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

Passed through Cologne in the middle of the day. I gazed from the window of the dining car at the city’s destroyed neighborhoods. The buildings and rows of houses radiated a grim, palatial grandeur through their destruction. We glide through this alien, colder world: this is the dwelling of death.

Düsseldorf also looked mournful. Fresh ruins and red roof tiles bore witness to the firestorm. This too is one of the stepping-stones to Americanism; in place of our old haunts, we shall have cities that are the brainchildren of engineers. But perhaps only herds of sheep will graze upon the ruins, as in those old pictures of the Roman Forum.

Perpetua picked me up at the station in the evening. Schulz had been saving fuel for a long time for this trip. I sent Rehm home to his wife in Magdeburg for a few days’ leave.

Back in Kirchhorst, where I am less tempted to write entries in my journal. This is the setting to recover. That is perhaps the best claim to be made for any place.

Upon arrival, I noticed that the quantity of books, correspondence, and collections was making me uneasy. They demanded my immediate attention and, thanks to my more relaxed state, I realized that everything lives from and depends upon involvement, upon mental, and physical responsibility. We possess things thanks to a special virtue, a kind of magnetic power. In this sense, wealth is not merely a gift but also an aptitude corresponding to the scope of one’s reach. It is clear that most people lack the inner capacity for wealth or even modest property. If it should nonetheless come to them from some outside source, then it disappears without a trace. It may be that this even brings misfortune with it. For this reason, old wealth is crucial so that not only the gift, but also the talent necessary to keep and use it freely, may be bequeathed to the child and subsequent generations.

Diet—even in relation to things and possessions that we acquire. Otherwise, instead of making our life easier, we must assume the role of guardians, servants, and custodians in life. The weather is autumnal, occasionally gray, punctuated by sunshine. The soft golden yellow of the poplars along the road to Neuwarmbüchen fits beautifully with the pale blue sky that arches over our unremarkable landscape.

At night dreams of ancient cave systems on Crete, where soldiers were swarming like ants. An explosive charge had just obliterated thousands of them. When I woke up, it occurred to me that Crete was the island of the Labyrinth.

Foggy day. Heavy fringes of dew accumulated on the reddish-black cabbage leaves like those little silver bubbles that form on the ruddy seaweed from deep in the ocean. Brockes was the first to note this, just as his oeuvre is rich in examples of the way a new sense of nature emerges from the gravitas of the baroque, although it is often indistinguishable from it. Thus, the ever-changing fabric of the ages becomes interwoven, like the color gradations on the throat of a pigeon.

Thought: Nature has forgotten the hydrogen animals, those lighter-than-air creatures that swim through the atmosphere like whales through the seas. In doing so, she deprived us of the true giants by adopting the more elegant solution of flight from the outset.

Concerning the habit of touching wood to avert some inauspicious omen. This can probably be traced back to some particular event, yet some customs become engrained only when they possess inherent symbolism. This might lie in the organic nature of wood. We reach out to it as something that has grown, and transposing the gesture to suggest fate, we imply our life span with its own destiny, in contrast to the lifeless mechanism of seconds, which merely count the tempus mortuum [time of death].

The breaking of glass as a symbol of luck could then be interpreted as a corollary—as an explosion of mechanical form and a release its living essence.

Friedrich Georg writes to me from Überlingen about lilies and the Eremurus [foxtail lily] bulbs that he planted in the garden in Leisnig. It gives me great joy to learn that he has finished not only a new collection of poems but also a second work on mythology with the title Die Titanen [The Titans]. He seems to be hard at work. At times in happy hours, I sense that fate has granted me not only the gratitude of a person who enjoys good fortune but also a sense of wonder that I have benefited equally from our camaraderie.

Walked across the lonely fields in the evening through the fog and drizzle. Clumps of trees shimmered hazily in the distance and between them and old farms, like gray arks carrying their cargoes of man and beast.

Finished reading Louis Thomas, Le Général de Galliffet [General de Gallifet, 1909], in an edition enriched by both an autograph of the author and one of the general. Galliffet offers a model of the sanguine temperament appropriate to a good cavalryman and especially a commander of the hussars. It is the temperament of a man who must be able to move and make decisions quickly, easily, and forcefully. Sanguine optimism drives vigorously toward its goals, albeit goals that are usually short term and narrow in their perspective. The world spirit propels characters like this to the fore wherever quick intervention is called for—as at Sedan and during the riots. Galliffet is also typical for the history of modern brutality and for the rediscovery of bestial methods. He got his early training in Mexico.

As I read, I recalled an old project of mine: the diagram of a historical process showing the order proceeding from left to right according to natural law. It starts at one end with the rank of tribune and moves to that of senator with Marius and Sulla, with Marat and Galliffet. Someday I would like to venture a brief typology of history—it would resemble a description of the tiny crystals in a kaleidoscope.

What did Galliffet lack to make him a Sulla, and what differentiated him from a Boulanger?

I read further in Chamfort, sampling him in small doses. His maxims are much more pointed and less appealing than those of Rivarol.

In the afternoon, I harvested carrots, celeriac, and red beets, and put them in the cellar. This kind of work, with the earth, makes me feel my health returning.

In the morning, dreams about future air raids. A hybrid machine the size of the Eiffel Tower flew through the fire above a settlement; beside it was a structure resembling a radio tower. On its platform there stood an observer wearing a long coat; he was taking notes and throwing these down in smoke canisters.

In the afternoon, I attended the burial of old Frau Colshorn. As always happens at such events, I noticed a group of five to seven middle-age men wearing morning coats and top hats. These were the village fathers of Kirchhorst. Because the community does not own a hearse, neighbors carry the casket to the cemetery. This is announced in the following way: “Jur Vadder mot mit an’n Sarg faten.” [Your father has to help carry the casket.][1]

Visit to the neighbors in the evening, but just as we were beginning to chat, the air-raid sirens started up in Hannover. We gathered in a downstairs room with our coats and suitcases, as if we were in the cabin of a ship in distress at sea. People’s behavior during these attacks has changed. It shows how close the catastrophe has come.

Through the window, I could see the bright red tracer bullets being fired from the Bul [section of Hannover] into the cloud cover, as well as the flickering illumination of the shells and the fires in the city. The house was shaken to its foundation several times, although the bombs were falling far away. The presence of children lends the events an even more oppressive and gloomy feeling.

We hear that yesterday’s attack involved only about fifteen aircraft. I am bothered by the landing of the Americans in North Africa even more than by these things. As I respond to contemporary events, I perceive a level of empathy in myself that marks a man who realizes he is caught up less in a world war than in a global civil war. For that reason, I find myself entangled in very different conflicts from those of the hostile nations. The solution to those conflicts is secondary.

Departed this morning along with Mother and Perpetua. As I was saying goodbye, I showed our little boy a lovely drake that was swimming happily around in a puddle near the train stop. Never before have I embarked on a journey knowing so little about the course it will take or what it might achieve. I am like a fisherman casting his net into murky waters on a winter’s day.

Studied some physiognomy during the trip: the subtle, almost imperceptible trace of experience that I saw at the corner of the mouth of a young girl. Lust etches its presence in the face as sharply a diamond.

In Dahlem in the evening; we are staying with Carl Schmitt.

Friday, the thirteenth of November. The day brings the first snow of the year. Strolled with Carl Schmitt through the Grunewald Forest in the morning.

My reading matter, the journal Zalmoxis, was named for a Scythian Herakles mentioned by Herodotus. I read two articles. One about the customs involving methods of digging up and using the mandrake root, and a second one about the Symbolisme Aquatique. They discussed the connections among the moon, women, and the sea. Both are by Mircea Eliade, the editor. Carl Schmitt filled me in on him as well as on his mentor, René Guénon. The etymological associations between seashells and the female genitalia are very informative. Latin conca and Danish kudefisk for “mussel” reflect this, whereas kude is synonymous with vulva.

The agenda evident in this journal is very promising; instead of following strict logic, pictograms emerge. This gives the impression of caviar, of fish roe. Every sentence contains fecundity.

Carl Schmitt also gave me a book by de Gubernatis, La Mythologie des Plantes [The Mythology of Plants]. Sixty years ago, the author was a professor of Sanskrit and mythology in Florence.

Strolled through Dahlem during the evening blackout. We talked about the daily Bible verses of the Moravians; the quatrains of Nostradamus; about Isaiah and prophecies in general. The fact that prophecies come true—even transcending distant ages—is the mark that lets us recognize the real prophetic power of their vision. With the passage of time, what the seer observes in the elements repeats as though refracted through a prism. His gaze does not pause on the history, but rather on the subject matter; nor on the future, but on the law. It is justifiable then that the mere knowledge of future dates and conjunctions betrays symptoms of a sick mind or of vulgar magic.

It was late when we visited Popitz, where I also met Sauerbruch, the surgeon. Conversation about the difference between military and medical authority as embodied in the role of the military physician, where they are more or less united but also produce tensions. There followed a discussion about the large edition of classical writers that the minister[2] is planning.

Sauerbruch said goodbye early to go see a first lieutenant whose pelvis had been fractured by a Russian shell. He feared that his art would be of little use here; in the best-case scenario, however, the pieces of bone would knit themselves together again like the shards of a clay pot. As he put it: “Still, a visit during this crisis might have a positive effect upon the patient.”

Departure from the Silesian Station [Berlin] yesterday at nine o’clock. Perpetua accompanied me there; we sat in the waiting room for a while. Brother Physicus[3] was at the train along with Rehm, whom I am forced to leave behind. After leaving the station, I was soon fast asleep and did not wake up until we reached Masuria[4] in the late morning. The land reminded me somewhat of deer—there was something modestly furtive about the brown pelt of the earth and the tranquil eyes of the lakes.

Spent the day at the camps in the forest around Angerburg and Lötzen, where I was issued identification papers and tickets, and am now in Lötzen in a downright dingy hotel room.

I have stayed in Lötzen because all the seats in the airplane to Kiev were full. They have been reduced because of a crash caused by ice on the wings three days ago.

Visited the bleak cemetery in the morning. To the museum in the afternoon, a place that is more of a hero’s shrine since memorabilia from combat in East Prussia in 1914 are collected there. The visit made me uneasy; the memory of all this is still too fresh. The corpse of this war has not yet decomposed, which explains the ghostly resurrection of so many of its apparitions. Specters in graveyards.

Went to the airfield in the morning, but several seats in the plane were eliminated because of the weather. I’ll be staying here until tomorrow.

Before eating, I took a short walk through the fields, where I observed two crested larks in front of an abandoned barn.

Thought: When traveling, we have to be as warmly insulated as these birds are by their plumage. How often I envy them when I see them in the snowy woods sitting upon a branch, solitary but not abandoned. Feathers have been given to them, whereas we have received the spiritual aura that protects us from the loss of warmth. This bolsters and nourishes man through prayer, and for this very reason is beyond price.

In the afternoon, I drove with Major Dietrichsdorf to Widminnen, where we had been invited by a comrade who owns an estate there. It was almost dark. Illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, there lay a placid lake covered with brown and purple mists; by morning, these displayed a gentle, cool, green reflection. Along its shores stood young birch trees; their white trunks glistened through the soft brown of the surrounding thicket.

In Widminnen we were welcomed with coffee and mountains of cake. We then drank East Prussian Bärenfang, a concoction of honey and alcohol. The honey is supposed to appeal to the sweet tooth, but it is then anaesthetized by the high-octane alcohol. During the evening, there appeared sausages, with cooked drumsticks and breast of goose. Along with this came conversation, mainly about the delicacies. Life in these eastern provinces revolves more slowly, with greater gravitational force, greater lethargy, with easy enjoyment. Here we approach bear country.

Our host was a great hunter. I noticed a spotted nutcracker among the stuffed animals in his room. I had never seen one before: a brown bird with pale speckling and tail feathers with whitish tips—perfectly camouflaged for a seamless disappearance into Nordic conifer forests at dusk.

In the morning strolled around the Boyen Fortress;[5] its angular redoubts are wreathed by sparse woods of birch and elder. Flocks of crows swarmed in the bare treetops. I reached the hill on the lake where there stands a tall iron crucifix as a memorial to Bruno von Querfurt, a missionary to this region, who suffered a martyr’s death on 9 March 1009.

Current reading: Got further in Jeremiah and also thumbed through Henri Bon, La Mort et ses Problèmes [Death and its Problems]. There I found quoted the morbid opinion of Parmenides who attributes sentience to corpses. They are supposedly aware of silence, cold, and darkness. As I read this, I thought of the uncanny changes I saw on the faces of the dying horses during our advance.

In the evening, I went back out into the dark to visit the lake, as the moon shone through the clouds. I felt a renewed inner strength and was immediately more curious about the course this journey would take.

Takeoff at nine o’clock through low-lying cloudbanks and light snowfall. Once we had gained altitude, I could again see the lakes around Lötzen bounded by birches and bands of blanched rushes. Then fields under a dusting of snow that revealed the brown earth and green shoots beneath this blanket. Conifer forests followed, and yellowed cracks in the land with networks of branching streams gleaming blue against the frost. And then the shiny dark earth of the peat ditches. In between, separated by large expanses in brownish-gray islands, lay the cultivated earth with some solitary settlements, or others stretching along the roads. The cottages or stables seemed to be fast asleep, yet tracks in the snow leading out from them were evidence that their inhabitants had already fetched hay, straw, and provisions from their barns, haystacks, and vegetable stores.

The clouds grew heavier toward noon, and our aircraft flew low over the ground. I had dozed off for a while; then I woke up to notice a change in our situation. A long, pale red flame trailed from the engine cowling. At the same time, the aircraft struggled to land but not, as I thought, due to a carburetor fire, but because we had reached Kiev. Amazement and terror combined at the sight of all this to create a state of petrified attention. At such moments, something primeval and familiar awakens within us.

Once we were on the ground, I spoke with the pilot about the crash that had happened the previous week on this runway. The aircraft had burned out. The corpses of the passengers were found pressed against the door, which had sealed tightly shut.

In Kiev I was billeted in the Palace Hotel. Although the sinks lacked hand towels and the study had no ink, and several marble steps were missing from the stairs, this is supposed to be the best hotel in occupied Russia. No matter how long you turned the faucets, they produced no water, let alone warm water. The same was true of the flush toilets. As a result, the whole Palace Hotel was filled with a noxious odor.

I took advantage of the hour that was still left before dark to walk through the streets in the city—and was glad to return after this sojourn. As true as it is that our earth harbors enchanted lands, we also encounter others, where disenchantment reigns and nothing magical remains.

I shared my room with a young artillery captain. Despite my objections, he insisted on covering me with his coat when it got cold. When I woke up, I saw that he had made do with a thin blanket. He also frightened away a big rat that had emerged from the crannies of the hotel and made for my paltry rations.

Reveille before dawn. Departure through hazy weather around six in the morning. The flight took us across the huge expanse of the wheat fields of the Ukraine, where in some places the fields were still covered in faded stubble, while on most of them the fresh topsoil already glistened. Very few trees, but on the other hand, frequent deep branching, washed-out gullies that give the impression that the good soil reaches immense depths here and only its uppermost, thinnest layer is cultivated.

Reached Stalino[6] at nine o’clock, and after another hour we were in Rostov. There the weather became so unsettled that the pilot thought it advisable to take only the courier baggage to Voroshilovsk and leave the passengers behind—all the more so because a thick crust of ice was already forming on the wing sections of his aircraft.

I decided to travel on to Voroshilovsk the following day by train and then spent the night in the officers’ quarters. That is what they call one of these squalid buildings where sacks of straw are laid out in rows in the rooms and a stench lingers in the hallways.

Stroll through city: images of despair repeat themselves. In Rio on Las Palmas, or on many an ocean beach, the walks I have taken have seemed like beautifully composed melodies. But here dissonance assaulted my heart. I watched some ragged children playing as they slid along the ice, and I marveled as if I had glimpsed a colored light in Hades.

The only products for sale are black sunflower seeds, offered in shallow baskets by women from the steps of burnt-out houses. High atop the trees in the middle of the busy avenue I noticed clusters of crows’ nests.

Unfortunately, I did not pack enough equipment. I had no idea that little things like a pocket mirror, knife, sewing thread, or string are precious items here. Luckily I constantly come across people who help me. Not infrequently they are some of my readers, whose help I count among my fortune.

I was able to scare up a bowl of soup in the soldiers’ mess this morning.

Changed money; the Russian banknotes still bear Lenin’s portrait. To compute the exchange rate, the female civil servant used an abacus with large balls that she flicked back and forth. I am told these machines can’t be compared to the ones children at home use. Anyone who can master them can supposedly achieve a result more quickly than with pencil and paper.

In the afternoon, went to one of the few cafés permitted to operate on the free market. A small piece of cake costs two marks there, and an egg, three. It makes me sad to see people dozing and killing time, as though in waiting rooms before their trains depart for some terrible destination. And it’s the privileged few sitting here.

I continue to study people on the street, which again reinforces my impression of the Orient as a place of disenchantment. The eye has to grow accustomed to the most unpleasant sights imaginable—there is no oasis, no respite. Technology is the only thing that functions in good order: the railroad, the cars, the airplanes, loudspeakers, and naturally everything belonging to the world of weaponry. Otherwise, there is a complete absence of everything organic, of nourishment, clothing, warmth, light. This is even more pronounced for the higher aspects of life—for joy, happiness, and cheer, and for any benevolent power of art. And all this on some of the richest soil on the globe.

The story of the Tower of Babel always seems to repeat itself. In this place, however, we do not find it under construction, but rather in the stage after its collapse and the confusion of languages. These rational constructs always contain the seeds of their own destruction. They have an icy chill that attracts fire the way iron attracts lightning.

The empty windows of the burnt-out office buildings show red calcination near their rooftops where the pure flame leapt out. Along each side, they bear the dark traces of the escaping smoke. The floors have collapsed; the steam radiators dangle on the bare walls. A tangle of twisted metal rises from the cellars, and neglected children comb through the heaps of ashes with hooks looking for bits of wood. One walks through a world of rubble that is home to rats.

When it comes to commerce here, all one sees except for women selling sunflower seeds are boys with shoe-cleaning brushes or people who have constructed little carts so they can carry soldiers’ gear. They prefer bread to cigarettes or money.

People’s clothing here looks like disguises, as if they have put on every garment they own and don’t take them off at night. Coats are rarer than thickly padded jackets. Like so many other things, these are reduced to rags. For head covering, they wear caps with earlaps or trimmed flaps. You also see Soviet caps made of tan cloth and with a high crease in the center. Almost all these people, and especially the women, carry sacks over their shoulders. The sight of them indicates a burdensome, onerous existence. They bustle about hurriedly, restlessly but without any noticeable purpose, as if they were in an anthill that has been pried open.

Among all these you see many uniforms, even Hungarian and Rumanian, as well as ones that are completely unknown, like those of Ukrainian volunteers or of the local security service. After nightfall, you can hear gunfire from the desolate factory yards over near the railroad station.

In the afternoon, vacationers waiting for their trains were stopped and sent to the front in hastily assembled marching units. There is news that the Russians have broken through north of Stalingrad.

Toward evening, I continued on my journey, heading toward Krapotkin, where we arrived at four in the morning. There I slept on the counter in the waiting room until the train left for Voroshilovsk. Within two short days, I have adjusted to this existence in cramped train compartments, in cold halls, without water, without service, without warm rations. But I observe others who are worse off, such as the Russians standing in open freight cars or on the running boards in the icy wind.

Our route leads through the fertile Kuban steppe;[7] the crops have been harvested, but the fields are mostly untilled. Their dimensions are huge and the boundaries are out of sight. From this treeless expanse now and again there arises a cluster of silos, tanks, or warehouses. These contain heaps of yellow or brown wheat that gleam like some higher power created by the fertility of the good earth. There are still traces of the cultivation of wheat, corn, castor bean, sunflowers, and tobacco. The edges of the train embankment are covered with the desiccated, parched brown flora of thistles and other composite blossoms. There is also a plant that resembles a horsetail, but in the form and size of a small fir tree. This plant stock reminds me of the Japanese tea blossoms that I used to dissolve in warm water when I was a child. Then, too, I would try to guess their species by attempting to imagine them in bloom.

Arrival in Voroshilovsk after dark. I am billeted in the office building of the GPU,[8] a place of gigantic dimensions like everything else under the authority of the police and prison systems. I have a little room here with a table, a chair, a bed, and, most important, intact windowpanes. For shaving, I have even found a piece of broken mirror to use. After my experiences of the past few days, I recognize the value inherent in such objects.

The weather is rainy; the streets are covered with mud. I am going to be stuck here for a while. A few streets I have walked down have made a more positive impression than the things I’ve seen up until now. In particular, the houses from the Czarist period radiate a certain warmth, while those monstrous Soviet boxes oppress the country for miles around.

In the afternoon, I climbed the hill where the Orthodox church stands—a crudely finished Byzantine-style building with its onion dome half blown away. The old buildings always project something primitive, but it is still more pleasant than the abstract nullity of the new construction. Here one can quote Gauthier: “La barbarie vaut mieux que la platitude” [Barbarism is better than a platitude], where platitude is best translated as nihilism.

In the afternoon the commander-in-chief of the Army group, General Colonel von Kleist,[9] appeared and dined with us. I knew him already from my years in Hannover. Discussed Giraud, the French general now in command in Tunis. Right after his retreat, Hitler is supposed to have said that further unpleasantness could be expected from him.

The women’s voices, especially those of the girls, are not actually melodious, yet they are pleasant. They convey strength and serenity; one could almost imagine them resonating with the deep tones of life’s music. Mechanical and impersonal changes seem to pass over such natures without affecting them. I noticed something similar among South American Negroes; their deep, enduring joy after generations of slavery. Incidentally, the staff doctor, von Grävenitz, told me that physical exams showed the great majority of the girls to be virgins. This is also apparent from their faces, but it is difficult to say [whether] this is more readable from their foreheads or their eyes. A silver glow of chastity suffuses the face. Its light does not have the glow of active virtue, but more a second-hand reflection, like moonlight. It lets us perceive the sun, the source of such serenity.

Snow flurries accompanied by high winds. I tried to climb the church tower to have a look around, but I found the upper steps badly charred. Thus, I had to make do with a view from halfway up. Then I made my way toward a sparse wood that I had spied. Unfortunately, I found it to be impassable, so I had to be satisfied with the captivating sight of a flock of birds swooping nimbly through the bushes and hedges. They resembled our titmouse but seemed to my eyes to be larger and more brightly colored.

At lunch, I saw Major von Oppen, the son of my former regimental commander. Among other things we discussed the poem “Der Taurus,” which Friedrich Georg dedicated to the memory of Oppen’s father, who is buried there.[10]

In the afternoon got a vaccination for typhus. Inoculation remains a remarkable act. I used to like to compare it to baptism, yet the more precise analogy to the spiritual world is perhaps represented by holy communion. We use the living experience that others have collected for us through their sacrifice, sickness, or through snakebite. The lymph of the lamb that has suffered for us. Miracles are prefigured and preserved for us in matter—they are its most exalted expression.

In the evening, Lieutenant Colonel Schuchardt explained the situation to me. Using the large map, he showed me the recent Russian breakthrough of the lines formerly held by our adjoining army group. The thrust destroyed the sections of the front held by the Rumanians and let the Sixth Army be surrounded. A cauldron like this has to be supplied by air until a land bridge can be established.[11]

Life in these areas surrounded by carnage presents the most extreme challenges. The threat resembles that of a besieged city from classical times when no one could expect mercy. This is true of morale as well. For weeks and months, death could be seen approaching from afar. Many scores are settled this way, for the political structures that the states had assumed have been turned inside out.

Visited the city museum in the morning. This had been founded under the Czars and is mainly a zoological collection that has suffered over time. I saw snakes faded by sunlight, curled around branches as white, scaly forms, and others as desiccated mummies in display jars because the alcohol had evaporated. Yet at one time all these objects had obviously been displayed with love and a certain joy in design. Informed viewers can discern such things from little clues. My gaze also fell upon a small label that indicated the activity of groups of local amateurs: Acta Societatis Entomologicae Stauropolitanae, 1926 [Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Stavropol, 1926]. Stavropol is the old name of Voroshilovsk.

Among the taxidermy specimens, I noticed two double-headed animals, a goat and a calf. The goat showed a deformity resembling a Janus head, whereas in the case of the calf, two snouts but only three eyes had formed with the extra one located like that of Polyphemus[12] in the center of the forehead. This intrusion was not without its aesthetic elegance. It gave the impression of an intentional composition, rather than one of a zoological, mythological creature.

Incidentally, it would be a good project, either for the natural scientist or for a humanist, to work on the concept of two-headedness. The conclusion reached would probably be that the phenomenon is part of the lower strata of life, either the vegetative or the demonic. The advantages one could imagine—such as a special synesthetic intelligence or the ability to converse with oneself in the most astonishing way—were allotted to us more simply and cleverly in the form of the hemispherical structure of the brain. The Siamese twins were not so much connected with each other as they were shackled together.[13]

Despite the early hour, I noticed a number of visitors in rapt attention at the display cases. I observed two women in peasant clothing conversing about the objects. One of them seemed particularly enchanted by some of them, such as a pink shell that was armed with long spikes, like a hedgehog.

In the evening I was a guest of Lieutenant Colonel Merk, the quartermaster, a man who excels in that precise businesslike style characteristic of people in charge of supplies. Two Korean women, twin sisters, served us with elegance. Conversation with Captain Dietloff, who had managed a large estate here before the war. We discussed crops and yields that were possible on the soil types here. The fertility is enormous, but as always in such cases, this also applies to the blights. Icy winds can ruin the budding cereal crop in minutes, and wheat rust forms such thick clouds during the harvest that the horses are blinded. Furthermore, there are legions of grasshoppers and June beetles, and thistles with stalks that can grow as thick as a man’s arm. Farmers fear a thorny vine that rolls up into a ball when it reaches maturity and, after rotting at the root, separates and is carried across the fields by the autumn winds, casting its seed as it goes.

Visited the large town market in the morning; it was crowded with people, but there was very little merchandise to be had. The prices are those of famine times. I paid three marks for a little spool of thread that I saw for sale in France for a few pennies a short while ago. Listeners were crowded around a singing beggar with a freshly bandaged arm stump. It seemed that they were listening less to the music than to the long, drawn-out text. It was a Homeric image.

A funeral procession then passed by. Two women in front carried a wooden cross decorated with a wreath, and following them were four more carrying the coffin lid on their shoulders as though it were a boat decorated with flowers. Four young men bore the coffin slung from linen cloths. In it lay the dead woman. She was approximately thirty-six years old, had dark hair and a face with sharp features. Her head lay on a bed of flowers. She was carried feet first, and at that end, lay a black book. I had encountered this Orthodox practice most recently on the island of Rhodes in the public display of the dead, and I approve. It’s almost as if the deceased were consciously bidding farewell before descending into darkness.

During these days, I conceived of a new project, “The Path of Masirah.” The narrator Othfried begins at the moment when he has wandered through the great desert and can make out indications that he is approaching the coast. Salt accretions, grasshoppers, and snakes appear at first—a world of animals and plants that seems born from the arid sand. Then come thorn bushes in bloom, and, finally, palm trees and traces of earlier settlements. Yet the land is desolate and abandoned; now and then, his march goes past destroyed cities whose walls have been breached and huge siege machinery stands in the sand.

Othfried is in possession of a map drawn by Fortunio showing half the text as lettered and the other half consisting of landscape hieroglyphs, all describing the path to Gadamar, where Fortunio had found a mine of precious stones. The study of this map presents difficulties—Othfried wishes he had taken the sea route because each reference leads to the next one like the links of a chain. It seems that Fortunio has given the map’s owner a task to be rewarded with the discovery of the treasure. The details of this mission are at first thrilling, but then they involve intellectual powers as they finally emerge as ethical trials.

Each evening, Othfried unfolds this remarkable map like the bellows of an accordion. He would have given up his quest long ago had it not been for the glimpse of one of the jewels that Fortunio showed him as a test—an opal the size and shape of a goose egg, possessing iridescent, mystical depths. Looking at this stone long enough reveals magical scenes and images from the past and future. This stone was mined in the earth’s mythical period and offers a last remnant of the vanished riches of the Golden Age.

With his followers, Othfried must traverse the path of Masirah across a frightening track high above the coastal surf. This represents ethical patterns of plot and topography. The track has been cut so steeply and narrowly into the smooth cliff face that no more than a single human foot or mule’s hoof can make its way across. The two points of access are invisible to each other, and, to prevent caravans from meeting on the path, there is a kind of turret at each end. From this vantage point, travelers must call out their intention to enter the path. Othfried neglects this warning and thus brings misfortune to a caravan of Jews from Ophir approaching from the opposite direction at the same time. Both parties meet with their mules on the narrowest, most frightening spot above the abyss, the point where any thought of turning around fills the heart with terror. How can this conflict, which threatens to end with the destruction of one or both groups, be solved?[14]

While I was walking across the market square thinking about this subject, it seemed to me a shame to have to delete any piece of it; it lends itself to a parable about the path of life itself. The map would then have to reveal fate, so that we could read it the way we read the lines on someone’s palm. The lode of precious stones is the Eternal City described in Saint John’s vision in the Book of Revelation: It is the goal that rewards the path. Thinking like this, one could derive much significance from the material.

Of course, this inspiration occurs to me at the least opportune moment, and today I laid aside the first page that I have written. Better days may come when I have more freedom.

Visited the cemetery, the most derelict one I have ever seen. It is a square area bounded by a half-collapsed wall. The lack of names is striking; there are hardly any inscriptions, whether on the moss-covered grave markers or on weather-beaten Saint Andrew’s crosses cut from soft golden-brown limestone. On one of these, I thought I could decipher the word incised in Greek letters, Patera. It made me think of Kubin and his dream city Perle, like so much else here.[15]

The grave mounds are choked with brambles; thistles and burrs also run riot everywhere. Among these, apparently without any plan, new places have been dug out, as yet unmarked by either a stone or wooden monument. Old bones are bleaching on the churned-up ground. Vertebrae, ribs, and leg bones are scattered like pieces of a puzzle. I also noticed the greenish skull of a child on top of a wall.

Back through the crumbling suburbs. In the construction of the houses, in the facial features of the people, in countless mostly imponderable details, the senses pick up echoes and hints of Asia. I sensed this especially when I saw a little boy with his hands folded across his body in a distinctive way. Such fundamental things are perceived as subtle, invisible messages. Scholars think they have found traces of the third eye, the eye in the forehead that was perhaps the eye for such primeval images. Originally, we perceived the lands, animals, springs, and trees as figures—gods and demons—the way we nowadays perceive surfaces and shapes.

Visit to the Research Institute for Plague Control, which is staffed by Russian scholars and employees. The fertile soil of this country is an El Dorado for epidemics and sicknesses like Ukrainian fever, dysentery, typhus, diphtheria, and a virulent variety of a jaundice pathogen that has not yet been isolated. They say that the plague returns every ten years. It appeared in 1912, 1922, and 1932, so its time is again fast approaching. It is brought by caravans from the region of Astrakhan. A mass extinction of rodents precedes it heralding its arrival. In such cases, the institute sends out an expedition comprising zoologists, bacteriologists, and collectors to do more thorough research. The advance of the contagion is observed and combatted by means of quarantine in small stations—so-called plague houses. Particular care is given to the extermination of rats, a function fulfilled by specialized rat catchers called “deratizers,” who can be found on every collective farm.

Professor Hach, the research director, put me at ease during our conversation. A Frenchman would call this relationship between people humane, but it has a different, more primitive tinge with Russians and springs from deeper currents. In France, the endearing quality of an individual is produced by subtle exertion, by psychological action; here it is the product of lethargy. It has a more feminine, but also a darker, amoral quality about it.

Professor Hach has been placed under a mild form of banishment called Minus Six. This means that he must avoid entering the six largest cities in the country. Because the Plague Research Institute also produces large quantities of vaccine, it was placed under the protection of the German troops after the invasion and assigned the responsibility for a collective farm where, before this, the Russian state had employed and fed 800 mentally ill people. To clear the estate for the Plague Institute, these patients were exterminated by the Security Service. Such an act betrays the tendency of the technician to substitute hygiene for morality, similar to the way he substitutes propaganda for truth.

Hints of the executioners’ presence are often so palpable that all desire to work, to create images and thoughts, dies. Evil deeds have a negating, upsetting consequence: Human growth becomes stunted as if polluted by invisible decay. In its proximity, things lose their magic, their aroma, and taste. The mind is exhausted by the tasks it has set itself, tasks that used to refresh and engage. Yet, it is precisely against such things that it must now struggle. The palette of the flowers along the deadly mountain ridge must never fade from our sight, even though they are but a hand’s breadth from the abyss. This is the situation I described in Cliffs [On the Marble Cliffs].

The foggy weather was sufficiently clear by evening that I could just make out the stars through the veil but not really see them.

The sunflower seeds that they sell everywhere here are black with fine white striation. You see people, young and old, nibbling them whether they are walking or standing, by popping them quickly into their mouths and cracking them deftly. The shell is then spit out and the little seed eaten. On the one hand, this resembles a pastime like smoking, and on the other hand, it seems to be a kind of homeopathic nourishment. The saying goes that these are good for building firm breasts for women. All the paths and pavement are covered with the shells that have been spat out, as if you were walking along behind a procession of rodents.

In my dealings with people, I have noticed that I do not speak much to the middle sort, whether of intelligence or character. My contact with very simple as well as highly developed natures, however, presents no difficulty. I seem to resemble a pianist playing only the keys at the extreme ends of the keyboard and just having to make do without the rest. It’s either peasants and fishermen or people of the highest quality. The rest of my social dealings consist of arduous attention to the mundane—rummaging through my pockets looking for change. I often get the feeling that I am moving within a world for which I am not adequately equipped.

Sunday, clear frosty conditions. A little snow lies on the ground. In the morning, I took a walk through the woods and at the site of that light, pure dusting I thought of the wondrous verse that Perpetua once murmured to herself upon waking up in our Leipzig garret:

[Windblown snowbanks hide the worst—]

In those days, we lived in a studio. At night, we could watch the stars in their course and, in winter, the softly falling snowflakes.

My impressions from the woods were a little more cheerful. There peasant women approached me carrying long, curved yokes with buckets of water or small bundles swinging at the ends. Even the yokes on the small Panje horses[16] dance high over their shoulders and are pleasant to see when they trot. That conjures up a bygone age, times of plenty. I feel that this land has been depleted by abstract concepts and that it would blossom again under the sun of a benevolent paternal force. Especially when I hear the people speak with their vowels that echo deep joy and resonate gentle laughter, I am reminded of winter days when flowing springs were audible beneath ice and snow.

Finished reading Jeremiah, which I had begun on 18 October in Suresnes. My journey takes me through the book of books, and the eventful world provides the evidence for it.

Jeremiah’s visions can’t quite measure up to those of Isaiah, whose incomparable power towers over his. Isaiah describes the fate of the universe, whereas Jeremiah is the prophet of political configurations. As such, he plays a significant role; he is the professional prophet, the subtlest tool of national sentiment. He still unites the powers of priest, poet, and statesman. He views the decay of the state not as a cosmic catastrophe stimulating horror and lust, but rather as political collapse, the shipwreck of the state that introduces in its wake a deviation from the divine order.

The situation he sees confronting him is that of Nebuchadnezzar’s threat, a power that he can assess differently and more accurately than the king can. He advises Zedekiah without success. It is hard for us to discern the difficulties of his office, because we are so far removed from theocracies. To do justice to them, you would have to compare Jeremiah’s duties to that of a gifted visionary at the Prussian court in 1805. In that year, he would have to have predicted not only how the year 1806 would end but also 1812 and, then, armed with this knowledge, have warned the king against Napoleon. In such cases, one is not only opposed by the pro-war faction but also by the common man. It is hard to exaggerate the courage that Jeremiah displayed, for it presupposes that there was no doubt of divine guidance. That is what gave him such certainty.

Yesterday was a significant day. I got a glimpse of: “This is you.” Not since South America have I felt such a force.

Can there be such things as geographical, or better, geomantic influences on character? I don’t mean just on behavior as Pascal and Stendhal have understood it, but rather influence upon our essence. That would mean that in other latitudes we could undergo disintegration and then reconstitution. This would correspond to corporeal transformations: at first we are enveloped in fevers, and then we recover our health. We would be world citizens in the highest sense if the globe in its totality were to form and shape us. World leaders are elevated to such status by their nations; the legend of the supernatural conception of Alexander the Great is akin to this. A lightning bolt strikes the mother—strikes the earth in her womb. The great poets like Dante in his excurses and Goethe in the West-östlicher Diwan[17] interpret this spiritually. So do the world religions—with the exception of Islam, which is too influenced by climate. Take Saint Peter’s vision of the animals: the enjoyment of their flesh symbolizes the assimilation of all the empires and nations of this world.[18]

The evening was crystal clear. The great constellations glittered in a light such as I know only from the southern hemisphere. I wonder whether people in other ages ever felt this sensation of tremendous cold that comes over us at the sight. Lately, I found this most accurately described in a few verses by Friedrich Georg.

I had a dream in which I was engaged in various tasks. The only image that remains is the scene that preceded awakening: a car with a hood that had a small weevil, the hazelnut borer, as radiator ornament. But here it was the size of a lamb and shone like a cherry-red, striated horn, translucent in the sunlight. The impact of seven bombs dropped by a Russian plane at dawn awakened me at the moment when I was admiring this figure.

It was a radiant morning; not a cloud darkened the blue vault of heaven. I climbed the church tower, an octagonal cylinder resting on a square base. The tower supports a squat onion-shaped dome on top. For the first time, I could look out over the town as a whole with all its far-flung, square dwellings of low houses with a few gigantic new buildings sticking up here and there. These are either a barracks or a police station. To build such boxes, several million people had to be exterminated.

In the morning light, Mount Elbrus with its twin peaks seemed to rise up right in front of the gates like shining silver walls of snow, and yet it is several days’ march from here. It dwarfs the dark Caucasus range over which it towers. This sight made the earth speak to me again for the first time in a long while, as a work of God’s hand.

On my way back, I passed a group of prisoners doing road repair under guard. They had spread their coats out along the edge and passers-by had laid the occasional donation on them. I saw bank notes, slices of bread, onions, and one of the tomatoes they like to pickle in vinegar here when they’re still green. This was the first kind gesture I have noticed in this landscape, aside from a few children at play or the fine camaraderie among the German soldiers. All the parts worked together here: the residents who donated, the prisoners who were poor, and the guards who permitted this activity.

Departed last night with the courier train to meet the Seventeenth Army. The train resembled an automobile on tracks pulling a freight car. After a short journey, we stopped on the tracks for part of the night due to snow squalls. Because we were able to scare up some wood, a little stove warmed us for an hour or two.

Arrived in Krapotkin in the morning, where I spent the day waiting for the train to Belorechensk. Many hundreds of soldiers were waiting in the huge, bare railroad station just like me. They stood together in silent groups or sat on their gear. At various times, they crowded around windows where soup or coffee was being served. In this vast space, you sensed the presence of powerful forces that drive human beings without ever being revealed to their sight: raw, colossal power. Hence the impression that every fiber of our will is being commandeered, while our comprehension remains idle. If pure intuition were possible—such as on a painter’s canvas—that would surely bring great solace and relief. But at this stage, it is as impossible as the interpretation of events by a great historian, or better yet, in a novel. We do not even know the names of the powers that have squared off against each other.

A thought at this moment: “Freedom in the nineteenth century sense cannot be restored, as many people still dream. It must rise up to new and freezing heights of the historical process and higher still: like an eagle soaring above the turrets that tower above the chaos. Even freedom must pass through the pain. It must be earned again.”

I departed from Krapotkin after a fifteen-hour delay. The word “delay” of course loses its meaning here. We have to adjust to a visceral condition that destroys all patience.

The rain was pouring down, so I permitted myself some time to read by candlelight in the compartment. Even with my reading matter, I now live à la fortune du pot [by potluck] by having to pick up many an unappetizing item, such as in this case Abu Telfan by Wilhelm Raabe. I brought this along from Voroshilovsk, a book I had heard praised by my grandfather, the schoolteacher, although I was never especially curious about it. The constantly repeated ironic embellishments in this prose resemble the gilded metal mounts on imitation rococo of the sort seen on walnut furniture from this period. Things like: “The poplar trees are again showing that they are capable of casting very long shadows.”

Or: “The white fog, which had unfortunately already been used by the honest Wandsbecker Bote,[19] also made its presence felt upon the meadows.”

This provincial irony is one of the symptoms of the nineteenth century; some authors seem to be plagued by its chronic itch. Yet these Russian years claim not only human victims but also books. They turn yellow like leaves before the frost, and someday it will be noticed that whole literatures have silently ceased to exist.

Arrived in Belorechensk in the early morning hours. Waiting on the muddy train platform I studied the magnificent, luminous constellations. It’s remarkable how they captivate the spirit in new ways when you are approaching a world of suffering. Boëthius mentions them in this context in his final, most beautiful verse.

In the bed assigned to me, I discovered two drivers whose vehicle had gotten stuck in the mud. The hut had only one room divided in half by a large stove; it contained two more beds where the housewife slept along with her female friend. They crawled into bed together, freeing up a warm berth for me.

I visited the commander-in-chief, Lieutenant General Ruoff, around midday, bringing him greetings from his predecessor, Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Discussion about our positions. Whereas the cold temperatures had been the most dangerous aspect of the first Russian winter, now at least on this section of the front, it’s the damp that is even more debilitating. For the most part, the troops in the wet forests are huddled in foxholes, because the advance has been halted for the past three weeks. Tarpaulins offer the only protection. Flooding in the brooks and rivers has washed the bridges away. Supplies are held up. Aircraft cannot even drop anything over these foggy woods. Exertion reaches its extreme limit here, at which point men die of exhaustion.

In the afternoon, I was present at the interrogation of a captured nineteen-year-old Russian lieutenant. His soft, unshaven beard growth looked innately girlish. The boy wore a shearling cap and carried a long wooden staff in his hand. He was a farmer’s son, who had gone to engineering school and before his capture had led a mortar unit. The general impression reinforced this: a peasant turned mechanic. There was something ponderous and deliberate in his hand motions. I could imagine that these hands had not forgotten their work with wood, although by now they had grown used to the feel of iron.

Discussion with interrogating officer, a Balt who compared Russia to a glass of milk from which the thin layer of cream had been skimmed off. A new layer will have to rise to the top, or else it won’t taste right. That is graphic! The question is, what sort of sweetness remains finely dispersed within the milk? This could be a leavening agent when times are calm again. To put it differently: Has the cruel imposition of technical abstraction penetrated the fertile human substrate? I would say no, based purely on the impression conveyed by the voices and physiognomy of the people.

Relapse. It was extraordinary: at the very moment when I realized it, a heavy piece of the ceiling fell down, leaving a hole shaped like the outline of Sicily.

Because frost had formed overnight, I took a walk around the town where yesterday the muddy paths were impassable. Today they lay like broad village ponds under sheer ice. The houses are small one-story buildings roofed with reeds, shingles, or tin the color of red lead. The bottommost layers of the reed roofs are constructed of the strong stalks; the upper ones are made from the leafy sections, resembling shocks of yellow hair. A remarkable style of canopy roof decorates the entry doors of the more stately buildings and partially protects the steps from rain, but these structures are also for show. The feature probably harkens back to a time when tents influenced architecture. The decoration of these walkways roofed with tin suggests fringe or tassels.

Inside the cottages, it is not uncommon to see heat-loving plants, such as tall rubber trees or lemon bushes bearing fruit. The small rooms with their large stoves are like greenhouses. Poplar trees grow in profusion out of the gardens and at the edges of the broad streets. The dense branches were glorious in the sunlight.

A small military cemetery contained the dead from a field hospital as well as a few from aircraft that had crashed over the town. As many as thirty graves had been dug and marked with crosses, a number of others had been dug for future use—something that Meister Anton in Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena decries as a sacrilege.[20]

Outside, on the banks of the Belaya River. It churns with dirty gray floodwaters. Along its banks there extended a field position with barriers and foxholes that were being worked on by groups of women under the supervision of soldiers from the Corps of Engineers. In a narrow gorge lay a dead horse; the last shred of flesh had been scraped from its skeleton. From this vantage point, the city with its wooden huts and roofs covered in green moss doesn’t look bad. You can still feel the vitality that comes from handwork and the organic mellowing that make the place livable.

Afterward I spent time with my landlady, Frau Vala, short for Valentina. Her husband had been away since the beginning of the war in the field with a chemical warfare unit. Living with her is a sixteen-year-old friend, Victoria, daughter of a doctor, who spoke a little German and had also read Schiller. Like almost all her other compatriots, she admires him as the archetypal poet: “Oh, Schiller, super!” She is now obligated to go work in Germany and is looking forward to it. She is a high school student, but her classmates who are over sixteen have been mobilized as partisans. She told me about a fourteen-year-old girlfriend of hers who had been shot near the river, conveying this in an unemotional tone that was by no means harsh. That left a deep impression on me.

Had a conversation in the evening with Major K., primarily about the partisans; it is his job to locate and engage them. The fighting is merciless enough between the regular troops. A soldier will go to any extreme to avoid capture. This explains the tenacity with which these cauldrons are defended. Russian orders have been found that place a bounty on captured soldiers who are delivered alive—prisoners the Intelligence Service can then use in its interrogations. Other orders state that the prisoners must first be brought before military officers and only then, before the political officers. This means that they follow a clear sequence for squeezing the lemon.

The opponents expect no mercy from each other and their propaganda only reinforces this opinion. By way of an example, last winter a sleigh carrying wounded Russian officers blundered into the German positions. At the moment the men realized their error, they pulled the pins on the hand grenades they had concealed between their bodies. Prisoners are nonetheless taken in order to increase the workforce and also to attract deserters. But the partisans stand beyond the reach of military law, inasmuch as one can even still speak of such a concept. They are surrounded in their forests like packs of wolves to be exterminated. I have heard things here of the most bestial nature.

On the way home, I pondered these things. In such intervals, a thought forms that I used to spin out in various scenarios. It is this: Where everything is permitted, first anarchy, then tighter order is the result. Anyone, who arbitrarily underestimates his opponent, cannot expect pardon himself. And so new and tougher rules of combat evolve.

That seemed to me like a tempting theory, but in practice, we inevitably confront the moment when we must raise a hand against defenseless noncombatants. This is only possible in cold-blooded combat with beasts or in wars that atheists wage against each other. At that point, only the Red Cross has any clear mission.

There will always be areas where we cannot allow ourselves to accept the rules of the opponent. War is not a cake divided up by the parties until it’s all gone; there is always a piece left over to share. This is the divine part that remains outside the fray, separate from the struggle between pure bestiality and demonic power. Even Homer recognized and respected this. The truly powerful man, the one destined to rule, will be distinguished by the fact that he does not appear as an enemy filled with hatred. He also feels responsible for his opponent. That his strength is superior to that of the other’s is apparent at more sophisticated levels than physical violence, which serves only to persuade his subordinates.

Yesterday’s meeting tells me that I am not going to get a full briefing on the status of this country. There are simply too many places that are off limits to me. These include all those where violence is being perpetrated upon defenseless people and also where reprisals and punitive measures are being applied collectively. Incidentally, I have no hope for change. Things of this sort are part of the zeitgeist; we can see that being eagerly embraced everywhere. Adversaries copy each other.

I wonder if it might be good to visit these places of terror as a witness in order to see and remember what sort of people the perpetrators and the victims are. With his The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky had enormous influence. But he was not there as a volunteer, but rather as a prisoner.

There are also limits to what we are capable of seeing. Otherwise we would have to be ordained to higher holy orders than our age is capable of bestowing.

The departure for Maykop that was planned for the morning was postponed until dark. I was again the guest of the commander, along with a short Saxon general whose car had gotten mired here in the mud. He described the difficulties he had experienced in Kharkov. At first, seventy-five people starved to death each day, but he had underreported this number as twenty-five. He spoke of police tactics with the attitude of a gamekeeper, for example: “I consider the view quite erroneous that the thirteen and fourteen-year-old youths captured with the partisans should not be liquidated. Anyone who has grown up that way, without a father or mother, will never turn out well. A bullet is the only right thing. By the way, that’s what the Russians do with them too.”

Citing evidence, he told an anecdote about a sergeant who had picked up a nine-year-old and a twelve-year-old lad overnight out of pity; in the morning, he was found with his throat cut.

Said farewell to Frau Vala. My billet in her parlor with the large stove wasn’t bad—a sort of cabbage-soup comfort. Our life’s paths lead us to strange way stations.

In Maykop, I was the guest of the supply commander. I was billeted in a house that had no light except for a tiny flame illuminating an icon. But the commander sent me a honey-colored candle that gave off a delightful aroma.

I departed for Kurinski before dawn. Just past Maykop the road took a turn into the mountains. Signs at the edge of the woods: “Achtung, partisan alert. Keep weapons at the ready.”

The wooded areas are secured against the Russians on the opposite side by sparse positions, often no more than outposts; the larger areas beyond are only traversed by troops along the roads. They are not only threatened by partisans—or bandits (to quote the German term used for them)—but also by scouting parties and patrols from the regular forces, as when the car of a division commander was recently ambushed and hit by a high explosive charge.

The ground was frozen solid, making it easy for our car to go uphill. It followed the road to Tuapse, made famous by the German paratroopers’ attack and the Russian defense. The track had already been cleared; only heavy vehicles like steamrollers and tractors were occasionally visible on the slopes. In the undergrowth lay a horse frozen to the ground. Its flesh had only been stripped from the upper portion, with the result that its bare ribcage and frozen blue and red intestines made it look like a detail from an anatomical atlas.

The forest was thick and leafy, and untended growths of young oak trees spread out in curtained rows as far as the eye could see to the point where the jagged white peaks of the lofty mountain range met the blue mountains. In some places, woodpeckers flew down from stands of older trees to peck at the brittle wood. Their bright raspberry breasts shone here and there against the snowy tree trunks.

In Kurinski, I am told that these hills are overgrown in part with bushes and, as for the rest, with shoots that propagate directly from the tree stumps. The reforestation took place mostly under Russian authority, since the Circassians who lived here, being cattlemen, kept the land open. Only a few huge surviving trees were spared. These are therefore called Circassian oaks. Other places in these vast forests are still habitats for bears. Here there still exist patches of virgin stock, but otherwise this sea of forest has an inherent primeval power of its own. The eye notices the first thing that will be exploited: nature as yet unspoiled by swarms of people passing through.

At Khadyshenskaya a bridge had been flooded out. Soldiers from the Corps of Engineers conveyed us over the torrential river, the Pshish,[21] in inflatable dinghies. Beside me a young infantryman crouched on his gear: “The last time I sat in a thing like this we got a direct hit that ripped it in half and killed four comrades. I and one other man got away with our lives. That was on the Loire.”

And so this war provides generations to come with material for tales to tell their children and their children’s children. People will forever hear about how the narrator drew one of the lucky numbers in the terrifying lottery. Of course, it is only the accounts of the survivors we hear, since they are the ones who write history.

In the utterly devastated town of Kurinski, I reported to an Austrian, General de Angelis, the commander of the Forty-Fourth Paratroop Corps. He showed me our positions on the map. The advance along the road from Maykop to Tuapse has brought heavy losses since the Russians have taken cover in the extensive, dense forests and defended them with skill and tenacity. Thus, it happened that—to use the words of Clausewitz—the attack reached its zenith just before the watershed and came to a standstill just short of its strategic goals. Such a situation is fraught with calamity at every step. After tough close-quarter combat in the undergrowth, torrential rainfall destroyed the bridges and made roads impassable. Now the troops have been pinned down for weeks in sodden foxholes, being worn down as much by the cold and damp as by enemy fire and frequent attacks.

In the afternoon went up into the mountain forest that rises above the huts of Kurinski. The undergrowth level consisted of rhododendrons that were already bearing greenish-yellow buds. I returned by way of the narrow valley of a mountain stream that flowed over green marl. It was here that the populace survived the fighting by hiding in small caves. You could still see the remnants and traces of their campsites.

Starry night. I spent it in the bare bedchamber of a Cossack hut that was equipped with only a metal bedframe for sleeping. Luckily the large stove built of rough stone was in working condition so that a good fire produced heat for the first few hours. Before falling asleep, I listened for a while to the cricket of this hearth whose voice rang out in full-throated melody, more a chime than a chirp. The next morning was intensely cold. Russian aircraft could be heard circling over the valley in the distance, releasing strings of bombs. This was punctuated by the brisk pumping action of our Flak [anti-aircraft guns].

In the morning, the weather was clear, and I went out with First Lieutenant Strubelt to get a view of the terrain on both sides of the road to Tuapse. We drove in a car that had a row of bullet holes at the back of the roof—traces of an attack by partisans.

A railroad line had been built through the Pshish Valley along our road. It looked like a muddy hellhole. The river had reached a high-water mark a few days ago. By now it had fallen to the point where long banks of gravel glittered among the whirlpools. The section where the valley was the widest had room for gun emplacements, command posts, field dressing stations, and ammunition depots. At those spots, the road had been churned by the wheels into thick yellow-brown mire that seemed bottomless. Parts of horses and cars projected from it. Rows of tents and huts had been built a little higher up the slope. Bluish smoke hovered over them, and Russian or Turkoman prisoners could be seen splitting wood in front of their doors. The scene gave the impression of a caravansary that had been built at the edges of a wide current of thick silt. The nature of this material and its dull hue conveyed the essence of lethargic, creeping activity. Streaks of flame blazed up amidst all this as our artillery fired on a battalion position the Russians had breached that morning.

Columns of herded animals and processions of bearers with Asiatic faces crept through the morass. Among them was a large number of Armenians, with their dark penetrating eyes, large hooked noses, and olive skin, often heavily pock-marked. You could also see the Mongol types of the Turkomans, with their smooth black hair and, occasionally, with the beautiful, tall physiques of the Caucasian tribes like the Grusinians and Georgians. A few individuals shuffled by so wearily that one could see their near-fatal exhaustion. Strubelt actually told me that some of them would lie still in holes in the earth in order to expire like animals.

We turned away from the valley and drove farther into the winter forest, climbing gradually. High mountain peaks were visible in passing as they shone briefly. Some of them were in Russian hands. In other words, we were visible—but in this region, the enemy is saving his ammunition he must carry with such great effort through the mud to the gun emplacements. For a moment, a plane appeared and then veered away abruptly when two gray clouds of smoke materialized near it. As the pilot banked, the underside of his aircraft shone like the silver belly of a trout, displaying two Soviet stars in place of its red spots.

We stopped at the Elisabeth Polski Pass near a small cemetery, actually just a group of graves. For one of these, the grave of an anti-aircraft gunner, his comrades had constructed a fence of slender yellow shell casings by hand. These were arranged like those bottles sometimes seen stuck bottom up into the earth along the edges of our own garden beds. Nearby the last resting places of three soldiers from the Corps of Engineers had been lovingly fenced with garlands of oak leaves strung in makeshift rows. The grave of a Turkoman bearer was marked by a wooden post with a foreign inscription, perhaps a verse from the Koran.

We ascended the north side of the mountain where a layer of new snow had thawed overnight and frozen again. The new crystal formations produced patterns of broad needles that glistened with a bluish tint. After driving up the mountain for three-quarters of an hour, we reached the ridge, which revealed a view of a sea of forested mountains for miles around. The closest ones had mossy green coloration that came from the lichen covering the bare branches. The blue mountain ranges got darker and darker, and behind them rose the snow-capped peaks, with their ashen slopes and sharp crags. Opposite us towered Mount Indyuk with a long ridge ending sharply in twin peaks and connecting to a domed ridge. A white cone rose up behind it. On our flank to the right, the Góra Sarai towered upward to a Russian observation post in position at the summit. For that reason, we retreated back into the undergrowth when we unfolded our white maps.

We had reached the ridge at a point where an artillery lieutenant had been directing the fire toward the spot where the Russians had broken through that morning. Far down behind us from the dense forest floor the deep roar of the large guns could be heard. Then their shells spiraled up over our heads, their shrill whistles slowly fading into the distance and finally dying out in the green valleys with the dull, barely audible reports of their impacts. White clouds then billowed up from the conifer groves and hung suspended in the humid air for a long time.

We watched this activity for a while across the broad expanse. Afterward, I walked a bit on the south slope, which was protected from view by dense tree growth. The sun warmed its ridge and dappled the pale foliage as if it were a beautiful spring day. The north side was covered with beech trees. These had grown a layer of moss from all the rain and bore a lush growth of black crescent-shaped tinder fungus. But here on this side, the oak trees predominated. Plants also flourished, such as large bushes of hellebore beside delicate Alpine violets with their light, spotted leaves on a purple background.

It reminded me of home; I felt as though I had often been on such oak-covered slopes. The Caucasus is not only an ancient wealth of peoples, languages, and races; it also preserves animals, plants, and topography of far-flung regions from Europe and Asia. Memories awaken in these mountain ranges. The meaning of the earth seems more palpable, just as the minerals and precious stones are more visible, and water here springs from its source.

Inspected our position above Shaumyan with First Lieutenant Häussler. At the outset, we accompanied General Vogel as far as the field headquarters of Regiment 228. We reached this by climbing up a steep and narrow depression made by the melt water as it ripped deep into the forest floor. On each side, huts were pasted into the clay like swallows’ nests showing only their front walls facing outward. Inside, these were close and dirty, but brick stoves radiated good heat. There is no lack of wood in this ocean of forests.

We then climbed through the dense but leafless woods and stayed on a path that had been trodden deep into the brown mud by the pack animals and their guides. Walking was difficult; the path had recently come under rocket fire, and one hit had killed one of the animals, a lovely little dark brown horse that lay dead in the mire. Dark blood had flowed into yellowish clay-colored pools of water left by its hoof prints and settled there, undiluted.

The trees, mostly oaks, were thickly covered with liverwort, and thick, silvery green tresses hung from their branches like beards. These gave the forest a soft, swaying quality. In the winter sunlight, the woodpeckers and the agile nuthatches flitted from trunk to trunk as squawking jays flew around. These last, a local Caucasian variant recognizable by the black crests atop their heads, animated the forest. Yet I still felt that the zeitgeist was trying to extinguish all beauty in us. We perceive it as if we were gazing out through the bars of prison windows.

We climbed upward along a trail that had been blazed in order to reach a high-elevation emplacement that jutted out like a nose. Neither barbed wire nor any continuous trench demarcated it from no man’s land. All that was visible was a group of molehills scattered through the forest. Each of these hills concealed a small shelter—an excavated hole that had been shored up with tree trunks and then covered in earth. Here and there a tarpaulin had been spread on top, providing only inadequate protection from the rain.

The company commander, a young Tyrolean from Kufstein, showed us around his demesne. Close by on the other slope, the Russians had dug in. We could make out one of their pillboxes from a minor variance in coloration from the gray-green shimmer of the forest floor. As if to prove the point, a loud volley of gunfire whipped across in our direction. The only bullets we heard distinctly were those that whistled as they ricocheted through the branches. One of them tore the sight off a machine gun.

We jumped into the foxholes for cover and let the storm pass over. Such situations make me recognize both their half-comical and half-upsetting aspects. I have long since passed the age, or better said the condition, when I find such things amusing and immediately try to outdo them.

In order to smoke out our foxholes, the Russians had hauled an armor-piercing artillery piece up the mountain. The small shells exploded on impact within the target areas causing many casualties. Countless trees that had been shorn off at mid-height bore witness to their force.

It was dull, melancholy, and dank. After the sleepless night, most of the unit was lying down asleep; individual sentries were scanning the forest. Others were polishing the fresh rust off their weapons. A short fellow from Thuringia had soaped himself from head to foot and was having a comrade slowly pour warm water over his body.

I spoke with these men, who have landed here at the end of the world. They have taken part in the difficult offensive and fought their way forward through these mountains step by step, only to dig themselves in here when the force of the thrust diminished. They have been holding their position under fire and without relief for a long time. Casualties, direct hits, sicknesses like those brought on by exhaustion and damp, deplete their numbers each day—numbers that were low at the outset. They are truly living on the edge of existence.

During the descent to Shaumyan, we again passed by the horse we had seen that morning. In the meantime, it had been butchered down to its bones and small intestines. Turkoman soldiers perform this duty, eaters of horseflesh in huge quantities whose yellow faces could be seen bending over canisters full of bubbling goulash.

Shaumyan was badly battle-scarred; it comes under fire daily. One hit is enough to dismantle the huts like houses of cards so that their construction can be studied: four walls whose flimsy timbers have been covered with a mixture of clay and cow dung; the roofs are covered with wooden shingles split paper thin. Two pieces of furniture protrude from the ruined ground plans: the large stone oven and the metal bed frame.

This town is a way station for our vehicles. Stretcher-bearers carry the wounded down from the mountains to this point. A cemetery with crosses damaged by shelling is evidence that this first station has taken already taken its deadly toll.

At a wound-dressing station (one of the reconstructed huts), we met Dr. Fuchs performing the duties of both doctor and soldier. He hospitably invited us to eat with him. The place is not marked because the Red Cross means nothing here. Just yesterday a rocket struck the adjoining house, severely injuring a stretcher-bearer.

The wounded come in intermittent batches once the battle picks up, and then there’s a lot to do. The injured leave the woods at dark and arrive in a state of extreme exhaustion, some even dying on the way. This morning, for example, the doctor heard a cry outside: “Please come help me!” He found a soldier with outstretched hands who had collapsed into the mud and lacked the strength to get up by himself.

After eating, our host treated us to a cup of coffee and a piece of Christmas cake that his wife had sent him. We then took our leave from this unassuming helper, whose shelter even had a cultivated air about it—a trait that people of character seldom lose.

On the subject of mythology. The secret of the Odyssey and its influence lies in the fact that it is a metaphor for life’s journey. The image of Scylla and Charybdis conceals a primeval configuration. The man burdened by the wrath of the gods moves between two dangers, each more terrible than the other. In these cauldron battles, he seems to stand between death in battle and death in captivity. He finds he is forced into the tortuous narrow gap between the two.

If a great poet of our age ever wanted to express how human beings long for peace when they are pushed to the limits of destruction, he would have to write a continuation of the Odyssey as a new epic or as an idyll: Odysseus with Penelope.

Walk to the Góra Sarai, a peak whose summit the Russians occupy. Ssarai, a word of Tatar origin, means “barn,” and gora is Russian for “mountain.”

I got this explanation from a young interpreter, whom Häußler had brought along to carry a machine gun because the region is rife with partisans. He is German-Russian, descended from Swabian emigrants.[22] His parents lived as prosperous farmers in the Crimea near Eupatoria. As “Kulaks,”[23] they were deported to Omsk in Siberia and forced to leave their eight-year-old son behind. He has not heard anything from them since 1936.

We climbed up the mountain through a dense mixed forest growth of young oaks, aspens, and beeches. At times, we made our way through bushes with pink and bright green branches as well as little islands in marshes with tall stands of cattails hung with brown cotton fluff. On the way, a corporal carrying an axe joined us. He was out hunting for a Christmas tree.

After an ascent of two hours, we reached the ridge that concealed a row of pillboxes behind it. The sentries were positioned slightly higher so they could see down into the valley on the other side. We inspected their line, which had been drawn up very carelessly. There was a gaping hole in the right flank, then came a battalion of Turkomen troops. Here the corporal crept forward with his axe and returned after an hour with a beautiful fir tree. Its needles showed pale growth lines on their undersides.

We rested at the quarters of the company commander, who then took us to an elevated point where two weeks ago the Russians had been able to break through. In doing so, they had slaughtered all the men. The graves along the heights were crowned with crosses that had been planted with Christmas roses [hellebore]. From there the summit was visible—a bare peak with bunkers in the nearby undergrowth. At that moment a cluster of rockets hit the earth with a loud explosion. It startled an enormous eagle that soared in lazy circles over the chaos.

During the descent following this, Häußler briefed us about an execution of partisans. Behind us I heard the interpreter laughing, so I studied him a bit more closely. I thought I could tell from his features—the parchment texture of his skin, the grim look in his eyes—that he was the type of person who longs for such bloodshed. The mechanical habit of killing produces the same ravages in the facial features that mechanical sexuality does.

Visited General Vogel for tea; he sent me back to Kurinski with a bodyguard. Just yesterday after dark, two couriers were ambushed, shot, and their corpses stripped to their shirts.

Departure at noon for the field headquarters of the Ninety-Seventh Division. The commander, General Rupp, was waiting for me at the demolished bridge over the Pshish. We crossed the silted river of yellow clay in an inflatable dinghy. We had to cross a steep mountain ridge in order to reach staff headquarters because an explosion had made a tunnel through the mountain impassable.

We wriggled our way through dense undergrowth, and then crossed over cliffs through hart’s tongue fern, which had opened its long tender leaves. We encountered hundreds of Russian and Asiatic bearers on the narrow path. They were laden with rations, equipment, and ammunition. On the descending slope lay a dead man with long black hair on his face. He was covered with clay from his head to his feet, which had been robbed of their boots. He was barely distinguishable from the mud. The general leaned down over him and then, without a word, continued on his way. Despite any imaginable comment to the contrary, I have never seen a dead body more out of place than here. Flotsam on a loveless sea.

Back in the valley, we again came to the Pshish. The towering railroad bridge had been blown up here as well. High water had rammed driftwood against it, moving the huge structure downstream. Among its trestles hung trees, wagons, gun carriages, and even a dead horse dangling by its halter among the branches of an oak tree. Set among these titanic dimensions, the animal looked as tiny as a drowned cat.

The staff was quartered in a stationmaster’s house. I sat beside the general, who was affable, shy, and a bit melancholy. I had the feeling that despite a few peculiarities, he was loved by his officers. Like Chichikov among the landowners in Dead Souls, I am driving around with the generals and observing their metamorphosis into workers. One has to abandon the hope that any traits of a Sulla or Napoleon might develop from this class. They are specialists in the area of command technology and as interchangeable and expendable as the next best worker at a machine.

Spent the night in the blockhouse of the ordnance officer. The gaps between the heavy oak beams are packed with moss. Three bedsteads, a card table, and a desk. Two telephones ring in brief succession. Outside a sloshing, scraping sound is audible: people and animals are slogging through the mud. A Russian prisoner cowers by the stove—an “Ivan”—and puts wood on the fire when it dies down.

Climbed with Major Weihrauter to an observation point placed high above the valley. In the soggy mist, we passed through clearings of mighty beeches with patches of black fungus on their bark. Among these towered oaks and wild pear trees with light gray crackled trunks. The trail had been marked by blazes on the trees; our steps through the viscous mud exposed the flat tubers of the cyclamen.

Once we had reached our objective—a hut concealed underneath cut branches—we lit a small fire and trained our field glasses on the wooded area. Dense, heavy mists curled through the valleys, obscuring our sight but at the same time making the contours as distinct as on a relief map. Our field of vision was cut off by the highest parts of the watershed. The position at the foot of Mount Indyuk, which towered up to the right with its twin peaks and steep ridge, had come under fire today. To the left is the tallest peak, Mount Semashko, giving a view of the Black Sea. This was under German control but had to be abandoned because it was too hard to supply. The access points to such peaks soon become littered with the corpses of bearers and pack animals.

Up on a bare snow-covered patch, the field glasses picked out a small group of Russians apparently crawling around aimlessly in one direction and then another like ants. Resisting this impression, I saw men for the first time as though through a telescope pointed at the moon.

Thought: “During World War I, we would have been permitted to fire at them.”

Early departure along the Pshish Valley with Nawe-Stier. The trees along the highest ridges were covered with hoarfrost. From afar, the branches stand out from the mass of darker growth in the valleys as if dusted with silver powder. How remarkable that a small deviation of a couple of degrees from the norm is a sufficient difference to create such enchantment. There is something about this that gives hope both to living and dying.

We rested upon reaching Captain Mergener, the commander of a combat unit. His combat position turned out to be a white house set alone like a forester’s hut in a mud-choked clearing. In the midst of this wasteland scattered with the detritus of war, I noticed a number of neatly tended graves that had been especially decorated for Christmas with holly and mistletoe. The farmstead was surrounded by deep craters, but its inhabitants had not yet moved out. The contrast between warm rooms and hostile marshlands is all too great.

The combat unit of the twenty-six-year-old commander consisted of a battalion of engineers, a company of Bicycle Infantry, and a few other units. After a cup of coffee, we made the ascent to the position defended by the Corps of Engineers Battalion. Here I found the conditions somewhat better than in the other sections. Some modest barbed wire was strung between the sentry posts along the steep ridge between the trees. In front of this a triple row of mines was set out.

Laying mines, especially at night, is dangerous business. In order to be found again, the mines must be laid out in a pattern. They also have to be well concealed, because it happens that the Russians sometimes dig them up and bury them in front of their own positions.

The S-mine is the type generally used here.[24] When triggered, the device is launched into the air to approximately a man’s height where it then explodes. The trigger mechanism is either a tripwire activated by a footfall or by contact with the three wires that project from the earth like feelers. The zone is paced off very cautiously, especially in the dark, but things often happen anyway.

As an example, a while ago, a cadet was checking the mines with a corporal. They kept their eyes on the tension wire but did not notice that this had frozen to a clump of earth, which pulled the wire away when the cadet stepped on it. The corporal shouted: “Look out, smoke!” and threw himself on the ground. He survived, but the explosion ripped his companion apart. Before the mine springs upward, it makes a hissing noise for a few seconds—just enough time to get down. Sometimes the fuse can also be set off by rabbits or foxes, as happened a few weeks ago when a great stag that had been rutting in the valley for a long time was blown up.

Captain Abt, with whom I talked about these things, recently stepped on a mine himself and threw himself down on the ground. He was not hit: “—because this one had not been placed according to my instructions,” as he added. An old Prussian would have enjoyed that additional comment.

The position was thus more secure, but the men were nonetheless thoroughly exhausted. Three men are sheltered in each of the tunnels connected to a small combat position. One of them does sentry duty; then comes the work detail: getting rations, maintaining the trenches, laying mines, cleaning weapons, and cutting wood. All this with no respite since the end of October under heavy fire in a position established after a period of long and intense fighting.

It was easy to see that there had been a lot of shooting in the woods. The forest was pockmarked with many shell craters, new ones as well, which looked freshly greased on the bottom; the earth was rippled at their edges. Inside these hung a knot of mist. The tops of the trees were lopped off. Because the Russians do not spare their rockets, one or another of the lookout patrols always gets picked off.

Visited the battalion commander, Captain Sperling, in his shelter framed in oak timbers. Rougher tree trunks supported the ceiling. Two crude cots, shelves on the walls with canned goods on them, as well as cooking utensils, weapons, blankets, field glasses. The commander was fatigued, unshaven, looking like someone who had tossed and turned all night. He had been jumping from tree to tree in the dark, sodden forest, waiting for an attack while the rocket launchers churned up the dirt and ripped down the treetops.[25] One dead, one wounded, so it went night after night. Our own artillery had even dropped a shell behind his own slope position:

“No talk of being pinned down here. You’ll have to answer to me if the shells fizzle out in the trees.”

And so, the classic exchange between artillery and infantry.

“Nobody grouses anymore. They’re getting apathetic. That worries me.”

He talks about his ceiling made of beams that can withstand shells but not survive heavy rocket fire. Losses: “it has happened that some days we don’t have any.”

Sickness: “rheumatism, jaundice; kidney infection, which makes the extremities swell; the troops die as they march to the field dressing station.”

I heard all these conversations in World War I, but in the meantime, the suffering has become more dismal, more compulsory, and is rather the rule than the exception. We find ourselves here in one of those great bone mills that have been familiar since Sebastopol and the Russo-Japanese War.[26] The technology, the world of automatons, must converge with the power of the earth and its ability to suffer in order to give rise to this sort of thing. By contrast, Verdun, the Somme, and Flanders[27] are mere episodes. It is impossible for such images to affect other areas such as air and sea combat. Ideologically, this Second World War is completely distinct from the first. It is probably the greatest confrontation about free will since the Persian Wars.[28] And again the fronts have been drawn up completely differently from the way they look on the map. Germans lost World War I together with the Russians, and it could be that they will lose the second along with the French.

Descent around twelve o’clock. In order to target the men going for rations, the artillery started to pepper the ravines with concentrated shelling, causing Sperling some apprehension about his own shelter. The barrage sounded truly massive—like mountain ranges breaking apart and collapsing with a crash.

Back through the Pshish Valley. A figure of mud lay on the riverbank—a dead Russian face down, his head resting on his right arm as if he were asleep. I saw his blackened neck and hand. The corpse was so swollen that the mud was caked on it like the pelt of a seal or the skin of a big fish. And so there he lay, no better than a drowned cat—a disgrace. In the Urals, in Moscow, or in Siberia, a wife and children have been waiting for him for years. Following this, our own discussion of “that topic” gave me the opportunity to marvel again at the general numbing process, even among educated people. Individuals have the feeling of being passive participants, enmeshed in a huge mechanism.

In the evening, I read a strange phrase in the military communiqué that mentions the danger of a threat to the flanks. This is likely to be a reference to the threat against Rostov, for that is without doubt the strategic target of the Russian attacks.[29] There is always the prospect of being caught up in mass catastrophes like a fish trapped with its school in a net cast by a distant hand. Yet it is up to us whether we too shall suffer mass death, death dominated by fear.

Returned to Kurinski in the morning. I again passed the railroad bridge that had been washed downstream. The dead horse—so tiny in the distance—still hung on one of the trees that decorated the structure like bouquets of flowers.

The middle plank of a wooden walkway had just broken where gun carriages were crossing so that a draft horse plunged through the opening and dangled in its harness with its head just above the rough waves. For a few long moments its nostrils kept being submerged in the water while up above the agitated drivers were scrambling around helplessly. Then a corporal with bayonet drawn sprang down onto the bridge from the bank and slashed through the straps, letting the animal tumble into the water and swim to safety. An aura of unease, of abnormality lay over the place—a mood of crisis.

Crossed the ridge with the tunnel again. Omar, a good-natured Azerbaijani who had been looking after me for the past few days, followed with my gear. The dead bearer was still lying there in the mud even though many hundreds of men had passed him by every day. The display of corpses seems to be part of the system—I don’t mean the human system, but that of the daimon who rules over such places. That tightens the reins.

A bit farther up, I saw two new dead bodies, one of which had been stripped to his underwear. He was lying in the streambed, his powerful chest protruding, blue from the frost. His right arm was crooked behind his head, as though he were sleeping; on his skull glistened a bloody wound. For all I could tell, people had tried to rob the shirt off the other corpse too, but without success. Yet it had been pulled up far enough here to reveal a small, pallid entry wound near the heart. Mountain troops with heavy packs hurried past, and lines of bearers loaded with beams, coils of wire, rations, and ammunition. None of them had shaved in a long time, they were all caked with mud, and the odor of humanity emanated from them—people who had been strangers to soap and water for weeks. They barely glanced at the corpses, but they start with fright when a shot from a heavy mortar down below resounds like a boom out of a large empty kettle. Interspersed were pack animals that had wallowed in muck like great rats with clotted pelts.

On the cable car across the Pshish. At great height on a narrow board swinging over the river, both fists clenched around a cable, I comprehend the landscape like a picture in one of those moments that goes deeper than any painting. The little ripples down below take on something stiff and eternally frozen in time, a bit like the pale edges of the scales on the body of a snake. I am swaying next to one of the tall bridge abutments with Romanesque windows that remains standing like a shattered tower. An officer peers out through one of the fissures in the way people look out of those hollow eggs in Bosch paintings and glimpse bizarre machines. The officer is calling numbers over to the crew of a heavy cannon. Down below, the artillerymen are visible around a gray monster; then they stand back and cover their ears as a red tongue of flame flashes through the air. Immediately afterward, the head calling out numbers emerges from the wall again. Injured men with bright white bandages are ferried across the river and then taken on stretchers to the ambulances, which have driven up en masse. Their red crosses have been camouflaged. Like ants, hundreds and thousands of bearers in long lines bring forward planks and wire. Through all this, melodies of Christmas carols in a supernatural voice fill the enormous cauldron: A propaganda unit’s loudspeaker is playing Silent Night, Holy Night. And accompanying this, the constant furious pounding of mortar shelling echoes through the mountains.

In the evening, de Marteau brought the first mail from Maykop: a parcel containing Christmas cake, the holiday bread baked by Perpetua with hazelnuts from the vicarage garden. Included were letters from her, from Mother, from Carl Schmitt. He writes about nihilism, which he equates with fire when he considers the four elements. Nihilism, he says, is the urge to be incinerated in crematoria. These ashes then produce the phoenix, that is to say a realm of the air.

Carl Schmitt is among the few people who try to assess the process in categories that are not entirely shortsighted, such as the national, the social, and the economic arguments. Blindness increases with awareness; humans move in a labyrinth of light. They no longer know the power of darkness. Who can even imagine the scale—whose delight requires dramatic effects like those I witnessed yesterday while hanging from my cable? Immensity is triumphantly enthroned at its center. It is obvious that at some level a deep enjoyment is derived from these hells.

Reading matter: Der Wehrwolf by Löns, a book I haven’t read since childhood.[30] I found a copy here in one of the bunker libraries. Despite its crude and woodcut-like style, traces of the old sagas, of the old nomos, shape the description.[31] I am engrossed by the book because the plot is set nearby, actually not far from Kirchhorst.

Then read further in Ezekiel. The vision that introduces his book conceals an insight into the structure of the world. This transcends the boldest thoughts, the most elevated works of art. We enter the region of absolute concepts and explore them in a state of ecstasis.[32] In this tangible model is revealed the luster of the world and its overworlds.

Dreams last night. I had long talks with Friedrich Georg and others, and I was showing him around Paris. One of them, a short fellow from Saxony: “All people possess the capacity to lead happy lives, but they just never make use of it.”

Walk into the Pshish Valley after breakfast to spend a little time for a short beetle hunt. Such activity serves to preserve my dignity, as a symbol of my free will in the world.

Celebrated Christmas in the afternoon. As we did so, we saluted the troops of the Sixth Army. If they were to be defeated by this encirclement, then the entire southern portion of the front would start to crumble. That would correspond exactly to what Speidel predicted to me last spring as the probable consequence of a Caucasus offensive. He said it would open an umbrella, meaning that it would lead to the construction of huge fronts with narrow points of access.

In the evening, we got together in the little space that Captain Dix had set up in town in the former bathhouse. Leather seats from a bus are arranged around the smokers’ table; the colossal wooden wheel of a Russian artillery piece hangs from the ceiling as a chandelier. The occasional chirp of a cricket, gentle and dreamlike, comes from the walls of the immense stove now and then. We ate roast duck and had sweet Crimean champagne to go with it.

I soon withdrew to my Cossack hut to devote myself to studying the extensive correspondence that de Marteau had delivered to me during the party. The most important contents were four letters from Perpetua. Friedrich Georg writes about a trip to Freiburg and conversations with the professors there who “observe the passage of time from their Alemannic retreats.” Grunert writes about the Eremurus [foxtail lily] and lilies and lets me know that he is sending some beautifully blossoming allium species. His letter contains a marginal note referring to the Magister and a meeting with him in a London pub just before the outbreak of war. Claus Valentiner writes about our circle of friends in Paris. Two letters from people I didn’t know contain references to authors, one of them to Sir Thomas Browne, who lived from 1605 to 1681; the other to Justus Marckord and his work Gebete eines Ungläubigen [Prayers of an Unbeliever]. A photocopy of a will informs me that another unknown correspondent who used to write to me, but who in the meantime has been killed in action, has designated me as the heir of his literary remains. There is also a strange message from a Dr. Blum from Mönchen-Gladbach about a passage that he read in my Gärten und Strassen [Gardens and Streets]. In the description of Domrémy, I mention the grave monument of a Lieutenant Reiners, who was killed there on 26 June 1940. I am now told that this young officer had been a horticultural genius, an enthusiastic breeder of fine fruits and flowers, preferring the amaryllis above all others. Surpassing even the Dutch gardeners, he was often able to achieve eight huge blossoms on one stem—from the purest white to the deepest crimson, and wrote about all of his flowers in a journal. Blum believes it was no accident that I memorialized this rare person, and I agree with him. In addition, letters from Speidel, Stapel, Höll, Grüninger, and Freyhold, who tells me that he is going to send me a salmon from the coast of Finland. Strange, how the game of cat’s cradle keeps playing out in life even in the midst of carnage. If there were no more mail deliveries, we would have to confide in the ether.

In the morning, I attended a service of a young Catholic cleric who performed his office superbly. Then took communion from the Protestant pastor—also a young corporal—who distributed it with great dignity.

Following this, went to the Pshish to hunt for beetles. In a rotten tree stump found a nest of Diaperis boleti [darkling beetles] with red femurs—this is the Caucasian aberration. The study of insects has consumed much time in my life—but you have to see such things as an arena where you can practice the art of precise differentiation. These provide insight into the most delicate features of the landscapes. After forty years, one learns to read wing covers as texts, like a Chinese scholar who knows a hundred thousand ideograms. Armies of schoolmasters and pedants devised the system, work that took nearly two hundred years.

Visited the Mirnaya ravine in the afternoon with First Lieutenant Strubelt, one of Hielscher’s intelligent pupils. When our conversation came around to the predicament of the Sixth Army, I became aware of a bond that had never before seemed so clear: in these cauldrons, each and every one of us is melted down and remolded, even if he is not physically present. Accordingly, neutrality does not exist.

We struggled in the fog through the stands of oak and wild pear trees that enveloped the low hilltops in thick forestation. On one of these slopes we came upon a cluster of graves. Among them was that of Herbert Gogol, killed here as a private in the Corps of Engineers on 4 October 1942. The sight of these crosses in this primeval, foggy, wet forest interwoven with gray lichen, filled me with deep sadness at so much anguish.

Thought: they have huddled together here like children in the sinister enchanted forest.

In Apsheronskaya for two or three days in order to bathe here and have things repaired that were badly damaged by the mountain walking.

The place has been taken over by supply and relief troops and also field hospitals, enclosed by a rapidly expanding wreath of cemeteries. We sow the ground profusely with our dead. Many of those buried here must have died of epidemics, a fact I conclude from the doctors’ names that appear frequently on the crosses.

I answer my mail in the evening. I stopped working when a nearby loudspeaker started up. This kind of disturbance has become more and more outrageous since the days when Luther threw his inkwell at a blowfly. I find that they create acoustic images similar to the visual ones found on the great pictures of temptation by Bosch, Brueghel, and Cranach. These brazen, underworld noises, demonic grunts, intrude upon intellectual work like the laughter of fauns peering over the edges of cliffs into the landscape, or like the mad cheers resounding from the depths of the elves’ caves. What’s more, it can’t be turned off—that would be sacrilege.

Walked to the opposite bank of the Pshish across a long narrow suspension bridge that swayed from two cables like vines. At this point, the river is broader than upstream in the mountains, its beautiful stone-green water flows along a bed of dark slate with vertical striations.

Magnificent stretches of woods extend along the other bank. I came upon a settlement of gray wooden houses where smoke emerged from ramshackle shingle roofs and, in spite of the cold, women sat in front of them busying themselves beside little stoves that had been set up outdoors. The settlement seemed medieval, barely spawned from the earth—a world of wood and clay. Add to this the machines, so important here, that were allotted to the white man in America. And so I noticed a sawmill; all around it for quite a distance the forest had been cut down to the ground. Such a sight makes clear the devouring and gluttonous aspect that Friedrich Georg has described in his Illusions of Technology. This runs its course as long as it has natural resources and leaves behind a soil weakened and forever infertile. We lack minds like that of old Marwitz, men who will ensure that we take only from the increase of the earth and not from its capital.

Dreams last night: Among other things, I was thumbing through a history of this war, which was arranged systematically. It contained a paragraph on Declarations of War dealing with several types, beginning with the simple invasion and including the performance of significant ceremonies.

Departure in the morning, initially from the railroad station in Muk and then via Asphalti and Kura-Zize to Kutais. From Kura-Zize onward, I used a truck because the deep tracks had made the road impassable for light vehicles. It had frozen, but the pressure of the wheels soon thawed the top layer, making the surface resemble a piece of buttered bread. Then came the slopes, potholes, and other obstacles that forced us to push the vehicle through the muck. The driver, a Swabian from Esslingen, was a man of choleric temperament who took all these hardships very much to heart: “If you have any feelings at all for a vehicle, you could just weep.” Now and again he would let out particularly strong sighs: “Poor little truck,” referring to this enormous behemoth.[33]

Forest enveloped our route, choking it off in places with long green ropes of moss hanging from the branches. The road passed by the ruined drilling towers and other demolished facilities of the oil fields. We could see individuals staggering among the wreckage like ants.

This place resembles a mudhole with plank walks connecting individual points with each other—such as the staff quarters, the field hospitals, and the mess. Except for these paths any effort made to get around is almost futile. As a result, deaths from exhaustion are not uncommon.

The deluge of sludge even penetrates the interiors of the buildings. In the morning, I was in a field hospital that rose from the center of a yellowish-brown morass. As I entered, the casket of a first lieutenant was being carried toward me. Yesterday he succumbed to his sixth wound of this war. Back in Poland, he had sacrificed an eye.

Under such conditions you must try to secure at least the three most basic requirements for comfort: to be warm, dry, and fed. This had been accomplished: The patients in their heated shelters could be seen dozing in apathetic groups. Exposure to the cold is the leading cause of ailments, especially in their severest forms like kidney and lung infections. Frostbite was prevalent, caused here by the constant soaking and evaporation even at temperatures above freezing. You get the feeling that every last bit has been drained from the troops. Their bodies completely lack any reserves, meaning that a mere flesh wound can be fatal because the body lacks the capacity to heal. There are also fatal cases of diarrhea.

The countless mines that still carpet this town continue to do damage. For example, recently a Russian was found at the edge of the road with his legs blown off. Because detonators were discovered on him, he was immediately executed—a gesture that may have mingled humanity with bestiality, but which correlates with the decline in our ability to discriminate moral categories. The realm of death becomes a depository: There we stick anything that seems upsetting where it won’t be seen again. But that may well be wrong.

Dreams at night: I was party to a conversation between a lady wearing a riding costume and a middle-age gentleman. I was carrying on this conversation myself, sometimes as one partner, sometimes as the other; otherwise I just listened. I was individualized in the dialogue. This revealed the true chasm that exists between participant and observer: The unity of this process became clear to me in the vision, then took on a dialectic quality whenever it was my turn to speak. The image captures my situation in general.

In the morning, I visited Herr Maiweg, the commander of a unit in the Technical Petroleum Brigade in Shirokaya Balka. This is the designation for a part military, part technology group; it is their mission to discover, secure, and develop the conquered oil regions. Shirokaya Balka, meaning “the wide ravine,” was one of those places that produced considerable quantities. Before their retreat, the Russians were extremely thorough in destroying all oil wells and other equipment. They filled the drill-holes with cement reinforced with pieces of iron, springs, screws, and old drill bits. They also submerged iron mushroom-shaped devices. When these are drilled and lifted up, they spread out and tear apart the mechanism.

After a lengthy conversation, we mounted horses and rode across the terrain. With its toppled drilling towers and exploded boiler houses, it looked like those containers for old iron that plumbers have. Rusted, bent, dismantled pieces lay scattered around and among them stood the blasted machines, boilers, tanks. To get anywhere with this chaos would have been depressing. Here and there across the terrain one saw a lone man or a troop wandering around as if they were in the middle of a puzzle that had been dumped out on the floor. Fresh mine craters gaped, especially over near the drilling towers. The sight of sappers looking for mines as they carefully poked the soil with their pointed iron forks awakened the oppressive feeling that comes when the earth can no longer be trusted. But I still had my good horse under me.

At lunch we drank Caucasian wine and discussed the vast topic of how long the war might last. Maiweg had lived ten years as an oil engineer in Texas and was of the opinion that the war with Russia would create a new limes [frontier][34] and also play itself out against America, but at the price of the English and French empires.

I countered by saying that it is precisely the violence of the war that contradicts this. The still undecided conclusion would be the worst imaginable. The widespread prognosis of an infinite continuation derives essentially from a lack of imagination. It occurs to people who see no way out.

Detail: Russian prisoners Maiweg had selected from all the various camps to work on the reconstruction—drilling technicians, geologists, local oil workers. A combat unit had been commandeered at a railroad station as bearers. There were five hundred men; of these three hundred and fifty died along the roads. From the rest, another hundred and twenty died from exhaustion when they returned so that only thirty survived.

New Year’s Eve party at Staff Headquarters in the evening. Here again I saw that during these years any pure joy of celebration is not possible. On that note General Müller told about the monstrous atrocities perpetrated by the Security Service after entering Kiev. Trains were again mentioned that carried Jews into poison gas tunnels. Those are rumors, and I note them as such, but extermination is certainly occurring on a huge scale. This put me in mind of the wife of good old Potard[35] back in Paris, who was so worried about his wife. When you have been party to such individual fates and begun to comprehend the statistics that apply to the wicked crimes carried out in the charnel houses,[36] an enormity is exposed that makes you throw up your hands in despair. I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much. Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians. Mankind has thus reached the stage described by Dostoevsky in Raskolnikov.[37] He views people like himself as vermin. That is precisely what he must guard against if he is not to sink to the level of the insects. That terrible old saying applies to him as well as to his victims: “This is you.”

I then went outside where the stars shone brightly and the artillery shells streaked like sheet lightning against the sky. The eternal symbols and signs—the Great Bear, Orion, Vega, the Pleiades, the band of the Milky Way—what are we human beings and our earthly years before such glory? What is our fleeting torment? At midnight, through the noise of the carousers, I vividly recalled my loves and felt their greetings touch me.

1943

Prophetic New Year’s dreams—I was waiting in a large inn, discussing other travelers’ luggage with a doorman who had silver-embroidered keys on his uniform. He told me that they were embarrassed to admit they did not wish to be separated from their bags because these signified more than just containers for their possessions. Their contents included the rest of their journey and all their reputation and credit. These were like a ship, the last thing we leave behind on an ocean voyage—they were like our own skin. I vaguely understood that the inn was the world and the suitcases, life.

For Alexander, I then carved an arrow from a rose shoot so he could use with his bow. Its tip bore a scarlet bud.

Got up early for the return journey to Apsheronskaya. The sun shone gloriously on the mountains, and the woods breathed the violet palette of early spring. I was in a good mood as well, like a fencer returning to the arena. The minor, mundane tasks on this first day of the year are more precious: washing, shaving, eating breakfast, and making journal entries—all are symbolic acts of celebration.

Three good resolutions. The first, “Live moderately,” because almost all the difficulties in my life have been the result of breaches of moderation.

Second, “Always have a care for unfortunate people.” It is an innate human trait not to recognize true misfortune. This goes deeper: we avert our gaze from it, and then sympathy gets neglected.

Finally, I want to banish contemplation of individual refuge in this chaos of all potential catastrophes. It is more important to act with dignity. We only secure ourselves shelter at superficial points within a totality that remains concealed from us, and it is precisely such delusions of our own devising that can kill us.

The road surface did not seem quite as bottomless as it had on the way here. As a matter of fact, I probably counted five hundred people working on it. A further five hundred were bringing up supplies on wagons or horses. Such images reflect the gravitational field of the wider area. Within this space, even individual mountains like the Ssemasho take on the burden of Atlas. Spengler’s superb prognosis also came to mind.

In Apsheronskaya, Massenbach and I then ate together before taking a walk through the woods. The mountains gleamed white on the horizon. We discussed the atrocities of our age. A third man with us said that he considered them inevitable. He went on: The German petit bourgeoisie had been reduced to a state of panic by the slaughter of the Russian middle class after 1917 and by the execution of millions in the cellars—and this turned them into something horrifying. As a result, something emerged from the Right that was an even more hideous threat than when it came from the Left.

Such discussions clarify how deeply technology has already penetrated the moral sphere. Man feels he is inside a huge machine from which there is no escape. Fear reigns everywhere supreme, be it in obfuscation, grotesque concealment, or all-powerful mistrust. Wherever two people encounter one another, they are suspicious of each other—it begins with their greeting.

Nearly fifty bombs fell on the town during the night. In the morning, I departed for Maykop. The journey led past troops that had been relieved and were pulling medieval supply carts behind them. Generally speaking, I am reminded more of the Thirty Years’ War than of the previous one, not just because of the look of things but also because of the obvious religious questions that loom large.

The weather was mild and clear. In the morning, I visited the Cultural Park where plaster figures of modern supermen were crumbling, and then went to the steep banks of the Belaya. In the afternoon, I was received by General Konrad, commander of the Caucasus front. He showed me the large situation map and said that the retreat was in preparation. The pounding suffered by the Sixth Army had shaken the entire southern flank. He was of the opinion that during the last year, our forces had been squandered by people who understood everything except how to wage war. The general continued, saying that their neglect of the concentration of forces was especially dilettantish. Clausewitz would be turning in his grave. People followed their every whim, every fleeting idea; and propaganda goals trumped those of strategy. He said that we could attack the Caucasus, Egypt, Leningrad, and Stalingrad—just not all at once, especially while we were still caught up in secondary objectives.

When I arrived at the airfield at eight in the morning, a German reconnaissance plane was just landing. On his morning rounds over Tuby, he had taken an anti-aircraft hit in the left wing, where a hole the size of a watermelon could be seen. Four fighters were then on top of him. The gunner on board put a burst of twenty rounds into his own rudder when he swung his gun into position. In the course of the firefight, a hit from a fixed cannon ripped up the right steering mechanism, and over thirty bullets drilled through the plane. Its gray paint peeled off revealing silver furrows in the metal. The fuel tank also showed leaks.

The pilot, a first lieutenant—washed-out, overtired, inhaling cigarettes—explained that the dogfight that had just taken place. The holes in the fuel tank seal off automatically with a layer of rubber. Discussion about getting out of a burning aircraft.

“Impossible over Russian territory. It amounts to the same thing whether you shoot yourself in the head when you’re up there or wait until you bale out.”

I then got aboard a Fieseler Storch,[38] a small liaison aircraft with room for the pilot and one passenger. As we gained altitude, the dimensions of the settlement came into focus: equilateral squares of houses surrounding garden plots. We swayed slowly over the ground in that direction. I was delighted to be able to observe birds, like the geese hurrying away in formation or the chickens flapping their wings as they ran for the cover of hedges and fences—their typical reaction in response to an actual stork. Birds of prey with the wings of sparrow hawks flew away from us; clouds of titmouse and finch shimmered above the landscape of sunflowers.

I thought of a conversation I had with my father around 1911. His subject was whether the day would come when human beings in flight above us would cause as little surprise as a flock of cranes. In those days, I had a future-oriented, romantic feeling, as if we still had the age of the dinosaurs ahead of us. That is a trait I have shed. The optics at the center of cataracts is different from the optics used to correct them. All this corresponds to our wishes, our great desires; we put all our energy into them.

From the airfield at Cherkessk we went by car up to the Kuban Valley, one of the grand and solemn plains, before reaching the highlands. Its ice green waters bore glacial floes downstream. The broad gorge was surrounded by brown, serrated peaks; those facing the valley were steep and formed white cliffs with smooth or vertically corrugated faces. These patterns alternated with those resembling organ pipes and others like beautifully folded shapes. Then came canyons with mesas of reddish-brown or pink stone in horizontal strata, so that we seemed to be driving past giants’ masonry. Down below us the broad riverbed with its white, glossy pebbles.

In Chumarinsk and other villages, little wooden mosque with their crescent moons dominated the town centers. Mounted shepherds drove their sheep and cows along in front of them. Others led donkeys heavily laden with wood down from the forests. They wore the burka, the stiff shearling coat native to the people of Karachay.

The mountains gradually appeared closer and presented jagged openings that permitted glimpses of the blue-white giants of the high mountains. Near Mikoyan-Shachar, the seat of the local government rose out of nowhere. The path turns down into the Teberda Valley. Teberda, a spa town for lung ailments, has a veneer of homey comfort, of affluence of the sort one looks for in the valleys of the Harz region or in the Tyrolean Alps.

With Colonel von Le Suire, who commands a fighting unit of mountain troops, I am a known quantity in the midst of an army of one hundred thousand. He welcomed me cordially into the circle of his small staff. The towering mountains have an invigorating effect, as I have often experienced; they make the blood lighter and freer and communication more candid and comradely.

Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.

Pushed farther into the Teberda Valley, as far as the field headquarters of Captain Schmidt. With his mountain troops, he is blocking two passes up there. I used the motorcycle, a vehicle for difficult climbs.

The narrow path led between stands of gigantic conifers and upward toward moss-covered boulders. A small brook trickled down it beneath the snowdrops encapsulated under domes of ice. On the right, the waters of the Teberda flowed between pale deposits of scree veined with multiple channels; then came the Amanaus, which is fed by the glaciers. I was buoyant with a sort of high-altitude intoxication.

High above in the Amanaus gorge stand the wooden buildings of a mountain climbing school as well as a sanatorium. Here Schmidt welcomed me to his headquarters, the ice giants towering above us: to the left the massif of the Dombai-Ulgen, then the craggy Karachay needle, the eastern and the western Belaya-kaya, and between them, the unusual pinnacle of the Sofrudshu. The sentries securing the passes are stationed on the mighty Amanaus glacier with its fields of green glare ice, deep fissures, and sparkling crevasses. They still have seven more hours to hike up to their huts of ice and snow. Their path leads among rockfalls, avalanches, and grim precipices. Schmidt explained to me that all the mountaineering dangers are dwarfed by those of the war. During a difficult ascent thoughts are concentrated on the enemy. A message had just reached him: Russian scouts had burrowed into position in dugouts in the snow; a firefight was under way. These dugouts are each papered with newsprint and heated by a candle; that is the only trace of comfort.

I had planned to stay up here as long as possible and to make forays high into the glacier region. I felt at home and sensed that up in these massifs one more of those great sources lived on, as Tolstoy had felt so powerfully. But as I was discussing the details of my stay with Schmidt, a radio message came from Teberda ordering immediate retreat. That can only mean that the situation in Stalingrad has deteriorated. The weather has been clear here for weeks but has suddenly become threatening. It was apparent that the warm Black Sea air was making its way across the passes in eddies and billowing swathes; wafting vapor attached itself to the mountain peaks. I glanced back from the hollow for a last look at these giants—saw their ridges, peaks, precipices. Boldest, highest thoughts, combined with all the dark terrors of power. Such places reveal a blueprint of the world.

In Teberda as well I found everything in a state of agitation. The First Tank Division was abandoning its positions; the Caucasus front is in flux. Within days positions will be abandoned that cost more blood and toil to capture than the brain can comprehend. As a result of the tumult, much will be left behind. The colonel has received the order to explode munitions and destroy supplies. The crosses are also to be removed from the graves and their traces obliterated. Otherwise his mood was philosophical. For example: “I wonder who will be pinching Anastasia’s bottom a week from now.”

His remark referred to one of the two serving maids who has been waiting on us at table. They were crying and said that the Russians would slit their throats, whereupon the colonel made room for them in the convoy.

Back in the Teberda Valley again this morning in gentle rain. Who knows when a German’s eye will ever gaze on these forests again? I’m afraid that when the war is over large sections of the planet will be hermetically sealed off from each other.

I especially wanted to take in the sight of the ancient trees once more. The fact that they are becoming extinct on this planet is the most alarming sign of all. They are not only the mightiest symbols of pristine terrestrial power but also of the ancestral spirit embedded in the wood of our cradles, beds, and coffins. In them is enshrined a sacred life that is lost to man when they are felled.

Yet here they still stood erect: mighty firs, their trunks clasped by a thick garment of branches; beeches of shimmering silver; thick-barked primeval oaks; and the gray wild pear. I said farewell to these giants like Gulliver before he goes to the Land of Lilliput, where Gargantuan proportions are the product of interpretation rather than natural growth. All this was revealed to me as in a fleeting dream like Christmas marvels glimpsed by a child through a keyhole—yet memory preserves the proportions. We need to know what the world has to offer so that we do not capitulate too easily.

Arose early for the journey to Voroshilovsk. Thanks to the heavy snowfall, I saw little of Teberda and then of the Kuban Valley. Trifling, casual thoughts and fantasies, full of intellectual power. I attribute this to the mountain air and to honey, that powerful nectar, the old food not only of the gods but [also] of the hermit and the recluse, food I had practically lived on in recent days. If I could only always have enough of it and, in addition, white bread and red wine—then my mental wings would spread like a butterfly’s.

The road was choked with retreating columns. Karachay rode among them in their black coats. They drove their cattle down from the mountain slopes or turned into side valleys. People are in a tough spot because they had welcomed the Germans as liberators. If they do not follow the retreat, they will probably have to flee into the impassable mountains in order to escape slaughter. The terrible part is the changing balance of power and the short-term nature of errors that take an ever-higher toll in blood.

Beyond Cherkessk, the road disappeared completely in the snow as it wound its way between cornstalks and dry sunflower stems. Then these signs gradually petered out too, and the driver followed a wheel track for a long time that was the only visible trail. This led us only as far as a large haystack, then made a loop around it and doubled back upon itself. No choice but to go back. A second attempt ended at a river that wound its dark course through the snow desert. Meanwhile, we were losing the daylight and the mist was rising.

We finally reached a barn where people had been threshing, and a young lad showed us the way by galloping beside us on horseback. He did not want to get in, as he apparently feared we might not let him go. Back on a deeply rutted track, we reached a slope covered in fine clay as brown and glistening as cocoa butter. We tried to push the car forward, but the wheels spun in place covering us with thick mud from head to foot. A couple of peasants working nearby came to help us and threw their backs into the job. In doing so, their broad shoulders pushed in our car windows as they lifted.

Following this, we tried to drive around the spot, with the result that the car broke through a snow-covered layer of ice into a bog hole. I was watching it sink ever deeper when a carter came by, hitched up his horse, and pulled us out of this mess with a rope. We continued to drive through the night as the snowstorm enveloped us with thousands of shining flakes whirled into the field of our headlights and then went dark, as though they had melted away. Arrived late in Voroshilovsk.

Our odyssey gave me an inkling of the power with which the steppes assault the mind. This assault suggests a contradiction felt as a dull, paralyzing anxiety, such as I have never felt at sea.

Among the staff officers I found the mood more depressed than among the troops. This makes sense, because they have an overview of the situation. Cauldron battles produce a frame of mind unknown in earlier wars from our history. Inertia sets in when we are about to hit rock bottom.

That cannot be a result of the facts, no matter how terrible the prospects are of dying in frost and snow huddled together with masses of the dead and dying. It is rather the mood of people who believe that destruction is absolute.

At a high-level staff headquarters, you can hear the rustling of the net being tightened; you can observe its mesh closing almost daily. Tempers can be the object of study over weeks as panic sets in gently like placid currents of water predicting the imperceptible but approaching flood. During this phase, people isolate themselves from each other; they fall silent and become reflective as they were during puberty. But the weakest specimens provide evidence of what we can expect. They are the points of least resistance, like the little first lieutenant I found shaking in a fit of weeping when I went to his office.

The populace is also restive; goods they were hoarding appear on the market; the value of the currency rises. The peasants desire the Russian banknotes because they must stay behind; the city dwellers want the German ones because some of them will accompany the retreat. Similar things were reported by the First Tank Division, and also that some people who had set out with them along with their wives and children dropped behind by the second or third day and are now in a much more dangerous situation than before: their attempt to flee will seal their fate.

The Russians are of course trying to blow up bridges and railroads and are deploying numerous troops of saboteurs for this purpose; some infiltrate through gaps in the front, while others are parachuted in. An officer from Military Intelligence told me details about one such troop of six members, three men and three women. Two of the men were officers in the Red Army and one was a radio operator; one of the women was a radio operator, the other a scout and quartermaster; the third was a nurse. They were captured as they spent the night under the cover of a haystack. They had not been able to complete their mission to blow up bridges, because the parachute carrying the explosives had landed in the village. The women, all high school graduates, had served as soldiers in the Red Army and been assigned to a sabotage course. One day, they were told to get ready and to board an aircraft, where there were pushed out behind the German lines without being told their mission. Their equipment consisted of machine guns (even the nurse carried one), a radio, canned rations, dynamite, and a first aid kit.

A sign of humanity: During their arrest, one of the girls ran up to a Russian doctor accompanying the mayor and the German soldiers. She tried to embrace him and addressed him as Father. She then began to cry and said that he looked just like her own father.

The old nihilists of 1905 celebrate their resurrection in such people. Naturally, under different conditions. Their means, their mission, their way of living have remained the same. But nowadays the state provides the explosives.

Went to the marketplace early. It was crowded with people. The situation encourages selling, since it’s easier to carry money than goods. The food is now sumptuous; the men are wolfing down the supplies. In gardens, I saw soldiers smoking geese; mountains of pork were heaped upon the table. I could sense the whirlwind of terror that announced the approach of the eastern army columns.

At noon, visited the commander-in-chief, Colonel General von Kleist, whom I found anxiously studying his map. Nice to have stepped out of the hubbub of the marketplace right into the center of things. The field marshal’s perspective is incredibly oversimplified but at the same time fiendishly detached. The fates of individuals vanish from sight, though they are mentally present—a combination that creates an incredibly oppressive mood.

In the anteroom, the intelligence officer handed me a telegram: my father is seriously ill. At the same time rumors are circulating that the railway to Rostov has been disrupted. I happened to meet First Lieutenant Krause, with whom I’ve been in contact from earlier matters, especially since the secret meeting at the Eichhof.[39] He was waiting for a plane from Berlin and offered it to me for my return. While we were discussing this, the chief of staff of the commander-in-chief sent word to me that a seat was being reserved for me in the courier aircraft scheduled to take off from Armavir tomorrow morning. A car is leaving for there in two hours.

Had vivid thoughts of my father during the night flight. I have not seen him since 1940 when I was on leave in Leisnig after the campaign in France. I have spoken with him a few times on the phone, of course. Now in the fatigue of the early morning hour, I saw his eyes beaming in the dark sky; they were large and had a deeper, more vivid blue than ever before—the eyes that are essentially so appropriate to him. I now saw them gazing on me full of love. One day I would like to describe him like a mother possessing male intelligence—with a deeper sense of justice.

Arrival in Armavir at two o’clock, where I dozed a bit on the full mail sacks. Sleepy secretaries were sorting letters and parcels while bombs were falling on the town. In the midst of this restless slumber, the nocturnal side of the war oppressed me. Part of this is just sleeplessness from all those interminable night watches at the front or back home behind the lines.

At six o’clock took off in a green painted craft that bore the name Globetrotter and was piloted by a prince of Coburg-Gotha. Two hours later, we were flying over the frozen, green Don dotted with white ice floes. The roads were choked with columns of people streaming westward. In Rostov, we landed for a moment on an airfield where swarms of bombers were loading huge projectiles.

In Kiev I spent the night in an old hotel that now seemed very comfortable. Everything is relative. I shared my room with an officer from World War I who had come from the Stalingrad cauldron. It seems that there the airfields are under targeted bombardment. They are clogged with destroyed aircraft. Inmates of a large prison camp that used to be part of the compound at first survived by eating horseflesh, then they turned to cannibalism; finally, they died of starvation. People who escape the cauldrons are disfigured, carry scars—perhaps the stigmata of future glory.

Arrived in Lötzen around noon and immediately booked long-distance calls to Kirchhorst and Leisnig. At seven o’clock, I learned from Perpetua that my good father had died, just as I had clearly felt it. He is to be buried in Leisnig on Wednesday, so I have arrived in time, which is a great comfort.

As I have often done in recent days, I spent a long time thinking about him, about his lot in life, his character, his humanity.

Made some purchases in Lötzen, where it was bitter cold. Departure to Berlin in the evening. Colonel Rathke, head of the department of military affairs, was on the train. Conversation about the situation in Rostov, which he considers reparable. Then, about the war in general. After the first three value judgments, one recognizes someone from the other camp and retreats behind polite clichés.

Looking back. During the trip to Leisnig on 12 January I noticed the faces of the other travelers. They were pale, artificially bloated, the flesh a temptation for serious, debilitating illness. Most people slept, laid low by extreme exhaustion.

The German Greeting[40]—that most potent symbol of voluntary coercion or coerced volunteering. Individuals give it upon entering or leaving the train compartment, that is to say, when they are discernible as individuals. But amidst the anonymity of crowds this gesture gets no response. During a trip like this, there is ample opportunity to study the nuances that tyranny is capable of.

After paying a short visit to my siblings in Leisnig, I went straight to the cemetery where the caretaker gave me the key to the mortuary chapel. It was already dusk when I opened the gate. Far in the distance, high and solemn on a bier in an open casket, my father was laid out wearing white tie. I approached slowly and lit the candles to the right and left of his head. I gazed at his face for a long time. It seemed so unfamiliar. The lower portion particularly, the chin and lower lip, were those of someone else, someone I didn’t know. When I went to his left side and stood back to view his brow and cheek, the red line of his familiar saber scar was visible. I was able to make the connection again—I saw him as I had countless times before, chatting after eating while sitting in his easy chair. Such a joy to find him thus before the earth conceals him from me. Thought: “I wonder if he is aware of this visit.” I touched his arm, which had gotten so thin, his cold hand, and shed a tear upon it as if to thaw it. What is the meaning of the immense silence that surrounds the dead?

Then I returned for tea in the familiar old dining room where the conversation centered on him. He had gotten sick on the first day of Christmas and gone to bed after having spent a few days on the sofa. “Now you will just have to see how you will manage alone,” he said a little while later. His health deteriorated quickly and the doctor ordered him taken to the hospital, where his condition was diagnosed as double pneumonia.

Friedrich Georg had the impression that he was focusing increasingly on himself, and not making any time to see visitors. “Take a seat” and “water” were the last words he heard him say. He saw him on Friday afternoon. During the night, Sunday, at one o’clock according to the nurse, he died. That would make it about the same time I saw his eyes appear during my journey to Armavir. When I looked back through my journals I was also struck by the discovery that precisely one year before to the hour, I had awakened in sadness because I had dreamed of his death.

He was seventy-four years old when he died, ten years older than his father and ten years younger than his mother. This again confirms my view that one of the ways to calculate the age we will probably attain, is to take the midpoint between the lifetimes of our parents—assuming that they died of natural causes.

That night I slept in his room, where he used to read in bed by the soft light or play chess. The books he had been reading during his last days were lying on the night table: Jäger’s History of the Greeks, works about the deciphering of hieroglyphics, and periodicals about chess. I felt very close to him here and sensed a deep pain when I observed the well-ordered domesticity with its libraries, laboratories, telescopes, and apparatus. In his last days, he had set up a large electrophorus[41] with an X-ray tube in a special room in the attic. The house is our garment—an extended self that we arrange around us. When we pass away, it soon loses its form in the same way that the body does. But here everything was still fresh, as if each object had just been set aside by a human hand.

The burial service was on the following day; only family members attended, just as he had wished. We all took his hand one last time—“so cold,” said my mother when she touched it.

I note that when I returned to the house I felt an almost uncontrollable exhilaration. That is a primeval human trait in the wake of mysteries from which we have become estranged.

On Saturday, I traveled to Kirchhorst for several days. On the train, we were subjected to four inspections. Once by police detectives.

I immersed myself in those new publications by Friedrich Georg that we had talked about during our walks in Leisnig. I read the Titanen and the Westwind, where I found many pieces that were new to me, among them the “Eisvogel” [“Ice Bird”] and the “Selbstbildnis” [“Self-Portrait”]. His poems about animals are suffused with magical insight and serenity—quite different from impressionistic treatments of such creatures based on external observations. This poetry reveals a dichotomy that has long been observable in painting.

Today’s mail included a letter from Feuerblume, who describes a New Year’s dream in which she heard the name of a city that sounded like Todos or Tosdo. The recollection of this caused her to avoid taking a particular train to Hannover on 3 January—a train that was then wrecked. She interprets Tosdo as “So Tod” [thus death].

Current reading: Les Aventures de Lazarille de Tormes [The Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes] in the beautiful edition printed by Didot Jeaune in Paris in 1801 and illustrated by Ransonnette. The paper, printing, binding, and engravings all contribute to my enjoyment of the content.

Then read further in the Histoires Désobligéantes [Offensive Stories] by Léon Bloy. Here I found the following sentence paraphrasing a fundamental thought in the Marmorklippen [The Marble Cliffs]: “—I harbored the suspicion that this world is modeled on the perfidious prototype of the charnel house.”

This also implies a challenge.

I’ve been in Berlin since yesterday for a short visit, where I have again been staying with Carl Schmitt. Today, I participated in the traditional wreath laying ceremony of the Knights of the Order Pour le Mérite at the monument to Frederick the Great. I had the distinct feeling that this time was to be the last. That splendid utterance of Murat: “I wear medals so that people will shoot at me.” I have only to reverse this sentiment in order to comprehend my own situation. They are still talismans.

Heavy damage in Dahlem.[42] The last air raid not only crushed whole blocks of buildings but also lifted the roofs off of entire districts and blew in thousands of windows. Air pressure often acts in strange ways. For example, it penetrated a neighboring house by getting under a balcony door without damaging it, but once inside the room, tore a piano stool in half.

Walk through the park at night. Conversation about the death of Albrecht Erich Günter, and then about dreams. In a dream, Carl Schmitt was involved in a conversation about conditions he finds difficult to accept. To others who marveled at his expertise or even doubted it, he answered: “Don’t you know that I am Don Capisco?”

A marvelous expression to capture danger and adventure and absurdity all at once—and one that includes subtle insight.

The day before yesterday Tripoli was evacuated.

Back in Kirchhorst, where I’ll be on leave until 18 February. I am falling behind in my journal entries. I have been bothered for weeks by a slight migraine, the likes of which I have hardly ever known. This accompanies far-reaching ruminations that the mind is not free of—even when life is most solitary. The effects of these are felt not only in the basic elements of life but even in one’s moral core. Aside from moments when the spells are bad, the pain is conducive to a feeling of sympathy.

Today I walked the long circuit through Stelle, Moormühle, Schillerslage, Oldhorst, and Neuwarmbüchen. Even at a quick march this takes three hours.

To the right in the fields stands the shed with writing painted on one side that reads: Burgdorf Asparagus Nurseries. The bright lettering is as readable in the distance as a newspaper headline, making the building itself almost disappear. Such advertising can change arbitrarily until it gets obliterated by wind and weather and the honest old shed in the background is visible again—like an obedient donkey that bore the letters on its back. This is how true forms survive over the course of time.

Thoughts about the link between intoxication and productivity. Although they are mutually exclusive in combination, they correlate with one another like discovery and description, like exploration and geography. In a state of inebriation or euphoria, the mind advances more adventurously and more spontaneously. It experiences things in the realm of infinity. There can be no poetry without such experience.

Incidentally, the jolt that accompanies the conception of poetic works is not to be confused with intoxication—it is like the transposition of molecules just before crystallization. Love materializes in the same way—through vibrations as we become attuned to a higher chord.

The sight of Moormühle made me think of Friedrich Georg and the conversation we had here in 1939 about the “illusions of technology.”[43] Since this book evokes the spirit of silence, it was fated to remain unpublished at the time. It was incompatible with events.

Then discussed Schopenhauer and his metaphysics of sexual love. It’s a good thing that he finds the magnet of the erotic encounter in the resulting child and not in the individuals themselves. But the child is essentially only a symbol of the higher unity consummated here. In this sense, the fulfillment is the more significant, more direct testimony, expression. Plato unveils the mysteries better in his Symposium. Biology obfuscates Schopenhauer’s work. Villiers de L’Isle-Adam apprehends the timeless, colorless core of the flame of love more deeply. Weininger’s admiration for Axel is understandable.[44]

Finally, some remarks about certain facets of my life in connection with the entries that I recorded about my good father. Among them there is much that I consider taboo; I have not explained the obscure and murky passages. As Rousseau remarked, such things do not require honesty. Honest confession is nothing to be scorned, but in reality, it is more important that the author achieve liberating energy in response to his ephemeral creation. He will succeed at this—whether as poet or thinker—to the same extent that he transcends his individuality.

When coming this way again, one might cross the moor from Schillerslage to Neuwarmbüchen.

Had breakfast with stout Hanne [Wickenberg] and Perpetua. Then read Rimbaud whose “Bateau Ivre” represents a last beacon of hope, not only for the literature of the nineteenth century but also for Copernican literature. After this endpoint, all literature must be grounded in a new cosmology, whether it is the product of physics or not. According to such terms the terrifying Isidore Ducasse only appears contemporary; he is modern. The tropical fevers have run their course; the path now leads to the Polar Seas.

Then I worked in the collection, especially with the order of the genus Galerucca [beetle]. Specimens can be found in the marshy ground of our terrain. Related species turn up mostly in similar habitats or, to use the language of the hunter, similar territory. Yet there are exceptions, as in the case of the Scymnus beetle, where a small group lives on aphids instead of sap. The theories about this focus either on environment or on characteristics, for these are the essential features that drive the struggle for life. Both explanations seem to be one-sided, learned arguments that are futile. All these theories illuminate only layers of reality. We need to lay them all on top of one another like blueprints and peer through them at the colorful map of nature. Of course, we also need new eyes to do this. I described the process in my Sizilischer Brief [Sicilian Letter].[45]

Went to the barber in the nearby county town. He repeated the story of the wicked nature of the Russians who devour the dogs’ food themselves, and he had some new thoughts on the subject as well. He said that they shouldn’t be given a single seed to plant because they would eat these up right away—they even gobble up raw asparagus. Generally speaking, nothing edible is sacred to them, as he put it. Despite all this, this barber is a good-natured man.

Current reading: Dead Souls by Gogol after a long hiatus. This novel would be even more powerful without all the musings and the all-too-frequent intrusions of authorial consciousness to remind us that he is painting genre pictures.

Due to the heavy rainstorms, I spent a long time in bed this morning, even having my breakfast there. While doing so, I had thoughts about the protective strategies of plant eaters that are so conspicuous in many classes of the animal kingdom. The oversized and plantlike nature of these defenses can reach branchlike proportions, as in the case of stags and many insects that live on wood. Even the shedding of antlers has a vegetable quality to it. Nothing similar is found among predatory animals. The defensive aspect of these protuberances is probably just a secondary characteristic, a conclusion I draw from the fact that they belong mostly to an animal’s sexual characteristics and are produced in species that never use them defensively, such as in many beetles found in dung or others in wood or dry rot. The oversized excrescences are part of their physical structure and form not only the jaws but other parts of the chitinous exoskeleton as well. You get the feeling that these herbivores like to make themselves look more terrifying than they are.

Our kind of life, our essence, is our arsenal; from it we gather our weapons when we need them. This thought stands in significant contrast to the formulaic model of the struggle for life. Different premises apply here, such as “when God appoints a man to an office, He also gives him the wits for it.”[46]

There are predators with all the attributes and characteristics of herbivores, such as whales that graze for their prey.

Heavy rainstorms. I brought a plum branch in from the garden to force. It is in full bloom indoors. The bare wood is covered with a profusion of small white stars.

Migraine worsening, as if under heavy clouds.

Yesterday the Russians captured Rostov. In the mail there was a letter from Edmond’s sister [Fritzi], who is contemplating her escape from Poland. We offered her and her children refuge here.

Friedrich Georg writes from Überlingen, “It may be that we are reaching the point when our opponents will have to do the thinking for us. And if they don’t do so out of revenge—they will cast us into a black hole.”

We have beautiful sunshine today after days of stormy, rainy weather. This morning among the gooseberry bushes, I picked fresh parsley—green, mossy, and encrusted in frozen dew.

The Goncourts wrote about Daumier that his descriptions of the middle class had reached a degree of reality bordering on the fantastic. That can be seen wherever realism reaches a climax. The final brushstrokes then add unreal touches.

Yesterday the Russians captured Kharkov. We are expecting Fritzi Schultz, who is fleeing from Alexandrov with her children. Her ancestors settled there over a hundred years ago. Before my departure, I am thinking about how to preserve a portion of my manuscripts. In doing so, I must take into account the possibility of the house being ransacked and plundered, and of protecting them from aerial bombardment and fire. Considering how difficult it is to find suitable hiding places for things, it is quite astonishing how much old paper has come down to us over time.