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

1941

Arrived before dawn at the railroad freight yard in Avesnes, where I was jolted out of a deep sleep. This made me aware of a beautiful dream: I was both a child and a grown man traveling along my old route to school from Wunstorf to Rehburg, a trip we always took by narrow-gauge railroad. I got out in Winzlar and followed the tracks on foot. It was night, for in the area around my father’s house I could see shots being fired, high and bright, through the darkness. But at the same time, it was also day, and to my left the fields were bathed in sunshine. One of them was covered with green seedlings, and I could see my mother waiting there, a magnificent young woman. I sat down beside her, and when I got tired, she picked up the edge of the field like a green blanket and pulled it over us.

The dream image made me very happy and warmed me for a long time afterward while I stood on the cold loading ramp and supervised the work.

March to Sars-Poteries; billeted there. I was assigned to two old ladies. One was eighty-two years old and had already seen three wars. I was able to contribute a bit of sausage to their evening meal, but it was still little better than meager. It consisted essentially of three large potatoes that had stood on the stovetop under a clay dome. This little device was called an étouffoir, probably because the food inside is steamed by closing off its air supply.

Strolled near the railroad station. In the ceramics factory, I inquired about the source of the clay that gave the town its reputation. A little beyond the tracks, I reached the pits and saw that these had been excavated from the lovely brown and white sand. I did not discover any of the fossils I was hoping to find. At the bottom of one old abandoned excavation, there were puddles that must occasionally flood with water. There I came upon willows growing at the bottom of one of the pits, taller than a man and covered with tiny, hairy roots. These sprouted like moss from the trunk and branches—a nice example demonstrating that each individual part of a plant can reproduce others. The whole organism is suffused with concentrated powers of generation. We humans have lost this art, and once our cultures display leaves and blossoms, we will never again see roots. Yet, when danger mounts in moments of sacrifice, we send out different, more spiritual organs, aerial roots, into the void—naturally at the expense of individual lives. All of us benefit from this new growth.

As I walked back, a storm of heavy wet snow dappled the landscape. Yet in the gardens, I could still see hazel and laurel blossoms covering the bare branches like swollen lilac blooms. In protected places, I noticed clusters of snowdrops. These seemed quite early, especially after the harsh winter. Here they are called fleurs de Saint Joseph [Saint Joseph’s flowers], whose day is celebrated on 19 March.

During my early morning sleep, I was in a little pharmacy where I was buying various things. Then Rehm woke me up. Before my eyes were open, I briefly noticed a paper bag labeled Braunschweiger Rubber Cement. It is always strange how we focus on such details.

Currently reading Reine [Queen] by Julius [recte Jules] Lermina, a book lent to me by the lady who owns my living quarters; it rather amusingly describes the factionalism around 1815 in the style of The Three Musketeers. Here you come across passages like the following that surpass the quality of the popular novel: “There is something childlike to be found in every conspirator.” I can confirm that judgment from personal experience.

Dozed in the early morning hours and pondered exotic books like Die Geheimnisse des Roten Meeres [The Secrets of the Red Sea] by Henry de Monfreid. The work is bathed in the gleam of coral and mother of pearl and the delicate breath of the sea. Also pondered Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des Supplices [The Garden of Torments]. This garden, with its paths paved in red brick dust, is filled with green vegetation and great masses of blazing peonies. It draws its luxuriance from the countless corpses of coolies who created it under conditions of murderous toil and have moldered anonymously in its depths. This book deserves praise for clearly delineating the beauty and savagery of the world—as the two forces whose combination and interplay remind us of sea monsters. Veiled in iridescence, these camouflage the terrifying dangers of their weaponry with alluring hues. In such intense coalescing of hells and heavens, the eye cannot differentiate the details of desire and suffering any more than it can the tangled chaos of a jungle island. Here our planet reveals a most incredible drama to our spirit.

Then about Wagner, who appeared to me in a new, more meaningful light for our age. I thought I spotted the error of Baudelaire, who possessed an authentic relationship to the ancient, eternal verities. Thoughts about the mighty mind of the dramatist who breathes artificial breath into past ages and dead cultures so that they move like corpses we can quote. A sorcerer of the highest order who conjures with real blood at the gates of the underworld.[1]

Things assume colors that make it hard for even the sharpest eye to distinguish truth from illusion. The actor steps into reality, becomes a historical person, achieves triumphs, garners laurels as green as real ones. What good does it do to contradict or debate with him? He has arrived because his time has come. In this alone lies his guilt, which runs deeper than any guilt based on individual action. Art as a hothouse of past ages—it is like a promenade through winter gardens or salons where palm trees bloom. It is hard to take issue with this, for the terrors of destruction are so great, so horrifying, that the will to rescue a single shade is all too understandable. Nietzsche presents a contrast that stands and falls in wintery tempests. These are the exemplars that our youth, like Heracles, beheld at the crossroads.

The case of Nietzsche contra Wagner[2] reminds me of those little toy houses we used to have with their different figures that would emerge depending on the weather conditions. One little figure would stand outside and forecast the weather, prophetically correct but out of step with the moment. The other showed the prevailing climate conditions, whether or not signs of a downturn could be sensed. For that reason, this figure waits in safety, away from the bright light. And yet they both were attached to one and the same little strip of wood fashioned by the carver of the little weather house.

Departed from Sars-Poteries, in particular from my eighty-two-year-old maiden lady, whom I thanked before dawn while she was still in bed. Then marched to new quarters near Saint-Michel, at first in a light frost and then through damp snow. The numerous destroyed or abandoned houses make the town a forbidding place. A tank juts out of the little river that flows through it. Myths are already being created: people say the driver plunged off the bridge to deprive the Germans of their prize. Wherever the inhabitants have moved back again, they have attached strips of white linen to the doors of their houses to signal their presence. They give an impression of being poorer and more famished than the people of Sars-Poteries. Swarms of children with bare legs frozen blue huddle at the field kitchens. Rats can be heard scampering in the houses; cats stare from the empty windows.

I am living with Rehm in the house of a landlady whose husband is a prisoner of war in Germany. She is probably around forty but is still attractive, lively, and hospitable and likes to talk about her husband, whom she provides for diligently. Still, I’d like to think of her as available; she is filled with high spirits stimulated by fresh and vibrant experiences. Such things often dwell in one and the same heart, for the moral world cannot be called to account or dissected as neatly as the physical world. By the same token, most men do not behave like Othello (something I never understood before) but know how to forgive, especially in long-lasting marriages.

Vivid dream images, as usual, in the early morning hours. I was taking part in a meeting where people were amusing themselves by imitating dead or forgotten politicians. They were improvising in the spirit of the moment. Here and there someone in the company would rise from his seat and provoke hilarity with his histrionic gestures. I saw a large stout man pretending to be Bismarck; he enjoyed loud applause. It occurred to me that many a subtle gesture elicited much surprise and laughter, but only among a few people. I concluded from this that the people here were my contemporaries, probably my colleagues. But the survivors of small forgotten cliques could be seen wildly applauding figures whose humor was lost upon anyone but them.

The group gave the superficial impression of being high-level civil servants or retired generals, types known from anecdotes and lost personal accounts that show them carousing in their clubs. There was an undercurrent with a different tone, this time concerning the drama of human history, but one devoid of bitterness, producing mirth instead. It was suffused with a trace of childlike innocence, like the kind that comes as no surprise in dignified old retired gentlemen. Also a little bit of plaudite, amici [Give me your applause, friends], if we take the meaning in an ironic or self-deprecating sense.

Significant warming over the past two days. At first accompanied by showers, then by sunshine. The snow disappeared in no time with the warm breeze. Water levels rose, and the trees gleamed in the play of color that marks early spring.

As for animals: I saw large Timarcha beetles [bloody-nosed leaf beetles] crawling on the hard earth yesterday in the rain; noticed especially how the male of the species showed very broad tarses [leg joints]. I imagine that this chrysomelid [member of leaf beetle family Chrysomelidae] is related to the early onset of warmer days. When I was a young boy, I noticed this as one of the first signs of life in the bare quarries near Rehburg as it glistened blue in the February or March sun. In Algeria and Morocco, I saw them in their large forms as early as December, and their appearance always correlated with a certain mood of melancholy that overcomes me during this period of the year and then disappears when the trees turn green.

Then as I was riding my bicycle along the road to Hirson, I brushed past a salamander—a female recognizable by the greatly enlarged mons veneris [mound of Venus] visible at this time of year. Its gentle swelling terminates in the brown-spotted abdomen tinged with a faint red pigmentation. I carried the little lady, who twisted gently in my fingers, to a damp meadow—thereby saving her life. How many times has the sight of such creatures filled me with new strength, like a source of life?

Yesterday Rehm and I called on Madame Richardet’s aunt, who had invited me for a meal. We talked about being thunderstruck—that coup de foudre [love at first sight]—as a form of love to be avoided.

Field maneuvers in the morning in the vicinity of Ferme La Butte; during these, I meditated on the theme of worlds—for example, reflections of human relationships in other dimensions—to visualize them better. One might think of polished spheres—such as cloudy opals or rock crystals—that reflect the drama more minutely, intensely, and deeply. It could all play out in a large house that can be explored from cellar to attic.

In Charleville, I was a witness at a military tribunal. I used the opportunity to buy books, like novels by Gide and various works by Rimbaud, who was born here and—as I was told by the bookseller—where a small circle of poets preserves his memory. On the return trip I read a beautiful passage about the kaleidoscope in Si le grain ne meurt [If It Die, 1924].

Saturday and Sunday in Paris. Spent the evenings in the company of Lieutenant Colonel Andois in the Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque near the Saint-Lazare railroad station and, after that, in Tabarin. There, saw a floorshow of naked women before an audience of officers and bureaucrats of the occupying army seated in the front rows. They fired off a volley of champagne corks. The women’s bodies were well proportioned except for their feet, which had been deformed by their shoes. Perhaps a further thought: the foot as a kind of degraded hand. Performances like this are geared to the mechanism of the sex drive—the point is inescapable, although it is always one and the same. The rooster-like quality of the Gallic race was powerfully evident. Les poules [the sluts].

Then went to Monte Cristo, an establishment where patrons luxuriate on low cushions. Silver chalices, fruit bowls, and bottles glinted in the twilight as in an Orthodox chapel. Companionship provided by young girls, almost all of them born in France to Russian emigrés. They chattered away in several languages. I sat beside a small, melancholy twenty-year-old and, through the champagne haze, carried on conversations about Pushkin, Aksakov, and Andreyev, whose son [Daniel] had been a friend of hers.

Today, Sunday, uninterrupted rainfall. I went to the Madeleine twice; its steps were covered with fallen beech leaves. Was at Prunier at noon and in the evening. The city is like an old familiar garden that now lies desolate but where paths and passageways are still recognizable. Its state of preservation is remarkable, almost Hellenistic; clearly, special ploys of the High Command are at work. It is alienating to see the white signs on the signposts that the troops have placed throughout the city—gashes in an ancient, organic stand of timber.

New plans, new resolutions: “It is not yet too late.” During the night a beautiful woman appeared to me. She kissed me many times gently on my eyes, which I kept shut. Afterward, I went to a horrible place, where the door that I opened was bound with barbed wire. An ugly old woman was singing vulgar songs. When she turned her back on me, she lifted her skirts.

On the previous night, it was a journey to Tibet. The houses, rooms, and furniture didn’t seem to be original anymore. An influence of foreign forms was already discernible, yet the change was slight. I walked through the houses without noting the inhabitants, yet I felt their presence in rooms I did not enter. The dream was malevolent in that I was an invisible, demonic being. Czarist officers appeared as adversaries. We saw and recognized each other from a distance—there was a hierarchy of visibility.

Easter Day stroll. The brown fields, as yet unplowed, seem bare, but in some places, they are blanketed with delicate low-growing nettle blossoms—almost invisible, approaching ultraviolet—where bumblebees forage as if on a tissue of dreams.

The narrow, deeply rutted woodland paths. Even these possess northern and southern slopes where the different plant species grow at different rates.

Got up early for transport to Paris. The regiment has been ordered there for guard duty.

The reveille sounded during one of those dreams that are like living tableaux, posed groups full of tension. In them, the dreamer savors a first-rate insight, for he soon sinks into them, into the hopes and suffering of the figures; soon he emerges from their constituent parts and sees them integrated into one static image. Thus, the complexity of the content and the poverty of movement contradict each other; the actions remain under the spell of the meaning, and this repression unleashes a feeling of dizziness that often becomes a nightmare.

In this state, I saw José with the high-ranking doctor and his wife, along with me and four orderlies in a room where the furniture reminded me of a hospital. José was suffering from rabies and had sunk his teeth into the doctor’s wife’s neck to infect her, and without a doubt, he had succeeded. I saw his victim, who was being held down on a hospital bed by two orderlies and also saw the wounds from the bite; a slight film of pus was already forming on their red edges. The high-ranking doctor was about to give her an injection because she was nearly mad. As he tested the solution in the hypodermic, his glance fell upon José—serious, pained, yet in complete control of his passion. José was also being forcibly subdued by two orderlies, half in the twilight state that follows an attack and half in triumph because his assault had succeeded. I had both hands around his powerful neck, stroking him the way one pats a horse’s flanks. Yet at the same time, had he tried to escape, I could have choked him. The little room where we were suffering was so full of radiation that I comprehended his inner being like the text of a book. The remarkable thing about the attack was that after all the years of secret infidelity, José now wanted to unite with the high-ranking doctor’s wife in death. And in the husband’s eyes, I read that he completely understood the gravity of the deed. Although he felt he had been bitten by a viper, he remained conscious and maintained his medical objectivity. In this context, José’s vicious action was a sign of illness, a symptom of fury. The will to heal was the appropriate response. It struck me as great and wonderful that this master controlled himself calmly in the face of such an onslaught of passion.

And yet during this struggle, I felt myself on José’s side; I patted his broad neck as I would that of a good horse that I might watch streak across the finish line in a storm. I felt that his moral sense was still intact. Nonetheless, he seemed to be like one of those ancient chieftains who took everything of value—gold, weapons, slaves, and women—when they crossed into the realm of death. This body was already inhabited by death, but I sensed in it the immense power of life.

Once again, I was the observer of the image as a whole, constructed by my mind in contemplation out of sense and nonsense like a pattern in the wallpaper.

Departure from Saint-Michel; perhaps, we may eventually return to this place. The gentle willows will stay in my memory along with their hawthorn hedges, whose still-leafless thickets shelter green globes of mistletoe and dark magpies’ nests. The celandine and violets were already blooming among the dead leaves, and nettle shoots were beginning to sprout. This is an undulating landscape; here and there it conceals large farms with stables and barns. The shiny slate roofs reflect like mirrors from its valleys. My thoughts upon gazing at these farmsteads: the age of magic has past, yet we still possess the keys to bring it to life. But then there are stages when man loses the memory of goodness and truth. There he does not recognize the sources of his unhappiness.

In Laon by midday. We drove around the lower portion of the old city. It was with a sense of joy that I saw the cathedral again. From the distance, the perforated spires make an especially powerful impression. I imagine it is possible to grasp the internal structure of the work, the pillars and shafts of the shell, the intellectual aspect of the whole plan. It presents a wealth of kaleidoscopic variations to the eyes of those who drive past, as if the building were turning gently on its axis to the sound of a music box.

We reached Paris very late and then marched through dark and desolate streets to Fort Vincennes, where the troops will be billeted. After a walk through the quarters in the early morning hours, I took a room in the Hotel Moderne at the Porte de Vincennes. In the early light, a glimpse of the huge pillars on the Place de la Nation. Behind it, in the distance, a hazy view of the Eiffel Tower. Monumental traits become ever more exaggerated when they appear en masse.

First Sunday in Paris. In the meantime, I have moved to an apartment that provides a lovely view of the Donjon des Forts. Powerful feeling of melancholy. Afternoon, to the zoo in Vincennes. Giraffes were eating dried acacia leaves from a high trough, picking them out with their long, pointed tongues. Black bears, a pride of cheetahs, Alpine rams from Corsica posing on the crags of a mighty cliff. The stupendous aspect of these pageants: they speak, but we no longer understand their divine nature.

Stroll through the streets and alleys of Vincennes. Details: a man with a slender sickle mowing the grass of a railroad embankment next to a busy street and stuffing the clippings into a sack, probably collecting fodder for rabbits. In his other hand, he held a small basket to collect little snails that fell out of the grass as he worked. In the outskirts of the big cities, scenes of Chinese frugality are often evident—they bring to mind the grasses and herbs that grow in the crevices of a wall.

Hôtel de Ville and Quais de la Seine;[3] took stock of expenditures. Tristitia [melancholy]. Looked for solutions; only doubtful ones presented themselves. The monsters of Nôtre-Dame are more brutish than those of Laon. These incarnations stare so knowingly out over the roofs of the cosmopolitan city, surveying realms of lost knowledge—the knowledge, yes, but its existence as well?

At Prunier, Rue Duphot. The little room on the first floor is cool and cheerful, with its aquamarine atmosphere, very inviting for the enjoyment of seafood. The round church very nearby; a fig tree flourishes at its wall. Then the Madeleine—a church despite everything. Boulevard des Capucines. The Blitzmädchen[4] whom I had noticed the day before yesterday on the Place de l’Étoile,[5] a tall West Slavic type with long wavy hair. The strange feeling when we begin to notice and pay attention to each other. It is we who beget relationships; a new human being is like a seed that originates deep inside us. An alien image inhabits us; it is like a small wound, a gentle pain when it marks us. How well women know this phenomenon; it always intensifies when the encounter is repeated.

Telephoned Schlumberger. But like almost all my earlier acquaintances, he is not staying in Paris. When I looked for an escape route between the Pont Neuf and the Pont des Arts, it became clear to me that the labyrinthine nature of our position resides only inside us. This makes the use of force destructive; that would demolish walls, chambers in ourselves—that is not the path to freedom. The hours regulate themselves from the inner mechanism of the clock. When we move the hand, we change the numbers but not the course of fate. No matter where we desert to, we carry the full military kit with us, inborn. Even in suicide, we cannot escape ourselves. We must ascend, sometimes by suffering; then the world becomes more comprehensible.

Sacré Coeur. Chevalier de la Barre was gruesomely executed at a very early age for not showing proper respect during a procession. I recently read his story in Voltaire. A statue of him at the martyr’s stake stands in the consecrated area of the church as an altar to Freemasonry. The choice of the space lends the monument a dialectical flavor and disrupts commiseration with the fate of the unfortunate man. We raise our finger in warning as we leave him.

Then Place des Ternes. I bought a small bouquet of lilies of the valley in celebration of the day. These were probably responsible for my encounter with Renée, a young office clerk in a department store. The city effortlessly produces such couplings, but then one can’t help notice that it was founded on the altar of Venus. It’s in the water and in the air. I now sense that more clearly than when I lived here for the first year and a half of the war isolated in barracks and garrisons and billeted on farms. In long periods of asceticism when we tame our thoughts, we get a foretaste of the wisdom of old age, of serenity.

Ate, then went to the cinema; there I touched her breast. A hot iceberg, a hill in the spring, filled with myriad seeds of life, perhaps something like white anemones. During the newsreel, the room remained illuminated to prevent any demonstrations. Our offensives in Africa, Serbia, and Greece were shown. The mere glimpse of the weapons of annihilation produced screams of fear. Their automated nature, the way the steel plates of the tanks glide, the way the ammunition belts with their bright projectiles are swallowed as they fire. The rings, hinges, armor, observation slits, sections of the tank, the arsenal of life-forms that harden like crustaceans, toads, crocodiles, and insects—Hieronymus Bosch had already envisioned them.

Subject for study: the ways propaganda turns into terror. The beginnings in particular contained much that people are going to forget. That is when power walks on cats’ paws, subtle and cunning.

We said goodbye at the opera, probably never to meet again.

In the sunshine in front of Brasserie Lorraine on the Place des Ternes. These are the moments when I can breathe, like a drowning man. Opposite me a girl in red and blue who combines absolute beauty with an icy manner—a pattern of frost crystals. Whoever thaws her, destroys the form.

When I turn off the light I am gladdened by the thought that I shall now be alone for eight, nine hours. I seek solitude as my cave. I also like waking up now and then to enjoy it.

On the Place des Ternes in front of the Brasserie again—a pleasant spot I find so appealing. I usually sit here in the sun drinking a cup of tea and enjoying some paper-thin sandwiches—almost wafers, which I dedicate to the memory of past abundance. Then, across the Champs-Élysées to Rue Duphot. I always enjoy seeing the fig tree at its entrance in front of the small church.

The cliffs of porphyry. Even plants and animals have to differentiate themselves from everything else on the earth.

Jardin des Plantes. A jujube tree in full bloom. Some of the blossoms sprang directly from the trunk, so that they gleamed from afar in like coral branches or clumps of pink bees.

Large black or amber-colored cats can be seen napping in the shop windows. Then the Paulownia [princess tree; foxglove tree] trees, still without leaves, blooming in the allées or in large groups on the squares. Their delicate violet veils cast a spell over the silver-gray stone. Amethysts on elephant hide.

I drove to the Place des Ternes as usual. At the Bastille, I was overcome by the desire to get out. I found myself in a crowd of thousands, the only one in uniform, not to mention that it was the Feast of Joan of Arc. Still, I took a certain pleasure in walking around and meditating, the way one would walk through a powder magazine, dreaming while holding a burning candle. I later discovered that there had been a few disturbances at the Place de la Concorde.

They placed us barefoot around a bright fire and moved us close to it so we could see the skin first reddening, then becoming like parchment, and then cracking open. Then they scourged them with whips. Bundles of vipers were attached to the handles instead of cords. They sank their teeth into the raw flesh, and I experienced the bites as relief when compared with the pain of the fire.

On what slave ships do such images occur to us?

In the night I lay anxious in the dark for a long time, counting the seconds and then counting them again. Then came a horrible morning in the barracks yard of Vincennes. I was like someone who is very thirsty: during a break, I slaked my thirst with the foamy freshness of white blossom clusters up against the fortress wall. When I see the blossoms spreading out so peacefully in the sunlight, their serenity seems infinitely deep. I feel that they speak to me in words and sentences that are sweet and comforting, and I am always seized with pain because no sound from any of them can penetrate my ears. We are summoned, but we do not know where to.

At midday the colonel arrived with Captain Höll, who will be staying here for a while and is supposed to paint a portrait of me. I was with him in the evening in the area around the Madeleine and bought gifts for Perpetua.[6] In the shop of a Negro; conversations about cola nuts and white rum. It was a strange afternoon and confirmed my opinion that it is we who control experience; the world provides us with the means. We are endowed with a certain kind of power that activates the appropriate objects. Thus, if we are males, women will appear. Or, when we are children, presents are showered upon us. And when we are pious—

At noon my company took over guard duty in the Hotel Continental. Before that, mounted guard duty on Avenue Wagram. I had my company perform the drill that we had been practicing for a month and then pass the Monument to the Unknown Soldier in parade step. We went by the monument to Clémenceau, who had clearly foreseen these things. I nodded to him, as though to a prophet.

The night was troubled, even turbulent, as more than forty men who had been detained by patrols on the streets or in bars and hotels were brought before me. These were mostly cases of inebriation or soldiers without leave who had been picked up in the little hôtels de passe [brothels]. The prostitutes they had been enjoying themselves with were brought along too. After brief interrogations, I entered them all in the large incident log and then had them confined in little cells that had been built on the first floor in great numbers, like bathing cabins. Anyone who had slept with a “companion” was first disinfected. Breakfast was doled out in the morning, and then the whole group was brought to a disciplinary judge in the same building for sentencing. Along with one of the wagonloads that had been picked up on Montmartre, there was a little eighteen-year-old prostitute who stood at attention just like the soldiers. Because this little person was especially cheerful and showed bon moral [morale], I had her sit and chat with us in the guardroom. By doing so, I was keeping her like a pet canary in this depressing place.

In the morning in the Hotel Continental as an associate justice on a military tribunal. Three cases. The first involved a drunken driver who had knocked over a gas lamppost with his car. A second before, he had “seen something dart across street.” Four weeks confinement under close guard. When asked if he had any response to the sentence:

“I am surprised that the sentence is so lenient.”

Then a second driver who came to blows with four of his shipmates in a bar and passively resisted arrest: sentenced to forty-three days in military jail. During the cross-examination one of the sailors said, “he rarely sets foot on land,” to characterize the sobriety of a crewmate. He also differentiated between strong inebriation, “a big trip,” and simple tipsiness, “a little trip.”

Finally, a corporal who went berserk in front of the Metro station Jean Jaurès, attacked several pedestrians, and stabbed people with his bayonet until he was arrested by the military patrol. Postponement because several of those involved did not appear, probably out of fear.

In this last case, the perpetrator’s fury was evident in the hearing. The proceedings had to be patched together from bits and pieces, leaving a series of gaps. The differences between the testimony of the French witnesses and the translation by the interpreter were informative. The method revealed a person as a sensory organ, receiving and transmitting. This practice shows how much gets changed and lost in the process.

In the evening in the Ritz with Count Podewils, whom I met for the first time today, although I have been corresponding with him and his wife for years. He brought First Lieutenant Grüninger along with him, who reminded me of characters from Ardinghello. Höll joined us. Colonel Speidel, chief of the General Staff of the Supreme Military Command, showed up late for a moment.

The morning visit. Two friends in silk costumes stand in front of a table made of mother-of-pearl and ivory. They have a folder with colored etchings open in front of them and are viewing the pictures through lorgnettes. The room is colorful, splendid, cheerful. I notice especially the rich intarsia in the table. Yet there’s also something unusual about it. When I take a closer look, I discover a woman kneeling beneath it. Her heavy silk dress, delicately powdered face, colorful hat with feathers, blend so perfectly with the furniture that the concealed woman reminds me of one of those butterflies camouflaged to resemble the blossom it perches on. I now become aware of the mood of terror underlying the cheerfulness of the room that streams with morning light, and I realize that this puzzling figure is frozen with fear. The enigmatic nature of the scene was latent in the title: it was not only about the visitor but also about his wife, the female visitor who was all too lovely and all too near.

Called on Höll in the afternoon on the fifth story of a house on Rue de Montreuil. There three of us raised several glasses, first to his model, Madeleine, then to a magnificent rainbow over the roofs of Vincennes where it formed a double arch of happiness.

Conversations related to the girl’s profession; she was an entraîneuse, whose job it was to lead clients to a nightclub. She was no beauty but education, a good background, and clearly also good nature would be superfluous to this job. There was a sick mother to be provided for and other things like that. As usual with types like her, I am moved by the mixture of superficiality and melancholy. Thus, we navigate toward destruction on ships festooned with garlands. This artificial enhancement that helps to disintegrate these middle-class lives merits closer inspection. In the final analysis, this is the last stage of a more general decline. Money holds one of the supreme secrets. If I place a coin on the table and receive a piece of bread for it, this act reflects not only the order of the state but also the universe. It would be worth researching to what extent numismatics, in the higher sense, gets expressed in the symbols stamped on the coins. My contact with Höll does me good and has pulled me back from the brink of those dangerous thoughts that have engulfed me since the beginning of the year. I reached a low point in February when I refused nourishment for a week and in every sense drew down the capital I had accumulated in the past. My situation is that of a man who dwells in the desert between a demon and a corpse. The demon urges him to action; the corpse, to sympathy. In life it has often been the artistically gifted person who came to my aid during such crises. He distributes the treasures of the world.

To add to the flood of repugnant things that oppress me comes the order to be present at the execution of a soldier sentenced to death for desertion. My first inclination was to report in sick, but that seemed cheap to me. Furthermore, I thought to myself: maybe it is better that you are present rather than someone else. And in truth, I was able to accomplish many things much more humanely than could have been expected.

Basically, it was exaggerated curiosity that was the deciding factor. I have seen many people die, but never at a predetermined moment. How will the situation present itself that today threatens every one of us and spreads and spreads its shadow over his existence? And how should we act in this situation?

Therefore, I looked at the records that culminated in his sentencing. The matter concerns a corporal who left his unit nine months ago to disappear into the city where a French woman gave him shelter. He moved around, sometimes in civilian clothing and sometimes in the uniform of a naval officer as he went about his affairs. It seems that he felt a false sense of security and not only made his lover jealous but also beat her. She took her revenge by reporting him to the police, who turned him in to the German authorities.

Yesterday after this, I accompanied the judge to a little spot in the forest near Robinson, the appointed location. In a clearing, an ash tree, its trunk splintered by previous executions. Two groups of bullet holes are visible—a higher one for the head and a lower one for shots to the heart. In among the delicate filaments of the exploded fibers of the tree’s heartwood layer, some dark blowflies are resting. They objectify the feeling that I brought with me to this spot: no place of execution can be sufficiently sanitized to efface all vestiges of the knacker’s yard.[7]

We drove a long distance today to reach this spot in the forest. The staff doctor and a first lieutenant who was in command were in the car. During the journey. conversations had a particular quality of closeness and intimacy characterized by things like “imagine being in a fix like this.”

In the clearing we meet the detail. We form a sort of corridor of two rows in front of the ash tree. The sun is shining after the rain that fell on our way here; drops of water glisten on the green grass. We wait a while until shortly before five o’clock. Then a car pulls up the narrow forest road. We watch the condemned man get out, followed by two prison guards and the clergyman. Behind them a truck appears, driving the burial detail and military issue coffin: “cheapest model, standard size.”

The man is led between the two rows; at that moment, I am overcome with a feeling of trepidation, as if it were suddenly difficult to breathe. He is placed before the military judge, who stands beside me: I note that his arms have been secured behind his back with handcuffs. He is wearing gray trousers made of good material, a gray silk shirt, and an open military tunic that has been draped over his shoulders. He stands erect and is well built, and his face bears pleasant features of the sort that attract women.

The sentence is read aloud. The condemned man follows the procedure with the highest degree of attention, and yet I still have the impression that he doesn’t understand the text. His eyes are open wide, as though drinking it all in, large, as if his body were suspended from them; he moves his full lips as if he were spelling. His gaze falls on me and stays there for a second on my face with a penetrating, questioning tension. I can tell that the agitation lends him an air of something confused, florid, even childlike.

A tiny fly plays about his left cheek and alights several times close to his ear. He shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head. The reading takes barely a minute, but the time seems extraordinarily long to me. The pendulum becomes long and heavy. Then the guards lead the condemned man to the ash tree; the clergyman accompanies him. Heaviness increases in this moment. There is something staggering about it, as if heavy weights had been lowered. I remember that I am supposed to ask whether he wants a blindfold. The clergyman answers yes for him while the guards tie him to the tree with white ropes. The clergyman softly asks him a few questions; I hear him answer them with jawohl [yes sir]. Then he kisses a small silver cross while the doctor pins a piece of red cardboard the size of a playing card onto his shirt over his heart.

In the meantime, the firing squad has followed a signal from the first lieutenant and has taken up their positions standing behind the clergyman, who still blocks the condemned man. He now steps back after running his hand down the prisoner’s side once more. The commands follow, and with them I again awaken into consciousness. I want to look away, but I force myself to watch. I catch the moment when the salvo produces five little dark holes in the cardboard, as though drops of dew had landed upon it. Their target is still standing against the tree; his expression shows extraordinary surprise. I see his mouth opening and closing as if he wanted to form vowels and express something with great effort. This situation has something confusing about it, and again time seems attenuated. It also seems that the man is now becoming menacing. Finally, his knees give out. The ropes are loosened and now at last the pallor of death quickly comes over his face, as if a bucket of whitewash had been poured over it. The doctor rushes up and reports, “The man is dead.” One of the two guards unlocks the handcuffs and wipes the glistening metal clean of blood with a cloth. The corpse is placed in the coffin. It looks as if the little fly were playing around him in a beam of sunlight.

Return trip in a new, more powerful state of depression. The staff doctor explains to me that the gestures of the dying are only empty reflexes. He did not see what was most gruesomely clear to me.

At the Ritz this noon with Colonel Speidel, Grüninger, and Clemens Podewils. I have counted Grüninger among my most insightful readers, and probably pupils as well, and it was his idea that I would be in a better position here in Paris than I would be elsewhere. In truth, it’s quite possible that this city has not only special gifts but also inspirations for work and other influences for me. Almost more important is the sense that earlier it was always a capital, symbol and fortress of an ancient tradition of heightened life and unifying ideas, which nations especially lack nowadays. Perhaps I’m doing the right thing if I take advantage of the possibility of establishing myself here. The opportunity presented itself without my instigation.

In the evening, I was visited by the two sisters who were acquaintances from my lodgings in Noisy [Noisy-le-Grand]. The three of us chatted together. The older one is getting divorced from her husband, who squandered her dowry. She speaks of his misconduct and of her lawsuit with Gallic certainty, using the phrases of a canny notary. I gather that there are no insoluble problems here. It seems that she is not obsessed with enmity toward men, but just toward marriage, and that in her own way she wants to introduce the younger woman, who looks like an Amazon, to life. In all this there is a remarkable contrast between pedagogical dignity and epicurean subject matter.

In the afternoon, went to the little patisserie of Ladurée on Rue Royale to say goodbye to the Amazon. Her red leather jacket, the green shoulder bag on its long strap. The mole over the left corner of her mouth rises nervously, appealingly, when she smiles and exposes her canine tooth. On Sunday she will be eighteen years old.

Of all the things we used to refer to as style in the old days—the instinctive extravagance that a man displays openly in his own milieu—all that remains is the company of a beautiful woman, and she alone gives the feeling of this vanished condition.

The great cities not only refine the senses, they also educate us to things that belong to their own genera—things we would otherwise enjoy only in isolated or specialized contexts. For example, in Barcelona, I noticed that there were specialty shops for all things salted. The pastry bakeries, antiquarian bookshops selling only eighteenth-century bindings, and others, only Russian silver.

Current reading: Anatole France, Sur la Pierre Blanche [On the White Stone]. Alexandria—the thoughts have lost all their organic components, thereby permitting a linear analysis that is clearer and more mathematical. The style is filtered through all the strata of skepticism; in this way, the clarity of distilled water communicated itself to him. Prose like this can be read at twice normal speed just because every word stands in its logical place. That is its weakness and its strength.

Took leave of my little apartment in Vincennes. In the bedroom there hangs a photograph of its owners who fled—a photograph I found unpleasant from the start. Their expressions had something strained, distorted, and agitated about them. They bore the marks of a querulous spirit, which is reflected in the contents of their library. I often thought of removing the picture, especially in the evenings, and only the reluctance to change anything about the furnishings prevented me from doing so. It now seemed as if I were discovering a new character trait in the face of this unknown and involuntary landlord, as though from beneath the mask there gleamed and smiled something different, a glimmer of understanding, of sympathy. That struck me as odd—almost as a reward for the fact that in this apartment I had always behaved like a human being. On the other hand, maybe it was a sign that of my own accord I had penetrated the individual surface to that core where we are all united and can understand each other: penetrated to the pain, the suffering, that is the universal substrate.

On the afternoon of 5 June, we marched off. The girls of Montreuil and Vincennes formed two columns in front of the gates of the fort as the beauties of old had when Alexander’s troops departed from Babylon. Höll also said goodbye to me. My contact with artists of a free and lighthearted style of life has always been the most valuable.

We marched through the woods of Vincennes, then via Nogent, Chelles, Le Pin, Messy, and Vinantes to Montgé, where I spent three days with the company. The name of the town is supposedly derived from Mons Jupiter. I am living here in the house of a Monsieur Patrouix and his wife, both of whom are quite aged yet energetic and vivacious. The man is an engineer who carries on his business in Paris during the week. The woman takes care of the house as well as the large garden, which is watered by seven springs and produces a rich fruit and vegetable harvest. As we chatted about flowers and fruits, I recognized in her a dilettante in the best sense. Evidence for this is that she likes to give away the extra produce from her abundant harvest, but never sell it. Monsieur Patrouix is a Catalan born in Perpignan. We discussed his language. He told me that of all living tongues, it is closest to Latin.

In order to reach old age, he says, people must work. Only the lazybones dies early. I tell him that in order to grow old, we have to stay young.

Marched through the great, steaming woods in heavy rain as far as Villers-Cotterêts. There I warmed myself at the stove of a doctor in whose house I was billeted. I conversed with him as we ate together, and when he was called away to an urgent case, he left his daughter behind to keep me company. I found her—the wife of a surgeon—to be well read and well traveled. We conversed about Morocco and the Balearic Islands, then about Rimbaud and Mallarmé, especially about the first strophe of “Brise Marine” [“Sea Breeze”]. Here the study of literature always refers to a finite canon and its contents, while back home, ideally, we speak of specific individual works, naming distinct schools and often distinguishing them by their political sympathies. Things are similar when it comes to painting. In Paris, I saw ordinary people stop in front of art dealers’ windows and heard them make sound judgments about the pictures on display. Literary appreciation surely corresponds to that of painting. Yet it is remarkable that in a musical people like the Germans, the corresponding sensitivity to sculpture is so poorly developed.

We marched as far as Soissons, where I got some sleep in the Lion Rouge. The house façades were riddled with bullet holes. Often it remained unclear whether these were from the last war or this one. Perhaps this is the way the images of each one coalesce in memory.

Strenuous march to Nouvion-le-Comte. High up on the right, the massive ruin of Coucy-le-Château. Rested at noon in the glass factory of Saint-Gobain. The inclement weather forced us to eat inside the building among huge piles of bars and sheets of glass. The sterile quality of this material impressed me. In the evening, despite my fatigue, I did a little hunting for subtiles [brown mushroom beetle].[8] Such entertainments are like a bath that washes off the dirt of duty; there is freedom in it.

We spent the rainy twelfth of June resting. I wrote letters, updated my diary, and worked. In the evening, slightly tipsy from white Bordeaux as I read Giono, Pour saluer Melville [Melville: A Novel, 1941]. In such moods, we are more receptive to books. We also read more into them; we fantasize over them, as over a piano keyboard.

Regimental march with combat training. In the Bois de Berjaumont. At around eleven o’clock at night, we reached our quarters in Saint-Algis. I sat for another hour around the stove with my landlord’s family, enjoying cider, cheese, and bread. We had a good conversation. Finally, the woman made us coffee and offered sugar and a little glass of brandy.

I particularly liked the paterfamilias, a fifty-six-year-old man who wore the same vest at the table that he had worn in the fields. I wondered how such a simple, good-hearted, childlike creature could still exist in this day and age—maybe only because he is so completely disarming. His face, especially in the gaze of his blue eyes, communicated not only inner joviality but also an exceedingly gracious quality. I could easily imagine myself being in the company of a vassal from olden times. I sensed this especially at several of his questions, which were directed to me with great delicacy, such as, “Vous avez aussi une dame?” [Do you also have a lady?], and his eyes lit up when he heard that I possessed one, as well as property.

In the morning, I had coffee in the company of my hosts, and then we marched to Origny for a combat exercise. During the final discussion on a hot hill, General Schede took me aside and informed me that I had been promoted to the staff of the High Command. I could see that Speidel had been thinking of me. Time resembles a hot object whose temperature cannot be reduced but can be endured for longer and longer periods by shifting it from one hand to the other. The situation I find myself in reminds me of someone who has a supply of gold coins he needs to change into smaller denominations. He searches in vain in his pockets for the smaller coins. On several occasions, especially back in Dielmissen and during the first half of my stay in Paris, I got swept into the rapids, but I always maintained the minimum amount of breath to make it possible to swim, or at least float. I predicted this situation years ago, but the ways it has come about have surprised me.

In the afternoon, we entered our old Saint-Michel again. Madame Richardet welcomed me with such delight that I found it touching. She said that the time since we had last seen each other had passed so slowly. After the milking was over, Ma Tante[9] came by with her little basket as usual and asked me whether I had experienced the coup de foudre in Paris. In this mood of mutual domestic familiarity, we all then drank a bottle of wine with Rehm.

Read my correspondence; among it a letter from Höll sent from Rue Montreuil in which he recalled the rainbow. It bears a postscript from Germaine, expressing the hope of seeing her two captains again, who had turned up at a crossroads in her life. In general, I have to say that one reason my stay in Paris was so fruitful was that it brought me such a wealth of human contact. People still preserve much of their seed corn, which can sprout again as soon as the weather becomes milder and returns to more humane temperatures.

Lovely letters from Perpetua. I note the following from 10 June:

I am writing these lines at the semicircular table where I have so often read and worked before. Madame Richardet has picked some peonies from her garden and placed them in a tall vase among the letters, diaries, magazines, and manuscripts. Once in a while, one of the dark red or pale purple petals falls from one of the open blossoms so that the material disorder of the space is exaggerated by a second, colorful one, but at the same time that disorder is negated.

Incidentally, I don’t usually update my notes until the following day, and I do not date them on the day of their writing but rather the day they occurred. Nonetheless, it happens that some overlap can occur between both dates. That remains one of the imprecisions in perspective that I don’t attend to very strictly. This applies all the more to what I have just said about the flowers.

Spent Saturday on the banks of the Glandbach stream, where I have organized sports for the men, the first time this year. While they were doing that, I hunted for subtiles along the beautifully tree-lined banks. In a tree fungus where I once found a reddish-brown Orchesia [darkling beetle] before our stay in Paris, this time I discovered a related species with orange spots, and a little bit later on the stump of an old alder tree, a variety Eucnemidae [false click beetle]. I also glimpsed the dark, otherwise inconspicuous Staphylinidea [rove beetle]. In the bright sunshine, they danced with their abdomens pointed upward like black flames upon the fresh crust of river mud in a wild celebration of life. When their armor glistens, the nobility of their black color becomes obvious.

I gave some more thought to my project about Black and White. For a long time, it has seemed that I must still establish a method before beginning it.

For anyone who wants to pursue this. A youth once came to an old hermit and asked him for a rule to guide him through life. The hermit imparted this advice: “Strive for the attainable.”

The youth thanked him and asked whether it would be immodest to ask for a second word of wisdom as sustenance for his journey, whereupon the hermit added another piece of advice to his first: “Strive for the unattainable.”

In the evening, in Madame Richardet’s garden. A bee approached a pink lupine and alighted upon the lower lip of the blossom, which drooped obligingly under its weight. In this way, a second narrow sheath, deep dark red at its tip, opened up. This section holds the pollen receptacles. The bee feasted on this sideways, right at the point indicated by the dark shading.

I stood for a long time before an iris with a tripartite crown. Entry to its chalices lay across a golden fleece leading to an amethyst cleft.

You flowers, who dreamed you up?

Höll arrived late by car. Because it was my sergeant’s birthday, I took him along to see the junior officers. It was a hearty feast. At around two o’clock, we pledged our close friendship over toasts.

He brought along the photograph from Rue Montreuil. The likenesses and also the view had come out well, but the rainbow was missing, that symbol of our attachment. The inert lens does not capture those authentic and miraculous qualities.

In a dream I was sitting with my father at a table heaped with food. It was at the end of the meal where others were present. He was in a good mood and posed the question to what extent every gesture—especially a man’s gestures in conversation with a woman—carries erotic significance. In doing so, he revealed the structure of gestural language and produced a cynical effect, yet this impression was mitigated by his astonishing erudition. Concerning the gestures, he mentioned those men use to indicate their experience and prowess; he cited Juvenal’s reference to the two books of Anticatones.[10]

Before the roundtable broke up he passed a goblet holding bright red wild strawberries on a mound of white ice cream. I heard him comment on it, but I have unfortunately forgotten what he said, although it was rather more profound than jocular.

Departure to Paris in the very early morning. I was warmly embraced on Rue de la Bovette by Madame Richardet and her aunt, who warned me again about the coup de foudre.

Laon again with its cathedral, which I love especially. In the woods, the place where the chestnut bushes are beginning to bud marks the boundary of a growing zone. Just on the outskirts of the city there are tall stands of marvelous wild cherries that glowed the color of coral as they ripened. That surpasses the limits of the gardener’s art, encroaching into the realm of precious stones and jewelry—just like those trees that Aladdin found in the grotto of the lamp.

For three days now we have been at war with Russia—strange how little the news has touched me. But the ability to absorb facts in times like these is limited unless we do so with a certain callousness.

Standing in front of La Lorraine again on the Place des Ternes. I reencounter the same clock that has so often been the focus of my gaze.

When I take up my position in front of the troops to say goodbye, as I did on Monday, I notice the urge to stand off-center. That is a trait that denotes an observer and a prevalence of contemplative leanings. In the evening, bouillabaisse with Ziegler at Drouant. I waited for him on Avenue de L’Opéra in front of a store displaying rugs, weapons, and jewelry from the Sahara. Among these were heavy silver armbands and ankle bracelets, fitted with locks and spikes—ornaments common to lands where slaves and harems are found.

Then Café de la Paix. Took stock of the situation as it comes into focus more clearly.

Toward morning, dreams of earthquakes—I saw houses swallowed up. The scene was as confusing as a maelstrom and threatened to make me dizzy and even lose consciousness. At first I struggled against the urge, but then I threw myself into the vortex of annihilation, as into a swirling shaft. The leap produced desire, which was part of the horror, yet also transcended it as the body dissolved into malevolent, fragmented music. Sadness prevailed, as when a flag is lowered.

Had a further conversation about the situation with Ziegler in the Ambassador. Also talked about second sight, a trait inherited in his wife’s family. She saw the explosion of the zeppelin[11] three hours before it was announced on the radio, as well as other things. Yes, there are strange springs that feed our knowledge, for she also saw Kniébolo[12] lying on the floor, his face spattered with blood.

At the table, I joked around with a beautiful three-year-old child I had grown fond of. Thought: that was one of your own children, unbegotten and unborn.

In the evening I accompanied the sisters to Montmartre, which was glowing like a volcanic crater. They complement each other like a centaur, a twin being in spirit and flesh. While half asleep I ardently entered into the spirit of language. The consonant groups m-n m-s m-j that express the exalted, the masculine, and masterful became especially distinct.

I met Morris on the Place d’Anvers, a man still mentally alert and physically active at age seventy-six. He has spent his life guiding rich Englishmen, Americans, and Scandinavians through the city. He has intimate familiarity with all of its far-flung districts. His experience is also extensive in clandestine matters, in the vices of the rich and powerful. Like the face of all who have passed through such regions, his own betrays a somewhat demonic aspect. While we ate together on the Boulevard Rochechouart, he gave me a lecture on various techniques of making amorous advances. At a glance, he can tell women who expect money from those who don’t, almost infallibly. I find that a rather coarse trait. Despite all his debauchery, I found something pleasant, even lovable in him. At the same time, I also sensed an icy chill in this person, who has spent years unattached relying on himself alone in this metropolis.

Strolled with Madame Scrittore to the Place du Tertre opposite the old Mairie near Sacré Coeur. I showed her a mullein flower blooming in a dry crevice in a wall. She said she thought it had grown thanks to “collaboration du Saint-Esprit” [collaboration with the Holy Spirit]. Conversation about the men who are good husbands and bad lovers. In such cases, women tend to take comfort in the thought that “I have always led a double life.” I wondered about the reason for such confidences. It can probably be attributed to the loneliness felt by two people who live near each other—a loneliness imbued with something terrifying.

Men live there as if suspended over chasms lightly covered with flowers but which conceal snakes and small carcasses in their depths. But why? Ultimately, only because they instill fear and mistrust. If we possessed perfect, divine understanding, our fellow human beings would reveal their secrets to us like children, without suspicion.

We ate together in a wine bar on the Place d’Anvers. Here I allowed myself the pleasure of interrogating my companion about details of French history, such as the heraldic significance of the lilies. At the next table, there sat a married couple, obviously “people who smell well-educated,” as the Chinese say. They were becoming increasingly disturbed by our conversation. Several times the man had to restrain his wife with effort when she wanted to interrupt and give me a piece of her mind.

Bastille Day. The streets were very crowded. When I crossed over the Place des Ternes in the evening, I felt someone touch my hand. A man carrying a violin under his left arm gripped my hand powerfully as he passed, while giving me a silent but genial look. There was something strangely invigorating about it, and it immediately improved my melancholy mood.

The city as sweetheart. Her streets, her squares, as bounteous places where we are surprised by gifts. I get special joy from seeing loving couples who walk with their arms around each other and occasionally pull each other closer for a kiss.

Went to the flea market with Speidel in the afternoon. I spent several hours in this jumbled maze in the kind of mood produced by reading Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. A place where East and West mingle and combine in the most outlandish way.

The impression of this fairytale world is evoked by all the treasures of metalwork, stones, pictures, fabric, and antiquities mixed in with a lot of rubbish. Treasures can be found in cheap market stalls, precious items among the piles of bric-a-brac.

This is the final collecting point for things that have spent their dreamy lives for years, decades, and centuries among families and households. They pour out of the rooms, the attics, and the storage rooms and bring anonymous memories with them. They fill the whole market with the emanations of household gods.

My transfer to Paris left a lacuna in these entries. Even more than that, the events in Russia are responsible for it; these started around the same time and evoked a kind of mental exhaustion, not just in me. It seems that this war is deteriorating in stages organized according to the rules of some unidentified dramatic structure. Of course this sort of thing can only be guessed at because events are sensed by those who are living through them in all their anarchic spirit. The maelstroms are too close, too violent, and nowhere, not even on this ancient island, are there any places of safety. The breakers are surging into the lagoons.

At noon Speidel and I went to see Ambassador de Brinon, on the corner of Rue Rude and Avenue Foch. They say that the little palais where he received us belongs to his Jewish wife, but that did not prevent him from making jokes at table about the youpins [Yids]. There I made the acquaintance of Sacha Guitry, whom I found very pleasant. His dramatic side also far outweighs his artistic side. He possesses a tropical personality of the sort I imagine Dumas Père had. On his little finger there gleamed a monstrous signet ring with a large embossed monogram SG on the gold surface. I conversed with him about Mirbeau, and he told me that the man had died in his arms as he whispered into his ear: “Ne collaborer jamais!” [Never collaborate!] I am recording this for my collection of last words. What he meant was collaborating on comedies, for in those days, the word did not have the odor that it does now. Sat next to the actress Arletty at table. At the moment, she can be seen in the film Madame Sans-Gêne [Brazen Lady]. Just the word cocu [cuckold] is enough to make her laugh, which means that in this country she is almost always in a state of merriment. Orchids in a vase: smooth, stiff, with a lip that divides into trembling feelers. Their color, a shimmering white luster, as though enameled for insects’ eyes in the jungle. Lasciviousness and innocence are wondrously united in these blossoms.

Pouilly, Burgundy, champagne, just a thimbleful of each. On the occasion of this breakfast, around twenty policemen were stationed in the vicinity.

Went to the Monte Carlo with Nebel in the afternoon, where we discussed the matter of the safe. He had just returned from leave and told me that a novel by Thomas Mann, Ein Tag aus dem Leben des alten Goethe [A Day in the Life of the Aged Goethe][13] was being circulated clandestinely.

Later called on Consul General Schleier on Avenue Suchet. Conversation with Drieu La Rochelle, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, focusing on Malraux, whose career I have followed ever since I got my hands on his novel La Condition Humaine [The Human Condition] many years ago. Since then, I’ve considered him one to be of those rare observers with an eye for the war-ravaged landscape of the twentieth century.

Went to see Speidel in the evening, who had just been on the telephone with the quartermaster general. Snow has already fallen in the central area of the eastern front.

The morning was brisk, but I spent a pleasant hour in the Tuileries Gardens in the afternoon. It is impossible to be bored out in the sunlight. There we bathe in the fountain of time. Then went to the Quais de la Seine, where I bought a large-format “Temptation of Saint Anthony” by Caillot in good condition. At the same stall, I pored over a colored drawing of the familiar motif of the bird that must be coaxed back into its cage. The pair of lovers who reclined, half-exhausted and half-revived, on a Biedermeier sofa, wore thin, tight clothes. Details of their anatomy were not exactly obvious, but nevertheless could be discerned in the contours of the cloth, resembling impressions of shells and ammonites. In this genre, it is especially important to set a trap for the imagination. This is the art of the embarrassing moment.

Herpetology Museum—first in the empirically zoological section, then to works of art and ethnographic collections. Finally, the snake as symbol of magic and cultic power. All this in a southern landscape between labyrinthine gardens and ranges of cliffs crisscrossed with dazzling, winding paths. A flight of marble steps leads upward, and on it black, bronze, and multicolored bodies laze in the sunlight. The entrance is treacherous, discovered only by the initiated. In the background, near caves, are further buildings—like baths and a temple of Asclepius.

The snake as primeval power is an archetype, a Platonic idea. The images, whether of life or of the mind, advance toward it without ever reaching it. There is a similarity here to worms, round fish, reptiles, and dinosaurs or to Chinese dragons and fabulous creatures of all sorts.

It would good for the “house” [project] to put the world into architectonic order—from its dark cellars to its observatories. The staircases where encounters occur are important. Life takes place in the rooms, chambers, and halls. This is visible in all its detail, as if in pictures painted in shimmering dreamy hues. We move as though on stage but at the same time remain spectators. “Pilgrim’s Progress.” The manuscript would have to be kept partly in the form of stage directions. Add to this the audial dimension: cries, which significantly simplify life’s relationships. “On tue les nôtres.” [They are killing our own.] “They’re interrogating the children.” The populated area would have to be paced off; anyone doing so would need to be of advanced age and have extensive experience.

Individual rooms: the chamber of irrevocable decisions as a Platonic ideal of all courtrooms. The declassification office. Elevators for the more sophisticated who no longer need steps. A cabinet of mirrors.

Went to the [Hotel] George V in the evening with Speidel. Sieburg was here, who with his pleasant nonchalance personifies all the skills of the cosmopolitan journalist and, even more important, with pronounced self-confidence that underscores and magnifies his talent. To judge by his horoscope, I can only assume the middle of the transit of Jupiter plus a good position of the sun. As is common with this kind of aspect, the shape of the face departs from oval and approximates round. This impression is intensified by the hair sticking straight out from his head.

He thinks the defeat of France is irreversible, but on the other hand, he believes in the continued predominance of this country in matters of taste and culture.

Went with Speidel to Sacha Guitry’s for lunch on Avenue Elisée Reclus. In front of the house, on city property, there stands a bust of his father, the actor Lucien Guitry and in the garden, a female torso in sexual ecstasy by Rodin.

When he welcomed me, Guitry handed me a folder containing one letter each by Octave Mirbeau, Léon Bloy, and Debussy—the three authors whom we had discussed at our first meeting—and he told me to add these pieces to my collection. The little sheet by Bloy is especially lovely, with its personal comments and the oversize penmanship typical of him.

We then looked at books in manuscript, among them Flaubert’s Ėducation Sentimentale [Sentimental Education, 1869]. In a work by Bergson, he showed me the author’s dedication “À Sacha Guitry, un admirateur” [To Sacha Guitry from an admirer] and pointed out the un [an] as opposed to son [his] as being especially choice. Molière’s travel case filled with first editions of his plays, Napoleon with all his marshals of the Empire cast in lead, and many other things.

In the bedroom. Over the bed, the wall has been broken through, as in dining rooms, so as to let plates be passed through from the kitchen. This opening leads to his wife’s bed—“but it is a bit tight for her, master,” says one of the guests. “Being Madame Guitry comes at a price,” he is promptly informed by the slender lady of the house.

A colleague from the theater arrives late: “the most beautiful woman in Paris—twenty years ago,” Guitry whispers to me before greeting her.

At the table. The salad was served on silver, the ice cream on a heavy gold service that had belonged to Sarah Bernhardt. I was again astonished by his effusive personality, especially when he told anecdotes of his encounters with royalty. When talking about different people, he would accompany his words with expressive gestures. During the conversation, he used his large horn-rimmed glasses to great dramatic effect.

It dawns on me that in the case of such talent, the whole reservoir of personality that a marriage can possess gets used up by the man. And yet my first impression is corrected, because at the same time, this is surely a human being with real heart. I caught a glimpse of the fecund materia prima [primal material] that is the root of all character. It is true that we enjoy ourselves in the aura of such idiosyncrasy, and this feeling of well-being produces the climate that promotes his personality.

At noon in the Ritz with Carl Schmitt who gave a lecture the day before yesterday on the different significance of land and sea under international law. Colonel Speidel, Grüninger, and Count Podewils also there. Conversation about current scholarly and literary controversies. Carl Schmitt compared his situation to that of the white captain in Melville’s Benito Cereno, who was held captive by black slaves, and he quoted the proverb: “Non possum scribere contra eum, qui potest proscribere.” [I cannot write against him who can proscribe.][14]

Walked along the right bank to the Trocadéro. We discussed the matter thoroughly while doing so. Carl Schmitt finds significance in the fact that layers are beginning to peel away from the human stock and ossify beneath the region where free will exists—similar to the way that animals are the cast-off masks of the human image. Man is evolving a new zoological order from himself. The real danger of privilege lies in whether or not one is included in it.

I added that this ossification had already been described in the Old Testament and can be seen in the symbol of the bronze serpent. In that age, law represented what technology does today.

Finally, we went to the Musée de l’Homme and viewed skulls and masks.

Visited Port-Royal with Grüninger and Carl Schmitt. There on top of Pascal’s books, I found the little bird’s nest again that had so amused me during my first visit. Even in their state of dilapidation, such places still hold more life than when they are preserved as museums. We picked a leaf from Pascal’s dying nut tree, then had breakfast in Moulin de Bicherel, and spent the night in Rambouillet and Chartres where I saw the cathedral for the very first time. The colorful stained glass had been removed, and as a result, a dimension was lacking.

The Doctoresse called on me in the Majestic[15] to discuss matters of the safe. It concerned letters I had written from Switzerland to Joseph Breitbach in 1936 that had been confiscated along with other papers in a bank safe, but not yet read. They contained references to further correspondence, such as the one with Valeriu Marcu. I am cautiously attempting to gain control of these matters through the financial office of the Army High Command.

I am keeping my personal papers and journals under lock and key in the Majestic. Because I am under orders from Speidel to process not only the files concerning Operation Sea Lion,[16] but also the struggle for hegemony in France between the military commander and the Party, a special steel file cabinet has been set up in my room. Naturally, armor like this only symbolizes personal invulnerability. When this is cast in doubt, then even the strongest locks spring right open.

Went for a walk with a milliner from the South who grew up near the Spanish border; she had come to me to make inquiries about a comrade. I had the pleasure of buying her a hat in a salon not far from the Opéra—a little number the size of a hummingbird’s nest with a green feather on top. It was remarkable to see how this little person seemed to grow and change with her new adornment, the way a soldier swells with pride after receiving a medal. It wasn’t so much a head covering as a decoration.

We strolled and chatted through the twilit alleys near the Madeleine. It was Morris who first made me aware of this quarter. During such encounters, a strong feeling of curiosity makes me want to eavesdrop on people I don’t know, get into strangers’ gardens, or gain entrance to hallways of houses otherwise locked. And thus, I got a glimpse into an ancestral village—a noste, as they say here—with its groves of chestnut trees (châtaigneries), sheltering mushrooms and ring-necked doves.

The wolf breaks into the fold, slaughters two or three sheep confined there, but several hundred die in the stampede.

Discussion with the Doctoresse at Crémaillère [restaurant]. A doctor with deft, precise, mercurial intelligence. At first, we conversed about the matter of the secure storage cabinet, then about grammar, then acquaintances we had in common, like Hercule.

Finished reading Huysmans, A Vau l’Eau [With the Flow, 1882] in a beautiful edition that I bought from Berès with a dedication from the author to his friend Rafaëlli, if I interpret the handwriting correctly.

The hero of the book, Fromentin, is a bourgeois Des Esseintes.[17] The tone of the book is filled with powerful disgust at the counterfeit nature of civilization—every page contains perceptions and judgments that presuppose a nervous dyspepsia. As I read this, the thought occurred to me once again that certain maladies resemble magnifying glasses. They enable us to see more clearly the conditions they correspond to. One could categorize the literature of decadence accordingly.

How much further we have sunk in the meantime, and how delectable those things have become that nauseate Fromentin—the leathery meat of the food stall, the blue wine, all that muck in general.

Huysmans describes one of those points where we begin to delve into all these defects. This is the reason he is experiencing a renaissance today

Lunch with Ina Seidel at Prunier. She was worried about her son-in-law, whom Hess employed as his astrological advisor but who has been arrested. That surprised me, since I thought that the flight to England had happened with Kniébolo’s knowledge and possibly even on his orders.[18] One could counter this by saying that, with the rediscovery of raison d’état [reasons of state], even having knowledge of certain secrets has become objectively more dangerous than before. Surely, that’s the case here. This daredevil exploit gives an idea of the spirit of the roulette game that controls us. The return of the structures of the absolute state, but without aristocracy—meaning without objectivity—makes catastrophes of unimaginable dimensions possible. Yet they are anticipated in a feeling of fear that tinges even the victories.

I heard something from Ina Seidel that I have occasionally heard from other intelligent women, namely that in certain figures of speech and images the precision of language leads us deep into forbidden regions that give the impression of imminent danger. We should always listen to such warnings, even when we must follow our own precepts. Like atoms, words contain a nucleus around which they orbit, vibrating, and they cannot be touched without unleashing nameless powers.

Where people do intellectual battle, death is part of their strategy. This gives them something impregnable, and the thought that the enemy is intent upon taking their life loses some of its power to instill terror. On the other hand, it is of the highest importance that this should happen in the correct manner, and in a situation heavy with symbolism in which such people can be reliable witnesses. At times, they might give the impression that they shrink from death. In doing so, they resemble a field marshal who hesitates at length until the time is ripe before giving the signal to attack. There are different ways to conquer.

The enemy who senses this in his obtuse way feels appalling, frenetic anger when confronted by real intellect. This explains the effort to try to overpower him in vanguard action, bribe him, or somehow distract him. These encounters produce moments that erase the incidental or historical nature of the enmity, and something evolves that has existed since the beginning of our earth. The roles are reversed in a remarkable way. It almost seems as though the fear were transferred to the side of the attacker, as if he were trying to corrupt his victim by all means possible, but postponing the death that he has prepared for him. A hideous triumph accompanies the butchery. History records situations in which men clutch death like a staff of office. So it was in the Templars’ ritual where the Grand Master and the judges suddenly reveal themselves in their true characters. Then a ship dispels the phantasm as it comes into our astonished view, flying flags and showing its cannons. In the evening, it would then be burned, but during the night, the site of the conflagration would be guarded so that people could not steal any of the holy relics. The ashes instill fear in the tyrant, who knows he must perish.

Judges at bloody assizes. When they cross the corridors and enter, they have a perfunctory aura about them, the erstwhile dignity of macabre marionettes. They are Duk-Duk dancers.[19]

“That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”[20] And what kills me makes me incredibly strong.

In history, ideas do not proceed in linear fashion. They create reactions like the falling weight of a clock as it moves not only the hands but its counterweight as well.

This establishes equilibrium. The ideas that correspond to forms are prevented from developing into monstrosities or from persisting within them. In the realm of free will, it’s the same kind of pruning that in zoology trims the developing tendrils.

Roland has returned from Russia and describes the hideous mechanism for executing prisoners. This is done under the pretext of wanting to measure and weigh them, for which they must strip. Then they are taken to the “measuring apparatus,” which in reality positions the air gun for delivering the coup de grace.

In every age, there are two theories of evolution. One of these seeks our origin above, and the other, below. Both are true; human beings may be categorized based on whether they accept one or the other.

Regarding illnesses. There are differences here in the way these affect the imagination that do not correlate with the severity of the malady. I feel that I tend to ignore disorders of the lungs and heart more than those of the stomach, liver, and lower body in general. Purely with regard to the flesh, it seems there are also qualities of dying. Flames are reserved for unbelievers; thus, not only is cremation increasing but also immolation of the living.

History is also made up of atoms, and it is impossible to imagine a single one different without changing the entire course of its progress. Marat would have made quite a different impression if his name had been something like Barat, or if when his assassin entered, he had been spending that hour at his desk instead of in the bath. It is precisely assassinations that often cause the greatest changes, and yet essentially they depend on such a concatenation of chance. Sarajevo provides us with a very good example here.

When we look back, it is hard to imagine a single pebble in a different position. Should we be able to draw conclusions from this about the future? Should we conclude that the intellect is only capable of finding such seamless progression intelligible if we see all of the future inexorably folded in upon itself? Or is it the present that causes a change in the aggregate condition of the age by monumentalizing and fossilizing everything it touches? The future is fluid; the past is fixed. The whole resembles a game of cards: we have to distinguish between the ones on the table and the others, which are still in play.

These observations form a mosaic. Yet we have to see those little pebbles of chance in a higher vision as Boëthius does, a vision that endures unchanged in his mind. Genuine morality lies outside of time.

In the afternoon, read the farewell letters of Count d’Estienne d’Orves, who was executed by firing squad. I received these from his defense attorney. They are reading matter of the highest order; I had the feeling that I was holding an enduring document in my hand.

Contrast between the graphs of morale and physical health: even in good physical condition we often may be depressed, whereas the opposite is also true. We experience an upsurge, a spring tide, when our whole potential comes into play.

It is good when an important date or significant meeting happens to fall on such days.

To the George V, in the evening. I brought the maxims of René Quinton for Colonel Speidel. When he asked me for an inscription, I chose, “La récompense des hommes, c’est d’estimer leurs chefs” [Men’s reward is to honor their leaders]. Under his aegis, here deep in the military machine, we formed a kind of cell of intellectual chivalry, meeting in the belly of the beast, trying to preserve regard and compassion for the weak and vulnerable.

Conversation with Grüninger about soldiers’ obedience and its relation to absolute, even constitutional, monarchy. After a while, this virtue resembles an instinct that continues to exert an influence, but can damage the man who possesses it by making him a tool of unscrupulous forces. This brings him into conflict with the second pillar of chivalry: honor. This, the more delicate virtue, is the first extinguished, leaving behind a kind of automaton, a servant without a real master, who is finally little more than a pimp.

In such times, the best characters founder upon the rocks, while more cunning intellects cross over into politics. In some lucky cases, a general from an old patrician family who finds himself in this situation laughs at those who try to command him, putting them in their place as the pourriture [rot] they are.

Visit from Dr. Göpel this morning; he brought me greetings from Carlo Schmid from Lille. Afterward, with Grüninger in the print collection of the Louvre, where we viewed lovely old pictures of flowers and snakes.

The hour of twilight—night announces its presence like a tide that, murmuring and barely noticed, sends forth its first waves. Strange beings arrive with it. This is the hour when owls ready their wings and lepers come out on the street.

We may demand of people no more than what is commensurate with their essence; from women love, not justice.

Invitation to the birthday party for Jacqueline, the milliner from the South. Quai Louis-Blériot. A narrow back staircase led to the fifth floor, and a warren of low garret rooms reminiscent of the catwalks of a theater. There was her apartment: a tiny bedroom almost completely filled by one of those large beds and as on small ships, a still smaller kitchen where her friend Jeannette—a tall, gaunt, slightly demonic person—prepared the feast. She conjured up seven courses. In addition, there was Bordeaux, Chianti, café au rhum.

In the corner, there hung one of those wooden stakes overgrown with the interlocking coils of a hardy vine. The wood was the sort that carpenters’ apprentices at home traditionally use to cut walking sticks for themselves. This had also been trained to curl around the trunk so that the vine resembled a snake. The dimensions of the body, created by the play of muscles, worked well, probably because there are similar forces at work in the plant. The color was also very natural, a yellowish brown, speckled with black of the sort found in swamp-dwelling species.

In this vein, there was a conversation about snakes in general. Her friend said that when she was a child a noste in the Béarnaise region, she was once sitting in the garden with her mother who was nursing her little sister. Because the smell of milk attracts snakes, a gigantic adder slithered slowly and unnoticed out of a nearby hedge, up to the chair, and frightened her. Her father came out and killed the creature.

She recounted that quite graphically in a mythical way.

Concerning this journal. It captures only a certain layer of events that take place in the intellectual and physical spheres. Things that concern our innermost being resist communication, almost resist our own perception.

There are themes that interweave themselves mysteriously through the years, such as that of the inevitability that consumes our age. This is reminiscent of the grand image of the wave of life in Asian painting, or of the maelstrom in E. A. Poe. There is something extremely instructive in this, for when there is no escape or hope, we are forced to stand still. Our perspective changes.

It is nonetheless remarkable that confidence animates me most profoundly. The star of fate shines through the foam of the breaking waves and tattered clouds alike. I don’t mean this only personally, but generally. During the past weeks, we reached the nadir and have gotten past it.

The efforts we must make to survive our times and gain strength take place out of sight, deep in the mineshafts. So it was in the decisive dream upon the heights of Patmos on my journey to Rhodes. Our life is like a mirror; although it is smudged and hazy, it reveals meaningful things. One day we shall enter into this world of reflections and then attain perfection. The measure of perfection that we shall be able to bear is already implied by our lives.

During the lunch break, went to the sales division of the print collection [of the Louvre], where I had ordered a few copies of etchings that were out of print. Among these was the beautiful image of a cobra, coiled and erect with its neck flared. The sales clerk, a gaunt dark-haired girl roughly in her thirties, told me that she always placed this sheet face down on the pile. When she wrapped it up for me, she bade it goodbye muttering “sale bête” [filthy beast].

Otherwise an amusing person. When I made a comment that she seemed to find unusual, she was taken aback for a moment, and looked me up and down and said, “ah bon” in acknowledgment.

During this brief visit, I leafed through the large folder of etchings by Poussin. Although I have had an English reproduction of his Heracles at the Crossroads hanging over my desk for years, it was only today that I truly realized the mighty, even regal spatiality of this master. This is absolute monarchy.

Paid a visit to the Doctoresse in the afternoon; an amethyst-tinged flight of stairs leads to her apartment. I climb the steps through violet light in the spiral whorl of a seashell. In such centuries-old houses, time itself is still part of the continuing construction process. There are small depressions, dislocations, and curvatures of the beams, and these change the proportions in a way that no architect could imagine. The Doctoresse thinks that families who rent apartments here never move out but simply become extinct in this place.

We then went out to eat on Place Saint-Michel. Had garfish served on ice and seaweed. Long strings of the plant covered the plate, and its color was extraordinary. At first glance it appeared black, but closer inspection revealed a dull, dark, malachite green, yet without any mineral hardness—one of life’s great delicacies. Accompanying this were oyster shells with their green slate mother-of-pearl encrustations amid the reflections of silver, porcelain, and crystal.

At Weber’s for half-an-hour in the evening; the Doctoresse taught me how to open the safe. She also mentioned a doctor who took pictures of the dying so as to capture and study the agonies produced by various illnesses—a thought that I found both astute and repugnant. For some minds, taboos no longer exist.

Lunch at the Morands’ on Avenue Charles-Floquet. There I also met Gaston Gallimard and Jean Cocteau.

Morand epitomizes a kind of worldly sybarite. In one of his books, I found a passage comparing an ocean liner with a Leviathan infused with the aroma of Chypre.[21] His book about London is commendable; it describes a city as a great house. If the English were to build pyramids, they would include London in the decoration of their tombs.

Cocteau: amiable and at the same time, ailing, like someone who dwells in a special, but comfortable, hell.

With intelligent women it is very difficult to overcome physical distance. It is as though they girded their alert intellects with a belt that foils desire. It is too bright within their orbit. Those who lack specific erotic orientation are most assertive. This could be one of those chess moves that ensures the continuity of our species.

One can ask advice of a subaltern in a matter, but not regarding the ethical system fundamental to that matter.

The dignity of man must be more sacred to us than life itself.

The age of humanity is the age in which human beings have become scarce.

The true leaders of the world are at home in their graves.

In moments of inescapable disruption, individuals must proclaim their allegiance like a warship hoisting its colors.

By choosing certain circles in life, such as the Prussian General Staff, one may gain access to certain elevated spheres of inside information but exclude himself from the highest.

I sometimes spend my noon hour in the little cemetery near the Trocadéro. Moss has grown over many a gravestone and edged the names and inscriptions with borders of green velvet. Things glow in their after-image and often more beautifully in memory before they dissolve into the nameless void.

After such visits, I usually have a half-hour left over when I drink coffee in my room and read books or look at pictures. Today I admired Memling’s series on the procession of the ten thousand virgins. These paintings give a hint of the transfiguration that man can attain, as well as what the artist can perceive.

Reading matter: Fumée d’Opium by Boissière,[22] a book that Cocteau recommended and sent to me. Furthermore, this strange story of the island of Juan Fernandez, a present from Doctor [Werner] Best.

Dropped in on the print and book dealers on Rue de Tournon in the afternoon. In the antiquarian bookshop of Lechevalier, with whom I have been corresponding for years. Admired entomological volumes, among them one by Swammerdam.

Went to the Brasserie Lorraine in the evening with Nebel and Poupet. When Poupet wants to characterize something trivial, like a book that’s creating a stir, he says, “cela n’existe pas” [that does not exist]. He likes to work in bed, and then in the morning when he wakes up, he continues his work where he left off. He sleeps with his books spread out around him on the bed and turns over carefully at night so as not to touch them.

In the afternoon, I met Grüninger at Countess Podewils’; he had just returned from the Pyrenees. He said he had dreamed about me. In the dream, he asked whether he should depict an ivy-covered ruin. I answered yes and added, “That suits you. I, on the other hand, want to represent an elephant.” This bothered him as a reference to Romanticism.

In the evening, went to the Grand Guignol with the Doctoresse to cheer her up. I didn’t find it as amusing as I had before the war, which is probably because horrors have replaced everyday life in the world, and so the presentation has lost its remarkable quality.

Montmartre—dark, foggy, and locked down tight by police and soldiers because of an assassination that had taken place there.

Conversations among men should be conducted like those among gods, among invulnerable beings. To duel with ideas is to use swords of the intellect that cut through matter without pain or effort. The deeper the cut, the purer the enjoyment. In such intellectual encounters, one must be indestructible.

At the shop of Lechevalier on Rue de Tournon in the afternoon. While studying engravings and colored plates in books on insects, I was overcome by a feeling of disgust, as though the presence of cadavers had diminished my enjoyment. There are transgressions that touch the world in its entirety and its whole logical context. At such points, the aesthetic person must turn away from beauty and devote himself to freedom. The terrible thing nowadays is that it cannot be found in any of the parties, and so one has to do battle alone. On the other hand, it is the day laborers of this war we must envy; they fall with honor on a small patch of ground. And yet they too enter another, greater world.

Later, at Charmille’s on Rue de Bellechasse. The street is quiet, and when I cross the stairwell time stands still in the twilit forecourts. This brings a feeling of security: “No one knows my name and no one knows this place of refuge.”

“Voyage autour de ma chamber” [voyage around my room] in the old easy chair, as on the flying carpet from One Thousand and One Nights. We chat, mostly about words and their meanings, and sometimes look things up in books. The library is rich, especially in theological and reference works.

Charmille. What I admire about her: her sense of freedom, which is evident in the shape of her forehead. Among human beings there exists a type that is salt of the earth, people who always prevent history from sinking completely into stifling servitude. Individuals know by instinct what freedom is, especially when they are born among policemen and prisoners. You can always find those who belong to the race of the falcon or eagle; they are recognizable even behind prison bars.

I had to reach this age to find enjoyment in the intellectual encounter with women, just as Kubin, the old sorcerer, prophesied of me. The change has meant something startling for me, precisely because I had been satisfied with the course of my life, like a specialist in ballistics who has watched his shot traverse its prescribed trajectory and then seen it take a new direction into a limitless dimension. He had not known the laws of the stratosphere.

In addition, the hunger for human beings grows significantly. In prisons, men see clearly their companions’ latent merits. We can do without anything as long as we have other people.

Ended the evening late at the Raphael:[23] Boissière, Fumeurs d’Opium. This book from 1888 was a treasure trove for me. It not only describes life in the Annamese [Vietnamese] swamps and forests but also has intellectual appeal. In the opium dream, there towers above the febrile tropical zones another, crystalline, world. Viewed from this level, even cruelty loses its horror. There is no pain here. That is perhaps the most exquisite quality of opium: it animates the mind’s creative power and begets enchanted castles in the imagination. Upon those towers the loss of the swamps and foggy realms of this earth can never inspire fear. The soul creates levels for our passage to death.

Went to the theater at Palais-Royal in dense fog. I returned the Boissière to Cocteau. He lives nearby on Rue de Montpensier in that very house where Rastignac[24] received Nucingen’s wife. Cocteau was entertaining guests. Among his furnishings, I noticed a slate blackboard he uses to illustrate aspects of his conversation with swift chalkmarks.

I sensed the danger on the way home, especially when the doors in the narrow old streets near the Palais-Royal opened onto hazy red-lighted areas. Who knows what is brewing in such kitchens, who knows the plans the lemures[25] are hatching? We pass through this sphere in disguise, for if the fog were to lift, we would be recognized by these creatures, and the result would be disaster.

“L’homme qui dort, c’est l’homme diminué.” [A man who sleeps is a man diminished.] One of Rivarol’s errors.

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. He speaks with a manic, inward-directed gaze, which seems to shine from deep within a cave. He no longer looks to the right or the left. He seems to be marching toward some unknown goal. “I always have death beside me.” And in saying this, he points to the spot beside his seat, as though a puppy were lying there.

He spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews—astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it. “If the Bolsheviks were in Paris they would demonstrate it, show how it’s done—how to comb through a population, quarter by quarter, house by house. If I had a bayonet, I would know what to do.”

It was informative to listen to him rant this way for two hours, because he radiated the amazing power of nihilism. People like this hear only a single melody, but they hear it uncommonly powerfully. They resemble machines of iron that follow a single path until they are finally dismantled.

It is remarkable when such minds speak about the sciences, such as biology. They apply them the way Stone Age man did, transforming them only into a means to slay others.

They take no pleasure in having an idea. They have had many—their yearning drives them toward fortresses from which cannons fire upon the masses and spread fear. Once they have achieved this goal, they interrupt their intellectual work, regardless of what arguments have helped them climb to the top. Then they give themselves over to the pleasure of killing. It was this drive to commit mass murder that propelled them forward in such a meaningless and confused way in the first place.

People with such natures could be recognized earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays they hide under the cloak of ideas. These are quite arbitrary, as seen in the fact that when certain goals are achieved, they are discarded like rags.

The announcement came today of Japan’s declaration of war. Perhaps the year 1942 will be the one when more people than ever before will pass over and enter Hades.

Walked through the deserted streets of the city in the evening. Because of the assassinations, the populace is under curfew in the early evening. Everything lies lifeless in the fog. The sound of radios and chattering children came from the houses, as if I were walking among birdcages.

In the course of my work about the struggle between the army and the Party for authority in France, I am translating the farewell letters of the hostages[26] who have been executed in Nantes. These came to light in the files. I want to preserve them because they would otherwise be lost. Reading them has given me strength. When faced with imminent death, man seems to emerge from his blind will and realize that love is the most intimate of all connections. Except for love, death is perhaps our only benefactor in this world.

In my dream I felt Dorothea returning from my early childhood days. I felt her approach and touch me with her delicate and slender fingertips. I felt each individual finger, especially at the point where the fingernails begin as she trailed her hands over me. Then she stroked parts of the face, the eyelids, the corners of the eyes, the zygomatic arches.

That was a very pleasant characteristic of this being and her whole conception. She performed the most detailed physical survey on me; it almost seemed as though she were trying to sculpt me, for she moved her fingers as though molding a fine pastry dough.

Then she turned her attention to the hand, but she seemed to make a mistake as she made long strokes across the back of my hand. While this was happening I noticed in the magnetism of this contact that she was now caressing the imaginary hand whose fingers were a bit longer than those of the physical one.

In parting, she placed her hand upon my forehead and whispered, “My dear friend, say your farewell to freedom.”

For a long time I lay awake in the dark, sad as never before, at least since the days of Vincennes.

The Japanese are attacking with fierce determination. Perhaps because time is most precious for them. I surprise myself by changing allegiances. Sometimes I am overcome by the mistaken belief that they have declared war on us. It is impossible to untangle, like a sack full of snakes.

Floods. I was in the nineteenth century with a party of people on an outing who had taken refuge upon toppled oak trees to escape the mud. At the same time, great numbers of snakes were struggling to get to these dry spots. The men lashed out at the creatures with their walking sticks and flung some of them high into the air, so that some smashed when they fell but others landed in the crowd, biting. That caused an outbreak of panic, and people threw themselves into the mud. I was bitten by a living cadaver as it hit me. I thought: if these brutes left the animals alone, we would all be safe.

As I translate the letters of the executed hostages as a document for future ages, I notice that the most frequent words are “courage” and “love.” Perhaps “farewell” is even more frequent. It seems that in such situations man senses a compassionate power and abundance of generosity, and he can comprehend his actual role as that of victim, as that of benefactor.

On furlough in Kirchhorst. Here I feel hardly any urge to write—a good sign for the gravitational pull that Perpetua exerts on me. Why carry on a monologue? Visitors, including Carl Schmitt. He stayed here for two days.

During the night, images in the style of Hieronymus Bosch: a crowd of naked people, among them executioners and victims. In the foreground a woman of wonderful beauty whose head the executioner struck off with a single blow. I saw the torso stand for a moment before it crumpled—yet even headless, it seemed desirable.

Other henchmen dragged their victims along on their backs so as to slaughter them somewhere else, in private. I saw that they had bound the chins with cloth to prevent any obstruction to the blow.

The ducks in the garden. They mate in the puddles on the lawn left by the rain. Then the duck stands in front of the drake and flaps her wings, puffing out her chest—a primeval courtship ritual.

1942

Returned to Paris at midnight. Before that, dinner on Stephansplatz with Ernstel and Perpetua.[27] Looking at the boy in profile, I noticed the genteel but also pained quality his face has acquired. In these times, the two go hand in hand. The year will be extraordinarily perilous; we never know whether we are seeing each other for the last time. Every farewell includes the confidence in a higher reunion.

In the compartment, conversation with a lieutenant returning from Russia. His battalion lost a third of its men to the freezing temperatures, in part because of the amputations. The flesh turns white, then black. Conversations like this are now quite common. He says there are field hospitals for soldiers with frostbitten genitals, and even their eyes are endangered. Frost and fire conspire like the two blades of a vicious pair of shears.

At Ladurée’s in the company of Nebel and the Doctoresse. We spent the afternoon chatting in the [Hotel] Wagram. I have the impression that, given the nature of the situation, we can no longer continue as caution dictates. As in the act of childbirth, we are forced onward. This is the effect of the reviews of On the Marble Cliffs[28] in the Swiss papers.

I like the euphony of the Ei in bleiben [remain, stay], in the same way that I like other vowel sounds, such as in manere [Lat. remain], manoir [Fr. country house, manor]. This is the way we must rediscover language.

Grüninger, about his conversation with a theologian: “Evil always appears at first as Lucifer, then evolves into Diabolus, and finally ends as Satanas.” This is the way the Bringer of Light develops, from the one who divides to the one who destroys—or, to express this with the quality of vowels, we see the triad: U, I, A.

During the midday break bought paper for my manuscript about peace. Began with the outline. Also tested the safe for its security.

Stavrogin.[29] His disgust with power. No corrupt authority ever tempts him. By contrast, we have the man who comes from below, Pyotr Stepanovich,[30] who understands quite well that under such conditions power becomes a possibility for him. Thus, the humbler man rejoices when he sees the magnificent woman he desires shamed, for only then does she become attainable for him.

This also shows up after the fact, in the regiment. Where villains reign, they can be seen exercising infamy without restraint and disregarding the tenets of statecraft. This infamy is celebrated like a mass; in its depths, it conceals the mystery of popular power.

Read the manuscript of Maurice Betz’s translation of Gärten und Straßen [Gardens and Streets]. For the word freilich [certainly] I found il est vrait [it is true], which in this instance does not sound right to me. Freilich can precede a qualifier; on the other hand, it can also signal emphasis. The closest to it is probably “my opinion boils down to…,” or “when we consider this properly, we find that…” You could say that it’s an intensifier, but it also makes you put your cards on the table. Yet something else is in play here as well, namely a note of exhortation, a kind of cheerful affirmation implied for the reader’s benefit. The reader’s assent has been tacitly assumed.

At the George V in the evening. Among those present were Nebel, Grüninger, Count Podewils, Heller, and Maggi Drescher, a young sculptress. Nebel declaimed the poem to Harmodios and Aristogeiton, to whom there stands a magnificent statue in the Museo Nazionale [Naples]. He followed this with verses by Sappho, Sophocles, and Homer. He easily accesses the extraordinary memory he has at his disposal, giving the impression that he is actively creating the poetry. That’s the way to quote: by incantation…

In the afternoon at Poupet’s on Rue Garancière. In these narrow streets around Saint-Sulpice with their antiquarian bookshops, book dealers, and old workshops, I feel so at home, it’s as though I had lived among them for five hundred years.

When I entered the building, I recalled that I had first crossed this threshold in the summer of 1938 coming from the Palais du Luxembourg just as today via Rue de Tournon. And so, the circle of years gone by has closed like the clasp of a belt.

When I entered I tried to convey this feeling to Poupet, the feeling that overwhelms me so often when I glimpse old familiar things and people—this feeling from the past, bounteous as a net full of fish, becomes clear when we encounter it again. Even though this was difficult to express in a foreign language, I had the impression that he understood me.

Charmille. We talked about Proust, and Poupet gave me one of his letters. Then about acquaintances whom she characterized in acerbic detail. Also about the influence of Eros upon physical development. Related to this, the word souplesse [flexibility], like désinvolture [detachment], seems untranslatable.

The first letter from Perpetua. As I had sensed, after they had brought me to the station, the two of them continued talking about me for a long time on their way home through the dark streets. She might buy a house for us near Uelze, that region in the heart of the [Lüneburg] Heath would be just right for the solitary life we both long for.

In addition, a letter from Wolfgang, who—the third of us four brothers—has been called up. As a corporal, he has been put in charge of a prison camp in Züllichau. The prisoners will be in good hands there. He writes this curiosity: “Yesterday I was sent on official business to Sorau in the Lausitz [area], where I had to deliver a prisoner to the field hospital. While there, I also had to pay a visit to the asylum. There I encountered a woman whose only tic consisted of continuously murmuring ‘Heil Hitler.’ At least it’s a fitting, topical form of insanity.”

Even when viewed tactically, exaggerated prudence increases danger. People listen most carefully to those who disguise their voices. There is, incidentally, an aristocratic as well as a Jacobin instinct for anyone not party to this. There are degrees of subtlety and simplicity that are dissembled, and ultimately, what is prudence without providence?

In the evening, another bottle of Beaune with Weinstock, who is going to Angers. In him, as well as in Nebel and Friedrich Georg,[31] I can observe the powerfully formative influence that ancient Greek culture still exerts upon modern Germans. Their language, history, art, and philosophy will always remain indispensable for the training of elites.

I was thinking again with great animation about The Marble Cliffs. The book is open-ended, unfinished; it finds its continuation in events. On the other hand, the events harken back and change the book. In this sense, it resembles an ellipse with two foci. One of these marks the author’s place; the other, the place of facts. Filaments connect these two as in nuclear fission. Thus, it can change fate, but it’s also possible for it to determine the fate of the author. This indicates that he had been working in other realms than language—for example, where dream imagery is powerful.

Tea with the Doctoresse. In the evening we went to a small cellar restaurant on Rue de Montpensier to meet Poupet and Cocteau. Cocteau was delightful, ailing, ironic, fastidious. He complained that people were sabotaging his plays, letting rats loose, and throwing teargas bombs onto the stage.

Among the anecdotes he recounted, I found the one about the bad-tempered coachman especially good. When he was a student in school, he had taken a cab home in the pouring rain after seeing a play in the theater. Unfamiliar with the standard rates of tipping, he gave the coachman too little and then approached the door of the building where the family, who were friends of his parents, was standing in the rain because the lock was difficult to open. As he greeted them, the coachman called after him: “What kind of tip is this—what if I were to tell them where I picked you up?”

Read a little more back in the Raphael. I finished the novel by Countess Podewils, then started Confession by Kanne. It is a significant work, recommended to me by Carl Schmitt, its editor. Kanne’s experiences at prayer. He feels it when his prayers “get through.” His own little cog of destiny turns in conformity with the course of the universe.

Woke up at five o’clock. I had dreamed that my father had died. Then I thought about Perpetua for a long time.

In the morning, Maurice Betz came and brought his translation. We looked through a series of questionable passages and normalized some of the less common words, particularly names of animals and plants. In such cases it is best to go back to the Latin of Linnaeus’s system. That logical, conceptual system makes it possible to elucidate philosophical and poetic differences.

Birthday party at the Raphael. It dawned on me for the first time that the inhabitants of this hotel are trustworthy. That kind of thing is only possible today when the circle is the result of an unspoken self-selection. A vicious joke that Phillipps told about Kniébolo gave the signal for candid conversation. Coercion and caution separate people like masks; when these are stripped off, exuberant merriment breaks out. I got into a serious conversation with Merz and Hattingen and explained the main ideas of my manuscript about peace to them.

Conversation with Luther about surveillance. He said it had been difficult to recruit Englishmen for the job, yet before the war, he had succeeded in recruiting a man of good social position whom they equipped with a shortwave radio that he still uses to transmit weather reports from London. He said this was crucial for the aerial attacks. This Englishman had recently given shelter to an agent who had broken his leg in a parachute landing. For weeks he had to hide and care for the man in his apartment. The first time this agent went out, he was arrested and later executed without ever having betrayed his host.

These things have an almost demonic nature, especially when we consider the terrible loneliness such people endure in the midst of a population of millions. For this reason, I can’t commit any details to these pages.

Charmille. There are conversations that can only be compared to smoking opium together. Part of this is the lighthearted, effortless back and forth, like the gracefully coordinated movements of acrobats. She, incidentally, praises something in my own conversation that others have criticized: that I am almost always thinking of other things and often reply to sentences after my partner makes some good observation—once they have long since dissolved into the greater context.

In the mail, a letter from Feuerblume with a note about the Hippopotamus:[32]

“I think that your princess has been a bit influenced by ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ but she also shows the path to healing. That is good. Poe showed only the decline.”

The fact is, when I conceived of this story in a dream before visiting Kubin, I experienced a powerful longing to emerge from the maelstrom. We have to view such things as prognostication, for these imagined figures begin the circle dance of destiny, keeping it going, sometimes smiling and sometimes terrified. And literature is invisible history, as yet unlived—but also its corrective.

In addition, a letter from Perpetua who in the meantime has taken a look at the house near Bevensen. During the trip she got into a political discussion with the driver. To her amusement, he ended it with the comment: “Anything but a group where the chairman has lice.”

By the way, it is one of her greatest qualities that she can converse on all social levels. When she presides at table she puts everyone at ease.

In my dream, I was at Emmerich Reitter’s in Paskau looking at insects. He showed me a case filled with examples of the species Sternocera. Instead of showing their typical cylindrical form, all of them were broad and flat. I nonetheless recognized their classification at first sight. I love these variations that still preserve the species. These are the adventurous journeys of an idea across archipelagoes of matter.

In the afternoon, Charmille picked me up to go swimming. Magnificent sight in the pond. I saw one of the large and marvelous fishes cloaked in tiny bubbles, hovering in the green water. I perceived this from above, foreshortened, as is frequently the case with magical things.

A restless night. Sleep interrupted by long period of wakefulness. I spent the time thinking of Carus, my imaginary son.

In the evening, I saw Armand, who wants to go underground. We ate together in the Brasserie Lorraine. After walking up Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where I always feel good, he asked me whether I wanted to meet his friend Donoso, and I said no. Later he responded to a comment about both our countries: “Ah, pour ça je voudrais vous embracer bien fort.” [Ah, for that I’d like to give you a big hug.] Said goodbye on Avenue de Wagram.

I then put my uniform on and went to the George V. Speidel, Sieburg, Grüninger, and Rörecht, chief of the General Staff of the First Army, with whom I had discussed Rimbaud and similar things in Hamburg right after World War I. Then Colonel Gerlach, who has come to us from the East as a quartermaster, and in whose conversation one can study the pungent wit of Potsdam.

There are always the same conversations in these gatherings, sometimes more, sometimes less emphatic, as though we were in the antechambers of the inevitable. In these situations, I always have to think of Bennigsen and Czar Paul. Gerlach, in particular, was informed about the lack of winter clothing in the East. This—like the execution of hostages in the West—will become one of the major themes of later research, whether that research is focused on the history of the war or on adjudicating it.

On optics. In the afternoon in the Raphael, looking up from my reading, I stared at a round clock. When I turned my gaze away, it remained as a pale, round after-image on the wallpaper. I kept my eye focused on a projection from the wall that was closer than the part the clock was fastened to. Here the after-image appeared much smaller than the clock. But when I moved my eyes so that my gaze got very close to the clock, then its after-image merged with it, and they both overlapped. And finally, when I projected it to a point farther away, I had the impression that it grew bigger.

This is a nice example for the mental alteration that we project based on distance. By straining the retina in the same way, we enlarge a familiar object in the distance, and we minimize it when it seems closer. E. A. Poe bases his story “The Sphinx” upon this law.

Nowadays when I wake up at night in the Raphael, as often happens, I can hear the deathwatch beetle in the wooden paneling. It knocks louder and slower—and with greater significance—than the ones I heard in the dead wood of my father’s pharmacy. These somber signals probably come from a large dark Anobiid [wood borer beetle]. I found a specimen of one on the staircase last summer and now have it in my collection in Kirchhorst. I could not identify it; it is probably an imported species.

These sounds announce a tremendous remoteness from everyday life—sounds from a creature active nearby in the dry wood. And yet, in comparison to other distances, it is close and familiar. We are passengers on one ship.

In the evening with Doctor Weber in Palais Rothschild. Thanks to his clandestine gold purchases, he has a thorough knowledge of all the occupied territories and the neutral countries. I asked him if he would pay a visit to Brock in Zürich regarding the matter of the Swiss newspapers. He can also be useful to me in other ways. I enjoy talking with him, especially because he’s a compatriot who exemplifies the dry humor of the Lower Saxon type. He leaves the impression that the world is not about to end all that soon.

Incidentally, it is instructive to see a gathering of intellects like those assembled during that remarkable meeting of national revolutionaries at Kreitz’s at the Eichhof [Conference] and to consider them in a European and global context. One can sense what lies at the core of the human being—sometimes it is the tyrant in the petty bookkeeper or the mass murderer in the ridiculous swaggerer. These histrionics are rare because it takes extraordinary circumstances for this core to reveal itself. It is also remarkable to reencounter marginalized characters and literary types whose chaotic nocturnal rantings are impossible to forget. How amazing to meet them again in positions of authority where their word is law. There are times when the flimsiest dreams force their way into reality. Yet when Sancho Panza[33] was governor of Barataria, at least he didn’t take himself seriously. That’s still his most attractive attribute.

In yesterday’s dispatch, the Russians claim that when they try to remove the boots from German prisoners, the feet come off too.

A typical snippet of propaganda from that icy hell.

Visit to Charmille on Rue de Bellechasse.

The clock runs faster during our chats, as in the primeval forests of old. Various factors converge to create this effect: beauty, complete intellectual comprehension, and the presence of danger. I attempt to slow the pace through reflection. This retards the delicate clockwork.

I find a human being—that’s like saying, “I discover the Ganges, Arabia, the Himalayas, the Amazon River.” I saunter through that person’s secluded places and vast expanses; I note the treasures I find there, and in doing so, I change and grow. In this sense, especially in that person, we are formed by our fellow human beings, our brothers, friends, women. The atmospheric conditions of other climates remain in us—so powerfully that after some encounters I feel: “This person must have known this or that other one.” Contact with human beings stamps us like goldsmiths’ hallmarks on precious objects.

In Fontainebleau with Röhricht, the commander of the First Army. He lives in the house belonging to the Dolly sisters. I spent the night there. Reminisced about old times, the Hanoverian Riding School, Fritsch, Seeckt, and the aged Hindenburg—in those days, we lived in the embryo of the Leviathan. The stone floor of the dining room is tiled in green-veined marble and lacks a carpet. According to the old custom, it is uncarpeted so that diners could toss bones and scraps of meat onto the floor for the dogs. Fireside chat, first about Mommsen and Spengler, and then about the progress of the campaign. Our conversation reminded me of the damage Burckhardt caused with his Renaissance,[34] especially those Nietzschean impulses that spread among the educated class. These were intensified by theories from natural science. It is strange how pure speculation can be transformed into will, into passionate action.

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]

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] In the hallways during the New Year’s Eve festivities, they had made fun of the “Head Forester.”[37] Nebel has to disappear for a while, but the departure of such a clever mind from this city saddens me.

In the afternoon at Madame Boudot-Lamotte’s where Cocteau read aloud his new play Renaud et Armide. It was a magical combination of supple and melodious sound, and he was more than up to the task. His lilting voice had both lightness and strength and was especially fitting when describing how the sorceress Armida enchants and snares the bewitched Renaud. He let out cries of “file file file” [run run run], launching them into the air like autumnal gossamer.

There, in addition to Gaston Gallimard, I met Heller, Wiemer, the Doctoresse, and the actor Marais, a plebeian Antinous. Afterward, conversation with Cocteau while he recounted amusing anecdotes about a play that used painted human hands representing snakes rising up out of a basket on stage. Actors then lashed out at these beasts with sticks, but it happened that when one of the snakes was struck particularly hard, “merde!” [shit] was heard from beneath the trap door from a bellowing extra.

In Drouant, near the Opéra. It’s one of my old failings that the days when I especially love my neighbors and those when I actually express this to them rarely coincide. At times the spirit of contradiction grips me powerfully.

Dreams at night—in deepest sleep, the meaning of the chambers became apparent to me. They bordered on the room where I was sleeping, and each had a door: one for the mother, one for the wife, for the sister, the brother, the father, the mistress. And in the silent power and influence of these rooms, in their overwhelming nearness and grand detachment, there lay something both solemn and fearfully clandestine.

“—and then the mother entered.”

At the Ritz in the evening with the sculptor Breker, who had invited me and his wife, an intelligent Greek woman—a true bohemian. Madame Breker devoured our appetizer of sardines without leaving a trace: “J’adore les têtes, vous aussi?” [I just love the heads, don’t you?] Nebel was there as well, again with his typical Parnassian joviality. When it comes to things he likes, he possesses a delicate touch, as though he were lifting a curtain with a smile to reveal precious objects.

He called our modern savagery unique, insofar as it maintains no belief in the indestructibility of the human race and, in contrast with the Inquisition, is determined to destroy and obliterate us all forever.

His case, incidentally, was decided with leniency: he was transferred to Étampes.

In the morning, Jessen called on me in my room in the Majestic. As soon as I saw him, I remembered those good, or rather, precise predictions that I had heard about him a year ago when most people had not given any thought to a Russian war. The value of a clear, highly focused intellect that perceives the inherent logic of things is evident. You can see that in him, in his eyes, and especially upon his brow you see evidence of a consummately rational intellect. Men like him and Popitz, who was also present at the time, are the last specimens that German idealism has driven into this desert.

New predictions. We talked about the rigidity that has made itself felt since the beginning of this year. I perceive it very clearly, as if I carried a gauge inside me that measures currents and countercurrents.

Then Valentiner, a son of the U-boat captain, the old Viking. As a corporal here, he has a minor post as an interpreter for the airmen. He spends most of his time with books or with friends in a studio that he has rented in a garret on the Quai Voltaire. He invited me there, and I had the feeling that the visit was going to be the first in a long friendship. It was gratifying to note his intellectual courage when he entered the room.

Stokers in a boiler room where pressure of a million atmospheres throbs behind the escape valves. The manometers rise gently beyond the last red line on the gauge. Things are suddenly silent. Flames flare up behind the tempered glass.

Finished reading La Faustine by Edmond de Goncourt. A few weeks ago, I bought a copy of the book signed by the author from Berès. As I read it, I was slightly displeased whenever I came upon a fact that I was familiar with from Goncourt’s journals. Things like that can be annoying in artistic works, which should incorporate life experiences more profoundly and unobtrusively. Otherwise they remind us of the sort of picture that disrupts painted imagery with an overlay of collage.

A word about the author’s method of connecting with the reader: In his preface, Goncourt invites his female readers to send him documents humains [personal documentation] revealing private details of their lives that could be useful to him as an artist. This gesture is improper; it oversteps the boundaries of the genre that should constrain the work.

Faustine shows little composition, and the characters make entrances where they are not necessary, but the author happens to need them. Furthermore, the decadence is so far advanced that it is tolerable only in very well-written descriptions.

New poems by Friedrich Georg arrived from Überlingen. In “Zelina,” I recognize his old love for female tightrope walkers and circus performers. I had already known “Peacocks,” so full of bright sunshine, as though reflected from faceted gems, and the poem “Sundial.” A man’s true masculinity does not begin to show until he has reached his fortieth year.

This morning’s dreams were of a pond or lagoon edged in stone. I stood there to watch the creatures in the water. Birds would dive beneath the surface and fish would jump out. I listened to a gray speckled coot as it swam over the rocky bottom. Stone-gray fishes rose to the surface, dreaming and becoming ever more visible. I watched this from my vantage point on domes that protruded from the water’s surface and twice gave way underneath me: I had been standing on the shells of tortoises.

At Speidel’s this morning. There was a large crowd in his outer office because of the Sunday signatures. He had just returned from headquarters and showed me the notes he had made on the files. These altered my opinion that strategies of elimination—those efforts to murder by shooting, starving, and exterminating—are produced by a general nihilistic tendency in our age. Of course that is also true, but behind the swarms of herrings, there are sharks driving them on.

No doubt there are individuals responsible for the blood of millions, and they go after bloodshed like tigers. Aside from their vulgar instincts, they have an inherently satanic will that takes cold pleasure in destroying human beings, perhaps even humanity. A deep sorrow seems to come over them, a wail of fury when they sense that some power prevents them from devouring as much as their lust demands. You can see them preparing massacres when these seem unnecessary, even when they threaten their own security. It was horrible to hear what Jodl reported about Kniébolo’s objectives.

Let’s not forget that many Frenchmen support such plans and are eager to provide the hangman’s services. But here in our organization there are regulations in force that restrain the participation of our partners and even put a stop to clandestine activities. Most of all, it is crucial that any semblance of humanity be diligently avoided.

Went to the X-Royal in the afternoon with the Doctoresse. After that, to visit Valentiner on the Quai Voltaire. An ancient elevator supported by a cable alarmed us all the way up as it let out creaking wails of protest. In the garret, we found several little rooms full of old furniture; books were strewn about on tables and easy chairs. The owner received us in casual civilian attire. Whenever time permits, he sneaks off to this hideaway and changes his life with a change of clothes as he wiles away the hours in reading and introspection or in the company of friends. The degree to which he succeeds is a testimony to his freedom and imagination. In this place Cocteau felt himself reminded of times he had spent similarly during World War I. We enjoyed fine conversation in his little lair and were able to gaze out over the ancient roofs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Called on Nostitz in the evening on Place du Palais-Bourbon. Among the guests, I noticed the young Count Keyserling,[38] although he spoke not a word the whole evening. He reclined in an easy chair half languishing and luxuriating dreamily like a cat. The old families still have a sense of security, even intrinsic elegance, in the most intellectual circles.

Took a walk down Avenue des Ternes in the middle of the day. After these past weeks of bleakness, the first glimmer of spring filled the air with life. Underfoot the black, hard-packed snow still lay on the streets. I was feeling nervous, excited, and whimsical, which often happens when spring approaches.

On the catastrophe of human life: the heavy wheel that grinds us to a pulp, the shot of the murderer or fanatic that cuts us down. The tinder had accumulated inside us long enough, and now the spark has just been ignited. The explosion comes from inside us.

This caused so many of the wounds in World War I. They corresponded to the fiery spirit that exhilarated me and found escape valves because it was too powerful for the body. The same is true of the wild escapades and affairs that result in wounds and often, suicide. Life leaps into the barrel of a revolver.

Went to the Raphael. Met Major von Voss, in whom a bit of the fifteenth century is visible, like a vein of silver in a rock. His bloodstream carries something of the troubadour, something of the old free and easy sorcery. There is always good company there. From encounters like this, you can learn history right from its source.

I dropped in to see the Doctoresse, who was laid up with sciatica. Conversation about the human body, then about its specific anatomy. She told me that in the early days on her way home from the dissection lab after staring at the deep red color of human flesh, she often felt ravenous.

Andromeda. In the case of such regal daughters, it’s the same as with the Germanic tribes: They had to be broken before they embraced Christianity. They can love only when they are prey to the dragon in the abyss.

The love of a particular woman is twofold, because on the one hand, she shares what she has in common with millions of other women, and at the same time, she alone possesses what differentiates her from all others. How strange it is that both aspects meet so perfectly in the individual—the chalice and the wine.

Visited Calvet in the evening at a party that included Cocteau, Wiemer, and Poupet, who gave me an autograph of Proust for my collection. That prompted Cocteau to tell about his association with Proust. He would never let anybody dust his rooms; the layer of dust on the furniture was as “thick as chinchilla.” Upon arrival, you would be asked by the housekeeper whether or not you had brought flowers, whether you were wearing scent, or had been in the company of a woman wearing perfume. He was usually to be found in bed, but dressed and wearing yellow gloves to prevent him biting his nails. He spent a lot of money making workers in the building stop because their noise disturbed him. It was never permitted to open a window. The night table was covered with medicines, inhalers, and sprays. His refined taste did not lack macabre aspects: he would go to the slaughterhouse and ask to be shown how a calf was killed.

Concerning poor style: This becomes most apparent in moral contexts, such as when a bad writer tries to justify the shooting of hostages. That is far worse—far more flagrant—than any mere aesthetic offense.

Style is essentially based on justice. Only the just man can know how he must weigh each word, each sentence. For this reason, we never see the best writers serving a bad cause.

Visit from Baron von Schramm, back from the eastern front. The colossal loss of life in the gruesome cauldrons[39] awakens a longing for the old death—death that was other than being trampled. Schramm expressed the opinion that not everyone was dragged into these lethal rings, just as fate did not send everyone to the Manchester bone mills.[40] The crucial distinction is ultimately whether you die a humane death in either of these. Then you draw on personal strength to make your own bed and altar. In those depths, many of our grimmest dreams come true; things become historical reality that we have seen coming for a long time—for more than seventy years.

Called on Klaus Valentiner on the Quai Voltaire in the afternoon. There I met Nebel, the “Outcast of the Islands,”[41] who is being sent to one of the islands tomorrow, just as in the days of the Roman Emperors. Then visited Wiemer, who is leaving. While I was there, Madeleine Boudot, Gallimard’s secretary, handed me the page proofs of the translation of Marble Cliffs by Henri Thomas.

In the Raphael I woke up to a new attack of melancholy. This just comes, like rain or snow. The enormous distance that separates us human beings became clear to me, a distance that we can gauge in our relationships with our nearest and dearest. We are separated from each other by endless distances like the stars. But that will all change after death. The most beautiful part of death is that it erases this distance while extinguishing the physical light. We shall be in heaven.

An idea that makes me feel better: maybe Perpetua is thinking of me at this moment.

The struggle of life, the burden of individuality. On the other hand, all that is universal, with its ever-rising high-water mark. In moments of embrace, we submerge ourselves in it, sink down into strata penetrated by the roots of the tree of life. Of course, there is also superficial, transitory lust—combustible as kindling. Above and beyond this lies marriage—“you shall be one flesh.” Your sacrament: one bears only half the burden. Finally death, which tears down the walls of individuation. That will be the moment of greatest genius (Matthew 22:30). All of our true bonds have laid aside the mystical knot tied in eternity. We are granted sight when the light is extinguished.

Books. It is wonderful to find thoughts, words, and sentences in them that make the reader suspect that the narrative is leading him down a man-made trail through uncharted forests, deep and unfamiliar. Thus, he is led through regions with unknown borders, and only occasionally do tidings of plenty reach him like a breath of fresh air. The author must seem to be distributing unlimited treasure, and by paying in hard currency, he introduces foreign coins—doubloons, with the coats of arms of unexplored lands. Kipling’s phrase, “but that is another story” must be weighed carefully in the text.

This afternoon went to the Palais Talleyrand for a tea in honor of the departing commander-in-chief, General Otto von Stülpnagel.

He shows a remarkable combination of delicacy, grace, resilience, reminiscent of a court dancer, with traits that are also wooden and melancholy. He uses phrases of elaborate courtliness, wears high patent leather boots and gold buttons on his uniform.

He summoned me to talk about the hostage question, as he is concerned about how posterity will judge the exact description in the historical record. This is the reason for his present departure. In his position, one can see only the grand trappings of proconsular power from the outside, not the clandestine plots and other palace intrigues. This problem is fraught with tensions between the embassy and the Party in France, which is gradually gaining ground without the support of the High Command. On Speidel’s orders, the development and continuation of this struggle—wrangling over the lives of the hostages—will be part of my report in the confidential files.

The general first touched upon the human, all too human, aspects of the matter. People could see that things had affected his nerves and shaken him to the core. Then he went into the tactical reasons for his resistance. He was of the opinion that it was necessary to tread a middle way, especially considering the damaging potential of the situation. The industries would produce more, the better this matter were managed here. In view of the unexpected course of the eastern campaign, he deemed this to be of the highest importance. He argued that our influence in Europe must transcend the current age in which we are a presence brandishing bayonets. He claimed that he had always remained on the side of reason, with never a shred of weakness, which the political leadership had accused him of. Like many old professional soldiers, he was particularly hurt by the allegations of weakness and unreliability.

In view of the tremendous superiority of the enemy, he considered retreat to be the only possible tactical option. For this reason, he tried to give special emphasis to the fact that acts of collective retribution were only doing the résistance the greatest favor. This explains the sentence that frequently appeared in his brief communiqués to the High Command: “The reprisals are getting out of hand.” With a single revolver shot, a terrorist could incite a powerful ripple effect of hatred. The result was a paradoxical subterfuge of concealing the majority of the assassinations in the report to the High Command.

The pervasive weakness of the middle class and the aristocracy shows in these generals. They have enough vision to recognize the way things are going, but they lack the authority and ability to oppose minds motivated only by violence. The new masters exploit them like wardens. But what if these last props were to fall? Then horrible leaden terror like the Cheka[42] will spread over the land.

There is always something timeless in these situations. In this case, it’s the figure of the proconsul, one of whom was Pilate. The demos[43] vehemently demanded the blood of the innocents from him as they cheered the murderers on. And from afar the emperor, who enjoyed divine status, threatened with his thunderbolt. That makes it difficult to maintain the dignity of a senator—he passes judgment as he washes his hands or, as in this case, he disappears like an air-raid warden into a Berlin apartment block.

Death. A few, too refined for this life, dare to disobey. They seek the void, isolation. Some beings who cleanse the filth of their natures with light often show their noble character in their death masks.

What I love about man is his essence beyond the grave and the fellowship with it. Here, love is nothing more than a pallid reflection. “Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen.” [What we are here, a god can augment there.][44]

How did Pontius Pilate enter the Creed?[45]

We would have to ask the Copts; they honor him as a martyr.

In my dreams at night, I am climbing cliff fortifications. Their foundations are so weak that my weight dislodges them, and my every movement brings the threat of a terrible plunge.

As soon as I sensed that I could no longer keep my balance, I tried to open my eyes and switch off the dream. My action was like that of someone showing a film in which he is also acting: when catastrophes approached, I cut off the electricity.

In this respect, I have learned a lot that should stand me in good stead for my daytime life. We generate the world from dreams and, if necessary, must dream more intensely. For these years there was a dream in which my behavior was significant: I was sailing to Rhodes when Kniébolo appeared and engaged me in a test of will.

Report on how things unfolded chronologically during the night at Gerstberger’s in Ermatingen. Vesuvius opened up for a moment; the insight followed that historical forces could not reverse things. The dogs howled outside the house. That must have been preceded by Trott’s nighttime visit to the vineyard. “They want to confront the dragon and are awaiting the order from you.” By daylight, clouds form above the fearsome crag.

Visited Fabre-Luce in the evening on Avenue Foch. There I met two professors of philosophy who are brothers and a Monsieur Rouvier.

The host told a story about an acquaintance who hated priests. Often when the man came home he would fold his hands and say, “My God, I thank you for not making me a believer. I thank you.”

He was once sitting on a bench in the forest in Upper Bavaria looking at the mountains when a tree crashed to the earth beside him. He left because he no longer found the view as pleasant. “Il y a des choses, qui rompent le charme.” [There are things that break the spell.]

We ate in the study, which was paneled halfway up in dark wood. A large map of the world was mounted in one of the walls. It was completely white, like terra incognita, and only the places that its owner had seen were painted in.

Letters. Mother writes to me from Obersdorf that she is disturbed by the little word nichts [nothing], which is beginning to appear with ever-greater connotations. For example on posters: “Das Volk ist alles—du bist nichts.” [The nation is everything—you are nothing.] That would then be a totality composed of zeroes. You certainly get that impression at times. The game that the nihilists play is becoming more and more transparent. The high stakes force them to show their cards and often for no reason.

Otte reports that in Hamburg there is talk of pulping the remaining copies of Kubin’s Andere Seite [The Other Side]. That would merely achieve a destruction of paper, whereas with people, it would be a destruction of the flesh.

Finally a letter from Henri Thomas, who is all worked up about the translation of some proper names and place names that have allusive meaning in the Marble Cliffs. An example is “Fillerhorn,” which derives from the obsolete verb fillen, meaning to maltreat, abuse, or skin. He choses corne aux tanneurs and says that this guild is one of the oldest and that mentioning it would convey a dark, medieval tone as well as one of suspicion. Köppelsbleek—or better, Köppelesbleek—is a place of bleached skulls.[46] For that he uses the expression rouissage [retting]. Here I was using a place name of a landscape feature in the region of Goslar. In Germany, the name has already changed to Göbbelesbleek. For Pulverkopf, he wanted to use hauteflamme of brusqueflamme, but that choice did not seem to connote enough irony to answer the old artillery soldier whose name is not even known. He had boasted of having a cannon in reserve to use against Christendom. I suggested calling him le vieux pétardier [the old artilleryman], which seemed too coarse for Thomas. He suggested boute feu, which as well as fuse, can also mean arsonist—a word that over time has gained an ironic note. Soit. [So be it.]

I have the impression that he was being a little bit devious as he translated, for he knows how to walk like a hunter or trapper along the fault lines of language. Translation demands passion.

Finished reading Frédéric Bouyer La Guyane Française [French Guyana] a description of a journey the author took in 1862–1863. Good account of the flora, fauna, and people of the swamps. Even back then, the native people knew about a kind of vaccine against snakebite. One such young man, who thanks to this vaccine thought himself invulnerable, found a delicate coral adder while he was digging a grave and without listening to any warnings, draped it around himself like a necklace. He was bitten and died immediately. Another man who had also been vaccinated against snakes let pit vipers bite him for money. He also kept a number of them slithering around his dwelling, thus eliminating the need for lock and key, since everyone gladly avoided the place.

Visit from Grüninger, who has returned from the East. He commanded a battery there. A selection of his capriccios [anecdotes, sketches]:

The 281st Division, deployed with inadequate winter gear, was almost immediately wiped out by the frost and was dubbed “The Asthma Division.”

At a crossing in a trench, a commissar who had been killed in hand-to-hand combat by a German corporal, had frozen solid in a standing position. This corporal, whose frequent duty it was to lead captured officers through the lines, used to take them past his frozen commissar, rather like a sculptor displaying his work.

A Russian colonel was captured with the remnants of his regiment, which had been in the cauldron for weeks. When asked the source for his troops’ rations, he answered that they had nourished themselves from corpses. When reproached, he added that he himself had eaten only the livers.

Today was the first spring day after this grim winter. Joy and exhilaration animated the crowds on the Champs-Élysées. The sound of countless shovels removing the slabs of black snow from the streets was almost like Easter bells that aroused an agreeable feeling.

In the bookstore at 8 Rue de Castiglione I bought a three-volume page-turner, which promises to offer many an enjoyable hour during future winter nights on the Lüneburg Heath. It is a story of shipwrecks, winter survival, exposure to the elements, Robinson Crusoe–like adventures, firestorms, famine, and other calamitous incidents on the high seas. The book was published by Cuchet, Rue et Maison Serpente, in the third year of the Republic. A stamp reveals a former owner of the book to have been a Jesuit priory.

In this great chess match, women do not always consider the endgame, yet they appreciate it when intimations first suggest that direction with subtle clarity and nuance. That is the spice of seduction.

In the evening at Ramponneau with Abt, who had been a cadet with Friedrich Georg. After dinner, we heard a distant sound that reminded me of an explosion, so I wrote down the exact minute. When we heard further rumblings, we concluded it was a spring storm, not unusual around here at this time of year. When Abt asked the waiter whether it was raining, the man answered with a discreet smile, “The guests think it is a storm, but I’d prefer to believe that it’s bombs.” Hearing that, we decided to leave, and outside we heard that anti-aircraft fire really was in progress. The orange-yellow flares of the English hovered over the cityscape. Bombers occasionally darted over the roofs like bats.

The shooting continued for a long time after I had gone to bed. I read the essay by Du Bos about the Goncourts and a chapter in the Book of Samuel. The shelling provided contemporary atmosphere.

Last night’s attack targeted the Renault works and by this evening has cost five hundred lives, mostly workers. Ten German soldiers were mortally wounded, and more than a thousand casualties have been admitted to the field hospitals. Although huge factories and two hundred dwellings were destroyed, from the vantage point of our quarter, the whole thing looked like stage lighting for a shadow play.

Yesterday the Doctoresse and I dined on one of the hens sent by dear Madame Richardet from Saint-Michel. Afterward, I consulted her about a bad cold I felt coming on. After drinking some hot rum in the Raphael, I lay awake most of the night in a semifeverish state. Such hours are not lost. I have the impression that when the temperature is elevated, body, and mind work better and faster as a unit, and one surges like water over a weir. For me, feverish nights are always highly creative. I’d like to assume that they have transformative power. In addition to distinguishing sickness from health, they also mark spiritual eras, the way festivals mark the seasons.

In the evening, paid a visit to Valentiner in his studio apartment on the Quai Voltaire. He had turned up a beautiful copy of Tocqueville for me; he also gave me the Contes Noirs by Saint-Albin. Heller, Rantzau, and Drescher also there; conversed with them about Tocqueville.

From delicate souls like Rantzau, I hear the opinion that in dangerous times like these leadership belongs in the hands of impulsive, brutal types and should be left up to them. Après on verra. [We’ll see later on.] That’s the point of view of a traveler who has landed in a flophouse and hopes that downstairs they will all kill each other while he is asleep upstairs. It doesn’t always work out that way.

Went to lunch at Prunier with Mossakowsky, who used to be a colleague of Cellaris. If I can believe him, there are certain butchers in the large charnel houses[47] they have built in the border states on the eastern frontier, men who have single-handedly slain enough people to populate a midsize city. Such reports extinguish the colors of the day. You want to close your eyes to them, but it is important to view them like a physician examining a wound. They are symptoms of the monstrous lesion that must be healed—and I believe that it can be healed. If I did not retain that hope, I would immediately go ad patres.[48] This, of course, goes much deeper than anything political. Its infamy is unremitting.

Went with Weinstock and Grüninger to the Raphael in the evening, where the air was full of capriccios from the eastern front. Perhaps one day there will arise a new Goya to depict these Desastros,[49] an artist who understands the whole spectrum of human cruelty, including its absolute nadir.

Wounded Russians in the forest who screamed for help for hours drew their pistols and fired on German soldiers who finally came to rescue them. This is a sign that the struggle has reached the point of bestiality. An animal shot and lying where it fell begins to bite when it is touched.

People have seen corpses lying on the tarmac that have been crushed by thousands of tanks until they are as flat as sheets of paper. The march goes right over them, as if over decals or designs visible in the icy depths of the roads.

Grüninger represents the precursor of a type who is “above it all”: able to cope with a high level of pain and at the same time more subtle in his perceptions. A paradoxical combination, but one that is probably the basis for this development in general, which arises from a pattern of converging forces.

At the table, there was a major who had lived in Moscow long before World War I and told stories of sleigh rides, fine furs, varieties of caviar, and dinners of Asiatic splendor. Today that sounds like a dreamland from a sumptuous fairytale realm, perhaps out of medieval Persia. One of the rich merchants had champagne served in silver chamber pots but immediately ordered it removed when he noticed a guest with an expression of disgust on his face. An example of fusion of coarseness and gentility that has probably changed very little.

Read further in the Book of Samuel. The rivalry between Saul and David gives us the pattern for every conflict between youthful strength and legitimate power. There is no negotiation here.

A letter from Friedrich Georg in the mail. Among other things, he gives an account of his visit to the Straubs in Nussdorf—in the very house we used to pass so often on our walks to the Birnau Forest. He describes the light in the apartment as having something flower-like about it, “as if the shapes of very bright blossoms formed in the air.”

After dinner visited a young sculptor, Gebhardt, with Weinstock. He partially counts as an émigré and receives clandestine support from people here in the building. On the way, we discussed the situation as usual. It looks as though the three commanders-in-chief in the West are of one mind, and that we can expect the result in the form of a spring offensive. During such discussions, we passed by the catafalque that had been erected on the Place de la Concorde to honor the victims of the English aerial bombings. Dense crowds of Parisians file past the place.

At Gebhardt’s we met Princess Bariatinski. Viewed the sculptures and thought the head by young Drescher particularly striking. The countess said of Claus Valentiner, “He is like a bee: everything he touches, he turns to honey.”

The Doctoresse then arrived to pick me up, and I accompanied her through the quarter where the antiquarian bookshop are; these have always have the power to inspire me to dream, purely through the accumulated historical matter that they radiate.

In the night, I dreamed of various animals. Among them, a salamander with a blue back and a white abdomen speckled in blue and yellow. The exquisite nature of the colors lay in the fact that they were suffused with the glow of life, like fine damp leather. The freshness and delicacy of this palette melted into the creature. The slate blue and somewhat yellowish white of the underbelly dominated the whole effect. Such glorious luster is only possible when animated by life—like the flames that consume love.

Woke up with thoughts of my old plan about the Teoria dei Colori [The Theory of Colors], which will treat color as a function of surface.

The fact that I love the most elusive, and probably also the best, in them—that may be the source of the coldness they perceive in me.

We live life merely at its edge: it is but a battlefield where the struggle for life is fought. It is a remote fort, hastily built in the dimension of the citadel into which we shall retreat in death.

The goal of life is to gain an idea of what life is. In the absolute sense, of course, that changes nothing, according to the priests—but it helps our journey.

We bring our chips to the table and gamble for infinitely high stakes. We are like children who play for beans without knowing that each one of them contains the potential for the marvels of blossoms and May.

In the evening, with the Doctoresse who invited me to the Comédie Française: Les Femme Savantes [The Wise Women]. There are still islands where one can find a mooring. In the foyer, Houdon’s sculpture of the seated Voltaire, combining the traits of age and childhood in a wonderful way. It is beautiful how intellectual liveliness easily triumphs over the gravity of years.

The work of art must reach a state that renders it superfluous—when eternity illuminates it.

Its intangible stature increases as it approaches the highest beauty and deepest truth. The thought becomes less and less painful that, as a work of art with its ephemeral symbols, it must perish.

The same applies to life itself. There we also have to reach a stage in which it is possible for it to cross over easily and osmotically, a stage in which it earns death.

In the evening in the round salon with the new commander-in-chief, Heinrich von Stülpnagel.[50] We talked about botany and Byzantine history, a subject in which he is well read. Andronikos is a name that keeps coming up even today. He attributed this and other bits of learning to his frequent poor health. He was often bored in the field hospitals and supplemented the Spartan cadet training with his own studies. In contrast to his brother and cousin, he possesses an unmistakable désinvolture [detachment, unconcern] and, on top of that, an aristocratic bearing. His steady smile makes him appealing. This is noticeable even in the way the staff treats him.

Carlo Schmid called on me this morning. Years ago, I spent a whole night drinking with him in Tübingen, and now he is in Lisle with the commander-in-chief of Belgium. We talked about his Baudelaire translation, from which he read aloud “Les Phares” [“The Lighthouses”].

Then, about the situation. He felt that nowadays it is less a struggle between human beings than a struggle about them. For him, it is possible to see very concretely how they are caught up and led either to the right or the wrong side.

Visited Gallimard after dinner. Had a conversation with the head of the firm, its director, Stameroff, and Madeleine Boudot-Lamotte about the Falaises de Marbre [On the Marble Cliffs]. Gallimard gives the impression of a spiritual as well as intellectual and commanding force—all traits of a good publisher. There must also be something of the gardener in him.

Read on in Samuel. With David something new enters the law—a trace of elegance. You can see how the law changes when mankind observes it differently, without challenging it. The forms remain in place, but they are danced.

Baal—Jehovah had to be merciless with such rival gods. Even today, we should really try to imagine them in a way that lets us see them, even though their altars have long since fallen into ruin. They are not mere milestones on humanity’s path. Dostoevsky saw Baal in London’s railroad stations.

In peacetime, I plan to rearrange my reading matter according to a new plan, with theology as its basis.

It is said that since the sterilization and extermination of the mentally ill, the number of children born with mental illness has increased. Similarly, with the suppression of beggars, poverty has become more widespread. And the decimation of the Jews has led to the spreading of Jewish characteristics in the world, which is exhibiting an increase in Old Testament traits. Extermination does not extinguish the primeval images; on the contrary, it liberates them.

It seems that poverty, sickness, and all evil rest upon certain people, who support them like pillars, and yet they are the weakest in this world. They are like children who need our special protection. With the destruction of these pillars, the weight of the vault topples. Its collapse crushes the false economists.

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]

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.

Then about Japan, which he called the real victor in this war.

Departure from the Gare de l’Est at seven o’clock this morning. Rehm drove me to the station. The sky was a crisp blue; I noticed especially the magical play of color in the water of the rivers and canals. I thought I was seeing sounds that no painter had ever observed. The blues, greens, and grays of the water gleamed like clear, cool stones. The color was more than just color: it was the symbol and essence of the mysterious deep glimpsed in the play and reflection of the surface.

Somewhere beyond Coolus, a bright russet falcon landed on a thornbush. Fields full of high glass domes for raising melons and cucumbers—retorts for the finest fermentation in the area of horticultural alchemy.

Before reaching Thiaucourt, I read a little of the Faux-Monnayeurs [Counterfeiters] in the sunshine. After the sun had disappeared behind a mountain, the letters began to glow with a deep phosphorescent green.

Reached Mannheim in the evening, where Speidel picked me up at the station. I stayed with him. Little Hans, an artist in the way he enjoys things. Such children attract love and presents like magnets. There is also a little daughter, very delicate. When there has been a night air raid, she will not eat the next day. Who knows the burden that weighs upon the shoulders of women?

The Speidels took me to the station in the morning. The shift in social stratification was apparent in the interaction of people on the trains, especially the staff in the dining car or in the hotels; inevitably, differences are being eradicated. This is particularly apparent when you arrive here from France.

Late arrival in Hannover. Perpetua picked me up from the station in the car.

On the moor with the children. Our little boy called a salamander a “water lizard” when he saw it for the first time, which tickled me, as though he had addressed the creature by name. In doing so, he demonstrated an ability to differentiate, which is the foundation for knowledge as surely as gold is the security for paper currency.

When I woke up at six I wrote down a fragment from an extensive dream negotiation:

I: “It’s best that I proceed with my old subject, the comparative physiology of fishes.”

Perpetua: “If the results turn out favorably, he will be in such a good mood that he will frighten his friends.”

I: “That indicates to me that the future is going to be horrible.”

Pale, moon-shaped fishes lay on the ground. I inserted my index finger into the mouth of one of them to find a gland, which I could feel as a little bump.

On the moor. I heard the first call of the cuckoo, that oracular crier, although I had plenty of money on me.[52] On the other hand, we haven’t just cut into the ham but almost finished it up. That’s a good indication of the way things stand this year.

I took a sunbath by a peat-cutting bank. The color of the old walls that had been sliced by the shovel changes from a rich black to a soft golden brown. Just above the water level, there is a long mossy band; the sun creates red embroidery upon the dew. All this shows order and necessity. Thought: This is only one of the countless aspects, just one of the gashes in the harmony of the world. We must look beyond such formations to perceive the power of its form.

It is a fine feeling to stride across the damp peat interpenetrated with a deep, ruddy glow. Here you walk upon layers of the pure stuff of life, more precious than gold. The moor is a primeval landscape and therefore the repository of health and freedom. I sense this so gloriously in these northern refuges.

I found a letter from Valentiner in the mail; he states that Gallimard had printed the second edition of Falaises de Marbre. He also reported on a visit of the Outcast of the Islands [Gerhard Nebel] to Quai Voltaire.

Reading matter: Tolstoy’s short stories, including the “Recollection of a Billiard-Marker.” It’s a good narrative technique that a basically noble but dissipated life is captured and observed in a diary of a servant, as though in a cheap mirror. Between the cracks, we can sense the tragic and authentic image.

Unfortunately, I could not find my favorite story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” in the edition.

Drive to the barber’s. Had a conversation there about the Russian prisoners who are being sent from the camps to work here.

“They say there are some tough customers among them. They’d steal the dogs’ food.”

Noted verbatim.

Frau Lukow brought a letter from Grüninger in which he bewailed the demise of our Arthurian round table in the George V. Other than that, the usual capriccios. After capturing a Russian reconnaissance patrol, his soldiers had discovered among the dead a seventeen-year-old girl who had fought fanatically. How that was possible, no one could say, but the next morning, her naked corpse was lying in the snow. Because winter is a brilliant sculptor who preserves shapes in their firm, fresh state, the occupying troops had plenty of opportunity to admire the beautiful body. When the base was later recaptured, many a volunteer reported for duty to take pleasure in the sight of that splendid form.

My departure from Kirchhorst approaches. I quickly adjusted again to the house and study and also to the garden where I’m leaving behind the beds in good order. Perpetua thinks that I should move into the parsonage again in the autumn. Well, we shall see. How I would like to live here beside her and grow old slowly, but I yearn to get back to work.

She, incidentally, found an expression for the remarkable relationship between me and the lemures. She says that I am [swimming] in a different current.

I treated Astor, the dog, very badly for constantly running through the garden beds. He has just walked up to me wagging his tail as I sit beneath the old beech trees. He’s not looking at me reproachfully, but rather inquisitively, thoughtfully: “Why are you like this?” And like an echo I hear inside me: “Yes, why are you like this?”

My current reading: James Riley, Le Naufrage du Brigantin Américain Le Commerce [Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig “Commerce,” 1817], published by Le Normant (Paris, 1818). Some of the shipwrecked sailors are murdered, some are stripped naked by brutal nomads and are driven through the Mauritanian deserts under horrible conditions. They come upon deserted cities bleaching in the sun reminiscent of the visions of Emir Musa. The breach in the wall is visible as well as the abandoned siege machinery in front of it, like an oyster-shucking knife lying beside a plate. A scene that Poe could have described plays itself out on a sheer cliff wall rising into the clouds from the sea. A path barely as wide as a hand has been carved into it, and before traversing that terrifying track, people call out from a precipice to make sure that nobody is approaching in the opposite direction. A small caravan of Jews once neglected to do this. They wanted to reach their camp before twilight and, as fate would have it, a group of Moors, who thought no one was on the path, came toward them from the opposite direction. They met in the middle of the path above the terrifying abyss where it was impossible to turn around. After long and useless negotiations, they set upon each other one by one, falling to their deaths in pairs.

Riley’s attitude, and even his fate, are proof of the power that rational belief still possesses. In the midst of the most horrible suffering, trust directs itself to God and his guidance as though to an effective system of curves in a superior form of higher mathematics. For an intelligent being like Riley, God is the highest intelligence that inhabits the cosmos. Mankind is sustained all the more powerfully, the more logically he thinks. That is reminiscent of the “strongest battalions” of Old Fritz.[53]

Scholz picked me up in his car at eleven o’clock for the return trip to Paris. Perpetua waved to me in the darkness by making circles with the flashlight.

During the trip, read about the Panama scandal, then a biography of the Berlin entomologist Kraatz, and last, a collection of classical letters; among these Pliny’s appealed to me most of all. Whenever I glanced up, I caught a glimpse of the way fields and gardens were laid out, inspiring in me new aesthetic ideas for the design in Kirchhorst.

Rehm and Valentiner welcomed me at the station in Paris even though the train was delayed. I went to Valentiner’s studio for a cup of tea and to contemplate the ancient roofs, which after a rainstorm stood out in glistening clarity.

Today’s mail brought a letter from Grüninger with some new capriccios. As I read it, I thought again about this intellect and its sense of the geometric expansion of power. Such types are perhaps unknown in other cultures, although foreshadowed by Dostoevsky. When Bolshevism is measured against the strongest of these fictional characters, its decline is obvious.

It is certain that only such characters who understand the fundamentals of power on which the world is based, and are dictated to “from above,” are capable of confronting the horrible popular revolution that is destroying the world. They are like snakes who have joined a swarm of rats bent on gnawing everything to bits. Where others retreat, they are attracted. Calmly, and with satanic joy, they approach the terrifying ceremonies used by the lemures to spread their horror, and they join in the game. They are also drawn to the Muses as Sulla was. That is the essence that Pyotr Stepanovich recognizes in Stavrogin.

In the clandestine power struggle in this area, it was Grüninger who delayed—not to say prevented—Kniébolo’s attempts to establish himself and his agents here by about a year. Like Stavrogin, such characters fail because the rot attacks even the small class of leaders that would be necessary to shield the operations—in this case, the generals.

In the afternoon, went to Plon on Rue Garancière with Poupet who seemed to be ailing. He described the most beautiful dedication he’d ever read in a book: “À Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire.” Absolutely, for no invention can attain that profundity of substance. In this sense, to make a name for oneself means to give it substance by giving each of its letters the greatest weight and importance.

The same applies to language in general. Anyone can say “more light,”[54] but only in the case of Goethe do those two syllables contain such richness. Thus, the poet bestows with language what the priest does with wine. In doing so, the poet contributes something to all.

In the evening sat in the Raphael reading Routes et Jardins[55] over a strong grog. I find the translation by Betz a little too polished, but it reads smoothly.

When I think about the difficulties of my situation compared with other people—especially those in the Majestic—I often get the feeling: “You are not here for no reason; fate will untie the knots it has tied, so rise above worries and see them as patterns.”

Thoughts like that seem almost irresponsible. Of course, when we face dangers in dreams, it is certain that waking up will dissolve them into smoke—but by day, we are not permitted to see though the charade too clearly. We have to take it seriously, or people will take advantage. We must dream along with the rest, for better or worse.

Someday we will be astonished by the fact that the living do not see us, just as we are puzzled that no signal from the spirit world reaches us today. Perhaps these realities are aligned, but with different modes of seeing like the reflecting and opaque sides of a looking glass. The day will come when the mirror is turned around, and its silvered side is covered in the black crepe of mourning. We can only gain the night when we have penetrated it with our antennae.

On the Quai Voltaire this afternoon. The sight of the ancient roofs is wonderfully relaxing for the mind. It tarries there far from our fragmented age. In addition to Valentiner, I met Rantzau, Madeleine Boudot-Lamotte, Jean Cocteau, and the actor Marais.

During our discussions about plants, Cocteau told me the most wonderful poetic description for Zittergrass [quaking grass]: le désespoir des peintres [the painters’ despair].

Between two and four this morning the English flew over the city dropping bombs within the river bend of the Seine. I awoke at four from dreams of islands, gardens, and animals and kept dozing, but was jolted awake now and then when one of the airplanes approached under fire. But I stayed asleep during these events, as I monitored the danger. When dreaming, it is almost possible to think that you are in control.

The crack of the shrapnel in the empty streets—like that of meteorites on a lunar landscape.

Went to Parc de Bagatelle[56] in the afternoon, where I admired a range of clematis species whose blue and silver-gray star-shaped blossoms decorated the wall. The roses were already in bloom. I noticed especially a Mevrouw van Rossem. The bud was still closed and showed at its base a hue of tea rose yellow with flaming veins of peach-red radiating out toward its point. It resembled a delicately curved breast pulsating with red wine, its aroma sweet and pungent.

Took an afternoon walk to the Place des Ternes, with its clock on the pharmacy. Then, to the Majestic. Today, I move among officers as formerly among zoologists in the aquarium in Naples. We each perceive the same situation and take completely different sides.

In the evening, I met Henri Thomas at Valentiner’s for the first time.

Kossmann, our new boss, told me that our old comrade N. had committed suicide recently. On the shooting range where he was in charge, he suddenly took his drawn pistol, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger.

Although more than ten years have passed since my last encounter with N., even back then I noticed the pressured, mercurial, exaggeratedly ethical component of his character. In personalities like this, suicide is as predictable as the breaking of overstretched strings on a violin.

In the Bois de Vincennes. I was thinking about my walks and my worries of last year and paid a call on the woman who was my old concierge who lives opposite the fort. You talk to these simple people the way you talk to children, without creating any subtle disparity between words and their meanings. In times like these, it is desirable to keep a small coterie of such people. There are situations in which they can be more helpful than the rich and powerful.

In the morning, Carlo Schmid paid me a visit; he had just returned from Belgium. We talked about his translation of Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. Then about the world and its erotic hierarchy. Then about dreamcatchers, which he takes to be a kind of person who can capture other people’s dreams like a concave mirror and then fulfill them. These people can either elevate or degrade the dreamers.

As we walked, he mentioned his fourteen-year-old son who writes letters about stylistic differences in sentences of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; the boy is also a remarkable draftsman. I was amazed as I listened because, during the times that we’ve been together, we have talked about so many different subjects, and for the first time the father was now mentioning such an important relationship in his life.

In the morning, Rehm reported in his field uniform. He has accompanied me as my adjutant since the beginning of the war. Contact like this evolves into something like the relationship between knight and squire, which is why I shall find it hard to part from him. Went to Valentiner’s in the evening where the time passed unobserved and painlessly as we contemplated the ancient towers and roofs.

Among today’s letters there was one from the Comtesse de Cargouët that bespeaks highbrow audacity: “My family has lived in the same house for five hundred years. My forebears were corsairs in the royal fleet and later famous Chouans.[57] So we’ve remained quite untamed.”

She then asks why I emphasize that women are becoming more intelligent. She says that in France they have always been more intuitive and have grasped things more quickly. Based on their intellectual gymnastics, many men have seemed to think and speak intelligently, but how few of them have truly acted and lived in an intelligent manner.

Perpetua writes to me that the garden is thriving. In her letter, she enclosed a pressed blossom of bleeding heart from it. I also find beautiful her statement that people can never get used to the loss of freedom. That is the basic difference between free men and slaves. By freedom, most people mean new forms of slavery.

During World War I we confronted the question of whether man was more powerful than machines.

In the meantime, things have gotten more complex. We are now concerned with the problem of whether humans or automatons will dominate the earth. The issue brings up further divisions beyond the imprecise ones that partition the world into nations and groups of nations. All around us men stand fully armed at their battle stations. The result is that we never completely agree intellectually with any partner; there is only greater or lesser rapprochement. Above all, we must fight against that tendency within our breast to harden, calcify, ossify.

Concerning marionettes and automatons—the decline in that direction is preceded by loss. This hardening is well depicted in the folktale about the glass heart.

The vice that has become commonplace leads to automatism, as it did so terribly in the case of the old prostitutes who became pure sex machines. Something similar is emanating from the stingy old men. They have sold their souls to material things and a life of metal. Sometimes a particular decision precedes the transition; man rejects his salvation. A widespread vice must be the basis for the general transition to automatism and its threat to us. It would be the task of the theologians to explain this to us, but they are silent.

What an image of a superman, cowering on the tattered cushions in his carriage with a bullet in his spleen and horsehair stanching his wounds. Such news burns through the hell he has created like a lugubrious, celebratory bonfire. Anyone who would assume the role of the despot has to be invulnerable and insensitive to pain, or else he becomes a burden in the hour of his destruction.

Went to Maxim’s at noon, where I had been invited by the Morands. The conversation included a discussion of American and English novels like Moby Dick and A High Wind in Jamaica, a book I read years ago in Steglitz with acute suspense, like someone who watches children who have been given razors to play with. More talk about Bluebeard and Landru, who killed seventeen women in a suburb near here. A railroad official finally noticed that he always bought only one round-trip ticket. Madame Morand said that she had been his neighbor. After the trial, a small-time innkeeper bought the house where the murders had been committed and named it Au Grillon du Foyer [The Cricket on the Hearth].

On Rue Royale, I encountered the yellow star for the first time in my life. Three young girls who were walking past arm in arm were wearing it. This badge was distributed yesterday, and those who received it had to part with a point from their clothing ration card in return. I then saw the star more frequently that afternoon. I consider things like this, even in my own personal history, a significant date. Such a sight is not without consequence—I was immediately embarrassed to be in uniform.

Perhaps the least miraculous thing about the cosmos is that most things astonish the mind. There is no difference among miracles, whether one or a billion worlds exist.

Went to Bagatelle in the afternoon. There Charmille told me that students had recently been arrested for wearing yellow stars with different mottoes, such as “idealist,” and then walking along the Champs-Ėlysées as a demonstration.

Such individuals do not yet realize that the time for discussion is past. They also attribute a sense of humor to their adversary. In so doing, they are like children who wave flags while swimming in shark-infested waters: they draw attention to themselves.

Reading matter: Le Martyrologue de l’Ėglise du Japon [The Martyrdom of the Church in Japan, 1549–1649] by Abbé Profillet (Paris, 1895).

The book contains the example of an answer that trumps the threat it elicited. In December 1625, Monika Naisen appeared before the court because, along with her husband and her little daughters, she had given asylum to the Jesuit priest Jean-Baptiste Zola. When the judges threatened to strip her naked, she tore off her girdle herself, crying “There is nothing you can do to me that will make me deny Christ. I would strip off not only my clothing, but my skin.”

Called on the Comtesse de Cargouët. We talked about the end of the war, and she said she is betting on the Germans. Then we discussed English society and Churchill, whom she has met a few times. She said that all the whiskey he drinks was preserving him like plums in brandy.

Went to Berès’s at midday, where I bought Mon Journal by Léon Bloy. The epigraph that he included after the title reads, “Le temps est un chien qui ne mord que les pauvres.” [Time is a dog that bites only the poor.] This is debatable, for our age bites everyone. This is the democratic principle contrasted with the aristocratic one. For this reason, time cannot be leased, and no one adds a single second to his own life.

I then leafed through an edition of epigrams and poems by Johan Christoph Friedrich Haug (Unger, 1805). I thought the motto preceding the epigrams wasn’t bad: In brevitate labor [Concision is hard work] because, like a good pedagogue, it furnishes the existential example. Although the price of both volumes was not cheap, I bought them because of the epigram about the bridge, which first caught my eye:

[Here stands a bridge, ingenious, strong, and high! / It lacks but water nigh.]

At Bagatelle in the afternoon. Extensive contact with individuals reveals their stories, which accumulate pebble by pebble from chats and anecdotes. Some secrets we share with them alone, and we become intimate.

Reading matter: the memoirs of Alexander Dumas and Les Jeunes Filles [The Girls] by Montherlant. In order not to forget passages that have struck me as I read, I have found it most useful to put a check mark beside them and note the page numbers at the back of the book along with keywords. I could paste in a sheet of paper for the same purpose, something like the bookplate that identifies the owner. These are methods that can save a lot of searching.

Went to Gruel in the afternoon to inquire about a case for my journals. There I held in my hand a small skull very artfully carved out of beech wood from the period of Henri IV. Half the head was still covered in skin, while the other was depicted as the bony skull. A snake emerged from an eye socket. While I was admiring it, I was surprised by Wiemer and Madeleine Boudot-Lamotte, who happened to be standing in front of the shop window. The larger a city is, the more exhilarating and meaningful such an encounter seems.

Visited Valentiner afterward, who brought me greetings from Carl Schmitt. Went from there to Florence Henri, the photographer on Rue Saint-Romain, who lives on the top floor where she tends a lovely roof garden. She asked me to prune her tomatoes, and the aroma of the curly leaves clung to my hands afterward, awakening a longing for Kirchhorst.

Took a Sunday excursion yesterday to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. From my dreams during the night, I can recall the wall of an ancient fortification. I was standing there with Perpetua, and we watched as a pale adder emerged from a cavity in the crumbling stonework. The creature was pale as the moon with an oval patch of hair at the back of its neck, parted in the middle. We watched as it slowly climbed up among the decayed stumps of the hazel shrubs along the fortress until it disappeared into a rectangular pit that had been formed when an embrasure collapsed.

There had to be another reason why this scene was so disturbing. I believe that we had known the wall for ages, and that we had never noticed an inhabitant like this one, although the walls and fortification had always seemed mysterious.

In the morning, the dream had almost vanished, become as transparent as the snakeskin itself, but then in the middle of the day, it came back into focus.

The patch of hair must probably be understood as a symbol of rank, like a crown, or at least as some human trait. Yet it looked repugnant, the way humans have always degraded animals.

Truhe [coffer, chest, box] from truen “anvertrauen” [confide, entrust]. Then there is the word hüstrue for “female spouse,” “housewife,” which I have seen on northern European gravestones. Then there is trude, meaning “witch.” Here the concealed, hidden aspects take on negative connotations. The word trudeln [trundle, spin] belongs to this family and describes how witches navigate through the air.

Received news that our little fellow is better. I had been very disturbed by reports of his fever, his cough, and his weight loss. Nowadays, despite all our radio and telegraph technology, we are still unable to offer any help from a distance. We probably accomplish more in certain dreams than with all the technology in the world.

A second letter from 26 June came from Perpetua around noon. She writes that during the night nine bombs hit Kirchhorst, exploding on the meadow behind the Kähne bakery, where they blew the heads off several cows. When considering whether she should take our little boy downstairs or stay where they were, she chose to do the latter. It seemed too risky to get him out of bed.

The proximity of the lemures and their bleak rites awakened homesickness for the archipelagoes and the worlds of fixed stars, whose expanse is revealed to the initiate beyond the cliffs and narrow mountain passes of death. We feel that our home is there, and here we dwell in a strange land.

Maggi Grüninger brought me a letter from Friedrich Georg that shows, to my joy, that he is in better condition now.

Current reading: Montherlant, Les Jeunes Filles [The Girls], one of the books that Comtesse de Cargouët sent me; it reminds me of Les Liaisons Dangereuses [Dangerous Liaisons]. Certain aspects of the hunting scenes high in the mountains are well done, particularly the cold-blooded observation tempered with fascination. The perfect proportion of innocence and consciousness in the creation of molecules from these two elements produces one of the aspects of our age. This combination is seldom successful, because each half destroys the other if they are not joined in a very specific way.

The book tells the story of a girl who drinks water from a fountain and swallows a snake’s egg. Years later, X-rays reveal the body of a snake deep inside her. This hybrid image shows elements of the primeval within the conscious world.

Then I read the memoirs of Alexander Dumas. Connoisseurs prefer these to his novels, which—although I don’t like to put aside books I have just begun to read—I have grasped only minimally. The annoying thing about such texts is that their author avoids describing nuanced and gentle impressions while recording and exaggerating lurid ones. Reading them is like walking through meadows thronged with larger-than-life blossoms, while grasses and moss are absent.

Ebb and flow. When we exhale, sleep, dream, the tidal zone is visible with its seaweed and shells, sea stars, and aquatic life among the colored pebbles. Then the mind appears like a quick white bird with red feet and snatches up its prey.

The longing for death can become wild, sensual, like the light green sea as it cools upon the beach.

Went to the Tour d’Argent in the evening, that silver tower where Henri IV dined on egret pies. Sitting in the dining room is like being in a large airplane looking out over the Seine and its islands. In the rays of evening light, a film of mother-of-pearl covered the surface of the water. The contrast between the coloration of a weeping willow and its reflection in the water was lovely—in silent introspection the silver-green foliage became imperceptibly darker in the water.

The people up there on the balcony dining on suprême of sole and the famous duck seem like tower sculptures looking down from their demonic comfort upon the gray sea of roofs at their feet, beneath which the starving eke out their living. In times like this eating—eating well and much—brings a feeling of power.

In the mail I found a letter from Clemens Podewils from Kharkov describing the Russians and other things we frequently hear about. He mentions, in particular, the aloofness of the simple Russian women. Bolshevism has barely dented the surface of the innate strength of the people.

Certain dreams cannot be recorded. They go back before the Old Covenant and dismantle the primitive raw materials of humanity. We must suppress what we have seen there.

Memories bear traits of an inverse causality. The world, as an effect, resembles a tree with a thousand branches, but as memory it leads downward into the tangled network of the roots. When I confront memories, it often seems like gathering a bundle of seaweed from the ocean—the tiny bit visible from afar, when slowly dragged up into the light, reveals an extensive system of filaments.

As past and future intersect in the narrow neck of the hourglass, there must be a point from which they look like mirror images. In ethics, guilt and retribution refer to this point, and so does the iron-clad law of causality in logic. An artistic person senses unity in the conflict, the innermost identity of the world. It is his calling to proclaim this in poetry. We recognize him thus:

[O give us wings of most steadfast minds / To cross over and to return.][58]

Reading matter: Léon Bloy, Mon Journal, bound in purple leather and pleasing to the touch. His mind has a certain condensed quality of something boiled down, like a soup made from extinct fishes and mussels whose flavor has intensified. Good to read when the appetite has been destroyed by too much bland food. Incidentally, this time the association, or rather the correspondence, with Hamann occurred to me. This lies in a penchant for absolutes; a comparison between these two authors would produce a good study.

Twice he mentions that the dead wake him up at night, sometimes knocking at his door, or sometimes he simply hears their names. At that point, he gets up and prays for their salvation. Maybe today we are experiencing the power not only of past but also of future prayers that will be said after we die.

This spirit is strongest in its relationship to death. I am thinking here of a beautiful passage in another of his books, in which he says that dying has no greater significance for us than being dusted off has for a piece of furniture.

But I find his wild pamphleteering repugnant. For example, when he describes people as barely worthy of cleaning the chamber pots in hospitals or scraping off the residue on the latrines of a Prussian infantry barracks. He reaches levels of hatred that veer off into lewdness, for example, when he describes a former cleric who suggested in a newspaper article that he had made such an impression on women by wearing his cassock that he would have had no trouble seducing one or more of them if he had wanted to.

Went to Prunier for lunch with Grüninger and his young wife. He was brimming with new capriccios and passed around some photographs from Russia. I found one quite touching: a young girl who had been injured was lying down having her wound dressed. In order to give her an injection in the buttock, the medic had pulled up her clothing. In the photograph, she is crying, not from pain, but because soldiers were standing around looking at her like an animal caught in a net.

In the evening I read the poem by Friedrich Georg about the blue flints—a Stone Age hymn.

When I close my eyes, I sometimes see a dark landscape of stones, cliffs, and mountains at the edge of infinity. In the background, on the shore of a black sea, I recognize myself, a tiny little figure that almost seems to be drawn in with chalk. That is my forward posting, at the edge of the void. Over there at the abyss, I am fighting for myself.

The linden blossoms these days—I don’t think I’ve ever smelled them so powerfully and fervently.

I read Carlo Schmid’s translation of Baudelaire’s “The Cats.” The second stanza is especially effective:

The two last stanzas beautifully describe not only the 1–0 advantage of cats over dogs but also the moment of general stillness before action.

Dropped in on Valentiner in the afternoon, where I met Henri Thomas with his wife. Thomas shows the synthesis of youth, poverty, and dignity, which—when combined with intelligent insight—lends his judgment a certain incorruptibility. His wife, who still lives with her parents, is remarkably gracious. That was evident when she said to me, “You want to find an expression in language that describes things with greater clarity than reality does. I try to do the same thing in the theater, but using my entire body, not just the head.”

I encouraged Thomas to support her talent, but he said that was difficult, and when it comes to realizing an individual’s talent, human beings are basically all alone.

“Yet support can be useful to other people.”

“I believe rather that it is talent that creates support.”

Concerning Montherlant, whom I compared to a cannonball, Thomas said:

“Yes, but he doesn’t penetrate things very deeply.”

Again, the ancient roofs were magnificent. I often sense that it is the pressure of time that distills beauty. Every day I have to tell myself that the signal to evacuate could come at any moment, at which point I, like Bias, will take what is mine and leave the rest behind—if need be, even my skin.

Then at Charmille’s, where I ate dinner and studied the calendar.[60]

Was with a woman in a shop that sold edible snakes. The merchant opened a drawer and, without looking, reached in and yanked out the creatures by the middle of their bodies. Before handing them over, he put miniature muzzles on them, through which the little vipers’ horns quivered. We paid twelve or fourteen marks for a medium-size specimen.

Once I had awakened, I kept scratching my head over who the woman had been. Such apparitions are vaguely familiar, often combining several people like a sister, mother, or wife—all the primeval elements of femininity combined. We grope our way through a dark web and do not recognize each other.

Visited Valentiner in the afternoon. Before I entered, I rummaged around in the displays on the Quai. I picked up a 1520 copy of Doctrina Moriendi [Doctrines of the Dying], which according to a handwritten entry by the chancellor of the church in Paris, Jean de Gerson, was written in the fourteenth century. A further notation by Baluze, the librarian of Colbert, documents that this volume once stood in the Biblioteca Colbertina.

Then went to the Louvre with the Doctoresse to look at the sculpture. We ate dinner together and enjoyed lively chitchat.

What I ought to have is a reserve of good books printed on newsprint—books to be read in the bath or while traveling that can then be tossed away.

Daily schedule in Kirchhorst. I need two hours in the evening to unwind, time to go through and organize books, clippings, manuscripts, diaries, correspondence. Cura posterior [secondary tasks].

Five gladioli in a vase on the table in front of me—three white, one pale red, and one salmon colored. Gladioli tend to have hues of a concentrated quality; the life force within the blossoms almost retreats behind the powerful flash of the pure extract of their tint. When looking at these flowers—as with anything of a pure, all too pure, nature—a feeling of emptiness and ennui is hard to avoid. Yet the white examples especially stimulate theological questions.

During the noon break, went by Berès’s shop and rummaged through the books. I picked up the Monographie du Thé [Monograph on Tea] by J. G. Houssaye (Paris, 1843). It had nice engravings, even if the binding does show some wormholes. Also La Ville et la République de Venise [The City and Republic of Venice] by Saint-Didier (Paris: De Luyne, 1660). The binding is beautiful and indestructible, full vellum with mitered corners and vellum bands on the spine. Finally, Lautréamont’s Préface à une live future [Preface to a Future Book], published in 1932, again in Paris, the great city of books.

On the way I was overcome by the desire to write something, even if it were nothing more than a short story or two. I thought about Riley’s shipwreck,[61] and then about the story of the bootblack of Rhodes, which I’ve been pondering for quite a while.

Architectural dreams in which I saw old Gothic buildings. They were standing in abandoned gardens; not a soul grasped their meaning in the midst of the solitude, and yet I thought them even more beautiful in a cryptic way. They showed a clear sense of structure like that intrinsic to plants and animals—it is their higher nature. Thought: that had been built in for God.

Visited the photographer Florence Henri in the afternoon. Just before that, rummaged around in books on the corner, where I bought, among other things, Les Amours de Charles de Gonzague [The Loves of Carlo Gonzaga] by Giulio Capoceda and printed in Cologne in 1666. There was an old bookplate inside that read, “Per ardua gradior” [I forge ahead through adversities]. I underscored my agreement by writing my own, “Tempestatibus maturesco” [Storms have made me the man I am].

Jews were arrested here yesterday for deportation. Parents were separated from their children and wailing could be heard in the streets. Never for a moment may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering. What kind of human being, what kind of officer, would I be otherwise? This uniform obligates me to provide protection wherever possible. One has the impression that to do that one must, like Don Quixote, confront millions.

Visited the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in the afternoon. There I wandered around among the monuments with Charmille. Now and then we stumbled upon famous names in the labyrinths of this necropolis without looking for them. We found the gravestone of General Wimpffen holding a sword with a ribbon curled around it bearing the word “Sédan?”[62] The question mark on grave inscriptions was new to me. Then we found Oscar Wilde, whose monument had been paid for by one of his wealthy lady readers. Tasteless. You can see the tormented spirit who hovers on it being borne aloft by wings that weigh tons. Then we went down a mossy path canopied with green, which leads like the Street of Forgetting[63] into the valley among crumbling monuments. There we found the grave of Cherubini crowned by an urn, an adder coiled around its foot. Beside this was Chopin’s grave with an oval marble relief.

The derelict parts of this cemetery are the most beautiful. Comforting epitaphs occasionally gleam from the toppled stones, like obitus vitae otium est [Death is life’s rest]. Thoughts about the multitudes resting here. There are no spaces large enough to accommodate their ever-increasing armies. A different principle must be applied. They shall find space in a hazelnut.[54]

This contact with a being who then disappears with the dark scepter is surely the most wonderful thing in the world. This cannot be compared with birth, which is merely the budding of life already familiar to us. Life lies in death like a small green island in the dark ocean. To fathom this—even at the edges and tidal zones—means real knowledge, compared to which physics and technology are mere trifles.

Returned to the city by the back streets. Every time I see the winged spirit of the Bastille with his torch and the broken chain in his hands, the sight reinforces the notion of highly dangerous and still potent energy. He combines the impression of great speed with stasis. He represents the spirit of progress raised on high, embodying the triumph of future conflagrations. Just as the rabble and the merchants united in spirit to erect this column, the vengeance of the Furies unites here with Mercury’s cunning. This is no longer a symbol, but an actual idol surrounded by the terrible tempest that has always illuminated such bronze columns since time immemorial.

Finished reading Lautréamont, Préface à un livre future [Preface to a Future Book]. I’m going to read the complete works of this author, which are collected in one volume, to deepen my understanding of him. In this preface, a new version of optimism is predicted, one without God, but differing from notions of progress by taking the perspective of the consciousness of perfection rather than some Utopian recollection of it. This gives his argument a metallic quality, gleaming in technological glory and conviction. He writes in an easygoing style, as if we were on a beautiful, fast ship devoid of other passengers—propelled by consciousness rather than electricity. Doubt has been abolished as has air resistance; all that is worthwhile and good is to be found in the material, which the structure makes visible.

Our age shows strong evidence of this attitude. An early example among the painters would be Chirico, whose cities are deserted and whose human beings are constructed from bits of armor plate. This is the optimism that our machine technology brings with it and which it cannot do without. The message must be heard in the voice of a speaker who delivers news of a metropolis that has been reduced to rubble and ashes.

Called on Picasso in the afternoon. He lives in a spacious building in which the floors have been designated as storage rooms and depots. The building on Rue des Grands-Augustins appears in Balzac’s novels; Ravaillac was brought here after he committed the assassination. In one corner, a narrow spiral staircase with steps of stone and ancient oak twisted upwards. A piece of paper bearing the little word ici [here] in blue pencil was pinned to a narrow door. I rang, and the door was opened by a short man in a simple worker’s smock: Picasso himself. I had met him briefly once before and again had the impression that I was looking at a magician—an impression that was only intensified by the little green pointed hat he wore.

The household consisted of a small dwelling and two further storage rooms, one of which was in the garret. He appeared to use the lower one as a sculpture workshop and the upper one as a painting studio. The floor was tiled in a honeycomb pattern. The walls were colored with a yellow wash and supported by dark oak beams. Ribs of black oak ran across the ceilings. The rooms seemed to be perfectly laid out as a workspace. The sense that time stood still lay heavy in the air.

First we looked at old papers downstairs, and then we went up to the second story. Among the pictures standing around, I liked two simple female portraits and then, most especially, a beach scene that blossomed in tones of red and yellow the more I looked at it. We talked about his views on painting and writing from memory. Picasso asked whether there was a real landscape behind the Marble Cliffs.

I found other pictures, like a row of asymmetric heads, quite monstrous. We have to grant such remarkable talent its own objectivity when we watch it develop such images over years and decades, even when they differ from our own perceptions. He is essentially showing us things as yet unseen and unborn; they are like alchemical experiments, and the word retort was mentioned several times. It had never dawned on me so powerfully and oppressively that the homunculus was more than just an idle fiction. The image of man is predicted magically, and few can sense the terrifying profundity of the decision that the painter makes.

Even though I tried more than once to draw him out on this subject, he avoided the topic, perhaps intentionally: “There are chemists who spend their whole lives investigating the elements concealed in a piece of sugar. So I would like to know what color is.”

On their impact: “My pictures would have the same effect if, after they were finished, I were to wrap them up and seal them without showing them to anyone. These are manifestations of the most intuitive nature.”

Concerning the war: “Both of us sitting here together would be able to negotiate peace over the course of this afternoon. In the evening people would be able to turn their lights on again.”

I began reading the Book of Esther, where Herodotus’s ancient world of splendid pageantry still reigns supreme. Right there in the first chapter we have the feast at Susa lasting months in the Asiatic palace of Ahasuerus, who reigned over 127 empires, from India to the land of the Moors. Anyone who appears before him unbidden must die unless he raises his golden scepter, as he did to Esther. Nowadays the only remnants of this terrible magical kingdom are the Jews—the unbending bronze serpent of the old life. I witnessed this once quite clearly. It was the sight of a Polish Jew at the Schlesischer Bahnhof [Silesia Station] in Berlin. My thought: “That is how you must have stood back then under the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.”

My mail contains more and more letters from survivors writing to me about readers of mine who have been killed in the war. It often seems as though the dead appear as voices from a reading public in tenebris [in darkness].

Visit from Kurt, who was the model for traits in my character Biedenhorn.[65] He could be called a sort of Falstaff who mingles good living with a sense of entitlement. He’s back from the East, where he commands a tank company. He carries his official seal in his pocket so he can issue courier’s identification cards, tickets, ration coupons, and whatever else he wishes at will. He uses it to stretch out in special train cars along with his pilfered “courier baggage,” which he orders the conductors to guard. When hotel staff do not jump to attention, he demands a room, service, and wine in his thundering voice—leaving the hoteliers quaking and apologizing. If he wants to force his way into a room that’s off limits, as he did today when he wanted to get into the commissary of the military academy, he doesn’t use subterfuge; he inspects the guards in order to find fault with them. Then he has people brought in to carry the merchandise he purchases. All this gives him material to joke about over wine.

I talked with him for a long time in the Raphael, partly because his conversation embodies a cynical but elemental power, and also because he is significant as a type. He seems to have instinctive insight into our situation. He thinks it is old fashioned of me, one of my whims, that the injustice of this world still grieves me. He says that will never be eradicated, and at this point, I discover a gentle trait in him: the concern of the stronger for the weaker man, which is how I seem to him. This concern is quite specific: he would not feel it if I were under fire with him or attacking someone in authority of the sort that he, as an old OC-man,[66] well knows. On the other hand, it would distress him to see me come to grief as a result of my “good nature.” He has political ideas of the sort you’d find in a herd of big game. You have to avoid the dominant stags and protect yourself as long as they’re in power.

While we were conversing so casually about the temper of the times, I wondered whether or not he might still be preferable to those officers who are blindly obedient while honor goes to hell. The Landsknecht[67] represents an authentic type, a powerful contrast to the flaccid idealism that soldiers on as if things were all in order. One gets the feeling that he was, is, and will always be in all regions and at all times, and that he has nothing in common with those living corpses. As danger increases, he feels happier and becomes more necessary.

Beautiful images appear before my closed eyes while dozing. Today it was a honey-yellow agate with sepia moss-shaped inclusions. It drifted slowly past like a blossom falling into the abyss.

Those red flowers one sees now and then in the windows of darkened rooms—they are like cut gems that sparkle in the sunshine.

The tiger lily on the table in front of me. While I am observing it, all at once the six petals and six stamens fall from it like a magnificent robe rudely ripped off, leaving behind only the desiccated pistil with the ovules. At that moment, I become very aware of the force that destroys the flower. O reap your fruit, for thus do the Fates cut you down.

Went to the Latin Quarter in the afternoon, where I admired an edition of Saint-Simon in twenty-two volumes. Such a monument to historiographical passion. The work represents one of those points where modernity comes into focus.

Tea with the Doctoresse at her place. Afterward we went to see Valentiner, who had invited us to dinner. In addition to him, des Closais was there. We talked about Picasso and Léon Bloy. Des Closais told an anecdote about Bloy that I don’t believe, but have written down nonetheless because it gives a hint of the profound and perhaps not undeserved hatred of the literary establishment for this writer:

What makes the story especially suspect is the setting, which is actually not one where anyone would die. It’s also remarkable that Bloy hardly ever mentions his father in his voluminous journals, despite the fact that they are otherwise overly rich in detailed family description.

On his own deathbed, Bloy was asked what he felt as he faced death: “Une immense curiosité” [enormous curiosity].

That’s very good. He had the habit of disarming his listeners by making the first thrust.

Then there was talk about celebrities. The Contesse de Noailles had invited Marshal Joffre.

“That must have been so boring just before the Battle of the Marne.”

When he was serving, the porter clicked his heels every time he presented a platter. He had spent World War I as a trench fighter with a combat patrol. A German had bitten off one of his thumbs in hand-to-hand combat. He forbids his wife to call the Germans “Boches,” adding, “I’m allowed to say ‘Boche’ because I fought them.”

Visited Montparnasse Cemetery in the afternoon. After searching for a long time, I finally found the grave of Baudelaire, with its tall stele showing a gigantic bat with furled wings.

In the midst of all these dilapidated monuments, I paused a long time in front of the gravestone of Napoléon Charles Louis Roussel, who died on 27 February 1854 at the age of nineteen, having been an “artist” for half a year. Over the slab that his friends had paid for lay an urn that had fallen from its pedestal. It was covered with moss that gushed from it like a green life force.

I am always fascinated by the mystery surrounding such tombs of ordinary people in this sea of graves. Like tracks in the sand, they are soon erased by the wind.

In the Raphael, I read Heinrich Hansjakob, Der Theodo. I sense such a narrative gift springing from the popular imagination is now running dry. With it dies the compost of literature, the mossy flora on the roots and at the base of the trunks, and for that matter, the whole range of descriptive powers. Then the treetops start to dry out.

In the night, I dreamed about a beautiful snake; its iridescent, steel-blue scales showed labyrinthine wrinkles like those on a cherry pit. The creature was so large that I could barely put my arms around its neck; I had to carry it a long way because no cage was available.

I thought I would like to build a beautiful garden for it, but how could I construct it without having to charge an entrance fee?

The mail brought me a surprise in the form of the Griechische Götter [Greek Gods] by Friedrich Georg. These are the page proofs published by Klostermann. Even though I was familiar with the images and thoughts from conversations we had in Überlingen, reading them in this format had a very powerful effect upon me. It is beautiful how the ancient and modern worlds meet here—primeval thoughts are grasped with the perspective of our time. One feels that the German has nourished them step by step along their way and that they have reciprocated. The mythical universe is omnipresent here; it resembles the abundance that the gods conceal from us. We wander as beggars in the midst of inexhaustible riches, which the poets pay out to us in coin.

The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported. Such benign individuals would not think of defending themselves, except with reasons. Even when they kill themselves, they are not choosing the lot of the free who have retreated into their last bastions, rather they seek the night as frightened children seek their mothers. It is appalling how blind even young people have become to the sufferings of the vulnerable; they have simply lost any feeling for it. They have become too weak for the chivalrous life. They have even lost the simple decency that prevents us from injuring the weak. The opposite is true: they take pride in it.

After writing these lines before lunch, I called on Potard, that good fellow, and took him a prescription that the Doctoresse had written for me. When he brought it to me, he gave me a small bar of soap as a gift, as if he sensed that I had been directing good wishes to him. I never allow myself to forget that I am surrounded by sufferers. That is more important than any fame achieved through military or intellectual exploits, or the empty applause of youth, whose taste is erratic.

I then went to the shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré that belongs to the lady bookseller with the limp. There I examined an illustrated volume about a journey up the Nile by Carl Werner from about 1870. Looking at pictures does me good when I’m upset.

Visited Père Lachaise [Cemetery] in the afternoon. Here in the city center, not far from the overpopulated neighborhoods around the Bastille, you can enjoy one of the most tranquil walks. On a mossy path among the graves beneath the canopy of ash and acacia, I came upon an obelisk erected to the memory of the great entomologist Latreille. Just under the scarab above the inscription of his name, a silkworm larva had established itself. The scarab lifted up the ball like a sun disk. I laid a blossom on this grave and as I picked it, a small weevil fell out into my hand as a reward. It was one I lacked for my collection.

Such an old cemetery is like a quarry. Many generations have contributed to the richness of its variety as well as its individual monuments. When I was looking at many different types of granite and porphyry, I had the thought that in the world of stones, the polished finish embodies what the blossom does for plants, or the mating display for animals. It provides the place where the hidden glory and order that reside deep in matter are visible. By contrast, the crystal structure bursts forth in flowers.

A bell rings in the evening to remind visitors to leave the cemetery. You then see them pushing toward the exit, either one by one or in little groups. Their pace is faster than when they wandered around the cemetery. It is almost as though the thought of being locked into this labyrinth of death awakens a dark terror in them.

Large cemeteries like this make the unity of culture visible, especially through their power, which rests beyond all struggle. The dead have returned to their maternal ground and are now unassailable; instead of feuding with each other, the names merely accumulate. Here we can see the inviolate nature of people, like a glimpse into rooms behind the stage. Whereas there the actors become people again, here they are transmuted into spirit. The mighty dead—how could this insight ever be lost?

I returned by way of Rue de la Roquette, from which you can sometimes see the guardian spirit of the Bastille gleaming like one of the Furies in the distance.

Back in my room in the Raphael, I met a Miss Vilma Sturm who had come to seek me out for advice. Then I read some Renan and a little of the biography of the Brontës, then finally some of the Book of Job. Chapter 28 contains a foreshadowing of the immense distance separating man from wisdom: “Destruction and death say, we have heard the fame thereof with our ears.”

Finished reading Renan, Das Leben Jesu [The Life of Jesus] and in addition Robert de Traz, La Famille Brontë [The Brontë Family].

The Brontës are significant because they seem to possess an intelligence unlike that of other people—one that flows to them indiscriminately, like electric current. You can almost imagine knowledge being conducted through the earth and through the trunk of the tree until it reaches the bird’s nest and the young brood in it. Such power could endow heavenly bodies with intelligence.

This extraordinary side of the Brontës suggests that it is the rule on other stars, in other profound thought systems. In this sense, prophetic dreams that come true, second sight, and prophecies are all extraordinary. In the same way that colors exist outside the visible spectrum, there also exists a dark body of lore that is seldom individuated. The harmony and subtle interaction of our life cycles depend on its invisible influence.

This morning a Herr Sommer dropped in to see me at the Majestic and brought me greetings from Federici. We spoke about China, which he knows well, having been born there. Then, about Japan. His father, who wanted to have a pair of polo breeches made, entrusted a tailor with the task by giving him a garment purchased in England as a sample. He made it especially clear to the Japanese tailor that he was allowed to cut this model apart so that the new breeches would fit him perfectly. On the day of delivery the tailor arrived with six pairs, all matching their model like mirror images—he had even included the two patches and a worn spot on the inside of one of the knees.

Perpetua writes me that bombs fell on Hannover in the afternoon of 2 August, killing many people. When the fires started, she heard the old gravedigger Schüddekopf yelling from the cemetery, “What do you know? Now they’re coming in broad daylight!” In the parsonage, she keeps a suitcase ready, packed with some underwear and the manuscripts.

Dinner at the Morands. He did not appear because he was made a minister today. His wife represented him; I also saw the new prefect of police and Princess Murat. I had a conversation with the prefect about what the underworld was up to on Rue de Lappe. He was not pleased to hear that I take walks there.

Tallemant des Réaux. I am reading his Historiettes [Brief Histories] right now, and I find they surpass Saint-Simon’s history when it comes to meaty substance. They give a kind of social zoology.

Yesterday I heard an amusing anecdote about the Marquis de Roquelaure. It conveys the comedy well and exposes the source of the humor as the clash between social conventions and natural artistic relations. During a ball, Madame Auber took Roquelaure by the hand, whereupon he plucked a steward’s sleeve and asked him whether it was permissible to dance with this bourgeois woman. The event was turned into a satirical rhyme:

[Rocquelaure is a dancer of importance; / But? / If he does not understand [how to make] the connection / He will never dance at all.]

Dropped by Valentiner’s in the evening. There, in addition to des Closais, I met a young pilot who is commanding a tank company on the islands. Darkness fell gradually during our conversation; bats fluttered about the old gables, and swifts settled into their nests. A city like this has its animal element, like a coral reef.

Walked back to the Étoile with des Closais. We talked about the obelisks and the way they seem to stand in the great squares as magical cynosures, symbols of spiritual rectitude. They imbue the world of stone with meaning. I sometimes think I see sparks shooting from their tips. It is lovely when they glow in different colors, perhaps red, or are illuminated by an errant ray of light, but glimpsing them can also be frightening. In them we sense the life of cities devoid of people, where their shadows count the hours like a gnomon.

Conversed about Boëthius and in that context about the threats of our own age, which, despite everything, need not distract individuals from their normal mode of life—the stillness at the heart of the waterfall. Des Closais observed that this presumed a reference to some point of stasis. He recalled that this was how he had always braved his fear of thunderstorms as a child, sustained by the thought that, high above the clouds the blue heavens were shining unchanged.

D.—an appalling man. Made aware of this because every day six to ten people in his forced labor camp die from lack of nourishment and medication, and yet relief is supposed to be provided: “Have them enlarge the cemetery.”

I wonder whether we ever agreed to our fate at some decisive point in our preexistence. Perhaps we selected it, as if from among a pile of costumes before a masked ball. But the light in which we rummaged around in the anteroom where we made this hasty decision showed the material with its true meaning in the game of life. Perhaps then the beggar’s tattered garment appeared more desirable than a regal robe.

I’m reading Diable amoureux [The Devil in Love, 1772] again and find that the most significant passage is the one in which Biondetta explains that the world is not ruled by chance, but by a system of finely balanced inevitabilities, from the course of the stars down to the petty trifles of the gaming table. It seems that cosmic events are determined by a secret law of numbers, which explains why the future is unknowable.

After this explanation, she gives Alvarez a few signals that help him win at faro. Even though he takes no money from her, he does not consider this sort of help to be cheating.

That is a subtle detail, for in the Kabbala the devil actually reaches his greatest heights when all traces of his origin are obliterated. By such means, it would be possible to form holy names, the Lord’s Prayer, or passages of scripture by applying automatic calculations to create infinite sequences of numbers and combinations. Texts generated in this manner would, of course, merely have the semblance of the letters in common with the true ones, but not possess their meaning and healing power.

Although Alvarez does not recognize all these connections, his reaction is a nice countermove that shows his basically healthy character: after a winning streak, he tires of the game of faro.

Human beings are privileged in not knowing the future. That is one of the diamonds in our diadem of free will. If we were to lose it, we would become automatons in a world of machines.

In the night, I dreamt of the trenches of World War I. I was in the dugout, but this time the children were sitting with me, and I was showing them picture books. I then went outside and stretched out in a bomb crater. The earth had been turned to powder by the shelling. I rubbed the soft crumbs together in my hands, recognizing it as I did so as the material from which we are made and to which we shall return. I could hardly tell the difference between the soil and my own hand. I lay there like a mummy surrounded by concentrated essence of mummies.

A letter from Schlichter containing photos of some powerful new pictures and drawings. I look forward to good things from his illustrations for One Thousand and One Nights.

I was with Friedrich Georg on a cliff at the edge of a desert. We were throwing stones at a little piece of something the size of a snail shell that glistened like a piece of lapis lazuli. We talked about the distance we had to keep from it because it was such highly explosive material. It is odd that our dream conversations so often have to do with the physical world, while in our waking state our discussions are about art.

We then made our way down and gathered insects at the damp grassy edge of the desert. They were unlike any genus I was familiar with. I considered whether I should even be taking them, for they differed so greatly from the structures inherent in their type that I took no pleasure in collecting them. I found myself confronting the demiurge like a child who says, “I’m not playing anymore.”

Went to the Bagatelle in the afternoon to admire the beautiful flowers, among them the Dolichos vine [hyacinth bean] with its magnificent broad, purple-lilac seedpod—this living thing that does not flaunt its blossoms but rather its fruit.

Then the Virginia jasmine with its large, slit blossoms that reach upward like blazing trumpets—a decoration for garden gates in One Thousand and One Nights. Star clematis—the flower flies, in their tiger colors, hovered around them, suspended in space, quivering spasmodically over the sea of blossoms.

Resting in the grotto. It stands over dirty green water, where a large golden orfe with its dark, scaly back, was swimming. It went past like a dark shadow in the depths, shimmering ever brighter as it rose lazily and then broke the surface with a burst of incandescence.

Probably influenced by these things, I dreamed at night of a bookplate that I would like to own. It showed a swordfish breaking the surface of the water from a matte black background in India ink; it was delicate, Japanese, with an antique gold border. When I woke up, I felt so joyous from the sight of this image that I wanted to have an engraving made, but by daylight this charm faded. The joy we feel in dreams is like the joy of childhood. Within minutes after awakening, we grow into adulthood.

Finished reading Jean Cocteau, Essai de Critique Indirecte [Essay of Indirect Criticism]. It contains the prophetic dream that the author had already recounted to me when we met at Calvet’s. As for me, I can’t remember dreams like that, and experiences often seem as though I had just dreamed them. At one point they were experienced most profoundly as Platonic ideas—that is far more important than their literal fulfillment. This is the way one should consider death so as to become used to the idea of it.

I noted the following good observations: “Surnaturelle hier, naturel demain.” [Supernatural yesterday, natural tomorrow.] Certainly true, for the natural laws that Konstanz Renan makes such a fuss about will always adjust to reality. They are like the musical accompaniment that falls silent as soon as things become dramatic. Existence knows no law.

One could probably put that a bit more cautiously: natural laws are those that we perceive. At all points, when we ourselves enter the equation, we can no longer perceive them.

Technology has now been so profoundly implemented that even after the domination of the technicians and their major premises has been broken, we are going to have to deal with its remnants. The terrible fate of its victims is built into this system. Thus, it will remain, in the same way that the ancient law still held sway after the appearance of Christ—as one of our memories, along with its human residue. The real question is whether these memories curtail freedom. Probably a new form of slavery is the result. This can be reconciled with comfort and even the possession of power—but the chains remain in place. Nonetheless, free men know each other and are recognizable by a new nimbus that suffuses them. Perhaps we are talking only about small groups that preserve freedom, probably among its victims, yet the spiritual gain compensates for its losses many times over.

The flowers, the birds, the gems—those things of glowing color or pungent aroma. The sight of them fills us with longing for their places of origin.

Saturday and Sunday in Vaux-de-Cernay at the house of Rambouillet, as a guest of the commander-in-chief, who is using this old monastery as his summer residence. My stay here has the advantage that I can do and say what I think is right and not be seen by any lemures. The woodsy surroundings are damp, even swampy, which reflects the rule of the Cistercians, who built like beavers. I saw the venerable and unpretentious gravestone of the early abbot Theobaldus, known as Saint Thibaut de Marly.

While there, I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a story that superbly describes the transformation of civilized optimism into utter bestiality. Two Philistines come to the Congo to make money, and there they adopt cannibalistic habits. In broader contexts, Burckhardt described this process as “rapid decay.” Both men heard the overture of our age. Conrad perceives something more clearly than Kipling, and that is Anglo-Saxon constancy in transitional situations. That is a remarkable and unpredictable trait in our world, which might sooner have been prophesied of the Prussians. The difference between them, however, lies in the fact that the Englishman can tolerate a significantly greater dose of anarchy. If the two were innkeepers in squalid neighborhoods, the Prussian would expect the regulations to be followed in every room. In doing so, he would actually be preserving a certain veneer of order while the entire building was being devoured by nihilism from the inside out. The Englishman would turn a blind eye to the growing disorder at first and just keep on filling the glasses and collecting the money until finally, when the racket on the floor above got out of hand, he would take a few of the customers upstairs, and together they would beat the others to a pulp.

From the standpoint of character analysis, the Englishman has the advantage over the Prussian in being phlegmatic, while the other is sanguine; objectively, he has the advantage of the seaman over the landlubber. Seafaring people are used to greater fluctuation. Add to this the frequently noted superiority of the Norman genetic material, which is more favorable for the creation of a leader class than the common Germanic stock. In any case, it is better that such cousins stand back to back, or rather shoulder to shoulder—as they did at Belle-Alliance [Waterloo]—instead of nose to nose. This was always the goal of Prussian policy, which was good as long as landowners were in charge of it, and not people elected by a democratic plebiscite. Naturally, the influence of the soil diminishes when population numbers rise and there is a shift to the large cities. But the influence of the seas grows. That is an important difference. We talked about these things over dinner, and then about the situation in general.

Took a walk later in the woods with Herr Schnath, the director of the Hanoverian Archives. The conservation and lore of strange old things, especially those of Lower Saxony reminds one of ritualistic purification rites with smoke, or of a world of images still present in the moor and the turf, redolent with the smell of fire and earth. The tradition relates to the demons of the landscape, and turns into a sort of ghost hunt. Historical fact intrudes into this twilight realm, as in the case of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.[68] Without any outside sources, that event would have been woven into mythology long ago. In the midst of the tools of the peat-cutting culture in the Hanoverian Museum, the silver treasure of Hildesheim shone brilliantly. Its character appeals to me; it indicates the superiority of the Norns over the formulaic history depicted on it. No matter how colorfully and richly the thread may be dyed, they spin and cut it, and then the pattern fades down the river of time, and only the warp of the fabric remains—that ancient, gray sensibility common to us all since time immemorial.

The general came around to the topic of the Russian cities and said that it was important for me to be aware of them, especially with respect to particular corrections in “the figure of the worker.”[69] I responded by saying that for quite a while I have been considering a visit to New York for my sins, but I that was not opposed to a command on the eastern front.

Visit to the Bois in the afternoon, then tea at Madame Morand’s in her garden, where the top of the Eiffel Tower looks down over the tallest trees onto the marble paving stones. Heller, Valentiner, Rantzau, and the Marquise de Polignac were there; she and I compared memories of the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo. She said that the sight of this morbid parade of death awakened in her a mad lust for life, and that when she emerged into the daylight, she felt tempted to throw herself at the first decent man to cross her path. Perhaps that was why mummies were thought to have aphrodisiac qualities in ancient times.

Capriccio: I wonder whether these ancient arts of embalming might still provide nourishment nowadays, and whether in the necropolises you could give a feast with bread made of wheat from the pyramids, broth from the steer god Apis. Then one could excavate carbonized flesh from the necropolises the way we do carbonized plants from coal in coalmines. That would be an inferior form of nourishment, just as coal is an inferior fuel source.

Destroyed papers in the morning, including my plan for an effective peace that I had composed last winter.

Conversation with Carlo Schmid, who came to my room and told me about his son again, as well as about his dreams and the Baudelaire translation he has now finished.

I bought a notebook in a stationery shop on Avenue Wagram. I was in uniform. I was struck by the expression on the face of a young girl behind the counter: it was clear that she was staring at me with incredible hatred. The pupils of her light blue eyes were like pinpoints; she met my gaze quite openly with a kind of relish—a relish the scorpion uses to pierce his prey with the barb in his tail. I felt that this intensity of human emotion had not existed for a long time. The shafts of such glaring looks can bring us nothing but ruin and death. I sense that it wants to spread like an epidemic or a spark that can be extinguished only deep inside, with difficulty and self-control.

To the Ritz at noon with Wiemer who wants to visit Poupet and Hercule in Marseille in the next few days. Discussion of the situation. “Nous après le déluge” [We (shall be here) after the deluge.].

Called on Charmille for tea right after that. We ate on the Rue de Duras and afterward, crossed the Rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Étoile under strong sheet lightning. On our way, we occasionally heard the crickets chirping in the bakeries; our conversation was wide-ranging and retrospective in nature.

Current reading: Schlegel’s Lucinda, which gives me the impression that here Romanticism could have turned into a way of life, the way details have become perpetuated in bad style through Gentz and Varnhagen [von Ense]. Here there are just intimations and foreshadowing. Perhaps one day they will form a melody. Then Romanticism would emerge as an intricate prelude to exquisite and refined attainments of our later culture. Today, one can still sense the urge with which it tries to capture talented individuals; it resembles a spirit that influences us with its design and demands to find form in flesh and blood. These individuals can also transform anything into the Romantic mode, as Ludwig II did to the Versailles of Louis XIV, or the way Wagner transformed the world of the Norse gods. The Romantic key fits ninety-nine treasure houses; madness and death lurk in the hundredth.

Friedrich Georg writes to me that during the last attack on Hamburg, the type for his second edition of Illusionen der Technik [Illusions of Technology] was melted in the fire.

The Doctoresse picked me up in the evening for a walk through the old neighborhoods by the light of the full moon. At the monument to Henri IV, we went down to the Square du Vert-Galant, where we saw lights in the ships’ galleys, and it smelled of stagnant water. We talked about Platen’s poetry, whose beauty she compared to the harsh brilliance of the moonlight—secondhand light. Let Eros bathe in reflected light.

At times I have difficulty distinguishing between my conscious and unconscious existence. I mean between that part of my life that has been knit together by dreams and the other, by the day. It’s similar when I try to create images and characters—when I work as an author, many things coalesce into flesh and blood and develop lives of their own.

Man could disappear into the images that he himself has invented in the role of sorcerer, but actually the opposite must happen: the images must raise him up into the light, and then they can fall from him like petals from the fruit.

At the moment, we are in the process of implementing the exact opposite dynamic from that of the Romantics. Where they dove deep into things, we rise upward. This new, clearer vision is still painful, still unfamiliar.

“Les tape-durs” [the stubborn, hard-headed ones]. This is what the Septembriseurs[70] call themselves. The word contains a frightening tenderness, evoking something of the world’s malicious child’s play.

Still no news of my journey to the East. At noon had a conversation with Weinstock about Plato and his contemporary appeal. These ideas come to me after having read Friedrich Georg’s Griechische Götter [Greek Gods].

In the afternoon, I had a visit in the Majestic from a Herr S., an owner of factories that make electrical equipment. He posed the question whether moral man is prepared to enter reality today and whether there is any prospect for this. We discussed this a long time, calling to mind Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Stavrogin.

My visitor seemed to be animated by a certain pragmatic moralism, or Utopian­ism, a kind of substantiated rationality like that of the Jesuit fathers who commissioned the vault in Saint Michael’s Church in Munich. The philosophical tract that was popular one hundred and fifty years ago, The Economy of Human Life,[71] came to mind.

It’s good to keep the concrete world in sight and close at hand when having such abstract discussions. It’s like a great machine in which the momentum of our conversation sometimes powers a piston and at others, a flywheel.

We can seek another person with the intention of being particularly cordial or particularly intimate that day, yet that is no protection against annoyance. The tuning of the strings to produce a harmonious chord is not controlled by our will. This often happens to me with encounters I’ve been looking forward to—they seem chilly, and the proper harmony is not reestablished until days or weeks later.

Dreams of clouds last night. They looked like massive ribbons of snow, with edges of soil, like the clumps of earth children used to roll along the ground in wet weather in the spring thaw.

In the afternoon I went to visit le Moult on the sixth floor of a house on Rue Duméril to examine his insect collection. The door was opened by a stout gentleman sixty years old with a full white beard who had obviously been debilitated by his many years in the tropics. He left me alone for a moment in a large room; its walls were covered with cases full of butterflies the way a library would be with books. I saw an aquarium, and a ring-necked dove flew down toward me from the top of one of the cabinets. It cooed at me and hopped onto the index finger of my hand. Then le Moult returned and showed me his magnificent butterflies from the Solomon Islands and other archipelagoes of the world. Here I was again reminded of the strange enterprise of accumulating hundreds of thousands of tiny colorful mummies—there is something Egyptian about the activity. These arts, he says, seem so tenuous in our world of destruction. A single such case often represents the result of many years of the most painstaking work. That explains why le Moult poured out his heart with a distraught account of an anti-aircraft shell that had quite recently exploded nearby.

At night I dreamed of climbing a mountain. From a small rivulet, I picked out a green fish with seven pairs of eyes, those in the front were blue, the ones at the back still in an indistinct embryonic stage. When I ascended higher into the icy mountain terrain, the fish stopped moving and froze in my hand. I then entered a mountain chapel.

Visited Bagatelle in the afternoon with Charmille. There was a yellow lantana blossom with a red center. The bloom is like velvet and gives forth a delicate velvet aroma. This attracts the butterflies, especially the swallowtail, which hovers over it with outspread wings as it inserts its proboscis into the colorful recesses. I’ve seen these in the Azores, but they were violet, and I’m always overcome by a feeling of homesickness when the sight reminds me of those Hesperides. On those islands and on the Canaries and on the mountains of Rio de Janeiro, I spent hours that revealed to me that there must have been a paradise—so solitary and beautiful, often majestic. Even the sun seemed to shine with a different light, more divine. In such hours, out of all the evils of our modern age, only one remained: that the moment had to pass.

Went by the new antiquarian bookshop I have discovered: Gonod on the Rue de Miromesnil. A new bookdealer means a new hobbyhorse. I especially liked a little square room completely lined with books. I bought the memoirs of Baron Grimm, whose writing, in addition to his letters, will always remain a choice morsel for connoisseurs. Each volume bore the bookplate of a Baron de Crisenoy, “Je regarde et je garde” [I watch and I guard]—a proud motto. In addition, I picked up a detailed account of the shipwreck of the American brig La Sophie (Paris, 1821). And finally, L’Art du Duel [The Art of the Duel] by Tavernier signed by the author to A. Gerschell, whom he identifies as the “king of photographers.” Just to poke around among all these things is informative; memory retains in passing a mass of names and dates, and although these facts erode, they deposit a kind of compost in the mind, which nurtures later growth of diffuse knowledge. This can be superior to precision, as it consists of nuances of contour and intellectual currents. Thus, none of my many walks along the quais is ever in vain—just as the appeal of the hunt lies in the chase, not in bagging the prey.

The first of September—along the Quais de la Seine, there already extends a pattern of yellow, jagged, heart-shaped poplar leaves. We are now entering the fourth year of this war.

Called on Valentiner in the evening to watch darkness climb over the rooftops. The swallows and swifts had already moved on. Later, to the Tuileries with Charmille. We sat on a bench as the big dipper sparkled overhead and talked about the flower with the golden calyx, the flower of imagination.

My current reading: Paul Morand, Vie de Guy de Maupassant [The Life of Guy de Maupassant]. These are bouquets, flowers interlaced with variegated spiders and snakeheads. Incidentally, one should not become the biographer of anyone one does not love.

Visited Parc de Bagatelle in the afternoon. The leaves are turning yellow and asters are coming into bloom. Intimate conversation in the pavilion.

Slept poorly at night. There is a sort of dream in which only thoughts form instead of images. We cannot seem to penetrate the deeper vaults of the structure to find solutions.

Went to Valentiner’s in the evening; Henri de Montherlant was there, as well as Nebel, who had come from the islands. Nebel told us about a prophecy from the sixteenth century that had foretold the destruction of Cologne for our time. He claimed that it had been fulfilled quite literally and concretely, for only the city center within its sixteenth-century limits had been demolished. Then, a discussion of American values, which will be further promoted by the obliteration of our old cities.

Further conversation about de Quincey; Nebel had brought an English edition with him that made my mouth water. Talk of bullfighting, which had encouraged Montherlant to run away from home when he was a boy. About the Duke of Saint-Simon and the memoirs of Primi Visconti from the court of Louis XIV. Montherlant told the anecdote about the Comte de Guiche that he had run across and which he mentions in one of his books.

Breakfast at the Morands’, where, in addition to them, I also saw Benoist-Méchin. Talked about Maupassant on the occasion of Morand’s biography. He said he owned a large number of unknown letters by this author. Then talk about d’Annunzio, whom Benoist-Méchin once visited on his island. On his little battleship, d’Annunzio fired off salutes to honor various nations after toasting each of them briefly. At the end, after a particularly heartfelt acclamation of France, the powder from the guns settled into a ring around the ship, which gradually rose into the air. At this d’Annunzio said to his guests, “Do you now believe I am a poet?”

Benoist-Méchin then talked about the recruitment of the 650,000 workers that Germany is demanding of France, and about the prospects and disadvantages that await them. Among these he listed the increased dangers for central Europe that such an accumulation of rootless individuals brings with it from a purely technical aspect, and for France, particular danger by virtue of proximity.

This cabinet minister gives the impression of incisive intelligence. His error lies in the fact that he made the wrong decision at the crossroads. He now finds himself upon a path that is becoming ever narrower and more impassable. In this situation, he has to step up his activity, although the results will diminish. In this way his energies are dissipated: his desperate measures will ultimately lead to his downfall. Europe resembles a beautiful woman with too many suitors. She is holding out for the right one.

Then I met Charmille at the Eiffel Tower in the Parc de Bagatelle. The asters are beginning to bloom, one in particular bears myriads of pale gray buds hardly larger than pinheads on its bushes. The flower thus brings honor to its name, as if it were reflecting the firmament in a microcosm.

Went to the Ritz in the evening with Humm to hear the correspondent for the Kölnische Zeitung [Cologne newspaper], Mariaux and his wife. Mariaux reported that in the turmoil of this war, fire had destroyed all his notes and manuscripts, the result of thirty years of work. He compared the condition he’s been in since then to that of Peter Schlemihl, the man who lost his shadow.[72]

His misfortune made me wonder whether or not I should publish certain of my unpublished materials, like my travel journals, earlier than I had planned to. Appearing in print is a safety measure against these types of losses.

During these past years, solipsism has emerged as a particularly difficult hurdle in the evolution of my thought. This is not only a product of isolation, it is also related to a temptation to embrace misanthropy, a trait that one cannot resist strongly enough in oneself. When surrounded by these crowds who have renounced free will, I feel more and more alienated, and sometimes it seems as if these people were not even there or that they were merely specious outlines constructed of half-demonic, half-mechanical materials.

Active solipsism: the power that lets us dream the world. We dream ourselves into health or death; if we could dream more powerfully, we would become immortal. That is seductive, yet you always have to think of the dangers, the way Ruysbroeck L’Admirable saw them and described them in his Mirror of Eternal Salvation: “One finds other, evil, and diabolical men who say they are God, that heaven and earth were made by their hands, and that they received Him along with everything else that exists.”

These are the temptations of theological speculation, like those visible in the Thebais.[73] How puny by comparison is the entire world of technology.

Sunday stroll to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. It is my habit to have a leisurely breakfast there in the inn Chez Yvette. Then I walk up the hill to a large park abandoned by its owner. A good cigar for its gatekeeper, the disabled veteran who opens this overgrown garden. I rest on a solitary slope overgrown with low chestnut bushes with a view of green stands of fir and oak, the jays and woodpeckers flying back and forth among them. In the rhythm of resting and thinking, the afternoon passes all too quickly.

The riddle of life—before it, blocking the way, hangs the combination lock of the mind doing its job. The outrageous aspect of this job is that the contents of the safe change according to the method applied to gain access to it. If the lock is ever broken open, it evaporates.

Doucement! [Carefully!] The more delicately we finger it, the more remarkable are the combinations that are revealed. By the same token, they also become simpler. Ultimately, we begin to sense that we are gaining access to our own breast, to our self, and that the riddle of the world is a reflection of the riddle of life. The treasures of the cosmos now pour in.

Current reading: Progressing in the Bible, which I have been engaged in systematically for a year. Among the Psalms, Psalm 139 struck me especially, for it is an expression of divine physics. This can be called monistic, because one trunk bears a branched system of contradictions. God is present as far as the depths of hell, and the darkness illuminates Him as the light. He inhabits matter, sees our bones growing in the womb, and knows their future.

For our thought processes, this psalm sets itself completely apart from the others by its perfect intelligibility. Compared with others, such as the powerful Psalm 90, it is more modern in the same sense that Thucydides is more modern than Herodotus. In contrast with the other songs of destiny, it is composed of the highest spiritual content. Verses 19–22 seem to break down and, if I am not mistaken, appear to be by a different author. On the other hand, verse 14 is lovely, when man thanks God for having created him “wonderfully made.” It makes sense that piety is only imaginable between wonderful beings. The animals express their praise through their behavior and their magnificent coloration, but for this purpose, man has been given the Word.

Further reading includes the story Quitt by Fontane. As I was reading, the thought came to me that a powerful narrative gift can sometimes be a detriment to an author, since delicate intellectual plankton cannot thrive in a swift flood of writing. The fact is that narrative talent was originally a rhetorical gift and thus does not conform to the pen but drags that instrument too quickly in its wake. Of course, it usually reveals a healthy nature, yet lends itself equally easily to a kind of optimism that assays men and things too superficially. But when poetic and narrative power remain in equilibrium at a high level, incomparable creations result—as in Homer. The ancient bards did not separate rhetorical and poetic craft, and fiction was born spontaneously of the quill. This presupposes that poetry is the mother tongue of the human race, as Hamann suggests.

Finally, Maurice de Guérin. In many respects, he represents the highest quality. For example, in the way that his language not only mediates feelings and sensations but is in itself a thoroughly sentimental, animated presence that requires taste to its last syllable. Because Guérin is master of this free spirit, which transforms clay into flesh and blood, his language is called as no other to delineate and describe a pantheistically animated world.

I noticed that in a journal entry of 6 February 1833, Guérin gives a list of German poets, yet he does not mention Novalis, whose life and works possess many similarities to his own.

Wednesday afternoon in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Among the combined stock of the pheasant house, I noticed a small pair of Sumatra chickens—black, with a deep green luster, making a magnificent display in the full sunshine. The male is powerful and does not only carry the long, curved tail plumage upright in a crescent form as our roosters do but can also drag it like an Oriental train. This finery especially befits an animal perched in a tree, as it can then display a cascade of metallic green.

Why do we feel such a strong sense of delight when something so familiar, like our good old domestic rooster, reappears in an unexpected guise—transformed on islands beyond the charted seas? This has such a powerful effect on me that I sometimes find myself close to tears. I believe that in such moments, the unimaginably concentrated essence inherent in familiar images is revealed to us. Such a creature seems to be gravid with life, even down to his last cell, and flourishing there magnificently in those zones, it unfurls its profusion. It is the one thing, the archetype visible to us in these bewitching games. The sight even induces a giddy feeling: we plunge from the iridescent effect of the plumage down to the animal’s very essence. The hierarchy of rainbows: it is imaginable that the whole universe was built according to an archetype and finds its variation in a myriad of solar systems.

Herein lies the charm of collecting, not in any sense of completeness. It’s a matter of finding points of reference in all this multiplicity that indicate a creative energy. That is both the meaning of gardens and ultimately the meaning of the path of life itself.

Then tea in the shade of the trees in the Pavillon d’Armenonville at the edge of the tiny pool of the same name. The gentle strokes of the fishes’ fins or the fall of a ripe chestnut drew delicate circles of ripples across its surface; they crisscrossed to form an exquisite latticework that reflected the magnificent green of the trees. This network seemed to become ever more delicate at the edges, so that the leaves of a tall catalpa tree in the center were reflected in ovals, only to blur into green bands at the shore and then flutter like flags in a breeze before returning to the deep.

Thought: “This is the way we ought to spread the new message—pedagogically, using images that reflect familiar concepts. In this focused area the less restrictive law holds sway.” But isn’t this the way it is? Innovation works by attaching itself to what is acceptable as a gentle contradiction, a possible gradation. Then it turns things inside out. We should be able to trace this in the history of painting, using examples that evolve from the use of shadow, mirrors, twilight, or darkness. Incidentally, history shows something similar: innovation bides its time in reflections and at the creative margins; it influences intellectual games, utopias, philosophical theories—and then it gradually becomes concrete, finally seeping in as if by osmosis. The boats that bring the prophets of destiny land in the twilight on distant shores.

Not to be forgotten are both of those kingfishers whizzing around here at the edge of the metropolis over cushions of duckweed. They make their nests in the small tributary that feeds the little pond. Of all the facets of this gemlike animal, I find its display of tail feathers most beautiful—their azure blue backs flash like turquoise dust.

Current reading: Harold Begbie, Pots Cassés [Broken Earthenware, 1909]. This book, translated from the English, describes the lives of a series of proletarian Londoners. They have all fallen—physically, spiritually, and morally—into the mire and then have been converted. The book makes it clear just how far an institution like the Anglican Church has strayed from its original mission and how it forsook the pure practice of saving souls. In the terrible chaos of decline, we need guides who know exactly what the drowning man is struggling to breathe. This is where we can learn from the sects, especially the Salvation Army, which can be viewed as the most recent of our great holy orders. As the Benedictines built on the heights and the Cistercians down in the swamps, they have chosen the big cities as their sphere of influence, and from these desperate wastelands, developed their rule of conduct and their tactics.

The efforts of these men and women are even more important for their pioneering than for the huge treasure of good works that they have performed. Just as pioneers throw themselves into the breach of an attack, the salvation and conversion of the individual precede the onslaught of faith on the masses. The masses lead superficial lives, ignorant of their innermost nature. Yet they crave knowledge of this, and to relish it better than their means would allow, they accept a little piece of spiritual bread.

The details included a passage about alcohol that I liked. Long quotations without sources are included claiming that the irresistible attraction of alcohol is not caused by physical enjoyment, but by its mystical power. It is thus not depravity that leads the unfortunate man to it, but rather hunger for spiritual power. Drink gives the poor and uneducated what others derive from music and libraries: it provides them with enhanced reality. It leads them from the edges of reality into its innermost workings. For many, this narrow zone in which they experience a breath of air is a place close to the realm of inebriation. Consequently, people make a considerable mistake in thinking they can combat drunkenness as a species of gluttony focused on liquid.

The air and nitrogen oxide are cited as keys to this mystical insight. They give us a glimpse of a deeper truth that is revealed as one falls from precipice to precipice. This is absolutely correct, and is also described in the little study by Maupassant about the ether that I translated many years ago. The author considers the possibility that there does not have to be only a single condition of consciousness, but rather many different ones, separated by membranes—membranes that can be permeable in a state of hallucination.

I pursued some similar thoughts when I was studying various kinds of hallucinatory states. I pictured normal consciousness as a disk attached horizontally to an axis. Depending on the drug administered, the varieties of intoxication change the angles of the axis, and with that the orientation of the plane, and with that the characters, which light up. One full revolution of this disk completes the sum of these changes, and with it the entire mental universe in spherical form. Once I have voyaged across all the seas of hallucination, rested upon all its islands, passed time in all its bays, and explored all its archipelagoes and magical cities, then I have completed that great circle—that journey around the earth in a thousand nights and have traversed the equator of my consciousness. That is the grand tour, the excursion into the mental cosmos, that place where countless adventurers have come to grief.

I sat on a bench near the Étoile during the afternoon and fed pigeons; they were so trusting that they perched their little coral-colored feet on my hand. The sight of a pigeon’s neck always carries me back to childhood. It was a time when nothing seemed more wonderful than this green, golden, and purple play of color that the tiny feathers produce when the bird pecks grains from the earth, or when the male parades before the female making his cooing sound. In this dazzling display, the modest gray pigmentation is transmuted into a higher opalescent hue igniting the light concealed deep within.

Walked along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the company of Charmille, who encouraged me to buy a little paperback she saw lying in the window of an antiquarian bookshop. It was apparently a translation from a manuscript by an ancient Brahmin.[74] In fact, a casual glance revealed it to be a good find. In addition, I also bought the Histoire Générale des Larrons [General History of Thieves] by d’Aubricourt in the editio princeps [first printed edition] of 1623.

We sat for a while on the Place du Tertre in the garden of Mère Cathérine and then ambled around Sacré Coeur in lazy spirals. The city has become my second spiritual home and represents more and more strongly the essence of what I love and cherish about ancient culture.

At the age of three, children display the full dignity of the moral person, combined with exhilaration, which they later lose.

Visited Vincennes in the afternoon, where a particular reason led me to pay a call on the old woman who used to be my concierge. Our acquaintances are like colored strings that fate has placed in our hands. When we combine and braid them, we see patterns whose value and order determine the measure of harmony granted to us. Not everybody knows how to husband these resources.

Walked with Charmille in the Forest of Vincennes. We discussed what these years had brought and the chaos we see approaching. The weather was rainy; the damp paths were strewn with shiny chestnuts.

In the night I dreamed about the soldiers I was with. They were wearing small round medals on their chests, awarded for having shot the wounded. I concluded from their conversation that these were awarded by some international organization and had the endorsement of something like the Red Cross: “Quite right. That is the point on which you still agree.”

Poupet and Heller paid me a visit in the Raphael. We talked about the memoirs of Caillaux, which have just appeared with Plon. Poupet said that at a recent dinner he had seen Madame Caillaux, who had shot the publisher Calmette in 1914. She appeared wearing elbow-length red gloves.

Objects that have absorbed aromas for years have particular appeal: mortars, bath towels, spice grinders, or sometimes whole buildings, like the ancient pharmacies or tobacco storehouses that I saw in Bahia.

Have been reading documents and contemporary accounts of events during the French Revolution. The fate of the royal family is so melancholy and opens up such depressing insights into the shame of the human race. It is as if one were seeing swarms of rats surrounding defenseless victims, ultimately to pounce on them.

In the afternoon, Claus Valentiner dropped by the Majestic and gave me an edition of the works of Vico issued by Michelet in 1835.

Walked in the rain through the Forest of Vincennes. We took the path around Lac des Minimes with its islands and, at the edge of the woods, watched people bowling. Their casual nonchalance had amused me greatly once when I was here with Höll. There you encounter men between forty and sixty years of age, mostly lower-level civil servants and businessmen. From behind a pair of boundary lines on a cement lane, they pitch metal balls approximately the size of their open hand and try to hit a smaller ball roughly the size of a pomegranate. They give the impression that the fall of empires, the collapse of military campaigns, are here only vaguely comprehended. It is restorative to watch these games—like being among philosophers.

We then visited the stalls of a small circus and watched a jack-of-all-trades who was in makeup as he was energetically scrubbing three elephants in the courtyard before their performance. The rain ran down the tent and formed puddles at the edges. One of the elephants furtively used his trunk to fish out chopped straw that had been washed into them by the rain. He formed little balls of his pickings and crammed them contentedly into his mouth. To make them completely presentable, after their toilette was finished, this jack-of-all-trades forced them to relieve themselves. When he cracked his whip and shouted “chi-chi-chi,” the obedient beasts stood up on their hind legs and produced tremendous amounts of water and excrement.

The jack-of-all-trades was apparently afraid that he was not going to finish the cleaning process before the beginning of the performance. This increased the humor of the process significantly. In general the comical nature of such absurd activities, like making elephants move their bowels, is enhanced by the level of seriousness motivating the pursuit. This is also the key to the real comedy in Don Quixote, which is raised to the third power there when the narrator seems to take the adventure seriously.

Very wakeful night, tossed and turned feverishly, but still the hours fly by. I glide across the surface of sleep without sleeping, the way one does on black ice.

As is my habit, I traced the paths of times past, step by step. When I do this, I land on an island and awaken memories. This time I was again climbing the mountains of Las Palmas. The air was filled with the spray of a heavy, warm rain, and I saw the fennel in all its wondrous freshness—its green sap pulsing through the delicate gossamer of its emerald veins. The heart of the plant was revealed. These were perhaps my most exalted moments on this earth, more yielding than the embraces of beautiful women. When I bent down over such a miracle of life, I had to fight for breath, as though submerged by a wave rising from a blue sea. A small star-shaped blossom is no less an object of veneration than the entire firmament.

Thought: All night we sleep with our bodies in the same position, but our state of mind is always making its way through new underbrush, encountering a new ambush. Thus, we often lie in sinister places on isolated terrain, infinitely far from our goal. This accounts for the often inexplicable fatigue after deep sleep.

Perpetua writes me that the most recent attack on Munich destroyed Rodolphe’s studio. Fortunately, none of his pictures were stored there. The loss of the portrait that I sat for in Überlingen would not have bothered me much.

Siegler dropped by in the morning and told me about the attack on Hamburg. The firebombs were dropped in batches of up to seventy pieces. To keep the fire brigades from extinguishing them, every tenth bomb was packed with explosives. When the print shop was in flames, fifteen hundred fires were already raging in the city.

In the evening heard a lecture by a little Mauritanian with a certain cynical complacency who spoke about propaganda techniques used to influence the masses. This type of man is certainly novel, or at least in comparison to the nineteenth century, downright new. The advantage that people like this truly possess lies in their negative qualities. They have thrown off the moral baggage sooner than the majority of other people and introduced the laws of mechanical engineering into politics. But this advantage will be overtaken—not by moral human beings, who are necessarily inferior to them relative to their unrestrained violence—but rather by people just like them who have learned at their feet. Ultimately, the stupidest man says to himself, “if he respects nothing, then why should he insist we respect him?”

It is, therefore, an error to expect religion and piety to restore order. Animalistic tendencies are produced at the zoological level, and demonic ones on the demonic level. This means that the shark is devoured by the leviathan and the Devil by Beelzebub.

Corrected the Letters from Norway.[75] I had doubts about “molten rivers of lead.” Unjustified, because rivers can also be frozen and solid.

The flaw that I sense here is incidentally inherent in language itself and is a result of one of the tiny spaces in the mosaic. Language lacks the concept “solid river” as an independent noun.

The ventral side of many terrestrial animals, such as the flat fishes, the turbellaria [flatworms], and the snakes, is drab. Nature is a frugal painter.

Visited the National Library in the afternoon. The catalogue room—I often wished I could possess folios where I could look up every printed book. But here one sees the research tools no individual could own, no matter how rich he might be. These match the stature of the Great Man, that is to say, the state. So it is with this system of catalogues. Standing before them, one senses an intellectual mechanism designed by a methodical mind.

Here I spoke with Dr. Fuchs, who is working on a comprehensive catalogue of German libraries, which will represent a major work of human industry worthy of the bee. The enterprise of collecting and cataloguing on a grand scale seems to be in its infancy; here we stand before a new style of Chinoiserie, a Mandarin culture devoid of creativity that nonetheless knows how to conjure the existing ideograms. In the area of archives, we can look forward to the emergence of a more severe, more modest, but also more enjoyable scholarship that possesses downright anarchic traits when compared to that of the nineteenth century. Many of the strands of this scholarship will connect with that of the eighteenth century, to Linnaeus, to the Encyclopedists, and to the Rationalist school of theology. It will be easier to live with intellectuals like these; they can be manipulated. They are the conservators in the world of carnage. We have new pyramids and catacombs in our future—the subterranean bustling of an ant colony. In the days of the pharaohs, priests tried to protect the king and his household from the world of transience; today this is happening with methodically organized material of inquiring minds, down to the last trivial detail.

Afterward visited the manuscript room where magnificent objects were on display, such as the Gospel of Charlemagne, the Bible of Charles the Bald, and the book of hours of the Duc de Berry, which was opened to the calendar for August and September. The space was like a shrine where tiny motes of dust hovered in the clear air, as if we had entered a picture by Memling. Archival order achieves its highest form when the choicest pieces also have the power of relics; the precious nature of these things is intensified by the aura of ancient authority. This is where one should counter historical developments and install a new clerisy to be the custodians of such things. Of course, their way must be prepared by a new sense of responsibility. One cannot expect that of a state that uses its police to protect its Monument to the Unknown Soldier.

Among the musical pieces, there was the score to Debussy’s opera Pélleas et Mélisande, which revealed something amazingly precise. It resembled the blueprint for an electrical circuit; the heads of the notes were little glass insulators arranged on wires.

In the evening, we went to the Rôtisserie Nique on Avenue Wagram with Heller and Siegler, whose visits to Paris are always a pleasure. We discussed the situation and for the last ten years have agreed in our appraisal of it. Then we spoke about acquaintances, among them Gerhard [Nebel], whose wife is so-called one-quarter Jewish. For this reason, the house committee of the building where she lives has banned her from the air-raid shelter. It’s hard to imagine that a sense of purity of blood is so finely developed among the secondary school teachers of Hamburg who live there. To compensate for that, however, they are uncannily acute at sniffing out scapegoats.

Later I read The Wisdom of Solomon and then slept very little and poorly, which has been typical recently. Sleep is the principle opposed to the will, which is why I am becoming more alert the more I try to force it. For its part, thought stays on the path of the will. One can thus think of all those things one wants to think of, but on the other hand, we cannot banish thoughts we do not want to think. Here is where the anecdote about the farmer belongs: he was promised treasure but only on the condition that he would not think of a bear when he dug it up. The joke is deeper than it seems; it shows the path leading to the treasures of the earth.

Perpetua writes to me that the end of our century will perhaps be even more terrible than the beginning and middle have been. I do not tend to believe that, and I have often thought that people will look back upon it like the baby Herakles who strangled the snakes in his cradle. But she’s quite right when she says that in an age like ours, we must develop the habits of lizards: we must learn to seek out those rare sunny spots and use them. This is also true of the war; we cannot always be wondering uselessly when it will end. We have no control over that date. Yet we still have the capacity to spread joy in the teeth of the storms, joy for ourselves and for others. When we do so, we hold a tiny shred of peace in our hands.

I’ve also heard from her that the astrologer’s father has been missing for some time. It is assumed that Russian prisoners of war murdered him for his clothes. That reminds me of the terrible fate of old Kügelgen. Years ago, incidentally, I predicted the resurgence of gangs of robbers without imagining precisely how history would fulfill my prophecy. I was simply deriving my prediction from negative evidence, such as overweening power and the nationalization of injustice.

I met the Doctoresse in the evening at the Place des Ternes for one of those cups of lemon verbena tea she has prescribed for me. Since I have started to worry about the state of my health, this hour together is also an office visit.

When I got to bed, I read in the journals of Léon Bloy and then a bit further in the Book of Wisdom. The inclusion of a document of such great skepticism in the canon, and the assumption that it is one of the authentic books, is surprising and only comprehensible when we view the Bible as landscape, a piece of creation where different sections complement and balance each other. In this sense, one ascends to heights where the old golden eagle with his white crown builds his aerie. The air has become thinner, and the earth reveals its design. No gaze is more piercing than that of the wise king, yet Job penetrated deeper. In old age, he still brought forth fruit, for pain cultivated his soil.

The preacher sees pain as vanity. In doing so, he has ignored the life of Lear while enjoying that of the aging Faust. He transformed lands into lush gardens, planted forests and vineyards, and in his pleasure domes lived with multitudes of female slaves and singers. But all that was as vain as the wind, and this notion is more terrible than the one that sees it as the veil of Maya.[76]

Each life holds a certain number of things that, out of consideration, a human being does not confide to his dearest friend. They are like the stones you find in chickens’ stomachs that are not digested along with everything else. Man preserves the basest and the best so anxiously. Even when confession has relieved him of the burden of evil, he still wears his best for God alone. The part of us that is noble, good, and holy resides far from the social sphere; it cannot be communicated.

Incidentally, women are significantly more secretive in this respect. They are often the true graves of past love affairs, and does there exist even one of them about whom a husband, a lover, knows everything—even when she is lying in his arms? Anyone who has encountered an old lover after many years has been frightened by this mastery of silence. Daughters of the earth indeed! Some knowledge that finds sanctuary in our breast is terrifying and lonely; fatherhood is one such. The horrors of Medea rear up in a thoroughly middle-class world. Thus, the dilemma of the woman who watches her husband cherish a child through the years—a child that is not his.

“Two people who love each other should tell each other everything.” But are they strong enough to do so?

“I would like to confess something to you, but I’m afraid you’ll hear me as a priest in your own right and not someone who listens with wisdom, as a representative of God. I fear you might become my judge.”

That is the prodigious—but also healing—significance of prayer, namely that for a moment it opens the recesses of the heart and lets light shine in. For human beings, especially in our northern latitudes, it opens the only portal to truth, to the ultimate, radical honesty. Without it, people could not live with their nearest and dearest without suspicion and dark thoughts. And at times, when caution would not silence our tongues, then consideration would do so.

Thoughts about negating consonants, those that convey something pejorative, especially N and P. Pes, pejus, pied, petit, pire. The P is also used as a sound denoting pure contempt. The foot as a symbol of the lesser human being, as a degraded hand. After the war, I want to work on these connections, especially the way in which the human body is represented by language. To do so it would, of course, be a good idea if I were to move in again with Friedrich Georg, who animates conversation a great deal.

In the afternoon, I dropped by the bookshop in the Palais Royal, where I bought the 1812 Crébillon edition printed by Didot. One can see from the green calf bindings what a powerful sense of style the Empire possessed. It naturally had access to the guild of artisans of the Ancien Régime, and that’s more important than the style; that is a matter of substance. Today France still enjoys this advantage of traditions passed down from hand to hand, and will certainly retain these thanks to its largely rational policies. But what is important in this country at the moment is that its old haunts, the cities, will not be plowed under and on its ruins chain stores from Chicago would be built—which is what will happen in Germany. To activate the huge potential slumbering here, to consign it to the flames, that is the goal of both warring parties, and only a small group of people is keeping the scales in balance. That this could have succeeded for this long is all the more astonishing, since it contradicts the brutal politics of the day.

I decided not to erase the comments of the bookdealer on the inside of the flyleaf. His notes about the condition, plates, the value of the various editions, et cetera, contribute a note to what Feltesse calls the authenticity of the book. I make my own note on the bookplate regarding the time and place of my purchase, or of the giver, and occasionally other special circumstances.

Dinner in the Doctoresse’s apartment. Watched her cook. The way in which she goes about it shows something of the femme savant, especially in the way she times things and plans the sequence of the various tasks and procedures. In this way, cooking has the appearance of a well thought-out process, rather like a chemical experiment. Incidentally, just the acquisition of ingredients has become a feat in itself; the shops are almost empty, and hunger is spreading.

Currently reading: Conan Doyle. We reach an age when even good mysteries bore us. Our appreciation for the kaleidoscopic shifting of facts begins to wane; the elements are all too familiar.

This is also true of life. We reach a point when we master the facts that satiate us. “We number our years as threescore and ten…” One could add to that: and that is quite sufficient. Anyone who, up to then, has not learned enough to be promoted to the next grade must go back to the beginning and make it up.

This explains the childish aspect of broken-down old men, especially the lecherous, stingy, cruel, and petty ones. In them chaos has displaced the awareness that promotes successful old age, which carries quite precise external signs.

Outing to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. Rambled through the woods after breakfast. The mushrooms are thriving in all this moisture, their caps gleam in the moss among the spiderwebs heavy with dewdrops. I saw a round puffball that had long white spines on its cap, obviously the hedgehog member of this outlandish group.

A squirrel was romping high in a chestnut tree, a lovely burnished red against the wet green foliage. It had tossed shiny nuts down for the winter; we shared in his harvest.

Quite melancholy because I am becoming more unhappy with my physical condition. I have been losing weight for weeks. I often grow weary of this business and treat the body as a mutineer, but it is better to open my ears and listen to what it wants.

In the evening read further in La Porte des Humbles [The Gate of the Humble] by Léon Bloy. I always find his writing satisfying despite his maniacal and indiscriminate diatribes against everything Germanic. He would like to destroy London with a single bomb, while he sees Denmark as a kind of filthy Sodom. I think, however, that by this time I’ve learned to value people’s intellect, although their motivations are different from mine, and to see them in their pure state devoid of contradictions.

Read further in the Song of Songs.

In the afternoon, I thumbed through Pyrrhus by Crébillon. The method by which language is revealed here seems unparalleled. It is so smooth and perfectly burnished that it cannot be improved. For language to attain new sounds or new colors, we would have to penetrate words with chemical processes. Décadence would be the inevitable result.

The verses follow upon one another with a beautiful lightness and move toward the rhymes with such unforced grace—here in poetry language is at play more naturally, not more artfully. What makes these verses so supple is surely the wealth of one-syllable words, which creates the dactylic meter.

[The night is more clear than the depths of my heart.]

Back to the Quai Voltaire in the evening, where I met the Valentiner brothers and Poupet. Silver-gray mists cloaked the houses, and above them slate blue clouds with a brown ring of dusk. Some tones had already been drained away; the shaft of light from Saint-Germain-des-Prés looked washed out, and only the dark tower roof shone through.

The light grey limestone used to construct so many houses, pavement, bridges, and quais shows countless concave impressions made by the shell of the slender whorl snail. I am always pleased when my eye falls upon one of them: they are part of those secret heraldic beasts, the microcosmic embellishments of this city.

Finished reading La Porte des Humbles by Léon Bloy. I can sense the old lion mellowing. Such hard cider takes seventy years to lose its kick.

Reading provides me with such pleasure, especially during the noonday break. The true appeal of journals is not their strange or extraordinary content. Much more challenging is the description of simple daily routines, familiar rules that govern life. That is done very successfully here; a reader is a participant in everyday activity. Thus do the passing years repay us once more, in the same way that many a summer has provided the wood that warms us as it burns in the fireplace.

The book contains predictions, including one that concerns the Russian Revolution. This period actually provides us with an apocalyptic vision of our own. From one of the final sentences, we hear the sage say: “I am expecting the Cossacks and the Holy Ghost.” Then, shortly before the end, on 16 October 1917, we read an oracular utterance: “I am no longer eating. I lack appetite. Everything about me needs to change.” Death was to accomplish this and left its stamp on Bloy’s features, which were then judged to be “majestic, serene, and commanding.”

His life demonstrates that it is not our errors that threaten our authority when we pass through the final gate of honor that our spirit has yearned for. It could more likely be our shortcomings, which are taken as nakedness there. We shed them as Don Quixote his armor, and our disrobing is greeted with laughter.

Visited the bookshop of Jean Bannier in the afternoon, at 8 Rue de Castiglione. There I picked up Roma Subterranea [Underground Rome] by Aringhus, a work containing many plates and inscriptions from the catacombs that can be seen as a predecessor to Rossi’s Roma Sotteranea. In our zones of fire and devastation, the peace offered by such tombs hewn into the rock holds great appeal for its promise of eternal slumber in the earth’s womb.

But, even more important, however, was the beautiful copy of Breton’s La Chine en Miniature [China in Miniatures], which I bought. I had tiptoed around this several times like the fox around the bait before the trap springs shut. The purchase was beyond my means, but what we gain from books makes the investment worthwhile, although I have the feeling that I am stacking them up for the heap of rubble that the house could someday all too easily be reduced to. Still, I am browsing with great enjoyment in these six volumes with their miniatures that are more than 130 years old yet still glowing in the brightest colors. The distances created by deserts and oceans are hardly greater than the space of heaven, and therefore life in these foreign realms often seems to us like images from a distant planet.

Concerning abnormalities: below all the soft-soap artists and snake oil salesmen that authors write about there lies a deep-seated atavistic stratum—the memory of a time when our whole skin was still mucus membrane. This membrane is a precursor of skin, evolutionary remnant from the ocean’s cradle and of our Neptunian origins. Here the sense of touch struggles to grasp similar states, like those that open to our vision when we perceive the color red. But one can also find types different from the sanguine solarian, namely lymphatics with little pigmentation, a preference for steam baths, hairdressers’ salons, and mirrors; for the lunarians, it is the world of caves. They exhibit blood disorders and a tendency toward eczema and pruritus. Exaggerated symptoms—often manic cleanliness, occasional albinism, fear of microbes, and loathing of snakes—are common.

These abnormalities are not really disorders—they are elements that have been released, elements that are present in all of us, latent and potent. In our dreams, they often climb up from the chasms. The deeper these things lie concealed within us, the more powerful is our alienation, our horror when nature works as a chemical analyst to reveal them in their pure form. With that, the snake emerges from its hole. This explains the terrible excitement that can grip a metropolis in response to news of a rape-murder. When this happens, we all feel the sound of the bolt sliding shut in our own netherworld.

The misguided attempts of certain doctors are surely questionable when they try to protect a perpetrator from justice by portraying him as sick. That point of view would be defensible if the sickness were not the sickness that afflicts us all but is merely manifest in him and could be surgically removed. Like an ancient human sacrifice, he is immured under the bridge buttresses of the community. What’s at stake here is less the poor criminal than the millions of his brethren.

Slept poorly. Was awakened in the early hours by a strange but gentle rain inside me. I have the impression that the body is trying to say something, yet in the artificial lives we lead, we understand its sentences and vocabulary hardly any better than we would those of an old tenant farmer conversing with us at our city address about things like parish fairs, harvests, and stunted crops. We can dismiss him with money, but we have to give the body pills. In both cases: back to the land—that means to the earth and its elements.

Read in the newspapers: “A book that reaches an edition of 1,000,000 copies is always something unusual—a remarkable event in the intellectual world. It is evident that a deep need exists for such a work. The success of Mythus[77] is one of those signs that lets us perceive the latent will of a coming era.” Thus speaks the wise Kastor in the Völkischer Beobachter of 7 October 1942 about the Mythus by Rosenberg, the dullest collection of hastily copied platitudes imaginable. The same Kastor argued in the same publication almost ten years ago, “Well, didn’t Herr Spengler read the newspapers?” Thus, a philosopher refers another philosopher to the newspapers for his source of inspiration—and this in Germany and quite openly. That simply never should have been articulated so blatantly. And let it be noted that this Kastor is considered the most prominent voice in his field, the chief spokesman of the heroic school of philosophy. This is but one small example of the quality of the air we have to breathe.

People like this Kastor, incidentally, belong to the type of truffle-hunting pigs found in any revolution. Because their coarse fellow ideologues are incapable of identifying their most exquisite opponents, they co-opt the corrupt higher-level intellects to sniff them out. And once their opponents have been exposed, they can then be attacked—when possible through police intervention. Whenever I noticed him referring to me, I expected the police at my house with a search warrant. Kastor even called on the police to go after Spengler, and there are those in the inner circle who say he has that on his conscience.

Went to Berès in the evening, where I looked at books. I bought the old Malleus Maleficarum [Hammer of Witches] by Sprenger in the Venice edition of 1574. The purchase would have excited me more twenty years ago, when I was studying hallucinogens along with magic and Satanism.

In the afternoon, rode through the Bois de Boulogne, where the leaves are turning. Colonel Kossmann told me that my command posting to Russia could get serious in the next few days. Preliminary orders have already been received. Since my life here has taken on a new form, this disruption could be a welcome one. While pondering this, I knocked a glass off the washstand, and it smashed to pieces.

I shall try to have Rehm assigned to me as my adjutant.

Sunday, went to the Rue de Bellechasse in the afternoon. Perhaps my last time crossing this threshold into the stairwell where the amethyst spiral always gives me a feeling of anxiety, the kind one feels when keeping tremendous secrets. I noticed the pattern of the tiny snail shells on the stone threshold; the sight of these in this city has often brought me such delight.

Slept very poorly, which is certainly the result of illness. At the moment when I am supposed to go to Russia, I can’t simply report to the infirmary. Such coincidences have often arisen in my life; they create a real dilemma.

Among my letters was one from Umm-El-Banine, an Azerbaijani writer who enclosed her novel Nami. A beautifully pressed lily of the valley falls out as I thumb through the volume. From its dark brown stalk, ten yellow ones branch off into little bell-shaped blossoms as if embossed on heavy paper.

Slept very poorly again. In the morning I went to the senior staff doctor, who recommended a short stay in the infirmary in Suresnes, which can still be arranged before my marching orders come through. Have just arrived there. I am spending my time partly lying on the bed reading, and partly looking out the window, which provides a view of Mont Valérien. Its foliage is still mostly green but sprinkled with patches ranging from copper-hued to fiery red and yellow. Foliage also covers the fort, the ancient Bullerjan from 1871, up to its roof.

The images from last night are still in my mind. I recall standing in the parlor with my father, along with several siblings, one of whom was squirming in a laundry basket. I wanted to make a comment about this and turned to my father several times. He seemed to ignore me deliberately. I was finally able to make myself heard: “You were not successful in achieving the optimal combination in any of us. My conclusion is based on the virtues that I see in us as a whole, but are not present in any one of us individually.”

The old man thought about this for a few seconds, vacantly gazing with an acid stare, and then said dryly: “You may be right.”

Similar things as well that I would like to have written down, but I was afraid I would become wide awake if I turned on the light.

Deep melancholy. Rehm arrived yesterday, so I am not at a loss for someone to run errands.

I called on the Doctoresse in the evening and brought her red zinnias. She didn’t stop pestering me about going to the staff doctor. She even had a meeting with the head medical officer here.

To return to yesterday’s dream: the document about death should perhaps begin with a chapter that emphasizes the operation of chance in our individual lives. We would not exist had our father married a different woman, or our mother a different man. Assuming this marriage continues, we are chosen from among millions of embryos. We are thus random combinations of the absolute. We resemble winning lottery tickets with values written on them in the characters of fate are then paid out in earthly currency, in the form of talent that we should make the most of.

We could draw the conclusion that as individuals we are imperfect, and that eternity is neither suitable nor bearable to us. Moreover, we have to revert to the absolute, and this possibility is offered to us by death. Death has both an external and an internal form; the latter is usually visible in the physiognomy of the dead. Death has its mysteries, which the mystery of love nonetheless transcends. We become adepts when he takes us by the hand. The smile of surprise is a spiritual one, yet its reflection penetrates the physical world as far back as the features of the dying man.

Consider here what I wrote about the wheel of fortune and the number disk.

Current reading: Paul Bourget, Voyageuses [Women Travelers, 1917], a collection of short stories that introduces the author in a way that does not invite a second reading. The thick shell of convention is hardly scratched here to reveal the human content beneath.

Read further in the book of Chinese miniatures, where I noticed a description of a snake merchant. At the bottom of his basket is a bowl filled with a concentrated brew of viper flesh. And above this, a container holding live snakes. In the ancient pharmacies of the West, we also attribute particular healing powers to risking our lives. The serpent, a tellurian animal, is a powerful medicine.

I again found the journals of Emperor Kang-hsi mentioned, as I have so often in the course of my reading over the past years. I have been eager to find this work for a long time. The attraction of such power of mind transcends empires and centuries.

Read further in Isaiah, the prophet of destruction, whose “heart laments for Moab like a harp.” A good visionary for our age as well.

I have a tendency to distance myself from people I love. It’s as if their images developed such power in me that their physical presence becomes intolerable.

The man who murders his mistress chooses the opposite path: to possess her he extinguishes her likeness. Perhaps this is how immortals treat us.

A shared death is always a significant act—beautifully described in Axel by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. In this respect, Kleist seems like someone in a hurry; he took the first good one that came along.[78]

“I say to you today you will be with me in Paradise.” That also applies to the unrepentant thief. We’re just not supposed to say that too loudly.

Had a bad night. I dreamed of doctors who had treated me, including an imaginary one whose waiting room seemed quite familiar. After waking up, it took a long time for me to distinguish this mirage from reality; perhaps its specificity was nurtured by memories of earlier dream visions.

Very worn out in the morning, but still mentally alert. I appreciated the natural vault presented to my eyes by the green and yellow trees in the gardens.

Got further in Isaiah, who luxuriates in images of destruction. His essential vision is one of the obliteration of the historical world, its old cities, fields, and vineyards, and of the triumph of the elements. This produces recovery and preparation for the new, indestructible reconstitution by the divine spirit. Men and empires will someday become just as the inner eye perceives them.

This imagery could be seen as a sort of three-field system of agriculture: the tilling of the earth; the fallow period; harvesting the fruits of the spirit. The centerpiece of the triptych when the earth lies dormant has its own inherent beauty, painted by a connoisseur of blooming deserts and fecund wildernesses. To this field, God has applied his measuring rod.

Was weighed and found to have gotten very thin. But this morning, I measured my mental weight against the sight of the trees. This is not the first time in my life that the ebb of the body and the flow of images coincide—as if sickness made things visible that were otherwise concealed.

Had a visit from Valentiner and the Doctoresse in the afternoon. She placed a purple cattleya orchid with bearded lower lip and vanilla yellow calyx on my table. It’s good to see the way the little nurse from Holstein, who likes to see me reading the Bible, avoids this flower like a dubious insect as she works.

Another night of distress. In one dream image, I was waiting with Friedrich Georg in a room where the floor was tiled in white porcelain. The walls were built of glass bricks, and in the room stood cylindrical vessels of glass and ceramic, roughly in the shape and size of our water heaters.

We were playing a game, throwing glass balls the size of snowberries, but only one in ten was white like these. The others were colorless and invisible in flight. The balls hit the ground with a dry smack and then bounced against the walls and the vessels, creating mathematical designs of angles and straight lines as they did so. The path of the invisible balls delighted our imaginations, while the white ones resembled guidelines whose network gave the sensual connection to the all-too-intellectual, all-too-abstract game.

Thought: that must have been one of the weightless cells deep inside the cloister of the workaday world.

Read further in Isaiah, accompanied by Lichtenberg’s aphorisms and Schopenhauer’s Parerga, two reliable old sources of comfort when in need. I read these while walking up and down in the room with the tube that they had forced down my throat hanging out of my mouth.

Lichtenberg’s judgment on Jean Paul: “If he starts over again from the beginning, he will become great.” Even though this presupposes an impossibility, from an individual standpoint, it still points to the procreative, spermatic force of Jean Paul’s prose. Many stories by Stifter bring forth such shoots. I have always regretted that Hebbel could not start over again “from the beginning,” especially by adding greater potency to his journals.

We say, “That’s as certain as two times two equals four,” but we don’t say, “as one times one equals one.”

The first version is actually clearer; it has already overcome the hurdle of the identity theorem.

How to counter the objection that I no longer use certain expressions that I formulated years ago, expressions that have now become common, such as the word “total”:

“Gold is withdrawn in times of inflation.”

That comes from a letter to Grüninger, who enjoys such ripostes.

Sunday. In the morning, the top of the Eiffel Tower was shrouded in fog.

Friedrich Georg wrote yesterday, mainly about reading Isaiah, which I notice he began to read at about the same time as I did. There are so many invisible threads uniting us.

Visit from Charmille, who brought me flowers. What is it that attracts me to her so? Probably the childlike nature that I recognize in her. We meet people who awaken in us the desire to give them presents—that is the reason I regret not having been blessed with worldly goods.

Toward evening Sacré Coeur emerged, at times beaming brightly from atop its hill and at others half-hidden in a violet haze. There is something phantasmagorical about this structure. Distance increases its magic, letting us see it as a symbol of all that is miraculous in it.

Intense air raids in the night: La frousse [extreme dread]. Then comes the reckoning: from Charlemagne to Charles V, from the Reformation to the chaos of World War I.

I was fishing on the seashore and caught a giant sea turtle. Once I had landed it, it got away from me and dug itself into the earth. While in pursuit, I not only injured myself on the fish hook, but a disgusting sea creature crawled out of the turtle and right over me with its many feet. That was the first time that a turtle had appeared to me in a figure in a dream, and with such significance at that.

I was discharged at noon with an entry in my service record that read “alkaline gastritis.” I think the Doctoresse was fearing much worse. She was pleased at the diagnosis and conferred again with the senior doctor, whom she knows from Bergmann’s clinic. Rehm then picked me up, and we drove together to the Majestic to prepare for the journey.

In a volume that appeared in 1757, I read the court records of the case brought against Damiens. The assassination attempt took place in the first month of this same year. The historical introduction also includes a detailed description of the horrible execution.

Louis XV’s demeanor during the attack upon his person was regal. He identified the perpetrator, recognizable as the only man who kept his head covered. The king commanded that he be arrested and decreed that no harm should be done to him.

Went to Chez Nique in the evening where we played American roulette [pinball].

Bad night. La frousse. Since I can’t possibly report in sick now, I went to a French doctor on Rue Newton whose assurances were very helpful—more helpful than the doctors in the infirmary with all their equipment. When he heard that I was off to Russia, he didn’t want to take any payment. Telephoned Ritter von Schramm.

Dropped by Morin’s in the afternoon and poked around in his books one last time. I spent a further enjoyable hour in his little antiquarian bookshop. There I discovered something I had been seeking for a long time, the work by Magius, De Tintinabulis [On Bells], including the tract De Equuleo [On the Rack] bound with it in one volume. Then De Secretis [On Secrets] by Weckerus—a treasure trove. The Spanish Journey by Swinburne bound in red morocco. Among other things, I finally came upon the trial of Charles I, where I browsed in the description of the execution, which showed the king’s great dignity, far above bodily concerns, like a ship’s passenger standing on the gangplank, taking his leave of friends and entourage before a long journey.

I shall miss the world of books; I have spent precious hours in it—oases in a world of carnage. Walking along either bank of the Seine represents perfection in its own right; time flows by easily. It is hard to imagine how to improve on this, and it would not be anywhere near as beautiful if the books cost nothing. The water is part of it all.

In Chez Nique in the evening. Conversation there about little Alcor, “the rider on the wagon shaft.”[79] This was punctuated by a brief air-raid alarm and a few rounds of gunfire in the darkness. Played some more American roulette, a maze where the course of nickel balls lights up electric bulbs and rows of numbers. It’s the old game of chance under the guise of technology.

Reporting for leave today, so I called on Kossmann and the commander-in-chief who told me that on his staff there would always be a little “Wartburgstübchen” [little Wartburg room][80] waiting for me. I found everybody more cordial; maybe that was just a reflection of my own improved morale. “Life is opinion,” says Marcus Aurelius. The general is one of those people who entered my life as an unexpected gift at a time when it had become hard to breathe. He circulated books of mine here that could no longer be published in the Fatherland, and he still has high hopes for me.

The morning passed with the transfer of current business to Neuhaus; I locked the rest up in the safe and am taking the key with me.

As a farewell, I visited a church: Saint Pierre-de-Chaillot. I took it as a good sign that a red carpet had been laid down on the steps, and the large portal decorated with curtains. But this was closed, and I had to enter through a side door. Upon leaving, however, I found it open, and once I was outside, after having thoughtlessly walked through it, noticed that it had been decorated and prepared for a funeral. This convoluted configuration revived me; I was able to find a kind of irony in it superior to the Socratic. Rebus, “by means of things”—that could be a motto.

Paid a visit to Rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré once again. There I walk across patterns in the carpet of my past. Also went to Rue de Castiglione, where I bought a seal as a memento of this day.

It’s strange how often I come across the image of a turtle on my walks after having dreamed of it. All these signs surround us, yet the eye chooses but a few of them.

Departure from Charmille at Chez Nique near the Place des Ternes. Air-raid alarm, but fortunately it was soon lifted; otherwise, I would have missed the train to Berlin.