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

Returned to Paris yesterday afternoon. Perpetua took me to the train and waved for a long time as it pulled out of the station.

On the train, conversation with two captains who offered the opinion that this year Kniébolo was going to attack using new methods, probably gas. They did not exactly seem to condone this, but restricted themselves to that moral passivity typical of modern man. In such cases, arguments relating to technology are the most forceful. For example: given our inferiority in the air, any such undertaking equals suicide.

If Kniébolo is planning anything of the sort, then domestic political concerns are going to be crucial as they are for all his ideas. Propaganda takes precedence over everything else. In this case, it would be important to him to drive a wedge between nations that cannot even be reconciled by the best of intentions. In this he is consistent with his own genius, relying on dissension, partisanship, and hatred. We have come to know the tribunes.[1]

A brief digression here: When people with minds like this hear reports from the other side about such crimes, a trace of demonic joy rather than horror flickers across their faces. The defamation of one’s enemy is a cult among the courtiers in the realm of darkness.

After having seen cities like Rostov, Paris holds a new and incomparable glory for me, despite the fact that scarcity has become more widespread—with the exception of books. I celebrated my return to them by purchasing a beautiful monograph on Turner. It contains an account of his remarkable biography, previously unfamiliar to me. Fate seldom beckons so powerfully. In his last years, he stopped painting and turned to drink. There will always be artists who outlive their calling; this is particularly true in cases where talent appears early. Ultimately, they resemble retired civil servants following their own inclinations the way Rimbaud turned to earning money and Turner to drink.

Went to the Tour d’Argent for lunch with Heller and Kuhn, the painter. We talked about the how books and paintings exert influence even when unobserved. “Doch im Innern ist getan.” [In our hearts this is achieved.][2] This thought will be incomprehensible to contemporaries who exalt communication and publication, meaning that they have replaced spiritual connections with technology. Come to that, does it matter whether the prayers of a monk are ever heard by those for whom he is praying? Wieland still knew this. He told Karamsin that he could have written his works on a lonely island with the same zeal, in the certainty that the Muses would be listening to them.

Then we went to Le Meurice, where Kuhn (who is serving as a corporal for the Commandant), showed us pictures. I especially liked a resplendent dove whose rosy and dark palette intermingled with that of the city in the background. It was called Twilight in the City. We discussed this on our way home and also talked about the atmosphere of twilight and about the influence it exerts. Dusk transforms individuals into figures, removes personal details from people, and turns them into general impressions—a man, a woman, or simply a human being. In this way, the light itself resembles the artist, in whom much twilight and darkness must dwell in order for him to perceive figures.

At this moment, in the evening, I am thumbing through an issue of Verve from 1939, where I find excerpts by Pierre Reverdy, an author I do not know. I jot down the following: “I wear a protective suit of armor forged completely of errors.”

“Être ému, c’est respirer avec son coeur.” [To be moved is to breathe with one’s heart.]

“His arrow is poisoned; he has dipped it into his own wound.”

On the walls of the buildings of Paris, I now frequently see the year “1918 “scrawled in chalk. Also “Stalingrad.”[3]

Who knows whether or not they will be defeated along with us?

In the morning, I looked at a portfolio of pictures taken by the propaganda branch of our troops blowing up the harbor area in Marseille. This was one more destruction of a place that was out of the ordinary and one I had grown to love.

During the midday break, I always permit myself a visual treat. Today, for example, I browsed in my Turner edition; his maritime views, with their shades of green, blue, and gray, convey icy chill. Their reflections lend them a feeling of depth.

Then went to the little cemetery near the Trocadéro, where I again looked at the mortuary chapel of Marie Bashkirtseff, a place where you sense the uncanny presence of the deceased. There were already many types of plants in bloom, such as wallflower and colorful mosses.

In the bookshop on Place Victor-Hugo, I found another series of works by Léon Bloy, whom I wish to study more thoroughly. Every major catastrophe has an effect on the supply of books and casts legions of them into oblivion. Only after the earthquake, do we see what ground the author relied on in times of safety.

I took a short walk in the evening. The fog was denser than I had ever seen it—so thick that the rays of light that penetrated the darkness through cracks looked as solid as beams, so that I was almost afraid I was going to bump against them. I also met a lot of people who were trying to find their way to the Étoile and was unable to give them directions—but we had been standing right there the whole time.

The true measure of our worth is other people’s growth in response to the power of our love. Through this, we experience our own value and the meaning of the terrifying thought: “thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” This is most obvious when we fail.

There is a kind of dying that is worse than death; it happens when a beloved person obliterates the image of us that lived inside him. We are extinguished in that person. This can occur because of dark emanations that we convey. The blossoms close quietly before our eyes.

Sleepless night punctuated by moments of waking dreams—first there was a nightmare in which grass was being mowed; then scenes like those in a marionette theater. There were also melodies that reached a crescendo in threatening bolts.

According to the rules of an arcane moral aesthetic, it is more dignified to fall on your face than your back.

Gave a lecture about my mission. In the meantime Stalingrad has fallen. This has made our predicament more acute. If, according to Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by other means, this implies that the more absolute the methods used to wage war, the less politics can influence it. There is no negotiation in battle; no one has a free hand, and no one has the energy for it. In this sense, the war in the East has absolutely reached a magnitude that Clausewitz could never have imagined, even after the experiences of 1812. It is a war of states, peoples, citizens, and religions, with brutal escalation. In the West, we still have a free hand for a little while. This is one of the advantages of the two-front war: it defines the fate of the center with its classic pattern of threat. Apparently, 1763[4] is the ray of hope for those in power. At night they send our columns to paint that date on the walls and cross out 1918 and Stalingrad. But the miracle of miracles lay in the fact that “Der Alte Fritz” [“Old Fritz”][5] enjoyed the sympathy of the world. Not so Kniébolo, who is seen as the enemy of the world, and it would not matter whether one of his three great adversaries were to die—the war would still be prolonged. Wishful thinking focuses less on the idea that one of them could extend the hand of peace, than on the hope that he will capitulate. Thus we are becoming progressively icier, more rigid; we cannot thaw by ourselves.

Imported Cuban cigars in glass tubes stood on the table. In Lisbon, these are traded for the French cognac that high-ranking staff members on the other side hate to part with—but at least it’s a form of communication. My duties have been increased to include oversight of postal censorship in the occupied territory—a ludicrous yet delicate business in every conceivable way.

In the evening, I pondered the word Schwärmen.[6] This could be a chapter title in a book about the natural history of the human race. Three things constitute Schwärmen: heightened vibrancy of life, communal gathering, and recurrence.

The vibrancy of life, or vibration as seen in a swarm of midges, is collective energy; it unites the individual with its species. Their communal gathering serves its purposes in the forms of wedding, harvest, hiking, and games.

In earlier times, the rhythm of Schwärmen was surely primeval, determined by the influence of the moon and the sun upon the earth and its vegetation. When we sit beneath large trees in full bloom and filled with the buzzing of bees, we receive the wonderful sensation of what Schwärmen means. Times of day, such as twilight and moments when electrically charged air precedes the storm can be important here as well. These natural-cosmic signs are the substrate beneath ever-changing historical periods—they remain as the facts of the ceremonies whose significance seems to change with rituals and cultures. What changes, however, is only the devotional portion, while the primeval aspect remains unaltered. Hence, the pagan side to every Christian festival.

Incidentally, the designation Schwarmgeister[7] is well chosen to characterize an aberration, when at its core, there lies a confusion between the devotional and primeval aspects of the rituals.

Midday on the banks of the Seine with Charmille. We strolled down along the quay, from the Place de l’Alma to the Viaduc de Passy and sat down there on a wooden railing watching the water flow by. Milk thistle, with its seven golden crowns, was already blooming in a crevasse of a wall; in one of these blossoms, there sat a large metallic-green fly. Once again, I noticed many examples of ammonites, the small land snail, in the cut stone of the breastwork along the riverbank.

Heller and I visited Florence Gould for breakfast; she has recently moved into an apartment on Avenue de Malakoff. There we also met Jouhandeau, Marie-Louise Bousquet, and the painter Bérard.

Conversation in front of a vitrine filled with Egyptian artifacts from Rosetta. Our hostess showed us ancient unguent jars and tear vials from classical graves. From these, she playfully scratched off the thin dark purplish-blue and mother-of-pearl layer—the accumulation of millennia—letting the iridescent dust swirl in the light. She even gave some of them away. I could not turn down the gift of a beautiful pale gray scarab with an extensive inscription on its base. She then brought out books and manuscripts that had been bound by Gruel. One of the volumes of old illustrations was missing three pages, torn out so that she could give them to a visitor who had admired them.

While we ate, I picked up details about Reverdy, whom I had mentioned because both Bérard and Madame Bousquet are friends of his. One mind can suggest and reveal itself through a single epigram.

Had a conversation with Jouhandeau about his work methods. Hércule had sent me his Chroniques Maritales [Marital Chronicles] years ago. He rises at four in the morning after barely six hours of sleep and then sits over his manuscripts until eight. Then he goes to the Lycée where he teaches. Those quiet morning hours that he spends with a hot water bottle on his knees are the most enjoyable for him. Then we talked about sentence construction, punctuation, and especially the semicolon—something he couldn’t do without but considers a necessary alternative to the period in cases where the phrasing continues on logically. About Léon Bloy: Jouhandeau heard details of Bloy’s life from Rictus that were new to me. Bloy is not yet a classic writer, but some day he will be. It always takes a while for literary works to slough off their contemporary masks. But they must also pass through their own purgatorial fires before they outlast their critics.

Went to the Trocadéro during the noonday break to admire the crocuses covering the grassy banks in clusters of blue, white, and gold. The colors sparkle like jewels that shine from their slender florets—these are the first and purest lights in the annual blossom cycle.

Today finished reading Léon Bloy, Quatre Ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne [Four Years in Captivity at Cochons-sur Marne], including his journals from 1900 through 1904. This time, I particularly noticed how utterly untouched the author is by the illusions of technology. He lives as an antimodern hermit in the midst of the throbbing crowds animated by the excitement of the great World Exposition of 1900. He sees automobiles looming as instruments of death. He generally associates technology with impending catastrophes and thus sees the methods of rapid transport like motorcars and locomotives as inventions of minds bent on escape. It could soon be important to reach other continents quickly. On 15 March 1904, he uses the underground for the first time. In its catacombs, he grudgingly admits a certain subterranean, albeit demonic, beauty. The whole system stimulates in him the impression that the end of idyllic springs and forests, of sunrises and sunsets, has arrived—the general impression of the death of the human soul.

The inscription from a sundial is appropriate for this attitude that awaits judgment: “It is later than you think.”

Visited Poupet in the afternoon on Rue Garancière. His top floor lodgings are stuffed with books and paintings. There I met the novelist Mégret, with whom I had corresponded during peacetime. The Doctoresse was there as well. May such islands of serenity long endure.

Since the beginning of the year, I have been bothered by a mild migraine. Nonetheless, since January, I have been filled with a powerful trust in a turn for the better. In times of weakness and melancholy, we forget that ultimately all will be well.

A word to men. Our position with respect to two different women can resemble that of the judge pronouncing a Solomonic verdict, yet we are also the child. We deliver ourselves into the custody of the one who does not want to cut us in half.

In the afternoon went to a showing of the old Surrealist film, Le Sang d’un Poète [Blood of a Poet]; Cocteau had sent me a ticket. Certain scenes reminded me of my plan for the house, in the way it presented glimpses through the keyholes of a series of hotel rooms, but only in its superficial structure. In one of them, we see the execution by firing squad of Maximilian of Mexico, which is then repeated in two more versions; in another, we see a young girl being taught how to fly under threat of corporal punishment. The film shows the universe as a beehive of secret cells where the disconnected progression of scenes of a life condemned to manic rigidity is playing. The world as a rationally constructed insane asylum.

It is appropriate to this genre that the Surrealists discovered Lautréamont and Emily Brontë, as is their curious preference for Kleist, whose Käthchen von Heilbronn seems to be the only work of his they know to the exclusion of his Marionettentheater [On the Puppet Theater],[8] the work in which he conceived his dangerous formula. They never noticed others such as Klinger, Lichtenberg, Büchner, or even Hoffmann. When we look beneath the surface, we have to ask ourselves why the Marquis de Sade is not the grand master of this order.

Visited Baumgart in the evening on Rue Pierre Charron for our usual chess game. While playing this game, you might not glimpse the absolute superiority of a person’s mind, but you do encounter a special form of it. A kind of logical pressure is revealed, as well as the muted reaction of the other player. This gives us an idea of how simpletons must suffer.

On my way home I was running fast, as was my habit, and in the dark I had a painful collision with one of the barriers in front of our office buildings that have been erected to prevent attacks. As long as these things happen to us, we are not completely rational. Such harm comes from inside us. Things that injure us this way surge up as if from the depths of our reflected selves.

“Secret cemeteries”—a concept of modern coinage. Corpses are hidden from adversaries so that they cannot be exhumed and photographed. Such activities among the lemures are evidence of an incredible increase in wickedness.

Visited Florence Gould for lunch. There, Marie-Louise Bousquet described her visit to Valentiner: “With a regiment of young men like him, the Germans could have captured France without a single cannon shot.”

Florence then recounted her activity as an operating room nurse in Limoges: “I found it much more bearable to see a leg amputated than a hand.”

Then on marriage: “I can live perfectly well within marriage; this is obvious because I have been happily married twice. I would just make an exception in the case of Jouhandeau because he loves appalling women.”

Jouhandeau: “But I’m not in favor of tantrums measured out in tiny doses.”

Current reading: Contes Magiques [Magical Stories] by P’Ou Soung-Lin. One of them has a nice image: a man of letters who feels compelled to go chop wood in distant forests wears himself out to the point where he gets “blisters like silkworm cocoons on his hands and feet.”

In one of these tales, we read of a concoction that reveals whether one is dealing with a female demon. We are supposed to take the creature whose humanity is in doubt and place it in the sunlight to see whether part of its shadow is missing.

The importance of this becomes clear in an extremely vicious trick that one of these sorceresses plays on a young Chinese man. She succeeds in beguiling him in a garden so that he embraces her, yet at the same time he falls to the ground with a terrible cry of pain. It is revealed that he has thrown his arms around a huge log with a hole bored into it where there lurks a poisonous scorpion with a sting in its tail.

A word about the jokes that go around the table in the Raphael. A couple are quite witty, for example: “Die Butterquota wird steigen, wenn die Führerbilder entrahmt werden.”[9]

Perhaps some people have kept journals of the jokes that have emerged during all these years. That would be worthwhile because their chronology is revealing.

There is also an act of stylistic discourtesy that comes to light in phrases like “Nichts weniger als” [nothing less than] or “ne pas ignorer” [do not ignore]. They are like snarls woven into the weft of prose and left up to the reader to disentangle. Toxic little fish berries of irony.[10]

In the afternoon I visited Marcel Jouhandeau, who lives in a little house on Rue du Commandant Marchand. It is one of tiny nooks in Paris that I’ve grown so fond of over the years. We sat together in his diminutive garden with his wife and Marie Laurencin. Although the garden is barely wider than a hand towel, it produces masses of flowers. The woman reminds me of those masks one comes upon in old wine-producing villages.[11] They fascinate us less by their facial expressions than by the rigidity that these wooden and brightly painted faces project.

We took a tour through the apartment consisting of one room on each of three floors (except for its little kitchen). Downstairs there is a small salon; in the middle, the bedroom; and on the top floor, almost like the observatory in a planetarium, a library that has been set up as a living space.

The walls of the bedroom are painted black and decorated with gold ornamentation to complement the scarlet lacquered Chinese furniture. The sight of these silent chambers was oppressive, yet Jouhandeau enjoys spending time and working here in the early hours when his wife is asleep. It was lovely to hear him tell how the birds gradually awaken and the way their songs echo and answer each other.

Heller joined us later, and we went to sit in the library. Jouhandeau showed us his manuscripts—he gave me one as a present—as well as his books on medicinal herbs, and his collections of photographs. One folder of images of his wife also contained nude photographs of her from her days as a dancer. Yet that did not surprise me because I knew from his books that, in the summertime especially, she liked to go about the apartment unclothed. And in this state, she dealt with tradesmen, workmen, or the gasman.

Conversations. One concerned Madame Jouhandeau’s grandfather, a postman who worked in his vineyard at four in the morning before delivering the mail. “Working in this vineyard was his prayer.” He considered wine the universal medicine and even administered it to children when they were ill.

We then talked about snakes because a friend of theirs once brought a dozen to the house. The creatures dispersed throughout the apartment and would turn up months later under the carpets. One of them had the habit of winding its way up the base of a standing lamp in the evening; it then coiled itself around the middle of the lampshade, the warmest spot.

Once again my impression of the Parisian streets, houses, buildings, and dwellings was confirmed: they are the archives of a substance interwoven by ancient life, filled to the brim with bits of evidence with all sorts of memories.

Sickbed visit to Florence in the evening. She injured her foot in Céline’s house. She said that, despite his substantial income, this author always suffers from penury because he donates everything to the streetwalkers who come to him when they are sick.

If all buildings were to be destroyed, language would remain intact as an enchanted castle with towers and turrets and ancient vaults and passageways that nobody will ever completely explore. There in the shafts, oubliettes, and caverns we will be able to tarry and abandon ourselves to this world.

Finished reading the Contes Magiques. I took great pleasure in this sentence from the book: “Here on earth only human beings of exalted spirit are capable of great love, because they alone do not sacrifice the idea to external stimuli.”

Concerning my text “The Worker.”[12] The description is precise, yet it resembles a finely etched medal lacking a reverse side. A second section would have to describe the subordination of those dynamic principles I described as a static sequence of greater status. When the house has been furnished, the mechanics and the electricians leave. But who will be the head of the house?

Who knows whether I’m ever going to find the time to work on this while I’m here, yet Friedrich Georg was able to make significant progress in this area with his Illusionen der Technik [Illusions of Technology]. This shows that we are truly brothers, always united in spirit.

Blood and spirit. The connection between the two has often been claimed, insofar as blood corpuscles and serum also show a spiritual correlation. Here we must differentiate between material and spiritual layers—a dual game of the worlds of images and thoughts. Yet in life both are closely allied, and only rarely are they separate from each other. Images are carried off by the torrent of thought.

Correspondingly, we can differentiate between a prose that is like serum and one that is like corpuscles. There are grades of embellishment through images ending with Hamann’s hieroglyphic style. There are also curious interpenetrations, as in the case of Lichtenberg. Here we are dealing with an imagistic style refracted by the intellect—a kind of mortification. To stay with the analogy, you could say that the two elements have separated from one another and then been artificially recombined. Irony must always be preceded by such a rupture.

Had a conversation about executions with the president[13] at midday. In his role as chief prosecutor, he has seen a great number of these. Regarding types of executioners: For the most part, horse butchers apply for the profession. Those among them who still use the axe show a certain artistic pride in comparison with guillotine operators—theirs is the consciousness of custom handwork.

At the first execution under Kniébolo: The executioner, who had taken off his tailcoat for the beheading, gave his report in his shirtsleeves, top hat askew upon his head, carrying in his left hand the axe dripping with blood. Raising his right arm for the German salute,[14] he said, “Execution accomplished.”

The neuroanatomists, who want to embalm the skull and its contents when it is still as fresh as possible, lie in wait for the blow like vultures. Once at the execution of a man who had strung himself up in his cell, but had been cut down while still alive, they were visible in droves at the foot of the scaffold. It is claimed that precisely after this kind of suicide attempt, a certain kind of mental illness sets in later in life, and that this inclination shows up early in changes to the brain.

In the afternoon visited a church in Saint-Gervais, one I had never seen before. The narrow streets that encircle it preserve a bit of the Middle Ages. The irreplaceable quality of such buildings: with each one, part of the root system is destroyed. Visited the chapel of Saint Philomela, a saint I had not heard of before. There I saw a collection of hearts from which flames erupted as if from little round flasks; some were copper, others bronze, a few were gold. This seemed to be a good place to ponder the turn of events of the year that had begun in the Caucasus.

On 29 March, 1918, a projectile from the German shelling of Paris[15] penetrated the vault of this church, killing numerous worshippers assembled here for a Good Friday service. A special chapel is dedicated to their memory with windows showing a speech banner bearing the inscription, “Hodie mecum eritis in paradiso” [Today you shall be with me in paradise].

Afterward I went to the quais to look at books. This is always a particularly satisfying hour, an oasis in time. There I purchased Le Procès du Sr. Édouard Coleman, Gentilhomme, pour avoir conspirer la Mort du Roy de la Grande Bretagne [The Trial of Sir Edward Coleman, Gentleman, Who Conspired to Kill the King of Great Britain] (Hamburg, 1679).

I heard from Florence that Jouhandeau had said after my visit to him that I was “difficile à developper” [difficult to draw out]. That assessment could come from a photographer of the psyche.

Departure to Moisson, where I have been ordered to take a training course. From the railroad station in Bonnières, we marched along the Seine valley, and on our left on the far side, saw a towering chain of chalk cliffs. In front of them stood the fortress and chateau of La Roche-Guyon and also a solitary belltower built over the vault of the cave church of Haute-Isle.

I am living under the roof of an old priest named Le Zaïre, who spent his life as a Jesuit building churches in China and has devoted the rest of his days to this undesirable parish on poor soil. His looks are pleasant in a childlike way, even though he’s blind in one eye. I conversed with him about topography and found him to be of the opinion that it is not worthwhile to travel far, since we always encounter the same formations wherever we go—just a few different patterns that are the basis for everything.

This opinion comes from one who has insulated himself, someone who loves life on the other side of the prism to the point where he can say that it isn’t worth looking at the spectrum because its frequencies are already contained in sunlight. Yet you have to respond that the frequencies also give human eyes the ability to see colors—in itself a precious gift.

The discussion reminded me of one of my early doubts: whether we lose a pleasure when we retreat into our unique self—a pleasure that only time and variety can provide. And I wondered whether or not this concealed the very reason for our existence, namely that God requires individuation. I often had this feeling when observing insects and sea creatures and all of life’s astonishing miracles. The pain is great at the thought that one day we take our leave of all this.

By contrast, it must be said that when we revert, we shall regain organs that we do not know about, although they are located and prefigured within us, such as the lungs of the child that the mother carries in her womb. Our physical eyes will wither just like our umbilical cords; we shall be equipped with new vision. And just as we see colors here in refraction, there we see their essence with greater enjoyment in the undivided light.

Had a conversation this evening about the East and also about cannibalism. It has been claimed that people have been observed enjoying testicles. This is supposedly not explained by hunger alone. Captured partisans have apparently been found to carry these among their rations to trade for things like cigarettes.

When it comes to such bestial—or even demonic—traits from our basest motivations, I always think of Baader and his theory. Purely economic doctrines must necessarily lead to cannibalism.

New pleasures I have experienced here: the sight of cherry blossoms as they produce a miraculous awakening from their dormancy—like a butterfly spreading its wings as it creeps out of its dark chrysalis. This new glory heightens the barren soil of the fields and the gray walls of the houses: they are animated by a delicate chromatic veil. This pink blossom is more frugal than the white, but brings more blossoms when they bud on the bare branch, making a deeper impression upon one’s mood. The gentle curtain signifies that the year has begun its magic show.

Then to the morning fire on the hearth. In the cold room the night before, I stacked up the pile of wood consisting of dry vines and oak bark and then I set these alight in the morning a half hour before getting out of bed. The sight of the open fire giving warmth and light is a cheerful beginning to the day’s activities.

Had field duty in the morning on the dry heath. It was covered with pale gray and green lichen, with a sparse growth of birch and conifer. Once again we confront things we have lived through, and we overcome them. It is a spiral: if these experiences are not meaningless, they become the material for higher conquests. This is how World Wars I and II strike me. It is said that in death the chronicle of our life will pass before our eyes. Then coincidence will be sanctified by necessity. A more exalted seal will leave its stamp upon it once the sealing wax has melted in the pain.

Incredibly hot today on this heath with its stands of conifers. In the light of noon, a creature whirred past me in the air that I did not recognize: It moved its glassy wings in a blaze of pale pink and opal light and trailed two long, beautifully curved horns behind it like trains or pennants. Then I realized that it was the male long-horned beetle I was seeing in flight for the first time. Such lightning-fast impressions hold immense happiness, and we sense the secret workings of nature. The insect appears in its authentic guise, in its magical dances, and in the costume given it by nature. This is one of the most intense pleasures that consciousness can grant us: We penetrate the depths of life’s dream and coexist with its creatures. It is as if a small spark ignited in us the intense and uncomplicated desire that infuses them.

In the afternoon, I took a second excursion to Haute-Isle and La Roche-Guyon with Münchhausen and Baumgart. This landscape—with its steep and frequently hollowed-out chalk cliffs that follow the river’s course like organ pipes towering above it—contains an element that makes us feel it has been settled by human beings since the dawn of time. The chronology is evident in La Roche-Guyon. Here in the white ivy-covered cliffs, you see the dark entrances to deep, branching caverns. Some of these still serve as storehouses and stables. Close by them come the bulky fortifications from the Norman period, and finally in the foreground, there stands the proud chateau with its towers built over the course of gentler centuries. Yet beneath all this lie the deep cellars where the spirit of antiquity hovers; the caves with their bands of flint are still preserved, perhaps containing treasures with gold and weapons, along with bodies of the slain and giant ancestors that may lie with dragons in many a secret, collapsed corridor. You can even sense this magical presence out in the open air.

Return journey to Paris in the evening after having sat by the fire in the morning making various entries in my journal. Piles of birthday mail were already awaiting me at the Raphael. I first read the letters from acquaintances and from my readership, then those from intimate friends, and finally those from closest family members, particularly Perpetua and Friedrich Georg.

Perpetua describes her dreams. She cast a net in order to catch a fish, but instead she tugged at it with great effort and finally pulled up an anchor with these words incised on it: “Persian Divan 12.4.98, Rimbaud to his last friends.” She scrubbed off the patina and realized that the anchor was made of pure gold.

We are allowed to assign rank to our nearest and dearest. Our position on firm ground, at the right place, becomes evident. Likewise, the faithlessness of our pupils, friends, and lovers reproaches us. Their suicides even more so. That is evidence of shaky foundations. When misfortune befalls us, as it did Socrates, one last symposium must still be possible.

At Valentiner’s. He brought me a letter from Berlin from Carl Schmitt containing a dream image that he had jotted down for me in the early morning hours. He also included a quotation from Oetinger’s Das Geheimnis von Salz [The Secret of Salt (1770)]: “Have the salt of peace within you, or you shall be cured with salt of another kind.”

That reminded me of an image of freezing and thawing.

Because the clocks were turned forward one hour during the night, I vaulted into a new year of life in a single leap. Waking up from a dream, I scribbled something down on a piece of paper that I found when I got up:

[Eve’s placenta…][16]

The insight, if I remember correctly, was something like this: The physical umbilical cord is severed, but the metaphysical one remains intact. This context gives rise to a second, invisible family tree deep in the flow of life. We are forever united through its veins and participate in a communion with every person who ever lived, with all generations, and hosts of dead souls. We are interwoven with them by an aura that returns in dream imagery. We know more about each other than anyone realizes.

We can multiply by two different means—by budding or by copulation. In the second sense, it is the father who begets us; in the first, we descend solely from our mothers, with whom we have a permanent connection. In this sense, there is but one single birth- and death-day for the whole human race.

Of course, the mystery also has a paternal pole, in that a spiritual act lies at the heart of every insemination, and this association is expressed most purely in the procreation of the absolute human being. Thus the human being corresponds not only to the masculine but also to the feminine aspect of its origins, to its greatest potential.

Incidentally, this dual origin can be intuited from the parables. These may be divided into those where the material aspect predominate, and others where the spiritual origin predominates: Humans speak as here lilies, as mustard seeds, and grains of wheat. They also speak as the heirs of heaven and of the Son of Man.

Speidel telephoned me from Kharkov at nine o’clock and from that immense distance was the first to congratulate me. The day passed cheerfully and pleasantly. In the evening went with Heller and Valentiner to visit Florence; this is also the first anniversary of our acquaintance. We picked up the conversation we had been having about death where we had left off last time.

In the evening, visit to First Lieutenant von Münchhausen, whom I had gotten to know during our training in Moisson. Like the Kleists and Arnims or the Keyserlings in the East, his bearing makes it evident that he comes from one of our intellectual dynasties. There I also met a doctor, a Russian émigré named Professor Salmanoff.

Fireside chat about patients and doctors. In Salmanoff, I discovered the first doctor with broader knowledge since Celsus, who treated me in Norway for a while, and Weizsäcker, who visited me briefly in Überlingen. I would gladly have trusted him to take care of me. He proceeds from the whole, and in doing so, from our age taken in its entirety, calling it “sick.” He claims that it is just as difficult for the individual who lives in these times to be healthy as it is for a drop of water to be motionless in a stormy sea. He considers the tendency to convulsions and cramps to be a particular bane of our age. “Death comes gratis.” That means you must earn your health through the common effort exerted by the patient and the physician. In the patient, sickness often begins as a moral disorder that then spreads to the organs. If the patient does not show himself willing to be healed at this moral stage, the physician must refuse treatment; he would only be taking a fee he had not earned.

Salmanoff is seventy-two years old. He has studied and treated people in almost every country in Europe and in several war zones. He left his career as a university professor in academic medicine at a ripe old age to combine his expertise with clinical practice. Lenin had been one of his patients, and he claimed that the reason for Lenin’s death had been ennui. His essential talent lay in the art of conspiracy and the creation of small revolutionary cells, but once he had reached the highest level and attained absolute authority, he found himself in the position of a chess master who cannot find a partner, or an exceptional civil servant who is pensioned off early.

Salmanoff’s fee took the form of being allowed to hand Lenin a small note with the names of prisoners who were then released. Lenin also arranged for his passport, thus making it possible for him to emigrate with his family.

Salmanoff does not think the Russians can be defeated, but he believes they will emerge from the war changed and cleansed. The invasion would have succeeded, he claims, if it had been supported by higher morale. Furthermore, he predicts an alliance between Russia and Germany after an interval of a few years.

During the midday break, visited the Musée de l’Homme, an institution where I have always marveled at the dual nature of rational intellectuality and sorcery. I see it as a finely engraved medal made of ancient, dark, radioactive metal. Accordingly, the mind is exposed to a dual influence of systematically organized intelligence and the invisible aura of its accumulated magical essence.

In the evening played chess with Baumgart in the Raphael. Afterward had a discussion with him and Weniger, who had served in the artillery with me in Monchy in 1915. He is visiting the troops, giving lectures and sounding out the officer corps in late-night conversations. He says that there is a movement afoot among the more important generals that is reminiscent of a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?”

Visited Florence for lunch, where I also saw Giraudoux and Madame Bousquet. She gave me a letter by Thornton Wilder for my autograph collection.

Letters. It’s odd that I write such cursory letters to the women I am closest to and pay so little attention to style. Possibly the result of the feeling that letters are almost superfluous in this case. We exist in the physical world.

On the other hand, I always make an effort when I am writing to Friedrich Georg or Carl Schmitt and two or three others. The effort is like that of the chess player who adapts to his partner.

In the afternoon, I went to a Turkish café on Rue Lauriston where I met Banine, a Muslim woman from the southern Caucasus whose novel Nami I recently finished. I noticed passages in her book that reminded me of [T. E.] Lawrence, as well as a similar recklessness about the body and its violation. It is odd how people can distance themselves from the body, from its muscles, nerves, ligaments, as though it were an instrument made up of keys and strings. In that state one listens like a stranger to the melody played by fate. This talent always carries the danger of sustaining injury.

Visited Salmanoff in the afternoon during his office hours when he sees patients in a small room completely crammed with books. While he was interviewing me, I studied their titles, which won my trust. Thorough physical examination. He found the small growth that is a vestige of my lung wound. Diagnosis and instructions are simple; he said that I would be feeling like myself in three months’ time. Speramos [let us hope].

Incidentally, he differs from my good old Celsus in that he uses medications, if only moderately. Even the best doctors have a bit of the charlatan about them. I could deduce a pattern of their interaction with their patients. That’s how it is with these prophet types: They ask a question that magnifies their reputation, whether the answer is yes or no. If the answer is yes, then it was a serious deliberation being pursued; if the answer is no, they resort to divination: “You see, that’s just what I was thinking.”

As a result, I am a bit disgruntled. This relates to the hyperacute sense of observation with which I am cursed, the way others have an especially keen sense of smell. I detect the shady moves that are endemic to humans all too clearly. In periods of weakness and sickness, this increases. There are times when I have seen through the doctors at my bedside as though I had X-ray vision.

The good stylist. He really wanted to write: “I acted correctly,” but inserted “incorrectly” instead because that fit the sentence better.

Sunday. As I was leaving the Raphael after eating, the air-raid sirens began, accompanied by artillery fire. From the roof, I saw a high wall of smoke hovering on the horizon though the bombers had already departed. Attacks like this last barely more than a minute.

Then, because the Métro is out of commission, walked to Georges Poupet on Rue Garancière. It was a beautifully mild blue spring day. Groups of Parisians were promenading together under the green chestnut trees of the Champs-Élysées, while out in the suburbs hundreds were foundering in blood. I stood there for a long time in front of the most beautiful group of magnolias I had ever seen. One of them bloomed blinding white, the second gentle pink, and the third crimson. Spring throbbed in the air with that magic felt once each year as vibrations of the cosmic energy of love.

At Poupet’s I met the Mégrets, a married couple. Discussions about war and peace, about rising prices, about Hercule and the anarchists of 1890, for just now I am studying the trial of Ravachol.[17] Mégret told an anecdote about Bakunin who was riding in a carriage one day when he passed a building being torn down. He leapt out, took off his coat, grabbed a pickaxe, and joined the work. Such men dance the grotesque opening number for the world of destruction as they lead the red masque before the eyes of the alarmed citizens.

Paid a brief visit to the Church of Saint-Sulpice. There I examined Delacroix’s frescoes; their colors have suffered. Also admired Marie Antoinette’s dainty pipe organ, remembering that Gluck and Mozart had once touched its keys. In the chancel, two elderly women were singing a Latin text; an old man sang along with them as he accompanied them on the harmonium. Lovely voices rose from the exhausted bodies and shriveled throats that showed the working of subcutaneous sinew and gristle. The sounds that emanated from these mouths surrounded by wrinkles were testimony to the timeless melodies possible even on brittle instruments. Beneath these arches—as in the Church of Saint Michael in Munich—rational theology and intellectual cosmogony hold sway. As so often happens in such places, I began to reflect on the plan of creation and the spiritual structure of the world. Who can tell what role such a church plays in human history?

Despite the lateness of the hour, I found a guide to take me via the narrow winding staircase described by Huysmans in Là-Bas [Down There] to the taller of the two towers. From here the view of the surrounding cityscape is perhaps the most beautifully comprehensive. The sun had just set and the Luxembourg Gardens blazed with riotous greens amid the silver-gray stone walls.

It can always be said in favor of human beings that no matter how deeply they founder in their pursuits and passions, they have been capable of such achievements. By the same token, we marvel at the artistic, burnished shells produced by a mollusk’s secretion; these still continue to glisten on the seashore long after the creatures that inhabited them have disappeared. They bear witness to a third power beyond life and death.

By noon today the death toll had exceeded two hundred. A few bombs hit the racecourse at Longchamp when it was crowded with people. As Sunday strollers emerged from the depths of the Métro, they ran into a crowd of panting, injured people with their clothing in tatters. Some were clutching their heads or an arm; one mother held a bleeding child to her breast. One direct hit to a bridge swept many pedestrians into the Seine. Their corpses are now being fished out of the water.

At the same moment, on the other edge of the little forest, a cheerful group of people in their finery was promenading and enjoying the trees, the blossoms, and the mild spring air. That is the Janus head of these times.

I was on the Place des Ternes when the air-raid alarm sounded. Conversation near the little flower stand on the traffic circle while people rushed passed us toward the shelters. Rhetorical figures—during the most spirited part of our conversation, fire-bursts from falling bombs lit up the air. Walked through empty streets to the Étoile while trails from white, red, and green tracer shots were shooting over the forest, where they exploded high above us like sparks from a blacksmith’s forge. That was a symbol of life’s course—like the path in The Magic Flute.

Human encounters and separations. When a separation is imminent, there are days when the exhausted relationship intensifies once more and crystallizes to the point where it reaches its purest, fundamental form. And yet it is precisely such days that inevitably confirm the end. In the same way, clear days often follow uncertain weather until one morning heralds particular clarity, when every mountain and valley shows itself again in its full glory just preceding the sudden drop in temperature.

I was standing in the bathroom this morning thinking about these things, just as I had before my trip to Russia, when I knocked over a glass and broke it.

Good prose is like wine and continues to live and develop. It may contain sentences that are not yet true, but a hidden life raises them to the level of truths.

Fresh prose is usually still a bit unrefined, but it develops a patina over the years. I often notice this in old letters.

Discussion with Hattingen at lunch about clocks and hourglasses. The trickling of the sand in the hourglass weaves the unmechanized time of destiny. This is the time to which we are attuned in the rustling of the forest, the crackling of the fire, the surge of the breakers, the eddies of falling snowflakes.

Later, even though the light was fading, I went to the Bois de Boulogne briefly near the Porte Dauphine. I saw boys playing there who were between seven and nine years old; their faces and gestures seemed remarkably expressive. Individuation comes out earlier here and shows itself with more pronounced features. Yet you get the feeling that in most cases, starting around age sixteen, their spring has lost its bloom. The Latin type crosses that borderline too early, the line that marks his final stage, whereas the Germanic type usually never reaches it. For this reason, commingling is beneficial; two deficiencies combine to create an advantage.

I rested at the foot of an elm tree surrounded by a profusion of pale violet nettles. A bumblebee was visiting the blossoms, and while it hovered over the calyxes, displaying its velvet brown band and gently curved abdomen, its extended proboscis pointed like a stiff black probe. The insect’s forehead bore a golden-yellow blaze of pollen formed by countless points of contact. It was remarkable to watch the moment it plunged into the flower. Once inside, the tiny insect gripped the long throat with both forelegs and pulled it over its proboscis like a sheath, almost the way a Mardi Gras clown puts on an artificial nose.

Had tea at Valentiner’s, where I met Heller, Eschmann, Rantzau, and the Doctoresse. Discussions about Washington Irving, Eckermann, and Prince Schwarzenberg, who is said to have instigated the collection of a huge, still uncatalogued body of material in Vienna relating to European secret societies.

Current reading: Carthage Punique [Punic Carthage] by Lapeyre and Pellegrin. The conquest of this city is rich in anecdotes befitting this phenomenal event. After the Romans had breached the walls, those citizens who were determined to fight to the death carried on their defense from the highest temple in the city. Among them were Hasdrubal with his family and other noble Carthaginians. And by their sides another nine hundred Roman defectors who expected no mercy.

During the night before the decisive attack, Hasdrubal secretly leaves his people to look for Scipio. In his hand, he bears an olive branch. The next morning Scipio parades him in front of the temple and displays him to the defenders to demoralize them. They, however, after venting an endless stream of abuse and invective against their disloyal general, set the building on fire and throw themselves into the flames.

It is said that, as the fire was being laid, Hasdrubal’s wife donned her finest raiment in one of the innermost chambers of the temple. Then, in all her finery, she came to the rampart with her children and addressed Scipio first. She wished him happiness on his life’s journey, saying she was leaving him without anger because he had acted in accordance with the laws of war. Thereupon she cursed her husband in the name of the city, its gods, herself, and her children, and then turned her back on him forever. Then she strangled her children and threw them into the flames, finally throwing herself into the fire as well.

In such circumstances, people achieve greatness in the way that individual vessels are filled to the brim with symbolic content. At the moment of its destruction, Carthage itself makes its entrance onto the flaming stage in the person of this woman approaching the altar prepared for her ultimate sacrifice. Inspired with a formidable, sacred power, she utters blessings and curses. The place, the circumstances, and the human being—all is prepared, and everything secondary fades away. The ancient sacrifice to Baal, the incineration of children, is reenacted here for the last time, performed in order to save the city and now consummated so that it may live forever. The mother sacrifices herself so that the vine may burn with its fruit.

Carthage Punique. In that age, contact among states was more malleable and the powers of treaties more binding. When Hannibal and Philipp of Macedon signed their famous treaty, the gods—notably the gods of war—were present, tangibly represented by the priests of their cult.

After the destruction of the city, the site was cursed. It was sown with salt as a sign of malediction. Thus salt here symbolizes barrenness. Otherwise, it symbolizes the mind, and so we find both negative and positive poles associated with an object, as is true everywhere in symbolism. This applies particularly to colors: yellow for both the nobility and the rabble; red for both authority and insurrection; blue for both the supernatural and nothingness. This division is surely accompanied by differences of purity, as Goethe notes about yellow in his treatise on color theory.[18] We may thus imagine the salt of malediction as coarse and impure, in contrast to the Attic salt used to preserve food or to season dishes at the table of the intelligentsia.

Kubin mailed me another of his hieroglyphic texts from Zwickledt; I plan to decipher this when I can meditate on it at leisure. Grüninger reports the arrival from Stalingrad of copies of the last letters of Lieutenant Colonel Crome. It appears that people show a powerful reversion to Christianity when they are facing a lost cause.

Visit from Hohly, the painter. He brought me greetings from Cellaris’s wife and reported that he was mentally very active, despite his long imprisonment and poor physical health.[19] Let us hope that he will see daylight again. The conversation reminded me again of that terrible day when I had driven to Berlin and telephoned Cellaris’s lawyer. There, in the metropolis, I held out as much hope for assurance as I would for a drink in the desert. Standing in the telephone booth, I had the impression that Potsdamer Platz was glowing.

In the evening attended the premier of Cocteau’s Renaud et Armide in the Comédie Française. I noted that I clearly recalled the two powerful moments in the play that I had noticed when it was read aloud on Rue de Verneuil: Armida’s magical song and Olivier’s prayer. A talent like Cocteau’s lets us observe the extent to which our age claws at him, and how much the subject matter must resist that. His miraculous ability waxes and wanes corresponding to the level on which he is focusing his talent. At its most rarified, it becomes a tightrope dance or buffoonery.

I noticed many familiar faces in the audience. Among them, Charmille.

Conversation with Rademacher in the morning about the military situation. He is placing his hope in Cellaris and Tauroggen.[20]

Visited Salmanoff in the evening, who said, “if the German intelligentsia had understood the Russian intelligentsia as well as the Russians understood the Germans, it never would have come to war.”

We spoke of the mass grave at Katyn, where thousands of Polish officers who were Russian prisoners of war have apparently been discovered. Salmanoff thinks the whole thing is propaganda.

“But how would the corpses have gotten there?”

“You know, nowadays corpses don’t need tickets.”

Conversation about Aksakov, Berdyaev, and a Russian author named Rozanov. Salmanoff has obtained a book of his for me.

Made my way home through the Bois de Boulogne. The half-moon stood high above the new foliage. Despite the populous city nearby, complete silence reigned. That produced a half-pleasing, half-terrifying effect, like that of being onstage just before a difficult production.

Had a substantive dream about Kniébolo in the early morning hours, in which events were linked to my parental home. For some reason that I have forgotten, people were expecting him. They were making all sorts of arrangements, while I escaped into distant rooms so as not to run into him. When I finally appeared again, he had been and gone. I heard details about the visit, in particular, that my father had embraced him. When I awoke, this fact struck me in particular, and it made me recall the sinister vision that Benno Ziegler had related.[21]

In discussions about the atrocities of our age the question often comes up about where those demonic powers come from, the persecutors and murderers—people nobody had otherwise ever seen or imagined. Yet they were always a potential presence, as reality now shows. Their novelty lies in their visibility, in their having been turned loose and allowed to harm other human beings. Our shared guilt led to this release: By robbing ourselves of our social bonds, we unleashed something subterranean. We must not complain when this wickedness also touches us individually.

Visited Parc de Bagatelle in the afternoon. The intense heat of these days concentrates the flowering like a symphony: Myriad tulips blazed on the lawns and on the islands in the little lake. Flora seemed to outdo herself in many of the blossoms, like the violet-blue and silky gray clusters of the wisteria, light as feathers yet heavy in beauty. These hung down on the walls; the whole effect produced a magical display like fairytale gardens.

I always find this enticing, a promise of endless splendors, like a ray of light from treasure vaults glimmering through doors just briefly opened. Transience dwells in the withering, and yet these floral miracles are symbols of a life that never wilts. From it comes the beguiling charm that awakens their hues and aromas as they shoot sparks into the heart.

I also saw my old friend the golden orfe,[22] whose back glistened in the green water of the grottoes. It has been waiting here silently while I was on the move in Russia.

Thoughts about perversions—wondering whether the source could be an aversion that existed between father and mother. In that case, they would have to predominate in countries and social strata where marriages of convenience are prevalent. By the same token, they ought to be prevalent among the cold-blooded races and not vice versa, as is commonly thought. Hatred and aversion for the opposite sex are passed down through procreation. That is basically it; other things come later. Naturally, selection takes place, as nature gives preference to the fruits of sensual copulation. Perhaps, however, individuals are compensated with intelligence, since brilliant types are often the fruits of late conception, like Baudelaire. The bizarre way in which father Shandy[23] winds the clock also comes to mind.

These connections have hardly been researched, and they elude the scope of science. I would have to penetrate the secret histories of entire families, entire clans.

I could counter this thesis by objecting that there are rural regions where marriages of convenience have been common since time immemorial. In these places, individuation has evolved less in the meantime; any healthy person is acceptable to another one. Furthermore, in particular areas, degeneration can reach the level of that in the big cities; it is simply more covert. Perhaps the symptoms are different as well. Sodomy is probably more prevalent in the countryside than in the city.

Incidentally, that which we view as aberrant can definitely be associated with a more profound view of the world. The reason for this is precisely that this view is less subject to the pressure, the veil of our species. This is generally observable among homosexuals, who judge by intellect. They are, therefore, always useful to intellectuals, quite apart from the fact that they are entertaining to have around.

The Dreyfus trial is a piece of clandestine history. In other words, it is generally invisible, the sort of thing that is otherwise submerged in the labyrinths beneath political structures. When reading about this affair, I have the feeling of trespassing upon the taboo. It is like getting close to the mummy of Tutankhamun, with its dense layers of matter. As a result, the casual approach with which young historians like Frank treat such material is frightening.

Career choice. I would like to be a star pilot.[24]

Concerning self-education. Even if we are born with infirmities, we can rise to remarkable levels of health. The same is true in the realm of knowledge. Through study you can liberate yourself from the influence of bad teachers and from the prejudices of your age. In a completely corrupted situation even the most modest progress in morality is much more difficult. Here is where things come down to fundamentals.

When an unbeliever—let’s say in an atheist state—demands that a believer swear an oath, that is tantamount to the action of a corrupt banker who expects the other players in the game to lay real gold on the table.

In an atheist political system there is only one sort of oath that is valid, and that is perjury. Everything else is sacrilege. On the other hand, one may swear an oath to a Turk and exchange oaths with him. That is an exchange without chicanery.

Finished reading the Old Testament last night with the Book of the Prophet Malachi. I had started this project in Paris on 3 September 1941. Tomorrow I plan to begin with the Apocrypha.

I have also have begun Esseulement [Solitude] by Rozanov. I immediately sensed here that that Salmonoff had steered me toward a mind that would trigger thoughts in me, if not actually inspire them.

Had tea with Marie-Louise Bousquet on Place du Palais-Bourbon; the house stands out for the Roman severity of its architecture. These old apartments filled with inherited objects have adapted themselves to human beings and their nature over the course of decades and centuries—like garments that, after long wear, caress the body with each fold. These are shells in the sense of a higher zoology. Here I also met Heller, Poupet, Giraudoux, and Madame Ollivier de Prévaux, a great-granddaughter of Liszt. Madame Bousquet—whom I always treat with the same caution that a chemist exercises when handling questionable compounds—showed me the small, square, wood-paneled library. There I examined manuscripts, dedications, and beautiful bindings. Some of the books were bound in textured leather; touching them doubles the pleasure of reading. The bindings stamped in gold leaf displayed a color palette from a violet so deep that it approaches black, and then to its lighter shades. The patterns in dark golden-brown were often dotted with gold or embellished flame shapes.

Made my way back in the evening across the Champs-Élysées. It was a magnificent sunny day. I was also pleased with myself, and note this only because it is something I can say so seldom. Finished reading Rozanov’s Esseulement, one of the rare moments in which authorship and independent thought have succeeded in our age. Considering such acquaintances, I always think it seems as if one of those bare patches on the ceiling that encloses our space had been filled in with paint. Rozanov’s relationship to the Old Testament is remarkable; for example, he uses the word “seed” in precisely the same sense. This word, when applied to humans as a symbol of their essence, has always distressed me slightly. I’ve always felt a certain opposition toward it, like Hebbel’s toward the word “rib,” which he scratched out in his Bible. Ancient taboos are probably at work here: the spermatic character of the Old Testament in general, in contrast to the pneumatic of the Gospels.

After 1918, Rozanov died in a monastery, where he is said to have starved to death. He remarked of the Revolution that it would fail because it offered nothing to men’s dreams. It is this that will destroy its structures. I find it so appealing that his hurried notations came to him as a sort of plasmatic motion of the spirit in moments of contemplation—when he was sorting his coin collection or sunning himself on the sand after his bath.

Neuhaus, who is a great devotee of flowers, had the sensible idea of getting out of the office with me for an hour and visiting the Botanical Garden of Auteuil, where the azaleas are in bloom. A large cool-house was filled with thousands of azalea bushes so that it resembled a hall with brightly woven carpeting and multicolored walls. It seems impossible that a greater profusion or a greater exuberance of such a delicate palette could ever be assembled in one place. Yet I don’t count myself among the friends of the azalea; I find its hues unmetaphysical, for they display only one-dimensional colors. Perhaps that explains their popularity. They speak only to the eye and lack that drop of arcanum arcanorum supra coeleste [heavenly mystery of mysteries] in the pure essence of their tincture. This explains their lack of fragrance.

We also visited the gloxinias and calceolaria [lady’s slipper, or slipperwort]. The calceolaria constitute living cushions on which variety achieves its greatest range, for among the millions of individuals there are no two flowers that are completely identical. The varieties with dark purple and yellow stripes are the most beautiful; in order to appreciate the deep interior of these calyxes that brim with life, you would have to be able to transmogrify into a bumblebee. This remark, which I addressed to Neuhaus, seemed to amuse our driver, who kept us company, and I guessed the reason.

Only a few orchids were in bloom, but we strolled through the cultivars since Neuhaus is a breeder. A green and purple striped lady’s slipper caught my eye thanks to the dark spots on its upper lip; each wing whimsically sprouted three or four tiny, spiky hairs. It made me think of the smile of a long-lost girlfriend who had a dark mole.

It’s important that the gardeners remain invisible in gardens like this so that we may see only their oeuvre. By the same token, tracks that we leave in the sand need to be erased immediately by a phantom hand. That’s the only way we can fully appreciate plants and their language. Their essence could be summarized in the motto, Praesens sed invisibilis [present but invisible].

The prototype for all gardens is the enchanted garden, and the prototype for all enchanted gardens is the Garden of Paradise. Horticulture, like all modest professions, has sacred origins.

I finished reading the Book of Judith in the Bible; it is one of those pieces in the style of Herodotus. The description of Holofernes leads us into one of the state rooms of the Tower of Babel where the curtain of his bed is encrusted with precious stones. Preceding the night that Judith spends in his tent, Holofernes exchanges oriental compliments with her. The lip of the chalice is dusted with sugar; at the bottom lies deadly poison.

Though she was ready to do so, she was spared having to submit to Holofernes. In this book, I sense the power of beauty, which is stronger than armies. Then the triumphal song over the severed head of Holofernes. In my work on higher zoology, I want to describe the primeval figure that is the model for this; it will be in a chapter on triumphal dances following the one about Schwärmen.[25]

“Judith and Charlotte Corday: a Comparison”; “Judith and Joan of Arc as National Heroines.” Two topics for advanced school students, but in order to do justice to the material, they must have already eaten from the Tree of Knowledge.

Spent a Mauritanian interlude with Banine at midday. It is her custom to have coffee in her bed, which she does not enjoy leaving any more than a hermit crab its shell. The windows of her studio look out at the tall water tower on Rue Copernic. Just outside these, a tall Paulownia [princess tree] still lacks its leaves but is in flower. The long, light purple, funnel-shaped blossoms into whose Cupid’s-bow shaped openings the bees descend, stand out markedly yet subtly against the pale blue of the spring sky.

Conversation about the southern type, especially Ligurians and Gascons. Then about law and mysticism in religion. In mosques, the presence of the law is apparently obvious. I believe this is also true for synagogues. Finally, we spoke of expressions for fear and their nuances in different languages.

Visited Rademacher in the evening. He returns to Paris now and then and lives on Rue François I^er. There, for a few minutes, I also saw Alfred Toepfer, who has come back from Spain and is about to depart for Hannover. I asked him to look around for a little house on the heath for me near Thansen.[26] Political discussions, then reminiscences about Cellaris and the old days of the nationalist movement. The clandestine meeting in Eichhof in 1929 remains especially memorable. The history of these years with their thinkers, their activists, martyrs, and extras has not yet been written. In those days, we lived in the yolk of the Leviathan’s egg. The Munich version[27]—the shallowest of them all—has now succeeded, and it has done so in the shoddiest possible way. My letters and papers from those years mention a host of people; people like Niekisch, Hielscher, Ernst von Salomon, Kreitz, and the recently deceased Albrecht Erich Günter. All were men of great perception. The other players have been murdered, emigrated, are demoralized, or have high-ranking positions in the army, the intelligence branch, and the Party. But those who are still alive will continue to enjoy discussing those days; people lived with a strong devotion to the idea. This is the way I imagine Robespierre in Arras.

Making progress with my Bible reading and have begun The Book of Wisdom [of Solomon]. Death has very different significance depending on whether it strikes the foolish man or the wise man. To the one it brings destruction; the other is purified and tested like gold in the furnace. His death is illusory: “And having been a little chastised, they shall be greatly rewarded” (3:5).

These words reminded me of the Léon Bloy’s nice observation, according to which death is less significant than we imagine—perhaps no more so than dusting off a piece of furniture.

At midday, I had a visit from an old fellow from Lower Saxony, Colonel Schaer. Discussed the situation. Still no olive branch. His debriefing included a description of the shooting of Jews that was horrifying. He got this from another colonel, I think it was Tippelskirch, who had sent his army there to find out what was going on.

Horror grips me when I hear such accounts, and I am crushed by the sensation of overwhelming danger. I mean this in the general sense, and would not be amazed if the planet were to fly apart into fragments, whether from a collision with a comet or from an explosion. I really have the feeling that these people are probing the planet, and the fact that they choose the Jews as their primary victims cannot be a coincidence. Their highest-ranking executioners have a kind of uncanny clairvoyance that is not the product of intelligence but of demonic inspiration. At every crossroads, they will find the direction that leads to greater destruction.

Apparently, these shootings are going to stop because they have moved to a system of gassing their victims.

Visited Gruel at midday. On the way I again broke off one of the fresh leaves from the fig tree growing by the Church of the Assumption. This tree’s annual budding has given me joy for three years now. It is among my favorite trees in this city. The second is the old pollarded acacia in the garden of the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Perhaps the third addition is the Paulownia in Banine’s garden.

Breakfast with the Morands; Countess Palffy, Céline, Benoist-Méchin also there. The conversation tended toward ominous anecdotes. Benoist-Méchin told how his car had skidded on some ice, and he had crushed a woman against a tree as she was walking with her husband. He took the couple into his car to drive them to the field hospital and during the journey heard the man sobbing and groaning more than the woman.

“I hope you are not hurt too?”

“No, but a pelvic fracture—that means at least three months in the hospital—what an expense. And what’s more, who’s going to cook for me all that time?”

The examination revealed that it was luckily only internal lesions but that the healing would still take eight weeks. After that time, the minister visited the woman to inquire about her health, and he found her wearing mourning. Her husband had died of some gastric complications in the meantime. When he tried to express his condolences, she responded: “Oh please stop it. You don’t know what joy you have brought me.”

We talked about the wives of prisoners of war as well. Just as the Trojan War has become the mythical model of every historical war, the tragedy of returning soldiers and the figure of Clytemnestra constantly recur. A woman who hears that her husband is to be released from prison camp sends him a little parcel of delicacies as a love token. In the meantime, the man returns earlier than expected and discovers not only his wife but also her lover and two children. In the prisoner of war camp in Germany, comrades divide the contents of the parcel and four of them die after consuming the butter she had laced with arsenic.

On this subject, Céline recounted anecdotes from his own medical practice, which seems to be studded with an array of gruesome cases. Incidentally, that he is a Breton explains my first impression that had led me to consign him to the Stone Age. He is just about to go visit the mass grave at Katyn, now being exploited as propaganda. It stands to reason that such places attract him.

Benoist-Méchin walked with me on my way home. He is consumed by a demonic agitation. We carried on a conversation that has been repeated endlessly since the dawn of time: which type of display of power provides greater satisfaction, the practical, political form or the invisible, spiritual one?

In the evening I read Cocteau’s essay about the death of Marcel Proust, given to me by Marie-Louise Bousquet. It contains a sentence that graphically demonstrates the vast silence to which the dead descend: “Il y régnait ce silence qui est au silence ce que les ténèbres sont à l’encre.” [There reigns the silence that is to silence what darkness is to ink.]

I could not help thinking of Thomas Wolfe’s terrifying description of a corpse in the New York subway.

Good Friday. Visit from Eschmann this morning, who has come from Valéry. Discussion about dreams. Our conversation touched on things I thought it best not to pursue. It nonetheless gave me insights, as if I were looking at myself in a crystal clear mirror. By the way, even the clearest mirrors are hazy—they possess a dream dimension. We enter into them, and they capture our aura.

In the afternoon went to Quai Voltaire via Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I tend to be late here; hourglass time controls this route. I made my way to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. The white chestnut blossoms with their tiny traces of red had fallen and now lay on the pavement in the courtyard like a frame of ivory and other precious materials. This gave a ceremonial quality to my entrance. Visited the chapel first, where a crucifix was on display. Then the church thronged with women. There I heard a good Passiontide sermon. Great symbols renew themselves each day, like the one showing human beings choosing the murderer Barabbas over the Prince of Light.

Visited Valentiner. Both brothers were there, as well as Eschmann and Marie-Louise. Discussion about Jouhandeau’s Nouvelles Chroniques Maritales, the game of chess, insects, Valéry. Then visited the Doctoresse in the company of Schlumberger. We had not seen each other since 1938.

Conference with Colonel Schaer in the morning. I asked him once more whether I had remembered correctly that Tippelskirch had personally heard or seen details of the butchery he had told me about. He confirmed that for me. At times, these things oppress me like a nightmare, a diabolical dream. But it is necessary to view the evidence with the eyes of a physician and not to shrink from it. The general public insulates itself from such revelations.

Some thoughts about the column stinkhorn mushrooms I examined yesterday in Saint-Roule. Despite their vigorous appearance, they are actually just dead bits—nonspace within space. By the same token, we too are just corpses in the flow of life. Not until death breaks us open do we gain life.

In the evening I read Titanen [Titans][28] sent to me today by Friedrich Georg, then fell into a deep sleep as if induced by some mysterious narcotic.

Went to the Bois in the afternoon. Strolled from Porte Dauphine as far as Auteuil. Various types of Balanini [acorn beetle] on the bushes; the creatures reminded me of my dream in Voroshilovsk.[29] Then I wandered through unknown streets until I suddenly found myself in front of a large building on Quai Louis-Blériot; we once had a birthday party there for the little milliner on its seventh floor. Continued along the Boulevard Exelmans. There the Métro emerges as an elevated train; the enormous arches have a certain classical, ancient Roman feeling—something decisive about them that differs from our architecture. People would live more agreeably in cities built on such a model. You encounter the Paulownia, the imperial tree, everywhere. It enhances this city as the exquisite gray of the buildings cloaks itself felicitously in its purple veils. Its trunks have an intrinsically stately architectural form: they resemble ceremonial candelabra flickering with gentle flames. What the flame tree is to Rio, the Paulownia is to Paris. This comparison could also include the women.

Visited Valentiner; there I also saw the sculptor Gebhardt, whose mother is in danger since his aunt disappeared without a trace. On the staircase, I met Princess Bariatinski, who, along with Count Metternich, is caring for him. Metternich has given him asylum under the wing of the commander-in-chief. Walked back through the Tuileries; again, more Paulownia, and Judas trees too. Their blossoms shone like bunches of coral-colored grapes. A toothless old woman wearing thick makeup had carried two chairs into the bushes and waved invitingly at me with a grotesque smile. It was dusk, and this was a dreary sight.

Back at the Raphael continued reading Titanen. I stride through the chapters as if through the ancient construction site of the world. I imagine the coming of the gods to be something like an arrival from other planets bathed in joyous radiance. While I was reading, I could occasionally picture Friedrich Georg smiling gently as he inclined his head slightly to examine pictures or flowers on our walks together.

At the Morands’ for lunch, where I also met Abel Bonnard. I had them show me the picture of the Mexican goddess of the dead that Eschmann had told me about and which Madame Morand keeps hidden in the half-light behind a screen in her large salon. It shows a cruel, fearsome idol of gray stone with numerous victims bleeding to death before it. Pictures like this are infinitely more intense, infinitely more real than any photograph.

Discussion about the situation, then about Gide, whom Bonnard called “le vieux Voltaire de la pédérastie” [the old Voltaire of pederasty]. He went on to say that any literary movements, such as the ones that have formed around Gide, Barrès, Maurras, and [Stefan] George, would soon consume themselves. He finds something inherently sterile in them resembling the rustling of barren wheat fields beneath the rays of an artificial star. By the time the sun sets, it has all passed and no fruit remains, for it is all nothing more than pure emotion.

Bonnard also accused Léon Bloy of having believed in a miracle that had been performed for his benefit—a quality I rather like. He also spoke of Galliffet and about Rochefort, whom he had known personally. He said that the latter left the impression of a short photographer.

Talked about the Russians, who today are as overestimated as they were underestimated two years ago. In reality, they are more powerful than anyone thinks. It could be, however, that this power is not to be feared. This applies, incidentally, to any true, any creative power.

The conversation engaged my general interest because Abel Bonnard embodies a kind of positivistic intellectuality now almost defunct. For this reason the somewhat muted, solarian character of his attributes are apparent; these have something both childlike and senescent about them in their sullenness. I sense that there are epicenters of this kind of thinking. To be sure, such conversations, like those with my own father, resemble time spent waiting in anterooms. Yet they reveal more than conversations with our visionaries and mystics.

Sent a letter to Friedrich Georg about his Titans. Also wrote about dreams in which our father appeared to us. My brother had written to me that he had seen him with me in a garden and noticed particularly that our father was wearing a new suit.

At the Raphael in the evening with the Leipzig publisher Volckmar-Frentzel, Leo, and Grewe, the expert in international law from Berlin. From him, I gleaned details about the agonizing death of A. E. Günther.

Continued my reading in the Wisdom of Solomon. The seventh chapter may be seen as a counterpart to the Song of Songs, but on a more significant level. What was sensual desire there is spiritual here. There exists a spiritual lust. It remains inaccessible to those who spend their days only in the antechambers of the true life. Its glories are closed to them. Yet, “And great pleasure it is to have her friendship” (8:18).

Wisdom is here exalted as the highest independent human intelligence; it is the Holy Ghost that fills the cosmos with his universal presence. Even the boldest ways of the human mind lead not one step closer to it. Only when man purifies himself, when he makes an altar of his own breast, then wisdom enters into him unnoticed. Thus everyone may participate in the highest wisdom. It is cosmic, whereas intelligence is an earthly, perhaps a merely brutish power. We are more intelligent in our atoms than in our brains.

It is remarkable that the Sayings of Solomon incorporated the most extreme skepticism into Holy Writ. Whereas this book, so pervaded by a divine economy, is placed among the Apocrypha.

The mail brought a letter from Hélène Morand about The Worker. In it she calls the art of life the art of forcing other people to work while one enjoys oneself.

“The famous saying of Talleyrand ‘n’a pas connu la douceur de vivre’ [never knew the pleasure of life]”[30] applied only to a tiny elite, which was not even particularly appealing. We all would have found the salons of Madame du Deffand or Madame Geoffrin stifling. These people had neither heart, nor wits, nor imagination and were ripe for death. What’s more, they all died quite nicely. It is just a pity that Talleyrand was able to crawl away from danger—“on his belly.”

I am struck by the tough political flair of this woman, as well as the fascination and horror she arouses. There is some magic art in all this—especially a fiery will—which, in its brilliant light, calls forth the idols upon the roofs of alien temples licked by flames. I used to feel this too in response to Cellaris. The real danger is not that people are playing with cards that decide the fates of thousands and their happiness. Rather, danger dwells in the decisions of individuals—in the way they stretch out their hands. That can reveal the demonic realm. Every one of us knows the moment of resolve when we silence all within us in order to take this leap or to reach out. I have experienced this moment, albeit much more intensely—and this silence, though infinitely more profoundly: experienced it during particular encounters along my way. Demonic natures are accordingly more frightening when they are mute than when they speak in the midst of activity.

Then I read a new issue of Zeitgeschichte [Contemporary History] edited by Traugott and Meinhart Sild. I don’t take much pleasure in the fact that these essays draw their support from The Worker. A comment by one of the contributors is at least correct when he says this book offers only a floor plan without suggesting what sort of architectural structures could possibly be built upon it.

Sleep has its different intensities, and resting its various levels. They resemble the gear ratios of wheels that turn around a center point that is itself still. Minutes of the deepest sleep can thus be more restorative than nights of dozing.

Took a trip to Le Mans with Baumgart and Fräulein Lampe, a young art historian, in order to visit the painter Nay. We had spent the better part of the previous night at one of the little get-togethers given by the commander-in-chief. A professor was there who is said to be one of the most important specialists on diabetes. I am consistently amazed by the gravity with which I hear sentences like the following nowadays: “To date there have been twenty-two hormones identified that are secreted by the pituitary gland.”

No matter how far this mentality advances, its progress remains merely one of refinement. Insights spiral heavenward, as on the exterior of a top hat, whereas truth fills its interior. Diseases must naturally increase. The most important hormone is the one that cannot be identified.

Weniger was among the dinner guests; he has just returned from Germany, where he heard an epigram that isn’t bad:

[To the victorious Party (from) the grateful Wehrmacht][31]

—an inscription on a future monument commemorating this Second World War. At moments like this, the commander-in-chief has a charming quality about him, the smile of a fairytale king dispensing gifts to children.

In the morning I departed from Montparnasse. It was the day when lilies of the valley were being offered for sale everywhere in large bunches. They reminded me of Renée. I am still filled with pain when I recall gardens I never entered. It was raining, but the land was in full bloom. Among the trees I was particularly taken with the hawthorn. I find its chalky pigmentation especially appealing, somewhere between pale and dark pink. Wild hyacinth fills areas of the woods, flowers that one simply does not see in Germany. Their deep dark-blue blossoms were especially showy along a slope where they blazed in the middle of a stand of green and yellow spurge.

Nay picked us up from the train in Le Mans. Since he is serving as a corporal here, we met in his studio after lunch. A Monsieur de Thérouanne, whose hobby is sculpture, has made it available to him. Looking at Nay’s images, I had the impression of a laboratory where Promethean creativity is expressed in solid form. But I did not reach a verdict, because these are works that require frequent and long examination. Discussion about theory, about which Nay, like most good painters, has something to say. Carl Schmitt has even inspired him with his notions of space. I thought he used a particularly fitting expression that described his work at the point when the canvas “gained tension.” At such moments, it seemed to him as though the image were greatly expanding. This happens in prose as well, where a sentence, a paragraph, gains particular tension, more specifically, torsion. This is comparable to the moment when a woman whom you have long considered with indifference or simply as a friend, suddenly gains erotic significance. At that moment everything changes completely.

We then went to Morin, the antiquarian bookseller, who showed us his books and some magnificent early prints.

Pouring rain. The three of us went out to L’Épeau to eat in spite of it. Afterward, visited Morin where we also met Nay. Monsieur Morin showed us his collections: pictures (among them one by Deveria), furniture, coins, Chinoiserie, and the like. His collection represents a distillation, a melting down and recombination as the result of culling, sifting, selecting, and trading accumulated items. In this sense, it was a potent essence, representing the consolidated content of two, three rooms.

I stood with Monsieur Morin in the studio of his only son, who had recently been sent to work in Germany, specifically to Hannover. The father told me a good deal about him, how for example, as a child he already treated books with respect and would rather spend time with them than out of doors or playing sports. “C’est un homme de cabinet” [he’s an indoor man]. When he mentioned that he had set his son up in a small secondhand bookshop on Rue du Cherche-Midi, I immediately knew that he could be none other than the man who recently sold me the book De Tintinnabulis [On Bells] by Magius.[32] The father confirmed this, and even said that his son had recounted the conversation to him that he and I had had during the transaction. Because this encounter seemed extraordinary to me, I wrote down the address and made a note to look in on him on my next furlough.

Then we went back to the books. I was able to acquire a good supply of old paper, mostly from the eighteenth century. It was partially bound in large, barely used ledgers of the sort I had seen in Picasso’s flat, and that I could use as herbaria.

Walked to the cathedral through the upper part of town, where the streets still retain their Gothic character. The cathedral has a narrow, exceptionally high choir that is particularly impressive. The plan of the building hits the viewer squarely with its startling skeletal austerity. Much coming disaster lurks in this bravado as it proclaims its goal so openly to the initiate.

At the end, we returned to Nay for a second look at the pictures. They bear the stamp of primitivism coupled with awareness, and with that, they represent the true mark of our age. The colors are loosely related, sometimes in a way that symbolizes their dynamic value. Consequently, the arm raised in action is painted blood red.

We then returned to Paris, arriving at nine o’clock.

At Valentiner’s place at noon; he is leaving for Aix today. His garret on Quai Voltaire plays a role in my life similar to the one played earlier by the round table in the George V. I gave him an introduction to Médin.

Carlo Schmid came by in the afternoon. Discussion about the situation. The approaching fiasco in Tunis will bring political changes in its wake, especially in Italy.[33] They are supposedly building huge batteries of rocket launchers on the Channel coast. The rockets, fueled by liquid air, will be able to hit London. Kniébolo has always overestimated novelties of this sort.

There were letters from Banine and Morin in my French mail. Morin has a good archivist’s handwriting. In the afternoon, I visited Weinstock and took him a copy of The Titans to take along on his trip. Went to the Ritz in the evening with Carlo Schmid. He told me, among other things, the grotesque story of one of his colleagues, a sixty-year-old lawyer from the military administration in Lille who was the head of the passport office. When girls or women applied for passports, it was this man’s habit to order them to come to his apartment, where the same conversation always ensued before he would hand over the document:

“My child, before you receive your passport first you will have to cry.”

“But why do I have to cry? I don’t understand!”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

With these words, he placed his victim with great ceremony upon a sofa, quickly lifted her skirts and meted out robust blows upon her backside with a cane.

This bizarre compulsion was repeated, because in a majority of the cases, the concerned parties had no recourse for lodging a complaint until finally the military tribunal addressed the issue.

The hero of this scandal was until recently the head of an office of Jewish affairs in Berlin and a contributor to Der Stürmer,[34] where he had published articles about the sexual offenses of Jews. These things correspond like mirror images. You have to seek the culprit hiding in your own bushes.

Then we talked about Kniébolo. Many people, even his opponents, concede a certain diabolical greatness to him. This could only be elemental, infernal, without any personal stature or dignity, such as one observes in a Byron or Napoleon. Carlo Schmid said on this topic that Germans lack an instinct for physiognomy. Anyone who looks like that, so that neither painter nor photographer can create a face for him—anyone who treats his mother tongue with such indifference—anyone who collects such a swarm of losers around him… but still, the enigmas here are unfathomable.

So many Paulownia on Place d’Italie—it’s a walk among magical candelabra that are burning delicate aromatic oil. Experiencing this again called to mind my dear father, with all his severity and flaws. How death glorifies the memory of the dead. More and more, I distance myself from the opinion that people, deeds, and events irrevocably retain their form for all eternity at the moment when they enter the hereafter and continue to exist in that form. On the contrary, that point in time constantly changes eternity, which, back then, was still in the future. At this point, time is a totality, and just as all that has gone before affects the future, the present also changes the past. Thus there are things that at the time were not yet truth; we, however, make them true. Furthermore, books change in the same way that fruits or wines mature in the cellar. Other things decay quickly, become ciphers. Never existed, colorless, insipid.

This conceals one of the many meanings that justify the cult of ancestor-worship. When we live as complete human beings, we exalt our forefathers in the same way that the fruit exalts the tree. You see this in the fathers of great individuals as they emerge from the anonymity of the past as if bathed in a nimbus of light.

Past and future are mirrors, and the present flickers between them, incomprehensible to our eyes. In death, however, the perspectives change: the mirrors begin to dissolve and the present emerges with ever-greater purity until, at the moment of death, it merges with eternity.

The divine life is everlasting present. And life exists only where divinity is present.

Unpleasant, embarrassing thoughts, impure words or oaths surface in our soliloquies when we brood. These are infallible signs that something inside us is amiss—just as when smoke mingles with the flames of unseasoned wood on the fire. Things like vehemence and intemperance directed against others—often symptoms of nights spent boozing, and worse.

Went to see the president at midday; called on him in his room at the end of a long, winding corridor in the Raphael. Conversation about the loss and acquisition of belongings—they accrue to us over the years as we mature. In our youth, we are like the restless hunter who frightens his quarry. Once we gain tranquility, we perceive the eagerness of the game to run into our traps.

Went to a little restaurant on Rue de la Pompe in the evening. It seems much easier for women to move from friendship to love than vice versa. I sense this in marriages that continue as friendship—yet they are forever a grave of extinguished mysteries.

Bodies are vessels. The meaning of life is to fortify them with ever more precious essences, with unguents for eternity. If this happens completely, whether the receptacle breaks or not is irrelevant. This is the meaning contained in a maxim in the Wisdom of Solomon, that the death of the wise man is only illusory.

Read further in the Apocrypha. The “wisdom” dwindles when it merges into the historical portion. One reads this with a diminished sense of expectation, rather like Spinoza’s proofs, which follow from his theses.

The path through the Red Sea left behind a trauma in Israel; it was one of the decisive ruptures never to be forgotten. Miracles are the material that life feeds on. The sea is red, and it is also the Reed Sea. These are symbols for the life cycle, dominated by the code of the fishes: this teaches that one eats the other. It is the greatest of miracles that we are not devoured by this sea. What once happened in the past offers hope in all future persecutions.

Tobias, an uplifting story and pleasant to read. It gives delightful insights into ancient pastoral life during the phase when it clashes with historical powers and is threatened by them. I started with Jesus Sirach. If I recall correctly, Luther calls this a good domestic manual, but from the outset it offers great insights.

Concerning style. The use of the noun is in all instances stronger than verbal forms. “They sat down to eat” is weaker than “They sat down at the table,” or “they sat down to the meal.” “He regrets what was done” is weaker than “he regrets the deed.” This is the difference between movement and concreteness.

I got a phone call from the Doctoresse asking me to come to Ladurée during the midday break. I visited a bookseller on Rue de Castiglione beforehand where I bought a few nice volumes, such as the collection of Grothius’s source material concerning the Goths. Also found the Mémoires sur Vénus [Memorials of Venus] by Larcher, who covers all the names, rituals, and sculptures of this goddess. I bought this for Friedrich Georg, despite his prejudice against any French research on mythology.

The Doctoresse told me that the police had entered her apartment in the morning and had asked her, among other things, about her circle of acquaintances. Judging from details in her account, I could tell this was a simple case of denunciation. I liked the way she dealt with these visitors when they identified themselves as police: “Thank you,” she said, “I can already see that.”

Went to the Eastman [Dental] Clinic. I usually spend a little time on Place d’Italie watching the performance of a man approximately fifty years old. He is a gray-haired giant in tights who earns his daily bread by lifting weights and dumbbells and performing similar feats. He personifies something good-humored, gentle, and animal like in human form. He collects his money in a funnel.

I like to take the Métro in this direction because it emerges above ground in a number of places. The building façades seem abandoned and sun-bleached, yet they have a cheerful aspect. The sight of them awakens a primeval little lizard’s soul in me. Behind the silence of their sun-bathed walls, I see people resting idly in their rooms, dreaming, or indulging in amorous play. I travel past a gallery of intimate still lifes—past tables set with sliced melon and glasses filmed with condensation; past a woman in a red dressing gown cutting the pages of a novel; past a naked man with a full beard sitting comfortably in an easy chair and dreaming of sublime things; past a couple sharing an orange after their caresses.

Anyone who thinks in concepts and not in images perpetrates the same brutality toward language as someone who sees only social categories and not human beings.

The path to God in our age is inordinately long, as if man had lost his way in the endless expanses that are the product of his own ingenuity. Even the most modest advance is therefore a great achievement. God must be imagined anew.

Given this condition, man is essentially capable only of negativity: He can purify the vessel that he embodies. That will suit him well, for new luster brings increased exhilaration. Yet even the greatest rule he can impose upon himself culminates in atheism, where no god dwells, a place more terrifying than if it had been abandoned by God. Then one day, years later, it may happen that God answers—it could be that He does so slowly, through the antennae of the spirit; or He may reveal Himself in a lightning bolt. We sent a signal to a heavenly body, and it turns out to be inhabited.

This reveals one of the great beauties of Goethe’s Faust, namely the description of the lifelong, undaunted striving for exalted worlds and, ultimately, for access to their laws.

Conversation in the Majestic with Dr. Göpel about Max Beckmann, whom he occasionally sees in Holland and who asked Göpel to remember him to me. Painting in the period of Romanticism transcended the limits of literature and today dares to attempt feats reserved for music. Beckmann has a powerful, idiosyncratic line. His energy is convincing even where it is brutal: the statement “Auch hier sind Götter” [Here too are gods][35] proclaims a certain brilliance. One could imagine an archaic hybrid combining European and American elements: Mycenae and Mexico.

Dr. Göpel also told an anecdote about a count he had visited on the coast of Normandy, a man whose family had lived there for a thousand years.

“Over the course of this time, my family has gone through three castles here.”—

What a good way to put it, since houses are to dynasties what garments are to individuals.

Clemens Podewils joined us later, bringing me greetings from Speidel in Russia. Spent time with Weniger in the Raphael in the evening. Discussion about George and Schuler’s Blutleuchte [Blood Beacon], and also the terrific book Klages has written about it.[36] Weniger knows almost everyone of any importance in Germany, and his knowledge even extends to their genealogical connections. In this day and age such people are especially important because fundamental changes of the political-intellectual climate have occurred but not filtered down into the general consciousness. They are like the individual strands picked up by knitting needles and worked into one fabric. We find that they usually lead peripatetic lives, often getting submerged in discussions, conversations, and banter so that later on history barely records their names.

There was a letter from Friedrich Georg in the mail. He concurs with my suggestion to suppress the introduction to the Titans.

Heller and I visited Henri Thomas in Saint-Germain in the afternoon. He lives in an old apartment opposite the château with the salamander decorations. We also met Madame Thomas and two literary friends. I was again amazed at the intellectual precision in these sorts of encounters; what a contrast to similar ones with young Germans, who display their fundamentally anarchic character. They lack higher-level small talk.

In Thomas, personally, I notice the peculiar juxtaposition of mental presence and absence. Talking to him is like having a conversation with someone who lingers far away in distant dreamscapes, and then comes out with surprising and pointed rejoinders. Perhaps both are connected; he “imports” answers. One could say of him, quoting Prince de Ligne, “j’aime les gens distraits; c’est une marque qu’ils ont des idées” [I like inattentive people; it is a sign that they have ideas].

Discussion about Pascal, Rimbaud, Léon Bloy, then about the progress of the European revolution. Also talked about Gide, who is staying in Tunis these days. Walked back across the Seine. On the banks the willows gleamed a powerful, almost black green. This river valley is an altar to Aphrodite nourished by ideal moisture conditions.

Visited Florence in the evening; she has just returned from Nice. The usual crowd was there. She talked about Frank J. Gould, who, after reading Falaises de Marbre [On the Marble Cliffs] said, “it goes from dreams to reality,” which for an American billionaire is not a bad review.

After Jouhandeau had been drinking a while, he began to regale us with stories from his marriage, which we found amusing—of course, for the wrong reasons. He told about a time when Elise was once setting the breakfast table and making a scene about something. He kicked the tray she was holding right out of her hands. The move was done with such perfectly aimed, high-wire accuracy that all the crockery was scattered in pieces across the floor.

Visited the antiquarian bookshop of Dussarp on Rue du Mont-Thabor. There I purchased Balthasar Bekker’s Verzauberte Welt [Enchanted World], a book I have been coveting for a long time. In it I even found the author’s inscription in each of the four octavo volumes printed in Amsterdam in 1694.

Thought: I, too, now belong to the untold millions who have contributed to the life’s blood of this city, to its thoughts and feelings that are absorbed by the sea of stone and over the course of the centuries, mysteriously transmuted and fashioned into a coral reef of destiny. When I consider that I passed by the Church of Saint-Roch, where César Birotteau[37] was wounded, and passed the corner of Rue des Prouvaires, where the beautiful stocking-seller Baret[38] took Casanova’s measurements in the back of the shop—and that those are but two tiny facts in an ocean of fantastical and real events—then I am overcome by a sort of joyful melancholy, of painful desire. I am glad to be part of human life.

The dark afterglow of past life stimulates memory through aromas, odors. In the narrow alleys around the Bastille, I always pick up a little “essence de Verlaine” [whiff of Verlaine]. Shadows do the same. By the same token, Méryon is the great draftsman and portrayer of the city.

Visited Salmanoff in the afternoon. He gave me a book by Berdyaev, who is one of his patients. Discussed the fall of Tunis and the political situation in general. He repeated his prophecy about an impending alliance between Russia and Germany. That assumes the collapse of the dictatorship there as well.

Then, talk about illnesses: “sickness unmasks man; it exposes both his good and bad sides more clearly.”

He compared Schopenhauer’s idea about “what one perceives” to the leaves of an artichoke: there are situations that peel back the human foliage, and reveal “what a man is” in all its glory or triviality.

In the evening I spoke with General Geyer in the Ritz; he was a colleague of Ludendorff in World War I. We talked about the situation, which has become more critical since the fall of Tunis. Then, about the relationship between Ludendorff and Hindenburg, which to me has always illustrated the difference between will and character. After 1918, all Ludendorff had to do was to keep his head down in order to gain everything, but he was incapable of that. He is a case study of all the strengths and weaknesses within the Prussian General Staff, which after the departure of Moltke Senior, focused more single-mindedly on pure dynamism. Herein lies the reason why the General Staff was and remains incapable of resisting Kniébolo. Minds like this can only implement, only organize, whereas something more, something fundamentally organic, is the prerequisite for resistance.

This organic quality is present in Hindenburg. When Grüner heard that Hindenburg had become Reich president, he said, “at least the old gentleman is never going to do anything stupid.” In saying that, he was surely correct. If anything was going to oppose what the future held, it was never going to be the forces of democracy, which had only increased the intensity. Hindenburg’s capitulation was unavoidable; it was not a function of his advanced age—that was more or less symbolic. The organic quality that he possessed was particularly related to wood. The “iron Hindenburg” was a wooden, nail-studded Hindenburg. The aura of inherited power certainly surrounds this old gentleman—in contrast to Kniébolo’s intrinsically disastrous charisma.

As a young officer I was, of course, for Ludendorff. A contributing factor was a remark the old gentleman once made about me that I found irritating: “it is dangerous for one so young to be decorated with the highest honor.” Back then I considered it pedantic, but today I know that it was right. He had seen this confirmed by the fates of many a comrade from 1864, 1866, and 1870.

Discussion with the Doctoresse, who phoned me because her husband had been arrested in Vichy, and what’s more, on the very day after she had received that visit here in Paris. Because such abductions are carried out under the aegis of Kniébolo’s “Night and Fog Decree”[39]—which means without stating a reason or revealing a place of custody—we first have to find out where they have taken him. I’m glad she relies on me.

Went to Chapon Fin at Porte Maillot in the evening with Dr. Göpel, Sommer, and Heller. Talked about pictures and the magic captured by their artistic content. After the banker Oppenheim had purchased the White Roses by van Gogh, he stared at this picture for two hours before going to the meeting where he acquired a majority of stocks in the National Bank—which turned out to be his best business transaction. Viewed this way, the ownership of paintings also possesses a power both magical and real.

Conversation with the owner of the restaurant, who served our meal elaborately. In doing so, he came out with a saying significant to his profession: “je peux vivre partout où j’ais quarante copains” [I can live anywhere as long as I have forty companions].

Back in my room, I pondered the tragic side of the people I have encountered here. This restaurateur is an example. His neighbors call him “le Boche de la Porte Maillot” [The Kraut of Porte Maillot]. He brims with a passion for all things military and has developed a childlike fondness for Germans. He feels a kinship with our martial, comradely spirit. For me, it was touching to see his fruitless attempts to square this astrological affinity with the contrast based on blood and soil.

About style: Schopenhauer’s injunction not to insert relative clauses into the main clause, but rather to let each phrase unfold independently, is absolutely right—especially so when it refers to the clear and logical flow of thoughts in sequence. The presentation of images, on the other hand, and our appreciation of them, may be enhanced by the insertion of the relative clause. Suspense grows and is propelled forward, as if the current in the sentence had shot a spark across the interruption.

We apply such techniques for quite a while before we begin to think about them. In this we are like the peasant who one day suddenly discovers to his amazement that he has been speaking prose.

Read further in Jesus Sirach. The description of the moon, the sun, and the rainbow in Chapter 43 is beautiful. Nearby, in that context, there appears the thought that every detail of creation is good: Evil provides perspective because it appears over the course of time when God then finally puts it to his use. The example of the scorpion is cited. That demonstrates that poisons emerge only temporarily, as in a chemical reaction, during the production of an arcane elixir, where they then function in wisdom’s greater plan.

One such sentence, of which there are many in Sirach, can form the foundation for philosophical propositions and moral codes, or for visions like those of Jakob Böhme. In this sense, the Bible is surely the book of books, seed and raw material for all texts. It has brought forth literatures and will continue to do so.

In all its worldly experience, in all its accumulated common sense, Jesus Sirach also contains the bounty of the Orient: “Yet have I more to say, which I have thought upon, and I am full of thoughts as the moon at the full” (38:12).

The Jewish people must return to this, their great literature, and surely the terrible persecution that they now suffer leads them back to it. The Jew, whose cleverness so often makes him disagreeable, becomes a friend and teacher when he speaks as a sage.

Departure for Kirchhorst from the Gare du Nord. Preceded by a restless night. While my gear was being brought down, I scribbled a line to the president on behalf of the Doctoresse’s husband. The prison where he is being held has now been located.

Late arrival in Hannover where I was greeted by air-raid sirens. I took my place in an air-raid cellar and there continued my reading—a story about the unfortunate spring lobster fishermen who were abandoned on the island of Saint-Paul and suffered a lingering death from scurvy.[40] Their fate lets us glimpse the secrets of the most isolated islands as well as the secrets of our bureaucracies. The company that wanted to exploit these cliffs teeming with spring lobsters went bankrupt, and the representatives that they had sent disappeared from contemporary consciousness along with their bankruptcy assets.

After the all-clear signal, I rested for several hours in Hotel Mussmann, where I was shown to a room already occupied by a sleeping guest.

As I was dressing in the morning, I had a brief conversation with my roommate. He told me that he had commanded a punishment detail in Norway. In that capacity, he had been required to inform a twenty-year-old volunteer who had been sentenced to death that just before his execution, his appeal had been rejected. That had affected him so powerfully that he had been crippled by convulsions, which had now become chronic.

I listened to this long drawn-out story while I was shaving, and I asked him a series of questions while he was still laying in bed, a thick-set man of approximately fifty-eight years of age. He had an amiable face and answered my questions eagerly. I was in a hurry and not all that curious, which gave our exchange an oddly businesslike quality.

I then took the bus the rest of the way. Perpetua showed me the garden, which was in fine shape. It looked more verdant and leafy, and at the same time, strangely unfamiliar, like those oases that we speed past on the train, but whose glimpses nonetheless awaken in us a longing to retreat into a shady sanctuary. Here I saw my wish fulfilled. Among the plants, I greeted the Eremurus [foxtail lilies] that I had entrusted to the earth before departing for Russia. It had produced four tall stems that had a silver sheen in the snowy green shadows.

Went to the quarry with Alexander where we sunbathed. The veronica: Although I’ve known this flower since my earliest childhood, it was as if I had seen it today for the first time, with its blue centers whose gray pupils are surrounded by the darkly striated enamel of the iris. It seems that blue things have made a stronger impression on me lately.

Dreamed of being burdened with the corpse of a murdered man without being able to find a place to conceal it. This was connected to the terrible fear that this dream must be of ancient origin and generally widespread. Cain is certainly one of our great progenitors.

The age of the Book of Genesis is reflected in the fact that it contains great dream figures that reappear in us by night. Perhaps every night. This shows that it is among the sources, the primeval testimony of human history. In addition to the dream of the curse of Cain, other Genesis figures include that of the snake and the dream of being naked and exposed to view in public places.

What will man have been when the final bargain is made about the history of this planet earth? Something sinister and unknown surrounds this being, about whom Psalm 90 sings its terrible song of fate. There have actually been only three figures on the same level with this anonymous one, who lives in all of us: Adam, Christ, Oedipus.

In a world where everything is of consequence, art must cease to exist, for it presupposes differentiation, selection. By extension, if there were no weeds, but merely fruit alone, that would spell the end of horticulture.

The great trajectory of the spirit thus transcends art. The philosopher’s stone stands at the culmination of a series of distillations that lead with ever-greater purity toward an absolute, undiluted state. Whoever possesses the stone no longer needs chemical analysis.

We can think of this relationship as traversing a series of gardens where each surpasses the one before it. In each succeeding one, the colors and forms become richer and more luminous. Abundance necessarily reaches its limits at the point when it can no longer be enhanced. Then qualitative changes appear, which both simplify and conceptualize.

In this way, the colors gradually become brighter, then as translucent as gems as they lose their tint and ultimately transmute into colorless clarity. The forms increase into ever-higher and simpler relationships, recapitulating the forms of crystals, circles, and orbs, ultimately eliminating the tension between periphery and center. At the same time, the demarcated areas and differences merge as fruit and blossom, light and shadow are transformed into higher entities. We emerge from this abundance into its source as we enter the glass-walled treasury rooms. Related to this are those crystal tubes in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch that carry the symbolic meaning of transcendence.

We can already grasp the first beads on this rosary in our daily life—then we must cross over by leaving our bodies behind.

In Paradise—the first and last of these gardens, the divine garden—highest unity prevails: good and evil, life and death are not yet differentiated. Animals do not slaughter each other; they still rest in the hand of the Creator both in their primeval and their spiritually sacrosanct forms. It is the role of the serpent to instruct us in these differences. Then heaven and earth, father and mother, are sundered.

The two great sects that can be traced through the whole history of human thought and knowledge have their origins in this garden. One of these recalls the unity and views the world synoptically, whereas the other works analytically. When times are good, we know where truth originates, in whatever field or area it may appear.

Accusatory precision.[41]

Atome + Hamannsches H = Athome = At home.[42]

In the early morning, the stationmaster of Burgdorf announced the arrival of Princess Li-Ping. We sent our stout maid, Hanne, out to receive her. In order to protect the little lady from wind and weather, she held her against her substantial bosom. The little creature is beige in color with head, tail, and legs all smoky as if tinged with Chinese ink. She accepted no more than a little piece of tuna fish, but that lustily. Despite her tiny size, this little Siamese sat opposite our three Persian females with arched back, commanding respect with her bristling tail and a hiss like a snake. After sleeping in my bed for a little, she then followed me into the garden like a puppy and jumped onto my lap when I sat down. She displays features of her delicate breeding, her lissome Oriental form reminiscent of bamboo, silk, and opium.

I long ago lost any sense of the Darwinian logic that I used to apply to the coloration of such creatures. Nowadays, it seems to me that she must have been produced by a spontaneous act, as if with brush and ink from a paint box. A little animal like Li-Ping looks as if she had her paws, ears, and the end of her tail dipped in black. Black masks and dark extremities, like the tips of a crab’s pincers, naturally suggest creatures that seek shelter in caves, but mask and cave coincide at points that defy analysis.

Darwin’s theory is true in the way perspectives are true: they are alignments. Masses of incidental material come into play here, and these can be explained by the role of time—all those millions of years. Amplification lets us glimpse creation.

There was a letter from Friedrich Georg in the mail; we had been waiting for it. In it he devotes some commentary to the word übrigens [incidentally]. True, we should pay closer attention to such particles, especially if one has a penchant for them. First of all, they must be necessary, and following that, they need to fit the situation that they are meant to suggest accurately. From this point of view, frequent dissection of sentences that we have written is advisable.

Then there was also a letter from the president, who promises to intervene on behalf of the prisoner. I am now experiencing the friendship of fifty-year-olds as a source of good-natured productivity.

Mother and Friedrich Georg have arrived. Took a walk via Fillekuhle to the little pond, while Friedrich Georg told stories about the less familiar years in our father’s life—for example, the time he spent in London. Perpetua: “When I saw him lying there in his coffin I had the feeling that the nineteenth century now bids us farewell.” That is right, for he embodied it quite distinctly, almost too acutely, and I am grateful that Friedrich Georg is collecting memories of him.

In the last war, when we saw each other again, we used to talk about those who had been wounded and killed in action. In this war, we add to those names the ones who have been abducted and murdered.

Received a visit from Charles Morin, my Parisian antiquarian bookseller. I showed him the books and papers I had purchased from his father in Le Mans. Took a walk with him, Friedrich Georg, and Alexander on the moor where the mullein was in bloom. Its brown cushion throbbed with a lovely warmth.

In my conversations with young French people, I am amazed by their absolute solidarity. This makes the discussion relaxed; the four walls of the room are always there. By contrast, the character Vult from the Flegeljahre[43] feels at home in a house that lacks a front wall, which makes it possible for him to enjoy the freedom of nature with its mountains and flowering meadows. The intellectual connections between the Germans and the French could render the contrast between Shakespeare and Molière irrelevant.

Concerning Friedrich Georg’s Titans and the possible philological objections that have been raised, for example, that sources like the tragedies of Sophocles were not cited. You could counter this by saying that the author is cognizant of the sources and that he generates texts but not the commentary on them. A further word about our methodology in general, about the difference between the recombinative and the logical result: The great laws of correspondence are less dependent upon their era than the laws of causality and are thus better suited to describe the relationship between gods and man. A third work devoted to the heroes is planned. It will cover works about mythology.

Mother and brother have departed. I accompanied them to the railroad station in Hannover, which is looking more and more desolate. Who knows what will happen before we see each other again? There is only one maxim, namely that we must befriend death.

When I was with Friedrich Georg, I got the impression that he has entered that stage of life when a man achieves full consciousness of the powers given to him.

The jasmine is blooming in the garden, and this is the first year I have liked its scent. So it goes with many things that are highly prized: in order to take them seriously, we must first break out of that zone where we thought of them as decorations, as literary subjects.

There are people in our lives who take on the role of magnifying glasses, or better said, lenses that warp or coarsen and in doing so, damage us. Such types embody our urges, our passions, perhaps even our secret vices, which are increased by their company. On the other hand, they lack our virtues. Many people attach themselves to their heroes as if to cheap mirrors that distort. Writers frequently employ such characters, often in the person of a servant, for they cast the main characters in a more critical light. An example is Falstaff, who is surrounded by lowly drinking cronies, sensual associates who lack spiritual vigor. They, in their turn, live off his credit.

Such company is sent to test us, to stimulate self-reflection. These characters praise the cheap and gaudy materials of our intellectual and emotional equipment, and we then develop in this direction. It is usually not our own insight that separates us, but some ignominious adventure to which their fellowship has led us. At that point, we bid farewell to our evil spirit.

In the afternoon, I spent time in the garden, now in full bloom. I pruned the grape vines and because my time was limited, I did so earlier than experts would have advised. Two small tasks came up that needed attention. One was to preserve those vines that offer some leafy shade to Perpetua’s room, and then I had to preserve a robin’s nest that was positioned beneath the library window.

The vine stock uses its woody growth of years past to grip more tightly than with those tendrils that are just sprouting. This is a good example for the role of moribund organs in nature’s plan. Dead material continues to function and not just historically but also today.

The dead but still functional material (like this wood)—is no mere tool, but pulsates with the echoes of life. It is at work in substances like coal, oil, wax, chalk, wool, horn, ivory. This relationship is mirrored in human economy. Humans feed on that which soon decays, but then they are surrounded by a further layer of matter that resonates with life. Man clothes himself in linen undergarments, in woolen and silken apparel; he lives in a wooden house surrounded by wooden furniture by the light of wax candles or oil lamps. The trappings of temporal life—bed, cradle, table, coffin, wagon, and boat—and then his nobler instruments: the violin, paintbrush, pen, oil painting—all this envelops him like an aura of living matter. His urge to break free from this shell that life has constructed for his protection and bestowed upon mortals, however, has been obvious for a long time. He desires to use his intellectual powers to weave himself an artificial garment. Unforeseen dangers will be the consequence. He will stand before the sun like someone devoid of our atmosphere exposed to cosmic rays.

If our love is to bear fruit, we must prune the Phalaenopsis orchid back to one node.

The resistance of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto seems to have ended with their annihilation. Here, for the first time, they fought as if against Titus[44] or during the persecutions of the Crusades. As always in such encounters, several hundred Germans apparently joined their cause.

Current reading: Have gone back to Lichtenberg again, that rare example of a German who recognizes limits. It seems that the Germanic race always has something weighty tying it down, a kind of shackle, so that we don’t escape and get lost in the atmosphere. With the English, that can be the fetters of the sea; in the case of [Theodor] Fontane, the admixture of blood from the West.[45] For Lichtenberg, it’s the hunchback he bears.

The German is like certain kinds of wine that are most enjoyable when blended.

Read further in Naufrage de la Médus [Shipwreck of the Medusa] by Corréard and Savigny (Paris, 1818). The instructive aspect of these shipwrecks—and I have studied quite a few recently—is that they depict doomsday scenarios in miniature.

Last day of my furlough—perhaps the last one I’ll get in this war? After breakfast, a walk in the garden and in the cemetery. There on the graves, magnificent examples of freshly blooming fire lilies. The flower exudes remarkable power, incandescent as it blazes amidst the lush plants in the dappled shade of the bushes. There it glows like a lamp radiating sensuality onto the hidden abundance of life. Our capacity is comparable to the tent that Peri Banu gave to her prince in One Thousand and One Nights: When folded, it fits into a nutshell, and when unfolded, it offers shelter to entire armies. This indicates its origin in an unexpanded world.

There are moments when we have direct recourse to this capacity, as for example when we extend our hand to take leave from a visitor after an important conversation. In that moment of silence, we seek to convey more than all the words that preceded our parting. After weighing the pros and cons of a plan, it also happens that we finally listen to our inner self without any thought or intention. Then we feel either encouraged or pressured to change.

The relationship between youth and age is not linear across time, but rather qualitative and periodic. There have already been several times in my life when I was older than I am today, most especially when I was roughly thirty years old. I also see this in photographs of me. There are periods when we are “finished.” These can be followed by periods of relaxing, which are so important for creative people. Certainly Eros often brings renewed youth. New growth can be promoted by pain, sickness, or losses in the same way that the tree’s new foliage crowns what the gardener has pruned.

A creative person’s strength relies, generally speaking, on his vegetative state, whereas the strength of the active man draws on his animal volition. No matter how old the tree grows to be, it is young again in each of its new buds. Sleep, dreams, games, relaxation, and wine are also part and parcel of this.

Current reading: Faulkner’s Pylon, a book I am rereading after many years because it describes the abstract hell of the world of technology with such precision. I also picked up the tale of Captain Raggad, the Mountain Splitter again, which Cazotte included in his continuation of One Thousand and One Nights. Reading this is always such a pleasure. This man Raggad is the prototype of the braggart and petty tyrant who undermines himself through his own boundless avarice carried to extreme. His extraordinary gluttony can barely be satisfied, yet “the fear he instills in everyone keeps any help at bay.” He intimidates people with his arsenal of technology, yet that breaks down of its own accord. He is destined to be victorious without ever enjoying the victory.

Departed from Hannover in the afternoon as I have so often; Perpetua brought me to the station. Tight embraces—I do not know what can happen in the coming days, but I know the human being I am leaving behind.

Journey through the burned-out cities of western Germany, which form a line like a dark chain, and the thought again occurs—this is how things look in people’s heads. That impression was intensified from my conversations with other travelers. Their response to this ruined cityscape expressed itself in the wish to see the carnage expanded. They hoped to see London soon in the same condition and muttered rumors about immense artillery batteries that are supposedly being built along the Channel coast to target that city.

Arrived in Paris around nine o’clock. Right away, I received a report from the president about the prisoner’s fate, which is uncertain.

The mail brought a letter from Friedrich Georg. He is coming to the end of his stay in Leisnig and plans to travel to Überlingen. The employment bureau there has got their hooks into him for a job as a typist. The authority of these secretaries and policemen leads to grotesque developments. Minds like this would scrape the paint off a Titian to make themselves a pair of canvas slippers.

Grüninger continues to send letters and journal entries written by soldiers killed at Stalingrad. The noncommissioned officer Nüssle—a man I knew—was killed near Kursk on 11 February. During the past two winters, there have been decisive confrontations in the East and engagements in the desert after we had already reached the absolute nadir. Once broken like this, the spirit takes on childlike, touching traits that are apparent in the monologues from Nüssle. Clutching a hand grenade to his breast, he staggered across the snow-covered street as the fire from pursuing tanks blazed all around him in the darkness. “Dear God, You know that if I pull the pin now, this grenade is not meant for me.”

Went to Rumplemeyer’s [Café] in the afternoon to inquire about the prisoner, who seems to be doing better than the information from the president implied. Purchased the new monograph about James Ensor in a bookshop on Rue de Rivoli. Then off to Auteuil to visit Salmanoff, who was satisfied with my earthly form.

“There are two clinical methods. One is cosmetic, the other, hygienic. I used the latter with you.”

Salmanoff said that the contest will be over in the month of October. Consideration of morale: This is insignificant no matter how low it may sink. The despairing masses are like zeroes who will, of course, become extremely important as soon as somebody new makes them feel significant.

It’s remarkable that the handwriting of gastronomes is almost always vertical.

Kniébolo’s, on the other hand, tends downward more strongly than any I have ever seen. It represents the nihilum nigrum [little black spot] in the divine pharmacopoeia. He certainly has no appreciation of good food.

Hohly, the painter, paid me a visit and brought me one of his woodcuts. Discussion about Cellaris, whose conduct is viewed as exemplary. It demonstrates how rare true resistance is on this earth. As early as 1926, he had already founded a journal with this name—Resistance. It seems that shortly before his arrest, he had a premonition of things to come. His aged mother, who was dying at the time, would call out in her death throes, “Ernst, Ernst, it is so terrible the way they persecute you.” Later, in Blankenburg, Dr. Strünkmann sank into a trancelike state during a conversation. It lasted for a couple of seconds. Turning quite pale, he said, clairvoyantly, “Cellaris—I shall never see you again—terrible things loom in your future.” All this contrasts starkly with Cellaris’s very sober and worldly character. This much is certain: This man could have been a significant force in German history. He would have channeled the stream in a direction that would have permitted a unification of power and mind, which are currently divided. He could have done so well enough to bring incomparably greater stability and security. Of course, the demagogues promised all this more cheaply, while also recognizing how dangerous he was. It is certain that under his aegis war with Russia would have been avoided, perhaps even war in general. Nor would it ever have come to these atrocities perpetrated against the Jews, which enrage the cosmos against us.

Visited Florence at noon. She showed me paintings that she has ordered to decorate her place. Among them are a portrait of Lord Melville by Romney, a Goya, a Jordaens, a few primitives—in short, a small gallery. I was impressed by the way she picked the pictures up off the floor so matter-of-factly, like a person used to handling burdens heavier than human strength can bear.

Breakfast, then coffee in my “little office.” Discussion about Faulkner’s Pylon and Irving’s Sketchbook.

Took a walk in the Bois in the evening. At the foot of a mighty oak, I spotted a male stag beetle, one of the variety whose antlers have atrophied to a simple pair of pincers. Back in Mardorf, that forsaken hamlet in the Steinhuder Meer region, I used to catch huge specimens of this insect in the ancient oak forests, and I have always hoped I would find this small type. Now I was seeing it here sitting on a root, its ruddy carapace glistening in the late sun, emerging from a long-cherished dream. Such a sight always reminds me of how immensely wonderful animal display is, and that these creatures are just as much part of us as the rose petals are of the calyx. This is the stuff of our life, our primeval strength is here reflected in the faceted mirror.

As is always the case when we eavesdrop on private worlds, other unbidden insights emerge. I stumbled upon couples in the woods, out in the mild evening weather, in every stage of amorous embrace. Over the years, the undergrowth of round bushes has been hollowed out like green globes or lanterns, into bowers. Into these, courting couples had carried the yellow chairs that the city places all around the woods in large numbers. One could spy on the sexes there in silent embrace as the shadows fell. I passed by sculptural compositions like this: The man sitting on the chair stroked his lover’s thighs slowly upward with both hands as she stood before him, and when his hand reached her hips, pulled up her light spring dress. In this manner the thirsty reveler grips the lovely belly of the amphora and lifts the vessel to his mouth.

In this struggle, I stand on the side of letters and against numbers.

In the morning, Dr. Göpel came by and told me of his visit to the house where van Gogh died. There he had a conversation with the son of the doctor who had treated van Gogh. He mentioned his name—I think it was Dr. Gachet. Göpel said that in such cases a milieu that is emotionally understated more readily prevents the catastrophe. Thus it was only right for Hölderlin to go and live with a master carpenter. Gachet was remarkably reticent: “No one can know what someone may write in fifty years about our conversation.” That is surely true but cannot be changed. Our words are stones we throw, and we cannot know whom they may hit behind that wall of years. And that is especially true in the context of great solitary figures, who act as lamps in the darkness of our amnesia.

Then had a conversation with Colonel Schaer about Kirchhorst, where his sister used to reside in the parsonage in front of us. The so-called Security Service here seems to have allied itself with French criminals in order to extort rich Frenchmen. Their tactic is apparently to forge a photograph showing the victim keeping company with Freemasons.

Schaer also said that the last attack on western Germany cost sixteen thousand lives in a single night. The images are becoming apocalyptic; people are seeing fire raining down from heaven. This is actually an incendiary compound of rubber and phosphorus that is inextinguishable and inescapable as it engulfs all forms of life. There are stories of mothers who have been seen flinging their children into rivers. This hideous escalation of atrocities has produced a kind of nightmare. People are expecting unimaginable retribution and the enemy’s use of more potent horrors that await them. They cling to the hope of new weapons, yet all the while, they are in a condition where only new thoughts, new feelings are imperative.

Now, letters. After a considerable interruption, I thought I would soon receive a letter from Feuerblume again, but I then noticed that it was not from her but rather in her mother’s handwriting. She informs me of the death of her daughter, who died in Paris! I knew that this city was her goal—and so she reached it after all, yet this time without first having heard the word “tosdo” in a dream: “so Tod!” [Thus death.][46] This girl, from whom I first received that curious letter in Bourges, the Capua[47] of 1940, looms as a romantic figure in my life. There was a time when in my mind she would take me by the hand and show me her garden with its castle topped by the weathervane bearing the inscription, “Do as you wish.”[48] We saw each other a few times; over the years, she sent me hundreds of letters. This blossoming, this intellectual development, as if in a hothouse, presented a drama that could have been very fulfilling for someone less preoccupied. To me it all seemed excessive, but today I can see its significance. I think I’ll also find it in the stacks of hastily written papers: In these times of collapse, she was looking for a sincere reader, a good chronicler. In that I hope I will not have disappointed her.

Then there was a letter from Zwickledt from that old sorcerer Kubin, whose astrological scratchings are becoming ever more illegible, yet at the same time more logical. These are the true letters, ideograms drawing our eyes into surreal vortices. In one passage, I thought I had grasped it: “—and yet, at the end of the day, nothing more than the astral theater, which our soul produces by itself—me!”

Evening. It has become an almost daily habit to take a solitary walk in the Bois. Here, for the first time, I saw the little woodpecker, the smallest of its family, and noticed how its behavior was just like that in the fine description that Naumann provided for it. I related this to Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who always appreciates such communiqués.

Perhaps I should start collecting material for an account of the historical era when my consciousness first awakened, that is to say, between 1900 and the end of this war. I could use my own story for it, as well as what I have seen and heard about other people. Of course, it would not be much more than notes, because I don’t have the free time to do more, and furthermore, I am still much too young for it.

Finished reading the Book of Baruch. The last chapter of this book is significant for its detailed description of magic cults and idolatry. It counts among those portions of holy writ allied with that of the world of Herodotus.

Visited Gruel. My time there and our conversation about types of leather and bindings always give me the feeling of the late flowering of craftsmanship. What a delight it would be to live in cities populated solely by such fellows. Perhaps Tamerlane created something like that when he captured the artists, the masters from all lands, like colorful birds for his birdcages.

Then stopped by the little Church of Saint-Roch. There on the steps, I am reminded of César Biroteau[49] every time. Here, too, I find that tiny Parisian symbol, the ammonite [fossil whorl snail], scattered throughout the stone.

On the quays, among the books; just reading the countless titles alone is instructive. Interrupted again when the sirens sounded, which happens frequently, but the Parisians don’t let that disturb them as they go about their business.

Thought about my grammar as I strolled. I have to go deeper into the vowel sounds. The written word has created a connection between language and the eye that is too strong—the original relationship is between language and the ear. Language is lingua—it is tongue, and when written, it assumes the presence of an especially strong listener in the mind. Orare [pray] and adorare [worship]—the activity here designated is the same, yet the prefix points to the divine presence. What an enormous difference between o—a and a—o—a.

Current reading: Guégan, Le Cuisinier Français [The French Cook (Paris, 1934)].

“Couper en morceaux la langouste vivante et faites-la revenir à rouge vif dans un poêlon de terre avec un quart de beurre très frais.” [Cut a living lobster into pieces and let it turn bright red again in a crockery cooking pot with a quart of fresh butter.]

Clemens Podewils told me about Maillol, whom he visited in Banyuls. He is now over eighty and lives there as a sculptor and sage. Every third thing he says is supposedly, “a quoi ça sert?” [what good is that?]. Then about Li-Ping. The peculiar thing about Siamese cats is that they are more devoted to people than the house they live in. In this, they combine the attributes of cats and dogs.

Felt flushed with fever in the evening; took a long bath and pored over the new beetle catalogue from Reitter in Troppau. I am now studying the arid Latinisms as if they were musical notation, but instead of music, colors keep coming to mind. The great lack of merchandise and the excess of insects are producing a boom in the market for dried specimens. This is one of the unusual consequences of our economic situation. Whereas the principal branches of our economy are withering on the tree, the most remote twigs are thriving. Sometime I’d like to speak with an economist about this, someone who has an overview of the field and insight into the fiction of currency. There is a lot to be learned here, as is especially true in times when the disintegration of those obscure inner workings of the social machine are revealed. We can discern things the way children examine the insides of their broken toys.

We humans—our amorous encounters, our struggles about fidelity, about attraction. Their significance is greater than we know, yet we perceive them in our suffering, our passion. The issue is which rooms we shall share in that absolute state beyond the realm of death; it depends on what heights we shall attain together. This explains the terror that can come over us when we are between two women—these are matters of salvation.

Vokale: Pokale?[50] The vowel is carried by the consonant; it captures the inexpressible in the same way that the fruit holds the kernel and the kernel the seed.

Direct hits from bombs have struck the Cologne Cathedral. As I read in the newspaper, its “smoke-blackened walls are said to be a beacon of vengeance for the German people.” Is that supposed to mean that we intend (to the extent that we can) to set Westminster ablaze?

Had a number of different visits in the course of the morning. One was from a military chaplain named Mons, who brought me greetings; another from a ballistics expert named Kraus, who is friends with Brother Physicus;[51] and another from Valentiner, who is back in his studio for a few days. Noncommissioned officer Kretzschmar also brought me a copy of his Schiller biography.

I heard from the ballistics expert that Cellaris is now in the gravest danger. They have begun to “clear” the prison where he is being held, but at the first attempt to take him, the director, the chaplain, and the guards are all said to have stood in front of him. The protection that these people can give the infirm, defenseless victim is for the moment only minimal. The son of this same Cellaris is, incidentally, posted to the Russian front.

In Cologne, divine services are being held outdoors in front of the smoking rubble of the churches. This is one of those details that can’t be invented. I predicted it long before the outbreak of this war.

Many of the letters I receive take on an ominous, eschatological tone, like cries from the deepest regions of the vortex, that place that gives us a glimpse of rock bottom.

Perpetua, on 30 June: “As far as you are concerned, I feel certain that you will escape the great maelstrom unscathed. Never abandon your trust in your true destiny.”

In Edgar Allan Poe’s tale about the maelstrom, we possess one of those great visions that foretold our catastrophe in the most vivid way. We have now sunk into that region of the whirlpool where the dark mathematics of the alliances can be gauged in all their grim proportions; at the same time, all is more simplified and more terrifying. The noblest gesture instantly produces paralysis.

There is a collection of records from military tribunals circulating around here for our edification. Among them I find the following verdicts:

Without being threatened himself, an officer guns down several Russian prisoners and at the hearing explains the deed by declaring that his brother had been murdered by partisans. He is sentenced to two years in prison. When the verdict is presented to Kniébolo, he countermands it and orders the officer acquitted with the justification that, when fighting beasts, it is impossible to keep a cool head.

During a traffic jam, another officer is negligent in not leaving his vehicle to intervene with the other drivers, as prescribed by orders. He is sentenced to two years in prison and a demotion.

From such a contrast, we can see what is considered excusable and what is considered criminal in a world of chauffeurs. Of course the issue is not, as I had long believed, merely one of moral color-blindness; that applies only to the masses. In their innermost inclinations, minds like Kniébolo’s are bent on the most comprehensive homicide possible. They seem to belong to a world of corpses that they want to populate—they find the stench of the slain pleasant.

Finished reading Fridtjof Mohr, Weites Land Afrika [The Expanse of Africa (Berlin 1940)]. Such books provide the same sort of pleasure as good films, but they also leave behind the same dissatisfaction. The way they record colors or the motion of forms has a mechanical quality. Images flash past, as though through the windows of a moving car that accelerates in some places and slows down in others. With this style of factual description, literature reaches a level that really everyone, or at least the majority, can attain—just as the great majority can take photographs.

I’ve gradually changed my mind about this, namely that this kind of technical realism is preferable to impressionism. Yet their close chronological succession is inevitable.

An annoying stylistic aspect of this translation from the Norwegian is the especially frequent use of the construction als [when; as] with the present tense. “When I reach the peak of the hill I espy an antelope at the edge of the forest.” The “when” always indicates past time; with this conjunction, one more or less applies the first brushstrokes to a canvas of the past. Regarding the succession, the demarcation, and intersection of time levels: In general, innate logic persists in language, no matter how many forms of verbs have passed out of use or become rare. Over time, we have developed a series of methods and tools that can help us preserve the temporal aspect and the architectonics of the description without succumbing to the demand that Schopenhauer makes in his annotations: that we artificially preserve archaic verb forms.

Benno Ziegler has arrived; I haven’t seen him for almost a year. We discussed his publishing house, which—against all the odds of current practice—has been converted into a private commercial venture. He had to conduct all the necessary negotiations and business deals with the utmost tact. In these days of automatism, it is always refreshing to see someone swimming diagonally across, not to say against, the current.

We got down to the situation at hand. Two different wars are coming into focus with ever-greater clarity: one being waged in the West, the other in the East. This corresponds to an ideological distinction. The best that Kniébolo can offer the German people today is that the war will last indefinitely. Ziegler observed that the young Clémenceau, if I’m not mistaken, heard from Gambetta: “Do not rely on the generals. They are cowards.”

Troubled sleep. In the early morning hours, I started thinking, as I often do, about various writers, among them Léon Bloy. I saw an image of him in a small house in the suburbs, where he was sitting at his desk. Along the garden path, the blossoming chestnut trees could be seen through the open window, and there was an angel dressed in the blue uniform of a postman.

Visited Florence’s apartment, where there was plenty of good conversation rich in anecdotes. I liked the story that Giraudoux told about a grateful prisoner who was rescued from the guillotine by a certain lawyer, Dupont, from Lyon. The man was deported to Cayenne.[52] Once there, he wished to send a present to his attorney. Because, however, he owned nothing, all he had was what nature provided, and, furthermore, as a prisoner, he was not allowed to send packages. One day a ship landed in Marseille with a cargo of parrots. Among them was one that was heard to cry out, “Je vais chez Maître Dupont à Lyon.” [I am going to Master Dupont in Lyon.]

After breakfast, I read Psalm 90. In it the mayfly[53] achieved its most powerful and tragic hymn.

Found a letter from Grüninger in the mail. He inquires whether or not I wish to come to the East on a particular mission that General Speidel has for me concerning the fate of the soldiers of Stalingrad. This confirms my experience that once we have come in contact with a country, we continue to feel drawn to it. In this case, I had not even tossed a coin into the Pshish, which is otherwise my habit along riverine borders. When will they all take effect—those copper coins I tossed into the Aegean on Rhodes or dropped into the Atlantic at Rio? Perhaps in death—when we inhabit all the regions of the seas and stars and are at home everywhere.

Visited Dr. Epting in the evening. There I also saw Marcel Déat and his wife. We talked about the third part of the journal by Fabre-Luce, which was published thanks to cleverly avoiding the censors and now seems to be causing considerable outrage. I get the impression that a story involving the police will follow.

Déat, whom I met for the first time, has certain traits that I have noticed in different people, but which I cannot quite define. I am talking about severely moral processes that become discernible in a person’s physiognomy, notably in the skin. These traits sometimes give it a parchment quality and, at other times, a hard-edged aspect, but in any case, a coarsened character. Striving for power at any price toughens a man and also makes him vulnerable to demonic urges. One can sense this aura; it became especially clear to me when he drove me home in his car after the evening ended. Without even having seen the two brawny gentlemen, who had been invisible all evening but were now sitting beside the driver, I would have sensed that our journey was not completely innocent. Danger loses its appeal in bad company.

“Youth” is one of those fetish words that constantly crops up in conversation with minds like this: “Les jeunes” is pronounced with the sort of emphasis that used to be reserved for “the Pope.” For what it’s worth, it is insignificant whether youth is actually on their side or not. It is more a matter of the combination of their ardor and minimal judgment—a combination that the troublemakers recognize as a resource that can be used to their benefit.

Current reading: the great glossary in medieval Latin by Du Cange, which I bought in three folios for a song. Here one skims along through the cosmos of a bygone literature. Afterward, I browsed a bit in Schopenhauer for the first time in years. In his pages, I found confirmation for many an experience I’ve had recently: “If only I could dispel the illusion that the spawn of toads and adders are creatures like me, I would be a lot better off.”

All right, fine. But on the other hand, you always have to say to yourself, when confronted with the lowest of the animals: “This is you!”

This is my eternally dual role: to perceive both antagonism and affinity at the same time. This limits my participation in actions where I recognize patterns of injustice. It also makes me aware that the demise of a lesser creature is accompanied by some justification. As a result, I see things more clearly than is sometimes advantageous for an individual, unless he is writing history in retrospect.

Said my goodbyes to Benno Ziegler at Le Caneton. He brought me the news that Fabre-Luce had been arrested this morning. We talked about the last days of A. E. Günther, who fought for breath for a long time before he died. His last word to his brother: “…and all this while fully conscious.” This applies to the suffering of the twentieth century in general.

At ten o’clock, I strolled back via Boulevard Poissonnière. Every time I do so, I’m reminded of the con artist who accosted me there so many years ago. It was typical that I immediately saw through the situation, but I nonetheless let myself be clumsily duped by him and his accomplices, who appeared so obviously “by chance.” In sum, I played along with them against my better judgment.

Today I read in the Army Regulations Journal that General Rupp had been killed, that small melancholy convivial division commander I knew in the Caucasus. Reports of the deaths of my friends are increasing, as are those of the destruction of their houses in the bombings.

I fasted. I feel that in the long run the artificial life of this city is not good for me. This morning briefly in Saint-Pierre Charron, my little church with the toads where I again found the gate of death open.[54]

The battle that has been raging in the center of the eastern front offers a new spectacle of unusual ferocity for this region. The forces have equalized, and with that there is no more mobility; the fire is reaching a crescendo.

Went back to the little streets around Boulevard Poissonnière in the afternoon, where I delved into the dust of the past. In the pleasant bookshop of Poursin on Rue Montmartre, it was a joy to peruse books. There I purchased a series on the Abeille [Bee] quite advantageously. The first volume had a dedication in an old man’s handwriting from the entomologist Régimbart.

In the evening had a discussion with Schery, the Viennese musician, about rhythm and melody, representation and coloration, consonants and vowels.

This day is notable for the British landing in Sicily. This first contact with Europe has had repercussions; we are at a higher level of alert.

Current reading: Les Bagnes.[55] The book contains the assertion that when the prisoners of bagnos are executed, even the most violent and fearsome man embraces the priest who has escorted him. The presence of the clergyman here represents the human being per se, which does not mean the representative of humanity as opposed to the Eternal, but rather symbolic man, the one who on our behalf has raised his voice in Psalm 90. As such, he has the role of witness in a matter that transcends crime or punishment.

Words: For terasser, meaning “knock down, throw to the ground,” we lack a verb of similar precision. In general, verbs derived from nouns are stronger. In them movement is intensified by the material quality that is the royal prerogative of the noun. By the same token, fourmiller [teem, tingle] is more evocative than wimmeln [swarm, teem]; pivoter is more plastic than schwenken [swivel]; and barbieren is preferable to rasieren [shave].

Conversely, those nouns derived from verb forms are weaker. “Dying” is thus weaker than “death;” “wound” is more forceful than “cut.”

Continued my fasting regimen. Was in the city on many streets and squares in the middle of the day. I was aimless, a man in the crowd, which had an idle Sunday air about it. Brief visit to Notre Dame de Lorette. There I noticed a row of votive candles that were made of glass and not of the customary wax. A pointed electric bulb formed the flame. These were placed on tables with slots where people inserted money, and these then produced the electric circuit that lighted the candle for a shorter or longer period, depending on the denomination of the coin. I watched women play this devotional vending machine, for that awful word is the only one that does justice to the process.

This church preserves a door to the cell that once confined one of their priests, the Abbé Sabatier. He was imprisoned behind it before the mob murdered him in 1871.[56]

Afterward, I visited Valentiner, who is returning to Aix today. On the quai, I saw two old hourglasses, which were unfortunately very expensive.

Scant news from Sicily. The landing is successful. We shall have to wait and see whether it will advance beyond the formation of bridgeheads. The results of this fighting will let us predict the general outcome. The island is once more reverting to its ancient role of the pointer on the scale between two continents, just as in the days of the Punic Wars.

Restless, nervous night, triggered by air-raid sirens. Then I dreamed about snakes, particularly about dark, black ones that devoured the bright, colorful ones. I seldom get a feeling of terror from these creatures, which are so central to our dreams—for the most part, they seem to be showing me their side of life, their fluid, swift, flexible character stated so beautifully by Friedrich Georg:

[And as the adder’s belly / Glistens silver, / When quickly it flees, thus fled / The garlanded brook.]

The primal force of these creatures lies in the fact that they embody life and death, as well as good and evil. At the same moment that man acquired the knowledge of good and evil from the serpent, he acquired death. The sight of a snake is thus an experience filled with incomparable dread for each of us—almost stronger than the sight of sexual organs, with which there is also a connection.

The commander-in-chief communicated to me through Colonel Kossmann that, for the moment, I cannot travel to Russia. I am sorry about that, because I would have liked to clear my head, and I could do with Caesar’s remedy of those long marches.

The mail included a letter from First Lieutenant Güllich. He writes that his regimental staff on the eastern front is reading the Marble Cliffs: “At night, once the pressure of the battle and the appalling experiences of the day had subsided, we went to our tents, where, in the Marble Cliffs, we read about what we had actually experienced.”

At noon I encountered the young captain who had covered me with his coat in Kiev. It is always remarkable how the different pieces, the different landscapes, of our existence interweave and coalesce. We hold the power to create patterns within us, and I can say that everything we experience is like those pictures in a tapestry that have been wrought from a single thread.

In the evening, visited Count Biéville de Noyant, who lives on Rue des Saints-Pères in a large house that is decorated with extraordinary care. Such dwellings, of which Paris—and especially the Left Bank—boasts a large number, are secret repositories of ancient cultural material radiating extraordinary power. Of course, at the same time, objects can gain the upper hand—things whose only function seems to be to radiate an aura but which have lost their utility and that gives a haunted aspect to any visit there. The thought came to me when I saw an old chess set with exquisite figures that graced a table but was for the eyes alone.

There I met the critic Thierry Maulnier, Mlle. Tassencourt, and Admiral Ceillier, who is a man of considerable substance, as are most Navy men in this terrestrial nation. It is his opinion that art in France is much less individualized than in Germany, which explains the lack or absence of geniuses but the abundance of talents. That is also the reason, he said, that the creative urge is more collective: its greatest feat, its most significant work of art, is the city of Paris.

We conversed about Marshal Lyautey, André Gide, Hércule, Janin, Malraux, and others. Later the talk turned to the fighting in Sicily and the prospects for a German-French rapprochement. All this makes it clear to me how far outside our national state I already stand. Such conversations remind me of Lichtenberg, who sometimes would play the atheist just for the sake of practice, or of General Jomini on the battlefield, who tried to think for the enemy’s General Staff. Today people are fighting under the old banners for a new world; they still believe they are back where they began. Yet this is not a moment to try to be too clever, for the self-delusion that guides them is necessary for their actions and it belongs to the greater apparatus.

The German position is favorable, as will be revealed if we should be defeated. At that point all secondary advantages will disappear, leaving only the primary ones, like that of our location. It will then be clear, as Rivière said so well, that the Germans are not a people of “either-or” but rather of “not only, but also.” As a result, two paths will open to them rather than today’s single one that has brought this deadlock upon them. In this scenario, it will depend on them whether the twentieth century world looks to the East or West, or whether synthesis is possible.

Style. In phrases such as “I would like to hear your views about it” and the like, language reaches erroneously from the domain of one of the senses into a different one. This sort of thing usually happens when people thoughtlessly accept clichés. When it is the product of vitality, however, such a change of imagery can cause the expression to take on synaesthetic proportions.

Went to the Ministry of the Navy in the morning for a briefing on the situation. Topic: the Penicion Aktion, meaning the deployment of all available canal barges to the South to be used there as small shipping vessels to supply the troops in Sicily. The superiority of the English in the air and on the seas makes it impossible to deploy large freighters. That says enough about the situation.

At lunch with the president, brief discussion about our prisoner just between the two of us.

Coffee at Banine’s. It was such a potent Turkish brew that I had an accelerated heartbeat all afternoon. She gave me Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Brave New World by Huxley, which she had bought for me. We spoke at first about harems, then about Schopenhauer, and about Professor Salmanoff, and finally about the domain of the senses within the realm of language, a subject that I find myself turning to frequently these days. She told me that in Russian one says, “I hear an odor.”

For the expression, “He fixed his eyes on an object,” the Turk says, “He sewed them to it.” I asked her to do a little bit of word hunting for me; I need assistants for my plan. For a title I could choose Metagrammar or Metagrammatical Excursions.

It was extremely hot on the way home; the intense heat brought street life to a standstill. Through a shop window, I observed the interior of a small antiquarian bookshop on Rue Lauriston. There among the ancient furniture, pictures, glass objects, books, and rarities, sat the shop girl—a beautiful young woman wearing a hat decorated with feathers—asleep in an embroidered easy chair. There was something magnetic about her sleep: neither her chest nor her nostrils moved. And so I gazed into an enchanted chamber where all the contents seemed precious, but even the sleeper herself had been transformed into an automaton.

The afternoon in general seemed bewitched, as when I entered the German bookstore, where it seemed that all the salesgirls collectively defied me. Things like that have happened to me only rarely in my life. As if in a dream, I climbed the steps that led up into other rooms without worrying whether or not the public had access to them. And I entered a room where magazines lay on a table. I thumbed through them and wrote a few marginal notes beside political images that caught my eye. Then I turned and went back into the shop, where the cohort of salesgirls scrutinized me with great deliberation. I heard one of them ask, “What was he doing up there?”

Browsed in the Dictionnaire de la Langue Verte. Argots Parisiennes Comparés by Delvau [Dictionary of the Green Language; a Comparison of Parisian Argots (Paris, 1867)]. There I found Breda Street defined as a Parisian Cythera[57] inhabited by a population of women for over twenty years, “Dont les moeurs laissent à désirer—mais ne laissent pas longtemps desirer” [Whose morals leave something to be desired—though desire is not long deferred].

A Bismarcker was a double hit in billiard players’ jargon. The word first appeared in May 1866.

Donner cinq et quatre, to deal five and four [fingers], designates one of those slaps with the hand that is given first from the right and then from the left with the open hand, and then in the other direction, with the back of the same hand. With the second swipe, the thumb is not used. If this slap is given twice, one says donner dix-huit, to give someone eighteen.

A sleepless night, after reading the first stations in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Banine’s coffee had a lasting aftereffect. I turned on the light again around midnight and wrote down the following notes while sitting up in bed:

I notice that I harbor a special dislike for people who make insupportable assertions, and yet they apply all their energy in an attempt to persuade me. Brazen insolence or flippancy—of propaganda, for example—has something that I initially take seriously. I have trouble believing that nothing more than pure wishful thinking backs up such arguments.

Years later when the facts speak for themselves, I often feel the sting all the more sharply. I realize that I have been made a fool of by true pimps, by wicked rent boys of the regime in power. They had dressed up their whore to resemble truth.

Then there is the fact that they lack any sense of intellectual shame. The only blush they know is the one that results from a slap in the face. That means that they will always put their whoremongering to new uses, even for men and authorities for whom one has some respect and considers honest. That is especially galling to hear when these villains praise truth out of sheer opportunism.

I sense that my love of truth almost makes me an absolutist. I can break the moral code, act irresponsibly toward my neighbor—but I cannot deviate from what I recognize as authentic and true. In this respect, I am like a youth who might agree to marry an old lady—yet that wedding night sees no consummation, aphrodisiacs notwithstanding. The involuntary muscles of my mind will not perform their duty here. For me, truth is like a woman whose embraces condemn me to impotence in the arms of another. She alone embodies freedom and, hence, happiness.

Thus it happens that my access to theology comes via insight. I first have to prove to myself that God exists before I can believe in Him. This means that I must return to Him along the same path on which I left Him. Before I can dare to cross the river of time and reach the other shore with my whole self and without reservation, spiritual bridgeheads and subtle reconnaissance must precede me. Grace would certainly be preferable, but that is not appropriate to the situation, nor to my condition. That stands to reason; I sense that it is my work—these arches that anchor me to earth. Every one of these braces the interplay of doubt from the ground up and keeps me anchored. Thus, through my work, I can guide some people to that good shore. Another man may be able to fly, or lead those who trust him by the hand across the waters. Yet it seems that the eons do not give birth to such types.

When it comes to our theology, this has to be utterly modest and appropriate to our species, which is so devoid of fundamental vitality. For anyone who can see such vitality, our faith has long since lived more powerfully in biology, chemistry, physics, paleontology, than in the churches. In a similar fashion, philosophy has become splintered into specialized disciplines. These are naturally dead ends. The disciplines must again be purged of theology as well as of philosophical influences. This must happen for their own sake so that mere weltanschauung may again become science. The theological and philosophical elements have to be precipitated out, like gold and silver; as gold, theology then lends currency and value to the sciences. It also reins them in, for it is obvious where unbridled knowledge leads. Like Phaeton’s chariot, it sets the world aflame and has made us and our imagos into Moors, Negroes, and cannibals.

Additional notes:

After a strenuous hunt for insects in the mountainous forests of Brazil, I work through my trophies back on the ship at night. It happened that I once made a mistake by one day as I completed the labels showing time and place of discovery. I wrote something like 14 December 1936 instead of the 15th. Although it in no way changed anything, I then rewrote those hundreds of entries.

My conversation is often halting because I weigh each sentence before uttering it, anticipating any doubts or objections it could elicit. This puts me at a disadvantage with conversational partners who blurt their opinions.

When conversations end in agreement, the results are often a sort of congeniality and emotional accord. Even in my own family circle, even in response to Friedrich Georg, I am aware that I tend not to let this mood last long, but rather I seem to steer away from this port either by introducing a new, as yet untested, argument, or by making some ironic comment. This trait makes me unbearable on all committees and in meetings where people need to reach consensus, and that applies essentially to all group sessions, conspiracies, and political assemblies. This can be especially embarrassing when I am the object of the group’s attention. I have always preferred moderate, critical respect or substantiated recognition to admiration. I have always mistrusted admiration. Incidentally, the same applies when I read reviews of my books; an elucidation of the material or a reasoned rejection is more comforting than praise. I am ashamed of this, but also unjustified censure—perhaps out of personal or willful bad temper—offends me and gnaws at me. On the other hand, I appreciate criticism that presents me with good rationales. Then I don’t feel I have the obligation to enter into debate. After all, why should my adversary not be right? A critique that gets to the heart of the matter is not to be taken personally. It is like that prayer I can hear beside me when I am at the altar. It does not matter whether I am right.

This last sentence reveals the reason why I did not become a mathematician like my Brother Physicus. The precision of applied logic does not hold ultimate gratification. When something is right—right in the highest sense—it must not be demonstrable, it must be debatable. We mortals must strive for it in configurations that are accessible but not absolutely attainable. This then leads to areas where imponderable rather than quantifiable concepts honor the master and produce the artistic urge.

Here it is especially the service to, and with, the word that enthralls me—that subtlest of efforts that takes the word to the dividing line that separates it from the ineffable.

This also contains a longing for the correct dimensions according to which the universe was created, and which the reader should see through the word as through a window.

Went to the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the afternoon. There I watched the color palette unfold from deep blue lapis lazuli, green-gold, and bronze-gold shades as the male of a particularly splendid species of peacock produced his display. A foam of green and gold fringe encircled the extravagant plumage. The voluptuous nature of this bird lies in that exquisite parade as he fans out his allures. When he has reached the climactic point of his display, he escalates it with a shivering gesture that produces a delicate, spasmodic rattle and clattering of his feathers, as if under an electric frisson, as though he were shaking his tough, hornlike spears in their quiver. This gesture expresses blissful trembling, while at the same time producing the reflexive, bellicose pose of ardor.

Afterward, went to Parc de Bagatelle, where Lilium henryi [tiger lilies] were in bloom. I also saw the golden orfe again. The weather was very warm.

Finished reading Maurice Alhoy, Les Bagnes (Paris, 1845), an illustrated edition. The old bagnos tended to treat criminals more like criminals and did not apply concepts from other disciplines. As a result, the criminals led a harder life, but one that was also closer to nature and more robust than in our prisons today. In all conventional theories of rehabilitation, all institutions of social hygiene include a special kind of ostracism, a special brutality.

True misery is profound, substantive, and by the same token wickedness is part of its essence, its inner nature. We must not dismiss this puritanically. The beasts can be locked up behind bars, but once they are there, they cannot be allowed to get used to cauliflower; a diet of meat must be placed before them. We can concede that the French lack this puritanical urge to improve others, such as we observe among the English, Americans, Swiss, and many Germans. In their colonies, on their ships, and in their prisons, things run more naturally. The Frenchman often leaves well enough alone, and that is always pleasant. The French are accused of a flawed approach to hygiene, which is relevant here. Yet despite that, living, sleeping, and eating are all better among the French than in regions that are overly disinfected.

One curiosity struck me, namely that only a few years before 1845 in the bagno of Brest, the wastewater from the latrines was diverted to the prisoner in charge of the laundry. He would wash the shirts in urine, which presumably possesses an inherent cleansing property; there is probably an extensive ethnographic history of its use. In general the book is a good contribution to the study of the predatory, bestial side of human beings—but also of their better side, such as a well-developed good nature and a persistent noble instinct. The bagnos were to some extent criminal states, and upon examination, you get the impression that if the world were inhabited solely by criminals, then the law would evolve to prevent it from ever ending. By the way, a history of penal colonies confirms this premise.

Visited Florence at midday. Cocteau said that he had been present during the proceedings against a young man accused of stealing books. Among these was a rare edition of Verlaine, and the judge asked: “Did you know the price of this book?”

Whereupon the accused answered: “I did not know its price, but I knew its value.”

Books by Cocteau were also among the stolen volumes, and the judge asked a further question: “What would you say if someone stole a book from you that you had written?”

“That would make me proud.”

Conversation that included Jouhandeau about various types of curiosa. He was familiar with the narcissistic performance of the peacock, which had so enthralled me on Sunday afternoon. This phenomenon is apparently audible only when the weather is dry. The cleansing action of urine, as described in the book about the bagnos, probably relates to its ammonia content. Throughout the Orient, nursing mothers are said to savor a tiny amount of the infant’s urine, which is thought to be beneficial for their milk.

Cocteau claimed that a fakir in India had set his handkerchief on fire from a distance of twenty paces, and that in emergencies, the English there rely on telepathic transmissions of messages by the natives, because this is faster than the radio.

Shops that outfit hunters apparently carry whistles of such high pitch that they are inaudible to us and the game, but which dogs can hear from far away.

Florence had large vases full of very beautiful larkspur, pied d’alouette. Certain strains produce metallic hues rarely seen in blossoms, such as an enchanting blue-green and blue-violet. The blue blossom seems to be drenched in fiery green or violet ink that has dried with a reflective sheen. These flowers, like the monk’s hood, should be bred for their blue alone—their best feature.

In the office in the afternoon: the president. Then met with Erich Müller, who published the book about the Schwarze Front [Black Front][58] when he was younger. He is now a corporal in an anti-aircraft unit in Saint-Cloud. We discussed Cellaris and his imprisonment.

How does it happen that I find myself more uninhibited, less ceremonious, more nonchalant and carefree, and less cautious with intelligent and very intelligent people? They have a tonic effect on me. There must be something like “all men of science are brothers” behind this. In the rapport of the back-and-forth, the free and easy exchange of views, I find something fraternal, as if we were en famille. By the same token, I find an intelligent adversary less dangerous.

When I encounter fools, on the other hand, minds that acknowledge platitudes and live by them, people who are hell-bent on the empty, superficial hierarchy of the world, then I become uncertain, awkward; I commit faux pas and talk nonsense.

In such situations, I lack the ability to dissemble. As soon as I interact with a visitor, Perpetua always knows what we are in for. “For whosoever has, to him shall be given.”[59]—this is also my maxim.

“Das war die Lage in der ich stand.” [That was the situation in which I stood.]

A pattern for countless errors that are permissible when speaking, but incorrect when writing.

Cependant [meanwhile, however] has, like our corresponding indessen [meanwhile, however], a temporal as well as a contradictory sense. This points to one of the connections between grammar and logic: when perceived, two simultaneous events are mutually exclusive.

Visits in the morning: one from Major von Uslar and one from First Lieutenant Kutscher who arrived from Holland. He brought me a letter from Heinrich von Trott, whose earlier odd, nocturnal visit to the vineyard house in Überlingen became part of my concept for the Marble Cliffs.

Spent the evening with Alfred Toepfer in the garden of the officers’ quarters on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. We started out talking about Cellaris, and then went to the park and found a secluded bench where we could sit. Toepfer spoke to me the way many have in recent years: “You must now prepare an appeal to the youth of Europe.”

I told him that back in the winter of 1941–1942, I had already begun to make notes on this very topic, but had then consigned them to the flames. I thought about it later in the Raphael.

“Peace / Peace an Address to the Youth of Europe / An Address to the Youth of the World.”

Began working on the Appeal, which I have divided into thirteen sections; that took me half an hour. It is imperative that I keep this simple and clear and avoid clichés.

Continued working on the Appeal. Sketch and draft of the first paragraph, a sort of introduction that presents me with certain difficulties because it has to set the general emotional tone. I am not writing the way I first began—cryptically—but rather in plain language.

In writing the word Jugend [youth], I became aware of the solemn euphony of the first syllable, parallel to words like Jubel, Jung, Jul, iucundus, iuvenis, iungere, coniungere. [rejoicing, young, Yule, acceptable, young, to join, to connect], as well as in many cries of greeting, and names of divinities: the ancient festival Juturnalia [Roman goddess of wells and springs, Juturna].

Went to the Wagram in the evening with Ministerial Director Eckelmann, Colonel Kräwel, Count Schulenburg, the president of Silesia. Kräwel, who recently sat across from Kniébolo for twenty minutes, described his eyes as “flickering”—eyes that look through people and belong to a mind that is quickly veering toward catastrophe. I discussed my Appeal with Schulenburg, who wondered whether I would not do better by going to Wehrmacht headquarters in Berlin. It does not seem, however, that I would enjoy the protection there that the commander-in-chief guarantees me here. Keitel warned Speidel about me long ago.

Popularity is a sickness that threatens to become all the more chronic the later in life it afflicts the patients.

Piles of mail. Friedrich Georg answers my question about the whirring sound made by peacocks by citing a passage in one of his own poems that refers to these animals.

[He opens up his wheel / and makes his powerful / feathers whirr, / so that they rattle / like bars of a cage.]

My brother also paid a call on Pastor Horion at my behest. He has been living in Überlingen since his collections were destroyed by fire in Düsseldorf. Since January, he has contributed a further 1,400 species of beetles. Unfortunately, Goecke’s house also burned, but he was able to save his collections. News of fresh horrors in Hamburg and Hannover reaches us. We hear that in the phosphorus attacks, the asphalt bursts into flame, causing anyone who is fleeing to sink into it and be incinerated. We have reached Sodom. Perpetua writes that gas masks are quickly being distributed to the populace. A citizen of Bourges informs me that a lot of people are reading and discussing the translation of Gärten und Straßen [Gardens and Streets].[60]

Finished reading Huxley’s Brave New World. One can see from this book that all utopias essentially describe the author’s own age. They are versions of our life that project our own issues into a space with meticulous acuity, a space called the future. Since future and hope are essentially related, utopias are generally optimistic. This case, however, is one of a pessimistic utopia.

I found the following significant: a group of five tall skyscrapers illuminates the night far and wide, like a hand that raises its fingers in praise of God. None of the civilized atheists who live in these buildings is aware of this. Only a wild man from the jungle, who has ended up in this landscape, understands it.

News from Perpetua has finally arrived. The raid on Hannover happened at midday while she was working in the garden. Our child was frightened and recited a long prayer. The city center was demolished: the Opera House, the Leine Castle, the Market Church with most of the narrow old streets and their Renaissance and baroque houses—all were destroyed. It is still unclear how the parents-in-law have fared.

It has never been clearer to me than when I was reading these lines that cities are dreams. This makes them so easy to erase when dawn breaks, yet within us they take on a life of extraordinary depth and indestructibility. With this, as with so many other experiences of our times, I have the sensation that I am watching a beautifully painted cloth hanging in front of a stage as it goes up in flames while revealing the invincible depth behind this trembling curtain.

Strange as it may sound, loss also incorporates a feeling of deep joy. It is the foretaste of that joy that will surprise us at moment of our final temporal loss—the loss of life.

Visited Potard in the middle of the day; he has still heard nothing about the fate of his wife.[61] The lemures on Avenue Foch supposedly call these deportations “Meerschaumaktion” [Operation Sea Foam]. The complete uncertainty that the family suffers is specified by Kniébolo’s Night and Fog decree.[62] Such concepts are preparations for a grotesque language of thugs and demons—borrowings from the details of Hieronymus Bosch.

“The people who have done this are no friends of Germany,” said good old Potard, and with that he is probably right.

On Saturday and Sunday went with the commander-in-chief to Vaux-les-Cernay, where it was pleasant during this heat wave.

On the lake and in its dense reed beds where I studied flora and fauna with Weniger. We were sweltering in the tropical heat, which adds such atmosphere to swamp excursions. We talked about people, for whom Weniger has a particularly good memory; his head is an encyclopedia of names. We also discussed Hannover and the Guelphs, whom I have decided to mention in my Appeal.[63] My political core is like a clock with cog wheels that work against each other: I am a Guelph, a Prussian, a Gross-Deutscher,[64] a European, and a citizen of the world all at once. Yet, when I look at the face of the clock, I could imagine a noon when all these identities coincide.

In the evening we had discussions about botany, which the commander-in-chief finds fascinating. The description of Hottonia palustris [water violet]—sketched for me by Lottner, head of the customs office—has stimulated the desire to study this plant someday in its aquatic habitat. What is more, I have never seen bog myrtle.

Wille [the will] and Wollen [volition]: In the second word, we hear a more moral and logical nuance—that is one of the examples of the power of O. This increases in the repeated assonance of Wohlwollen [good will], whereas Wohlwillen[65] produces dissonance.

Pondre [to lay, put down]. By contrast, we lack a powerful noun like la ponte, at best translated as “egg laying.” This shows how linguistic designations of everyday facts are more or less hastily stitched together.

Tailler un crayon [to prune, clip, sharpen a pencil]; by contrast, our den Bleistift spitzen [to taper the pencil to a point] is more precise and apt.

In the mail I found a narrative from Alexander—his child’s eye view of the bombardment of the city.

In the afternoon, like every Monday, lesson with Madame Bouet. We worked on prepositions. It is odd that with cities whose names begin with vowels, the old form with en has been retained only for Avignon. Could it be because this city was once a state in itself? I think that even Daudet was amused at this “en Avignon.” In the ancient mind-palace of language such details are like remnants of earlier architectures barely discernible behind the plaster.

At the door Madame Bouet said, “I prayed that Kirchhorst would not be hit.”

Aquatic plants in Cernay that gleam dark green on the lake bottom. They resemble dream vegetation and the still water is their sleep. When we remember details of a dream by day it is like seeing a blossom, a tiny leaf, or a tendril on the surface of that water. We reach for it and pull the dark labyrinthine growth up into the light.

Letters are taking on an apocalyptic quality, the likes of which have not been seen since the Thirty Years’ War. In such situations, it seems as if the people’s afflicted reason had lost any sense of earthly reality. It gets swept up into a cosmic vortex that reveals a new world of visions of doom, prophecies, and extrasensory appearances. It surprises me, incidentally, that no flaming omen has appeared in the heavens, the way it otherwise does in such times of transition. Perhaps we could designate Halley’s Comet as a harbinger of the fiery cataclysm.

Continued working on the Appeal and began, as well as ended, the second chapter today: “suffering must bear fruit for all.”

Had breakfast with Florence Gould. People are saying that in recent days the air raids on Hamburg have cost two hundred thousand people their lives, which surely is grossly exaggerated.[66]

Florence has returned from Nice and reports that the news of Mussolini’s resignation was announced there at midnight. The troops were burning him in effigy even before the sun had risen. Although I have basically always known this, it still amazes me how ingloriously, how insignificantly, a dictatorship built upon terror simply evaporates into nothing.

Heller told me with great joy that Fabre-Luce’s prison sentence has been reduced thanks to the information about him that I had provided to the commander-in-chief. He will also appear before a proper court.

As often happens in dreams, I was at some fair or carnival grounds. I crossed it with a small elephant that I sometimes rode and sometimes led by draping my left arm around its neck. Among the images I still recall is the open field where enclosures were being built for wild animals. It was a cold, foggy morning, and in order to protect the animals, keepers were shoveling great loads of iron—pieces like chain links and brown magnets. These had all been heated to high temperature so that the activity illuminated the mists with vivid, shimmering light.

I gave this system of heating but a cursory glance; it was a technique familiar to me in all its detail. They were using a material that, unlike coal, did not have to be burned, but emanated radioactive warmth.

Finished reading Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, one of those works of great literature that I have neglected for too long. In it I found pieces that spoke to me powerfully and others that were instructive, such as the one entitled “John Bull,” which contained a description of the English character. I copied out some excerpts of this for my own Appeal.

Boethius is mentioned in a section where James I of Scotland is named—a monarch who spent long years of his youth as a prisoner at Windsor Castle. It is certainly true that reading his works in moments of despair is particularly comforting. I experienced that myself in the thatched hut on the Westwall.[67]

I have also found a nice comment about certain arrivistes: “they attribute the modesty of others to their own exalted positions.”

In the morning, I worked more on the Appeal, particularly on the third chapter. There I have to clarify the point that the seed from which the war will bear fruit is sacrifice—not only of the soldiers but also the workers and the innocent victims. I must not forget the sacrifice of those who were senselessly and savagely massacred. The construction of the new world will rest upon them in particular, as it once did upon those children immured in the bridge buttresses.

Stylistic considerations: “stärker verblassen” [to become more intensely pale] annoys me, and rightly so. I always have to try harder to use language with appropriate imagery, language that has fallen prey to a leveling of logic. In general, I have to go back to the images, of which the logos [word] is merely the emanation, the sheen. Language is the oldest, most honorable edifice that remains to us—our history and prehistory express themselves in it, with all their most nuanced expressions of life.

During the noonday break, I paid another visit to the Musée de l’Homme [Museum of Mankind]. Who is more macabre, the savage who with artistic care tans, dyes, and decorates the skulls of slain enemies with colorful incisions and fills their eye sockets with mussel shells and bits of mother of pearl; or is it the European who collects these skulls and displays them in glass cases?

Once again it has become crystal clear to me how material like stone is incredibly enhanced when worked by hand. The extent to which it is inhabited, imbued with soul, is physically palpable. All ancient artisanship lets you feel its magic. This hardly exists anymore, except in far-flung Chinese provinces or on the remotest of islands, and then only if there is a painter who still knows what color is, and a writer who knows what language is.

Incidentally, in the Musée de l’Homme, I have a powerful urge to touch things—something I’ve never felt when I’m in other collections. It is also nice that one can frequently encounter boys between twelve and sixteen years old.

Went to the Coq Hardi in the evening with Neuhaus and his brother-in-law, von Schewen. Spoke about diplomats from the period before World War I, men like Kiderlen-Wächter, Rosen, Holstein, and Bülow—all of whom Schewen worked closely with.

The slightest moves are significant here, as if it were the opening of a cosmic chess game.

In Germany, the sect with the slogan “enjoy the war, because peace will be terrible” is growing. In general, in all conversations about the way things are going, I notice that there are two kinds of people: One kind believes that if the war is lost, they will no longer be able to carry on, while the other type can easily imagine it. Perhaps both of them are right.

Worked more on the Appeal and began the fourth chapter, which is supposed to develop some observations about sacrifice. My plan is to contrast four strata that are becoming more and more promising. The first involves the sacrifice of active participants, including soldiers and workers of both sexes. Then there are those who simply suffer, including victims of persecution and murder. And, finally, there is the sacrifice of mothers, in which all these categories coalesce, as if in a vessel of pain.

Street studies in the afternoon behind the Panthéon. On Rue Mouffetard and its side streets—an area that has retained something of the bustle of the overpopulated prerevolutionary quarter of the eighteenth century. There I found mint for sale, which put me in mind of the curious night in the Moorish quarter of Casablanca. Markets are always rich in associations; they are a dreamland and a child’s paradise. Once more I was overcome by a strong feeling of joy, of gratitude that this, the city of cities, has survived the catastrophe unscathed. How amazing it would be if she could be spared, if like an ark, heavily laden to the gunwales with ancient treasure, she should reach a safe harbor after the flood has receded and be preserved for centuries to come.

Lunch with Florence in her apartment, where I spoke with Chief Engineer Vogel about our aircraft production. A few months ago, he had predicted that the stepped-up building program of night fighters would begin to curtail air raids on our cities right about now. But what about the fact that the squadrons of bombers now appear in broad daylight? We also spoke of phosphorus as a weapon. It seems that we actually possessed this material when we enjoyed air superiority, but we waived that option. That would be to our credit, and in light of Kniébolo’s character, bizarre enough. The load of phosphorus is carried in large earthenware containers and makes an extremely dangerous cargo for the pilot. A single piece of shrapnel is enough to blow his aircraft into an inescapable ball of flame.

Visited Jouhandeau in the evening on that peaceful little street, the Rue du Commandant Marchand, on the edge of the Bois. At first I visited with his wife alone—Elise, the woman he has made famous in so many of his novels. She is like a woman possessed. Her character is strong—much too strong for this day and age. Jouhandeau likes to compare his lady of the house with a stone, whether it be the boulder of Sisyphus or the cliff where he is doomed to eternal failure. We conversed for a while, and during our chat, she came up with the concept of the dégénéré supérieur [superior degenerate], which can be applied to most contemporary French writers: our physicality and morality have already entered their decadent phase, whereas the mind distinguishes itself through its power and lofty maturity. She went on to say that the clockwork is too weak for the powerful mainspring that drives it, and that explains the essence of indecency and perversions.

Around ten o’clock, Jouhandeau arrived and accompanied me on a walk through the streets around the Étoile. There in the west a glassy green sky glowed with the cold light that announces sunset. It was wreathed in the lustrous amethyst and grayish-violet hues of night. “Voilà un autre Arc de Triomphe” [Look! Another Arc de Triomphe], said Jouhandeau. We also passed the spot where I once made the acquaintance of Madame L., a brash act to test Morris’s technique. I consider him as one of my mentors in the ways of wickedness. When we walk through the labyrinth of cities, the bygone hours live again, as if the buildings and streets were awakening and taking on color in the kaleidoscope of memory. Jouhandeau agreed with me and said that he consecrated certain squares and streets to the memory of particular friends. We walked along Avenue de Wagram, which he called a curious island in the otherwise very dignified 16th Arrondissement. Here the cafés illuminated in red, the courtesans, and the hotels that rent rooms by the hour—all seemed like an inflamed artery in its maze of streets.

Throughout the night the anti-aircraft fire pounded away at the high-altitude planes returning from the destruction of Nürnberg. In the morning, the commander-in-chief summoned me and presented me with a beautiful botanical volume. I then received a visit from First Lieutenant Sommer who had been in Hamburg. He told me of seeing a procession of gray-haired children there, little elderly people aged by a single night of phosphorus.

I finished the fourth section of my Appeal; getting it on paper is slow progress. Its two parts could be called Principles and Applications. The first is meant to describe the reason for the sacrifice and, the second, the new order that can be built upon that. In the first part, it is difficult to resist succumbing to pity, and so I expect my pen will move faster in the second part.

Played two games of chess with Baumgart in the evening. Krause was in Hamburg during the bombardment and reported that he saw twenty charred corpses leaning close together across the wall of a bridge there, as if they were lying on a grill. On this spot people covered in phosphorus had tried to save themselves by leaping into the water, but they were carbonized before they could do so. He told of a woman who was seen carrying an incinerated corpse of a child in each arm. Krause, who carries a bullet deep in his heart muscle, passed a house where phosphorus was dripping from the low roof. He heard screams but was unable to help—this conjures up a scene from the Inferno or some horrific dream.

These days I sometimes rise twenty minutes earlier in order to read some Schiller with my morning coffee, specifically the little edition that Kretzschmar edited and recently gave me.

Reading this book put me in mind of one of my old plans to produce a volume of “Worldly Edification.” In it I’d like to collect a series of short pieces that, on the one hand, show how religion produces art, and on the other, how art produces religion. It would be a compilation of the highest expressions of the human spirit in accordance with the nature of eternity. Natural man attains this state thanks to his innate goodness; so does the religious man, by rising to the heights through his utterances that possess validity as they transcend the fragmentation of faith and all dogmatic traditions. A few reproductions of works of art could also be included in this reader. In my extensive reading, I have always felt the need for a vade mecum of this sort.

Schiller’s “Three Words” and Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch”[68] introduce a juxtaposition of the ideal and the empirical mind. It will always remain a thing of wonder that two luminaries of such magnitude should come together in a provincial princely capital, which in itself was otherwise not exactly devoid of great lights. Nowadays the space of a hundred million worlds cannot produce anyone to hold a candle to them.

The vaunted conversation about the Urpflanze[69] is significant, as is the mention of astrology in the correspondence on Wallenstein[70] in light of the distinction just touched upon.

The mail included an almost illegible letter from Tronier Funder, who, it seems, had to leave Berlin in a hurry. There was also a review of Gardens and Streets by Adolf Saager from the journal Büchereiblatt [Library Journal] from 19 July 1943. In his piece I read, among other things: “The naïveté of this anti-rationalist writer proves itself to be advantageous during the reality of a military campaign. To be sure, he conducts himself correctly, even humanely, but despite his delicacy of feeling, he gets chummy with all sorts of Frenchmen as if nothing had happened.”

Returned from Le Mans, where I spent Saturday and Sunday with Baumgart and Fräulein Lampe.

Visited Nay’s studio. He gave me a drawing: A pair of lovers in the middle of a tropical park bursting with flowers. A gigantic moon has risen above their stalks and fronds; a watchman stands in the background with a single large red eye painted on his forehead.

There I met Monsieur de Thérouanne again, a man whose intellectuality can be nurtured only by a life of pure leisure. It makes me think that the garment of intellect is old and comfortable; its every fold fits the body of the wearer like a second skin. Herein lies the superiority over all differences of class, fortune, nationality, faith—even of the intellect itself—a superiority achieved not by a leveling or generalizing tendency but through the advancement and growth of aristocracy and gentility. Aristocracy can become so significant that it bestows childlike traits and exemplifies in its bearer those ancient times when men were brothers. When it comes to powers of discrimination the simplest remains the most elegant. Adam is our highest prince. Every noble line traces itself back to him.

Nay belongs to the sort of obsessive workers the likes of which I’ve often met among artists; he even paints during the short midday break that his duties allow him. Now and then, Thérouanne comes to the studio and by way of communication, lies on the sofa and reads a book.

Although Nay is a very busy corporal, he feels quite at home in Le Mans with his duties. This shows that the state hardly pampers artists. No police barge into his studio here to finger his brushes and see if they have been used. Just as everything about Kniébolo is symbolic, so too is his profession as a house painter. The revenge for Sadowa is complete.[71]

Went to the Catholic military service on Sunday morning by happy coincidence. In this way, I got to enjoy a good, brief sermon about Mary as the eternal mother. Afterward walked along the Huine, a smooth, flat stream the color of clay. The heart-shaped leaves of the water lettuce spread across its surface while countless fisherman performed their cultic rites of relaxation. Large covered boats are moored beside the banks, where they serve as public laundries.

Then I visited the cemetery, where there was a good deal of brisk activity, for it was the Feast of the Assumption, and the dead participate in the festivities. In the midst of the grave monuments, a modest obelisk proclaimed the last resting place of Levasseur de la Sarthe, which gives him the unusual title of an “Ex-Conventionnel.”[72] When I saw it, I wondered whether later, perhaps in thirty years or so, someone may have himself buried as an “Ex-Nazi.” Who would ever care to predict the subterfuges and aberrations of the human mind?

At the Morins’ for lunch; the meal went on until around five o’clock. The lady of the house made everyone happy with delicacies like a paté of mushrooms, eggs, and beef marrow, the so-called amourette. The wines included a Burgundy that M. Morin had bottled in his son’s birth year and is meant to accompany him in his life’s celebrations like a melody that becomes lovelier and gentler, for the inside of the bottle had become coated with tannins over the course of the years. Downstairs in the shop, we inspected the books; there I purchased a copy of the Vulgate Bible, which I have long wished to have by me, especially in this beautiful Paris edition of 1664, a famous printing but with microscopic typeface.

During the trip back, we were surprised by the spectacle of a lunar eclipse. Because the point of greatest darkness happened during the twilight, the white edge of the crescent moon took on a brighter hue as it progressed, eventually turning a brilliant gold.

My reading during the train trip: Charles Benoist, Le Prince de Bismarck; Psychologie de l’Homme Fort [Prince Bismarck; the Psychology of the Strong Man (Paris: Didier, 1900)]. The only thing I found significant was the enjoyment of a certain déja vu while reading, because when I was growing up, decades of my father’s table talk had acquainted me with all the details of Bismarck’s life.

Afterward I browsed in Spleen de Paris, specifically the edition that Charmille gave me last year as a present. The epilogue—

[I love thee, oh ignoble capital! Courtesans / And low-lifes too, for you often offer pleasures / That the vulgar herd cannot understand.]

—captures the intellectual pleasure in ordinary things, their variety, which you experience like someone who has entered the confines of a zoo. This also explains the pleasure one derives from Petronius.

The Appeal can only appear when the time is right, and no one can foretell when that will be. Should it be finished sooner, then I shall keep going over it like a gardener, until its hour has come.

In my dream, I was inspecting a newly perfected machine that could spin fabric from air. When it rotated slowly, you could see a kind of loose cotton coming out of its nozzles and congealing; when it sped up, shirt fabric and linen. At full speed, it spat out ropes of thick wool. In each case, different gases were assimilated. I observed this whole notion of spinning with air with a certain admiration, although I found it simultaneously repugnant.

In the morning about three hundred aircraft flew over the city; I watched the anti-aircraft fire from the flat roof of the Majestic. These flyovers offer us one of the great spectacles; they convey the expanse of this titanic power. I could not pick out details, but some shells seem to have hit their marks, because over Montmartre a parachute could be seen floating to earth.

The bombardment of Hamburg constitutes the first event of this sort in Europe that defies population statistics. The registry offices are unable to report how many people have lost their lives. The victims died like fish or grasshoppers, outside of history in that primordial zone where there is no accounting.

Style. The repetition of certain prepositions in German—as in “das reicht nicht an mich heran” [that does not touch me, that does not affect me] of “er trat aus dem Walde heraus” [he emerged from (out of) the forest]—does not bother me as much as it used to. These imply an intensification or affirmation. You just have to use them sparingly.

In the evening had a discussion with Weniger and Schnath about insider secrets regarding Hannover; the destruction of our old hometown inspired the conversation. The bathhouse attendant Schrader, the mask-carver Gross, and my grandfather, the teacher of boys—all came up, along with other characters.

Behind the Waterloo column, a dark lane led to the Masch, where the soldiers from the Bult barracks would say goodnight to their girlfriends before curfew. It was also a place where drunks wandered around and people got up to all kinds of mischief and dirty goings-on. For this reason people called it Köttelgang [Turd Alley]. After the revolution of 1918 made Leinert mayor (a capable man, incidentally), you could read the following words on a fence: “Leinert Street, formerly Köttelgang.”

Example of a Lower Saxon joke.

With Jouhandeau in the evening, a man who has many an aspect of the medieval monk, specifically of the visionary type. His intellectuality is striking for its exquisite flights of fancy; any lighter and he would take wing. There’s a demonic side to this, too, of course.

Discussion about the dangers of the Bois, which recently came home to me especially vividly as I was walking alone in the dark. The paths and bushes were full of dubious characters. The fact that many of them had been called up to work in Germany and have deserted their residences means that the number of people living outside the law is substantially increasing, and this promotes criminality. The significant and assorted threats to personal freedom attract myriad recruits to the ranks of these crooks. Years ago I predicted this without yet knowing any specifics.

Rue du Commandant Marchand runs close to the Bois. Jouhandeau described hearing frequent pistol shots there; that was followed recently by a fearful wailing for the dead. Elise went into the street to see if she could help; that is impressive in itself. She is like the soldier, attracted by cannon fire, like one of those natures whose energies are not released unless danger is present. Women like her can inspire popular uprisings. Incidentally, I have observed that Germanophilia—naturally with the exception of those venal types—appears right in that segment of the populace where intrinsic strength is still alive. This is the same covert undercurrent that shows up in Germany as Russophilia. The authorities who are allied with the West oppose them. New structures will emerge from this conflicting polarity that is playing out in the center.

Regarding the dead. Jouhandeau’s mother died an old woman. At the moment of death, her face became transfigured, as if by an inner explosion. She took on the appearance of a twenty-year-old girl. Then she seemed to age again, and kept the face of a forty-year-old until her burial. We discussed modern idiocy, especially as it relates to death, and our blindness to the mighty powers that are right beside us. Then we spoke about Léon Bloy.

In a night during the year 1941, the wife of one of Jouhandeau’s acquaintances was preparing to give birth. Her husband rushed out of the house to inform the midwife. It was after curfew, and a French patrol stopped him and took him into the station. There he explained his situation. The midwife was told and the husband held in custody until the morning in order to corroborate the truth of his assertions. In the meantime, news of an assassination had been circulating. Hostages were rounded up, and this man was executed among others who had violated the curfew. The story tells a greater truth, thereby reminding me of one of those wicked tales from A Thousand and One Nights.

Mauritanian stories:[73]

The first fifty years of our century. Progress, the world of machines, science, technology, war—all elements of a pre- and postheroic world of titans. How everything glowing, everything elemental, becomes dangerous. In order to describe this range, perhaps in the novel, you would have to begin with a figure who embraces this indistinctly but with great enthusiasm—a sort of Werther of the twentieth century. Rimbeau perhaps. This demonic character must be juxtaposed with another figure, one with a sense of higher purpose, someone not merely conservative, but stunningly effective, a Grand Master of the Tower of Babel.

I was sitting at a table with my father and a few acquaintances; it was the moment when the waiter approached us to present the bill. I was surprised that he became so expansive about details concerning the wine and its purchase price. In the course of the conversation, he even pulled up a chair and sat down. A remark of my father’s made me realize that it was the innkeeper who was talking with us. His speech and body language were appropriate to his station, but they did not belong to that of a waiter.

When I awoke I asked myself, as Lichtenberg does, about the conciseness and dramatic nature of events like these. Why were the facts not revealed from the beginning when there was never any doubt until a casual remark was made? Does the dreamer perhaps actively direct this scene in order to heighten the suspense? Or is he an actor in a play that dwarfs him in significance?

Both are correct inasmuch as we appear as characters in our dreams and, at the same time, are parts of the universe. In this second category, we are inhabited by a higher intelligence that we marvel at when the waking state has jolted us back into our individuality. In our sleep, we are like statues with thinking brains and, what’s more, we are connected with all our molecules to a cosmic current of thought. We submerge ourselves in the waters of pre- and postmortal intelligence.

Was Lichtenberg too clever to grasp this duality? I would like to talk to him about it in any case, for I find his question more productive than many an answer has been.

Finished reading Cashel Byron’s Profession[74] by Bernard Shaw, a book that I relished despite all its Victorian dust. Such rather old-fashioned works teach us to see what things first fall prey to the passage of time. I note the following, which is but one of the countless aphorisms sprinkled throughout: “Rational madness is the worst, because it possesses weapons against reason.”

Also read a short biography of the painter Pierre Bonnard recommended to me by Madame Cardot. The anecdotes told about him include one that struck a particular chord with me: the proclivity to begin working again on old pictures, even if he had sold them long ago. He felt it was a shame that they had been separated from their state of finished perfection by the passage of time. Consequently, he would lurk in museum galleries until the guard had disappeared then quickly produce a tiny palette and paintbrush in order to add some highlights to one of his own paintings.

Such behavior throws light on all kinds of associations, among them the intellectual property of the painter, which is less well defined than that of a writer. The painter relies much more on the medium, which is why the Greeks correctly placed him lower in the hierarchy than the philosopher, the poet, and the bard.

Today I remembered one of the thoughts about philosophy I had as a child, but one that wasn’t bad for someone who was only a boy: “The ‘actual’ chicken is naked, just as we see it hanging in the poultry dealer’s shop. Then what do the feathers have to do with anything? They’re just there as a suit to provide warmth.”

By extension, I should have been able to conclude that man’s “actual” form consists basically of the skeleton or the flayed muscle tissue or the nervous system with brain and spinal column. Today I actually still feel a bit like an explorer when I glance through atlases of anatomy. But at the same time, I see things from the other perspective, in that I comprehend the various systems that constitute our body, that appear as patterns, as projections into the expanse of space. Their reality exists solely in their relationship to the whole, the unexpanded instance, and without them, they become as ridiculous and meaningless as a plucked chicken.

Trees, incidentally, are the best images of development from insubstantial form. Their actual point of vegetation cannot be located in space any more than we can see the pivot point on the axle of a wheel. This relates to the complex and radiciform character typical of many of our organs. By the same token, the brain resembles a bifoliate cotyledon that has attached itself in the body to the main and tendril roots of its spinal column. This would imply that it is not in itself the fruit, but rather the preliminary fructifying substance.

At quarter-to-six a massive phalanx of aircraft flew over the city at low altitude, framed by little brownish-purple clouds of anti-aircraft smoke. Undeterred, the planes lumbered along down Avenue Kléber toward the Étoile. These spectacles are titanic events being played out above large cities. Here the astounding power of collective toil emerges from anonymity and acquires visible contours. This also gives them a certain exhilarating quality.

The attack was targeting the airfield at Villacoublay where it destroyed twelve hangars and twenty-one bombers as it ploughed up the runways. Additionally, many farms in the nearby villages were destroyed and many inhabitants killed. Near a patch of woods, they found a cyclist with his bicycle who had been hurled there from a great distance by the blast of one explosion.

Went grouse shooting in the afternoon in Les-Essarts-les-Roi. Autumn has now begun its invisible intrusion into summer, like a crystal forming at the bottom of a chemical solution. It perfumes the day’s first breath and puts its fecund stamp upon the landscape as it fills out the ripening fruits, making them robust.

I never got off a single shot because I got distracted by subtiles at the edge of a pool. Hunting for them is much more thrilling. Here I encountered Yola bicarinata [water beetle], a Western European organism whose structure occupied me in the evening as I consulted Guignot’s beautiful volume on the water beetles of France.

It was late when I made my way up to the president’s room. He has just returned from Cologne, and he described the way people congregate in bombed-out ruins of the cellars of the Rhenish wine taverns. An intense feeling of warm conviviality prevails there. The drinkers often sing the old Karneval[75] songs. A special favorite is “Ja, das sind Sächelchen” [Yes, those are nice little things].

This is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, “The Masque of the Red Death.” Along with Defoe, author of A Journal of the Plague Year, he should be considered one of the writers for our age.

Worked a little more on my Appeal. I had set it aside during the heat wave, noting as I did so how little gets done by dint of willpower alone. The artistic muse is part of our vegetative, not our animal nature. This makes it more susceptible to weather conditions. What is more, this cannot be trained or forced into submission. Authentic writing cannot be coerced.

Went to Maxim’s with Neuhaus and his brother-in-law, von Schewen. I find in him, as in most old conservatives, the error of overestimating the new regime. Such people fail to recognize that its superiority rests on the fact that their people will work for lower wages by observing the rules of convention, law, and propriety when it suits them. That’s their way of double-dealing, which always leaves them with one last resort. Thus they end a chess game with a truncheon blow or conclude a pension contract by murdering all the pensioners. These tactics have shock value, but only for a while. It is precisely such mental gymnasts who turn sheepish when you respond to them in their own language, the only thing they understand. The conservatives are also capable of this when they actually reflect seriously enough and when they connect with their native soil, as you can see in cases like Sulla, and even in Bismarck. It often seems to me as if certain turning points in history are repeated only to elicit and unlock this reaction as an answer from the our primeval ancestors—as the rain brings forth the bud. With that, of course, innocence is lost; the monarchy is restored after the Fall of Man.

Coffee at Banine’s. The art of getting along with people lies in keeping the same pleasant middle distance over the course of time without becoming estranged, without becoming close, and without a change of quality. Compatible relationships depend on this desirable midpoint between centrifugal and centripetal forces. As in the universe, equilibrium depends on repetition, not change. This is so in the most pleasant relationships, marriages, and friendships.

This evening I had a long conversation with Weniger in the Raphael about our countryman Löns and that particular form of décadence that he has in common with several Nordic and English writers. In recent decades, the Germanic type has been undermined by a curious morbidezza [softness, delicacy]. Recognizing this is the key to a whole host of things and peoples. For example, it exerts a powerful influence on Art Nouveau, which nowadays is seen to be narrowly formalist and lacking in intellectuality. One particular decade is almost completely dominated by this style. This became clear to me when I was in the officers’ mess of the Seventy-Third Regiment in Hannover, where portraits of the old officers since Waterloo hung on the walls, and I noticed a curious loosening of form in the artistic style that prevailed since the turn of the century. In this connection, the Germanic type needs a Jewish mentor, figures like his Marx, Freud, or Bergson, whom he naively adores and eventually strives to emulate like Oedipus. You have to know this in order to comprehend anti-Semitism as a typical symptom of the Belle Époque.

In bed I started reading Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Even temperatures below freezing are fascinating if they plummet low enough. You get this impression from certain novels of the rococo, and it’s just possible that by the same token, Huxley will also enjoy posthumous recognition. At such temperatures, the flesh and erotic encounters lose their luster, and their physical dimension comes to the fore. In general, Huxley—the precise observer and analyst—delivers the scientific scaffolding of our era. Nowadays, good style presupposes a background in the natural sciences, as it once did theology.

As so often in the early morning, as so often in life, I was talking about books with my father and suddenly noticed that I had been misinterpreting our relationship for a long time. The error lay in the fact that it was I, not my father, who had died. “Correct, he dies in me; then it cannot be otherwise than that I have died in him.”

Then I tried to recall the particulars surrounding my death, but had trouble finding a point of reference. It was as if this were nothing but a brief journey, a mere change of place that we soon forget. But then the scene of the final moment suddenly welled up in my memory with all its details.

It was in a large railroad station with many small waiting rooms; in one of these a group of travelers was standing in front of a door. We could have been seven or nine, perhaps even twelve in number. We were dressed simply, like workers out for a Sunday excursion. The men were in coarse blue drill, the women in overalls of brown corduroy. As a badge, we all wore pins showing one of those yellow butterflies whose wings reveal shades of blue when they move. I noticed that not a single one of us carried any luggage, no suitcase—not even the small briefcase that workers carry so often.

After we had been standing in the throng of the waiting room for a while, the door opened and a clergyman hurried in. He was a short, gaunt man in a dark cassock, and he bustled around us, as pastors typically do in large, poorly funded congregations where their duties are constantly being interrupted by baptisms, burials, or a quick confession. These are pastors from the suburbs.

The priest squeezed our hands and led us through long, poorly lit passageways and up and down flights of stairs into the interior of the railroad station. I thought that perhaps we were being diverted to a suburban train for a short outing to see some miraculous statue or to a monastery where a visiting bishop was preaching.

Still, as we strode along, I felt waves of ever-increasing anxiety sweeping over me; finally, after struggling as though in a dark dream, I grasped the situation I was in. The people with whom I was being guided through these subterranean corridors were a group that had made a pact to die together. Feeling that they needed purification, they wanted to cast off their bodies like old garments. Such groups had become common since the world has fallen into disorder. They were constituted according to the method of death that their members had chosen. In our case, it was a shower of phosphorus that awaited us. Hence, ours was a small group.

How I had longed for this great purgation. My theological studies, no less than my metaphysical insights; my stoic and spiritual tendencies; my innate desire for a final act of daring and the luxury of sublime curiosity; the teachings of Nigromontanus,[76] the longing for Dorothea, and the lofty warriors who had gone before me—all of this had come together to strengthen my resolve and remove all obstacles. And now, in this narrow dark passageway, I was quite unexpectedly gripped by hideous fear.

“How good,” I thought, “that you at least left your luggage behind and can fold your hands.” I immediately started to cling to prayer like someone hanging from a terrifying precipice clutching at the end of the only protruding root. I recited the Lord’s Prayer fervently, with true ferocity, and repeated it as soon as it was ended. There was neither comfort nor benefit nor a single thought in any of this, but only a wild, final instinct, a primal awareness like that of the drowning man struggling for air, or the man parched with thirst craving water, or the child crying for its mother. In those moments, when a wave of relief brought respite, I thought, “Oh you magnificent prayer, you incalculable treasure, no invention on earth can equal you.”

Our path through this labyrinth finally came to an end, and we were led into a space lit from above and furnished like a music hall. The clergyman disappeared into a small sacristy and returned wearing a choir robe of white silk and over it a stole covered with colored gems. In the meantime, we had mounted a sort of platform, or balustrade, and from high up, I could see that it was constructed of the lid of a huge piano. The priest sat down at this instrument and struck the keys. We all started to sing the tune he played, and with the music that filled my every fiber, there came an outpouring of immense happiness—new courage, which was stronger than any mental or physical elation can ever impart. My joy increased and became so intense that I woke up. And strange to say, this was one of those dreams you would prefer not to wake up from.

Sunday afternoon, and I spent it browsing a bit in my book of fairy tales—by that I mean in the Musée de l’Homme. There I saw Miss Baartmann again, the Hottentot Venus.[77] There is always a jostling crowd of half-amused, half-shocked visitors around her. She died around 1816 in Paris at the age of thirty-eight and wasn’t exactly stuffed, but instead, a plaster mold was cast that reproduced every intimate detail of her body, which deviates from every physical norm. You can also see her skeleton right beside her.

Had a thought as I was observing the observers: I wonder whether invisible and extremely menacing life-forms exist for which you are museum exhibits and collectible objects?

Then went to the Maritime Exhibition on display for several weeks in the lower galleries of the museum. There were not only many ship models, weapons, nautical instruments, hourglasses, and documents but also paintings. These included various views of harbor and coastal sites by Joseph Vernet. One of these pictures, a panorama of the Gulf of Bandol, is brought to life by a depiction of a tuna catch in the foreground. The fishing boats where the butchering is in full swing are surrounded by luxurious vessels while an elegant audience gawks at the blood bath from their decks. Among the whitecaps and the coarse nets, a throng of half-naked lads grapples with the oddly stiff fishes, each one as big as a man. They are tugging at them with hooks they have thrust into their gills—or, wrapping their arms around them, they slice their throats with long knives. Murderous children with their toys. The city folk are fascinated by the slaughter; the women cover their eyes or, half-fainting, stretch out their arms in defense against the onslaught of images, while the gentlemen support them by putting their arms around their chests. We see that tuna fishing is a drama drenched in red, which Abbé Cetti’s beautiful description shows.

A sinking ship painted by Gudin around 1828[78] brought the violence of such an event home to me for the first time. This catastrophe is condensed in an amazingly concentrated welter of images. A first impression of the painting is enough to produce a weak light-headed feeling in the viewer. We see a huge ship in a terrifying, turbulent sea, occluded by dark clouds and curtains of rain. The ship is poised almost vertically on its bow as the huge roiling current sucks it into the deep as if it were but a log or chunk of wood. Its broad stern rises out of this vortex, where you can just make out the word “Kent” and a portion of the ship’s side, where smoke and flame belch from the portholes. A crowd of people huddle together on this slab of wood partially obscured by red flames, yellow smoke, and white spray. A few have separated themselves from this knot of people and have either thrown themselves into the waves or clambered down the rope ladders. A woman holding a child dangles from a pulley over the churning chasm in an attempt to reach one of the boats. It is astonishing that anyone can still think of saving himself in such horrific turmoil. And yet we can make out a figure in a tall hat among a group of people at the top; his arms gesture with authority as he seems to be giving orders. The wreck is surrounded by overcrowded boats fighting against the waves. In one, we see an approaching swimmer being fended off with the blade of an oar. In the midst of the white swirling sea spray, the waters have calmed into a sleek green surface of narcotic power. There we see people clutching at debris and others who have already drowned and are floating in the deep like sleepers, their bodies colorfully clad and still visible, yet already embedded in the limpid green-aquamarine. A pretty red bandanna shimmers from below.

In the evening visited Morand, who has been made ambassador to Bucharest. Autumn is coming; the swallows are flying away.

In one spot on the staircase at the Majestic they have put a fresh, soft, brightly colored piece into the old worn-out runner. I notice myself climbing the steps more slowly at that point, just noting the relationship between pain and time.

Carl Schmitt writes that his beautiful Berlin house lies in ruins. He mentions that all he could rescue of his property were the paintings by Nay and Gilles. And this preference is appropriate, for works of art are magical furnishings, part of the more important possessions, equal to images of the lares and penates.[79]

Dinner with Abel Bonnard on Rue de Talleyrand. Conversed about ocean voyages, flying fish, and Argonauta argo [greater argonaut; pelagic octopus], the last of the ammonites, which only surfaces when the sea is absolutely still in order to display its exquisite shell like a splendid ship drifting as it feeds. Then we talked about the picture in the Maritime Exhibition by Gudin, and I described it in detail. Bonnard added that, for his preliminary studies of shipwreck panoramas, this painter would smash lovely old sailing ship models from the eighteenth century with a club in order to reduce them to the condition he desired.

Why does such a clever, clear-headed man like Bonnard get involved in these areas of politics? As I watched him, I thought of Casanova’s statement about a minister’s actions, which surely have an appeal he himself is unaware of but which affect all who hold such posts. By the twentieth century, all that is left is probably the work and the kicks from the demos,[80] that donkey they have to contend with sooner or later. Shady business is perpetually on the increase.

More and more often I find that I have to enter two symbols in my address book, namely † for dead, and for bombed out.

On this subject, I received a letter from Dr. Otte in Hamburg saying that on 30 July the entire fish market and his pharmacy were destroyed along with all his inherited property from his great-grandfather’s generation and also the rooms where he kept his Kubin archive. He had opened an emergency pharmacy in a cigar store: “I’ll never leave Hamburg. I’ll live here or perish.”

Dinner with the president in the evening. He told me about concentration camps[81] in the Rhineland from the year 1933, including many a detail from this world of butchery. I am aggrieved to feel such things beginning to influence my relationship, if not to my Fatherland, then to the German people.

Yesterday, at the beginning of the fifth year of this war, deep melancholy. Went to bed early. I am worried about my health again, yet this troubles me less since I have begun to formulate an idea about it. My growth reminds me of a rhizome that lies dormant underground, where it often almost withers, yet occasionally as the years go by, when spiritually motivated, it brings forth green shoots, blossoms, and fruits.

Kept going in Huxley, whose arid chill makes reading difficult. In one passage that I found noteworthy, he explains that the influence of the seasons—that rhythmically recurrent order in life—is diminished as civilization advances. An example would be Sicily, where the birthrate in January is twice that of August. This makes sense; periodicity diminishes over the course of time. This is a kind of attrition, abrasion, caused by rotation. At the same time, the difference between normal days and holidays disappears; every day is a fun fair in the city. There are echoes of an earlier moral code that varied with the months. In the region around Lake Constance, married couples take it for granted that during the pre-Lenten carnival season they will treat each other with special tenderness. The disappearance of periodicity is but one aspect of the process—the other is that its loss brings a gain in rhythm. The range of the oscillations lessens but the number increases. Finally, our machine age emerges. The rhythm of the machine is frenzied, but it lacks periodicity. Its oscillations are incalculable but uniform; its vibrations are consistent. The machine is a symbol; its economy of motion is merely an optical illusion—it is just a kind of prayer wheel.

I began to feel better as I slept. I saw myself in a garden where I was saying farewell to Perpetua and our child. I had been digging there and my shovel opened a small hole in the earth, where I saw a dark snake napping. As we said goodbye, I mentioned this to Perpetua for fear that the child might get bitten by the creature while playing. Consequently, I turned around to kill it, but now I found that the garden harbored lots of snakes—knots of them were sunning themselves on the tiles of a derelict gazebo. There I saw dark red and blue ones, and others that were yellow, black and red, or marbled in black and ivory. When I started to fling them across the terrace with a stick, a bunch of them rose up and clung to me. I recognized that they were benign and was barely scared at all when I saw our little boy beside me. He had followed me unnoticed. He picked them up by their midsections and carried them out into the garden as though it were all a jolly game. The dream cheered me up and I awoke invigorated.

This morning it was announced that the English had landed on the southwest tip of Apulia. Yesterday’s sorties over the city targeted the central areas for the first time. Among them, streets that I love like Rue de Rennes and Rue Saint-Placide. Two bombs also fell on Rue du Cherche-Midi—one very close to Morin’s bookshop, which I immediately phoned, and another right across from where the Doctoresse lives.

Went to the Latin Quarter in the afternoon, primarily to meet a reader of mine named Leleu whom I did not know. He had requested a private meeting via pneumatic post. He turned out to be a traveling cloth salesman from Lyon who received me in a tiny room of a rundown hotel. Once I had sat down on the only chair and he settled onto the bed, we got deeply engrossed in conversation about the situation, during which he expressed strong but vague Communist proclivities. That reminded me of the years when I too would try to use logic like scissors to cut life into paper flowers. How much precious time we squander in these ways.

Afterward visited Morin. On the way, I inspected the damage on Rue du Cherche-Midi. The lovely soft stone from which the city is built had already been heaped into great white piles in front of the buildings that had been hit. Curtains and bed linens hung from the empty windows, and in places a solitary flowerpot stood on the windowsill. The bolts from the blue affected small merchants and many of the simple people who lived above their shops among the nooks and crannies of the ancient apartments. I also entered the Doctoresse’s apartment, which I had someone unlock for me, as she is traveling. I wanted to see if everything was in order. As in almost all the other houses, windowpanes had fallen out of their frames, but otherwise nothing had been damaged.

While I was attending to these errands, another lone aircraft circled the center of the city, surrounded by bursts of smoke. No alarm was sounded, and the busy pedestrians carried on undisturbed.

The greatest theft that Kniébolo has perpetrated on the nation is the theft of law—that is to say, he has robbed the Germans of the possibility of having legal rights or feeling that they have any legal recourse in response to the tribulation that is inflicted upon them, or that threatens them. To be sure, the people per se have made themselves complicit by their acclamation—that was the terrible, alarming undercurrent audible beneath the cheering orgies of jubilation. Heraclitus got to the core of the matter when he said, “the tongues of demagogues are as sharp as the butcher’s knife.”

Poor health again. What is more, I am losing weight visibly. I see two causes for this: on the one hand, the sedentary life of the metropolis is always harmful after a while, and on the other, my mental activity is like a lamp burning too much fuel. I made the decision to adopt the only course of action that promises success: long walks. And so I began with the route from the Étoile past the waterfall toward Suresnes and from there along the banks of the Seine across the bridge at Neuilly back to the Étoile.

Brief subtile hunt on the shore of the pond in Suresnes. The plants on the large ever-expanding rubbish dump—a paradise for nightshade. I looked for jimson weed in vain, but there in an open field I found Nicandra [nightshade] for the first time, the poison berry from Peru. It clustered in lush, thick bushes climbing on the south slope of a rubbish dump; from its branches, there hung the five-pointed star shaped, yellow and darkly flecked calyxes as well as its green lanterns. I have never seen it so vigorous, even in garden soil. Like so many of the nightshades, these do not require cultivation because they thrive best in rubble and on the slag heaps of society.

Crowds of fishermen along the Quai Galliéni; one had just caught a common rudd the length of a man’s little finger, which he was carefully reeling in across the surface of the water, saying gently, “Viens mon coco” [come, my darling]. Across the silted water kingfishers whirred away with their wonderfully delicate, plangent tones. Rested in a small church among the outlying districts. It was in a state of rural dilapidation. In a rundown barracks on the Quai National, there was a plaque to the memory of the composer Vincenzo Bellini who had died there on 23 September 1835. As I read this, thoughts came to me about the sacrifices made by creative people and their roles as outsiders in this world. There were also groups of anglers here hunkering either in boats or on stones along the shore as they conjured tiny silverfish out of the water. The sight of a fisherman is exhilarating—he has mastered the art of idly extending time, of relaxing, and that makes him the antithesis of the technician.

Impatiens noli tangere—jewel weed—yellow balsam, or touch-me-not. When I would take walks in the woods with women, I always found that they responded to the tactile appeal of this plant: “Oh, ça bande” [oh, it stretches]. This casting of seed represents tumescence and high energy, the trigger-happy, buoyant, procreative force. In greenhouses, I have seen tropical species almost larger than life. I would like to plant these in my ideal garden along the borders that will surround the joyous herms of Priapus[82]—these and several other mischievous little plants as well.

I do not contradict myself—that is a contemporary prejudice. Rather, I move through various layers of the truth. Of these the one that is uppermost at the time dominates the others. In these higher strata, when viewed objectively, truth becomes simpler; this is similar to the way—when viewed subjectively—concepts are subordinated at the higher levels of thought. When viewed outside any temporal frame of reference, this truth is like a branching root system sending out ever-stronger shoots and then, where light penetrates, converging into a single bud. That will be—at least this is my hope—at the moment of death.

Read more in Huxley. There is much theoretical thinking and purely constructive thought process in his style. In individual passages, his mind condenses images of substantive power like grains of gold in the alluvial deposit. An example is the observation that struck me today: that human economy forces us to exploit life, like those coal deposits that are remnants of prehistoric forests, or oil fields, and guano coasts, and the like. At such sites, train and shipping lines converge, and swarms of newcomers then settle. When viewed from the perspective of a distant astronomer, over the passage of time, such a spectacle looks like the activity of a swarm of flies that has picked up the scent of a huge cadaver.

The author goes deeper into such imagery, reaching levels where the superiority of our century’s thought can be found—superior when compared with that of its predecessor. This is a difference of light, which no longer appears as pure vibration but as something corpuscular as well.

Worked more on my Appeal. I notice in this work a kind of exertion that is difficult to describe, a sentence seems clear to me—I could write it down. Yet getting it on paper is preceded by an inner struggle. It is as if this audacious act needed a drop of special essential oil that is hard to come by. Still it is extraordinary that the written word usually fits the greater plan. Nonetheless, I still have the impression that what I have written has mutated since surviving the strain of that exertion.

Read further in Huxley. Then had a long dream about a stay in a farmhouse where I was a guest, but the only feature I could remember in the morning was that I had entered a room. On its door there was a sign that read astuce. “Aha,” I thought, as I awoke, “that must have been a sort of formal living room because astuce means ‘arrogance.’” As I look it up in the dictionary just now, I see that this word is translated as “guile,” “shiftiness.” And that applied to the situation.

I repeated my woods and water circuit in the company of Jouhandeau, who told me that the onslaught of images and thoughts kept him so busy that he was working almost around the clock. In fact, I did find him writing busily, engrossed in his notes, sitting on a bench at our rendezvous point at the Étoile. I get the impression that the massive calamity plaguing the nations has released mental energies that affect our subtle perceptions in ever-increasing waves, in stronger pulsations. Our heads are like the tops of towers during a storm when they are circled by pigeons and jackdaws. Legions of minds are seeking a place of refuge.

I showed Jouhandeau the plants on the mound of rubble and learned from him the name for mullein: Le Bon Henri.

Italy’s unconditional surrender was announced this morning. While I was still studying the large map of the Mediterranean, the alarm sirens sounded again, and I went over to the Raphael. There I finished my reading of the Apocrypha and with that of the Old Testament, begun two years ago on 3 September 1941. I have now read the entire Bible and plan to reread the New Testament, this time making use of the Vulgate and the Septuagint as I do so.

These books relate to each other in a marvelous way. They present the history of man, first as God’s creation, and then as God’s Son. The open, incomplete quality of the book seems to require a Third Testament: after the resurrection, beyond the transfiguration. This is actually intimated in the last section of the Bible in the Book of Revelation. One might interpret the supreme enterprise of western art as an attempt to create this testament; it filters through its great works. Yet one could also say that each and every one of us is the author of the Third Testament; life is a manuscript and from it is formed the higher reality of the text in the invisible space after death.

Stepping over to the window, I saw two bomber squadrons flying over the city in low V-formations while the anti-aircraft guns pounded away.

The beautiful passage at the beginning of the texts about Esther, where the letter of Artaxerxes begins. It is addressed to the 127 princes and their ministers between India and the land of the Moors [Ethiopia] who are all his subjects. Yet his words form the introduction to an execution order. That is a pattern still in force today.

Visited Jouhandeau in the evening. We examined poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—such as the sonnet by Mellin de Saint-Gellais, with its graceful refrain “Il n’y a pas” [there aren’t (isn’t) any], which ties all the loose ends together in the final verse. It reminded me of the beautiful Trost-Aria [aria of comfort] by Johann Christian Günther, where the word endlich [finally] repeats in a similar fashion.

[Finally the aloe blooms, / The palm tree finally bears its fruit, / Finally, finally comes one day.]

The dying words of Saint-Gellais are, incidentally, noteworthy. The doctors were holding a conference at his bedside, arguing about his sickness and how it was to be treated. After listening to them disagreeing, he turned to them and said: “Messieurs, je vais vous mettre d’accord.” [Gentlemen, I am going to make you agree], and turning to the wall, he passed away.

Read further in Huxley. The prose resembles a net of finely spun glass filaments that occasionally catches a few lovely fish. These alone stick in our memory.

A night full of dreams, but only fragments stayed with me. For example, in order to characterize a bad painter, I said, “when he couldn’t sell his paintings, he accepted unemployment compensation.”

When I woke up, I thought about those years of my journals that I had burned along with early works and poems. To be sure, my thoughts were flawed and often naïve, but over the course of the years one tempers self-criticism. We must gain distance from our early work and change in order to see it more fairly and impartially. This bond resembles that of fathers who disapprove of their sons, and for no other reason than that they are so similar, while at the same time they have good relationships with their grandchildren. At the time back in the spring of 1933 even Perpetua regretted my auto-da-fé after our house had been searched. I believe they were looking for letters in my possession from the old anarchist Mühsam. He had a childlike attraction for me before he was so brutally murdered. He was one of the best and most good-natured people I have ever met.

Affiliation and human contact on this earth must always remain very important. I note this in the pain caused by those connections we have neglected; it is pain that stings forever. This applies in part to the little dark Tentyria [beetle] on the parched cow path near Casablanca, where a stunted fig tree stood. How frustrating that I did not grab the little creature. Then there are especially those amorous relations—all the missed opportunities, the neglected rendezvous. Something has to be lost here that transcends the physical sphere, when in our role as hunters we do not “get off a shot.” We did not make the most of our talents. I am sure that is part of the great equation, if only to a small degree.

Thought: when we do make connections, perhaps a light goes on in unknown rooms.

I have gotten ahead of myself on the subject of the perception of historical realities, which is to say that I am aware of them somewhat in advance of the event. This is not beneficial for my daily life because it leads me into conflict with the powers that be. Nor do I see any metaphysical advantage; what difference does it make whether my insight refers to current conditions or later developments? I am striving for a spiritual union with the moment in all its timeless intensity, because that alone, not permanence, is the symbol of eternity.

Visited Florence in the evening. Jouhandeau was there as well. He had spent a sleepless night because he is said to be on an execution list. When he talked about these worries, there was something about him that reminded me of a little boy who had just been apprehended by a policeman.

The mail brought a letter from Carl Schmitt, one of those rare minds capable of viewing the situation impartially. He wrote concerning Bruno Bauer’s book Russland und das Germanentum [Russia and the Germanic Concept].

“The situation was already perfectly obvious to Tocqueville in 1835. The conclusion of the second volume of his Démocratie en Amérique remains the foremost document of the ‘Decline of the West’.”[83] Then concerning Benito Cereno[84] and reference to it in Fabre-Luce, which I inspired. “Du reste [as for the rest]: Ecclesiastes, 10:1.”[85]

Perpetua, who enjoyed my dream about the snakes, writes in her daily letter: “I too feel that you derive your necessary energy from this solitary point and that you will return to complete your task here.”

These years involve the risk that there is no escape on the horizon. No star shines through the desolate night. This is our situation in astrological and metaphysical terms; the wars, civil wars, and weapons of destruction appear as secondary, as mere contemporary décor. We have the responsibility of transcending this world of destruction, which can never succeed on the historical stage.

Visited the National Archive in the afternoon, where Schnath showed me a series of records in which German and French history converge. Throughout the centuries, particularly in the papal chanceries, a high culture flourished on parchment. When patronage was bestowed, a seal was attached to a silken ribbon; otherwise, it was attached to one of hemp. The monks, whose task it was to affix the seals, had to be illiterate—fratres barbati—so as to preserve secrecy. The skins of unborn lambs produced especially fine parchment.

Toured the stacks, which contain sustenance for generations of archivists and bookworms to come. The National Archive is deposited in rooms at the Hôtel de Soubise, one of the municipal buildings of the old Marais quarter, where you can see that the nobility was powerful and unconstrained when it was built.

Took a zigzag route from Rue du Temple through the old quarters to the Bastille. The street names included many I found delightful, such as Rue du Roi Doré and Rue du Petit Musc.[86] I bought some grapes and offered some to children who were sitting in their doorways. Almost everyone refused the offer or gazed at me with suspicion. People are not used to being given things. Went to the bookdealers on the quais, where I picked up a few pictures of tropical birds.

Read further in Huxley. There I came across the remark: “Every experience has an essential connection to the peculiar nature of the human being affected by it.” I share this view. In a murder case, it is not by chance that we appear as the murderer, the murder victim, witness, policeman, or as the judge. Nor does sociology contradict this view; on the contrary, it affirms it. Our milieu is a distinctive mark of our species, like the form and color of mussel and snail shells in the mollusk world. Just as there are a lot of petits gris [edible snails], there are also a lot of proletarians.

Hence the extraordinary significance of work for our inner life. We do not only shape our fate but also our world.

K has the consistency of the Kürbis [squash, pumpkin]: when you poke it with your finger, first it is hard, then soft, then hollow.

P, on the other hand, is like the Pfirsich [peach]: first comes the flesh of the fruit, then the hard pit, which in turn, encloses the mild seed.

At noon, I visited the sculptor Gebhardt on Rue Jean Ferrandi. Conversation about the chaos in Italy, where this war is forcing new and outlandish blossoms. The two great aspects of war and civil war are explosively combined here; we simultaneously glimpse scenes unknown since the Renaissance.

Then discussion about France. Here, too, hatred is constantly on the increase, but as in standing waters, it is more covert. Many people are now getting miniature coffins in the mail.[87] It is also Kniébolo’s role to discredit good ideas by carrying them aloft on his shield. For example, the friendship between these two countries, for which there is so much evidence.

I returned via Saint-Sulpice; I stepped into the church for a while, where I noticed details like the two huge seashells that serve as holy water fonts. Their fluted edges were trimmed with a metal border, their mother-of-pearl luster was the color of honey opal. They rested upon pedestals of white marble; one was decorated with marine vegetation and a large ocean crab. The other was ornamented with an octopus. The spirit of water pervaded everything.

While I stood there in front of a mediocre painting of the Judas kiss, the thought came to me: The sword that Saint Peter draws must have been something that he usually wore. Did Christ then permit him to carry it? Or did he wrest it from Malchus before striking him with it?

In the morning, the news arrived that Mussolini has been freed by German paratroopers. No mention of his location or of the circumstances. The war is becoming more and more graphic. If things in Italy keep on like this for a long time, they will lead to far-reaching exterminations, as in Spain. Mankind is in dire straits.

Telephone call with Schnath concerning Count Dejean and the possibility of gaining access to the files on him. I would like to include a series of essays among my shorter works. These will be expressions of gratitude and tributes to men and books that have helped me in life.

Horst has just told me that General Speidel’s beautiful house in Mannheim has been destroyed. Right afterward a courier who had just arrived from Russia handed me letters from Speidel and Grüninger, in addition to a detailed report about the Battle of Belgorod. Grüninger says that we cannot count on champions on white horses to march through the Brandenburg Gate; for that matter, it is uncertain how much longer the Brandenburg Gate will remain standing, and furthermore, the color white is becoming extinct. Correct, but the higher counteroffensive against red will take place on the blue field.[88]

Read further in Huxley, where I found the following nice observation: “You should never name an evil you feel attracted to, for in doing so you present fate with a model it can use to fashion events.”

This describes the process that people designate as a “calling,” which millions of people surrender to nowadays. To give your imagination free rein, or lose yourself in details of a disastrous future—that is, in a word, fear. Fear destroys the delicate, protective layer of salvation and security within us. This is particularly alarming under conditions where we have lost the knowledge of how we can reinforce and preserve this layer, especially the knowledge of prayer, which has largely been forgotten.

Telephone call with Marcel Jouhandeau. “Je vous conseille de lire la correspondence de Cicéron—c’est le plus actuel.” [I advise you to read the correspondence of Cicero—it’s most timely.] Yes, one always comes back to it. Wieland wrote almost the same thing after Jena and Auerstedt.[89]

Low fever during the night. Dreams in which I crossed lush wetlands on the lookout for insects. I picked a few off a tall chickweed or water dropwort—delicate, metallic species. To my astonishment, I saw that they were Buprestidae [jewel beetles].

“A truly remarkable find—their shape adapts them for a dry, sunny environment: water and marshland are quite alien to them.”

Then a deeper voice answered.

“But these are transitional creatures that have established themselves in this alien environment. These species have adjusted to moisture along with the fennel, yet the fennel’s height lets it tower upward seeking sunlight. Just think of Prometheus.”

Actually, then, nothing is more intelligible than the exception—there is a direct correlation between the exception and the explanation. Like light, the rule is inexplicable, invisible, and illuminates only when striking objects that resist it. Thus we say correctly that the exception proves the rule—we could even say that it renders the rule discernible.

Herein lies the intellectual appeal of zoology, in the study of those prismatic deviations that register invisible life in infinite variations. When I was a boy I was delighted when my father would reveal such secrets to me. All these details compose the arabesques in the design of the great mystery, of the invisible philosopher’s stone, which is the object of our striving. One day the design will evaporate, and the stone will suddenly catch the light.

Visited the Doctoresse in the middle of the day. Then walked through different quarters and streets of the city with a brief rest in the Church of Saint-Séverin, where both the exterior and interior move me deeply. Here the Gothic has not remained mere architecture. Its incandescence has lasted.

I was eating alone in my room in the Raphael when the air-raid sirens sounded at approximately twenty minutes to eight. The sound of intense cannon barrage soon erupted; I hurried up to the roof. The scene presented a display that was both terrifying and magnificent to my eyes. Two great squadrons were flying in wedge formation over the center of the city from northwest to southeast. They had apparently already dropped their payloads, for broad swathes of smoke clouds towered to the heavens from the direction they had come. The sight was ominous, but the mind immediately grasped that in that area hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were now suffocating, burning, and bleeding to death.

In front of this leaden curtain lay the city in the golden twilight. The rays of the setting sun glinted on the underside of the aircraft; their fuselages contrasted with the blue sky like silverfish. The tailfins in particular focused and reflected the rays as they shone like beacons.

These squadrons moved in formation like flights of cranes, shimmering at low altitude over the cityscape while groups of little white and dark clouds accompanied them. I watched the points of fire—focused and tiny as pinheads—gradually melt and spread out into burning orbs. Occasionally, a flaming plane would drift slowly downward like a golden fireball without leaving a trail of smoke. One of them plummeted in darkness, spinning to the ground like an autumn leaf, leaving only a trace of white smoke behind. Yet another was torn apart as it plunged, leaving a huge wing hovering in the air. Something of considerable size, sepia-brown, gathered speed as it fell—most likely a man attached to a smoldering parachute.

Despite these direct hits, the offensive maintained its course without deviating to the right or left, and this straight trajectory conveyed an impression of terrifying power. On top of this came the deep drone of the motors, filling the air and chasing the swarms of frightened pigeons in circles around the Arc de Triomphe. The spectacle bore the stamp of those two great attributes of our life and our world: strictly ordered discipline and visceral release. It embodied both great beauty and demonic power. I lost track of everything for a few moments as my consciousness dissolved into the scene, into the sense of the catastrophe, but also into the meaning that lies at its heart.

Vast fires from furnaces emerged on the horizon and blazed even more blindingly once darkness fell. Throughout the night flashes from the explosions streaked the sky.

Read further in Huxley, whose lack of structure is tiresome. His is a case of an anarchist with conservative memories who opposes nihilism. In this situation, he ought to employ more imagery and fewer concepts. As it is, he seldom exploits the real strength of his talent.

The image that he uses to describe the impersonal and tangled nature of sexual relationships is good: a knot of serpents, their heads lifted up into the air, while below their bodies are entwined in chaotic turmoil.

Film, radio—the whole array of technology—is perhaps meant to lead us to a better knowledge of ourselves: knowledge of what we are not.

The mail brought a contribution to my Hamann miscellany, sent by Donders, the dean of the cathedral in Münster: “I. G. Hamann, eine Festrede gehalten am 27. Januar 1916 in der Aula der westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität zu Münster von Julius Smend” [I. G. Hamann, an Oration by Julius Smend held on 27 January 1916 in the auditorium of the Wilhelms University in Münster (Westphalia)].

Hamann, after Herder a “man of the Old Covenant”—that is the hieroglyphic quality that I refer to as a pre-Herodotus, pre-Heraclitus character. Just as Weimar had Goethe and Schiller, Königsberg had Hamann and Kant.

Kant speaks of Hamann’s “divine language of observant reason.”

As an author, you also have to learn from painters—especially when it comes to matters of “overpainting,” meaning applying new and more subtle improvements to the rough text.

Finished reading Huxley in the evening. One of the mistakes he makes is not taking his fictional characters seriously, much less so than Dostoevsky, and just a bit less than Gide.

Walked the woods and water circuit with the Doctoresse. Among the diverse species of nightshade blooming along this path, I discovered a luxuriant, grass-green jimson weed proliferating, bearing blossoms and fruit on an embankment of the Seine opposite the little country church of Nôtre Dame de la Pitié.

Finished reading: Jean Desbordes, Le vrai Visage du Marquis de Sade (Paris, 1939) [The True Face of the Marquis de Sade]. It is remarkable how this name is maligned and associated with disgrace more than almost any other. This is understandable given the immense influence of the pen and the mind: a life of disgrace would be long forgotten were it not for disgraceful writers.

When names enter a language to become concepts and create categories, it is seldom a result of accomplishments. Among the great men of action and princes, only Caesar lights the way. Of course you can say that something is Alexandrine, Frederician, Napoleonic—but a certain special individuality is always inherent in the word. Caesarean conjures up a Caesar, a Czar, a Kaiser; here the word has become independent of the name.

Cases in which a name becomes attached to a doctrine, like Calvinism, Darwinism, or Malthusianism, et cetera, are much more common. Such words are numerous, arbitrary, and usually short-lived.

At the highest level, we find names that unite doctrine and exemplar: Buddhism and Christianity. The situation among Christians is unique, where (at least in our language) each one bears the name of the founder: “Ich bin ein Christ.” [I am a Christian.] Here “Christ” substitutes for human being, thereby revealing the dignity and mystery of this doctrine echoed in designations like “Mensch” [man], “des Menschen Sohn” [son of man], and “Gottes Sohn” [son of God].

In the morning, I worked in the Majestic finishing the first section of the Appeal. It is entitled “The Sacrifice.” While browsing in Spinoza, I chanced upon an epigraph for this section in Proposition 44 of the Ethics: “Hatred, when completely conquered by love, is transformed into love, and love is then stronger than if hatred had not preceded it.”

Began the second section of the Appeal, “The Fruit.”

My reading matter: A. Chavan and M. Monotoccio, Fossiles Classiques (Paris, 1938) [Classic Fossils]. From this book, I have learned that my little spiral snails are called Cerithium tuberculosum. The large one that I found in the bomb crater near Montmirail is called Campanile giganteum. Both were first described by Lamarck.

Reports came this morning of a new intense bombardment of Hannover; I am waiting for more detailed news.

In the afternoon, I went with Baumgart to Bernasconi, who is binding the Catalogus Coleopterorum [Catalogue of Coleoptera] for me. The way back took us through the gardens of the Trocadéro; there on the lawn were large, brick-red dahlias and multibloom asters: purple stars with yellow centers. Around this time of year, they are surrounded by honey-brown maggot flies; Admiral butterflies perched on them with outspread wings. The bright, pure, vivid red of this insect’s bands blends with images of quiet parks and gardens in my memory, places dreaming in the sun when autumn has begun to cast its chill upon the shadows.

Then came the air-raid sirens while I was engaged in political discussions with the president in his room. The German armies on the eastern front are in retreat, while the English and Americans are clawing their way forward in Italy, while their air forces are leveling the cities of the Reich.

Sometimes it seems to me as if, with all this misery that surrounds us, the laws of mirroring are in force. The universe encircles us like a great mirror, and we must first illuminate ourselves before the horizon can brighten.

The swimmers struggle slowly toward the coast against the tides. Only a few will reach it, only a few will get as far as the surf. At that point, we shall see who will prevail against the most powerful wave.

In the evening was with Heller and Dr. Göpel in the Chapon Fin. Conversation with the host, who is remarkable for clearly exhibiting all the traits of Mars in the descendant. The powerful physique is crowned by a head with dark hair and a very low hairline. His cheekbones are prominent, eyes restive, peering; and he is constantly bustling around. The disparity between intention and intelligence can be seen in the kind of torment obvious in his language when he struggles to get his ideas out. Our entertainment is a noisy congeniality among comrades. A sort of elective affinity has led him to befriend the Germans, whose martial nature appeals to him and provides him with activity and employment. For some time now, he has often been harassed and followed, and he has already been sent a small coffin.

As we were leaving, the sirens sounded the alarm and squadrons flew over the city. Our man now showed himself to be in his element. In his German helmet, his coat, and equipped with a flashlight, he roamed the dark square accompanied by a large German shepherd; with his whistle he signaled pedestrians and stopped cars. People like him are trusty servants, the odd-job men in this world of fire. It must be said that they are not without virtues and courage; just as they display a dog’s merits and flaws, by the same token they always have dogs nearby. Even Kniébolo displays descendant aspects of Mars, yet at the same time, different planets like Jupiter govern him with his aura of disaster. He had all the attributes to introduce an era of strife; an instrument of wrath, he has opened Pandora’s box. When I compare the legitimate claims of our Fatherland with what has occurred at his hands, I am overcome with infinite sadness.

Visit from Pastor B. who often comes to read me poems. Discussion about the situation, for which he sees only one way out, namely the deployment of the new weapon. Everywhere in Germany people are whispering miraculous claims about this, abetted by covert manipulation from the Propaganda Ministry. They think that the destruction of most, or even all, of the English population is possible. At the same time, they are convinced (and not without justification) that similar wishes exist on the other side, and not just among the Russians but also the English. The massive attacks that employ phosphorus, like the one on Hamburg, are seen as a concrete evidence of this. Thus the charred desolation brings forth hopes and dreams directed at the extermination of large nations. The example of a clergyman is significant for the degree to which people have become bound together in this crimson jungle. Not only is he in the grip of this madness, but he sees extermination as the only salvation. They can be seen disappearing step by step into darkness and spiritual death like the children of Hameln vanishing into the mountain.[90]

Finished reading Maurice Pillet, Thèbes, Palais et Nécropoles [Thebes: Palaces and Necropolises] (Paris, 1930). It contains a photograph of the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun with his golden mask and jewels. As I read this, it became clear to me once again how our urge to archive and store relics corresponds in a minor way to the Egyptian cult of the dead. Mummified culture is to us what the mummified human form was to them, and their metaphysical fears are our historical ones. The worry that dominates us is that our magical expression could be lost in the stream of time; that is the fear that motivates us. Peace in the womb of the pyramids and in the solitude of those cliff chambers surrounded by works of art, texts, utensils, divine images, jewelry, and rich grave goods—this is meant for more sublime types of permanence.

At breakfast I started my second reading of the New Testament. Compared Matthew 5:3 to the texts in the Nestle edition.[91] “Blessed are the poor in spirit [geistig arm]…” I had always remembered this passage as “geistlich” [spiritual, sacred]. The discrepancy does not arise with spiritu or τψ πνενματι. Without doubt, both are meant—on the one hand, geistlich, in the sense of learned, scholarly, like the Pharisees; and on the other, geistig, insofar as this superior ability promotes doubt, thereby making the path to salvation invisible. Both are captured in the word einfältig [simple; simpleminded]. “Blessed are the foolish.” This word contains both worldly weakness and metaphysical superiority, even the mustard seed is foolish [einfältig]. A large number of these comparisons involve man’s naïve powers, those virtues from his dreams and childhood. Then Matthew 6:23, the dreadful words: “If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” I also find a positive association in this passage: darkness is an immense force. Our eyes separate and compartmentalize a bit of this when we split and refine that profound essence of darkness—the sense of touch—thereby refining and weakening it. The sexual act reminds us of the significance of tactile experience.

Perhaps when we have reduced our numbers by 90 percent, like the mutineers of Pitcairn Island,[92] we, too, shall return to Scripture as law.

The reports again mention a fierce air strike on Hannover last night. Thus the days pass over us like the teeth of a saw.

Finished reading Erdmannsdörffer’s Mirabeau, one of the best historical character studies I have ever come across. The author was in his late sixties. It radiates the gentle clarity of age, and in doing so, shows us the finest change that the mind can experience in its autumnal years: the inclination toward simplicity.

On my desk I found a four-leaf clover. It was floating in a vase—a present from an unknown hand. Books arrived as well, such as Plaisir des Météors [The Pleasure of Meteors] by Marie Gevers, an author unknown to me. The mail also included Friedrich Georg’s Wanderungen auf Rhodos [Hikes on Rhodes] and the Briefe aus Mondello [Letters from Mondello]. During the noonday break, I immersed myself along with him in our walks along the Mediterranean.

Still aboard this slave ship for no reason. In my next incarnation, I shall return to earth as a school of flying fish. That way I’ll be able to subdivide myself.

A night of dreams. In a room where I was a guest I found a guestbook bound in red leather on the night table. Among the many names, that of my good old father stood out.

Went to Rue Raymond-Poincaré in the afternoon. There I bought a present for Perpetua from Schneider: Lizst’s piano transcription of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Strange melodies for Kirchhorst.

The queues in front of the public offices and the shops are getting longer. When I pass by them in uniform, I am the object of glances filled with contempt—contempt that nurtures murderous intentions. I can read in their faces that it would be perfectly marvelous if I just dissolved into thin air and evaporated like a dream. Multitudes of people in all countries are feverishly awaiting the moment when it will be their turn to shed blood. Yet that is precisely what we must avoid.

Autumn weather, damp and gray. The pale foliage on the trees blends into the fog. Violetta, a half-forgotten friend, appeared to me in my dream. In the meantime she had learned to fly—or rather something more like hovering. She was appearing in a circus act wearing a short blue skirt that billowed around her pink thighs like a parachute. We, her old friends from Berlin, met her in a church where she was supposed to take communion. Standing up in the gallery we were whispering doubles entendres jokingly to each other the way we used to do about this “sailor’s sweetheart.” But we also sensed the particular gamble involved here; below us she crossed the red tiles to the center aisle toward the altar. We were horrified when a trapdoor suddenly opened in front of her with a thunderclap, revealing a yawning chasm to our gaze. A dizzy feeling made us turn away. But then, when we finally dared to look down again, we could make out a second, altar, which looked tiny because it was at the bottom of the crypt. It was encircled by a ring of golden objects. In the middle we could see Violetta standing. She had floated down like a butterfly.

In the afternoon went to Salon d’Automne, Avenue de Tokio, to see the pictures by Braque, whom I plan to visit on Monday. I found them powerful, both in form and color, and painted with more emotion than those of Picasso. For me they embody the moment when we emerge from nihilism and the ideas for new compositions converge for us. Accordingly, curved lines replace splintered ones. A deep blue color is particularly effective, as is a rich blue, then a deep violet coalescing with a soft velvet brown.

The exhibition offered a varied assortment of works. One had the impression that painters, like artists in general, are continuing to work obsessively during the catastrophe, like ants in their half-destroyed colony. Perhaps that is a superficial view, and it may be that beneath the great destruction deep veins remain unscathed. I, too, certainly depend on these.

I found viewing the pictures to be a challenge; an accumulation of artwork has the effect of a magical assault. If we develop an intimacy with individual ones, or even take them home and domesticate them, then their vitality inhabits us.

Depression, which always makes me lose weight.

Over breakfast continued reading the Gospel of Matthew. The story with the stater,[93] which the disciples will find in the belly of a fish, is surely a later, magical addendum, and contradicts the uncomplicated character that aims at salvation, not at mystification—which characterizes the other miracles. Chapter 4, verse 14 attests to the conviction that individuals are resurrected on earth. John, Elijah, and Jeremiah are mentioned. Perhaps this belief derives from the prophets. This passage, like so many others, seems to retain the small, ordinary coin of discourse, whereas it is usually the gold pieces that are bequeathed to us.

The mail brought a letter from First Lieutenant Häussler from the Kuban bridgehead. He writes to me saying that Dr. Fuchs, who was our host when we were in Shaumyan, was killed in action.

Made the woods and water circuit with the Doctoresse in the afternoon. The trees by the pond in Suresnes reflected their delicate crimson, dun, and deep golden brown hues in the clear water, with its margin of pale green plants and algae. Visited Parc de Bagatelle briefly, where I searched in vain for the large golden orphe. Still, I was compensated by being able to watch a water lettuce unfold its delicate spiked hyacinth blossom. The leaves where insects had inscribed their hieroglyphic trails had already been touched by autumn and enclosed the miraculous blossom in a heart-shaped form, like a circle of lacquer seals.

In the evening browsed in an issue of Crapouillot[94] about the French press with the feeling that I was deep inside the labyrinths of the cloaca maxima.[95] Freedom of the press in the political and social arena is what the freedom of the will is in the metaphysical—one of those problems that always arises and can never be solved.

In the morning I read further in the Gospel of Matthew. In 18:7 I read: “It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.”

There in a nutshell we have the distinction between predestination and free will, and certainly this passage was one of those that nourished Boethius.

Ich bin einfältig gewesen und ich werde mich wieder einfalten.[96] [I was foolish, and I shall make myself foolish again.]

Visited Braque in the afternoon with Jouhandeau. He owns a small, warm south-facing studio not far from Parc Montsoris.

We were received by a powerfully built man of middle height wearing a blue linen jacket and brown corduroy trousers. Comfortable leather slippers, soft wool socks, and a continually lit pipe magnified the effect of easygoing activity in his casual company. His face was expressive, determined, and his hair thick and white; the eyes of blue enamel and unusually prominent like the lenses of extrapowerful magnifying glasses.

The walls were richly hung with paintings. I particularly liked the image of a black table; its surface reflected the vessels and glasses standing on it in a way that etherealized rather than simplified them. On the easel, inherited from his father, stood a still life he had begun. The paint was laid on in thick layers of impasto and dripped down like colorful stalactites.

We conversed about connections between Impressionist painting and military camouflage, which Braque said he had invented, being the first to produce art in which the destruction of form was achieved with color.

Braque rejects the presence of any prototypes and models, thus painting solely from memory, endowing his pictures with their deeper dream reality. Expanding on this, he recounted that recently he had included a lobster in one of his pictures without knowing how many legs the animal has. Later, when he was dining and he saw one, he was able to confirm that he had gotten the number exactly right. He related this to Aristotle’s notion of a particular numerical correspondence that applies to every species.

As always, when I encounter productive people, I asked Braque how he experienced the aging process. He said that the pleasant thing about it was that it put him in a position where he no longer had to make choices. I interpret that to mean that in old age life becomes more essential and less accidental; the path becomes a single track.

He added: “One also has to reach the point when creativity no longer comes from here but from here.” In saying this he pointed first to his forehead, then to his belly. The order of his gestures surprised me, because it is generally assumed that work is a self-conscious activity—even in cases where practice, routine, and experience simplify it. We consciously abbreviate creative processes. Nonetheless, it made sense to me with regard to his own evolution, evident in his turn from cubism to more profound realism. There is also a progress toward naiveté. In the realm of the mind there are mountain climbers and mountain dwellers; the first follow the paternal inclination and the second, the maternal. One group gains greater heights and increasing clarity; the others are like the hero in Hoffmann’s tale of the mine at Falun, whose hero penetrates the earth through ever-deeper shafts toward that place where slumbering, fecund ideas reveal themselves to the mind in crystalline beauty. This is the true difference between the Apollonian and Dionysian. The greatest artists possess both of these energies, a double portion. They are like the Andes, whose absolute elevation is divided in half to our sight by the ocean’s surface. Yet their domain spans the sphere of the condor’s wings down to the measureless reaches of the ocean’s depths.

In Braque and Picasso, I have met two great painters of our age. The impression that each made was equally powerful, yet different in details. Beneath his intellectuality, Picasso appeared as a powerful magician, while Braque embodied a radiant geniality. The difference between their studios projects this as well; Picasso’s has a particularly Spanish touch.

In Braque’s studio, I was struck by the number of small objects—masks, vases, glasses, idols, shells, and the like. I had the impression that these are less models in the traditional sense than talismans, rather like magnets for attracting dream material. This accumulated and, again, radiating matter might come into play when one purchases one of Braque’s pictures. One of the objects was a large butterfly adorned with dark blue spots. Braque caught this in his garden, where he has a Paulownia growing. He believes that the insect arrived here from Japan along with the tree.

To the Ritz in the evening, where Schulenburg and I were alone together. We mulled over the situation and my related Appeal for Peace, which I outlined for him. The time may have come for me to move to Berlin. I of course mentioned that Keitel already views my presence here with suspicion and that, on the other hand, Heinrich von Stülpnagel under orders from Speidel, has not given me permission.

In the mail I found the first letter from Perpetua about the night of September 28 in Kirchhorst. Bombs hit the meadows near the house. The terror seems to reach its crescendo when the Christmas trees[97] light up the sky—these clusters of lights announce a mass bombardment. The little seven-year-old daughter of a neighbor was taken to the mental hospital the next morning. The future of our children makes me think—what fruits can this spring bear? The high and low temperatures will etch bizarre patterns into the butterfly wings of these little souls.

Took a stroll in the evening with Husser, whom I had arranged to meet at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He told me his life story as we walked along the Bois to the Porte Maillot, and from there back across Place des Ternes. Husser’s misfortune is that he is the son of a Jewish father while at the same time a passionate German soldier and warrior at Douaumont.[98] Under the prevailing circumstances, that was hard to reconcile. As a result, he turns up here like a man who has lost his shadow—anonymous, living under a pseudonym with a new identity and new passport from a deceased Alsatian. He lives in a cheap hotel in Billancourt and has just come back from the coast where he was a shepherd for a Breton nationalist on Hielscher’s recommendation. Incidentally, Hielscher himself will probably be coming through Paris soon because he wants to send Bretons to Ireland.

I took along mail for Husser’s wife and plan to send her parcels too. The problem is that neither she as their receiver, nor her husband as sender, nor I as go-between, can ever be exposed.

In the Raphael pondered the petty viciousness that no future historian will ever record, such as the behavior of the old regimental groups who at first tried to protect their members like Husser, but then betrayed him to the demos once things became dangerous. A similar case is the reason that Friedrich Georg and I, along with others, resigned from the Veterans’ Association of the Seventy-Third Regiment. In my plan of the “House,” I should include a room where the corrupt assembly of knights delivers up their wards under pressure from the mob rioting outside. The combination of false dignity, fear, and empty bonhomie—I saw them all on the mask of President Bünger when he interrogated the undesirable witnesses in the trial of the Reichstag fire.[99] Pontius Pilate is the prototype here. The accused is then set free, knowing full well into whose hands he will fall on the steps of the courthouse. The same fate could befall me if the commander-in-chief ever has to leave the Majestic. Except then the handwashing ritual might be made to smell sweeter: “My dear Herr J., Here your talents do not reach a wide enough circle. For that reason you are being ‘reassigned.’” Then comes the farewell celebration where one puts a good face on things and lifting the glass for the parting toast. These are details present in Shakespeare that put any professional historian to shame.

This morning in bed I finished the Book of Matthew. Then had my Sunday breakfast, which thanks to the good offices of the president, is always very satisfying. Thought: Even though I live for the most part surrounded by the trappings of comfort in this Second World War, I am in greater peril than when I was at the Battle of the Somme or in Flanders. It also seems to me that out of a hundred old veterans, hardly any one of them is able to bear up under the new atrocities that arise when we move from that stage of heroism into one of demonic possession.

Matthew 25: The main subject of this chapter is that in his lifetime man can acquire eternal value. He can collect oil for the lamp that burns forever. With his inherited portion, his talents, he can secure eternal riches. This transcendent power—to earn interest from time—is actually an extraordinary miracle, worth studying in one hundred thousand monasteries and countless hermits’ cells: time, the wine press, and the world, its fruit. It is not for nothing that so many images refer to wine and to the work of the vintner in the mountains, for the evolution of the wine up to that moment when it is drunk and transformed into spirit, provides us with a powerful symbol of life.

We live in order to realize ourselves. This realization makes death meaningless—man has converted his personal effects into gold, which everywhere and irrespective of borders, retains its value. Thus the pronouncement of Solomon that death is merely imaginary for the just: “As gold in the furnace hath he tried them and received them as a burnt offering.”[100]

Thus, we can attain a state where we never lose value when we are exchanged.

Great plans of destruction can only succeed when they parallel changes in the world of morality. Man must continue to sink in value, must become metaphysically indifferent, before the transition to mass extermination as we are experiencing it today becomes total annihilation. Just as our entire situation was predicted by Scripture, so too was this specific one—and not just in the description of the Flood but also in that of the destruction of Sodom. With that God says explicitly that He wishes to spare the city as long as ten just men can still be found there. This is also a symbol of the immense responsibility of the individual in our age. One can guarantee the security of untold millions.

Climbed down into an open grave onto the coffin of my grandfather, the teacher of boys. That morning I looked up tombeau [tomb] in a book of dream imagery, where I found it defined as longévité [longevity]. This is one of those shallow explanations typical of these books. To step down into the grave of an ancestor more likely means that one seeks advice under duress, advice that an individual cannot give himself.

The mail brought a letter from a young soldier, Klaus Meinert, who wrote me once before about my little piece on vowels. This time he tells me of his discoveries about the symbolic content of the antiqua majuscules:[101]

A is meant to embody breadth and height. The symbol [XX, see p. 170, German original] expresses this most simply. Two distant points meet at the zenith.

E is the sound of the void, of abstract thought, of the mathematical world. Three uniform parallels [XX, see p. 170, German original] connected by a vertical express this.

I, the erotic sign, expresses the lingam, blood kinship, love, and passion.

O represents the light-sound, the embodiment of the sun and of the eye.

U, or as our forebears wrote it V, is the earth sound as it delves into the depths. It also becomes clear that it is in opposition to A.

I was pleased by this work because it shows insight. I also thought about the conditions under which he wrote it—on maneuvers, on sentry duty, in his bivouac. Young people clutch at the intellectual elements of life as if at a constellation observed from a doomed outpost. How rarely do they find support in this, their finest instinct.

Horst was sitting beside me at the table when he got the news that his aged father had been killed in the attack on Münster. Uncanny circumstances surrounded this event. The bombings continue to multiply. The damage caused on the night of 9–10 October in Hannover is extensive; hundreds of thousands of people are said to be homeless. Still no news from Perpetua!

In the afternoon had a conversation with a Captain Aretz, who once visited me in Goslar when he was a student. We talked a long time about the situation. He said that I would not recognize the mental state of twenty- to thirty-year-old people, who believe only what the newspapers print because they have never learned anything else. He seemed to think that was advantageous, considering the inflexible attitude of the authorities. But the opposite is actually true. It would be enough simply to change what gets printed in the newspapers.

Gave some thought to technology and what we have lost because of it. As a product of the purely masculine intellect, it is like a predator whose overwhelming menace mankind has not immediately recognized. We have foolishly raised this animal in close quarters with ourselves, only to discover that it cannot be domesticated. It is striking that its first application—namely in the form of the locomotive—brought good results. The railroad under complete or partial state control, and subject to highly regulated discipline, has made it possible for countless families to make their modest, decent livings in the past hundred years. Generally speaking, a railroad employee is a contented person. The engineers, civil servants, and workers in this area enjoy the benefits of soldiers, and only a few of their disadvantages. We would be better off if we had structured the industry of automated mills in the same way, as a constructive development from the very start. Of course, something particular always pertained to the railroad, namely its geographical presence, which continued to expand across large areas. The railroad has the ability to connect a great number of lives that are only partially beholden to technology while the rest belongs to organic life. This would describe the simple, healthy quality of life of track inspectors and crossing guards. From the very beginning, every one of the technical professions should have been given a plot of land, if only a garden, for every life is dependent on the earth—that all-nourishing force that alone offers us protection in times of crisis.

Technology resembles a construction project built upon ground that has been inadequately analyzed. In a hundred years, it has grown so massively that changes on the great blueprint in general have become inordinately complex. This applies especially to those countries that have seen the highest rates of development. Russia’s advantage stems from this, and now becomes obvious when explained by its two essential causes: The country had no technological prehistory, and it possessed sufficient territory. To be sure, it also went through an immense upheaval, destroying property and life, but the reason for this lay outside the planners’ intentions.

There could be one positive aspect to the great destruction of our Fatherland, in that this will provide a new beginning for these things that seem inevitable. These upheavals will create conditions that will far exceed Bakunin’s most audacious dreams.

Finished reading the first volume of the Causes Célèbres, published in Amsterdam in 1772 by M. Richet, former attorney in parliament. In the descriptions of the trial brought against Brinvilliers, I found the sentence, “Les grands crimes loin de se soupçonner, ne s’imaginent même pas” [Great crimes, far from being suspected, are unimaginable]. That is quite right and stems from the fact that crime increases at the same rate that it rises from the level of bestiality and acquires intellect. The clues also disappear to the same degree as its animal origins fall away. The greatest crimes depend on combinations that are superior to the law in points of logic. Crime also shifts from the deed to a state of being, reaching levels where it exists as an abstract spirit of evil in pure cognition. Finally, interest itself wanes and evil is done for evil’s sake. Evil is celebrated. Then there is also the face that the question “cui bono?” [who benefits?] no longer provides a guiding principle—it is only one force in the universe that it benefits.

In the evening Bogo[102] came to the Raphael with Husser. In our age so lacking in original talent, Bogo is one of those acquaintances I have been devoting the most thought to, and yet have been the least successful in forming an opinion about. I used to think that the history of our age would record him as one of its exaggeratedly witty, yet least known, figures. Yet today I believe that he will deliver more. Many, perhaps most, intellectual young people who grew up in Germany after the Great War were influenced by him or were his disciples. I could usually tell that they had been affected by the encounter.

He arrived from Brittany after previously visiting Poland and Sweden. As was his quirky habit, he began to prepare for our discussion by unpacking various objects, such as a series of carved pipes with a tobacco pouch and pipe cleaners. He also produced a little cap of black velvet for his bald head. While doing so, he watched me with his crafty, quizzical gaze—one that was also agreeable—like that of a man who was expecting certain revelations, but at the same time, kept amusing things hidden. I had the impression that he chose his pipe according to the progress of the conversation.

I asked him about a few acquaintances, like Gerd von Tevenar who had recently died, and I learned that Bogo had buried him. Von Aretz, on the other hand, who visited me yesterday, said, “I officiated at his wedding.” This confirmed a suspicion I have had for a long time, namely that he had founded a church. Now he’s studying dogma and has made great progress in the area of liturgy. He showed me a series of hymns and a festival cycle, “The Pagan Year.” It coordinates the gods, festivals, colors, fauna, foods, stones, and plants. In this I read that the Lichtweih [Festival of Lights] is to be celebrated on 2 February. This holiday is sacred to Berchta,[103] whose attribute is the spindle, whose animal is the bear, and whose flower is the snowdrop. Her colors are rusty red and snow white; the mistletoe is considered the gift to give on her day. The celebratory food consumed is herring with dumplings. The accompanying drink is punch, and the pastry is a flat waffle cake. The entry for Fasnacht,[104] a holiday honoring Freya,[105] calls for tongue, champagne, and crullers.

Discussed the situation. He held the opinion that, since the Biedenhorns[106] had not succeeded in blowing Kniébolo sky-high, this was the task of certain particular circles. He implied that under specific circumstances he felt obliged to prepare and organize—almost like the Old Man of the Mountain[107] who sends his young people into the palaces. The underlying problem in our contemporary politics, as he sees it, may be stated as: how do you penetrate the inner circle for five minutes with weapons? When I had finished listening to him expound on the details, Kniébolo’s situation became clear to me: these days he is surrounded and deified by his huntsmen.

I thought I noticed a fundamental change in Bogo—a change that seems characteristic of the entire elite echelon. To be specific, he rushes into metaphysical areas with rationalist ardor. I noticed this about Spengler, and it is an auspicious omen. In brief, the nineteenth century was a rational one, whereas the twentieth century is sectarian. Kniébolo feeds on this—hence the complete inability of the liberal intelligentsia even to perceive where he stands on matters.

Then, concerning Bogo’s travels. Many a secret here. I was especially appalled by details he reported from the ghetto of Lodz, or as they are now calling it, Litzmannstadt. He contrived to gain entrance there under a pretext that allowed him to consult with the overseer of the Jewish community, a former Austrian first lieutenant. A hundred and twenty thousand Jews live there crammed together in a small space where they work for the arms industry. They have constructed one of the largest plants in the East. In this way, they are just able to scrape by, because they are essential labor. At the same time, new deported Jews pour in from the occupied countries. To dispose of these people, crematoria have been built not far from the ghettoes. They take the victims there in vehicles that are supposed to be an invention of Chief Nihilist Heydrich. The exhaust fumes are piped into the interior so that they become death chambers.

Apparently, there is also a second butchering method that consists of leading naked victims to a large steel plate through which an electric charge is passed. Then the bodies are burned. They moved to this method when it turned out that the SS soldiers who were ordered to deliver the pistol shots to the back of the head were developing psychological ailments and finally refused to carry out their orders. These crematoria need only a small staff; it’s a sort of fiendish gang of masters and their lackeys who carry out this work. Here, then, is where those masses of Jews are being sent who are being “resettled” from Europe. This is the landscape that reveals Kniébolo’s nature most clearly, and which not even Dostoevsky could have predicted.

The ones destined for the crematoria must be picked by the ghetto overseer. After conferring extensively with the rabbis, he chooses the old people and the sick children. Many of the old and infirm are said to volunteer, and thus such horrific negotiations always reveal the honor of the persecuted.

The ghetto of Litzmannstadt is enclosed. In other, smaller cities there are some that consist only of a few streets where Jews live. Jewish police, who have the task of seizing victims, are said to have picked up German and Polish pedestrians who were walking through the ghetto and handed them over, and nothing was ever heard from them again. This claim is made particularly by Volga Germans[108] who are waiting for confirmation of their land allotments. Of course, they protested to these executioners that they weren’t Jews, but the only response they got was, “That’s what everybody here says.”

No children are conceived in the ghetto except by the most pious sect, the Chassidim.

The name Litzmannstadt makes it explicit how Kniébolo distributes honors. He has linked the name of this general, who can claim military victories, for all times with a charnel house. It has been clear to me from the beginning that his commendations were to be feared the most, and I said, quoting Friedrich Georg:

[To fight your battles with you brings no honor. / Your victories are as despicable / As defeats.]

Went to the reopened Théâtre de Poche, Boulevard de Montparnasse. Schlumberger invited the Doctoresse and me to see his play Césaire. Strindberg’s The Tempest was also performed. This space heightened the ghostly aspect of the performance. It was done in costumes from the end of the last century, which had been dug out of old clothes cupboards; even a telephone (which would have been quite a novelty on the stage of that era) was in period style.

Afterward over tea the Doctoresse said, “The works of great artists are identifiable by their mathematical character: The problems are divisible and everything tallies. There is no remainder left over.”

This assessment is on the right track, but it describes only one of the two sides of productivity. The other side produces striking results precisely because they do not add up—there is always an indivisible remainder. That’s the difference between Molière and Shakespeare, between Kant and Hamann, between logic and language, between light and darkness.

Of course, there are always a few minds that are both indivisible and divisible. Pascal and E. A. Poe, and, in ancient times, Saint Paul—all of these belong to this category. At the point where language as blind power pours into the luminescence of thought, palaces gleam in polished darkness.

Visited Florence in the middle of the day. The colors of all the bottles and glasses continue to delight me, treasures found in ancient graves. Their blue is deeper and more exquisite than that of the butterfly’s wing in the mountainous forests of Brazil.

Marie-Louise Bousquet told of a woman who traveled to one of the bombed-out cities on the coast to look for her husband, who had not returned from a trip. She asked at the town hall, but his name was not among the lists of victims. Walking out into the marketplace, she saw a group of coffins on some wagons. Each one had a small peg that held a card with the name of the deceased. Her husband’s name immediately caught her eye, and what’s more, just at the moment when the wagon began to move toward the cemetery. And so she walked behind the coffin in her traveling clothes—in one of those lightning transformations of scenes familiar only from dreams. Life becomes more surreal.

Another report of a terrible attack on Hannover last night. I’m trying in vain to get through to speak to Perpetua. The lines are down. By now the city seems to have been utterly destroyed.

In the afternoon, paid a call on the art dealer Etienne Bignou who, in response to my request, brought a painting by the customs agent [Henri] Rousseau out of his bank vault. The painting had been missing for a long time. Rousseau called this large work from 1894 War and gave it the epigraph, “Gruesomely she passes, leaving despair, tears, and ruins in her wake.”

The colors are striking at first glance: clouds unfolding before a blue sky like large pink blossoms, and in front of these, a black and pale gray tree with tropical leaves hanging from its branches. The Angel of Discord gallops across a battlefield on a black, sightless steed. He wears a feathered smock. In his right hand he brandishes a sword and, in his left, a torch trailing a dark cloud of smoke that belches sparks. The terrain beneath this terrifying flying celestial visitor is strewn with naked or barely clothed corpses; ravens are making a meal of them. Rousseau gave his own face to the corpse in the foreground, which is the only one meagerly clothed in patched trousers. Another in the background, whose liver is being devoured by a raven, has the face of his wife’s first husband.

Baumgart informed me that this painting had been rediscovered. In it I see one of the great visions of our time. It also conveys a concept behind painting’s essentials, in contrast to a kaleidoscopic choice of possible subjects. Just as the canvases of the early Impressionists conformed to the old daguerreotype process, this painting approximates a snapshot. A kind of frightening spell, a sort of decorative brutality, stands in stark contrast to the fundamental power of its content. We can contemplate in peace and quiet that which is otherwise beyond our ken, be it because of the demon’s stealth or its terrible speed. You can see that around this time things had become incredibly dangerous. Then there is the Mexican element. Thirty years before, Galliffet had returned from that country. Without a doubt, a source of our world of terror derives from those tropical seeds that developed on European soil.

Among the various qualities of the painting, the childlike aspect is notable: purity in fairytale horror like the novel by Emily Brontë.

News from Perpetua has finally arrived. The terrifying attack of 10 October that destroyed large sections of Hannover just strafed Kirchhorst. From the parsonage, she watched as the phosphorus poured down on the city like molten silver. On the afternoon of 11 October, she forced her way through smoking ruins to her parents’ house. It was the only one within a large perimeter that was spared, but incendiary bombs had blasted into the rooms. She found her parents exhausted and with eyes swollen from fighting fires. Her little niece, Victoria, had acted especially bravely. And so we see in such moments that it is precisely the weak who find strength no one thought them capable of.

Capriccio tenebroso [dark fantasy]. Image of a dead Eurasian jay with its rosy-gray breast plumage and its black, white, and patterned pinion feathers. There he lies, already half-sunken into the loose earth; beneath it there toils a swarm of gravediggers. Its body disappears in jerks and spasms into the dark soil. Soon only the light blue tip of a wing is visible. It is covered by a clutch of tiny yellow eggs. This, too, disappears as the maggots crawl their way out of the eggs and glide down off it.

When crime becomes illness, execution becomes an operation.

A letter from Perpetua concerning the terrible night of 19 October finally puts my mind at ease. Kirchhorst was hit. Farmyards and buildings were burned down. High explosive and incendiary bombs as well as phosphorus canisters fell around the parsonage while the inhabitants lay on the floor of the hallway. Then there came an incredible noise, as if the good old building were collapsing, and Perpetua rushed out into the garden with our little boy. There they both pressed themselves against the arbor vitae.

This year I lost not just my father but also my native city. I also hear threatening news from Leisnig and Munich. In World War I, I was alone and free; I am going through this second one with all my loved ones and all my belongings. Yet there were moments in World War I when I dreamed of the second one; just as on the advance through France in 1940, I was less frightened by images of the present than by the anticipation of future worlds of destruction that I inferred in that deserted region.

In the afternoon, I visited Klaus Valentiner who has come over from Aix. He brought me greetings from Médan, whose fellow countrymen had sent two coffins and a death sentence to his house. His crime is believing that friendship between Germany and France is possible.

Ahlmann, Valentiner’s uncle, whom I got to know through the Magister, and a general were all invited to dinner at Carl Schmitt’s. Together they went looking for Kaiserswertherstrasse in Dahlem [Berlin]. When they arrived, they found the house in ruins, yet more by way of an experiment, they pushed the doorbell at the garden door. In response, Frau Duschka appeared from one of the cellar rooms. She was wearing a black velvet dress and announced to them formally that she was unfortunately forced to cancel dinner. This quality does her credit.

Valentiner also told a terrible story from Aix. An SS company is stationed there, from which a young soldier went AWOL and fled to Spain. The desertion succeeded, but he was extradited. The company commander ordered him brought in chains before the troops in formation, where he executed him personally with a machine gun. The action must have produced a horrifying effect; many of the young soldiers fainted and fell to the ground.

This violation is barely believable when we keep in mind that the commander is still always the father of his men. Of course, it applies to conditions dominated by raw force alone, thus placing the highest authority in the hands of the hangman.

Visited the Luxembourg Gardens during a drizzle. There the magnificent canna lily was in bloom, gaudy red with fiery yellow edges around the large oval, where in wartime people now grow cabbages and tomatoes.

Visited Florence at noon. She described details about decorating a castle in Normandy that she had bought years ago, but she couldn’t recall its name.

Marie Laurencin also at the table. I conversed with her about the customs agent Rousseau. She had known him when she was a young girl at a time when he gave painting and violin lessons; she praised his mellifluous speech. She found listening to him was much more enjoyable than watching him paint. She sat for him as he painted her portrait; it depicted her with huge girth, although she was a slender girl. When she pointed this out to him, he said, “c’est pour vous fair plus important” [It’s to make you more important]. Such a Paleolithic concept.

Was present at a meal where Socrates was also invited. He was a small man, thin, with short hair, a gaunt, intelligent face; he wore a gray, well-cut suit.

“It is so comforting that such a man is still alive,” I said to myself, and reacted as if I had just discovered that Burckhardt or Delacroix were still alive.

I chatted about this with one of my table companions, who poured liquid butter onto white bread toast for me. He was a Scandinavian critic who also knew my friend Birgit and heartily recommended an epic she had sent him. I remember some of the verses he quoted to me. They began: “Morus mehr Tänzer als Heimer—” [Morus, more dancer than Heimer—].

He called this beginning “outstanding,” yet I understood intuitively that he was using the word in both its laudatory and its restrictive sense, since “outstanding” establishes a relationship to the generic, which cannot be said of the absolute.

Dreams bring me hope for the future, give me security. This applies especially to the one in which I survived Kniébolo and his gang at the height of their power on a ship crossing to Rhodes. “Tout ce que arrive est adorable” [Everything that happens is adorable] is one of the best expressions Bloy has ever come up with.

As I woke up, I recognized a new harmony. I refer to the sort where a delicate green and a delicate yellow unite in lines and bands that can be called the harmony of the rushes. In gazebos at the water’s edge, in bungalows, in pavilions, and chicken coops, on bamboo bridges, on the binding of the works of Turgenev and Walt Whitman—that’s where it would belong.

Worked further on the Appeal. I have started the chapter about nihilism and at the same time am also recopying sections.

In her letter of 21 October, Perpetua writes about the children from Berlin that we are sheltering. One of them, a poor little thing only six years old, said to her: “Auntie, the bees are so afraid of me that they wiggle.”

Then there is the faith that the little boy has in the strong mother who keeps danger at bay. Such are the things we would never experience in times of safety.

Cramer von Laue visited me in the afternoon. He is one of those readers who was introduced to my works as a child and has grown up with them. In the meantime, he has been promoted to captain and his left cheek bears a scar gashed by a bullet wound, which becomes him.

Discussion about the situation and especially the question as to what extent the individual must feel responsibility for Kniébolo’s crimes. For me it is a pleasure to see how young people who have learned from me can get right to the point. The fate of Germany is hopeless if a new chivalric order does not emerge from its youth, and especially from among its workers.

Cramer drew my attention to a book by Walter Schubart published in Switzerland and called Europa und die Seele des Ostens [Europe and the Soul of the East]. He summarized passages from it, and I hope that I can track it down, even though there aren’t more than a few copies in circulation.

Visited Bernasconi, Avenue de Lowendal. There I picked up both volumes of the Catologus Coleopterorum in the sturdy bindings he had made for me. Then via Rue d’Estrées and Rue de Babylone to the Doctoresse, who had been ordered to appear at Gestapo headquarters that morning in the matter of her husband, who is still languishing in prison. Since such a summons always involves the danger of new accusations, my call was like visiting a convalescent.

Back on the ancient streets again, I was in such a good mood. I walked along under their spell as if in a state of exquisite intoxication.

Horst had just returned from Münster, and the funeral of his old father, who had been killed by a bomb. He brought me greetings from Donders, the dean of the cathedral. Donders lost his beautiful library of over twenty thousand books in the great fire.

“A good thing that I gave the Hamann to Ernst Jünger,” he told Horst.

The huge fires change the consciousness of property more than all the old tomes that have been written about it since the beginning of the world. That is the Révolution sans phrases [revolution without mincing words].

“The six nectar vineyard.” Pariser Zeitung [Paris Newspaper] from today. A nice typographical error.[109]

From Benoist-Méchin’s work on the history of the German army, I have just learned that Kniébolo’s driver had the apocalyptic surname “Schreck” [fear, horror].

Have been in Vaux since yesterday afternoon as a guest of the commander-in-chief. Our usual discussions by the great fireplace in the evenings. The general said that in the Ukraine henchmen of Sauckel[110] had announced that from now on the Easter festival would be celebrated according to the ancient rite. They then surrounded the churches and from the crowds pouring out of the service they abducted anyone they considered useful.

Went to the woods on Sunday morning to hunt for subtiles. Found a lovely Coccinellidae [ladybug] that landed on a reed in the sunshine. Its pale yellow carapace was dotted with white spots—a balance that only works when nature mixes the colors.

Two large hornets with lemon yellow abdomens tattooed with mahogany stripes were drinking deeply at a trickle of oak sap. Sometimes they would touch each other with their mandibles, almost billing and cooing as they tried to lap up the last bits of sap from each other’s head and thorax. Their gestures looked like a tender embrace, and attraction must motivate such antics, for one of the sources of tenderness is grooming. This explains the licking of newborns that is performed not only by most mammals but also by the Eskimos. Stroking and arranging the feathers with the beak is similar. These are sources of affection, captured in its essence by Rimbaud’s beautiful poem, “Chercheuses de Poux” [“The Lice Pickers”].

Then I found the Bovista fungi [puffballs] that populate the edges of the peaceful autumnal paths in their guise as yellowish-brown pods with their top third already decomposing. When they reach ripeness, a fontanelle forms on their crests that releases a cloud of dust spores. These are structures that transform themselves completely into seed and fertility, leaving only thin parchment shells behind as individual remnants. One could even see these as mortars that bombard us with life. Seen in this light, they wouldn’t make bad grave decorations or appropriate designs on the coats of arms of philanthropists.

Beginning of November. Slept poorly. In my dream, I was wandering through the destroyed city of Hannover because it had occurred to me that in my worry about my wife and children I had completely forgotten my grandmother and her little apartment on Krausenstrasse.

Visited the Didiers in the evening. Hendrik de Man, the former Belgian prime minister, was there; he gave me a printed though unpublished copy of his text on peace.

We conversed about Leipzig, where he had lived before World War I, where he was on the staff of the Social Democratic Volkszeitung [People’s Newspaper]. I am consistently astounded by the generic traits of these old Socialists, who were considered revolutionaries back in their day. They were basically a new class of ruling elite who elbowed their way upward in all the countries experiencing the birth pangs of a worker’s state. The transformation from civil servant to functionary—or to use Carl Schmitt’s phrase, from legitimacy to legality—resembles the transition from hieratic to demotic writing systems. You can read it in their faces. MacDonald in England and Winnig in Germany are types of this sort.

Had breakfast with Florence. While I was there, Heller told me about a doppelganger I have who supposedly resembles me down to every detail of gesture, voice, and handwriting. In such a case, there has to be some blood kinship.

To Marie-Louise [Heller] who cannot remember dates.

“Marie-Louise, you are certain you can’t remember your husband’s birthday anymore?”

“Yes, but on the other hand I can never forget his death day.”

This retort is apt, for in death that person is permanently linked to us—as I now feel about my father.

Kniébolo’s speeches are like bankruptcy hearings; in order to stall for time, the insolvent person promises to pay his creditors fantastic profits.

I think that people still underestimate his monstrous quality.

Today I finished the draft of my Appeal. I am curious to think what the fate of this work will be. Léon Bloy might perhaps praise the fact that it is directed “against everybody.” For me, it is just a good sign that I was able to write it at all.

In the afternoon conversation with Schnath, who is off to Hannover. His archive too was largely destroyed by the flames, along with the indices, with the result that the remaining inventory of his files has been transformed into an impenetrable mass of paper. We talked about storing his treasures in potash mines. The environment there is so dry that the bindings become brittle. Salt crystals also form on all surfaces, and these attract water. The pain that archivists feel as a result of the fires is especially acute.

In the evening visited a small publisher on Rue Boissonade named Haumont; the man is obsessed with a mania for typography. I talked with him and Heller about Prince de Ligne, whose works he is printing. Dr. Göpel then joined us and brought me Huebner’s book on Hieronymus Bosch. We went to Les Vikings and dined with a poet named Berry, who has written an epic poem over six thousand verses long about the Garonne River. He quoted one of them between two swallows of wine. It went like this:

[Dying is nothing, you have to stop drinking.]

He was a jovial fellow in other ways as well. In honor of the only woman in our party—one who had come with Haumont—he proposed to pen a dialogue in which one of her breasts engages in a competition with the other. I found the idea unsuited to a subject made far more appealing by symmetry than difference.

In the morning, I received a visit from one of my readers, Frau von Oertzen, director of the Nursing Branch of the Red Cross. We exchanged those secret signs that people use nowadays to recognize each other. We talked about the trips she takes to every war zone and to all the occupied territories. Then about the Old and New Testaments. She said that if she could carry only two books with her, one would have to be the Bible. And what about the other one? In my case that would probably be One Thousand and One Nights. In other words, two works of Orientalia.

In the afternoon went with Marie-Louise to visit Marie Laurencin, who owns a studio on the top floor of a house on Rue Savorgnan de Brazza; the place is like a doll’s house or the garden of the good fairy from an old children’s story. Her favorite color predominates inside: bright green mixed with a touch of pink. We looked at illustrated books of fairytales, especially those published in the second half of the last century in Munich.

I learned that the F’s[111] are showing Bolshevist tendencies in Bucharest. That’s a bad sign for Kniébolo. His biceps are losing their charm.

Visited Versailles with the Doctoresse in the afternoon to stroll in the rain through the long deserted allées. It was almost dark when we returned to the city from the Trianon. No painter will ever be able to capture the colors that one could merely sense in the fog—the night was bathed in a trace of yellow, red umber, as though colorful sea creatures were retreating into their shells and revealing their mysterious glory as they disappeared.

Breakfast with Florence. Cocteau called a writer whose prose uses platitudes meaningfully, a “flatfish of the deep sea”—“une limand des grandes profondeurs.”

In the afternoon Husser sneaked in to see me like Peter Schlemihl.[112] He brought me a copy of the History of the Spanish Conspiracy Against Venice.

Discussed the situation: when doing so, I always take the phone off the hook. During our talk, he mentioned a quotation from Voltaire’s History of Charles XII that says how difficult it is to destroy completely anyone fighting a coalition of powerful adversaries. Yes, but first he will be thoroughly thrashed.

Then talked about the Catholic clergy. Husser said he thought that they express nihilism in their disputations against science.

Received a visit from Morin in the afternoon. He told me about his father’s death and asked me for help settling his affairs. I was again amazed at the skill that young Frenchmen have in putting things in order. He focuses on the crux, whereas the young German gets distracted by his own interests outside the plan and soon loses concentration. His development is more fundamentally chaotic and to a great extent includes an element of unpredictability. It always comes down to the difference between Molière and Shakespeare that occurs to me with such comparisons, and with it comes the thought of whether or not a higher humanity would be possible atop these two pillars—an embodiment of a new order formed from opposing energies of centrifugal force and gravitation.

At the German Institute in the evening; the sculptor Breker was there with his Greek wife. In addition, Frau Abetz, Abel Bonnard, and Drieu la Rochelle, with whom I exchanged shots in 1915. That was at Le Godat, the town where Hermann Löns was killed in action. Drieu also recalled the bell that struck the hours there; we each heard it. Also present were the pens for hire, characters you wouldn’t want to touch with a pair of fire tongs. The whole thing seethes in a stew of self-interest, hatred, and fear. And some already bear the stigma of gruesome death on their foreheads. I am reaching the stage where the sight of these nihilists is becoming physically unbearable.

Discussion with Bargatzky, to whom I gave a copy of my Appeal. We talked about the possibility of a clandestine publication rebus sic stantibus [things being what they are]. This made me think of Aumont and also of a translation by Henri Thomas that Heller is about to begin.

In the afternoon, Ziegler arrived from Hamburg and reported on the massive air raids. Where sections of the city are in flames, the people suffocate either from lack of air or because carbon dioxide pours into the cellars. Such details make the death toll more comprehensible. An enormous cloud of ash transformed day into night, just as Pliny recounts in his description of the destruction of Pompeii. It was so dark that when Ziegler tried to write to his wife in the middle of the day he had to light a candle.

The great focal points. Prophets radiate toward them, apostles emanate from them.

Cramer von Laue brought me another book by Schubart. It places Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky in a triptych as the three main figures of the nineteenth century; as such, the great man of action is flanked on one side by the bad thief and, on the other, by the good one.

Cramer also had some information about the life of the author. It seems that before the outbreak of war he traveled to Riga to visit his wife, and there he was abducted after the Russians invaded. After that he was never heard from again. For this reason alone, his books are quite significant because they explore the Germans’ second option: our alliance with the East. It was thus no coincidence that I discovered quotations from my own Worker in his book—the book that represents my most radical swerve toward the collectivist extreme.

Traveling to Kirchhorst. I’m reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Right there in the first scene of the fourth act, Oberon says to Titania:

Sleep, in other words, has different aspects. One can also say that it possesses different dimensions, one being the duration, the other, the depth, which knows other regions than that of pure recovery. When viewed mechanistically, sleep is the simple opposite of the waking state, but the depth one can reach in sleep depends on the strengths of the different components that fuse to create it. To these belong prophecy, warning, healing, contact with the spirits of the dead. In these depths, refreshment can be extraordinary—for example, there is a kind of slumber we can sink into for a few minutes and waken from as if reborn. Illness ends with a healing sleep that flushes the remnants of the malady out of us like a bath. Throughout the ages, the healing arts have always tried to grasp this affinity. Greek culture did so especially beautifully in the temples of Aesculapius where the divinity would prophesy remedies to the dreamers in the sleeping quarters. Where those aspects of Mesmerism have proven tenable, they relate to this state of deeper sleep. Nowadays we are quite alienated from all this; in our cities sleep never achieves those deep layers where the great reward beckons, and it is horrifying to think that perhaps death loses its potency for the same reason.

Porta Westfalica.[113] When arriving from the West, I always greet it as a port of entry leading to the narrower Lower Saxon homeland. These are sacred signs; they remain standing. As I sat at the window pondering, I thought about placing my own gravestone in this region.

At my desk in the upstairs room where many unopened packets of books are stacked along the walls. Piles of Oriental carpets, rescued and brought to us by friends from the city, are also in storage here. In the entryway stand the pieces of getaway luggage, ready and packed as if this were a waiting room. The garden is overgrown; prisoners built a shelter in it. The beds and the paths are green with quickweed. On the moor and in the fields lie phosphorus canisters dropped by the bombers, along with leaflets and clumps of silver paper. At night the English fly over the house by the hundreds, while the anti-aircraft fire blazes away and shrapnel clatters down onto the roof tiles. The building seems to be losing its mooring; we relate to it in a way familiar only to inhabitants of river islands. It’s as though it had transformed itself into a ship. I only hope that it does not founder in the storm, but will reach port with its precious cargo.

In the library I am organizing piles of letters and manuscripts into folders. Later, at the microscope, where I study the water beetles I caught on the moor with Alexander. The cushions of floating mosses that flourish in the brown waters of the peat ditches conceal species of the far North that I can now compare with their western varieties that I have brought with me from the streams and ponds of the Paris basin. I take such a magical pleasure in observing such structural variation. From the tiniest details of the runes of creation we can discern differences in habitats with the sort of precision that only music can otherwise achieve. I look at the scientists of the nineteenth century as though they were typesetters who may have known their fonts, but knew nothing of the wonderful texts they worked on. This accounts for part of their greatness, which, by the way, will eventually be acknowledged.

The proximity of destruction gives new pleasure to the pursuit of these delicate objects—a new perception of their impermanence.

Local business. Perpetua visited the Grethes’ little boy, who was attacked and nearly killed by a ram. He was playing with his brother near a pasture when the animal knocked him down, probably because he was wearing a red jacket. Every time he tried to get up, the ram grew wilder, crushed both his clavicles, and butted his head, which swelled until he was unrecognizable. His little brother ran to the village to get help. He could hear the little boy trying to calm his horned attacker as he tried to get up, saying, “ram, I’m a good boy.”

A fireman who was on duty during the big attack on Hannover saw an old man running toward him down a street that was in flames. At that the very moment a tall building façade buckled and came down. It crashed down over the old man, but as soon as the dust had cleared, he could be seen standing there, unharmed. There he stood, to the amazement of the firemen, framed by a window opening like a gap in a net.

Afternoon in Hannover, which I found transformed into a heap of rubble. The places where I had lived as a child, as a schoolboy, as a young officer—all had been leveled. I stood for a long time in front of the house on Krausenstrasse, where my grandmother lived for more than twenty years and where I had kept her company countless times. A few brick walls still stood, and in my memory, I reconstructed the kitchen, the little guestroom, the parlor, and the cozy living room where my mother raised flowers on the windowsills. In a single night, tens of thousands of such dwellings, with their auras of active lives, were destroyed like nests swept to the ground by a storm.

Ernstel and I visited the house on Ifflandstrasse where my grandfather died. Just after we had walked a few paces past it, a building collapsed. Walking in this wasteland is a risk.

The tops of the church steeples were burned down, leaving their stumps towering in the air like open crowns blackened by smoke. I was glad to find that the Beginen Tower on the Hohes Ufer[114] had survived. The very old structures are stronger than the Gothic ones.

There was bustling activity in the midst of the rubble. The pushing and shoving of the gray masses reminded me of scenes I had seen in Rostov and other Russian cities. The East is advancing.

This sight oppressed me, but the pain was less than what I had felt long before the war at my own mental premonition of the firestorm. I also sensed it in Paris in 1937. A catastrophe was bound to come; it chose war as its best medium. Yet even without it, the civil war would have accomplished its work, just as it did in Spain—or simply a comet bringing fire from heaven, an earthquake. The cities were ripe for it and dry as tinder. And man was eager to commit arson. What had to come could be guessed once he set fire to the churches in Russia, the synagogues in Germany, and let his own kind rot in penal colonies without recourse to law or justice. Things have reached the point where they now cry out to high heaven.

On the Old Horst Moor. Because it was frozen, I was able to take paths among the birch groves normally trodden only by deer.

I am reading the back issues of Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Insektenbiologie [Journal of Scientific Entomology], alternating with the Jewish War by Flavius Josephus. I came across the passage again that describes the beginnings of the unrest in Jerusalem under Cumanus (II.12). While the Jews gathered to celebrate the feast of unleavened bread, the Romans placed a cohort above the columned hall in the temple to monitor the crowd. One of these soldiers lifted his cloak, turned his backside to the Jews, and bent over contemptuously “producing a lewd sound unbecoming for someone of his station.” That ignited the conflict that would cost ten thousand lives, making it possible to refer to the most catastrophic fart in the history of the world.

Of course, this example clarifies the immediate cause, or provocation, but not the actual cause. The philosophical significance of the provocation has not been fully appreciated. It can be seen as containing a powerful attack on the law of causation. In a certain sense, every provocation unleashes unintended consequences. In commerce, we are like customers writing checks; we know nothing of the bank and its reserves.

Like all physical processes, the provocation only becomes truly interesting in the world of morality. A child plays with matches and a populous city is reduced to ashes. The question is whether or not the one who caused the event under such circumstances did not play a more significant role than is generally assumed. Here I am thinking of Kniébolo—I sometimes have the impression that the world spirit[115] has chosen him in a subtle way. “In his most subtle moves he places his less important pieces to the fore.” Even the firing pin that ignites the charge with minimal energy has its particular form. One Thousand and One Nights provides a description of the intrigues of a wicked woman who is finally drowned in the Nile. The corpse washes up on land at Alexandria, where it causes an outbreak of pestilence. Fifty thousand people die as a result.

Read further in Flavius Josephus. In addition to the historical narrative, he also gives a series of general scenes of the highest quality. Among these are the descriptions of Roman military force and the city of Jerusalem. He is the source of invaluable insights.

It is curious how little Jewish culture is associated to this author, despite the fact that he was a priest and leader of his people. The Jewish element seems more difficult to cast off than other cultures, but in those rare cases where the rejection succeeds, the human quality is especially enhanced.

Visit in the evening from Cramer von Laue, who came by bicycle and brought me the book by Schubart. Conversation about the tremendous destruction in Berlin he witnessed and about the creation of a new kind of proletariat emerging under the cover of these events. I let him look at my essay about peace.

I spent the morning examining Persian insects I acquired from Reitter. Bodo von Bodemeyer brought these back from the Orient thirty years ago.

Reading matter: A. W. Thomas, Das Elisabeth Linné-Phänomen [The Elisabeth Linné Phenomenon]. The work examines the flashes displayed by certain flowers at twilight—a phenomenon that has interested, not to say disturbed, me for a while.[116]

In addition: Veressayev’s Erlebnisse [Memoirs of a Physician]. These are memoirs from the Russo-Japanese War that record the beginning of disinterested and mechanical butchery—though that had actually begun before, during the Crimean War.

Read further in Flavius Josephus; I was struck by a passage at the end of the fifth book, where the author writes that, had Jerusalem not been destroyed by the Romans, it would have been swallowed by the earth and covered by a flood, or consumed by fire from heaven like Sodom. I keep coming upon thoughts here that concern me greatly today and will probably always recur when catastrophes happen. Illness becomes irrelevant as the hour of death approaches. Death puts on masks when he detects its presence.

The remarkable passage in book seven also stood out, where he writes about voluntary self-immolation in India. Fire supposedly has the property “to separate the soul from the body in its purest possible form.” Fire functions here as a cleansing element. For this reason it is used as a means to extract the substance from the tough flesh. The same applies to the burning of heretics, such as when the spirit is entangled with the material world as it once was with luxuria [lust] in the days of Sodom.

The mail brought a letter from Carl Schmitt in which he discusses the disparity between protection and obedience that has shown up among the populace in the cellars during the bombing raids. Of all the minds I have ever met, Carl Schmitt is the one who defines things best. As a classically trained legal scholar, he wears the laurels, and his position is necessarily precarious when the demos exchanges one costume for another. With the rise of illegitimate powers, a vacuum is left in place of the top jurist, and the attempt to fill it could cost him his reputation. These are the adversities of his profession. In this respect, performers have it best nowadays; a world-famous actor will survive any upheaval without effort. To paraphrase an observation from Bacon, one could say that to survive the world of today, one should have neither too little of the actor nor too much of the honest man.

As is his wont, Carl Schmitt closes his letter with a Bible passage, Isaiah 14:17.

Browsed in the journals of the brothers Goncourt. The changes that affect a reader during this war are remarkable. One feels that huge numbers of books will not cross those customs barriers of the mind that he erects. These represent worlds of loss that go almost unnoticed. This is how moths do damage in locked cupboards. We pick up a book and notice it has lost its appeal like a lover thought about longingly whose beauty has not survived certain crises, certain adventures. Ennui will cull the collections more harshly than any censor, than any book ban. Yet it is predictable that this will be advantageous for books of the highest quality, especially the Bible.

In the entry of 16 May 1889, I found a good dream of Léon Daudet. Charcot appeared to him carrying a copy of Pascal’s Pensées. At the same time, he showed him the cells that these thoughts had inhabited in the great man’s brain. They looked like a dried honeycomb.

Nearby there is a reference to the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde. The sight of this has often reminded me of a magical pointer—in this context, it calls forth memories “of the pink color of champagne sorbet.” Such an image evokes the morbidezza [softness, delicacy] that is disintegrating the stone.

Edmond de Goncourt mentions conversations with Octave Mirbeau while, for his part, he has a connection to Sacha Guitry, with whom I have talked many times. These are bridges that connect the dead with the living across intermediary links. I often think of the erotic chain of events: Two men can have embraced one and the same woman. One of them was born in the eighteenth century before the French Revolution, whereas the other died in the twentieth century after the World War.

Departure from Kirchhorst in warm wind and gentle showers. Loehning sent his car for me. Because I missed my train, I wandered through the sorrowful ruins and in the midst of all the rubble. I recalled the evenings in Advent 1914 and even 1913, when a happy crowd laden with presents filled the streets. What a throng there was on Packhofstrasse, now transformed into two walls of rubble. My good mother used to take me along, and there she would buy me little meat pies in the morning, and in the afternoons, nut tortes.

Now the faces have changed; not only are they more tired, careworn, and sickly but also uglier in the moral sense. I notice this especially in waiting rooms where you get the feeling of sitting in a cage surrounded by animals. But isn’t it our own loneliness, our own loss, that creates this impression? Such waiting rooms emphasize the immense distance that separates us from our goal.

Then I went to Königswortherstrasse after I had visited the old cemetery on Langen Laube with its curious grave monuments. The house on the Leine River, where we lived in 1905, was undamaged. There I recalled the gloomy moods that often used to come over me on my way to school, a great feeling of isolation. In those days, I was tormented by worry about what would become of me if my mother died, as well as the feeling that I was so different from what people expected of me. Now, as I walked through the devastated streets, this long-forgotten mood returned, as if I had remembered earlier fears in some bad dream.

The rainbow in the haze that hovers over thundering cataracts—is this mist created from tears or the essence that gives birth to the pearl? It doesn’t matter; one senses the miraculous bridge that leads from annihilation.

When I picked up the French mail waiting for me in the Raphael, I found a letter from Jean Leleu about Léon Bloy, whose works people have recommended to me. He is struck by the “inhumanity” of this author. He brings the accusation that his Catholicism often stops being Christian. That is correct; Bloy, like many other Romance-language writers, could be accused of the “Spanish” variation that leads to a peculiar callousness and ultimately turns into ruthlessness. On the other hand, we have the Germanic variant, always striving toward dissolution into fundamental principles. The Grand Inquisitor and Angelus Silesius.[117]

Current reading: Horst Lange, Das Irrlicht [Will-o’-the-Wisp], a story that Kubin illustrated and sent me from Zwickledt. From his very first novel, I noticed this author’s perfect mastery of the swamp world, with all its fauna and flora, and its roiling life. Here in the desert of our literature there appears someone who shows command of his symbolism. He belongs to that sinister group of eastern writers that may someday be viewed as a school—here I am thinking of names like Barlach, Kubin, Trakl, Kafka, and others. These eastern portrayers of decadence are more profound than their western counterparts; they penetrate the surface of society, reaching its fundamental connections to the point of apocalyptic visions. Trakl is experienced in the dark secrets of decay, Kubin in the worlds of dust and mold, and Kafka in surreal demonic realms, as Horst Lange is in the moors, where the powers of destruction hold sway, where they breed. Kubin, who has known this writer for a long time, once predicted to me that bad times lay ahead for him.

Celebrated Christmas at the home of Vogel, the aircraft engineer. There I made the acquaintance of an Italian pianist named Benvenuti, who traces his genealogy back to the Donati family and shares a line of common ancestry with Dante. His face had a curious similarity to the well-known head of Dante, which was magnified alarmingly when Florence wrapped a red shawl around his head, giving his face a masklike quality.

Among the bad news that has reached me is that of the death of the young Münchhausen son. I had just gotten to know him this past spring. His manners and his intellectual style had something of the eighteenth century about them. Salmanoff also liked those qualities in him. It often seems that our preparations for the future involve a negative selection process: people, buildings, feelings—all are being pruned just as the gardener prunes the branches in a park. We are heading for a “truncated” society.

Read further in Luke, finished chapter 22 today. Here Christ accuses his adversaries of attacking him by night, although he may be found in the temple every day: “When I was daily with you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me: but this is your hour, and the power of darkness” (22:53). This is also the motto for the acts of terror in our own time, committed in horrific darkness behind facades built to the taste of the demos.

Walked my woods and water circuit alone through dense fog and balmy air. I paused on the riverbank at Suresnes at a spot where a drain muddies the waters of the Seine. There I watched a group of half a dozen fishermen. They were baiting their hooks with red maggots and flipping little silver fish with steel blue scales, about the size of sardines, out of the water.

Evening at the president’s with Leo, Schery, and Merz. Discussed the situation. The German ordnance has now been worn so thin that it won’t withstand the challenges that the new year will present here in the West.

In my Historia in Nuce [History in a Nutshell], I ought to include a chapter on the “Germanic Wars,” where I would explain that the same mistakes are always being repeated. There are secrets here that other tribes will never comprehend, such as the enchantment of Attila’s hall.[118] Was he the one who conjured up Kniébolo? Otherwise, how else can we explain this penchant, this brilliance, for avoiding victory when it has been placed in our hands?

Dreamed of Li-Ping, who was wailing for me. When I picked her up, I found her to be heavier, and now she also had a white coat: as I lifted her, I was also picking up the tomcat Jacko, who was inside her.

That is typical of dreams—there we can encounter a woman who combines traits of the mother, sister, or wife. In these hazy states, we enter the world of archetypes, which can be seen as generic images. This brings me to the thought that the genera in zoology are archetypes of the species. Like its primeval image, the genus does not exist in the everyday world, nor in the visible world. It appears only in the species, not by itself. In dreams we see things that are otherwise invisible.

When Schiller and Goethe discuss the Urpflanze [archetypal plant],[119] the difference between its day and night aspects also arises.

“To fight against [gegen] the enemy” and “to fight with [mit] the enemy”—two synonyms characteristic of the Germanic people. One fights with him, namely about something that belongs to either both or neither of them. Therefore, it isn’t actually about victory.

Shakespeare sensed the secret that Rivière surmised as well when he assigned to the Germans not the label “either-or” but “both-and.” Eckhard states the mystical version of this.

Perpetua writes that now her brother has been killed in action, too. Fate caught up with him on the Dnieper on 4 November during a reconnaissance mission. I had grown closer to him over these past years. From him, I borrowed traits for my character Biedenhorn, including his maxim:

[You fellows, bend your elbows, / the welcome cup is passed around.] [120]

Without ever giving a thought to its causes, of course he welcomed this war as a license for brawling and boozing. The ancient spirit of Lower Saxony shone through his everyday exterior. He came from one of the indigenous families that goes back to pre-Guelph times. He was someone who devoted his life to camaraderie, and that is where he thrived. Unreliable in many ways, here he was worth his weight in gold. Once when I was standing beside him in the garden near the tomatoes, I noticed that, although he was coarse, he was capable of great tenderness. I am saddened by his loss.

He fell behind the Russian lines. His comrades couldn’t retrieve his body. He had gone alone because he considered the situation too dangerous.

With Jouhandeau in the afternoon. Conversation about his new book, Oncle Henri. Then we talked about my current reading matter, the novel by his contemporary, Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes [Meaulnes the Great], published in 1913. We told each other our dreams, and Jouhandeau recounted how he had visited a doctor because of a painful infection he had developed in his index finger. The doctor split the finger open in the midsection, exposing a red lump like a bud. From this, a geranium of great beauty opened, which Jouhandeau carried carefully, with his hand stretched in front of him, from that day on.

At his place, I again saw the chick that he has raised as a surrogate for the brood hen; he fed it at the breakfast table and warmed it in his bed. It had now grown into a large white rooster with a red comb that let people stroke it, embrace it, and take it onto their laps. It would even crow if encouraged.

During the night, I thought I was standing in our garden in Kirchhorst. Out on the street, small trucks raced past. They were loaded with blocks of iron, huge cubes of white-hot steel, waves of heat radiating from them. The drivers tore past at full speed so as to distribute the heat backward. It was futile because their clothing and bodies caught fire as they shot by. Their screams of pain could be heard dying away in the distance.

At the edge of the garden, there stood a sign with ideograms on it that read, “Whoever rides upon a tiger’s back can never dismount again.” In front of this message, someone had placed a special sign like a musical clef: “western transfiguration.”

Massive squadrons flew over the city in the morning. As usual, I moved over to the Majestic, into the president’s room. It is our habit to celebrate these interruptions by making coffee and having breakfast there. We could hear the anti-aircraft batteries hard at work. Then the building began to shake from the exploding bombs as they brought devastation to the outlying precincts.

By evening over two hundred and fifty dead had been accounted for. More than twenty workers died in a shelter that took a direct hit. I heard that a woman who was trying to dig down into the rubble had called out her husband’s name. He had been doing an errand that had kept him from the disaster area and ran up out of the crowd. In moments like this, people embrace each other with great intensity, as after the Resurrection—with the power of the spirit.

Visited Dr. Salmanoff in the afternoon, who was sad about Münchhausen’s death when I found him. Discussed the situation. Salmanoff believes that an English and American landing may be expected in the coming weeks. There is much to support this, but on the other hand, there is the consideration of what advantage such an undertaking would bring to England, even if it should succeed. The longer and more thoroughly Germany and Russia continue to grind each other down, the greater England’s power grows. It is now in the position of a banker who profits from the sum total of all the losses. An attack would lead one to conclude that Russia’s strength is already greater than we suspect.

Furthermore, Salmanoff held the view that Russia’s hegemony in Europe is yet to come, and that we can count on internal political changes in that country and strong ties to Germany. Bolshevism was just a first phase; in the second, the Orthodox Church will rise again. Pillars of the new order will be the farmers in alliance with the victorious generals. People will not turn in their weapons again. A necessary consequence of victory will also be the control of the Balkans and possession of the Bosporus.

In this context, he touched on the peculiar nature of Russian colonization with the small farmer as its hero. With a piece of bread and a handful of onions in his pocket, far from the theater of world history, he will fan out over rivers, through primeval forests, and the icy steppes of three continents. Of course there is immense power here.

Concerning war reparations. These can only consist of a workforce, as prescribed by the era of the worker. Yet we will see degrees here ranging from slave labor to reparations contractually agreed upon, including the free cooperation of all those forces that once raged against each other. This is how I saw it in my Appeal. Yet perhaps hatred, which is always nourished by baser motives, makes this a utopia. By contrast, I never want to forget that a higher path—that of the spirit—leads to new worlds. We humans stand on that threshold. Like the rainbow, we shall arise from the ruins.

Of all the cathedrals only one remains—that built by the dome of our folded hands. In that alone lies our security.

1944

The year that has just passed, 1943, which I greeted in the Caucasus, has produced all that I feared. But it has not brought the end of the war, which many had predicted would happen by the autumn.

I began the new year by walking my circuit and retreating from my usual routine, enjoying a two-day siesta, conversations, reading, strong coffee, fruits, and wine.

During this time, when I was reading Hölderlin, I came upon the letter to Bellarmin, so full of terrible truths about the Germans.[121] How accurate his observation is that in this country the superior man lives like Odysseus, taunted by worthless usurpers in his own palace as a beggar. Another one also has such a ring of truth to it: “servility is on the increase and with it, coarseness of mind.”

Finished reading Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes [Meaulnes the Great]. This is one of the dry branches that stretches from Romanticism into the twentieth century. We can see how the transport of sap to the treetop becomes more difficult from decade to decade.

To end my circuit, took a long labyrinthine stroll through the crooked streets and byways of the Latin Quarter and the curious alleys around Rue Mouffetard back to the Raphael, where I slipped in by the back stairs.

I tried to visit the grave of Verlaine during the midday break but accidentally blundered into the cemetery of Clichy instead of Batignolles. At one of the walls, I encountered the gravestone of one Julien Abondance, who walked upon our earth from 1850 to 1917. Well, now I know where all the abundance has gone.

Air-raid alarms in force since this morning. They are almost a regular occurrence. I use the time to examine the Altar of the Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch in the book by Baldass. Dr. Göpel gave me this recent publication as a present. These paintings are puzzle pictures of horror that continue to reveal new and frightening details.

Bosch differs from all other painters by virtue of his literal vision, which Baldass calls his prophetic character. The prophecy consists of the deeper truths that reflect and reproduce the ages of man—as the details of the world of technology do today. One can actually discern the shapes of fighter bombers and submarines on these panels, and one of them—I think it is the Garden of Earthly Delights[122]—contains E. A. Poe’s macabre pendulum, one of the great symbols of the throbbing world of death. Bosch is the visionary of an eon, as Poe was of a saeculum. How apposite is the image of the naked man: in order to propel weird machines he runs like a squirrel, on a spike-studded wheel. The fact that Moors appear among the hosts of the blessed conceals a truth that, had it been spoken aloud, would have sent the painter to the stake.

Visited Verlaine’s grave in the Batignolles Cemetery. It bore a simple stone structure, like thousands of others one finds in Parisian graveyards. Among the names engraved on the monument was his:

A cross of blue paper violets covered this inscription, yet at the foot of the grave, there was a green bouquet from which I picked a small leaf. Not every poet still has fresh flowers on his grave after fifty years.

At the head of one of the death notices that I have received in the last few days:

“Your pathway is in the ocean, your roads in great waters, and your footsteps are unknown.”

“Eternal joy will be upon their heads.”

These two sayings contain a good contrast between the mysteries of earthly power and the clarity of heavenly power. Both are in us, which is why I take particular note of these words for the chapter “Head and Foot” in the work I am planning about the relationship between language and physique. In it I want to examine human growth as the symbolic key to cosmic structure.

The mail brought a letter from Carl Schmitt about the vis verborum [power of words] in which he quotes the Arabs Avicenna and Averroes, the Italian humanist Valla, Bismarck, and E. A. Poe. He calls Bismarck’s “In verbis simus faciles” [let us be easygoing about words],[123] an extreme case of the “Head Forester mentality.”[124] In the middle of the day, I waited for Madame Noël in the Majestic. She was working in Hamburg where her husband was blown to pieces before her eyes by an aerial bomb and her belongings consumed by flames. In addition, she is being persecuted as a “collaboratrice” [collaborator]. Because I was able to do a few things for her, she brought me a bouquet of flowers.

The first anniversary of the death of my dear father is approaching.

This morning I read further in the Gospel of John. “He must increase, but I must decrease” (3:30) is one of the greatest passages where the meaning of the words is not fully expressed. The Latin is better: “Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui.” Autem is one of the mildest of the conjunctio adversativa [adversative, or contrasting, conjunctions][125] and reveals not only a contradiction but also an association: immortal man will triumph, but at the same time, mortal man will lose.

Then I read John 4:50, which was thoroughly appropriate for this commemorative day: “thy son liveth.” Pondered this. The Master is speaking to the unbelievers, which makes these momentous words inadequate. In order to convince their dull wits, he must make visible the truth of the corporeal revelation: the corpse must be resurrected. People thus expect cheap tricks from him in all things—including an earthly kingdom. The Prince of Light must cloak his words and deeds in shadows so that men’s eyes can sense their true power. Even his miracles are parables.

Then finished reading “The Garden Party” in the stories of Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand writer who died young. In it she gives a lovely description of her country by moonlight: the shadows resemble bars of a bronze gate. I am familiar with this feeling of fear of the moon’s shadow and of its magical spell. It becomes considerably heightened when it occurs in an erotic encounter.

Finally, browsed in a portfolio of pictures of Oriental antiquities in the Louvre, especially Assyrian and Phoenician examples. One, the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar, was amusing despite its venerable age. The king of Sidon is clothed in the Egyptian funerary style, with all its provincial naiveté.

Following our conversation, Hielscher sends me excerpts from the journals of Leonardo along with some prophecies. One passage says this about human beings: “In their boundless conceit, they even want to fly to heaven, but the heavy weight of their limbs will keep them earthbound. Nothing will remain on the earth nor in the water that they will not hunt down, root out, or destroy. Nor will anything be spared that they can take from one land and haul into another. Their bodies will serve as tombs and entranceways for all living things they have killed.”

My Berlin publisher finally informs me that the entire stock of my books was destroyed in the attack on Leipzig. A further stockpile burned in Hamburg, according to what Ziegler writes me. This relieves me of many a worry.

Went to the Madeleine in the afternoon because I needed a space where I could think about my father. There I sat beside the memorial plaque for the priest Deguerry, who died in the prison of La Roquette on 24 May 1871 “pour la foi et la justice” [for the faith and for justice]. Happy is the man who succeeds in this without becoming too much of a slave to fear.

Following that, my adventure with the leper on Rue Saint-Honoré.

In a dream I saw Leisnig carpeted with bombs. Apartment houses were collapsing on distant hills, and facades of buildings were crumbling. I crossed over the market square and saw my father wearing a white coat and standing at the front door of a house. It was his old laboratory coat that was now in the service of higher research. Soldiers prevented me from entering by engaging me in conversation, but we waved to each other nonetheless.

Visit from Hotop, who as a physical type eludes the usual categories of classification. In India, he would be immediately recognizable as belonging to that particular caste whose lot it is to serve at table, in the kitchen, and in the baths, and generally attend to the pleasures inside the palaces. Theirs are natures that have a highly developed sense of touch and have also been granted a special sympathy with fear and pleasure. Here we find the most subtle connoisseurs of materials that can be evaluated by touching, tasting, or smelling. They are experts with cloth, with exquisite varieties of leather, perfumes, pearls, gemstones, woods, furniture, and refined cuisine, as well as with female slaves and all things from the world of the senses. Anyone who reads the Kama Sutra lingers in their milieu.

Their knowledge makes them invaluable to princes and great lords, for they are people who can discern rare objects, organize festivities, act as procurers, and maîtres de plaisir [masters of ceremonies]. In our country you, can find them among the ranks of the gastronomes, the manufacturers of luxury goods, the chefs of great restaurants. And it will always turn out that they have a particularly tactile sense; this is the capital they live off in the spheres of luxury and luxuria [lust]. But in every case, it is soon obvious that their efforts derive from a humble station. For them to establish themselves in elevated circles, these must consist of intellectuals or aristocrats, which explains why they rarely appear independently, but rather only in entourages. Tailors are not the ones flattered most by clothing, nor barbers by hairstyles.

Conversation about perfumes and how they are made. In order to concoct a scent for a client, the specialists in the large perfume houses do not inquire about hair color, but rather they request a piece of underwear that she has worn.

Current reading: L’Equipage de la Nuit [Night Shift] by Salvador Reyès, the Chilean consul, whom the Doctoresse introduced me to. Reyès takes as his models English-speaking authors who found their voices around the turn of the century—writers like Kipling, Stevenson, and Joseph Conrad, whose works can be described in three words: romantic, puritanical, global.

One of the images from this prose that I was particularly struck by was a description of stars that appear in the sky on a stormy night—gleaming as though they had been polished by the clouds. Although meteorologically far-fetched, this is poetically powerful. Among his sentences I find, “C’est l’amour des femmes qui forme le charactère de l’homme” [It is the love of women that forms a man’s character]. Correct, yet they shape us as the sculptor his marble: by removing parts of us.

Read further in the Gospel of John. There is the verse 8:58, “before Abraham was, I am.” By contrast, going in the other direction chronologically: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). Christ recognizes that he is the Eternal Man, and as such, he describes Himself as being of divine origin as the son of God. He will outlast the cosmos, a creation of the spirit.

Here man speaks as the eternal being, in contrast to the mortal point of view, that of the mayfly in Psalm 90. The difference between the language of Christ and that of Moses is the same as that between the prose of the baptized and that of the circumcised. Light and cosmic forces unite with the earthly.

Nihilism and anarchy. Distinguishing between the two is as difficult as differentiating between eels and snakes, but nonetheless it is essential for recognizing the game that is at stake. A relationship to order is critical here—the anarchist lacks this, but it defines the nihilist. This makes nihilism more difficult to discern; it is better disguised. A good indicator is the bond to the father: the anarchist hates him, while the nihilist despises him. Hence the examples of Henri Brulard in contrast to Pyotr Stepanovich.[126] Then we have the differences in attitudes toward the mother and particularly to the earth, which the anarchist seeks to transform into primeval forest and the nihilist, into desert. An examination would have to begin by clarifying the theological position. This will train the eye to see the figures behind the canvas, hidden behind the scenes in modern painting. This would be especially useful to our martial youth. A young person necessarily goes through an anarchist phase, during which time he can easily fall prey to the power of pure destruction.

Read further in the Gospel of John. In chapter 10, verse 34, Christ responds to doubts about his divine origin by referring to Psalm 82. There we read about the human race: “I have said, ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High” (Psalm 82:6). In the next two verses, he goes on to interpret this in relation to himself.

Passages like these are important for exegesis in the twentieth century, which must be able to counter every objection of the conscious mind, and in doing so, differ from all earlier exegeses.

What is the difference between the miracles and the parables? The parables refer to the absolute, whereas the miracles confirm the parables in time and space, that is, in the realm of episodic experience. The parables are accorded a higher status, since they are spiritual expressions, whereas miracles are material expressions.

Finished reading Silvio Pellico, My Prisons. These memoirs from 1833 create a textbook case of classical prose, to which the Italians have direct and undiluted access through these significant character types. The sentences and thoughts are presented with an instinctive knowledge of proportion. It is always obvious which is the main and which the subordinate clause; which are the main ideas and which the secondary. This has a stimulating and edifying effect, like walking among palaces and statues.

Conversation with Doctor Schnath, the archivist from Hannover. He has just returned from Lower Saxony and brought me a remarkable observation. If one were to get used to living in the destroyed cities, and afterward in the others that were spared—places like Hildesheim, Goslar, or Halberstadt—it would feel like living in a world turned into a museum or an opera set. This sense shows more clearly than the destruction itself that we have shed the old reality and the historical consciousness we were born with.

In the evening, visit to the Schnitzlers on Rue des Marronniers. Bourdin was there, the former correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and Naval Lieutenant von Tirpitz, the son of the admiral. He told us that among his father’s files from the period before World War I, he had found a lot of letters from prominent German and English Jews. They all called the possibility of a war between these two empires a huge disaster. Even if one posits purely commercial interests, these are more plausible than the opposite assumption.

Breakfast at Drouant’s with Abel Bonnard, Heller, and Colonel Alerme at the round table of the Académie Goncourt. Bonnard poked fun at the sort of speakers who prepare their speeches so well that they sound improvised. They even imitate apparently spontaneous asides as these occur to them, and then they learn these by heart. He called this a particular mutation of the confidence game.

“But what if someone lacks the gift of improvisation?”

“Then he should read from his notes. Even great orators like Mirabeau did that.”

About Poincaré: He not only memorized his speeches but prepared different versions predicting the mood he was going to encounter in the audience. In readying an address he was to give before the Assembly during a period of tension with Italy, he memorized a gentle, a medium, and a harsh version. Because the mood in the chamber was angry, he presented the third option.

About Abel Bonnard’s automobile accident; it left him unconscious for three hours. When I asked him for details:

“It was night, deepest night.”

“And do you think that it will be just that way after death?”

“I am certain of it.”

When he said that, he looked at me sadly, like someone who had revealed a terrible secret to a friend.

Colonel Alerme, who was the head of Clémenceau’s cabinet during World War I and served in the Sahara as a young officer, told us about his life among the Tuaregs. Their good breeding was not only obvious from their facial features but also in the nobility of their behavior. This is to be expected whenever race is the topic. Our modern experts are numismatists who prize only the impression, but not the metal from which the coin is minted. They are illiterates who think that the mere form of the letters is important, because they lack any knowledge of the texts.

Following that, there was conversation about riding camels. The noblest of these beasts loses its vigor when taken out of the heart of the desert and led to oases. I am noting a few details for my own Path of Masirah.

Visited Florence. During the meal, Jouhandeau told us that near the Place du Palais-Bourbon he had entered an antiquarian bookshop where a statue of an Indian god was displayed for sale because of its miracle-working properties. The bookdealer takes advantage of this by charging a fee from the stenographers when their appeals for winning lottery tickets are answered. Jouhandeau watched an older gentleman perform his devotions in the shop, which involved touching the image with his right hand while reverently removing his hat with his left. Things like this do not surprise me; we will be seeing more such marvels.

Dr. Göpel visited me in the afternoon and Friedrich Hielscher in the evening; he and I had been together in the Raphael. The conversation eventually turned to that remarkable evening in Stralau[127] in the winter of 1929 that began with the big euphonium and the burning of furniture, when Bogo and Edmond [Schultz] shook hands over the glowing embers.

Walked the woods and water circuit with the Doctoresse. There are minds we communicate with in particularly harmonious ways, not according to their degree but to their kind. Our relations are not ruled by tension but by rapport. The conversation is beneficial, relaxing, pleasing; it proceeds like clockwork, the wheels all functioning in unison. This is intellectual eros that softens any edge.

The Doctoresse called my manner of thinking that of a chemist, whereas Paul works like a mason. She’s right about the fact that I do not proceed along physical principles with a close correlation between cause and effect, but rather atomistically by osmosis and filtration of the smallest particles of thoughts. A logically correct sentence is insignificant to me if isn’t right at the level of its vowels. Hence the feeling of being active—not with consciously discrete thought processes—but perpetually, by day and night (especially during the night), like an hourglass. This makes it difficult to appreciate what I’m up to, or even fathom it structurally. Yet the change is radical; it is at the molecular level. This explains why I know people who couldn’t help becoming my friends, even through dreams.

Eros has a particular connection to symmetry—something suggested by its symbols: the bow of Cupid, the mirror of Venus, and her birth from the shell. Plato’s Symposium has the two sexes originating from a division, a separation. Two is the number of symmetry: the couple. It tries to cancel itself out in the whole, in union. This produces hermaphroditic forms in the insect world. On the right and left sides of the axis of symmetry. Sexual organs will always be symmetrical, as we see most beautifully in flowers. What is the link between symmetrical and asymmetrical design in creatures, and can we conclude anything from them about the plan behind their structures? I want to concentrate on these questions in my project about the connection between language and physique.

In addition to the existence of the physical complementary color, there is also a spiritual one. Just as green and red are part of white, higher entities are polarized in intellectual couples—as is the universe into blue and red.

The great struggles of our age take place beneath the surface: that is where the contest between the technician and the artist occurs. We have good weapons for this, such as Friedrich Georg’s Titans, which I received today from [the publisher] Vittorio Klostermann.

It is always a good feeling to hear a doctor talk about matters of health with hearty optimism. Doctor Besançon does so in his book Les Jours de l’Homme [The Days of Man], which the Doctoresse recently inscribed to me. Besançon is a pupil of Hufeland and, like him and his work, Macrobiotik[128] (and my paternal friend Parow), he estimates the human life span at 140 years. Like many older doctors, he is a cynic, but he possesses healthy common sense and a good empirical foundation.

I note the following from among his popular maxims:

“Death is a creditor. Now and then we have to pay him an installment to extend the terms of our loan.”

“Health is perpetual procreation.”

“Surprise attack, fool’s attack.” (“Tour de force, tour de fou.”)

“To cure down to the root is to cure to death.”

It is striking that, as rules for general health, he scorns the drinking of water, frequent baths, vegetarian fare, and athletic activity, especially when undertaken after age forty.

He maintains that water is impure, especially because it is not “isotonic.” He prefers good wine, sweetened tea and coffee, and fruit juices to it. Infinitely more people, he claims, have died from water than from wine.

“We digest with our legs.”

There is only one way to cleanse the pores, and that is through the cleansing power of sweat. Toweling oneself off in front of an open window followed by a rubdown with strong alcohol is preferable to frequent baths.

Fur coats are not recommended; when you remove them, a mantle of ice falls down onto the shoulders. Woolen undergarments are preferable.

In one’s later years, it is good to spend a day in bed now and then.

It is good to heat the bedroom with an open-hearth fire of dry wood, especially during those critical periods of chill that attend the changes of seasons. Central heating, on the other hand, has the effect of poison.

“Le bordeaux se pisse, le bourgogne se gratte.” [Bordeaux makes you piss; burgundy makes you itch.]

The book is profusely sprinkled with erotic curiosities. For example, when he was in his late eighties, Marshal Richelieu married a sixteen-year-old girl and lived another eight years in marital happiness. The marshal’s widow seems to have inherited longevity from him, for one evening she astonished Napoleon III with the sentence:

“Sire, as King Louis XIV once said to my husband…”

Whales must live to extreme old age—all indications point to this. Someone found the point of a Norman harpoon from the ninth century inside the body of one of these beasts.

Finished reading the Gospel of John. In the last chapter, when the resurrected Christ appears at the Sea of Galilee: “And none of the disciples dared ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord” (21:12).

When confronted by the miraculous, man falls into a state of rigidity where the power of words fails. Yet it is from here that the Word has its origin—language is freed from those who were dumb.

This corresponds to the opening of the gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). For the divine Word to reach mankind and become language, it must be revealed—then it becomes audible, divisible, becoming words the way colorless light reveals the rainbow when it is split. The phenomenon is described with the precision of a physical process in the Acts of the Apostles, 2:2–4. After the roaring of a mighty wind, there appeared “cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them,” granting the Apostles the gift of tongues. Such language lets them go out among “all” peoples, for there is something inherently indivisible, something pre-Babylonian about the nature of this Word.

My reading these days: Robert Burnand, L’Attentat de Fieschi (Paris, 1930) [The Assassination Attempt by Fieschi].

The study of assassination attempts is worthwhile because it is one of those unknowns in the historical equation. This applies only superficially, for upon closer inspection, they reveal a great deal. In the person of the assassin, even in cases of insanity, we can see the individual only against the background of ethnic tensions, political opposition, or minority identity. In addition, the assassin’s attempt must succeed. The individual of historical importance has his own aura, his superior necessity, a power that repels those fateful shots. Napoleon’s statement applies here: As long as he was under the spell of his mission, no power on earth could bring him down, whereas after he had fulfilled his mandate, a speck of dust would suffice. But how do we fit Caesar and Henri IV into this paradigm?

Assassinations often function as stimulants: They are responses to certain fundamental tendencies of the moment. One such is the failed attempt upon Lenin’s life. It is a sign of sloppy thinking to imagine that we can discern the representatives by their physical appearance. We lop off the buds on twigs so that they may blossom all the more vigorously.

In Fieschi’s case, madness—the self-destructive urge—is obvious behind such an act. This is the reverse side of the historical fabric that he is part of. Outside Louis Philippe rides past in the sunshine with his dazzling retinue, while Fieschi in his small, shrouded room where a fire burns, sets the fuse to his hellish machine resembling a pipe organ made of rifle barrels. Some of them explode, mutilating his hands and ripping open his skull, while on the street forty people heave in their own blood, among them Marshal Mortier. Such natures are agents of discord. Yet, we have to ask whether it is the diabolical machine or Fieschi that is exploding here. They restored his health with great difficulty and then decapitated him. Today he stands among the Church fathers in the catacombs of anarchy.

The chapter headings include one that delights me with its precision: “Le roi monta à cheval à neuf heures” [The king mounted his horse at nine o’clock]. In this simple sentence, the words appear in order of their importance; there is not one too few nor too many. The translation weakens it and would go like this: “Der König stieg um neun Uhr zu Pferd” [Literally: The king mounted at nine o’clock his horse]. Here the words deviate from their optimal order; in terms of logic, phonetics, and syntax, their connection is looser.

Also read Marcel Fouquier, Jours Heureux d’Autrefois (Paris, 1941) [Happy Days of Yesteryear]. This description of Parisian society from 1885 to 1935 is like a cake full of raisins in the form of wonderful quotations. Among them is an observation by the Duchess de la Trémoille: “Gullibility is spreading in inverse proportion to the disappearance of religion.”

La Rochefoucauld: “We find it more difficult to conceal those feelings we have than to affect feelings that we do not have.”

Nego [I disagree]—I think the second is more difficult. This difference of evaluation touched on one of the significant contrasts between the Romance and the Germanic peoples.

About language. A bottle of wine, a spoonful of soup, a cartload of coal—in such expressions our language emphasizes the content of containers through word placement—in contrast to soupspoon and wine bottles. The Frenchman, on the other hand, uses a special ending to designate the contents: assiettée [plateful], cuillerée [spoonful], gorgée [swallow, throatful], charrettée [cartload]. Nice how the accented “e” at the end designates “the contents” of the vessel. One could also say that it acquires an exaggerated feminine quality equivalent to pregnancy.

In bed with influenza. Visit from the president, who had heard from the commander-in-chief about the evening he spent with Baumgart and me. He said I was like a powerful motor, hard to start up but then suddenly revving in high gear.

We are distressed about Speidel; he and his army are surrounded in Russia. There is talk of General von Seydlitz appealing to him over Russian radio transmitters.

About language. Wort [word] in our language has two plural forms. The dictionaries generally state that Wörter is used for words without reference to any context, whereas one uses Worte for words that are [syntactically] connected. The definition is blurry; I tend to think that in the plural, the meaning splits into a grammatical-physical branch and a metaphysical one. Worte contain indivisible material. A similar effect is produced in other nouns by different articles, such as in der versus das Verdienst [earnings versus merit].

Got out of bed, but I still feel the influenza deep in my bones. Around midnight I received a call from Ronneberger, the Wehrmacht pastor. In my fever I saw a waiter enter the room and heard him say, “Capitaine, un appel téléphonique à longue distance” [Captain, a long-distance telephone call]. At first I wanted to stay in bed, but I thought I picked up the word “Wilhelmshaven,” and it suddenly went through my mind that Ernstel was stationed on the coast as part of the Naval Auxiliary Personnel. “There may have been a gunnery accident.” That got me up in a hurry. Downstairs I heard, to my relief, of the arrest of a group of high school students; their leaders were a boy named Siedler and a comrade of his. They have both been detained in Wilhelmshaven for a few weeks and, as far as I can understand, sentences of six and nine months have already been handed down. The reason given was supposedly candid conversations about the situation. Our boy feigned reticence and divulged nothing, although such action is only to his credit, it also seems that none of his superiors considered it necessary to inform me. Instead, the children were spied on for months in order to “collect material,” after which they were delivered into the claws of the state authorities.

It is preferable to receive such news when we are not in total control of our faculties.

Spent the morning with long-distance calls to Hannover and Wilhelmshaven. Professor Erik Wolf phoned me in the afternoon; he is staying with Valentiner and involved me in a conversation about the Buprestidae [jewel beetles] of the Kaiserstuhl region. I couldn’t follow it all with the kind of attention that this subject would otherwise elicit from me.

Because I found the boss in Wilhelmshaven to be a reasonable man, I was able to do some good on the case. It also looks as though his admiral, Scheuerlen, is not one of the really black ones.[129] Through General Loehning, the commander of Hannover, I was able to contact Perpetua so she could pay our boy a visit right away. At first the difficulty was a technical one, as it was so hard to get through by telephone. This finally succeeded thanks to the efforts of Corporal Kretzschmar, who works in the communications office.

Current reading: Lieder aus der Silberdistelklause [Songs from the Silver Thistle Refuge], sent to me by Friedrich Georg in manuscript. It is curious how his hand becomes lighter and freer to the degree that destruction advances all around us. Something mysterious lies behind the world of fire—the system of spiritual configurations that the sea of flame occasionally penetrates.

Then in the evening hours I picked up Saint-Simon again for the first time in a long while. I felt I had never appreciated the elegance of certain phrases so deeply, especially as they bring nuance to the descriptions of characters and their social positions. We also mature as readers.

Visit from Dr. Göpel, who is back from Nice and brought me an hourglass. Judging from the shape, it could date from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Its age has given the glass an opalescent sheen so that the reddish dust trickles down behind a veil woven by time. It is gratifying to have this piece, since I find the sight of mechanical clocks ever more unpleasant, especially when I am conversing, reading, or meditating and studying. One doesn’t want to calibrate such activities down to the minute—better to let the sand run in a little glass. Hourglass time is different, more intimately linked to life. No hour strikes and no hand jumps forward. Here is time that still passes, trickles, drizzles away—relaxed, erratic time.

In the evening, a Special Forces officer lectured us about the methods for interrogating and hoodwinking English and American flyers in order to get intelligence out of them. The technical side of these procedures is repugnant; our grandfathers would have considered it beneath their dignity ever to ask prisoners even a simple question of this kind. Today humans have become peculiar raw material for other humans—material to be used as a resource for work, information, et cetera. This is a condition that can only be called higher-level cannibalism. People don’t exactly fall into the hands of cannibals, although that can happen, but they are prey to the methods of the psychologists, chemists, racial thinkers, so-called doctors, and others who would exploit them. They work in the same way as those weird demons on the large panels by Bosch. With their instruments, they dismember the naked human victims they have abducted. I note this remark from the details: “that smokers are much more talkative than non-smokers.”

Got another phone call from Wilhelmshaven, where in the meantime Perpetua has used all her powers to gain access to the jail. On Tuesday, I’ll make the journey to Kirchhorst and Berlin on behalf of our boy. The commander-in-chief, whom I had Weniger inform, said, “This is one of the cases where you’re allowed to request a furlough from your general.”

Thus, we repay the debts of our fathers, and for this reason, childlessness in our hives has produced drones—unless metaphysical fecundity flourishes instead of natural reproduction. That would mean that individuals—whether clerics, donors, or breeders—join the ranks of the patres [fathers].

In the afternoon, there was noise in the corridor in front of my office in the Majestic. An Air Force corporal had encountered a woman who apparently had been deceiving and causing harm to soldiers for quite a while. He immediately grabbed her arm, and, as both parties shouted at each other, began to kick her. I watched this unseemly display as the man, who was out of control, stared at the woman with blazing eyes while she faced him like a ferret confronting a snake. Had them both arrested.

The incredible weakness—even self-destructiveness—is extraordinary when we give in to hatred to that extent.

Read further in Saint-Simon. There is something modern about the sensibility of this prince; the court is described like a large molecule in organic chemistry. The social relationships, the gradations of people’s status, down to the most delicate nuances—by contrast, much younger observers like Stendhal come across as dolts. It is indicative of Saint-Simon that he knows his task and responsibilities; it is an attitude encompassing historical pain, the knowledge of one who inhabits the city of brass.[130]

Continued reading in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. The parables of Christ all pertain to man’s relationship to God, whereas Paul’s letters focus on the relationship of human beings to one another and the idealized life within the community. That is the decline we always encounter in the history of the riches of the earth—abundance must decrease when it is passed from founder to custodian. This applies equally to princes and art. Thus a contraction in subject matter produces an increase in details, even in the relation between Bosch and Breughel.

Much from the Old Testament recurs in the New Testament in the form of heightened mirror images, and so for me the magnificent thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians seems to correspond to the Song of Solomon. It contains wonderful sentences like this: “But when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away” (13:10).

Verse 12 is also significant: “We now see through a mirror in a dark word, but then face to face” (13:12).[131]

By translating enigma with “dunkles Wort [dark word] the text loses that element from Plato’s theory of forms that graces his text in the Greek. One would have to ponder such passages for days on end.

Words. Wabe [honeycomb] from Weben [to weave]—it is the swaddling clothes [of the bees]. The resonance between Wachs [wax] and Waffel [wafer] can hardly be attributed to chance.

I was in Berlin working on Ernstel’s case; I returned on Friday. First I wanted to get in to see Dönitz, even went out to his base of operations, but I was expressly warned about him. It would only aggravate the situation and result in a more severe verdict. In general, I noticed that the Navy people had the tendency to brush me off with unruffled courtesy; this is especially obvious to anyone from a “white” staff like Stülpnagel’s.[132] I was there on an awkward mission that they wanted as little to do with as possible. I found myself directed to people who deal with such things professionally, men like the Naval judge Kranzberger. In the office of his deputy, Dr. Siedler, I was given access to the verdict, where I read a few more charges that made the case more serious. Our boy is charged with saying that, if the Germans wanted to arrange favorable peace terms, they would have to string up Kniébolo. Of the sixteen comrades named as witnesses, it was of course only one of them—the spy—who heard him say it. Yet the court accepts it as a proven fact. Furthermore, it is stated that, “during the proceeding he showed no remorse,” which suits me better. The people that we deal with in a matter like this give an accurate picture of the black and white strands from which our political fabric is spun.

The consequences of the desecration of such great cities cannot yet be assessed. It seems extraordinary that at first glance traffic seems to be increasing amidst the ruins, yet it is logical that its static counterpart, the dwellings, have been reduced in number. The roads and trains are filled to bursting. Seeing the capitol again in its new condition was less alienating than I had expected, and that reminded me that for a long time now I have had no faith in the stability of the city. Right after World War I and during the inflation, it looked as if it was beginning to deteriorate; in my mind, this period is filled with memories of a dream city. Then, after the so-called seizure of power, pickaxes were everywhere; whole streets were reduced to rubble. Ultimately, shops were looted, synagogues set afire, without such crimes ever being brought before a judge. The land stayed blood-soaked. An ecstasy raged for all red, explosive things.

Yet we must also see the destruction from the inside, like the stripping away of old skin. That creates bafflement; numbness is the consequence. America is conquering the places of ancient culture—I mean that aspect of America that has been more evident in modern Berliners with each advancing year.

I lived with Carl Schmitt, who had moved into a little villa in Schlachtensee after his house in Dahlem had been destroyed. We enjoyed a good red wine in the evening as we talked about the situation. He compared it to that of the Anabaptists during the siege: two days before Münster was captured, Bockelson promised his followers paradise.[133]

Together we read the conclusion of Volume II of Tocqueville’s Démocratie en Amérique [Democracy in America]. Amazing insights are to be found there. In the light of this perspective, our historical drama becomes small and distinct, and its players, straightforward and focused. These are writers who uphold our faith in the sensibility that lurks behind this apparently amorphous activity.

Talked more about Bruno Bauer, whose posthumous papers were bought up by the Bolsheviks before this war and sent to Moscow. Friends like Carl Schmitt are irreplaceable merely by the fact that they relieve me of the immense effort of examining them.

The next day, I left for Kirchhorst around noon.

March has begun and is bound to be a month of momentous events. I am studying what Bruno Bauer wrote about Philo, Strauss, and Renan, which Carl Schmitt handed me for my travel reading. It makes me want to study Philo more closely. The great destruction of libraries will make the hunt for books more difficult and may create a situation over the coming decades similar to the period that preceded printing. People will probably even copy books by hand. As we can read in Grimmelshausen, the fact that certain areas like Switzerland will have been spared, is again going to be a great blessing.

Life is perpetual procreation—during its course we seek to reunite with father and mother. That is our true mission, and our conflicts and triumphs derive from it. This is followed by new birth.

The way that father and mother alternate and combine within us is beautifully demonstrated graphologically. For this reason alone, collections of letters are significant—so that we may study the forces that influence our character over the course of years and decades, as well as how they are integrated.

Breakfast in bed. As I ate, I read Samuel Pepys and had a leisurely conversation with Perpetua about arranging our household in the coming time of peace. Of course, the question remains whether we shall ever reach that shore.

Read further in Bruno Bauer. His remarks about Renan’s landscape descriptions, reminiscent of opera sets, are good: actually, they remind one of landscapes by Millet. Philo urges us to practice and cultivate sensuality, for without this, the world of the senses is incomprehensible, thus leaving the “antechamber of philosophy sealed.”

Snow showers, yet the warm March sun broke through the clouds. I let its rays pour over me at the open window as I read Grabbe’s critical reviews. His pronouncements about the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller are noteworthy for their impertinence. More successful is the threat he aims at Betttina: “If the authoress carries it any further, then she shall not be treated like a lady, but rather like an author.”

What Grabbe says in his play Gothland, applies to him:

[—Man / Carries eagles in his head, / His feet placed squarely in the dung.]

In this way, each of us coins his own heraldic motto.

Textual criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers no more insights into the Bible than Darwinism does into the animal world. Both methods are projections onto the chronological plane—just as here the logos is subsumed into temporality, the same applies to species. The word becomes divisible; the image of the animal becomes but a passing phase, an impression.

By contrast, Luther’s statement applies: “The Word they shall allow to stand.” Both the Bible and the animal world are revelations, and therein lies their immense allegorical power.

In the morning, I enjoyed a letter from Ernstel, who thank God is allowed reading matter in his cell.

The weather was stormy, the sky covered by huge, blindingly white cloudbanks. Just after eleven o’clock several squadrons flew over the house; they were encircled by numerous little fire bursts that stood out sharply against the bright patches. The aircraft also left white vapor trails behind as they made their gentle curves, like skaters on blue ice.

Read further in Gide’s Journal, which wore me out. Every diary is of course a reflection of the author; but it mustn’t produce a result like this. His wonderful sense of justice, however, is significant. He has an ear that can calibrate the words and sentences of his prose with the precision of a jeweler’s scale, but this too is merely an endowment, a result of this profoundly derived origin; it lends its bearer prominence beyond the borders of his own country.

Later began reading Journal d’un Interprète en Chine [Journal of an Interpreter in China] by Count d’Hérisson, which I came across in my library. When writing such descriptions of distant countries and important events, it’s an advantage when the author does not possess too much expertise. In order to describe Goethe, for example, a second Goethe would be less suitable than Eckermann.[134]

Departure from Kirchhorst. During the morning, I went through my old journals from Rhodes and Brazil but could not make up my mind whether to take one of them along to Paris.

Again, as so often when I have parted from Perpetua, I had the feeling that there will be huge changes before we see each other again. At the moment when we were saying goodbye, General Loehning’s driver, who had come to pick me up, delivered the news that Wilhelmshaven had been badly bombed. Our distress was great when we thought of the flimsy barracks where our boy is being held prisoner.

On the train, I had a conversation with a doctor with the rank of colonel about childhood memories of Hannover from 1905. “Before 1914”—the awareness of this date is going to become as meaningful as “before 1789” once was. Then we talked about Russia and the Russians, whose language my interlocutor seemed to speak fluently. One of the proverbs he quoted sounded especially pertinent: “A fish rots from the head down.”

With great delays along the tracks we passed through cities on alert, like Cologne, where a bomb had just hit the slaughterhouse, mutilating sixty people.

Thought about this and that in my semi-waking state. Perpetua’s penetrating comment on Weininger came back to me: “He must have committed suicide in the autumn.” In this regard, she possesses judgment and because she is not impressed by elaborate scholarly methodology. She sees through it as if it didn’t even exist, in order to evaluate its proponents. In contrast to her, keen intellects sometimes resemble ostriches: when they stick their heads into their theories, speculations, and utopias, they are burrowing into crystallized sand and unwittingly make themselves figures of fun in her eyes.

After passing San Miguel, I took pleasure again in the sight of the first flying fish. I perceived a school of them flying past on the starboard side. I was hyperaware of this—down to the drops of water that dripped like pearls from their fins. Yet this was a mental construct. The creatures seemed to be made of mother-of-pearl, nearly transparent. I thought this apparition was an optical illusion, especially because I had been expecting such an image. Then I saw a second school appear before the bow, and others corroborated this. The two images captured both ideal and empirical reality—the reality of the dream and everyday reality. My imagination worked incomparably harder to produce the first image, which shone forth more wondrously. Were those really fish that glowed in the opalescent light, or just the sunbeams flickering on the waves that affected my inner being? The question seems almost trivial. At times I have had the same experience with animals—as though I have invented them, but then they were familiar to me. The mythical aspect takes precedence over the historical.

At two in the afternoon, the train rolled into the Nordbahnhof [North Station].

Continued reading in the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians. There I find verse 15:22: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

Appreciating the difference between natural and supernatural man is like discovering a higher chemistry. Christ is the agent who makes mankind capable of metaphysical bonding. Humans have possessed the innate possibility since the very beginning. Thus the sacrifice does not create them anew, but rather “releases” meaning, translates them to a higher level of activity. This has always been the power of matter.

I leave the house in the morning, and as I descend the stairs, I remember that I have forgotten my keys. I return to put them in my pocket and a minute later am back out on the street again. In so doing I encounter different people, different experiences. I meet an old friend whom I haven’t seen in twenty years; a flower shop is just opening up, where I spot an unfamiliar species; I step on an orange rind that a pedestrian in front of me has dropped; I fall and sprain my arm. And so that lost minute is like the smallest turn of a screw on an artillery piece calibrated to hit a distant target. Truly an aspect that has often frightened me—especially in this time of malicious clashes on my way through a world fraught with danger.

I have to comfort myself by saying that, although the number of coincidences is infinite and unpredictable, in every combination, they probably lead to the same result. When measured by this result, rather by than its individual moments, the sum of a life produces a fixed quantity, namely the image of fate that we are destined for, and which—when viewed temporally—seems to be made of a series of accidental events. When viewed metaphysically, such points do not exist in the course of our life, any more than they do in the flight path of an arrow.

Then we have great minds like Boethius, who provide a theological resolution to this labyrinth. As long as we follow our destiny, chance is powerless; we are guided by our trust in Providence. If we lose this virtue, chance is set free and attacks us like armies of microbes. Hence, the regulatory function of prayer, as an apotropaic force. Chance remains crystallized, calculable.

Certain aspects of nihilism resolve everything into coincidence. Modern man’s ridiculous fear of microbes belongs among these. This is particularly prevalent in the most benighted regions and is on the same level as the witch and demon craze of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This also applies to many abstractions in modern physics, which as scienza nuova [new science] releases powers of randomness that can be controlled only by the queen of the sciences: theology. Hence, it is so important that our best minds devote themselves to its study, which is in decline. There is no place for half measures. The close connection between science and faith—so characteristic of our age—makes it desirable that anyone who would become a master, magister, in this area, must first pass his journeyman’s test in specific disciplines. The most advanced should have an overview of the whole; that provides the evidence for their authority.

This solution would put great areas of controversy to rest. For example, the dispute about secular versus religious education. The precondition is that the state gets involved in a completely different way. The liberal national state is completely incapable of this. Given the way things may stand tomorrow in Russia and in Europe, there is hope of realizing the spiritual worlds we are trying to create. Then that nightmare will subside, which today robs so many of their desire to live: the hollow feeling of being without purpose in the midst of extermination, where they are victims of pure chance. People will also comprehend what happened during these years in Russia, in Italy, in Spain, and in Germany, for there are depths of suffering that will remain forever meaningless if they prove fruitless. And in this lies the immense responsibility of the survivors.

Visited Florence at midday. There I saw Dr. Vernes, the great expert and syphilis specialist. We discussed patients’ payments to doctors, which he said he considered as immaterial as the method of payment for the fire brigade during a blaze. It’s curious how in our day and age notions of sickness have become distinct from the individual—here, too, ownership gets lost. In fact, both the capitalist and the Bolshevist systems arrive at the same results. That was apparent to me in Norway. Vernes invited me to visit his laboratory on Tuesday.

Conversation with Jouhandeau, who recommended that I read Michelangelo’s correspondence with his father. Supposedly it contains important advice about health and how to lead one’s life.

My text The Worker and Friedrich Georg’s Illusion of Technology are like positive and negative prints of a photograph. Their simultaneity of methods suggests a new objectivity, although a narrow mind will merely find contradiction in them.

Thought while at the Métro station Concorde: how much longer will I continue to follow these tunnels and tubes dreamed up by technological brains around the turn of the century?

Illnesses of this sort can only be cured by amputating the head. This is from La Roquette.[135]

The Christian in the twentieth century has more in common with the first-rate physicist, chemist, and biologist than with the Christian of the nineteenth.

Books in name only, but actually just psychological machines to manipulate people. The reader enters a chamber and gets a dose of cosmic radiation. After reading the book, he becomes someone else. Reading, too, is now different—it is accompanied by the awareness of danger.

The mail included a letter from Speidel, which was also a confidential report on the breakout battle of Uman,[136] which he had commanded. It is a document of human struggle, human suffering, human courage, that one can only read with the deepest respect. The operation was preceded by the decision to burn the vehicles and leave 1,500 casualties with their doctors and medics to meet their fate. This will improve the situation and straighten out a lot of things.

Visited Dr. Vernes’s institute in the afternoon. I started out with him in the laboratory, where I had a long discussion with a white-bearded cancer researcher, an affable man who produced genealogies of vulnerable families. Members who had been spared by the scourge were designated by white circles, whereas victims showed up on their branches as dark spots. The pattern resembled a page of musical notes and made me think of the mighty symphony of fate lying sealed and impenetrable within it.

“Here you see the uncle of this woman who had cancer of the nose; he had a predisposition to the disease, which never presented itself in his case.” In doing so, he gestured toward a fetus in a jar of alcohol.

I also saw pictures of two aged sisters, twins who developed breast cancer simultaneously at age ninety-two. Such a demonstration made it clear that our modern science provides more data about piety than any earlier one.

I then went with Vernes into his dispensary, where the doctors were checking in the swarm of three hundred syphilitics. They were channeled to the examination cubicles, where women were seen to pull their skirts up and their underpants down to get injections in the buttocks. At the same time, other doctors in white coats were giving patients Salvarsan[137] in the veins of their arms or drawing blood samples. At the end of this row of booths stood a cot where a nurse was attending to an old man; he had collapsed in reaction to an injection that was too strong.

The whole thing resembled a huge machine that the patients fall into only to be directed to one or the other course of treatment dreamed up by the brain of Dr. Vernes according to how they respond. He is the inventor of a purely mathematical medical treatment and is thus the polar opposite of Dr. Parow, who treated me in Norway. Of course, their patients are also very different: Parow devoted his attention to independent individuals, while Vernes’s task is to treat the anonymous population of the metropolis. This makes illness something else again; one person sees the individual corpus of the sickness, while the other sees its mycelium.[138] In Vernes’s patients things other than the individual are the most important factor—things like statistical curves and sociological indicators. Parow, on the other hand, rarely mentioned syphilis; such labels were mere abstractions for him. He considered every patient to be unique.

During the night, I had dreams of worlds that had advanced along the same lines as our own. I was standing at a desk inside a gigantic airplane and observing the pilot, who sat at a second table as we took off. He was distracted and several times almost grazed mountain ridges as we flew over them. Only the utter composure with which I watched and spoke to him prevented disaster.

The progress of the years is like the motion of a centrifuge. It spins and precipitates an extract of minds that have greater range, thus creating a small body of European and world talent.

I cannot shake this influenza. It turned chronic when I interrupted my healing sleep. Was with Heller and Velut in a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées at noon. We sat there in the warm sun on the first day of spring and toasted each other with red wine. Velut is engaged in translating The Worker. We talked about the word style, which he plans to use as the equivalent of German gestalt [shape, form]. That alone suggests the difficulty of the enterprise. Precise empirical intelligence.

My influenza is gradually abating; the cough is going away and my temperature is back to normal. I can tell this by the fact that the telephone receiver is dry after I have made a call.

The mail brought a letter from Kubin in which he writes about his drawings for the edition of Myrdun that Bruno Ziegler is planning.

Yesterday I finished the draft of my Sicilian journal from 1929. I have entitled this “The Golden Shell.” The text became significantly longer during the writing. Brief notes from travel journals expand like tea blossoms when I’m revising. They provide scaffolding for memory.

Read further in Paul. His Letter to the Colossians contains the lovely passage in 2:17: “Which are a shadow of things to come.” This sentence includes the sublime flowering of Greek wisdom. We too are shadows cast by our own body. One day it will emerge.

Visited Banine for coffee again after a long absence. The lovely Paulownia in her garden is still in in its winter dormancy. On my way home, I passed the antiquarian bookseller, whom I once noticed snoozing among her rarities. I would enter her shop if I saw an item in the window that gave me an excuse to do so—but there hasn’t been any bait with sufficient appeal for quite a while.

Pondered further the nature of symmetry and its relationship to necessity. Perhaps we need to start with atoms and move from them to molecules and then to crystals. What is the relationship of symmetry to sex, and why is symmetry a particular feature of plants and especially of their sexual organs? In addition, there is the symmetry among nerves and structures of the brain as those vessels that give form to the mind. And then again, all symmetry can never be more than secondary. Tibetans avoid it when they construct their buildings for fear of attracting demons.

I began revising the text of my essay on peace.

The mail brought a letter from Rehm signed “Your unforgettable Rehm.” He describes his escapades in the East, including his two wounds. Earlier, in 1941, he broke his arm on a dark staircase in Magdeburg during an air-raid alarm, and then last autumn, he was hit by a piece of shrapnel. A little while ago he also injured his wrist. I finally recall a similar injury that he had on the same arm on the Westwall [Siegfried Line]. It sometimes seems that astrologers point to a well-founded relationship when they see in our horoscopes that particular organs or areas of the body are at special risk. There are other explanations for this, such as our inborn dancer’s rhythm, which always makes us commit the same faux pas. But for all this, the horoscope provides the best key.

Read further in Paul. There, in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2:11): “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.”

Yesterday, Sunday, went to Saint-Rémy-les-Chevreuses with the Doctoresse; after I recommended her to Vernes, she is now working for him. Breakfast in the restaurant de l’Yvette. How lovely it would be here in peacetime. It was the warmest, sunniest day we have had for a long time, yet the trees and bushes blazed in the sunshine without any hint of green. View from the slopes across the expansive landscape, where a couple of solitary English or American pilots were performing their Sunday afternoon flight routines.

My reading these days: Smith, Les Moeurs curieuses des Chinois [Chinese Characteristics (1894)]. Contains good observations. In addition, Lord Byron’s Letters and Journals, and the poems of Omar Khayyam: red tulips spouting from the soft earth of a graveyard.

Continued going over the Appeal. It is true that many of my views have changed, especially my assessment of the war and of Christianity and its permanence. But you never know when working down in these old mine shafts whether you are going to hit a seam. You also have to view the structure, which resembles an hourglass: When the grains of sand approach the point of their greatest volume, of the greatest friction, their movement is different from when they have passed that point. The first phase is governed by the law of convergence, of the choke point, of total mobilization; the second is subject to their final position and dispersion. And yet they are one and the same atoms spinning and producing the shape.

Lieutenant Colonel von Hofacker paid me a visit in the evening, and when he entered, he took the telephone receiver off the hook. He is one the figures in our circle, whom the staff has designated with a particular name. They call him “L’Aviateur” [The Pilot], while Neuhaus is called “Il Commandante” [The Commandant], and I am “La Croix Bleue” [The Blue Cross].[139]

Although he had removed the telephone receiver, he did not seem at ease in my office, where we have dealt with so many issues. He invited me to accompany him out onto Avenue Kléber for a heart-to-heart talk. As we walked back and forth between the Trocadéro and the Étoile, he informed me of details from reports by his confidants who work for the General Staff at the highest echelons of the SS leadership. People there view the circle around Stülpnagel with deep suspicion. Hofacker told me that Pastor Damrath and I are looked upon as opaque and suspect. He thus thinks it advisable that I leave the city for a while and go to the South of France, perhaps Marseille. He is prepared to suggest this to the commander-in-chief. All I could say in response was that I would await a decision.

Following this we discussed the situation, and he listed a series of names beginning with von Goerdler. His name has been mentioned for years in all sorts of contexts, especially if one knows Popitz and Jessen. It is impossible that Schinderhannes [Himmler] and Grandgoschier [Goebbels] are not informed of this, especially if one thinks of the Mexican characters disguised as generals who eavesdrop in the Raphael and the Majestic.

Hofacker believes that the Fatherland is now in extreme danger and that catastrophe can no longer be avoided, but can probably be mitigated and modified, because the collapse in the East is a more terrible threat than that in the West and will surely be compounded by extermination on the grandest scale. Consequently, we shall have to negotiate in the West, namely before there is an invasion. In Lisbon, they are already making preparations. This is all predicated on the removal of Kniébolo, who has to be blown to pieces. The best opportunity would be during a conference at his headquarters. Hofacker gave names of people in his inner circle.

As in other similar circumstances, I expressed my skepticism here—the objection that fills me with mistrust at the prospect of an assassination. He contradicted me: “If we don’t prevent the fellow from getting to the microphone, it will take him five minutes to turn the people around again.”

“You will just have to be more forceful at the microphone. As long as you lack that power, they won’t be brought over to your side by assassination. I think one could create a situation that would make it possible simply to arrest him. If Stülpnagel wants—and there’s no doubt of this—Rundstedt must go along with the plan. That will put the Western radio transmitters into your hands.”

We then went back and forth as I had done with Schulenburg, Bogo, and others. Nothing says more for the extraordinary aura that Kniébolo creates around himself than the extent to which his strongest opponents depend upon him. The big match will be played out between the voting demos and the remnants of the aristocracy. If Kniébolo falls, the hydra will grow a new head.

Birthday. The president arranged a little table with candles in my room. Valentiner, who had come over from Chantilly, was among the well-wishers. Read further in Paul, where I found this good maxim in the section for today: “And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully” (II Timothy, 2:5). Went to the Pavillon d’Arménonville at noon. The air was already filled with tiny insects. Their shiny buzzing in March has always seemed especially festive and mysterious, as if they let us glimpse a new area of sensation, a new dimension.

To Florence in the evening. This is the third time I have celebrated my birthday with her, and as we were sitting around the table, the air-raid sirens sounded, just as they had the first time. The mood was gloomy following numerous arrests in the city. Jouhandeau said that in his hometown young people were killing each other “pour des nuances” [over trivia].

“Gegen Demokraten helfen nur Soldaten.” [Only soldiers are any use against democrats.] That may have been right in 1848, but it’s not even true anymore in Prussia. Given the primitive condition we’re in, we should rather follow the adage that you can only fight fire with fire. Democracies regulate themselves on a global scale. For this reason, the only thing left is civil war.

If, however, the warrior caste thinks it can benefit from this, it is deceived. The best minds on the General Staff were not only against the occupation of the Rhineland and adjacent territories but also against compulsory rearmament in general. The commander-in-chief told me some details of this that every later historian will declare to be implausible. The situation could be described as a paradox: the warrior caste certainly wants to support war but in its archaic form. Nowadays it is waged by technicians.

This is an area that includes the attacks of the new rulers against the ancient concept of military honor and the remnants of chivalry. When I studied the documents, I was often astonished by Kniébolo’s intransigence in minor differences (to put it diplomatically), for example, in the dispute over the heads of a handful of innocent people. We will never grasp this if we cannot see through his desire to destroy the nomos [law, customs], which guides him infallibly. This can be expressed impartially: He wants to create a new standard. And because there is still so much about this new Reich that is medieval, it involves a steep decline.

When viewed politically, man is almost always a mixtum compositum [hodgepodge]. Time and place exert huge demands upon him.

In this sense, when seen from the ancestral and feudal perspective, I am a Guelph, whereas my concept of the state is Prussian.[140] At the same time, I belong to the German nation and my education makes me a European, not to say a citizen of the world. In periods of conflict like this one, the internal gears seem to grind against each other, and it is hard for an observer to tell how the hands are set. Were we to be granted the good fortune to be guided by higher powers, these gears would turn in harmony. Then our sacrifices would make sense. Thus we are obligated to strive for the greater good, not for our own benefit, but for reasons of our mortuary practices.

Farewell breakfast for Volckmar-Frentzel. The Leipzig publisher is returning to his old profession, since his books, machinery, and buildings have all been destroyed in the bombings. While I was there I spoke with Damrath, the pastor of the Garnisonkirche [Garrison Church] in Potsdam. The commander-in-chief has decided to send Hofacker there so that Damrath wouldn’t have to do without our company. Damrath also quoted the motto he had inscribed on his great bell in Potsdam. He had chosen a passage from the letters of Friedrich Wilhelm I to Leopold von Dessau: “Were I only to till the land without making Christians of the people, then nothing at all would help me. He who is not devoted to God will not be devoted to me, a man.”

A quotation from Léon Bloy could be placed beside that: “Il n’y a plus de serviteurs dans une société qui ne reconnaît plus Dieu pour maître.” [A society that has ceased to recognize God as its master no longer has servants.]

Departed for Kirchhorst in the evening, where I will spend several days of furlough to work on Ernstel’s case. I am also hoping to see him in Wilhelmshaven, where he’s in jail while his case is still undecided. But he must gain his freedom before the catastrophe.

Huge delays are holding up the train; these are caused by the daily attacks on the lines and stations. My reading: the Journals of Byron and Les Moeurs curieuses des Chinois.

Two young officers from the tank corps sitting by the window; one of them stands out by virtue of his fine features, yet for the last hour they have been talking about murders. One of them and his comrades wanted to do away with a civilian suspected of spying by throwing him into a lake. The other man expressed the opinion that after every time one of our troops is murdered, fifty Frenchmen should be lined up against the wall: “That will put a stop to it.”

I ask myself how this cannibalistic attitude, this utter malice, this lack of empathy for other beings could have spread so quickly, and how we can explain this rapid and general degeneration. It is quite possible that such lads are untouched by any shred of Christian morality. Yet one should still be able to expect them to have a feeling in their blood for chivalric life and the military code, or even for ancient Germanic decency and sense of right. In principle they aren’t that bad, and during their short lives, they are willing to make sacrifices worthy of our admiration. We can only wish that the words “above reproach” might be added to their unassailable motto, “without fear.” The second has value only in conjunction with the first.

Sitting opposite me was a first lieutenant, a paratrooper, with a book. He turns the pages silently, pausing now and then to raise his head and stare into space, like someone in contemplation. Then he continues his reading, smiling suddenly when he comes upon an entertaining passage. “The Reader”—a huge topic and an important emblem of intellectual humanity.

In Aachen in the afternoon, and then via Cologne through the succession of burned-out western German cities. It is horrible how quickly we grow accustomed to this sight.

“By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted: but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked” (Proverbs 11:11). A word of wisdom for future cornerstones, for new city gates.

Organized notes and books and browsed a bit in Byron’s Don Juan.

My compatriots from Lower Saxony. Today I found evidence in the Hildesheim Chronicle of that unshakable calm that is one of their finest intrinsic traits. On 1 August 1524 fire broke out in the Neustadt area of Hannover, destroying a huge number of houses and ultimately spreading to the top of the Pulverturm [Gunpowder Magazine]. The lead roof began to melt and drip down the walls. Master Builder Oldekopp was directing the firefighting efforts from atop the tower; beside him stood his son, Johannes. After the father had tried various ways to get him to leave his post, he said, “even one of us here is one too many—don’t you know that we probably have twenty tons of gunpowder under our feet?”[141] Only then did the younger Oldekopp leave his station.

Went to the Oldhorst Moor with Alexander to examine the anthill I discovered last winter. It’s always gratifying to accomplish such a goal—another knot tied in the net of life. The tiny creatures were very active; among their guests I found one unfamiliar to me: Myrmecoxenus subterraneus [darkling beetle], which Chevrolat, erstwhile tax official in Paris, described in 1835.

Along our way, we stepped into a shed because American bombers were being fired on overhead; on the way home we got soaked. Conversation about Don Quixote’s adventures with the fulling mills and the fairy Peri Banu from One Thousand and One Nights.

The lilies are poking their heads up in the garden and the Eremurus proclaims its presence with six hardy shoots. Everywhere on the overgrown lawn the crocuses that I planted with Friedrich Georg before the war are blazing—pure golden yellow, deep blue, white on an amethyst ground that sends out veins to embrace the calyx like clasps on a silver goblet. These vivid hues are cheering: the brilliance of the first flush. With these little brown bulbs I planted treasure here, which, like a fairytale hoard, sometimes makes its way to the surface. The plant kingdom contains an entire system of metaphysics that becomes discernible in the annual garden cycle.

The golden pollen deposited on the blue ground of the calyx by bumblebees.

Spent the evening browsing in my old journals, which Perpetua had packed away in a special suitcase. I see that I have always had to wait a few years before I look at notebooks like this again. Over time certain passages wither on the vine, while others continue to mature.

Also read in Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom. There in paragraph 46 one reads the warning not to call upon God with names other than those that are proper to him—such as not calling him something like Jupiter. Particular sounds and syllables could act like whirlwinds and attract other gods with those names. Noted this for my piece about vowels.

Out on the meadow in the afternoon where, in the company of Alexander, I dug wild acacia from the soil. While we worked, two American squadrons flew over in broad daylight. They ran into massive anti-aircraft fire over the city, and not long afterward, we saw one of the planes return with a stream of smoke coming from its right wing. Massive anti-aircraft fire followed it out of the cauldron and went silent once its fate became clear. Above us the plane plunged downward in a curve as three parachutes dropped clear of it. Without a pilot, it now made a constantly widening spiral. We thought it was going to crash near the house, but it floated toward the woods at Lohne, where a dark copper-colored sea of flames billowed up right after it disappeared. This then turned into a wall of smoke. Who could have imagined such drama in our quiet village?

After the famous void of the battlefield, we enter a theater of war encompassing operations that are visible for miles around. As a result, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of spectators participate in the great aerial battles.

Read further in Don Juan. In the third canto, beginning at verse 61, there is a prototype of a sumptuous banquet where sensuality and intelligence compete.

Reflected on the immense numbers of books lost to the bombings. Old books are going to be rare; to reprint them will require intelligent planning. It would be possible to blaze a trail through utterly ruined terrain by reconstituting the classics in theology, world literature, philosophy, and other individual disciplines through a series of good editions. Then we could move down the ladder to include third- and fourth-rate authors, and then include the outliers, and produce these subdivisions in smaller print runs. This would bring certain advantages, such as forcing people’s minds to engage with essentials.

Of course, it will be difficult to replace the journals, but perhaps they can be reconstructed from various library holdings. The collective nature of our existence will greatly promote library culture in general.

Have returned from the coast, where I had traveled with Perpetua to work on Ernstel’s case. We departed on Easter Monday. Even Easter Sunday brought numerous sorties with Vollalarm [general alarm] or “Vollala,” as three-year-old Peter, the little evacuee child staying with us here says. As we were leaving, I again noticed the blue calyxes of the crocuses in the garden; their deep background color showed a saffron dusting left by the bees. Those are hearty provisions for a journey.

There are many reasons why traveling is so difficult at the moment, but the planes cause the most trouble. We went through Oldenburg an hour after it had been attacked, and when we got out in Wilhelmshaven, we were greeted by the wail of sirens. We had met two officers on the train. One of whom, Emmel (an adjutant of the commandant) had already visited Ernstel in his cell on his own initiative. We did not let the alarm hold us up, but went right to the hotel. Once we had eaten there, we went to look for Dean Ronneberger in his half-demolished apartment.

The next morning a new alarm sounded while we were waiting for the streetcar in front of our hotel. We decided to walk along the streets that were quickly becoming less and less crowded, laden down with our parcels for Ernstel. We finally stepped into one of the air-raid bunker towers. Here you have the feeling of stumbling into a particular section of the Inferno that Dante missed on his progress. The interior of such a tower is like the cavity inside a snail’s shell. A gently sloping walkway spirals around a central axis; countless benches hug the walls. Large segments of the population huddle here to await whatever might come. The snail shell was filled with human plasma, exuding a feeling of stifling dread. As I walked up the spiral path, I examined the exhausted faces dozing there. The populace in cities like this spends a significant part of its days and nights crouching in these joyless towers. As in all such facilities, here you find the dreamlike vegetative state intimately combined with mechanical activity. I could hear the humming of fans as well as a voice that intermittently called out, “Conserve oxygen!”

After we had looked this spiral over and sensed that it was more distressing there than the thought of being hit by a bomb, we went outside and found a place to sit in a neglected garden amidst the rubble. There was still a little bit of shooting, but then the sirens announced the all clear.

In the detention center. A sergeant led our boy into the room where we were waiting. He looked pale and weakened. His chin protruded and showed little wrinkles. His eyes were sunken and had lost their childlike vigor; they communicated premature experience. Yet his bearing was good, both modest and strong. Seeing him sitting there in front of me in his short sailor’s jacket, I was reminded of how much he had longed for military laurels when he was a child, and how all his thoughts and energies focused on battlefield glory. He wanted to prove himself worthy of his father and was thus drawn to the most dangerous assignments. “You’ve acquitted yourself well, my boy,” I thought to myself, “and it’s a good thing that I understand that as a father.” This war that is being waged among nations represents just the crude backdrop—the struggle involves more dangerous trophies. And I realized it was a good thing that I had come to this modest cell wearing the high order of World War I. We truly knew a kind of glory no longer accessible to these boys, and for that reason, their achievement is all the greater.

The next day we traveled on to Cuxhaven to visit Admiral Scheuerlen, commander-in-chief of the coastal defenses of the German Bight[142] and presiding judge in Ernstel’s case. We discovered him to be an exceptional person. When one is involved in a case like this, it is possible to observe both of the actual points of contention in the greater process. Whether the man one meets is a human being or a machine is revealed in the first sentence he utters.

This was my last day of furlough, and I picked up some peas for Ernstel and planted my good wishes for him along with them. Today I plant the seeds without knowing who will harvest their fruits.

Cut some chervil in the garden. This little herb is to soup what woodruff is to wine. It grows in abundance under the old lime tree, and Alexander helped me pick it. I kept a nervous watch in case he picked hemlock by accident. This led us to a conversation about the cup that Socrates drank—his first introduction to the subject.

I brought back seeds in bulk from France. They have different shapes and coloration, and we’ll just have to see how they take here.

During the night, I was in Japan, where I acted boorishly toward strangers and strange things. I thought the rack used to display a shop’s merchandise was a stairway and started to climb it. This caused some damage. The Japanese regarded me with apprehension that mixed courtesy with disgust.

Afterward, in a room where I found men and women on a sofa intoxicated with ether. One of them staggered toward me lifting a heavy jug, ready to strike out. Because I could see that he was drunk and would miss his mark, I tried not to move, “Otherwise he is going to hit me by mistake.”

In the afternoon, Loehning sent a car to drive me to the station, where I boarded the train to Paris in a deluge of shrapnel.

On vowels. A new version of this essay would include the suggestions that the sound gradations of words are not arbitrary: When we perceive new things, several words usually suggest themselves to name them. The spirit of language will choose the most fitting of these and establish it as usage. In doing so, it will give precedence to the sequence of sounds rather than to logical meaning. For this reason, the word Auto is more powerful than Kraftwagen [car, vehicle].

Massive sorties last night, defensive fire, bombs hit the 18th Arrondissement and Saint-Denis. In the morning, I discovered the residents of the Raphael gathered for the first time in the air-raid shelter. A sort of lethargy kept me in bed. We hear that hundreds were killed.

Visited the Schnitzlers at midday; they are leaving tonight.

Current reading: the journal of First Lieutenant Salewski, who describes his days in the cauldron of Uman. Horst Grüninger sent me the manuscript. I also discussed it with Speidel, who has been given a command under Rommel; yesterday I saw him for the first time in a long while. Salewski’s description is straightforward and objective. It has the coldness of molten metal that has hardened to a mirror finish, rather like the air around an abandoned outpost. I found familiar trains of thought, but they seemed to have sprung from seeds that had drifted over the garden wall onto sand and grown there under extremely austere conditions. All this is edifying because the cauldron is the purest expression of our situation; that was obvious to me before this war began. It was prefigured by signs such as the fate of the Jews.

Visited Heller in the afternoon, where I looked at the picture Dr. Göpel had given me for my birthday. On the way, I found the Place des Invalides cordoned off. In its center, a battery of heavy anti-aircraft guns had been constructed, surrounded by stacks of ammunition and small pointed tents for the troops. There was something ominous about this sight, especially the presence of tents in the middle of such a huge city, which was beginning to look like a deserted wilderness.

My place is at the bridgehead that crosses a dark river. My existence on this projecting arch becomes more untenable every day as its collapse becomes more imminent—unless its mirror image stretches across to meet it from the other side to complete and perfect it. But the other shore is blanketed in dense fog, and only sporadically can lights and sounds be vaguely discerned in the darkness. That is our theological, psychological, and political situation.

Excursion into the Trois Vallées.[143] In order to get a sense of the people’s resilience, you have to see the rural populace—people who live on the country roads, not just the grand boulevards.

[In the distant forests / One hears the cuckoo’s call.]

I spent last evening and a large part of the night in the company of the commander-in-chief, who brought Colonel Ahrends, Baumgart, and the mathematics professor Walther with him to my malepartus [fox’s den]. The general’s love of mathematics led to a conversation about prime numbers and then turned naturally to military and political topics via questions of ballistics and rocket experiments, which are planned for the near future. After Walther had said goodbye—he was passing through and wanted to make the night train—I spent a while alone with the general. He gave me a description of the situation, in particular of Rundstedt’s character. It is due to him that we have not had any clarification or transparency in the West by now.

Anyone who knows Stülpnagel, Popitz, and Jessen—or even Schulenburg and Hofacker—has a picture of the Fronde.[144] One can see that the moral element—not the political—is ready to make its move. It is the weaker part of the operation, meaning that the situation could take a turn for the better if a Sulla were to appear, or maybe just a simple Volksgeneral [people’s general].

Concerning mirrors and the curious change they encourage in human facial expressions. When our glance wanders and sees conversational partners in the mirror, completely new traits are revealed. Their ancestors could have looked out from them in the same way, or intellectual substance is revealed that was otherwise concealed. This has an especially strong effect when the surface of the mirror seems to move or undulate. That happened yesterday when smoke wafted upward from cigars placed on a sideboard. Mirrors reveal things. Consider the changes on the faces of the dead; we see them in light that emanates from a dark looking glass.

In the morning two Flemings, Klaes and Willems, paid me a visit. We discussed Germany and France; they understand the reciprocal relationship between the two countries more clearly from their position à cheval [on horseback]. Talked about the situation, the Mauritanians, the two literatures, especially about Léautaud, whose Passe-Temps [Pastime, Hobby] I am reading just now.

For many years now I have noticed that my ability to speak depends on the intellectual acuity of my listeners. It’s as though the wheel of the conversation were rolling over a surface that is more or less smooth, meaning with more or less ease. Yet it is odd, that during a first encounter with strangers, I don’t need to wait for them to say anything—probably because that person possesses a spiritual aura, a trace of intellectuality.

First visit to Speidel, who now has a command under Rommel and is probably the man with the clearest overview of the situation on the western front. His headquarters are located out in La Roche-Guyon, a castle belonging to the La Rochefoucauld family. I spoke briefly with the duke and duchess while there, in particular about my stay in Montmirail.

The landscape around La Roche-Guyon, with its huge caves and cliffs rising from the Seine valley like organ pipes, has a labyrinthine and mysterious quality. It seems the perfect base for historical exploits, which is precisely what has happened throughout the various periods since the Normans and earlier. The place attracts history and colors it with the hues of its own fabric.

The slopes were crowned with anti-aircraft gun emplacements, and a tank unit was stationed in the valley for the personal protection of the commander-in-chief as well as for political considerations. In these regions, the prodigious efforts of war take on the air of greater ease. We are closer to the center around which the terrible weight of the wheel turns. I want to stay with this image in the technological sphere, in the system of coordinates that applies to the wielding of power with more or less mental states in Mauritania.[145] There is a certain exhilaration about this, such as Sulla must have experienced when he laid siege to Athens.

Lily-of-the-Valley Day. Speidel sent someone to collect my manuscript of the Appeal for Rommel, who wants to read it. I parted with it unwillingly.

Breakfast with Drouant and Abel Bonnard. I continue to admire the order and precision of his thought processes. His Voltaire-like and yet feline intellectuality, deftly reaches out to people and things, twists them playfully, and draws blood when it scratches. I used the opportunity to inform him that Léautaud—perhaps the last of the classic writers—lives in miserable circumstances on the outskirts of the city, almost without support and quite aged. Bonnard listened eagerly and asked me for more information. Léautaud is, of course, a cynic who is happy living among his cats, content in his easy chair. Visitors run the risk of being treated uncivilly by him. Add to this the calamitous political situation offering such bleak prospects for all human activity.

Back in Vincennes again in the company of the Doctoresse. We sunned ourselves a bit on the lawn by the path that goes around the fort. Half-naked soldiers were joking around on the ramparts as they looked down on the Parisians in their Sunday best. Like Roman legionnaires they gazed down from the citadel upon their conquered city.

In the woods, thousands of Scilla [Siberian squill] were in bloom. The gray-green streams were teeming with tadpoles; some already sported tiny back legs. What could be the reason for the second pair of legs’ developing at different times? After all, they depend on each other. The old school will suggest the metamorphosis of the ventral fins—but that is just what makes the prospect wondrous. We see the demiurge arranging its designs in the stuff of life. Barefoot children were fishing for the little creatures and barricading them in small pools enclosed by mud walls.

Then back at the fort, just at the moment when two American squadrons flew over and a gun opened fire from the ramparts. Images of death and terror permeate everyday life and its pleasures in the most surreal way—like coral reefs that reveal the tentacles and jaws of monsters in their colorful shadows.

On the Pont de Neuilly at midday; from its height, I gazed down into the water for quite a while. There, near the low river bank a big school of tiny fish was swirling around. The mass contracted and expanded like a breathing organism before seeming to condense around the center. From where I stood, the process was difficult to discern because the backs of these fry barely contrasted with the shade of the water. At moments, however, the anonymous throng flashed like silver lightning as it made a sparkling circle. This happened when one of the creatures occasionally shot upward through the collective excitation, making an ascending maneuver like a little ship gyrating on the water. At the water’s surface, this fish then exposed its pale flank to the noonday sun.

Watched a long time as the silver specks glimmered from out of the dark mass and then submerged again after performing their spasmodic figures. What signals are these, and for whose eyes are they conceived?

Kept watching. Here in this simplest of images was a revelation of fame in our day. Each of its constituent parts was discernible: the congregation of the anonymous masses; their throbbing rhythm; their energy, which is then discharged at a higher level toward an individual who steps forward and is swept into the limelight. In the same way, heroes shine as solitary fighters among the horde of warriors and stand out from drab armies. By the same token, a soloist in a striking costume stands out more distinctly from other dancers as voices of the great singers resound in concert over the voices in the choirs.

How profound, how simple, is that the life force within us that focuses our senses, makes our hearts beat faster—the cradle of the deep sea, memories of fins, wings, dragons’ forms, the sundials and astrolabes of the universe, the great dreamland and kingdom of childhood of our genesis. And above us, bridges of marble, high as rainbows. When viewed from them, the whole drama makes sense.

During the midday break visited the dog cemetery located on one of the small islands in the Seine near the Porte Lavallois. At the entrance stands a monument to the Saint Bernard, Barry, who saved the lives of over forty hikers lost in the snow. He stands in stark contrast to Becerillo,[146] the huge attack dog who mauled and killed hundreds of naked Indians. Man, with all his virtues and vices, is reflected in the animals he breeds. The place reminded me of days from my childhood and those play cemeteries where we used to inter insects and little birds.

Read more in the Letter to the Hebrews. Here the tribe of the Jews brings forth superior blossoms from the pure wood without any grafting. It’s very good to read between the lines about the sublimation of sacrifice.

A progressive comparison might look like this:

Cain / Abraham / Christ: Abel / Isaac / Jesus

This is the sequence of priests and of sacrificial offerings. Each of these pairs reveals a new condition in society, law, and religion.

Visited Florence; there I met Dr. Vernes and Jouhandeau; Léautaud was also present, wearing a suit in the style of 1910 and a long, narrow necktie he had tied into a bow like a shoelace. As an author he has walked a straight line, avoiding romantic debility, uttering far less dross than all of his other colleagues I have observed so far.

Conversation about the Mercure de France, then about language and style. Léautaud hates imagery, similes, and digressions. He believes an author must express what he means with absolute precision and economy. He should also not waste his time worrying about rhythm and polishing. “J’aime plutôt une repetition qu’une préciosité.” [I would sooner have repetition than preciosity.] If one wants to say that it’s raining, then one should write: “It is raining.” In response to Paulhan’s objection that this sort of writing could be delegated to an employee: “Alors, vivent les employés.” [Then long live the employees.]

It is his view that we can express anything we wish in words, provided we have absolute mastery of language, which prevents the slightest diminution between what is meant and what is said. Of course this only applies among non-metaphysicians. They are the only ones he recognizes.

What especially fascinates him is the sight of a human being who knows absolutely and unequivocally what he wants, for that is much rarer than one imagines nowadays.

His response to my remark that Victor Hugo was one of those authors I’ve been neglecting for too long, he said, “Vous pouvez continuer.” [You can continue.]

Regarding the symbolism of the sea. If a young married couple wants the child they are expecting to be a girl, then it is the custom for a mother in the Turenne region to wear a necklace of fossilized mussel shells. This would be an addendum to the fine essay by Mircea Eliade that I read in Zalmoxis.[147]

Style: “Queen Hortense retreated to this place after sitting on a throne and bearing the brunt of all the shame.” From the translation of Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe [Memoirs from Beyond the Grave].

Reading such a sentence is as disastrous as jumping out of a vehicle against the direction of traffic.

At the pond in Suresnes in the evening to observe the life in the blossoming maple trees. As is now the norm, squadrons flew over the city’s outskirts, which had already sustained varying degrees of damage. These noises and images are part of the fabric of daily life.

The Judas tree and the particular tint it lends to the palette of spring. Its pink hue verges on coral red and is bolder than that of the peach blossom, the pink hawthorn, and the chestnut trees. It is also more carnal.

Dreams last night about trilobites that I purchased in the institute of Rinne, the Leipzig mineralogist. I bought them from a catalogue and took the incomplete ones as casts, which were molded with extraordinary care, partly of pure gold and partly of red shellac. Like all my paleontological dreams, this one was particularly concise. In the morning Clemens Podewils paid me a visit. He had accompanied Rommel on one of the inspection tours that he has been carrying out along the Atlantic coast. There is something classical in his attempt to see as many soldiers as possible before the action. The marshal is preparing his defense of the shore: “Our adversary must be destroyed on the water.” This is in keeping with his calling up the reserves.

The landing is on everyone’s mind; the German Command as well as the French believe that it will happen in the next few days. But what advantages could this bring to the English? They are like bankers who derive certain profit from the vagaries of the war in the East. Why should they abandon this highly lucrative role? American wishes notwithstanding, there could be many reasons: Russia could become too strong or too weak. Russia could threaten to negotiate. The existence of Kniébolo militates against this: As long as he is in power, he serves as the glue in any coalition against Germany. He is the sort of person who, in Goethe’s words, “stirs up the universe against himself.”

The situation for Germany is not desperate yet—but how disgusting it is to watch the drama.

Nighttime bombing raids and fierce defensive fire. Agents had predicted four in the morning as the beginning of the invasion.

Finished reading Passe-Temps by Léautaud. Writers can be as different as fish, birds, and insects are from one another. What we want to see and enjoy in their work is the secure mastery of their medium. This is true in Léautaud’s case. Among the French, Chamfort is like him, as Lichtenberg is among the Germans. I note the following quotation: “Être grave dans sa jeunesse, cela se paie souvent par une nouvelle jeunesse dans l’âge mûr.” [Seriousness in youth often leads to new youthfulness in mature adulthood.]

Coming from Rousseau, we can learn from him how confessions may be served up without sauce. In doing so, you expose yourself to the danger of cynicism. For that, the book is a treasure trove. Furthermore, in a Russian combat manual, Partisan’s Handbook, third edition of 1942, in the chapter on “Reconnaissance,” we read the sentence “Enemy corpses must be camouflaged”—a clever euphemism for “buried.”

Boring conference on Avenue Van-Dyck. But I had the good fortune that there was a huge horse chestnut tree outside the windows in full bloom. In the noonday radiance, I saw this tree for the first time. Its blossoms seemed to lose color in poor light; then they take on a dull brownish flesh tone. But in full sunlight, their bright coral red hue now stands out against the blue sky. Yet even in the shade, they stand there so vividly, set against the green foliage as though fashioned from rose wax. Later, when they wilt, the petals fall so thickly that they form a deep dark red-colored ring around the trunk. Stripped of its petal dress, the tree produces yet one more lovely sight.

The subject focused on our implementation of battalions from the Caucasus. Major Reese and I have been put in charge of these troops under the command of the ilitary commandant. A tedious and unpleasant business, but thank God General von Niedermayer’s Eastern experts are responsible for the technical side. The general has enlisted huge numbers from among prisoners of war. When these men are kept in occupied territory, all kinds of abuses occur, and these are then, naturally, on our heads. In the Métro, the Parisians now gaze in astonishment at Mongols in German uniform. Yellow tribes of ants are being absorbed. Guarding them calls for particular expertise. In addition to the informers whose identity is known to the units, there are others that the boss consults only in secret, and they are monitored by a third party. Organizational systems like this fall outside our usual norms; they would be impossible if we did not have despotic powers. As a result, new types are showing up among the officers. Niedermayer himself is extremely remarkable. During the World War, he fomented riots in Persia or Afghanistan; I recall Stapel characterizing him as a German Lawrence.[148] In the Caucasus, I saw pictures of him standing among hundreds of Asians. He combines expertise in geographical, ethnographic, and strategic knowledge and affinities.

In the afternoon, went with Horst and Podewils to visit General Speidel in La Roche-Guyon. We ate together and then took a walk through the park and drank a bottle of wine in the most ancient part of the castle, beneath the Norman parapets.

In the coming action (the signs of which are growing more and more obvious), Speidel will be the decisive mind on the German side. It is good to see that he does not share the manners of other chiefs on the General Staff, whom one sees retreating to their rooms late at night with thick folders full of documents. In his vicinity tranquility tends to be the norm, producing that dead calm appropriate for the axle of the great wheel, the eye of the cyclone. I observe him while he sits at his desk admiring a flower, or making an observation about the Seine Valley, which we can see below us with its meadows and trees in bloom. The telephone rings; he lifts the receiver and puts it back after making a quick decision:

“A tank division is not a trucking company; requisition one of those.”

“What? The Führer cannot judge that.”

In the village the wisteria is in bloom, as well as the white stars of clematis, lilac, the golden rain tree; the first roses, more luxuriant than ever. Enjoying their colors and aromas, we strolled along the garden borders. Speidel quotes the verse from Platen:

[Whoever has gazed on beauty…][149]

And then makes one of those utterances that befits a field marshal who is supposed to have oracular powers: “By autumn the war in Europe will be over.”

Read further in the Book of Revelation. This contains one of the greatest insights of the unmediated perception of the construction of the cosmos. Along with it, strange currents appear—such as those that are beginning to break down the rigid symbolism of the ancient Orient. Butterflies with wings bearing eye-spot-patterns emerge from their Egyptian, Babylonian pupal state to return to the splendid glories of their origins. That feature still introduces confusion to the selection today, as if we were witnessing the most exalted transformations. Here one senses the tremendous bifurcations—not a decisive battle, no rise or fall of empires—just one that places display at the center. Above kings and their deeds, there stands the prophet.

Only those marked with God’s seal upon their brows shall escape the great destruction that has been foretold.

I read in this journal during the afternoon. In light of the precarious situation, I had given Hanne Menzel portions of the text to copy, and in the entry from 10 January 1942, I found that I recorded I had seen my dear, departed father in a dream. It is still strange that he died exactly one year later, namely during the night of 10 January 1943. At that hour I saw him in spirit, that is to say, when I was awake. I saw his eyes in the night sky gazing at me more meaningfully and with greater radiance than ever during my lifetime.

In the evening at the Didiers’. There I met Hendrik de Man again; he showed me the passage in his Après Coup [Afterwards] where he described our previous encounter.

Visited Florence. Abbé Georget, her aumônier [chaplain], was also there. Talked about the Celts and about Brittany, where he is from. Is there still anything Celtic in us? Just as fragments of old buildings are incorporated into castles, elements of lost races are intertwined with the modern nations. Forgotten foster-mothers approach our beds in dreams.

Georget was the confessor to the daughter of Léon Bloys. When he recounted details about this author he mentioned “Entrepreneur de Démolitions” [Demolition Contractor],[150] which Bloys had printed on his calling card. This is a nihilistic quirk similar to Nietzsche’s “Philosophizing with a Hammer” and more. Yet the assessment of nihilism lacks detachment—it must reflect the surroundings the nihilist encounters. And the dubiousness of its values, which he embodies both in his person and his actions, becomes evident. He thus becomes an annoyance; even more irritating is the drama of those minds that cannot perceive changes in the weather, like a drop in atmospheric pressure that precedes the typhoon. They seek to stone the prophets.

In the city the shortages of electricity, light, and gas are getting worse. We are living in the midst of a new kind of siege. The attack does not target factories and warehouses as much as it does the arteries of energy and traffic. This is in keeping with a war among workers. Assaults reinforce the effects of the huge bombardments.

The situation calls to mind that of 1939 when people talked about war until it finally came. It’s been like that with the invasion, which perhaps neither of the parties sincerely desires. Yet this is precisely where the stroke of fate will be revealed.

Through all this, you can still see beautiful women on the streets in their new hats, styled rather like tall turbans. This is the couture of the Tower of Babel.

Current reading: “Essay on the Destruction of Hamburg” by Alexander Friedrich—an account sent to me in manuscript. You get the feeling that these cities are like Bologna bottles:[151] internal tension makes their structure so delicate that a jolt is enough to make them crumble. It is curious that so many people seem to be gripped by a new sense of freedom that follows the complete destruction of their property. Friedrich Georg predicted this, even at the spiritual level:

[The knowledge that I have acquired / Is dry tinder / Come, flames, and engulf, devour / All this old rubbish.]

Property is not considered suspect only by outside observers but also by the disinherited themselves; it is even thought burdensome. Possessions require the strength to possess—nowadays who wants to keep up a castle, be surrounded by servants, or collect masses of objects? The nearness of the world of carnage is relevant here. Anyone who has ever seen a metropolis hit by a meteor and go up in flames will look at his house and his furniture with new eyes. Perhaps we will see the day when people offer each other their property as presents.

Capriccios—like the ones Kubin predicted as early as 1909 in his novel The Other Side. There, herds of cattle that had broken out of their pens on the edge of town came trotting down the burning streets. The animals entered the city, while humans spent their nights in the forests.

In one of the houses that was in flames, a little shop clerk was sitting between the cowering inhabitants of the building who were all prevented from fleeing by the exploding bombs. Suddenly a man of Herculean strength forces his way in to take her to safety. He grabs her around the hips and drags her outside. He carries her across a plank into a room not yet engulfed in fire, while behind them the house collapses. By the light of this pyre the man sees that he has not rescued his wife at all, but a woman he does not know.

Friedrich ends his essay with the reflection that it is a lovely thought for Goethe to let his Faust regain consciousness “in anmuthiger Gegend” [in a pleasant region].

Jean Charet, the polar explorer: “above the polar circle there are no Frenchmen, no Germans, or Englishmen anymore—there are only men.” The yearning for the north and south poles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is analogous to the search for the philosopher’s stone: They are magical sites, endpoints that create a planetary consciousness. They are also seminal poles, fructified by the eyes of their discoverers. The nations of the Old World are changed by these new dimensions. The polar circle is the absolute state where no differentiated energies can exist except the primal force. Compare that to the narrow view of Schubart, who envisaged eternally separate heavens and homelands for the nations. That’s one of the passages I read that harmed me; it also contradicts Germanic sensibility. For our fathers, the enemies that had just hacked each other to pieces entered the gates of eternity as shades, arm in arm, and proceeded to Glasor,[152] the grove with the golden leaves, where they were united at the banquet table.

Visited Madame Didier on the Boulevard des Invalides. Because there was no fresh clay to be had, she sculpted my head from the material formerly used in her bust of Montherlant. That is a detail that would have amused Omar Khayyam.

In the Tuileries. The field poppies were in full bloom. I thought in passing how well the name fits the essence of this plant.[153] It connotes both the garish, snappy quality of the color and also the fragility of the petals, which are destroyed by a breath of air. This applies to all authentic words—they are woven from a combination of meanings, from ever-changing material. For that reason alone, I do not share the avoidance of imagery shown by such authors as Marmontel and Léautaud, nor do I share the developmental perspective of etymology. Writing or speaking a word sounds a bell that sets the air vibrating within its range.

In the afternoon, the death sentence that had been handed down in absentia for General von Seidlitz was announced. It seems that his activity fills Kniébolo with worry. Maybe the Russians have a general on their side to match our Niedermayer. As this was happening, an oath of allegiance to Kniébolo from the field marshals in the Wehrmacht was proclaimed; it used the familiar clichés. I think it was Gambetta who asked, “Have you ever seen a general who is courageous?” Every little journalist, every working woman, is capable of greater courage. The selection process is based on the ability to keep your mouth shut and follow orders; then add senility to these qualities. Maybe that still works in monarchies.

Visited Madame Didier in the evening; her portrait bust of me is coming along. During the process, I had a feeling of Promethean emergence into being, like a demiurge. It is an uncanny sensation, especially the kneading, stroking motion that conjures the material into form. Artists are closest to the great creative energies of the world. It is their symbols deposited in the graves and rubble of the earth that bear witness to life that once pulsed with vitality.

Visit from Wepler, who is passing through. We spoke together about the death of Feuerblume.[154] The older and the younger friend of one deceased. Her death brings us closer.

Departed very early for Sissonne. I had not been in this place since 1917. In Laon I found the area around the railroad station destroyed by recent bombing, but the cathedral and upper part of the town were almost unscathed. Those cities and paths, so central to our destiny—the ones we keep returning to—what form does our transformation inscribe itself upon the earth? Perhaps that of garlands and blossoms of some miraculous kind.

We had work to do on the parade ground because irregularities had emerged in one of the battalions from the Caucasus. For the trip, we used a vehicle that burned wood gas from a stove mounted in the rear. We had to stop and stoke it occasionally with more wood, which we did under dense cover to elude the dive-bombers. The burned-out vehicles by the side of the road made us all the more wary. The machine guns that we now hold between our knees when we take such trips are evidence that things are less pleasant.

I must change my rules of conduct; my moral relations with my fellow man have become too strained. That’s how it stands with the battalion commander, who stated that he would have the first deserter who was caught brought before the company where he would “dispatch” him with his own hands. When I hear such hostility, I get sick to my stomach. I have to reach a plane from which I can view things the way a doctor examines patients, as if these were creatures like fish in a coral reef or insects on a meadow. It’s especially obvious that these things apply to the lower ranks. My disgust still betrays weakness and too great an identification with the “red world.”[155] We have to see through the logic of violence and beware of euphemism in the style of Millet or Renan. We also have to guard against the disgraceful role of those citizens who moralize about people who have made terrible bargains while looking down from the safety of their own roofs. Anyone not swallowed up by the conflict should thank God, but that does not give him license to judge.

This occupied my thoughts as I stood beside Reese while he addressed the foreign soldiers. They stood around us in an open square formation wearing German uniforms with badges of their ethnicity emblazoned on their sleeves—things like a mosque with two minarets encircled by the words “Biz alla Bilen, Turkestan.” Reese spoke slowly and in short sentences, which were translated by an interpreter.

Our position in the center of this quadrangle seemed bizarre, as if we were on a chess board planning intelligent moves, including ones involving ethnographic finesse.

We ate with the German officers, who gave the impression of being composed half of technicians and half mercenary leaders—the eighteenth and twentieth centuries merge into pseudo-forms that are difficult to classify. Wherever theory flakes off, it reveals pure force underneath. There is no military tribunal; the commanders have the power of life and death. On the other hand, they have to count on being murdered along with their officers should their troops desert in the night.

In Boncourt we then drank a mug of vodka with the Russian company commander, while the Turkomans and Armenians joined together around us in a wide circle. They huddled on the ground for hours, singing their droning chants. Every now and then dancers would leap into the circle and exert themselves either individually or in pairs to the point of exhaustion.

In the occasional hiatus, I was able to slip away for a brief half hour to go hunting for subtiles. In doing so, I came upon the blue-green Drypta dentata [ground beetle] in the wild for the first time; it is a creature of exquisite elegance. The Italian Rossi, who was a doctor in Pisa, first named it in 1790.

Air-raid sirens, planes overhead. From the roof of the Raphael, I watched two enormous detonation clouds billow upward in the region of Saint-Germain while the high-altitude formations cleared off. They were targeting the river bridges. The method and sequence of the tactics aimed at our supply lines imply a subtle mind. When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theater—pure power affirmed and magnified by suffering.[156]

Pentecost Sunday. I finished reading the Apocalypse after breakfast and with that, my first complete reading of the Bible begun on 3 September 1941. Previously I had read only portions, including the New Testament. Commendable is what I would call this effort, especially since it was the result of my own decision, and I prevailed despite some opposition. My upbringing ran in the contrary direction. Since my early youth my thinking had been directed by my father’s rigorous realism and positivism, and every important teacher I had abetted his endeavors. The religion teachers were for the most part boring; some of them gave me the impression that they were embarrassed by the material. Holle, the brightest among them, encouraged insights by explaining the appearance of Christ on the water as an optical illusion. He said that that region was well known for its ground fog. My more intelligent classmates and the books I loved all took the same line. It was necessary to have gone through this period, and its vestiges will always stay with me—particularly the need for logical evidence, by which I mean bearing witness to truth rather than relying on confirmation, and the immediacy of reason, which must always light our way. Such goals must remain before us. This sets me apart from the romantics and lights my journeys through this world of the living and the netherworld in my spaceship, which lets me dive, swim, fly as I speed through realms of fire and dreamscapes, accompanied by instrumentation that is the product of science.

Excursion to the Trois Vallées. A glaring, hot day. How beautiful it was in the silent thicket beneath the leafy bushes with the bright cloudless sky overhead: pure presence. “Verweile doch—” [Tarry a while…].[157]

The wisteria and the way its woody, winding vines curve around the bars of the garden fence. A single glance reveals to the eye the chemical substance they have been depositing there for decades.

The emerald wasp Chrysis against a gray wall—its iridescent, silky green thorax and garish raspberry-red abdomen. A tiny creature like this seems to collect the rays of the sun like the focal point of a magnifying glass. It lives cloaked in finely woven embers.

The tree frogs and the sound of scythes being sharpened that makes them break into their choral song.

“Der wollte auf der Geige reiten” [He wanted to ride on the fiddle]—an expression meant to describe an arrogant person.

With the president in the evening. Here in France, fifty thousand people have died by aerial bombs during these Pentecost holidays. One reason is that a crowded train on its way to the Maisons-Laffitte racetrack was hit.

The president told me about a corporal, who is eager to serve on firing squads. He generally aims at the heart, but if he does not like the man to be executed, then he aims for the head, causing it to shatter. It is a subhuman trait to want to disfigure, to want to rob another person of his face.

I wonder which ones he aims at in this way. Probably the prisoners who come closest to the concept of human being—those who are successful, kind, or well-bred.

“Soldiers, aim for the heart, spare the face,” shouted Murat when he stepped up to the wall.

Incidentally, the day before yesterday, a twenty-six-year-old captain was executed, the son of a shipowner from Stettin. The reason given was that he said he wished a bomb would hit headquarters. A Frenchman from the region of La Val reported him.

Visited Madame Didier in the afternoon. Conversation with her nephew, a child of five who was very nice. The little boy had recently been taken along to mass for the first time, where he saw the distribution of the sacrament. When asked what the priest had done: “Il a distribué des vitamins à tout le monde” [He handed out vitamins to everyone].

With the commander-in-chief in Vaux. Despite the stifling heat, we lit a fire to freshen the air. In addition to the general, Professors Krüger, Weniger, and Baumgart sat around the fire.

Generals are mostly energetic and stupid, which means they have a kind of active and calculating intelligence that any one of the best telephone operators possesses, and yet the masses pay mindless homage to them. Or they are educated, which diminishes the brutality that is part of their craft. There is always a flaw somewhere, either in their willpower or their sense of control. Very rarely is there a union of energy and education, as in the likes of Caesar and Sulla, or as we saw in our own age in Scharnhorst and Prince Eugene. For this reason, generals are mostly stooges for hire.

Then there is Heinrich von Stülpnagel who is called “the blond Stülpnagel” to distinguish him from other generals in this old military dynasty. He exhibits princely qualities befitting his proconsular station. These include his appreciation of peace and quiet, of leisure, and of the society of a small intellectual circle. All this contrasts with the workings that are otherwise found in the higher echelons of the staff. His aristocratic character tends to judge people by their minds. His life suggests that of a scientist, particularly in the way he acquired his comprehensive erudition during long periods of convalescence. He seeks out mathematicians and philosophers, and on the subject of history, he is fascinated with ancient Byzantium. Yet, one may say that as a strategist he was a good leader; as a statesman a good negotiator; and as a politician someone who never lost sight of our situation. All this makes it understandable that he has been an opponent of Kniébolo since the very beginning. Yet I notice clearly from one of his repeated gestures that he is tired: With his left hand he tends to rub his back, as if supporting it or keeping his posture erect. At the same time his face bears a worried expression.

Discussion about the Stoics and their premise: “In certain situations leaving one’s life is the duty of the capable man.” It looks as though the general carries on a private correspondence with his wife in which they discuss this and other topics of ethics.

Started reading Herman Menge’s translation of the New Testament, which Pastor Damrath gave me as a present.

Browsed some more in Georges Migot’s Essais pour une Esthétique Générale [Essays Toward a General Esthetic], a small volume where I noticed several observations about symmetry. This is a topic I have been thinking about more often over the past months. The author attributes to the Egyptians a tendency to asymmetry and cites their preference for heads in profile as evidence. Mirror imagery in art corresponds to repetition in music. The need for symmetry is apparently a subordinate trait. This means it applies more readily to the form than the content, like those related parts in painting where the size of the canvas, the frame, and in some cases, even the subject matter could correlate with each other but not the actual execution. Incidentally, the marginal notations are not especially precise. Symmetry is an immense topic. When I have the leisure time, I’d like to try to work my way into it via two paths—specifically, studying the relationship to free will and to the erotic sphere. An examination of insects and a description of a hermaphrodite butterflies gave me the idea.

Before returning, I swam in the lake and then went hunting for subtiles. This spring I have again fallen prey to this passion.

Had breakfast with Madame Didier. She put the final touches on the head and then wrapped it in damp cloths to store it in the cellar, since she is traveling to the mountains to visit Hendrik de Man.

Concerning the style of engineers: Entscheidung [decision, determination] becomes Entscheid [decree, decision], which means first, that it turns it crudely into a masculine noun, and second, that the meaning is shifted from a connotation of deep consideration to the superficial, willful present.

Visited Florence at noon. After we had eaten, had a brief conversation with Jules Sauerwein, who had arrived from Lisbon. We discussed the possibility of peace and what form it could take.

In the evening had a discussion with the president and a Captain Uckel about Stalingrad. It seems that teams of cameramen from a propaganda unit were filming until the final hours. The films fell into the hands of the Russians and are supposedly being shown as part of Swedish newsreels. A portion of the grim events takes place in a tractor factory where General Strecker blew himself up along with his staff. You can see their preparations and watch the camera teams, who are not on the staff, leave the building before the huge explosion. This urge to record the final moments has something robotic about it and expresses a kind of technological reflex, like those twitching frogs’ legs in Galvani’s experiment.[158] There is a scientific aspect to this as well. These are not monuments like those we leave to posterity or build to gods, be they only in the form of a cross hastily tied from willow twigs—these are, rather, documents by mortals for mortals, and mortals alone. How terrifying and real is the Eternal Return in its most lugubrious form: Again and again, this dying in an icy region is monotonously repeated. It is demonically conjured up without refinement, without splendor, and without solace. Where is the glory in any of this?

The captain [Uckel] thought the films should have been destroyed—but to what end? These are just reports from workers to other workers.

Then, concerning photography in general. On this subject, the president talked about a scene he had personally witnessed in Dreesen’s Hotel near Godesberg. As Kniébolo was coming down the steps, he was greeted in the foyer by a little girl, who approached him to present a bouquet. He leaned down to receive this and to touch the child on her cheek, and at the same time turned his head a bit to the side, calling out sharply, “Photograph!”

With Speidel last evening at La Roche-Guyon. The journey was complicated by the destruction of the Seine bridges. We drove back around midnight. Consequently, at headquarters, we missed the first reports of the landing by an hour. By morning, Paris had heard about it and been stunned by the news—especially Rommel, who was absent from La Roche-Guyon yesterday because he had driven to Germany for his wife’s birthday. That is merely one false note in the overture to this huge battle. The first troops that parachuted in were captured after midnight. Countless fleets and eleven thousand aircraft were deployed in the operation.

There is no doubt that this is the beginning of the great offensive that will make this a historic day. I was still surprised, precisely because so much had been predicted about it. Why now and why here? People will be talking about these questions well into the distant future.

Current reading: The History of Saint Louis by Joinville. I recently visited Husser in his apartment on Rue Saint-Placide, where he gave me an excerpt from the work to take home. In some scenes, such as the one of the landing of the Crusaders at Damietta, one sees humanity in the greatest glory it can achieve. Materialistic historiography only grasps things it can see. It does not recognize the variety that gives the fabric its color and pattern. This helps define our task: to rediscover the diversity of driving forces. This demands a more powerful objectivity than the positivistic approach.

Took a walk with the president in the evening. Two heavy tanks had halted on the Boulevard de l’Amiral-Bruix on their way to the front. The young soldiers were perched on their steel behemoths in the waning sunlight of the day in that kind of elation tinged with melancholy that I remember so well. They radiated a tangible aura of the imminence of death, the glory of hearts ready to embrace immolation.

Watched the way the machines retreated, disappeared with all their technological intricacy and grew simpler and more comprehensible as they did so, like the shield and lance that the hoplite[159] leans against. And the way the lads sat on top of their tanks, warily eating and drinking with each other like betrothed people just before the ceremony, as if partaking of a spiritual meal.

As we were eating, Florence left the table to take a telephone call. When she returned she said: “La Bourse reprend. On ne joue pas la paix.” [The stock market has rebounded. You don’t bet on peace.]

It seems that money has the subtlest feelers and when bankers assess the situation, they do so more meticulously and with greater precision than generals.

In the afternoon, I received a visit from Dr. Kraus, the ballistics expert. Conversation about my Brother Physicus and his work on suspension bridges and prime numbers. Then we talked about Cellaris, who is still in prison but for whom the hour of freedom will soon toll, as it also will for many thousands of his fellow sufferers.

We then talked about the so-called new weapon and the attempts to launch it. Kraus told me that a recent launch had taken an unexpected trajectory and landed on the Danish island of Bornholm. What’s more, this rocket was not only a dud, but by evening, the English had already photographed it. They were able to study its electromagnetic guidance system and immediately set up a power station with huge defensive capability in the southern part of their country.

The rumors surrounding this weapon make it possible to study destruction as the polar opposite of eros. Both possess a certain commonality, like positive and negative electrical charges. The whispers everywhere are very like the ones you hear that surround a lewd joke: no one is supposed to talk about it. At the same time, Kniébolo hopes that rumors he has carefully nurtured will circulate. The whole matter is highly nihilistic and stinks of the charnel house.

Back again on the Route de l’Impératrice on my way from Saint-Cloud to Versailles. I sunbathed again among the chestnut bushes in the little clearing. Each time I do this I think: this could be the last.

Visit to Husser in his apartment on Rue Saint-Placide where I want to store files, perhaps even seek shelter here for a few days. This is the base to my left in the Latin Quarter. The Doctoresse holds the center spot, and the secondhand bookseller Morin has the one on my right. Better than gold are those friends we have made.

I am reducing my luggage to a bare minimum. Kniébolo and his gang are predicting a swift victory. Just like the Anabaptist prince.[160] What figures the rabble follow, and how universal the ochlos [mob] has become.

Yesterday and the day before I again sensed the incubus, a weird constriction of the diaphragm that I was finally able to get rid of last night. Was there a danger that threatened me personally or others? I felt I had fended it off.

The army report states that the so-called Vergeltungswaffe [Reprisal Weapon][161] has been launched. At the same time, the propaganda in the French factories describes the large areas of London have been reduced to rubble. The masses are gripped by a wave of jubilation. These flying bombs are said to produce a bright flash just before detonation and are one of the last ploys in this morass of destruction. If they had any utility as weapons and not merely as propaganda, they would be deployed at the site of the beachhead. One thing about this is quite genuine: the will to transform the living world into a wasteland and there achieve the victory of death. Nowadays anyone who expresses doubt in “reprisal” and “destruction” commits a sacrilege.

In the morning, Lieutenant Trott zu Solz entered my room; he is company commander of an Indian regiment—someone I haven’t seen since that fateful night in Überlingen.[162] Once again he comes to me under portentous circumstances. Discussed the situation, particularly about General von Seidlitz, and then about the way Prussians have been victimized by the Party.

With Florence at midday. Heller was there; he had returned from Berlin and on the way his train was strafed. He told me that just after the landing Merline had submitted an urgent request for papers to the embassy and has already fled to Germany. I still find it curious how very much people who callously demand the heads of millions are afraid for their own paltry lives. The two things must be linked.

In the evening, there were sorties overhead and shrapnel rained into the courtyard of the Majestic. In the course of the bombardment, huge reserves of fuel and oil were hit, producing a thin cloud rising up to darken the heavens like the pine tree of Pliny the Younger.[163] A huge bomber crashed near the Gare de l’Est [railroad station].

For the word Kettenglied [chain link] the French language has a special one: chaînon. Our south German (probably archaic) Schäkel comes from the same root. The chain maker is le chaînetier, for which we say Kettler, which is preserved as a surname.

The building on the corner of Rue du Regard opposite the military prison on Rue du Cherche-Midi. Every time I pass it, I think of Pearl, Kubin’s dream city.

Visited Speidel in La Roche-Guyon in the evening. The destruction of the Seine bridges means that we could only get there via detours. At one point, we even had to get out of the vehicle because planes were swooping around overhead.

Walk in the park after we had eaten. Speidel told us details of his visit to Kniébolo, whom he had debriefed a few days ago in Soissons. He said that Kniébolo had aged, was stooped over, and that his conversation jumped around distractedly. For breakfast he devoured a huge amount of rice, drank different colored medicines from three different liqueur glasses, and also swallowed pills. He held a set of colored pencils between his fingers, using them occasionally to draw lines on the map. He expressed his displeasure that the English and Americans had been able to land at all, but did not go into details like the enemies’ air superiority. He has only a vague idea about the next step in the process and seems to hope—and perhaps even believe—that a providential man of destiny who has often rescued him from desperate situations, might appear again. In this connection he twice cited the Seven Years’ War.[164] He also believes that there is discord among his opponents and that they are all on the brink of revolution. He is announcing the release of new weapons for the autumn, particularly armor-piercing shells, and then he falls into a rage du nombre [obsession with numbers] when he starts talking about industrial “output.” He also spoke of the “hell hounds,” those flying bombs, one of which had taken an especially comical course and landed near his headquarters when he was present, which triggered a hasty exit.

I also talked with Admiral Ruge about details of the landing. It seems to be true that during that decisive night not a single German patrol boat had put out to sea “because of the heavy swell.” The English landed at low tide when all the underwater defenses were exposed and visible on the beach. The defensive system of obstacles for low tide had been planned but not yet deployed.

Colonel von Tempelhof spoke of the death of General Marcks whose brother, a lieutenant colonel, asked about the hour of death, because on the death day a picture had fallen off the wall at eleven o’clock. In fact, the general was hit at a quarter-to-eleven, and he died when the hour struck.

On the way back, our driver lost control of the vehicle and spun off the road into a blackberry bush at high speed. Its branches absorbed the impact like gentle springs.

Current reading: Hendrik de Man, Après Coup [Afterwards]. A nice rule comes at the very beginning of the memoirs, “that one must always aim higher than one’s goal.” In this book, I also found the description of our encounter at the Didiers’.

Street fighting in Cherbourg. Perpetua has written to me that on the morning of 15 June bombs fells near the house. One of them landed in the little swimming hole belonging to the Lohnes, blowing hundreds of carp and whitefish into the air.

In accordance with my policy that you can never revise work too often, I’m looking through my Appeal.

A new dream vision: friendly, auspicious; it was the deacon. Such encounters leave me feeling that they belong to our clan and keep returning as part of my own cast of characters.

A few days ago, following this, in great caverns that disappeared deep into the earth in serpentine tunnels, behind a barbed wire barrier that I had crossed. There stood the Head Forester, wearing a light hunting jacket, as an apparition of intensely concentrated power. He stood on the landing of the steps “entering,” and even though I carried a weapon, I recognized that it was futile to use such toys here. His aura paralyzed my hand.

On style. Tenses may be indicated, but we can also add nuance by temporal auxiliaries. Instead of saying “ich werde das tun” [I shall do that], we have “dann tue ich das” [then I’ll do that], or “Morgen tue ich das” [I’m doing that tomorrow].

This involves a slight loss of logic and also a bit of pedantry. I’m making progress in Menge’s Bible translation, which renders “Klopfet an, so wird euch aufgetan” [Knock and it is opened unto you], as “Klopfet an, so wird euch aufgetan werden” [Knock and it will be opened unto you]. That is schoolboy sophistry.

My reading these days: General J. Perré, Minerve sous les Armes [Minerva Armed for Battle], an essay about intelligence and military strategy that I, as the censor, read in manuscript form. This contained a remark of Marshal Joffre about the art of command at the highest level: “Ne rien faire; tout faire faire; ne rien laisser faire” [Do nothing; have others do everything; leave nothing to others].

Very true; a divine streak must be present in a military leader: Caesar-like divinity. His aura is more important than his directives.

Later browsed in a Guide Officiel des Voyages Aériens [Official Guide to Air Travel] from 1930 that contains a quotation about aeronautics on every page. It is filled with platitudes:

“L’aviation constituera un des facteurs les plus importants de la civilisation.” [Aviation will constitute one of the most important factors of civilization.] Louis Bréguet.

“Il n’ya plus de Pyrénées—surtout en avion.” [There are no more Pyrenees—especially in an airplane.] Albert I, king of Belgium.

“L’air deviendra le véritable élément d’union entre les hommes de tous les pays.” [Air will become the element that truly unites men of all countries.] General de Goys.

“L’aviateur conquérant du ciel es l’incarnation véritable du surhomme.” [The conquering aviator in the sky is the true incarnation of the superman.] Adolph Brisson.

And so it goes on for pages. Old Leonardo saw things a bit more clearly.

Colonel Schaer visited me in the Majestic in the morning. Since we last saw each other, he has commanded a regiment in the East, where he was sentenced to eleven months in prison because, in the heat of the moment, he did not keep his opinions under wraps. In general, the arrests and executions of officers are on the increase.

Schaer also showed me the photograph of a charnel house in the vicinity of Nikopol—a horrifying picture that one of his people was able to take during their retreat. He did so covertly, for these are taboo places of the most hideous kind. Seeing it moved me to make a correction in my own text about peace.

Visited Florence. Léautaud was there and he recommended that I read Jules Vallès. He very delicately offered me his help in case the Germans here in the city should encounter difficulties.

There are two ways to transcend differences among nations: through reason and through religion. Léautaud has achieved the first goal. Yet, even in his case, one can see that the more nationalism disappears from one’s consciousness, the more powerfully it is expressed in his personality.

The Russians are closing in on East Prussia. The Americans, on Florence, while the battle at the site of the landing rages on with heavy losses. The leadership is trying to promote hope in new and unknown weapons because they are incapable of new ideas. The complete lack of judgment shown by the masses as they permit themselves to be deceived into a state of euphoria remains remarkable.

I visited Monsieur Groult on Avenue Foch with Baumgart and Fräulein Lampe. After you cross through the courtyard, his house reminds you of Aladdin’s enchanted castle or Ali Baba’s treasure cave. Gardens with fountains and pools of water where swans and exotic ducks paddle on the surface, pergolas with statues and reflecting surfaces, Pompeiian galleries, terraces with parrots and ringneck doves are protected from view by high trellises covered with ivy and wild grapevines.

The Goncourts amassed their collections with the advice of Groult’s father, and these surpass the disbelieving accounts that Balzac delights in. They unite well over a hundred paintings and drawings by Fragonard and more by Turner than can be found in the British Isles. The formidable galleries are lined with one masterpiece after another. What is more, over a thousand of the best pieces have already been distributed to distant châteaux. The collections are barely known; a catalogue has never been published. Furthermore, only friends or people brought by friends are allowed to enter these rooms.

We spoke with the owner about the unparalleled treasures and about their security as well as their value. He considers best to leave these things in Paris. Transporting them could damage them, and they could also be shelled in the process. Furthermore, the fate of all other places in France is almost less certain than that of this city, which—one hopes—like Rome will be protected by its aura. During the air attacks, falling shrapnel sometimes breaks panes in the skylights. If that ever happens during wet weather, rain pours into the rooms, causing damage. We examined a pastel by Watteau with damaged velour and discolored by little green spots, as if mold were growing on it. The damage had affected this picture in an unusual way, less in a purely mechanical way than by distorting its features, rather like illness in a human being. The portrait of Dorian Gray changed along similar lines.

The coal shortage is a nuisance. The household requires a staff of more than twenty.

On the subject of value, Herr Groult maintained that this consideration did not exist for him, for he was never going to part with any of the pictures. Hence the question was irrelevant. How oppressive ownership has become, especially in this inferno. To shoulder a responsibility like this nowadays demands the courage of a swimmer who is laden with gold, like the soldiers of Cortez in that Sad Night.[165]

Current reading: Léon Bloy, Méditations d’un Solitaire [Meditations of a Solitary Man]. The book was written in 1916 under conditions similar to today’s and reflects all the author’s virtues and vices—even his shockingly powerful hatred, which can vie with Kniébolo’s own. Yet I find reading this to be not only entertaining but also downright bracing. It contains a true Arcanum aimed at our age and its debilities. When he lifts himself from his foul debasement to such heights, this Christian puts on an exceptional show, and the tops of his towers achieve rarified heights. This must be linked to the death wish that he often expresses with such power: desire to embody the philosopher’s stone emerges from base, dark, seething turmoil as it strives for lofty sublimation.

In the afternoon at La Roche-Guyon to see Speidel, who hosted us in his small study in the oldest part of the chateau below the Norman parapets. He had to make frequent phone calls. Kniébolo, who fears a new landing, wants to take command of two tank battalions after having made a personal assessment; he wants to give orders that differ from what the situation requires. Conversations included the topic of how much more time the Germans are going to take before they get this carnival huckster off their backs. Fate has started his countdown. This made me think of an expression of my father’s: “A terrible misfortune has to happen before anything changes.” And yet the general seemed to be in good spirits because he observed, “the essay on peace will soon be appearing.”

I then drove with Podewils and Horst to Giverny. We called on Monet’s daughter-in-law, who gave us the key to his garden. At the waterlily pond with its weeping willows, black poplars, bamboo borders, and half-derelict Chinese wooden bridges—there is magic in this place. Every wet pastureland contains these shallow pools filled with green water, edged with rushes and irises. Yet none seems more succulent, more suggestive, more colorful. A piece of nature like thousands of others made all the more distinguished by intellectual and creative vitality. Nineteenth-century scholarship is also at home on this island, from which the artist took his astonishing colors as if from a retort, heated by the fire of the sun and cooled with water. Like our eyes, each little pool catches a universe of light. In the large studio in front of the waterlily cycle that Monet began working on when he was seventy-five. Here we can observe the creative rhythm of crystallization and dissolution that brings a spectacular convergence with the blue void and with Rimbaud’s primeval azure slime. On one of the great panels a bundle of blue waterlilies takes shape at the edge of the pure wavering radiance like a tangle of tangible beams of light. Another picture shows only the sky with clouds reflected in the water in a way that makes one dizzy. The eye senses the daring nature of this gesture as well as the powerful visual achievement of the sublime disintegration and its agonies amid the cascading light. The final canvas in the series has been vandalized by knife gashes.

Yesterday news spread of the assassination attempt. I found out details from the president when I returned from Saint-Cloud toward evening. This aggravates our extremely precarious situation. The plotter is said to be a certain Count Stauffenberg. I had already heard the name from Hofacker. This would confirm my opinion that at pivotal points the old aristocracy comes to the fore. Everything predicts that this act will generate appalling reprisals. It is getting more and more difficult to continue the masquerade. This led me to an exchange of words with a comrade this morning who called the event an “outrageous disgrace.” And yet I’ve been convinced for a long time that assassinations change little and improve nothing. I implied as much in a description of Sunmyra in The Marble Cliffs.

By the afternoon, the news had circulated among the insiders that the commander-in-chief had been relieved of his duties and ordered to Berlin. As soon as the news came from the Bendlerstrasse,[166] he had all the SS and the intelligence officers arrested and then had to free them again after he had reported to Kluge in La Roche-Guyon and there was no longer any doubt that the assassination had failed. “Had the huge snake in a sack and then let it out again,” as the president put it in a state of high agitation when we were consulting behind closed doors. The dry businesslike nature of the act is astonishing—the basis for his arrest was a simple phone call to the commander of Greater Paris. He was probably concerned that no more heads should roll than absolutely necessary, but that makes no difference to authorities like these. On top of that there was the completely incompetent Colonel von Linstow as chief of staff—a man with stomach problems who had been clued in shortly beforehand and was invaluable for his technical abilities; now he is seen slinking around the Raphael like a ghost before he disappears. If only my old NCO Kossmann were still in charge; at least he would have done what is expected of an officer on the General Staff, namely, verified the reliability of the reports. In addition there is Rommel’s accident on 17 July,[167] which removed the only pillar that could have provided meaningful support for such an effort.

By contrast, the terrible activity of the Volkspartei[168] has hardly wavered in the wake of this offensive. Yes, it has been instructive. One does not heal the body during the crisis, neither in whole nor in part. Even if the operation were to succeed, today we would have instead of one pustule a dozen, with hanging judges holding court in every village, street, and house. We are undergoing a test that is justified and necessary; there is no reversing this machinery.

Telephone call from General Loehning from Hannover reporting that everything in Kirchhorst is fine. His jokes surprised me, for without doubt all conversations are monitored. Immediately afterward, I got the terrible news from Neuhaus that yesterday on the way to Berlin, Heinrich von Stülpnagel had put his own pistol to his head. He is still alive, but he has lost his sight. That must have happened at the same hour for which he had invited me to his table for a philosophical discussion. I was moved by the fact that during all the commotion, he actually canceled the meal. That is typical of his character.

Oh, how the victims are dying here, and especially in the smallest circles of the last chivalric men, of those freethinkers—the very people who are superior to the others, whose feelings and thoughts are but petty emotions. And yet these sacrifices are nonetheless important because they create an inner space and prevent the nation as a whole from falling into the horrifying depths of fate.

I heard that the first question the general asked when he woke up blind was about the facilities at the hospital. He wanted to know whether the senior physician found everything satisfactory. He is already being isolated by attendants who are also guards; he is a prisoner.

I thought about our conversation by the fireplace in Vaux about Stoic philosophy and that the gate of death is always open to man, and that given this reality, decisive action is possible. These are frightening lessons.

Visited General von Niedermayer in the afternoon, who vaguely reminds me of the Oriental scholar Hammer-Purgstall—I mean in the way that the Eastern ethos, the Asiatic spirit, can inhabit a person—his ideas, his deeds, even to the point of affecting his exterior.

In the army, the so-called German salute has been introduced as a sign that they have lost the contest.[169] This is one of the recent formalities to make people submit sub jugo [under the yoke] several times a day. This can also be seen as the progress of mechanization.

The Americans are in Pisa, the Russians in Lemberg [Lviv] and Lublin.

At the table we discussed Laval and his superstitions, including the one involving the white necktie he wears. He also always carries a copper two sous coin with him and steers clear of negotiations if he has forgotten it. He is convinced of his luck, of his guiding star, and took it as a particularly good omen that he had been born with a caul. At his birth, this lay upon his head, which popular superstition sees as an auspicious portent. Well, we shall see.

At Vogel’s in the evening. We talked about the details of the assassination attempt, which Vogel had been informed about. The effect of such actions is beyond calculation; usually very different forces are unleashed than what the perpetrator expected. They exert influence less in the direction than in the rhythm of historical events: the process is either accelerated or inhibited. An example of the first kind happened in response to an attempt on Lenin’s life, whereas Fieschi’s attack on Louis Phillippe retarded the progress of the democratic cause. Generally speaking, we can observe that an assassination attempt, if not actually abetting the cause of its target, at least propels it violently forward.

A peculiar mechanism of history is that the flaws of the German are being exposed as the wheel of fortune carries him downward. He is now feeling the experience of the Jew: being a skandalon [stumbling block, offense]. Whenever the conversation would turn to this topic, Valeriu Marcu used to say that the vanquished are plague carriers.

Panic is spreading through the Raphael. Types are turning up who can’t be called superiors in the old sense of the word. Instead they are commissars, and they are utterly destroying the last bonds that have remained intact since the days of Friedrich Wilhelm I.

My final breakfast with the Doctoresse. My way back takes me along Rue de Varenne, where as usual I am enchanted by the tall entryways typical of the old palaces of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. They were built to permit wagons piled high with hay access to the stables. A cloudburst drove me indoors for a short visit to the Musée Rodin, which would not have otherwise attracted me. The Waves of Sea and Love.[170] Future archaeologists may find these images right below the layer containing tanks and aerial bombs. People will then ask what could link the two so closely, and they will propose clever hypotheses.

Max Valentiner arrived from Lyons. In the South, the pure ethos of the lemures seems to be spreading. For instance, he told about a woman who had already been in prison there for four months. Two henchmen of the Secret Service were discussing what to do with her since she showed little interest in the matter they had arrested her for. “We could shoot her too. Then we’d be rid of her.”

Visited Dr. Epting in the evening. He told me that Médan had been murdered in Aix. Now he, too, has fallen victim to the hatred that increases every day. His only crime was that he considered friendship between our two peoples possible. Expressing this sentiment, he once embraced me in 1930 when I met him in Aix for the first and only time in my life. We had each commanded combat patrols in World War I.

I have his last letter before me. It is from 15 July, where he writes, “If I am to die then I would rather it be in my house, or at least in my own city than somewhere by the roadside in a muddy ditch. That is more dignified and also less trouble.”

He then added, “Je tiens à vous dire que c’est l’amitié admirative que vous m’avez inspirée qui m’a rapproché de mes anciens adversaires de 1914/18.” [I must tell you that you have inspired in me admiration and friendship that have reconciled me to my former adversaries of 1914/18.]

I now see that these were meant deliberately as parting words—as was his prayer, which Claus Valentiner told me about: that God might prevent any young Frenchman from bringing guilt upon his head by shedding his blood. In these past weeks, I’ve become acquainted with bitterness that debases the best people. In World War I, my friends were killed by bullets—in this second war, that is the privilege of the lucky ones. The others are rotting in prisons, must take their own lives, or die by the executioner’s hand. They are denied the bullet.

The Americans have reached Rennes, Mayenne, Laval, and have cut off Brittany. I am making my farewell visits; this evening I was with Salmanoff. Even my barber, who has been cutting my hair for years, seemed to have the feeling that he was performing his office for the last time. His farewell reflected the mentality of his class and of his sympathy for me: “J’espère que les chose s’arrangeront.” [I hope things will work out.]

Stood outside the portal of Sacré Coeur to cast a last glance over the great city. I watched the stones quiver in the hot sun, as if in expectation of new historical embraces. Cities are feminine and only smile on the victor.

Visited Florence at noon. This may be our final Thursday.

Walked back through the heat on Rue Copernic. There I purchased a little notebook of the kind I used to use when I was a journalist in more stirring times. As I walked out of the shop I ran into Marcel Arland, whom I became aware of in the last weeks after reading his novel. I respect his courage, which at times approaches hubris. We shook hands.

[I love candied grapes / Because they have no taste, / I love camellias / Because they have no fragrance / And I love rich men / Because they have no heart.]

The verses suggested the notion of including dandyism as one of the precursors of nihilism in my treatise.

Farewell visits in the afternoon; last times together. Walk with Charmille along the banks of the Seine. Every great watershed is expressed in countless private goodbyes.