thereupon Stülpnagel ordered the arrest of more than a thousand SS and Sicherheitsdienst agents. He had already set in motion plans to have them face mass executions. But at twenty to eight the same evening, the German radio reported that Hitler had survived. Chaos now reigned in the Hôtel Majestic. Jünger spent the day hunting butterflies in the forest around Saint Cloud[40] and made only veiled references in the journals to the sense of heightened danger when he came back to headquarters.

The news from Berlin was contradictory. Was this a trick by Goebbels to buy time? The commanding general in the west, Hans Günter von Kluge, would have to make a decision without knowing the true state of affairs. Kluge had known about the plot through one of its instigators, Henning von Tresckow, but when it came time to act he decided that there could be no coup while Hitler was still possibly alive. General Rommel, the only military leader in Nazi Germany who could have led a rebellion against the living Führer, had been badly injured just three days before Operation Valkyrie. All of the prisoners were released, including the top SS commanders Carl-Albrecht Oberg and Helmut Knochen.

Jünger’s confidante Hofacker was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris on 26 July, brutally tortured. and eventually sentenced to death by the infamous People’s Court. Under torture, he revealed details about General Rommel’s involvement in the German Resistance, but he did not disclose the participation of Jünger and the officers around Stülpnagel in Paris.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a servile mouthpiece of Hitler, ordered Stülpnagel to fly to Berlin. Stülpnagel sent Jünger regrets through his secretary for having to cancel a scheduled breakfast and then, instead of flying, ordered a driver to take him by car past the battlefields of Verdun where he had fought in the Great War. During a fierce rainstorm, Stülpnagel shot himself in the temple on the banks of the Meuse River. His driver rescued him from the water, still alive. He had blinded himself but was brought to an army hospital, guarded by the SS, and then taken to Plötzensee in Berlin, where he was tried by the notorious Peoples Court’s judge Roland Freisler on 30 August and hanged six weeks later. Kluge was replaced by General Walter Model on 17 August and ordered to report to Berlin. He took his own life with cyanide pills near Metz on 19 August.

Kluge’s representative in Paris, General Günther Blumentritt, may have saved the day for Jünger and others in the group that met at the Hotel George V. On the evening of 20 July, he sat down with Oberg and Knochen in the Salon Blue of the Hotel Raphael and, in a scene seemingly out of a tale by Rabelais, ordered several bottles of fine champagne to placate them. Blumentritt tried to frame the entire affair as a gross misunderstanding. Having been caught flatfooted by the plot that developed on their watch, it was in the SS commanders’ self-interest not to delve too deeply into the extent of the German Wehrmacht officers’ involvement in the botched coup.[41]

With Jünger having been so close to key members of the German Resistance, the question must be posed how he survived the brutal crackdown by the SS in Paris after 20 July. It is widely claimed that Hitler protected him, saying “Nothing happens to Jünger” (“Dem Jünger geschieht nichts”). There is only one source for this supposed utterance, namely Friedrich Hielscher, who heard it from Wolfram Sievers, an SS officer who was hanged after the war, in June 1948.[42] (Hielscher and Jünger carried on an extensive correspondence for fifty-eight years).

The Hielscher-Severs source seems credible, but it is uncorroborated. According to one biographer, Jünger was to have been called before Roland Freisler’s Peoples’ Court in the spring of 1945. Only the chaos of the final months of the war saved him.[43] Hitler is not known to have made compassionate exceptions, to say the least, even for war heroes. Erwin Rommel would be a good example. The more likely explanation is that Jünger was inordinately careful. He burned his manuscripts and letters on sensitive matters, as noted above, and he was in fact opposed to any attempt to assassinate Hitler or work against the party dictatorship, as much as he disliked both. He expressed his opposition to assassinations of dictators several times in his journals. He argued from historical precedents in which the aftermath of such killings had produced greater tyranny. In the specific case of Germany, he feared that a successful elimination of Hitler would lead to a new Stab-in-the-Back Legend.[44]

By early 1944, the liberation of Paris was imminent. Jünger noted that the Americans were in Renne on 5 August. He climbed up to the top of Sacré-Coeur to bid goodbye to his beloved Paris as the cobblestones baked in the hot sun. “Cities are feminine and only smile on the victor,” he noted enigmatically. On 10 August, he visited Florence Gould for the last time. Three days later he took a walk with Charmille on the banks of the Seine. The Paris journals end there. The next day, 14 August, the evacuation of the German army began, and Jünger was seated on one of the first military transports out of the city.

He received news of the liberation of Paris back home in Kirchhorst. On 17 August, the German army began placing explosives around the French capital, not only intending to hold off the Allied advance but also honoring Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris if necessary. Columns of German military vehicles were on the move everywhere in the metropolis. The French Resistance plastered the capital with posters calling for a general strike and mobilization against the Germans. The war journals are curiously silent about all this frenetic activity. On 20 August, he visited a cemetery and ruminated about short life spans. On 21 August, he joined some boys in a fishing expedition. Finally, on 23 August he noted that “the Americans have entered Paris” and then went off for a swim and sunbathing. Attacks on collaborators in Paris began at this time, and Jünger noted with bitterness how many of his Paris friends were arrested, beleaguered, or attacked by mobs. “They say Montherlant is being harassed. He was still caught up in the notion that chivalrous friendship is possible; now he is being disabused of that idea by louts.”[45]

On 25 October, before departing for the Italian front, Jünger’s son Ernstel visited Kirchhorst for the last time. On 27 October, Jünger was formally decommissioned from military service. He returned to his books and his garden, although constant Allied bombing made life difficult and dangerous even in rural areas in Germany.

On 12 January 1945, Jünger received the dreadful news that his eldest son, his namesake Ernstel, had been killed on 29 November 1944 in, of all places, the marble cliffs of Cararra, Italy. The boy had been overheard talking to a friend, Wolf Jobst Siedler (later an important writer and publisher in the Federal Republic), expressing “defeatist” remarks about the Hitler regime. Ernstel was also caught listening to foreign radio broadcasts. A spy denounced both boys, and they were arrested in January 1944. Hitler had recently given orders that fresh recruits (Ernstel was eighteen) were to be trained not only in the best military tactics but also as sharp ideological warriors. The actions of Ernstel and Wolf could therefore have led to death sentences.

Jünger had received permission to leave Paris in February 1944 and met with the authorities in Berlin, displaying his Pour le Mérite medal ostentatiously at his neck. In April, Ernst and Gretha visited the presiding judge in Ernstel’s case, Admiral Scheurlen,[46] who reduced an initial harsher penalty to Frontbewährung, which meant the boy was allowed to return to military service to prove his worth and was given a dangerous assignment in the Italian mountains. Jünger was never sure whether his son had been shot by the enemy or executed by the SS, with a shot to the back of the neck.[47]

For the most part, the war journals consist of dispassionate, precise observations, showing little emotion and only limited introspection, as when, for example, Jünger ruminates about his tendency to fall into depression, la frousse. By contrast, for weeks after he and Gretha received news of the boy’s death, he returned repeatedly to ruminating on the poignant pain of losing his eldest son. “I cannot stop thinking about Ernstel. So much about his life is a riddle that is hard to solve.”[48]

The war journals end with Jünger unenthusiastically commanding the local Volkssturm, the national militia of males between sixteen and sixty not already serving in the army, which had been announced by Hitler in the fall of 1944. As refugees streamed through the countryside, some billeted in his house, Jünger retreated as much as possible into his books and letters, hiding out in a garden cottage or upstairs in his attic. Perpetua took command of the household and kept intruders at bay. On 29 March, on his fiftieth birthday, he heard news from his publisher that Goebbels had forbidden mention of his name in the press, “the only honor that I prize.”[49] His final thoughts in these journals were about his dead son. As he watched American army tanks and other armored vehicles pass by on a road nearby, with jets streaming overhead, a “parade of dangerous toys,” he sensed the “incursion of a superpower into a completely crushed region.”[50] The only saving grace, at least Ernstel did not see this, for “it would have hurt him too much.”

As important as historical context is for a full appreciation of these war journals, it is necessary before concluding to pay some attention to Jünger’s idiosyncratic style. Nothing derogatory is meant by the term “idiosyncratic,” deriving from the Greek words “idio” and “sunkratikos,” or mixed together in a way particular to an individual. An “idiot” in Greek was someone who did not participate in the public sphere, but by inference was someone who took a singular path. Jünger was certainly no idiot, but he did very much march to the beat of his own drum. His depth of experience and knowledge was astounding, especially considering that he was still in his late forties when he wrote these journals. Furthermore, he was an autodidact who, despite some university study, lacked specialized academic training. Very few observers could have predicted at the time that by the 1980s he would be compared to Goethe.[51] The journals give many indications of why that judgment was not off the mark, not only because of the bountiful evidence of polymathy but also because of Jünger’s unique style and form. The following sections briefly address three key aspects of his writing that are essential for revealing the inimitable fabric, the texture that links words to reality in these pages.

Jünger’s thirst for adventure was played out in his short stint in the French Foreign Legion and his four-year, life-changing service in the Great War. It was also imaginary, as in his reflections on books, dreams, plants, and animals. These offer a key that can unlock many of Ernst Jünger’s writings. In these war journals, for example, Jünger returns repeatedly to adventure books about shipwrecks, a metaphor for the situation in which he finds himself, logging the events leading to the inevitable downfall of Germany.

Adventure is perhaps the oldest of all literary genres. Gerhard Nebel, who worked as a translator in Paris in 1941 and is mentioned in the war journals, explored the concept in his early post–World War II book, describing Jünger’s spiritual and metaphysical thirst for adventure as the glue that holds together such disparate endeavors as militant nationalism and Christian spiritualism.[52] Gerhard Loose also picked up the adventure theme in his Jünger biography, emphasizing the pitfalls inherent in the cult of self (Ichbezogenheit), which reduces the natural world, foreign lands, war, or just about any phenomenon to objects of speculation for Jünger’s aesthetic imagination.

In one of the most insightful essays ever written on the topic, the sociologist Georg Simmel defined the adventure as a self-contained experience, without reference to all the neighboring parts of life: “it is like an island in life, which determines its beginning and its end according to its own visionary powers (Bildungskräfte), and is not at the same time determined, as in the case of a part of a continent, by the one side or the other.”[53] Both world wars were (by Simmel’s definition) islands in Jünger’s life, and both provided ample material for his visionary imagination.

In the mid and late 1930s, Jünger’s adventures continued, but in a different key. In 1934 he published a collection of essays, Leaves and Stones, which marked a turn away from militant politics. The collection contained a travel diary, an essay on pain, a surrealist take on the “Man on the Moon,” and a piece on language, “In Praise of Vowels.” The volume also contained theoretical tracts on military subjects, in particular a reprint of “The Total Mobilization.” He revised The Adventurous Heart, which in tone and substance was so distant from the kind of literature published in Germany at the time that it might as well have been penned by a foreign author. In 1938 Jünger cut most of the autobiographical details of the first edition and replaced them with metaphysical reflections and dream sequences that would avoid the censor’s blue pencil in Hitler’s Germany. The method was “stereoscopic,” a journey into dreamlike realms below quotidian existence.[54]

“Stereoscopic perception” has a technical meaning for Jünger. In The Adventurous Heart, he noted that it involved “extracting two sensual qualities from one and the same object, through—and this is essential—the same sense organ.”[55] One sense organ has to take over a function of another. Thus, a red, fragrant carnation is not stereoscopic as it involves merely sight and smell separately. But a velvet carnation that emits the fragrance of cinnamon is stereoscopic because the nose both smells and tastes the qualities of spice simultaneously. The device has roots in French decadence and symbolism, as evidenced by repeated occurrences in the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. Jünger may have possessed synesthesia, or at least was able to create it poetically, by separating and mixing different sensory qualities in an object. “I thought I was seeing sounds that no painter had ever observed,” he wrote in an entry on 9 April 1942.

In the Paris Diaries, Jünger’s recollection of his dreams, as well as his zoological observations and recurrent descriptions of long walks and visits to cemeteries, parks, libraries, bookstores, antiquarian shops, galleries, and museums of Paris, partake of some of the same magical-realist method.[56] The diaries, one must add, are meant to be actual descriptions of events, not phantasmagoria. Jünger’s analogies are imaginative, but in these pages usually not technically “stereoscopic,” such as when he compares receiving a typhus vaccination to Holy Communion.[57] The method is stereoscopic in a broader sense, the way Jünger described, in an essay from the 1930s, the magical effect of perceiving a man’s face on a brightly lit moon.[58] As Jünger explains, “the real is just as magical as the magical is real”[59]—or to put it another way, the enchanted and the mundane are stereoscopically equal and present in Jünger’s optics.

A key term Jünger borrowed from the French was “désinvolture,” the casual and innocent observation of actuality from a distance, which embraces the Heraclitian flux, the “innocence of becoming” of all things that come in and out of existence, beyond good and evil.[60] In the harsh environment of the two wars, the applied method enabled Jünger to keep an emotional distance from the horrors he experienced and translate them into objective descriptions.

For Jünger there is no single mode of consciousness but rather multiple layers of experience, which must be uncovered below the Veil of Maya, the surface illusions of reality. For that reason, he was fascinated by hallucinatory substances. In the war journals, he refers to the effects of ether in an essay by de Maupassant on 17 September 1942 and to the Veil of Maya on 2 October 1942. In the 1920s, Jünger had an intense interest in hallucinogenic drugs, magic, and the supernatural.[61] In the early 1950s, Jünger would experiment under medical supervision with LSD with Albert Hoffman, its inventor. He dedicated an entire book, Annäherungen: Drogen und Rausch (Encounters: Drugs and Intoxication) to the subject, which was published in 1970.

In 1995 on Jünger’s hundredth birthday, his friends contributed to a collection of essays under the title The Magic of Serenity.[62] For the editors, Jünger’s work was so valuable because it demonstrated that “one can only understand one’s own time when one is not captivated by it” (wenn man sich ihr nicht ausliefert).[63] Both Jünger’s many admirers and his equally numerous critics recognize this attribute. For the former, Jünger’s distance to the events of his time and his familiarity with the occult traditions of occidental culture are an admirable antidote to the sicknesses of modernity, resisting ecological destruction, the loss of the sacred, unfettered consumerism, and the triumph of instrumental reason. For the latter, Jünger’s ambivalence about modern culture, his cold gaze, renders his Olympian stance suspicious, or worse, reactionary. Both sides in this long simmering feud fail to grasp that Jünger’s optics are informed much more by epistemology than politics. Although fully alert to the scientific and technological revolutions around him, Jünger’s aesthetic sensitivities were self-consciously old-fashioned—with the one exception of modern art, which fascinated him and led to friendships with avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Alfred Kubin.[64] One notices immediately when reading the war journals that the predominant books Jünger collected and read were published before his own era. He sought to rehabilitate an older version of science, organic and holistic, without jettisoning the value of scientific rigor.

In sum, Jünger was concerned with reversing Max Weber’s diagnosis of modernity as an iron cage, and he attempted to open doors for a reenchantment of the world, seeing, writing, and relating to reality in a way that supersedes the “modern.” Not unlike Heidegger and Nietzsche, who pined for the pre-Socratics, Jünger sought to recover the supposed epistemological primordial relationship to being as “awe,” which was closed off with the advent of abstract-rational thinking. Like another Nietzschean, Michel Foucault, who foresaw the eclipse of the modern episteme and the consequent “death of man,” Jünger conceived of modernity as a passing epoch, a cognitive horizon bound, one day, to yield to a return of new mythologies. The word “antimodern” fails to describe his fundamental project. An “alternate” or transcended modernity, in contrast to the flabby phrase “postmodernity,” better hits the mark.[65]

After 1945, Jünger would explore the posthistorical mood of a dissolved occident, that old Enlightened Europe that reached a zenith of development just as it destroyed itself in the process. If every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin famously observed, then the World War II chronicles of Ernst Jünger are surely one of the brightest and most enduring testaments to that Janus-faced history.