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

Left in haste when it got dark. I straightened up my room, placed a bouquet of flowers on the table, and distributed tips. Unfortunately, I left some irreplaceable letters behind in a cupboard drawer.

Journey via Sézanne, Saint-Dizier, Toul, Nancy, to Saint-Dié in Lothringen [Lorraine]. The roads shimmered in the late summer light; fighter-bombers patrolled overhead. We drove past numerous burning vehicles. Others had already been reduced to white dust.

Stayed in a garrison that was called Witzleben Barracks just a few days ago, but which has now been stripped of this name.[1] During the night, vivid dreams in extremely sharp outline, just like looking through a telescope the wrong way around so that not only the shapes but also the colors were intensified. I was standing on a marble staircase with snakes slithering up the steps.

With Klaebisch in Hotel Moderne in the evening. He had brought along a comrade who debriefed us on the progress of our withdrawal from Paris. Kniébolo’s strict order to blow up the bridges over the Seine and leave a trail of devastation behind had not been carried out. It appears that among those courageous souls who resisted this desecration, friend Speidel was at the forefront right beside Choltitz.

Arrival of the president yesterday evening; Neuhaus and Humm accompanied him. The president inspected my room once more; he found it tidy and in good order. Our farewell from the staff of the Raphael was cordial, even emotional.

In the afternoon had a swim in the Meurthe. Its surface was glassy, but with clear ripples that carried curling strands of pale green aquatic plants. Had a view of the round-topped foothills of the Vosges.

Current reading: Maurice de La Fuye’s Louis XVI. Given the events of our day and age, this king’s reputation gains as much as Napoleon’s loses. Such reversals are evidence of the degree to which historiography depends upon the historical process itself. In some obscure way, all clocks that have run down seem to be connected to the great clock of fate.

The destruction of the Old World begins to manifest itself with the French Revolution, or rather with the Renaissance, and corresponds to the dying of organic fibers, of nerves and arteries. Once the process is complete, men of violence appear; they attach artificial threads and string to the corpse and manipulate it in a more intense and also more grotesque political game. They themselves embody this character of jumping jacks—a quality that is shrill, blatant, and often frightening. Modern nation-states tend toward weakness. They can only prosper where some legacy is available. When that is consumed, the hunger becomes unbearable, and, like Saturn, they devour their own children. It is thus out of pure self-preservation that we might contemplate other systems of organization than those established in 1789.

Took a walk with the president to the large cemetery up the hill. As usual when I have such opportunities, I note a few inscriptions for my journal. Among these were the following from a small oval bronze plaque:

[Here rests Paul Rotsart, Baron de Mertaing. / Born in Bruges (Belgium). Dead far from his / Family for his too liberal ideas. / 1835–1885.]

When I ponder such a short life span, I sometimes get the feeling that I am understanding the fate of an anonymous person more deeply than any biography can convey. The details melt away.

Read further in Louis XVI. Certain sections, like the flight to Varennes, move me so powerfully that I have to alternate my reading with chapters from Dauzat’s Géographie linguistique.

De La Fuye notes that the flight to Varennes is remarkable for a host of symbolic references and cites examples of these. There is nothing astonishing about this, for the more significant an event, the more meaningful its details will be. In moments of earth-shaking consequence, the core of symbolic connections is revealed. Golgotha thus becomes the hill of the world; the cross, the fate of man; Christ becomes mankind.

Went swimming in the Meurthe in stormy weather. There I joined some boys in a hunt; they were turning over rocks in the current and using forked spears to impale fish hiding underneath. The finger-length creatures were marbled (or rather, flecked) with green and strung on a line in great numbers “pour faire la friture” [for frying]. This process was delightful for that small-scale economy Goethe appreciated so much, in contrast to the greater one.

In the evening read further in Géographie linguistique, from which I took a few notes for my work about language and physique. The question of literature has been bothering me since this orgy of fire began. We shall learn to appreciate the fact that countries like Switzerland have been spared. Incidentally I consider the Swiss support of the reestablishment of intellectual and cultural standards to be their contribution to the incredible advantage of neutrality. This is no longer a given, because it is not the balance of power, but rather the fate of the world at stake. In this respect, the preservation of Switzerland is a particularly happy outcome, and not just for the neutral nations, but for everyone else as well. Something of the riches of the past survives here.

New arrivals, including Lämpchen,[3] who took a walk with me along the Meurthe, and Toepfer, who was still in Paris on Saturday evening, the day before yesterday. Our troops had established defensive positions[4] around the Majestic and around the Ministry of the Navy. Rifle shots could be heard on the island [Île de la Cité], on the Place de la Concorde, and in the outer suburbs. On many streets people were already displaying the tricoleur [flag] from their windows.

The Americans have entered Paris. Went to the Meurthe again in the afternoon. The tops of the Vosges mountain range and their dark cliffs have a calming effect and convey a sense of earthly stability.

While sunbathing, I thought about the consonant clusters cl, kl, as well as schl—perhaps sounds the lips make in imitation of something closing. For example, clef, claves, χλεíξ, klappe, clapier, claustrum, clandestine, Schlinge, Schluss.[5] Here we have connections that transcend time. Modern etymology with its derivations persists in the same empiricism as Darwinism in zoology.

Walked in the darkness through the forbidden gardens.

Toepfer came by in the afternoon and took part of my Appeal with him to Hamburg for Ziegler. I am carrying a further portion of the essay among my portable files. The third section stayed behind in Paris, while the fourth is concealed beneath the false bottom of an insect display case in Kirchhorst.

In the evening went to the hunting lodge in the forest with the president and Lämpchen, who drove us.

I have come to understand diversity and its various systems—such as that found among insects. The appeal lies in their visual display embedded by those hundred thousand facets of natura naturata in the core of the natura naturans.[6] The beams of light are those of an inverted prism. They dazzle the eye primarily by reflecting the colors of the spectrum. In the realm of variegated color, our sense of wonder predominates; in white light, by contrast, we respond with joyous and apprehensive dread. The mind descends into the treasure grottoes where the great sigillum [seal] resides, the prototype for all subsequent creation.

And then, the workshops. When I look down from the cliffs into the coral gardens into the activity of the colorful creatures at the life source—how superior are such images to all destruction of individuals, to all selfish enmities. I have gained magnificent insights, and I am overcome by a feeling of gratitude when I consider that I may still have many a year of such visions before me.

Life is like a stalk of bamboo that forms recurrent nodes, thereby achieving height and strength. Similarly, now and again we encounter forces when purely chronological progress, the aging process, becomes concentrated in a meaningful way. These are birthdays in a higher sense, stages of maturation and not mere aging. When we die, we close the circle of life again before the fecundity of eternity.

A group of soldiers is billeted at a farm. When chickens are stolen, straw is confiscated without a receipt, or further excesses take place, someone or other among them will recognize the illegality and try to prevent it. It might be the farmer’s son who is looking out for his father’s property. When the order came to arrest hostages, I observed among the upper echelons, such as those of the commander-in-chief, that members of the staff were deeply affected and suffered as if the act cut to the core of their consciences. On the other hand, a primitive person follows the maxim, “anything my group does is good,” and unfortunately, it seems that this primitive behavior is increasing unchecked and with it, the bestial character of politics.

What can one advise a man, especially a simple man, to do in order to extricate himself from the conformity that is constantly being produced by technology? Only prayer. Here even the lowest human being has a vantage point that makes him part of the whole and not just a cog in the machinery. Extraordinary benefit surges from this source as well as self-mastery. This applies beyond the bounds of any theology. In situations that can cause the cleverest of us to fail and the bravest of us to look for avenues of escape, we occasionally see someone who quietly recognizes the right thing to do and does good. You can be sure that is a man who prays.

In the afternoon with the president on La Roche Saint-Martin, one of the nearby peaks marked by a cliff of red sandstone. From its summit, we had a panoramic view across the green meadows and the dark rounded hilltops of the Vosges region.

In the evening, read the book by Filon about Empress Eugénie. All the while rifle shots echoed from the nearby Kempberg [mountain]; now it is in the hands of the Maquis.[7] Began preparations for defending the cottage where Sergeant Schröter and I were sharing quarters. It was like remembering an ancient, half-forgotten craft.

In a dream, I was walking through a magnificent city. It was far more elegant than all the others I have known, chiefly because ancient Chinese and European designs merged there. I saw the street of grave monuments, the marketplace, the tall buildings of red granite.

As usual when I take such strolls, I also collected a few beetles in my ether flask. When I emptied it to examine my booty, I noticed two or three creatures I did not recall picking up. Among them was an almost transparent carnelian red Anoxia [dung beetle]. Upon awakening, however, I recalled that a few nights ago, in a different dream, I had thrown it into the flask, and was astonished that it seemed as if it were something intruding into this world in such a strangely concrete way.

I’ll make the journey to Hannover tomorrow; the military commander’s staff is disbanding.

Cavalry Captain Adler has just returned from a conference at headquarters. Himmler gave a speech there, too. His message was that one had to be tough. He told about a junior officer who had deserted and been returned to his battalion busy drilling in the barracks courtyard. The matter moved quickly and a verdict was reached. The man was forced to dig his own grave and then shot. The earth was thrown on top of him and stamped down. Then the drilling continued as if nothing had happened.

This is one of the most gruesome acts I have ever heard of in this world of butchery.

In Colmar by evening. A splendid rainbow shimmered over its houses. I spent the night in the room of a doctor in a cot covered with black oilcloth where he examined his patients. When I opened the window another rainbow hung there in the heavy atmosphere, magically connecting the Vosges with the Black Forest.

Early morning arrival in Hannover, where I was able to get a few hours of sleep. I then reported to General Loehning and, on my way, noticed to my amazement the green vegetation that was already covering the ruins. Grasses and plants had sprung up on the masonry rubble in the city center.

Kirchhorst. Was welcomed home. New refugees in the house. The garden gone to seed. Fences in disrepair. The hallways are overflowing with suitcases and crates.

The walnut tree I planted in 1940 is bearing its first fruit.

New housing for refugees in the village—this time they are Dutch, people who no longer felt safe in their own country. The persecutions will be called by other names, but they won’t stop.

In the afternoon Dr. Göpel arrived. He was on his way from Amsterdam to Dresden. He reported that Drieu La Rochelle had shot himself in Paris. It seems to be a law that people who support intercultural friendship out of noble motives must fall, while the crass profiteers get away with everything. They say Montherlant is being harassed. He was still caught up in the notion that chivalrous friendship is possible; now he is being disabused of that idea by louts.

Visit from Ziegler, with whom I discussed printing my Appeal. He always carries it with him in his briefcase. I heard from him that Benoist Méchin had been shot by terrorists in Paris.

Endless squadrons overhead. Misburg, their main target nearby, was hit again and huge oil reserves have been burning off beyond the moor beneath the clouds of leaden smoke. Since 1940, the sounds of the night have become significantly more ominous; the impression of impending catastrophe is growing.

I have been placed on furlough with the reserve command staff and am awaiting the final stage of the process. This, too, is extraordinarily dangerous; it is how the lemures commit a great number of murders that are identified by the postmortem conditions of the corpses. They are carrying out a kind of anticipatory revenge that has already claimed the former Communist leader, Thälmann, and the Social Democrat Breitscheit as victims. If they were more intelligent, one could quote Seneca to them, “No matter how many you may kill, your successors will not be among them.” One can only hope that they don’t have much longer to wait. Apparently, a huge number of the aristocrats in Pomerania have already been assassinated.

Out on the moor with Alexander and Ernstel, whom I found still weakened after his incarceration. He has reported to an armored unit, but I get the impression that he is not yet up to the rigors of the training. I am especially pleased that he does not harbor any resentment.

As I watched him sitting exhausted, at the edge of the woods, it became clear to me what a terrifying situation we are in. Compared to this, the acrid odor of the burnt-out cities is paltry.

My current reading includes L’Ile de Ceylan et ses Curiosités Naturelles [The Island of Ceylon and Its Natural Curiosities] by Octave Sachot (Paris, 1863). The work has a nice excerpt about daily activity in the tropics from the book by Sir James Emerson Tennent. I’ve been on the lookout for this volume for a while.

Visit in the afternoon from Gustav Schenk. Years ago I corresponded with him about the spotted arum [jack-in-the-pulpit]. Discussed the hallucinogenic peyote cactus, and then the three-day fast he is preparing for. Much reminded me of my years following World War I, when I was always keeping an eye out for those extra tickets to the spiritual heights. It is, of course, better to choose the portals that are open to everyone.

Discussed the situation. Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.

Worked a little bit on the “Path of Masirah.” I began by inventing the names and writing the introduction.

Beobachten [observe, watch] and Betrachten [look at, view, regard]—here we have a subtle difference between concrete and abstract seeing: Ich betrachte den Zeiger der Uhr [I am looking at the hand of the clock] but Ich beobachte seinen Lauf [I observe its movement].

In the morning, I looked for Banville’s Odes Funambulesques, which was brought to my attention thanks to a remark of Verlaine’s. Although I searched carefully in the library and the study, I was unable to find the book, so I thought I had lost it. But then I found it among my signed copies, because it bears a dedication from the author to Elisabeth Autement.

It’s a nice image: after believing we have lost something, we then find it in a more distinguished form.

Current reading: the Greek myths in the version by Schwab. Despite several shortcomings, it has enjoyable qualities in its description of the ancient pagan world. Schwab captures the clear, still, crystalline depths of its domain, where the spiritual conceptions and births take place before and outside of history. The origin precedes the beginning.

Yesterday evening I read in the second volume as far as the beautiful passage where Agamemnon is compared to Odysseus. There we read that, when standing, the Shepherd of the People[8] was the taller of the two men, while Odysseus was taller when they were seated.

After a short sleep, I was awakened by the noise of an intense barrage. Perpetua got up and dressed our little son while I watched the spectacle standing at the window in my dressing gown. We could hear the roar of myriad engines and watched as shells soared high into the sky—no bigger than the sparks that spew from burning steel in the forge. Then beyond the moor, at Anderten, red flames erupted. A long, shrill whistle immediately followed; now all attention, all fear, seemed focused on a red arrow falling out of the sky to earth. I stepped back, and immediately felt a fiery punch that shook the house to its foundation. We hurried downstairs to reach the garden and found the door jammed shut by the shockwaves, but panes of glass from its windows lay shattered in the hallway. The exit facing the meadow was still unobstructed. We carried the children outside through it, while shrapnel hissed down through the treetops. Down in the air-raid shelter, we waited for the bombardment to end.

A blockbuster bomb had fallen onto the field halfway between Kirchhorst and Stelle. It damaged the Cohrs’s farm primarily and ripped off roofs for some distance around. In our house, a crack goes from the cellar down into the ground below; the stairwell sags, and the roof shows signs of damage.

The mail brought a letter from Ruth Speidel. She reports that the general has been arrested. With him, the last participant at the historical conference of La Roche-Guyon has been caught, and all the rest are dead.

I am removing the tomato plants in the glaring autumn sun, while the admiral butterflies flutter around. The blade glides through the succulent stalks; my hands become impregnated with the tangy aroma. When I wash them, the rinse water flows dark green.

The search for mushrooms on the cow paths. From a distance, we can make our way toward these bright gleaming clusters. The most beautiful ones are like eggs, completely closed. But the others are exquisite, too—the pink-ribbed gills that smell faintly of anise and are visible through their torn membranes. They are grasped on the stalk with the whole hand like the clapper of a bell and then pulled out gently, letting their firm, waxy skin cool the fingers.

Turned to the task of putting my hunting books in order.[9] Today, I entered the locations where I found Dromius meridionalis [ground beetle]. It was mostly underneath chestnut husks in Parisian cemeteries, for example, not far from Verlaine’s grave at Batignolles. Others came from the bark of the large sycamores that line the banks near the bridge of Puteaux. The beautiful work of Jeannel gives me to understand that this is a variety dispersed particularly around the Atlantic. In addition to Great Britain and Ireland, he lists among their habitats São Miguel and Terceira in the Azores. In fact one of my own specimens is labeled: “Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, 26 October 1936.” There was a blue carapace sunning itself on the silvery-gray bark of a felled laurel tree. This shows that within my own extensive hunting grounds, I am not unacquainted with the territory from the North Cape to the oases of the Sahara, and from the islands of the Yellow Sea to the Hesperides. Despite the inhospitable nature of our times, I am still looking forward to further wonderful campaigns in this region.

On the moor. The golden crowns of the woods gleam in the distance accentuated by blue shadows. The autumn sun produces an abundance of blue. The same applies to the spirit. Autumn brings out metaphysics and also melancholy.

I need a lot of sleep, long nights. The brain is like the liver of Prometheus: plucked from his body by the eagle, it must regenerate in darkness.

Fruits of my reading: Arbeiten über morphologische und taxonomische Entomologie [Essays on Morphological and Taxonomic Entomology].

Here I find mentioned an article on the honeybee in ancient India, published in 1886 by Professor Ferdinand Karsch, and what is more, under the pseudonym “Canus.”

A similar pseudonym was the one used by J. Ch. F. Haug, who signed himself “Hophthalmos.”

After a period of great fasting, the German was led to the mountaintop by Kniébolo and shown dominion over the world. It did not take much urging before he was worshipping his tempter.

Dreamed about my father last night. We were playing chess in two different rooms; I was in the outer room, but we could see each other through a sliding door that gradually opened as the game progressed.

Afterward, was standing before a building that held memories for me. At first it seemed to be the demolished and then reconstructed house of my grandmother. Then it was the one belonging to Florence on Avenue de Malakoff; then it was on Rue du Cherche-Midi. That is the tremendous thing about dreams: they echo the archetypes—here, the one of “the lost house.” In light of such imagery, individual experience becomes indistinct. Only the deeper sorrow remains intact. Something similar happens at dusk when individual traits are blurred and general ones become more distinct. At the threshold of that night of death, we will finally recognize the identity of such experiences and the illusion of the world of numbers. There exists but one number, just as there is but one human being. Eros strains to reach him.

Dreamed about my father again last night. We were together on a stairway; he was bringing me wine from the cellar to drink on my journey. Then I was back in Paris.

Air-raid sirens in the morning, just the way they gradually wear down the populations in the cities.

Schenk encouraged me to assemble a collection of seed specimens from plants. The result would not just be a formidable archive of tangible objects, but one that also included their powers, poisons, medicinal, and hallucinogenic properties. Fields of flowers, forests, and flower gardens also would be concentrated in that vial.

Worked further on “The Path of Masirah.” Working in a new area may be too different, too strenuous for this day and age. I am now using an ink that flows blue from my pen but turns a deep, dark color overnight. This feature clearly differentiates the new work; I can now see the freshly plowed furrows in the field.

Squadrons overhead during the night. A great fire blazed over toward Braunschweig. Low-flying aircraft circled the region at breakfast. The house shook under the bombardment.

Worked more on “The Path of Masirah” despite the huge hardships these days. It’s strange how difficult it is to come up with names for characters in such stories, even though we have the whole alphabet at our disposal. It’s no less strange that they can seldom be changed once the text has been developed past the beginning. The characters that bear them have then achieved their own life, their own reality.

The use of the past perfect tense over the course of long paragraphs makes a text wooden. It is preferable to use the imperfect [simple past] at the cost of grammatical precision and just let the past perfect be audible on occasion. The reader then remains in the temporal dimension of the narrative. Style permits carelessness, but not outright mistakes.

Went to the Oldhorst Moor with Ernstel in the afternoon. The pale pink plant with waxy blossoms that I collected for my moor herbarium turned out to be bog rosemary. At eight o’clock in the evening as I sat at my microscope, warnings of enemy aircraft came through. The planes themselves followed shortly thereafter. We could see red and green Christmas trees[10] over the city where the southern section was being transformed into a boiling cauldron of explosions. A farm in Neuwarmbüchen went up in flames.

Kniébolo’s radio appeal for the formation of Volkssturm [civil defense; home guard] battalions makes it easier to institute new policies of annihilation that are directed against the populace as a whole. All his ideas turn out to be experiments that are then applied to the Germans on a large scale. I am thinking of the bombing of the synagogues, the destruction of the Jews, the bombardment of London, the flying bombs, et cetera. He demonstrates primarily that such deeds are imaginable and possible; he destroys all safeguards and gives the masses a chance to show their approval. The frenetic acclaim that accompanied his rise to power was essentially the approval of self-destruction, a deeply nihilistic act. My horror stems from the fact that, from the start, I could sense the terrifying cheering for the Pied Piper. Of course, Kniébolo is a European phenomenon as well. Germany’s central location will always make it the place where such things appear first and most distinctly.

I heard from Army High Command that my discharge has gone through. People in Berlin even seem to have been in a hurry to get rid of me by this method. Now I can work here a little bit, as if I were on a sinking ship or in a city under siege, where one presents the wave offering[11] before deserted altars. A good thing that the whole publishing business is collapsing. That makes my work more meaningful and more futile. By the same token, we might engrave chalices to offer to the sun and then cast them into the sea.

In the city, I discovered that the attack that happened the day before yesterday took many lives. Most were crushed by the crowds in front of the bunker doors. Some bunkers have flights of steps leading down; some individuals jump over the railing onto the people crowded together below. When they land, they break people’s cervical vertebrae. Harry witnessed one of these entrances to the inferno; the wailing and moaning from the dark shaft penetrated far and wide through the night.

Afterward went with Schenk to the studio of Grethe Jürgens, where we chatted about plant life on the moors and the small islands.

Return trip via Bothfeld. I visited the cemetery and, among the graves noticed that of W., a man with whom my father went to court over land disputes. Now both are lying in the same earth and returning to it. What is left to us from this life if we do not accumulate worth that can be exchanged for gold at the tollgate to death’s realm, to be exchanged for eternity?

In my dream I was dining with the commander-in-chief in the evening, and while doing so I thought, “So the reports of his death were wrong.” But I could see the pale scar of the pistol shot on his temple.

In the afternoon, I took Ernstel to the station in Burgdorf. He is still debilitated from his time in prison; his feet are also still sore from the marching. Yet he didn’t want his comrades, who are ready to head out, to leave without him. We embraced each other in the small chilly passageway that leads to the platform.

In Bothfeld for my discharge from military service. Since the war has now become ubiquitous, it hardly changes anything. On the way, I found a fragment of a horseshoe.

Current reading: Léon Bloy again, this time his diaries, followed by Sueur de Sang [Sweating Blood], containing a description of his (probably largely invented) adventures as one of the Francs-tireurs[12] during the winter of 1870–1871. This foreshadows the current situation with the partisans and maquisards. In recounting the deeds he ascribes to the Germans, hardly any atrocity is omitted. But among the actions of his own heroes, Bloy praises the bludgeoning of adversaries with machetes and bottles, burnings with petroleum, desecration of corpses, and more. This reaches the level of the horrors of Tantalus.[13] Bloy is like a tree rooted deep in a swamp yet producing sublime blossoms at its top. My own relationship to him—repellent in so many ways—makes me recognize the degree that my own work has purged me of national hatred.

Myth and science. One interprets the world, the other explains it. When Palinurus[14] falls asleep at the helm, a god touches his eyelids. A chemist attributes this phenomenon to the accumulation of lactic acid in the tissues. Alchemy offers a strange intermediate notion—experimentally scientific while in theory mythological.

Friedrich Georg is right when he says that the Titanic world is closer to the technical than to the Olympian world. The Titans sought refuge and shelter from Hephaestus, the only god one could call a technician. The scene is superbly described when they pitch in eagerly in his workshop to forge the weapons of Aeneas.

Seen in mythical terms, the sinking of the Titanic after it struck an iceberg corresponds to the Tower of Babel in the Pentateuch. The ship is a Tower of Babel en pleine vitesse [at full speed]. Not only is the name symbolic, but so are almost all the details. Baal, the Golden Calf, famous gems and mummies of the pharaohs—it’s all there.

Went to Celle, where I had things to do. The spirit of the first settlers lingers on in the abandoned farms along the way. Back then royal favor was dispensed to everyone. When that disappears in human beings, we experience periods like the one we have today. Loss of sovereignty precedes an assault upon dignity.

Read further in Léon Bloy. The effect he has derives from the fact that he represents the human being per se in all his infamy but also in all his glory.

Through my bedroom window, I gaze out into the morning fog, where the leaves of the grapevine are turning pale yellow at my windowsill. Their tips are turning red, as if dipped in blood. The life of plants and their cycle ensures the reality that is threatened with dissolution by demonic powers. The adversaries of the Head Forester[15] are gardeners and botanists.

When the blockbuster bomb fell, the walls of the house seemed to be rendered transparent, as if only the organic shell of beams and rafters might hold up.

Went to the cemetery, where since time immemorial indigenous families have lain: the Ebelings, the Grethes, the Lahmanns, the Rehbocks, the Schüddekopfs.

The act of dying must produce a significant gesture, perhaps one of genius. Whenever I receive death announcements, I consistently notice that a kind of emotion grips me and I feel astonished disbelief. It is as though the departed had passed a difficult examination and achieved something I had not believed him capable of. At that moment, the contours of his life are instantly transformed in the most wonderful way.

Thought about Lessing and his poem dedicated to the dead baboon:

[Now here he lies, the little, sweet baboon, / Who imitated us so well! / I’ll bet that what he did, we’ll soon / Imitate ourselves, that sweet baboon.]

First day of November. The fighting continues in Holland, in Alsace, in East Prussia, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. Tremendous escalation of the air war concentrating on Germany.

We hear that Holland seeks restitution for those parts of its land that were flooded by annexing German territory. Old mistakes seem to get repeated while the world—instead of learning from the emergence of Kniébolo—seems indebted to him as its example.

Concerning prayer. It possesses a conductive power, in the sense of a superior mechanism that dissipates and depletes fear. In ages when the practice is lost, large indigestible masses of feral dread build up in populations. In the same proportion, our freedom of will and powers of resistance diminish; the appeal of demonic powers becomes more compelling, and its imperatives more terrible.

Prayer clears the air. In this sense, the sound of bells represents collective prayer, the unmediated prayer of the church. This has been replaced by the wail of sirens, some of which are even mounted on the church towers.

Current reading: The tome by Volhard about cannibalism that Schenk brought me contains a wealth of material. The conclusions are less exhaustive; it’s also difficult to judge the ramifications of such a phenomenon. It is presented here like the “behavior of fishes”—meaning that they devour each other—and then it becomes incorporated into higher culture.

There are significant individual myths dispersed across our planet suggesting that superior sacrifices triumphed over cannibalism. In the South Seas, on the evening before a festival, the son of a king meets a slave wrapped in crimson robes and asks him where he’s going. The man answers that he is on his way to the royal palace; he has been designated as the ritual meal. In reply, the king’s son promises to save him, goes to the palace in his place, and lets himself be wrapped in palm leaves. When he is served before the king in this manner, the wrapping is opened, revealing to the king his son rather than his slave. This sight rouses and moves the father so much that he forbids the slaughter of human beings forever after. Here we perceive an echo of the highest theme of the human race.

For Indo-European peoples, a dreadful taboo must have been associated with human flesh since ancient times. This is suggested by our own folktales. The curse of Tantalus can also be traced back to a meal. The power of the prohibition can be gauged by the fact that even this war, which was instigated for the basest reasons, has hardly made a dent in it. This is surely noteworthy when we realize who the perpetrators are. Any rationalist economy, no less than any consistent racial doctrine, must essentially lead to cannibalism.

The theory of these matters is, incidentally, best worked out by the Anglo-Saxons, men like Swift. In Huxley’s Brave New World the corpses are exploited for their phosphorus content and their economic viability.

In the mail, a letter from Ina Speidel, the general’s daughter. She writes that Horst was also arrested on 29 October. Our old circle of the Knights of Saint George[16] and our cohort from the Hotel Raphael have been drastically winnowed. Some have been hanged, poisoned, imprisoned; others have been dispersed and surrounded by thugs.

The German language still possesses country lanes, whereas French runs on tracks. As a consequence, conventional nonindividual elements are on the increase [in German]. We need a liaison officer.[17]

Rivarol’s observation seems apt here: “if vowels and consonants were to attract each like magnetic substances, according to the laws of nature, then language would resemble the universe, unified and immutable.”

Visit from Hanne Wickenberg in the afternoon; she was recently surprised by a daylight raid on Hannover when she was in the old part of the city. She described the scenes that took place in the air-raid bunkers. The bombs screamed down nearby. Dust and smoke got in through a small window and made all the faces indistinguishable. The space was filled with sighs, screams, and groans; women fainted. People tied cloths over the children’s faces because they would vomit from fear. One woman was about to give birth:

“A doctor, quickly, a doctor. It’s starting to burn. It’s burning.”

Other voices responded:

“Where is the fire? For heaven’s sake, where?”

By the end, not one of the people inside was able to stand up any longer. They lay there quaking, foaming at the mouth, stretched out on the floor. Even sturdy Hanne said: “I was worn out when it was all over.”[18]

Massive detachment of aircraft overhead around noon, during which everyone in the house gathered in our little air-raid shelter. First came a squadron of forty planes, which took heavy anti-aircraft fire. Two were seen to have smoke trails; one made a hairpin turn in flames and disappeared in a white cloud that showered debris.

Huge numbers of bombs followed, glistening silvery white in the sunshine. The anti-aircraft fire surged to full force and occasionally the air was filled with the whistling of incoming bombs. I watched the events from our garden but entered the shelter during the worst parts. Just after the planes passed—the wind was from the west—thick clouds blowing over from the city obscured the view.

The roar of the squadrons darkening the sky is so strong that it drowns out the defensive fire and even the detonation of the bombs themselves. It is like standing under a bell filled with a buzzing swarm of metallic bees. The incredible energy of our age—otherwise diffused far and wide—emerges from its abstract potential and becomes perceptible to our senses. The impression of the squadrons lumbering on undeterred even when planes are exploding in their midst, is mightier than the detonation of the bombs themselves. We see the will to destroy, even at the cost of one’s own destruction. This is a demonic trait.

I was pleased with little Alexander and his courage—astonishing when we think about the monstrous weapons of destruction confronting such a tiny heart: “Now I really am having heart palpitations,” when the bombs screamed past and (as we later discovered) hit near the autobahn.

In the evening, there was a further attack with countless Christmas trees. Below them it was like a great array of gleaming white Christmas presents all spread out. Fires also tinged the horizon with red. A new anti-aircraft battery has been put in place at the edge of the moor woodland. Whenever it fires a shell, the house is jolted to its foundation.

When the alert sounds, the children are hustled into their little coats and, as soon as the droning of the aircraft or the noise of the first rounds reaches us, they are led to the shelter. Only thirteen-year-old Edmund Schultz remains out in the garden taking risks. His Aunt Fritzi stays in the house and occasionally looks out, remarkably unconcerned. I’m glad to see that a fearless soul stays indoors. As for me, I go indoors now and then to see that things are under control. At those moments, it’s strange to observe how the demonic powers deplete our communal spirit, especially our basic stability. I have the feeling of moving through the staterooms of a ship, particularly when I glimpse the illuminated dial of the radio. Aside from the red glow of the stove, this is the only light that penetrates the darkness of this strictly enforced blackout. The genderless voice of an announcer reports the maneuvers of the squadron up to the moment when they “are entering the city limits with bombardment to follow immediately.” I sometimes listen to other stations; many places on our planet are broadcasting dance music; others present scholarly lectures. Radio London transmits news and comforting words and reminds its listeners at the end to switch to a different frequency. In between come the rolling echoes of the detonations.

After eating went to church, where several panes of glass in the lovely rose window over the altar have been shattered.

General Loehning came for coffee accompanied by Schenk and Diels, who has particular insight into the political underworld—especially knowledge of the origins of the Staatspolizei [State Police], which he in fact founded.[19] From him, I heard details about horrifying suffering inflicted on friends and acquaintances before they were executed. Schulenburg, for example, was (like his coconspirators) addressed as “Schurke [scoundrel] Schulenburg” or “Verbrecher [criminal] Schulenburg” by the president of the People’s Court.[20] At one point, when this hangman type accidentally addressed him as “Graf [Count] Schulenburg,” he corrected himself with a bow; “Excuse me: Schurke Schulenburg, if you please.” A trait that brought him vividly to my mind.

Diels also mentioned Röpke, Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart [The Social Crisis of Our Time], a book that is apparently being widely read abroad. This is something Diels seems intimately familiar with; the general said that he had been observed with one of the chiefs of the Secret Service at a Turkish airport.

Took a walk in the afternoon to Moormühle and Schillerslage as far as the boulder with the horseshoe. Had a look there at the animals that had fallen into the holes dug along the road as shelter from dive-bombers.

As I walked, I thought about the cursory style of contemporary thinkers, the way they pronounce judgment on ideas and symbols that people have been working on and creating for millennia. In doing so, they are unaware of their own place in the universe, and of that little bit of destructive work allocated to them by the world spirit. But what is it, other than foam that sprays its fleeting whitecaps over the solid ancient cliffs? We can already feel the incipient tug of the undertow.

It’s also wonderful to watch the drama of the old liberals, Dadaists, and freethinkers, as they begin to moralize at the end of a life devoted completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order. Dostoevsky, who knew this whole aquarium from the bottom up, depicted it in the mollusk form of Stepan Trofimovich.[21] His sons are encouraged to scorn anything that had formerly been considered fundamental. Finally, it is said of the all-too-eager master: “Well, old boy, you’ve blathered on long enough. Now it’s time to boil you down for soap.” Then the wailing starts. Once the conservatives have also been bumped off, the chaos is over. And so in The Demons the matter rests with the German governor (Lemke, I think), who is not up to the task. Lemke’s situation is remarkably similar to that of the old Hindenburg. Add to this the young conservatives who first support the demos[22] because they sense its new elemental power, and then fall into the traces and are dragged to their deaths. In this chaos, only the nihilist retains his fearsome power, and anyone who thinks he can mount a counteroffensive must have learned how to do so from him.

Air-raid sirens at midnight, and right afterward while we were dressing the children, four bombs hit with a roar. The same thing happened at half past three this morning. After the all-clear signal, the shells with time-delay fuses exploded. Rain poured down on the garden, and from the old Hanoverian city center, the red glow of detonations flamed up through the steamy air.

During the alarm, even during the raid and the defensive fire, a certain order prevails. But once the first bombs begin to whistle, everyone—more or less dressed—piles into the shelter. Even then, the children are led by the hand; our concern focuses especially on them.

In the mail a card from Ernstel who is on his way to Italy as a Panzergrenadier [infantryman in a heavy-armor division]. In addition a letter from Ruth Speidel, from which we can see, to our great joy, that the general is still alive. I have thought about him, as well as Ernstel, every evening and every morning.

A raid just now—it is nine o’clock in the evening—which reddened the rain-soaked western sky with fires and powerful explosions. A bomb also fell in the area; the shockwave smashed a windowpane in my study that was already cracked, as well as the transom over the front door.

Current reading: Grundzüge einer Ökologie der chinesischen Reptilien [General Outline of an Ecology of Chinese Reptiles] by Mell. In certain sea snakes with paddle-shaped tails, only one ovary functions, while the other produces immature eggs. This prevents interference with the creature’s swimming while gravid. It also safeguards the fully developed capacity to search for food during this period, when nourishment is most crucial. In some species, the gums seem to be adapted for the absorption of oxygen and are thus capable of breathing. During long dives, these substitute for lungs, like oxygen canisters aboard submarines. There is one of the strangest cases ever attested in which snakes attack human beings: A Chinese woman on an island near Hong Kong was busy cutting grass. She laid her little child on the earth where it was devoured by a python that darted from the bushes. It was impossible to get help. Of course, infants left unguarded are prey to attacks from almost all animals, right down to the ants.

Here too I find the opinion (as I did recently in Sachot’s book about Ceylon) that certain people in regions where snakes proliferate possess a distinct ability to handle the creatures. A particular affinity exists in such places. I assume that, when seized by its captors, the snake perceives a sort of neutrality or even sympathy, rather like the touch of one of its own species.

The book is good because of its underlying passion for the observation of animals, the frisson of the magical and totemic encounter, without which all zoology becomes merely an arid summary of data.

In this context, I again pondered Darwinism. His main weakness lies in his lack of metaphysics. This finds its expression in the methodology, in that only one of the forms of observation—namely time—predominates.

By contrast, we have to see that animals have a relationship to their environment and to each other that resembles a bundle that is intricately knotted and intertwined. Their abundance requires less a chronological than a synoptic approach. The immense simultaneity—the parallel coexistence—becomes broken up by Darwinism into a succession: the bundle uncoils into a roll. This diminishes the grandeur of creation, the miracle of the genesis, as it emerges at a single stroke or in mighty cycles and eons, such as in the seven days of Moses, or in Hesiod’s hierarchy of the cosmos, or in Chinese natural philosophy.

From a theological perspective, Lamarck’s views are more significant. But it was, however, predictable that the more mechanistic theory would carry the day. After a certain point in time, selection takes place based on the greatest capacity for destruction.

After writing last night’s entry, I read Goethe’s [comedy] Die Mitschuldigen [Partners in Crime, 1787]. The work skillfully captures the milieu of a small inn, yet the ending is abrupt, and it is annoying that Sophie remains under the control of the wicked Söller. On the other hand, one could argue that the title announces the moral of the tale.

After midnight—it had turned into a clear, starry night—then came a second attack with countless aircraft. One of them, pinned like an insect by the beams of the searchlights, was pitching from side to side from the impacts of the shells that zigzagged around it like little red stars shooting off an anvil. The presence of the children made the events more intense, more human, than anything familiar to me from the bunkers of World War I. Perpetua holds our little boy on her lap, bends over him completely, almost embracing him with her shoulders so that no harm can come to him that would not first touch her. This is Niobe’s posture when confronting Apollo’s arrow.[23]

Then fell asleep and dreamed of animals. I was engrossed in the observation of birds in an ornithological cabinet, particularly a large, speckled hawfinch. I was surprised that the bird’s mottled coloration also extended to its beak, and pondered the reasons for this. Then there was a Javanese magpie that looks just like ours. “What makes this Javanese?”—I see, like some birds-of-paradise, it had a clump of red plumage under its open display of tail feathers.

The air-raid alarms sometimes yank us out of deep sleep. When this happens, I am again made aware that there are unknown regions of dreams, nethermost depths of the sea where no ray of light penetrates. Just as the organisms that respond to light and sun are accidentally caught down there in the net, the plasma of the deep dream state also changes in response to the consciousness of the moment. Only a few scales get stuck in the twine of the net. We descend into unfathomable, eyeless depths, down into the placenta of imagery.

Had an uninterrupted night. Read Goethe’s [play] Natürliche Tochter [The Natural Daughter, 1803], a coldly artificial display of fireworks. It is like a creation still in its preliminary, Promethean phase. It is precisely the high level of its workmanlike quality that speaks for its ingenuity.

Then read still unpublished biographies of Planck and Laue sent to me by Keiper, the Berlin bookseller. I want to pass these along to Brother Physicus. At these highest levels of insight into the physical world, the relationship to the environment becomes streamlined, instinctual—the visual, mathematical, oscillating, crystallographic sensibility suffuses the body like a fluid. Science cannot direct us to other areas than those concealed deeply within ourselves. Whatever telescopes and microscopes may discover someday—we have known it forever in our innermost being. We arduously retrieve fragments of palaces buried within us.

Yesterday’s mail brought a letter from Gerhard Günther, and included excerpts from the diaries of his son, who was killed in action in the mountains of the Southern Carpathian range. These included, in addition to prayers, meditations, and quotations, notations to my own works, which he read with great attention.

The prefigured image. Our science strives toward this. It is a mosaic pieced together on a background with a predetermined pattern. The more of these little pieces that are “laid out,” the narrower the choices become for the remaining pieces. At the start, you can work in any field or area. By the end, each location is defined.

Free will seems to be diminished in the process, yet it must be viewed as essential to the whole. Powerful decisions determined the greater process, which seems to become more and more automatic toward the finish. We are engaged in fitting the capstones into vaults and domes—stones that hermits envisioned and planned in their theological meditations. Free will is, of course, greater in Homo magnus than in the individual, yet the individual also has a share in it. In his undivided state, in the decision about good and evil, the individual is still in command today. Just appeal to his sense of sovereign mastery and you will see miracles.

Went to the dentist in Burgdorf in the afternoon and read Eckermann in the waiting room.[24] There I found a mention of the Pastoralia of the Sophist Longus and immediately felt the desire to own the work. In light of the difficulties involved in acquiring books, this won’t be the case for the time being. At the same time, I recalled the banks of the Seine between the bridges and their rich fishing grounds.

Later, while he was drilling, the dentist whispered political news in my ear.

The first snowfall of the year.

Many people in Germany today may feel as I do—people whose knowledge of infamy has produced disgust at their participation in the collective, in anticipation that future bodies of authority will just be branches from the same trunk. Even now, after such powerful portents of what is to come, the delusion of the numberless legions of the rabble surpasses all imagination and all moderation.

Nights without bombing raids, partially due to the November weather. On the other hand, the English and Americans need their strategic squadrons for their autumn offensive on the western Rhineland.

I am reading Stifter. His Bunte Steine [Colored Stones, 1853] has been standing untouched on my bookshelf for a long time because his circle of admirers is so unappealing. Lovely chapels filled with the smell of cheap incense.

I wonder whether the propensity for establishing total states corresponds to musicality. In any case, it’s obvious that three musical nations in particular have emerged: the Germans, Russians, and Italians. Within musicality, a shift to the coarser elements probably occurs—a shift from melody to rhythm. This development culminates in monotony.

Last night there was a raid and distant heavy bombardments. A Christmas tree spread out over Hannover like a red star of misery. Powerful tremors followed.

Read further in Colored Stones: “Granite,” “Limestone,” “Tourmaline,” and “Rock Crystal.” Saving one’s first ascent of particular peaks among the literary mountain ranges for one’s later years has its merits.

Stifter is the Hesiod of the moderns, someone who still understands the nomos[25] of the earth. It is wonderful how old Austria looms large, like a great work of art that we will be able to appreciate again once the last Napoleonic structures have disappeared. An ancient mountain forest where the topsoil of happiness is formed. By contrast, anguish is produced here where we are.

I can recall talking with readers of Stifter who thought his suicide incompatible with his work and life. But we should pay attention to those pedantic and overly scrupulous traits in his nature. These can easily develop into hypochondria. This shows up both in grammatical and narrative structures and points to a delicate, fragile constitution—at least in intellectual terms:

“The children wore broad straw hats; they had clothes with sleeves from which their arms protruded.”

Intensified bombing raids and attacks as they become more clever and malicious. The oil tanks in Misburg were burned out again. The ranks and columns of aircraft appear by day like white hydras snaking their way through the ocean of air. Fighter planes cut through the space above them with the speed of bullets.

Read further in Stifter, whose prose is infused with elements of the old Austrian chancery style. You get used to catchwords like “idem,” “ditto,” “the former,” and “the latter” and other peculiarities that you even begin to appreciate.

Dreams last night. I was being shown plants, among them a tropical specimen as tall as heather bearing numerous dark cherries. “Also has the virtue that nobody knows they are edible.”

Then I was standing at the edge of a pool facing someone else and playing a sort of chess game with him. Yet we had no chess pieces but were operating with mental constructs. In this way, we produced armadas on the surface of the water for our own sea battles, yet their strength lay not in their fighting ability but in their beauty. Strange creatures surfaced to chase or grab one another; it was a contest that revealed the treasures of the deep.

“In infinity every point is the center.” I came up with this axiom this morning while I was digging in the flowerbeds. It would affirm that infinity does not possess quantitative, but rather qualitative metaphysical authority. One can imagine a circle, a sphere, extending to an extreme degree without increasing the number of midpoints even by one. That remains the one and only central point. For every point to become the center, a process would have to occur that would require something beyond the realm of our sensory perception—a mysterious folding of space, probably to its irreducible form.

Like every mathematical or physical fact, this relationship also has a moral implication. As a metaphysical being, every human is the center of the universe and, as such, cannot be dislodged from this position even by the most distant galaxies. The vertiginous expanses of space fall away at the moment of death, yielding to reality.

The impression called forth in us by immeasurable distance is close to animal fear; it is how we reflect the world of illusion.

The encounter. The aura of the great hunt and also of magical practices predominates here. There is enchantment that is like the approach of very timid animals; we also find the realization of dreams that we used to doubt. These call forth a mixture of skeptical wonder, fear, and delight, even great tenderness. Repetition disperses these in favor of a feeling of splendid security.

Judar the fisherman. When he enters the subterranean regions to seek the ring of highest power, he meets a series of phantoms he must vanquish. At last he finds his own mother. So even here is the knowledge, as Boethius terms it, that defeated earth grants us the stars.

World conquest by men like Caesar or Alexander has to be understood symbolically. Purple is the symbol of victory, and the ivory scepter the symbol of the victor. The one betokens matriarchal lineage, the other, the patriarchal. Gold is the apotheosis of purple; it represents the concentration of earthly power.

In some unnamed metropolis, I was living in one of the many furnished rooms at my disposal in my dream life. Pons entered and took a seat on an easy chair so he could tell me about a love affair. He added that he was going to get married tomorrow. Upon awakening I thought; “look at that, the woman he described is better suited to him (given all the circumstances of their acquaintance) than the one he chose in reality.”

This is the way people can enter our dreams: not only in their historical guise but also in a way that embodies their potential. In our dream images we understand both their empirical and also their explicit character.

After having set aside the “Path of Masirah” several weeks ago, I am starting to revise my journal from Rhodes. The times are not conducive to such works. In the “Path of Masirah,” I wish to depict a survey of morality in historical, geographical, and physical scenes. The world of the spirit must shine through the natural one but also put its stamp on it like sealing wax.

Not a history, but a synopsis of philosophy presenting the philosopher’s stone with its facets polished by the guiding spirits of different ages and peoples.

Conversation with Alexander on how to keep a journal. I corresponded about this same topic with a Sergeant Müller, who sent me his own entries.

Going through my travel journals makes it clear how much they have been shaped by topical themes. The age we live in affects their content the way fermentation and aging affect wine in the depths of the cellar. Eventually, it must be carefully rebottled and have the yeasts poured off. At Florence’s apartment, I once had a long talk with Léautaud about this. He disapproves of this practice and declares that the word in its first version is inviolable and sacrosanct. That rule cannot be implemented in my case for technical reasons, because I intersperse much associative material as a sort of seal of memory. The best depiction of first impressions is the fruit of repeated exertion and intense rewriting.

Sunday morning. After hard rain over the past few days, dry weather and clear skies. Since we experienced two raids during the night, I put the Rhodes journals aside in order to organize Elateridae [click beetles]. Looking at them reminded me of walks in the woods of Saint-Cloud.

Then the report came through that massive bomber squadrons were getting nearer. I put on my coat to go into the garden, from which I could see a large number of aircraft crossing northern airspace. Then over five hundred planes approached from the direction of Celle in staggered formations of about forty planes each. After leaving jagged bands of white smoke signals over the southern part of the sky, they swung around in formation toward Misburg and dropped their payloads. We could hear the roaring and screaming noise drown out the anti-aircraft fire. Powerful explosions shook the earth far and wide. The attackers came in at low altitude below the little clouds of our defensive positions.

Two or three squadrons swerved straight toward the house, and opened their bomb bay doors above it in order to drop their payloads, as far as I could estimate, somewhere near Bothfeld. The defensive fire was stronger than before. The lead aircraft sustained a direct hit, and a long, pale red blazing flame trailed out behind it before it crashed nearby. The smoke clouds of the impact soon surrounded our house. It looked as though one of the aircraft parts, a large silver wing with an engine hanging from it, was spinning slowly and would crash onto us, yet it corkscrewed off toward the schoolteacher’s house making a hissing noise, disappearing behind it. Two parachutes also drifted over the garden; one was so low that the man hanging on it was as close as someone you’d meet on the street. Suddenly the air was thick with scraps and shavings, as if the airplane had been shredded into black confetti. The pageant was powerfully intoxicating; it staggered all reason. There comes a point in such events when one’s own safety starts to become secondary: the vivid elements become so intensified that they leave no room for reflective thought, not even for fear.

Without light, without water, without electricity since the power plant in Ahlten was hit. They say that six hundred planes flew over us with their white loops and trails. They looked like swarms of microbes romping about in an immense blue drop of water.

The wing came down in a nearby field; the aircraft hit the ground just behind Bothfeld and burned out. Near Grosshorst, they found a head and a hand. Two more shattered corpses were lying nearby; you could see that the parachutes had become tangled in each other and as a result failed to open.

One of the pilots landed in Stelle. We heard that an inhabitant of the village—none other than a Dutch refugee—went after him and hit him a couple of times with an axe. His neighbor, Rehbock, a soldier on furlough, was passing in his farm cart, got the wounded man out of his clutches and, in danger of his own life, brought him to safety.

The two Americans whose parachutes had become entangled were buried in the little cemetery today. General Loehning came by in the afternoon. He had heard the rumor that had been circulating for weeks that I had been captured or shot.

The task of the author is not to achieve absolute, but optimal precision. This is justified by the difference between logic and language. It is thus a prerequisite of good style that an author must be satisfied with the optimal expression. To seek the absolute leads him in the wrong direction.

Words are a mosaic; that is to say that cracks exist between them. When viewed logically, these are spaces. On the other hand, they reveal the earthly realm below for deeper speculation.

Perpetua dreamed she was having one of her eye teeth pulled.

Toward noon countless squadrons appeared under dense cloud cover and dropped their payloads. A gigantic carousel seemed to be revolving above our village, raining down steel as it turned. This fell in a circle around Kirchhorst, in Stelle, near Lohne, where from our garden I could watch thirty bombs explode. They hit Buchholz causing great damage, as well as in Misburg, where the corpses of fifty Women’s Auxiliary personnel were pulled out of the rubble.

The mail brought a telegram from Countess Podewils. Her husband writes from England—a happy report in the midst of so much dismal news.

In my dream, I paid a visit to my father and also found him, yet both of the columns at the entrance to his house had grown so closely together that it took great effort to force myself in between them.

Doing nighttime guard duty, which has been instituted here in our village because of the airplanes. The farmers are deep sleepers and usually don’t wake up until the bombs start falling. Luckily I had my neighbor Lahmann as my partner—a man with some brains in his head. Time is compressed by the presence of an intelligent or pleasant person. This noticeable effect goes so far that in intellectual or erotic encounters, time can completely lose its meaning. Pain, on the other hand, and mental dullness draw it out interminably. Anyone who wishes to comprehend the true power of death as the destroyer of time must come to terms with this thought. Death brings something that nothing else can.

Visit from Kohlberg in the morning; conversed with him about Löns and writers from Lower Saxony in general. Our dry soil is extremely unsuitable for the production of artistic types. “Frisia non cantat.” [Frisia (i.e., Holland) does not sing].[26]

Went to Burgdorf in the afternoon to pick up the Rhode Island Reds [poultry], a present from Hanne Menzel from Silesia.

Current reading: Origen’s On Prayer, in addition the diaries of Léon Bloy.

Bloy is eminently human in the way he is at home among sordid things: excrement, stench, aspects of hatred; and, yet at the same time, he recognizes the highest invisible law. That makes reading him distressing. Long passages can seem like festering splinters lodged under the skin. Yet I may say that I have exerted myself as a reader, and done so under challenging conditions. One cannot shrink from slights and insults. Only then can one sift the grains of gold from the froth.

Perhaps I shall include Bloy in the series of writers I am planning to cover in a study, just as an act of intellectual gratitude. I have been collecting material for such documentation for a long time. It will examine those people, books, and things that I have chanced upon along my way, people who have given me so much.

In the morning Ernstel’s favorite cat, the beautiful Persian named Hexe, was found dead in a nearby field. She was already stiff, and we assume she had eaten poison. She was the daughter of the old cat, Kissa, who spent many years in our house, and the mother of the young Kissa, who brings me such joy. In addition to her, the large white broad-headed angora tomcat Jacko and the Siamese princess Li-Ping still keep us company.

Air-raid sentry duty last night with my neighbor Lahmann while we discussed the way things are going and broke open a bottle of vermouth. The fire in Grosshorst, the blockbuster bomb near Stelle, those Sunday and Tuesday mornings last week that will forever be inscribed in the history of the village, and even grandchildren will tell their grandchildren about such matters—if they even still exist.

Dense bomber formations in the morning but no bombs dropped. I sensed that and just kept on turning the soil in the garden in Spartan fashion “in the shade.”

Kept reading in Mon Journal by Léon Bloy. There you can encounter passages, as I did this morning, like the following:

“Colding in Denmark. 8 April 1900. Palm Sunday. Terrible weather. Today is the birthday of stupid King Christian [IX], and it is a holiday all over Denmark. His reprehensible son-in-law, the Prince of Wales, has arrived in Copenhagen after escaping an assassination attempt at the Parisian Gare du Nord. A young Belgian fired at this pig but missed. It is better just to stab them. That is more reliable and is better for the sausage!”

It takes either incredible impertinence or manic confidence in one’s own judgment to write and even publish (Paris, 1904) such things. In truth, a decadent sense of security accumulated in the person of this Edward to an unrivalled extent. As a memorial to him, Paris preserves a device, a sort of orthopedic chair he had built to accommodate his fat paunch with the greatest possible comfort during intercourse. Travelers are shown this in one of the big lupinares [brothels] as a curiosity, and Morris,[27] who seems to have thought it one of the wonders of the modern world, urged me to go see it. Although I otherwise do not avoid erotic curiosities, I could not bring myself to do so—the thoroughly mechanical and soullessly comfortable aspect of the concept is just too awful. Such machines would be at home in the great pictures by Hieronymus Bosch.

As I write this, I am watching several dogfights taking place in the gaps of blue sky in the area between my study and Isernhagen. These dramas are perhaps—no, certainly—connected magically and causally to the fact that there were monarchs like this Edward, Leopold of Belgium, and even Wilhelm II. They are not the final duels of western chivalry.

Through the keyhole I watched the new chickens I’m still keeping in the coop. The rooster stands majestically at the feed trough, summons a few hens and pecks others away. After their meal, one of them approaches him, perhaps his favorite, stretches up on her toes and touches him, pecking very gently at his pink wattles and his comb while the rooster struts. This is courtly.

The garden is coming along. Here they say of fertilizer that has been exposed to air too long that it “burns out.” That is graphic.

Concerning the distribution of intelligence. It matches the particular properties of the organisms, for it works logically only in combination with them. The duck, the frog, the pelican, the lily—each possesses a particular intelligence that matches its predisposition. And so they get by. Too much or too little would be equally detrimental.

The towering intelligence of human beings seems to transcend this proportional requirement. At the same time, the surplus can be explained as relegated to invisible organs. When these metaphysical organs are no longer stimulated, when they atrophy, a disruption of the balance appears of the sort we are now experiencing: large amounts of intelligence are freed up to be applied to annihilation.

In addition: Intellectual training of the artisan has reached the level that surpasses organic needs. This releases immense amounts of energy in society, with destructive results. There are two ways to counteract this—either reduction of spiritualization or the creation of new entities, and these can only be invisible ones. This is one of the reasons I am motivated to augment my book about the worker with a theological section.

Of all Weininger’s hypotheses, the one stating that few benefits can be seen in maternal love has generated the most powerful outrage. By the same token, one cannot say he is wrong when we look at the robin, the cat, the pelican with her brood. There is no differentiation in the animal world. The devotion of animals is just as wonderful as that of human beings. Qualities to be venerated lie in a realm beyond and presume an advance over the sexual, even over all temporal connections. Our consciousness of the final unity of matter that transcends any accidental contact: affinity in eternity.

The mail brought the long-awaited letter from Ernstel, who is camped in a town in northern Italy. I’m glad he has ended up on this front. He writes that he is reading The Charterhouse of Parma in a French edition. In the afternoon, Hanne Wickenberg came by, as she does every Friday. We talked about the female Air Force Auxiliary personnel who were killed last week in the big attack on Misburg. They were found without any signs of external injury, lying close beside one another in the communications trenches. They died when their lungs ruptured. Because the air pressure of the shockwave had stripped off all clothes and underwear from their bodies, they were completely naked. A farmer who helped bury them was quite overcome by this horrible indignity: “All such big, beautiful girls, and heavy as lead.”

Went to church and afterward visited the grave of the two Americans. Aside from a few flowers, it is decorated solely by their helmets.

Melancholy. Today metaphysical need is particularly worth our attention because our upbringing is aimed primarily at destroying, at eradicating the best in us. Yet perhaps quite new and unknown prospects reveal themselves as well, as they can to the climber who has ascended the mountain peak across a rock face that was thought to be unconquerable. We must fasten ourselves to the cliff with our own blood.

Arras. I wonder if it has been noticed that this is the town that gave birth to two regicides, namely Damiens and Robespierre. I assume so. By way of redress, two peace treaties have also been signed there.

In 1493 when Arras fell to the Austrians, they carved this verse above one of the gates:

[When the French capture Arras, / The mice will eat the cats.]

In 1640, when the French captured the city, however, they chiseled the “p” off the inscription.[28]

This is an example of a retort that has a more concise and also wittier effect than the initial insolent challenge. I noticed this about the propaganda in France as well. The huge posters showing a French worker standing at a machine in Germany and showing all the signs of contentment is an example of this. By contrast, the nocturnal counterpropaganda was limited to a simple nose ring drawn in chalk on the poster figure.

Fortifications are hastily being built near the village. The goal is to set up two dozen anti-aircraft emplacements. This is going to draw heavier attacks closer to us, not to mention the chaos from the planes they will shoot down.

Raid and bombardment in the evening. Advent: a green Christmas tree hung in the air. A heavy bomb flew over the town with a hellish roar, only to detonate in the distance, perhaps over by the autobahn. The shockwave tore all the windows open and ripped off our blackout material.

Aboard sinking ships and floating wrecks. First the supplies are rationed, then the planks begin to loosen, and the struggle for places begins. Finally, the sinking amidst debris, corpses, and sharks.

Burckhardt was right when he expressed his fear of a “rapid decay.” He suspected something shady.

I am reading the Thankless Beggar by Léon Bloy, in which a poor man in disguise left behind a great wealth of consolation.

Words. Désobligeant (disagreeable, unpleasant) is generally translated as “discourteous,” which is actually a sort of inverted expression, since it describes the condition that discourtesy creates in another person.

Dreams about examinations. This kind of fright is too precise, too narrowly confined to be the result of memory alone. By contrast, why do impressions that are so much more powerful, like those of battle, return so seldom and so vaguely?

The test-taking dream must be connected with death; it conceals a warning that life’s tasks, its allotted time, are not yet completed. The final school examination, as my father used to tell me, reappears regularly as an apparition of terror.

“Oh God, I’ll soon turn fifty, and have been to university and I still haven’t done my final exams.”

This is the dream of the foolish virgins,[29] of the wicked husbandmen,[30] and of the man who buried his talents.[31] The feeling that one will never pass the test is a horrible one, and it’s marvelous to awaken from this of all dreams.

In another dream, I was counting money when Friedrich Georg was present. The popular interpretation of this has it that one will encounter hardship to be surmounted. Such explanations are, by the way, usually inadequate, even though they derive partially from experience or from insight into the secret nature of matter. Primers of dream imagery treat symbolism like translation, like dictionaries, by offering subordinated lists, as Huysmans does in his novel The Cathedral.

Léon Bloy’s nice comment about the occultists of this type occurs to me. In order to conjure evil, they need rituals, books of magic, and forays into the strangest and most esoteric regions, while at the same time, they completely miss the obvious Satanism of their grocer living on the next street corner.

It’s a rare thing when our mail doesn’t bring bad news. Our little postmistress approaches in the morning like a bird swooping through the garden, spreading tidings of disaster. Today, she brought the information that Edmond, whose sister and children are living with us, is missing in action, but it is probable that he’s been taken prisoner.

Friedrich Georg writes that, during the raid that destroyed the beautiful old city of Freiburg in twenty minutes, his book, The Illusions of Technology, which was being stored in a warehouse before publication, also went up in flames. It almost seems as if technology wanted to suppress the book. Twice now, the cast type has been melted in Hamburg after it was set.

I helped dig up a huge termite nest. It took a lot of work. Cranes were employed for the excavations, which were as big as a significant gravel pit. Deep in the middle of the steep yellow slope, the dark spherical structure glowed. Hosts of termites marched out in military formation. Among them I saw Termitophiles and Symbiotes like the many-legged wood louse with its black leathery carapace as it scrabbled away. My participation was that of an expert, a connoisseur of such political systems.

Construction of the batteries at the edge of the moor. The first families are leaving town. Mutterings precede the impending catastrophe, of the sort Defoe so ably describes in his book about the plague in London, or Hebbel in his [drama] Judith. It is the little details that produce panic. For example, here, word is going around that people should “remove the pictures from the walls.”

Went to the doctor in Burgdorf in the morning. I am overcome by a strange feeling of embarrassment when people ask me about the books I write. This is probably due to my difficulty in expressing in words the meaning of the things I do. Seen from an absolute perspective, it is insignificant that I am even writing at all—I could achieve as much by different means, for example, by meditation. Books are shavings, detritus of existence. A clandestine quality, related to the erotic, ultimately informs this feeling. On the one hand, you can present your children in public, but on the other, you don’t expound on the details of their procreation.

Rested in the little Beinhorn Woods, which is one of my spiritual haunts, something like the Place des Ternes in Paris. It was here that I decided to undertake a second complete reading of the Bible, in particular Luther’s translation with scholarly apparatus. I am hoping that these different readings will make the network of passages meaningful to me, and that in the course of time, I shall develop an exegesis for my personal use.

While I was tidying my files, I came upon a review of the Marble Cliffs by Näf that appeared years ago in a Swiss newspaper. When a neutral critic, who can be in no doubt about the situation in Germany, connects the content of the book with our political conditions, then carelessness, if not malice, must be at work. He criticized my style for starting a sentence with the particle “so” on almost every page, while pointing out that one of the greatest masters of language, Mallarmé, struck the word from his dictionary. For me that is not authoritative. It is important in my attitude toward life as a relationship to something higher, and a power that proves discernible in objects and their context.

Back to my tendency to introduce sentences with conjunctions and particles. It is not from the sentence per se that we can expect the words to acquire a necessary relationship to one another. It helps when the connection among the sentences is explicit: the logical sequence, the contradiction, the symmetry, the amplification, the introduction of an unexpected viewpoint. Introductory words accomplish this. They resemble clefs that announce tonal value, or the mood of the movement to follow. Words may live in sentences, but sentences, by contrast, live in a broader context.

I consider it the duty of the author to ponder these things; that is the least bit of technical tidiness that can be expected of him. The only objection worth responding to here would be: Is not language too worthy of our veneration to be approached with such techniques? Don’t they tend to damage the dark and unconscious aspects that dwell in it too easily?

By contrast, one could expound further: language itself is not worthy of veneration, but rather the inexpressible alone is. It is not churches that are to be venerated, but rather the invisible quality of what dwells within them. The author approaches this with words without ever attaining it. His goal lies beyond language and can never be contained by it. With words, he invokes silence. Words are his tool, and it is to be expected that he keep this tool in good repair by constantly staying in practice with it. He must not let a syllable pass that does not satisfy him, but he must also never imagine that he possesses mastery. He must always be dissatisfied with himself. He also must get used to the fact that he will surely provoke displeasure.

Very threatening raids in the morning and evening; bombs fell not far from here.

In the afternoon received a visit from Cramer von Laue, who was wounded for a second time in Italy and is walking on crutches. Conversation about the assassination attempt, and in particular, Kniébolo’s health, which they say has declined markedly. His distress at not having recognized his enemy, that he hadn’t perceived him, seems to have overshadowed all other considerations. That would correlate with details [General] Kleist told me in Stavropol and is also the reason why I always avoided a meeting with him. It is said that he has introduced a new instrument, a kind of garrote, for exterminating his opponents. The charnel house, this our reality.

The mail brought a letter from Ernstel, who is anticipating his first military encounter. In addition, The Illusions of Technology by Friedrich Georg, which he has given a new title: The Perfection of Technology. He sent me one of the few author’s copies that had been distributed before the great fire in Freiburg.

And unto Adam he said, “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:17).

The passage corresponds to the sentence in Hesiod describing how the gods reduced man’s crops, for previously the work of a single day was sufficient to provide for an entire year.

True profusion, Edenic abundance, exists outside the realm of time. There lies the landscape of great, immediate harvests such as myth describes and Genesis illustrates. Nor does death exist there. In the lovers’ embrace, we have retained a small spark of the great light of the world of creation—we fly beyond time as though shot from a crossbow. In myth, this primeval power is halted by the victory of Kronos. Kronos, who mutilates the primeval father with his diamond sickle, makes the race of gods incapable of further procreation. The role of Gaia is allied to that of the serpent.

Then Genesis, 3 and 24. The expulsion from Paradise happens less as punishment than as a means to prevent man from reaching for the Tree of Life and living forever. This is why the cherubim, with their slashing swords drawn, block the approach to the Tree of Life.

What does this mean? Man in a state of sin, and at the same time immortal, would become a demon of immense power. Should he then want to approach the Tree of Life, he will be cut down by the steel of the Angel of Death and, as a creature of earth, laid low before the gates. Yet he returns to eternity in his other form, as God’s breath.

In the afternoon went into Hannover; it has been burning since yesterday morning. The streets were covered with debris and shrapnel, also with vehicles and streetcars that had been hit. They were crowded with people rushing everywhere as in a Chinese catastrophe. I saw a woman walk past me; tears glistened as they fell from her face like rain. I also saw people carrying on their shoulders lovely old pieces of furniture covered by a layer of plaster dust. An elegant gentleman, gray at the temples, was pushing a cart on which there stood a small rococo cabinet.

Went to the address of my parents-in-law on Stephansplatz. Windows and doors had been recently blown in again when a cluster of bombs devastated the area. Anyone located in the fan-shaped target area of this kind of bombing pattern hears the rumbling growing frighteningly louder and changing to a whistling sound just before impact. It does not seem to be true, as is often claimed, that you can’t hear the bomb that is targeting you. A heavy layer of mortar dust filled the space in which the people in the houses waited for the end as they lay on the ground. I had someone show me the cellar: a bare, white-washed corridor where seven chairs stood as if in a waiting room. This is what modern torture chambers look like.

Returned through the streets as night fell. I was repeating a portion of my way to school from the year 1906—but not going past illuminated, well-stocked shop windows as in the old days, but instead past ruins of Piranesian bleakness. From the cellars came the red glow of the winter coal supplies. There were still crowds of people. Now and then, they would pass by a house where fire was still flickering on the walls and ceilings inside—but no one paid any attention.

In a subterranean department store the rooms had been built deep into the cliffs. Among them was a butcher’s stall carved from a vein of white-streaked red marble. It was very clean. The scraps were rinsed away by a mountain torrent that gushed down out of the chasms.

Back in Hannover in the afternoon where clouds of steam still rise from the ruins. I saw men and women sorting through the debris and pulling objects from it. Furniture lined the pavement as it began to rain. It is strangely affecting to see that the streets are perfectly clean and meticulously swept. Such a surviving trait of orderliness could be taken in different ways. I found it half repugnant and half admirable.

Mixed in with the bomb payloads are some with time-release fuses that don’t explode for hours, or sometimes even days. Est modus in rebus [moderation in all things]—in the context of the world of aerial bombing, this embodies a comic element. The comedy may be magnified: for last year’s attack on Berlin on Christmas Eve, the fuses were timed to go off at the hour when presents were being exchanged.

Visited Grethe Jürgens in her studio. Today, people visit others they know, not to see how they’re doing but to see whether they still exist.

Continued reading in Genesis. Lamech, who boasts to his wives Adah and Zillah that he has slain a man for wounding him and a boy for bruising him, says that he shall be avenged, not seven times like Cain, but seventy-seven times. It is a stroke of genius on Herder’s part to connect mankind’s earliest song of triumph with the invention of the sword that had been referred to in a passage shortly before. Lamech is the father of Tubalcain, the first master of all mining and ironwork who thus has tremendous superiority.

Lamech is one of the Titans, a superman of Cainite culture, which we must imagine as possessing primeval fecundity as well as a dark splendor. Human sacrifice is part of their rituals. Their corruption (Genesis 6:2) reaches an extreme.

Cainite culture is the antediluvian model of pure power. In this regard, places like Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon, and Dahomey are its later offshoots. The great fratricidal ritual sites on this earth are Cainite, like the Mexican teocallis,[32] the Roman Circus, the barbaric dungeons of machine civilizations. Cainite are also red flags, whatever symbols they may display; Cainite are the death’s head units of Kniébolo; Cainite is a battleship that flaunts the name Marat,[33] who was one of the greatest butchers of humanity.

Cainite women are described as extraordinarily beautiful. “Dans l’état de chute, la beauté est un monstre” [In its fallen state, beauty is a monster] (Léon Bloy).

Dreams are froth—from eternity.[34]

Continued reading in Genesis. I am reading Delitzsch’s Commentar über die Genesis (1860) [A New Commentary on Genesis (1888)] and Goldberg’s Maimonides. Kritik der jüdischen Glaubenslehre [Maimonides: Critique of Jewish Doctrine, 1935] at the same time. Goldberg touches on themes that have engaged me for a long time, such as the relationship of Judaism to the twentieth century. In this context, Weininger’s suicide is like the loss of a military leader in a skirmish at a far-flung outpost. The Jew is eternal—this means he has an answer for every century. I am beginning to change my view that the twentieth century has been so unfavorable toward him. I believe the second half will bring surprises in this connection. It is precisely this terrible victimization that suggests this.

Shared human attributes are becoming more nationalized and differentiated as written culture evolves. Adam is the father of the human race. Abraham, the father of the Semitic peoples; Isaac, the father of Jews and Edomites; Jacob, the father of Israel.

Jacob may not be the greatest, but he is the most remarkable of the patriarchs. His person embodies a series of important decisions. His deception in gaining the blessing of the firstborn from his father finds its analogue in the preference of the Chosen People versus all others. His time spent in the house of Laban is the first Jewish exile, and Esau, the first anti-Semite.

The ancient gods still stand before us with their magical presence, perhaps even in competition. The abduction of Laban’s idols represents a robbery of the nomos. They are stolen by Rachel and concealed from the pursuing Laban by a taboo act. Rachel conceals them under her and makes herself untouchable by claiming that she is menstruating. Later they are buried at the foot of an oak tree near Sichem, along with the women’s brooches. Perhaps this is the same oak under which Abimelech is later exalted as king (Judges 9:6).

Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling with the Lord. Two general thoughts on this:

Man must not let himself be vanquished cheaply: God must force it upon him. Man will be tempted to let himself be thrown down before he is thoroughly subdued, completely subjugated by the High Power. This is a particular danger of our time, when human beings are threatened en masse and dragged innocent to execution.

Furthermore, the struggle takes place at night because, ever since his fall, man cannot endure looking upon the face of God. It is not until morning that he recognizes Him and receives a blessing from Him. Here night is human life, during which the arm of the invisible God often makes itself violently felt; dawn, when His face appears, represents death.

We must allow our rationalist nature to be overcome. This wrestling match is taking place today. God is prosecuting our case.

Pure activity rises only to the level of anecdote, but not to historical reality. In this connection, it is correct that Columbus is seen as the discoverer of America and not the Icelanders, who made landfall there long before him. In order to produce historical reality and productivity, we need to hit the target intentionally, not by accident. There must be a spiritual dimension here. This is the only way to transcend hazard and blind chance.

The powerful echo of lovemaking—a trembling answer from the innermost marrow of life.

There is frost on the garden, but we have beautiful sunshine. When I look at the bare beech tree streaming with light, I get a feeling of secret joy: “Summer is resting in the cupboard.”

I’ve begun to read about the quite topical subject of shipwrecks, starting with Raynal Les Naufragés (1870) [Wrecked on a Reef (1874)]. The book describes the Robinsinade of the author and his four companions after a shipwreck in the Auckland Islands south of New Zealand. The stranded survivors lived on the flesh of the plentiful sea lions there, as well as fish, mussels, albatross eggs, and wild berries. This gives the author the opportunity to mention a tree covered by tasty flaming-red berries, which might lend itself to planting and grafting in our gardens. The climate is raw; for weeks, storms howl around the rugged cliffs where the Pacific Ocean surf breaks. A woods stunted by the winds grows on a patch of turf. Colorful birds swoop through this thicket. Among them is a little gray parrot with a bright red breast that breeds in caves.

The little community is active, at first building a tent from the sails they have salvaged. This is soon followed by a hut and a workshop with a forge and carpentry shop, where they build a seaworthy boat over the course of twenty months. They are able to accomplish a crossing to Stewart Island on the southern tip of New Zealand with this craft in July 1865. The author is straightforward, clear, filled with common sense. He mentions Bible reading and group prayer as beneficial to communal life. On the other hand, he also mentions fermented drink and card playing as dangers. Consequently, they burn their cards and destroy their still after a fight.

A translation of this book would be worthwhile. I made a few excerpts for the book on islands that my brother Wolfgang, the geographer, is planning.

In the morning I received a visit from a reader named Rosenkranz. Penchant for botany, combined with knowledge of modern pharmacology and toxicology. We sat near the stove, talking about mescaline. He told me of a blind man, whose appetite for color had driven him to write to him, hoping for a visual hallucination. We then discussed the different ways of preparing opium cakes in China, India, Persia, and Turkey. The poppy capsules have to be scored on sunny days, for only in the presence of light does the bitter milk coagulate and develop the narcotic power that forms its inner luminescence. We also talked about an obsolete drug, lactuacarium, that derives from the thickened sap of wild lettuce. Fields of this plant were supposedly cultivated in Zell on the Moselle River. In former times, doctors equated its effect to opium.

The last day of the year. In the morning went to church, which was not just falling apart on the outside but also losing its charisma within. Nonetheless, it is still the best place to honor the dead and those who have been taken from us by fire, as well as our own fate.

Then had breakfast with Hanne Menzel, and Perpetua. An air-raid alarm put an end to this; it wasn’t long before squadrons appeared overhead in the brilliant blue sky while earth lay below under a blinding white blanket of snow. The new gun emplacements in Stelle began to fire. Soon the dome of the sky was flecked with little clouds. Waves of aircraft struggled through these from the direction of Grossburgwedel heading toward Misburg, where huge clouds of smoke soon billowed up. The two vapor trails that clung to the motors like short beards left an impression of concentrated power, of the intensified vortex in the wake of their energy. Above them, the fighters swirled like spirochetes dangling from an extended thread, making their wide circles and spirals; we could hear the planes’ own guns in combat. One of them crashed in smoke and flames over in the direction of Bothfeld. Sometimes I stood at the window; others, in the meadow in order to commit each and every impression to memory, like someone busily taking a series of photographs.

1945

Spent New Year’s Eve with Perpetua, Hanne Menzel, Fritzi Schultz, and Hilde Schoor. A speech by Kniébolo launched the new year, a speech manacled by the spirit of hatred and Cainite vision. This descent into ever-darker regions is horrifying—it is a meteoric plunge from the sphere of salvation. Destruction must inevitably grow from these chasms and fire spew forth from them.

New Year’s meditation: We are approaching the innermost vortex of the maelstrom, almost certain death. I must prepare myself, steel myself inwardly to step across into the other, shining side of existence, and not as a captive under duress, but with inner affirmation and calm anticipation at that dark gate. My baggage, my treasures, I shall have to leave behind without regret. After all, they are valuable only to the extent that they have an intrinsic connection to the other side. The mass of manuscripts, the work of my mature years—I must become accustomed to the thought of seeing them go up in flames. Then all that will remain will not be what I thought and wrote for human beings: the core of authorship. This will be held in abeyance for the long trek beyond the realm of time. The same applies to the people and things I will be leaving behind. The real and divine aspect of my connection to them is the plane on which I loved them. The most fervent embrace is only the symbol, the metaphor for this inseparability. There we shall be united in the eternal womb, and our eye will no longer be sensitive to light, because it will exist in light itself forever.

The new year began with blue skies and sunshine. But soon enough, these skies were swarming with squadrons performing complex maneuvers while coming under heavy shelling. We could see some of the shots that hung in the air as incendiary puffs. Our house was right on their straight flight path—the formations seemed to chart their deadly course above us. Somewhere near Schillerslage, one of the jagged smoke signals was released and trailed downward from above almost to the earth. In the intervals, there came the terrible drumroll of the barrage, giving the impression that it creates zones of destruction everywhere, places where life can no longer exist. The target must be the town of Dollbergen, an oil transport point.

Aircraft also overhead in the evening, with red Christmas trees.

Léon Bloy, Lamentation de l’Epée [Lamentation of the Sword], which appeared in October 1890 in La Plume [The Pen]. The sword expresses its disgust with modern man who is no longer worthy to bear the weapon. It threatens to transform itself into its ancient form, into that of the sword of flame that will eradicate the whole human race.

Motto for a blackout curtain: “S’ils on éteint le jour, qui’ils soient éclairés de la foudre” (Michelet).

[If they have extinguished the day, let them be illuminated by the lightning bolt.]

One can certainly say, “God’s hand,” but not “God’s fist.”

Current reading: Baader, who is difficult for me. As with everything in the tradition of Böhme, individual images really stand out, such as when he speaks of the advantage of mechanical prayer. He compares devotion arrived at by this method to the pressure applied by the cabinetmaker who forces two warped boards together until the glue has joined them.

I would like to say that, through mechanical prayer, a vacuum, a lacuna arises in the causality of one’s daily routine that invites higher influence. In our modern age, this makes our decision to adhere to a credo less pointless than one might imagine, even if the inner calling is absent. Actually, it gives one the best opening moves in the metaphysical match. It is up to God to follow with a counter move. On this, see Matthew 7:7–11.

The passage is also revealing because it contrasts the fish as the goal and the gift of prayer with the earthbound creature, the serpent. Christ never comes up with such imagery by chance. Instead, He reaches deep into the foundations of the world order.

Went to Burgdorf in the morning because of the Civil Defense Unit I am supposed to take over. Our situation is such that desperation is its only positive aspect. This directs intelligent people to seek shelter in their inner and authentic fortresses. Rescue is now possible only if intervention comes from a different dimension.

In the afternoon, I took Hanne Menzel to the station. Thick formations of aircraft overhead in the evening. In the air-raid shelter. From our attic window I watch the city seethe under the bombardment. The yellow umbrellas of fire from the formation bombing[35] rose over the moor.

As I sit here in the quiet room that is under strict blackout conditions, the monotonous voice of the radio announcer again issues from the instrument.

“Numerous aircraft are approaching the district capital from the region of Steinhuder Meer. Air defensive action is urgently required.”

My God, who could have thought of such scenes in 1911? It eclipses any science fiction novel.

At ten o’clock a new, even heavier incendiary attack. The explosions were so powerful that objects inside the house fell over.

Read further in Leviticus. Anyone who sees merely hygienic intentions behind the ritual commands of the old lawmakers is like someone who interprets the streets and squares of a metropolis simply in terms of airflow management. That is also correct, but only up to a point. The issue here is not one’s physical hygiene, but rather one’s optimal conduct, including the hygienic optimum—the condition of sanctity that exalts and elevates one’s natural state of health. As a holy thing this even approaches immortality—see those passages where Moses’s face is “radiant” and thus unbearable to human eyes.

In this context, see Walter F. Otto, Dionysos, a work that is part of my reading these days. The introduction contains good insight into our theological situation: “The basic character of ritual acts does not derive from the fact that those who first performed them wished to invoke something they yearned for, but from the fact that they already possessed what they yearned for: nearness to their God.”

It can be assumed that the Israelites tried to expunge any residual traces of the Egyptians during their exodus. A tangible example of this is the stoning of the son of Shelomith (Leviticus 24:10–16).

Friend Speidel sent word from Freudenstadt that he is out of prison. His letter, dated Christmas Eve, was one of those rare pieces of happy news. I have thought of him every day with great intensity. On the other hand, still no word from Ernstel. That millions of people long to receive letters is a mark of this nightmarish world.

Was in the city in the afternoon. The ruins are new and have been harder hit; the thrashing has been followed by the scorpion’s sting. The southern part of the city was burning. Coal cellars were aglow and roofs were collapsing in showers of sparks in the houses on Podbielskistrasse and on Alte Celler Heerstrasse, where I used to ride my bicycle. Nobody notices the fires anymore; they are just part of the scene. On the corners the homeless were packing up their salvaged possessions in bedsheets. I saw a woman come out the door of a house holding a chamber pot in her hand; little more than a fragment was still attached to its handle. Huge craters surrounded the railroad station, where the equestrian statue of King Ernst August still stood in front of the bare, empty halls. Two entrances of the great air-raid bunker where twenty-six thousand people had sought shelter, had been buried in debris. The ventilation system worked only sporadically, making the trapped crowd start to tear their clothes from their bodies and scream for air in the first stages of suffocation. God protect us from mousetraps of this sort.

Burned-out trains stood on the platforms; the pedestrian passage facing the Central Post Office had been hit by a dud that lay on the pavement.

My father-in-law’s apartment on Stephansplatz was the reason I had undertaken this mission, and I could see that it was still standing. The building’s air-raid shelter had withstood several direct hits without collapsing. Between the first and the second raid, men had left the shelter to visit their homes, and returned to their wives with the sentence, “The house is gone.”

Tristitia [sadness]. Dreamed about Cellaris before awakening. I also think of him daily—what I would give if he could only glimpse the light of day again and be spiritually and physically free—if only his health has not been broken forever.

There is a lonely hut deep in the moor between Colshorn and Stelle. From it a soldier fires Christmas trees into the air during night raids in imitation of the target area markers used by the lead planes of the English squadrons. Yesterday Alexander called this a “lightning rod”—a superb comparison for a child.

Started reading the first volume of the History of Shipwrecks by Deperthes (Paris: Third Year of the Republic). First, his account of the winter spent by Barent and his crew in 1596–1597 on Novaya Zemlya. Fights with polar bears, which were truly threatening given the explorers’ very deficient guns. They conjure up images of encounters between humans and large prehistoric animals. There is a description of the toxicity of the polar bear’s liver; consumption of it is followed by almost lethal illness and a peeling of the skin. To counteract scurvy, people eat Cochlearia [scurvy grass]; it can even heal acute stages within two days. Another excellent cure is “low-growing prunelle” [blackthorn, sloeberries]. I assume that this is a variety of cloudberry.

Read more about shipwrecks. Eight English sailors, whale fishermen who in 1630 became separated from their ship, the Salutation, were forced to spend the winter in Greenland. They set themselves up in a hut that had been used for boiling whale oil. Here they lived mainly on the cracklings left over in heaps where the blubber had been cooked down. They also caught foxes in traps constructed from whalebones. The sun disappeared on 14 October and was not visible again until 3 February. Their vessel returned on 28 May 1631.

This account comes from one of the eight sailors, a man named Pelham. When I read such names, I sometimes think of the wish that Friedrich Georg once expressed during one of our nocturnal conversations: He wished for an index to the catacombs in which could be found the name of every human being who had ever walked this earth, including a short description of his fate. Who knows whether or not something like this exists? When viewed as an absolute, however, it might be no more powerful than a sheet of hieroglyphics on which the temporal notations resemble each other and record a curriculum vitae of human beings. In the same way, the millions of books that have ever been written can be reduced to twenty-four letters.

We have heard that Langenhagen was destroyed in yesterday’s raid. Corpses from the village were thrown through the air as far away as the distant autobahn. A few bombs also hit nearby in the parish of Altwarmbüchen.

Still no letter from Ernstel.

Anniversary of the death of my dear father, a date that I always commemorate.

Continued reading about shipwrecks. Winter encampment of the English captain Thomas James on Charlton Island in Hudson’s Bay. Scurvy causes the teeth to fall out and the gums to swell. In order to grow fresh vegetables, they plant peas in a covered space. Consuming melted snow causes illness, and so they dig a well that yields water, which they find to be “as mild and nourishing as milk.” They return after many fatalities and much privation. The description of such suffering had such a chilling effect on the English that they refrained from any further Arctic exploration for thirty years.

Then there is the Robinsonade about seven sailors who were put ashore by the Dutch Greenland Company on the island of Saint Mauritius on 26 August 1633 with their own permission so that they could observe the course of an Arctic winter. Scurvy soon sapped their strength, while they suffered under cold so severe that it froze the brandy in its casks, cracked the stones, and made the sea steam like a laundry room. They died one after another, keeping up their journal entries until 30 April 1634. On 4 July, the whaling fleet returned and found the corpses in their beds. One was holding the bread and cheese he had eaten shortly before he died; another had a prayer book in his hand and a box of salve to apply to his gums.

Concerning synchronicity. During these instances of solitary suffering, Wallenstein was murdered in Eger as the Thirty Years’ War played out in different parts of the planet. Such thoughts always touch me particularly deeply. They point to the sun’s great, all-seeing eye and to the great heart of the world.

Raids in the evening with intense bombardment, after several vicious “dog stars”[36] had been set off over the city. I stayed with Frau Schoor, whose bad influenza made it impossible for her to go to the air-raid shelter.

Read further about shipwrecks. Among other winter survival narratives, the one experienced by Bering is mentioned. His ship, the Saint Peter, foundered on 5 November 1741 on the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Before the vessel was wrecked, the men were already suffering from scurvy. Many died when they were lifted out of the musty ship’s hold into the open air—it was too powerful, too debilitating for the faltering life force. Bering died as well and was buried on the island named for him. Among his officers was a doctor, a naturalist named Steller. Their food source was the abundant sea life along that coast, especially the sea cow (which has since become extinct) that was named for Steller.[37] Two stranded whales were greeted with great joy; the men used the frozen cadavers as meat larders. Using their natural Russian talent for working with wood, they finished a new craft that was forty feet long on 10 August 1742. In this they were able to return to Siberia. Steller’s presence gives the expedition an intellectual, academic aspect, and puts the ever-recurring scenes of dazed suffering during this winter in a more illustrious light.

Ernstel is dead, killed in action, my good child. Dead since 29 November of last year! We received the news yesterday on 11 January 1945, just after seven o’clock in the evening.

The dear boy met his death on 29 November 1944; he was eighteen years old. He was felled by a shot to the head during a reconnaissance patrol in the Apuan Alps in central Italy and, according to his comrades, died immediately. They could not take him along, but went back for his body later with an armored vehicle. He was given his final resting place in the cemetery of Turigliano near Carrara.

Such a good lad. Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father. Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.

Today I went up into the little attic room that I had vacated for him, and which is still filled with his aura. Entered quietly, as if it were a sacred place. Found there among his papers a little journal that began with the epigraph: “He advances farthest, who does not know where he is going.”

Anguish is like rain that runs off in torrents and is only gradually absorbed by the earth. The mind cannot grasp it all at once. We have now entered the true, the only community of this war—entered its secret brotherhood.

I cannot stop thinking about Ernstel. So much about his life is a riddle that is hard to solve. What does it mean that during the same year he was able to free himself from the grip of tyranny? That was such a propitious sign; all the benevolent powers seemed to be working together, as if secretly in league with each other. Perhaps he was meant to bear witness before his death and prove himself in the true cause of which so few people are capable.

Sleep does me good, but as soon as I awaken, the pain starts up again. I ask myself how it is possible that we thought about the boy every day for all those weeks without ever even hearing an echo of the truth. Of course, there is always the notation that I made in the pages of this journal on 29 November 1944, on the day of his death, perhaps even in the hour of his death.[38] At the time I was thinking of the widespread popular superstition, yet it is strange that in all my attempts to interpret Perpetua’s dream, the closest possibility was the furthest from my mind.

We stand like cliffs in the silent surf of eternity.

Memorial service for Ernstel. Superintendent Spannuth held it in the library. The boy’s picture stood on the table between sprigs of fir and two candles. The conclusion of Psalm 73 and Ernstel’s confirmation motto (Luke, 9:62) were chosen as texts: “And Jesus said unto him, no man having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Present were: the family, the refugees living under our roof, and our two neighbors, Lahmann and Colshorn.

The death of a son introduces one of those dates—one of those watersheds—into my life. The things, the thoughts, the deeds before and after are now different.

Went to Burgdorf. Had vivid thoughts of Ernstel near Beinhorn. When we were there last December the two of us walked through the woods in the fog and discussed death. He said, “At times I’m so curious that I can hardly wait for it.”

The lemures try to intrude into a death like this, as if they could appropriate it. A case in point is the company commander who sent me the message that Ernstel had died “for the Führer.” What is more, he was well acquainted with the boy’s record. After that there was the functionary who had the task of bringing me the message “in a dignified manner” (as stipulated in his printed instructions)—horrendous. Yes, that’s all part of our reality, and it dawned on me early that one emotion is the only appropriate response: grief.

It is the tragedy of the best people that ethos and polis do not coincide in reality. Yet, like parallel lines, they cross in infinity.

While I have frequent and meaningful dreams about my dead father, things regarding my son are opaque. There is something about his death that seems unsolved, unreconciled, unsettled. Last night Perpetua had the first clear dream about him. She was in a hospital and met him in the corridor; he was startled to see her. He was already very weak, and died in her arms. She could hear his dying sweat splash onto the floor.

The Russians have entered East Prussia and Silesia. New efforts to halt this breakthrough while the butchering continues in the West. The energy, resilience of people’s wills remains astonishing. Of course, this quality only shows itself as we are heading downhill—its only trait and accomplishment being mindlessness and decline. This is no longer war, which is why Clausewitz warned that politics must never be allowed to reach this state.

According to reports, the Tannenberg memorial[39] has been blown up and Hindenburg’s body taken to safety. “Der Alte” [“The Old Man”] finds no peace in his grave, but then he was the gatekeeper, the man who held the door for Kniébolo. At first he thought he could oppose the man and then exploit him, but Kniébolo turned out to be the more cunning.

A night rich in dreams. I found myself in exotic climes, surrounded by brightly colored birds. Inside my coat on my left, I clutched a white dove and on my right, a dark bat. Both creatures—I cherished the dark one more—would occasionally take flight and then return to me as if to their nests. The dream image was comforting and lovely.

These days I often look at pictures of Ernstel with new ideas about photography. No photograph can compete with a good painting in that sphere where art reigns supreme and where ideas and consciousness hold sway. Yet photography has a different, darker quality—the photograph is basically a shadow image. It records something of a person’s substance, of his aura; it is a replica of him. In this sense, it is related to script. We leaf through old letters and photos to jog our memories. At such times, wine is beneficial.

Two weeks have now passed since I got the news. Starting to work again. I finished the manuscript of my Rhodes journals, and all that is left is to make a clean copy. I often have the impression of writing on paper that is already beginning to be scorched by the flame.

Read further about shipwrecks. In the course of my reading, I had some good thoughts of a general nature. For example, a ship represents order, the state, the status quo; a shipwreck loosens the planks and, with them, all cohesion, so that human relationships sink to their most basic level. They become more physical, bestial, or cannibalistic. Those amputated hands that are consistently mentioned demonstrate the physics of this dynamic. The lifeboats can only take a certain number of people; anyone else who clutches at their sides threatens to sink them in the deep. Because there is modus in rebus [a limit in all things], the crew will defend itself with oars, knives, and axes against any fatal overloading. This occasionally proceeds under a veneer of order, such as in 1786 when the Portuguese admiral’s ship Saint James foundered on a group of cliffs in East Africa. In this case, the crew of the overfilled lifeboat chose a leader with absolute power, namely a half-blooded Indian from a noble tribe. All this man had to do was point his finger at the weakest person, who was then immediately thrown overboard. Under such circumstances, it is typical that power always seeks the point of least resistance. And so whenever it happens that cannibals attack, they agree on the cabin boy—according to Bontekoe’s account.

The leaders who emerge from the crew in such cases, or who impose themselves on the crew, could be called “black captains”; they act as pirates in the way they manage the crime and the violence. When the Batavia was wrecked on a desert island off the coast of New Holland [Australia], power was handed over to a ringleader named Cornelis, who had everyone killed who did not accede to his plans. He divided the booty, including five women who had been among the passengers. He kept one for himself and designated another, an ambassador’s daughter, for his lieutenant. The others were given to the crew for their general use.

Shipwrecks pose the question of whether any higher order than that of the state exists. For order alone can save us, and we have seen this in the case of those sailors who settled on Pitcairn.[40] At such moments, every crew stands at the crossroads.

The evacuation of East Prussia and Silesia brings us pictures hitherto unknown in European history. This reminds me of the destruction of Jerusalem. The persecution of the Jews has aspects of which the blind perpetrators know nothing. As such, it negates the New Testament and promotes Abrahamic law.

The punishing cold continues. We hear that many of the children who fled from the Eastern provinces have frozen to death along the country roads and in open freight cars. Scores are now being settled, and the innocents are paying the terrible price. Went into the forest in the afternoon with old Herr Kerner to mark trees, since our coal supply is running low. We were also on the moor, where there is still a small stand of birches. The axe revealed the heartwood in its gleaming brilliance. As I was writing down the numbers, I saw my father, the man who purchased this forest, as if on the surface of a mirror. Wood is a wonderful, honorable material.

On the way home, I conversed with the old fellow. I noticed that a certain sense of homespun ease—familiar in many a Lower Saxon farmer—comes with a brazen heart. These are characters who even in their own family circles would walk right over corpses. He described a scene from his youth when he was both half-drunk and pretending to be drunk, and he eavesdropped on his wife with a friend. His wait for the fait accompli came to nothing.

In church for the memorial service for Ernstel. Tomorrow it will be two months since the boy was killed. For me, he will always be one of those I carry with me in the sanctuary of my heart. Omnia mea mecum porto [all that is mine I carry with me]—the proverb is more apt than ever.

Read more about shipwrecks. The crew of a Portuguese cutter that ran aground on a sandbank on the Calamian Islands in 1688 suffered a strange fate. In the first half of the year, the survivors lived on this desolate patch by eating sea tortoises that would come on land to lay their eggs. During the second half they lived off the flesh and the eggs of gannets, large sea birds that build their nests in the sand. These two creatures alternated as food sources. They were marooned there for six years until the birds stayed away. The shipwrecked men, whose number had dwindled to sixteen, then set to work constructing a boat, or rather, a type of chest out of driftwood and caulked with a mixture of birds’ feathers, sand, and the fat of tortoises. This was stitched together with the strong sinews of the tortoises. A sail was stitched from the birds’ skins. With this craft they were able to reach a port in Southern China, and from there they were taken by missionaries to Macao.

Read in the memoirs of Count de Viel-Castel; Friedrich Georg and I had talked about this work years ago. Unpleasant view of the world that sees only the dark side of human beings and their scandalous behavior. Of course, there was no lack of profiteering during the Second Empire. All the preconditions for the catastrophe we are now wallowing in were well established back then. I am often amazed that a war like the one of 1870–1871 could have ended so favorably—I mean for both sides—without worsening. Bismarck himself sensed this and was happy when the peace terms were finally ratified.

Most of our mail relates to Ernstel’s death, but today it also brought a card from Carl Schmitt:

[Ernstel has not left us but only preceded us. Since I know that all things die, and that the will of God alters the hearts of men and the fates of nations, I await patiently my departure from life.]

Name of sender: Volkssturmmann [Civil Defense Man] Schmitt, Albrechtsteerofen. The card upset me; it made me clearly aware of the abrupt shift that has cast millions of people these days into utter catastrophe, into mud and fire. Just as individual moments attach themselves to such ideas, the red silk easy chair surfaced in my memory. That was where I had sat so often in his apartment in Steglitz to discuss the course of the world late into the night over good wine.

Since Ernstel’s death, I have forgotten to record the raids and bombardments, although there has been no shortage of them in the interim. As I write this morning, the air is filled with activity. Am also worried about Brother Physicus. The last I heard, he was in Schneidemühl, which is surrounded.

Browsed in Chamfort again. What can be said of Rivarol is also true of him: There is a particular kind of clarity that can be attributed to disinfection [of prose style]. Yet this also incorporates a new freedom and to see it in statu nascendi [emerging] is a great pleasure. For a century, witty writers drew on him.

The following anecdote amused me once again: The Regent did not wish to be recognized at a masked ball. “I can remedy that,” said Abbé Dubois, and during the ball proceeded to dole out kicks to his backside. Finally the Regent said, “Abbé, you disguise me too well.”

To split firewood, aufklöben.[41]

Finished my reading about shipwrecks. The material should be organized into a systematic treatise.

Cannibalism. After the Betsey went down off the coast of Dutch Guyana in 1756, the helmsman, a man named Williams who was the strongest of the nearly starved survivors, showed his “generosity” by offering his comrades a piece of his hindquarters to help them cling to life with his blood.

The crew of the American ship Peggy was reduced to butchery in 1665 when she became impossible to steer while sailing from the Azores to New York and had to spend months as a plaything of the waves.[42] Once the ship’s cat had been devoured as the last of their provisions, the crew decided to extend the lives of the survivors by killing one of their own. Against the will of the captain, who lay ill in his cabin, lots were drawn and a Negro slave on board was chosen. This suggests that the unfortunate man had been chosen in advance and that the lottery was merely a sham. He was slain at once.

The body kept them alive for over two weeks. Then they had to settle upon a second victim, and this time the captain was in charge of drawing lots out of concern that it would otherwise take place without him. He wrote the names on small pieces of paper, threw these into a hat and shook it. The crew watched these preparations in silence, their faces pale and mouths quivering, their fright visibly etched on every feature. A man drew the piece of paper; the captain opened it and read the name: David Flat. The crew gave in to the captain’s request to postpone his slaughter until the eleventh hour of the next morning. At ten o’clock, when a large fire was already blazing and the cauldron in place on it, a sail came into view. It was the Susanne whose captain re-victualed the ship and took her in tow.

A detail reminds me of one of Joseph Conrad’s novels. An English ship, the Fattysalam, a troop transport vessel, sprang a leak in 1761 off the Coromandel Coast. It was so serious that it seemed inevitable the ship would sink in no time. Before the crew found out about the disaster, the captain and the officers secretly boarded the dinghy that was in tow and abandoned ship. From their safe distance, they watched as panic broke out aboard the Fattysalam. But soon the signal was given that the damage had been repaired. The captain was in favor of returning to the ship but was cautioned against it by his officers. Shortly thereafter, they saw the ship go down. The signal had just been an attempt to coax the dinghy back.

The collection is rich in similar examples of rational bestiality. The study of shipwrecks gives us a key to our age. The sinking of the Titanic is its most portentous omen.

An example of Wilhelmine baroque style: “It is in my opinion subject to no doubt at all…”

This example from Bürgermeister Mönckeberg, Briefe [Mayor Monckeberg, Letters] (Stuttgart, 1918). On the same page, he uses unbedingter [more absolute] as a comparative.

During the church service, the gun emplacements in Stelle were booming—a spotter plane circled low over the village, probably to take photographs. Since the Misburg oil works have been operational again, we’ve had to expect new raids close by. In Burgdorf a low-flying aircraft strafed a passenger train. Twenty fatalities.

Letters still come every day regarding Ernstel’s death, and with them, many a comforting word. Today, for example, the thought that our life presupposes another side; the effort [to see it] is too great for our physical existence.

Verses from Friedrich Georg that reminded me of Ernstel’s childhood in Goslar and Überlingen.

[On Ernstel’s Death / The winds are asking for their playmate: / “Where are you?” And the echo comes back. / Spring is now coming, soon spring will arrive. / “Where are you, Ernstel? Won’t you return?” // The Harz [region] is about to erupt in green. And on the meadows / The songs resound in the dense hedges. / The blackbird calls you from the thicket: / “Where are you Ernstel? Won’t you return?” // He is at peace now. Oh, you call him in vain / At the cool waters and in the groves. / To him was granted an early peace. / But we stayed behind to mourn him.]

Despite his youth, he left behind a definite impression, was also loved by many. Today the photo of his grave arrived from Carrara. Thus, every day brings an echo of him.

Ziegler writes to me from Hamburg that by special order of the Grandgoschier [Goebbels], the press will print no mention of my fiftieth birthday. That happens to be the only honor that I prize.

Restless night. The English have adopted a strategy of demoralization by sending a single aircraft to circle over the landscape and just drop a bomb now and then to keep tensions high.

During the day, one air-raid alert follows the next. We hear that Dresden has been heavily hit. With that, the last untouched city was probably reduced to rubble. Apparently hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs were dropped, and countless refugees died in the open spaces.

I worked in the garden. Yesterday, I got an early glimpse of the red shoot of a peony. Turned over the compost underneath the large elm. The way that all things there decay and return to earth has something instructive and comforting about it.

Read in the small dual language edition of Heraclitus that Carl Schmitt gave me on 23 March 1933. Also read in Louis Réau’s monograph on Houdon, who has interested me ever since I saw his bust of Voltaire in the foyer of the Comédie Française.[43] This sculptor of the rococo period achieves an extraordinary degree of physiognomic truth. One feels that here the inner truth of the age itself finds its expression: namely its mathematical-musical core. A chisel of Mozartian precision. A comparative study on him and Anton Graff would be instructive.

Heraclitus: “Sleepers are active participants in the events of the world.”

Their successes were the worst thing for the Germans—in any reckless match, a victory at the outset is most dangerous. That is the bait, the barbed hook that ensnares greed. Winning also seduces the player into showing his cards. He removes the mask.

After the victory over France, the middle classes were convinced that everything was fine. They no longer heard the voices of the unfortunates and their De Profundis.[44]

Incidentally, the Western powers are entering a similar phase. Success is making them ruthless. Just as their weapons become superior, their broadcasts also change from praising justice to threatening vengeance. The language of reason is displaced by violence. The willingness to make peace stands under the sign of Libra, the scales: one of the pans rises as the other falls. That has remained unchanged since the time of Brennus.

Who will stand by us after these spectacles have finished? Not the ones we shared our pleasures with at the banquet table, but rather those who shared the pain with us. This applies to the friends, the women, and to the relationships among us Germans in general. We are now finding a new, firmer ground for our commonality.

At my desk in the morning while the anti-aircraft guns fired and dense formations roared over the house. The windowpanes, the doors, the glasses in the cupboards, the pictures on the walls dance and shake like a ship on rough seas.

In the afternoon, I took Alexander along on my subterranean studies in order to train his eye a bit. We dug up a mole’s burrow and a nest of wood ants, and also visited a rabbit warren. The wood ants’ nest was located in the heart of a dead fir tree; its chambers, passages, and galleries followed the tree’s grain and had created recesses by leaving paper-thin walls that had perforated the wooden block like a honeycomb. The bleached-out structure possessed a certain delicate stability, so that if a hand were to grab a piece of it, one would have to strain in order to break it into dry fragments. The sight of all this made me think of the great story about my adventures with the ants, which I used when I was fifteen years old to keep my brothers and sisters spellbound until late at night. If this kind of innocence in storytelling were ever to come back to me, it would overflow like the contents of a krater.

Read further in the Old Testament. Deborah’s song of victory (Judges, 5): that terrible, joyous celebration over steaming blood. Verses 28–30, ironic enjoyment at the pain of Sisera’s mother, who waits for her son in an anguished state, still unaware that he will not return, because a nail has been driven through his skull. Abimelech also appears as a man of unbelievable violence in this book.

Mountainous areas are generally regarded as places of refuge, strongholds of freedom, where the collapsing national character survives. Here we find the opposite: The Israelites penetrate the mountains and cannot establish themselves on the plains, the home to peoples who possess “chariots of iron.” Perhaps the rule is that mountains are favorable to the weaker but more determined power.

A beautiful day. The tall hazel bush by my study has adorned itself overnight with woolly, greenish-yellow ribbons of blooms. The terrible destruction continues; in addition to Dresden, Vienna has also been heavily bombed. One gets the feeling that these are blows aimed at a cadaver. It seems that the cup of agony is not yet full.

Worked more in the garden and at my desk. Thought: whether this activity resembles that of those insects that we sometimes find along footpaths, their heads continuing to eat and their antennae moving, while their bodies have been stepped on.

This is only one side of the process; the other is allegorical, sacramental. One sows one’s seed without expectation of ever reaping a harvest. Such activity is either completely senseless or transcendental. Which of the two: it lies in our hands to determine that.

Discourse at the garden gate:

I: “Things are lively in the air today.”

Neighbor: “Yes, they say Osnabrück and Chemnitz have been destroyed.”

But I was talking about the mosquitoes that were buzzing around for the first time.

Manfred [Schwarz] was here for a few days of furlough and departed today. He was recently made commander of a tank unit and is wearing the Iron Cross. Nor does he lack for wounds: His left hand is crippled, the arm shattered by an explosion and rendered useless. During all this time of ferment, his thoughts have become clearer in a horrible distillation. These are the youths I have watched grow up over the years.

I was pleased by the way he judged the situation and showed him my essay on peace, making him one of its very few readers. We discussed it and later also talked about the books by Schubart and Tocqueville, as well as about Russia in particular.

We live in a state of nearly constant air-raid alerts. I was out on the Winkelwiese [meadow], partly to supervise the felling of trees and partly to do a little hunting for subtiles. While I was there, dense formations of aircraft overhead. Shrapnel whistled down; a dud struck some marshy terrain with huge force.

In the garden in the afternoon, still breaking up the soil, when I dug out a mandrake root. It had a slender twisted waist and hermaphroditic gender, a female that was also male. In flowers, the structure that people are more apt to take for a masculine than a feminine feature is formed similarly. I view this as a conundrum with sometimes the one and sometimes the other characteristic predominating.

Formations overhead while I worked on revising my Brazilian journal. They put down three “carpets.”[45] From the window, I again watched black smoke clouds rise over Misburg but heard later that a dummy factory had been set on fire. Burgdorf was hit; church and parsonage are destroyed. It is now the turn of the small towns, those last abodes of the old times. Swarms of low-flying aircraft accompany the squadrons in order to “go for the villages.”

During the day there is, incidentally, less incentive to head for the air-raid shelter. That says something about the role our imagination plays during these attacks.

Two Russians who cut wood for us told Perpetua in the kitchen that after three years of captivity, this was the first time that they had been fed inside a house they worked for. That is more troubling than the cruelty itself. Of course, Rozanov was already seeing things like this in Russia after World War I. This is generalized suffering.

An age that possesses such understanding of the physics of energy transfer has lost contact with the immense power contained in the offer of a little piece of bread.

Read further in the Old Testament. Anyone who wants to shape policy, like Kniébolo, should avoid lazy slogans and use the language of Nahash the Ammonite (I Samuel, 11:2).

Saul and Samuel, the first emperor and the first Pope.

Thought about Carus.[46] I wish him a beautiful physique and a great intellect. On this point: the first is always there to vouch for us. The second we must reveal ourselves: presence of mind. This explains the preference of Aphrodite over Athena; the Judgment of Paris incorporates astrological justice. Eventually, of course, the more intellectual power triumphs, and therefore Troy had to be destroyed

Pondered the naming of colors, always a vague and uncertain venture. Take weinrot [wine red]—red wine has dozens of shades. It would seem that the some spirit of speech bases the connections on vowel sounds. Hence the visual impression is stimulated less by comparisons than by direct experience.

It is inherent in the sound that purpurn [purple] must glow more darkly than scharlachrot [scarlet]. Bordeaux is brighter then Burgunderrot [Burgundy red]—and not just in view of the substances being compared, but also “synaesthetically,” meaning by sound magic. Without an instinctive control of these laws, good style is not possible.

The word is that Überlingen has been bombed, that magnificent old city. I am worried about Friedrich Georg.

We hear that Poland is to be compensated for those territories it will have to cede to Russia by being given Upper Silesia and East Prussia. This means that the other side does not plan to do things any better than Kniébolo would have. Human blindness to everything that has shown us the fiery omens for years fills me with horror.

Current reading: have picked up Huysmans’s Là Bas [The Damned] after many years. This book exerted particular influence on me after World War I, awakened an inclination toward expressionist Catholicism, which was then suppressed. Certain texts work like vaccinations.

Also reading Pitcairn, the Island, the People, and the Pastor by Rev. Thomas Boyles Murray (London, 1860) as a follow-up to my reading about shipwrecks. A passage about the Fiji Islanders asserts: “Their horrible habit of feeding on human flesh is the more remarkable, as they exceed their neighbors in talent and ingenuity,” as one of those not infrequent indications that cannibalism and higher culture are not mutually exclusive. I first became aware of this when reading Stucken’s Die Weissen Götter [The Great White Gods (1934)].

In the afternoon was at the fence that borders the churchyard; its stones and inscribed marble slabs peer over it. I have fallen behind with my digging, partly because of the general situation and also because of Ernstel’s death. This morning after snowstorms alternated with dense bomber formations, the sun broke through around the edges of the white cloud banks now and again. There was already warmth in the earth; I ran my fingers through it to pull out the roots of weeds among the currant bushes. In the loose, previously cultivated soil, my hand grabs hold of the still-hidden plants and gently pulls them out like creatures of the sea caught in a net. Under the thin covering things are sprouting vigorously, such as the nettles that shoot their green splendor from the yellowed root crown in a star pattern. This is true power, more real than a thousand airplanes.

The voice we use to attract animals or to drive them away differs depending on the species. The chicken, the dog, the cat, the sparrow, the horse, the snake—we have different calls for each one, special sounds and special melodies. Here we speak in tongues with the language of the Life Spirit that pours both over us and them.

Planted fava beans on the final recommended date. The flat seeds are large, plump, copper colored, like two-Pfennig pieces; I press them—not without pleasure—into the soft soil. When they are young, they produce an admittedly northern, but delicious, dish with chopped celery and mild bacon. Surely Hamann must have feasted on this. In Sicily, I once saw a smaller version; it was sweeter and served like sugar peas.

The early morning arrival of the donkeys and carts loaded with vegetables in southern cities is part of some of the most powerful memories of my life. For example, I recall the hour when I watched from a Neapolitan balcony as loads of onions, leeks, and fennel swayed in bright green and white bundles. They were accompanied by symphonies, as if whole populations of birds were chirping. These are images, like public offerings, that revive and strengthen us.

There was a letter from Hanna in the mail today. She writes from Leisnig that the news of Ernstel’s death was the fanfare announcing the entire calamity that has overtaken us. For weeks there has been no word from my two younger brothers, the geographer in Schneidemühl or the physicist in Crossen.

She also writes: “Of course, we can cross goodness and humanity off our agendas—but that makes the waves of hatred tremendously powerful.”

Read in the Bible, the passage on the building of the Temple and its dedication (I Kings, 6:7). The aversion to the use of iron for ritual purposes and sacred services is strange. Even the stones are dressed at distant locations, so that no sound of iron is heard during construction. Ore, on the other hand, is used copiously. This aversion is mysterious; it implies conservative as well as moral attributes. Iron is also a Cainite metal, and the foundation of superhuman power.

By contrast, it makes me ponder how little opposition was raised to the introduction of electricity into our churches. Every religious rite has the incorruptible Levite sense for the purity of sacrificial material and sacrificial instruments. Of course, this sense must not, as in Huysmans, derive from a feeling of nausea.

Concerning style. I have an aversion to the appearance of any kind of numbers in a text—the only exception being the notation of dates and textual references. This essentially stems from the fact that every concept that is predetermined and remote from perception is repugnant to me. Numbers are among these, with the exception of the dates of years, for they have substance: 1757, 1911, 1914 are quantities one can visualize. For me, it goes against the grain to write 300 horses, 256 dead, 100 Christmas trees. We don’t want to view things through the lens of statistics.

In this context, I should mention my horror of the decimal system in any nonsecular text. To me, in prose, words like centimeter, kilometer, kilogram sound like the sounds of iron during the construction of the Temple. In trying to avoid them we come back to the concepts: a foot, an ell, a span, a brace, a stone’s throw, an hour on foot—these are natural quantities.

The same applies to fashionable notions and topical expressions; these are primarily generated by politics, technology, and social interaction. They are the short-lived recombinations of linguistic material, and an intellect may be gauged by the extent to which it succumbs to them. Abbreviations belong in this category as well. Expressions formed this way should either be avoided or stated in their original words, which means writing them out.

Rivarol. I began with the translation of his Thoughts and Maxims. Perhaps today our language is finally achieving the same fluent consistency so that it, too, can be poured into such molds. That is naturally contingent upon a loss of potential energy.

I was again charmed by: “Un livre qu’on soutient est un livre qui tombe” [A book one defends is a book that falls]. The perfection of this utterance lies in the congruence, the absolute correspondence of its physical and intellectual quality. This balance embodies the hallmark of exquisite prose in general.

Death has now drawn so close that people take it into account in their trivial decisions—like whether or not to have another tooth filled.

Read further in the Book of Kings. The third chapter of the second book provides insights into the terrible splendor of the magic world. The king of the Moabites is besieged by a league of allied empires massed before his city. Under this duress, he gathers seven hundred swordsmen to attack the person of the King of Edom in the Asiatic way that Xenophon describes in detail. After this desperate action has failed, he slaughters his firstborn son on the city wall with his own hand for a burnt offering. No superior power is equal to this terrible incantation. It even exceeded Jehovah’s support: “Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there was great indignation against Israel: and they departed from him and returned to their own land” (II Kings 3:27).

I am sometimes overwhelmed by the unimaginable reality of these events—how much more real they are than Darwin’s theory or Bohr’s model of the atom. But then I think, perhaps it is precisely in this unreality, in this realm of the absolute fantastic, in this late Gothic spirituality of our world, that its actual merit lies.

Elijah. Elisha. The miracles of these men of God are the models, counterparts, for Christian ones. Their earlier magical aspects later become charismatic. Power also serves wickedness, lets children be torn apart by bears, or brings leprosy upon the head of the unfaithful servant.

The similarity is nonetheless evident. Among the Disciples there are thus some who see the resurrected Elijah in Christ. Peter, however, stresses the difference: “Thou art the son of God.”

There are passages in the New Testament where the charismatic miracle does not completely separate from its counterpart, the magical. Take, for example, the anecdote about the coin found in the gullet of the fish.

Perpetua’s birthday. New refugees have joined our household. We increasingly resemble a lifeboat in the vicinity of sinking ships. Perpetua shows herself equal to the throngs—her resources seem to increase as she distributes them. Something is always left over. From that I recognize the authentic relationship to abundance, to fecundity.

Piles of mail. Friedrich Georg calms me with one of his restorative letters, but nonetheless, he confirms that Überlingen has been bombed. At the very time of this peril, he was visiting Ziegler, the philosopher. I recognize in his report traits that are his alone: “People were killed and buildings destroyed. All around, the air was heavy with the scent of red cedars, cypresses, trees of life, firs, and other conifers, whose branches and foliage had been shorn off and crushed by the shrapnel.”

From Leisnig I also hear that Brother Physicus has written to me. That takes a further load off my mind.

Rosenkranz, who provides me with an ample supply of literature, sends a manuscript from the posthumous papers of Georg Trakl. I shall send this on to Friedrich Georg. I found nothing new here, for Trakl’s poetry is like a dream kaleidoscope viewed through the wrong end. In the moonlight behind the frosted glass, monotonous configurations of a few—but no less authentic—stones repeat.

Went to the dentist in Burgdorf in the afternoon. My prognosis does not seem completely unfavorable.

Magnificent spring weather. At the edge of the patch of woods near Beinhorn, I thought about Ernstel as usual, and the fact that he will never see earthly meadows and flowers again. His death brings new experience to my life—that of a wound that will not heal.

On spring days like this, the air is thick with swarms of the red Aphodius [dung beetle]. Its wing covers still have a reddish sheen, not the dirty, rusty brown tinge of later months. I watched legions of them buzzing around today and countless others that had been crushed flat by feet or wheels covered the country road. Such a mass hatching in this previously deserted space always makes me reflect on the question of the archetype that propagates itself with such enormous power in these myriads. The phenomenon resembles that red curtain, the red cloud that encircles an invisible pole. Ernstel’s curiosity was focused on this in these fields when he once told me that he could hardly wait for death, as if it were some mysterious ceremony.

Incidentally, contact with the archetype is inherent in every conception—transubstantiation, from which flesh springs. Novalis:

[They do not know, / That it is you, / Who hovers over the / Gentle maiden’s bosom / And makes the womb a heaven.]

Formations of planes flew over the area during my whole excursion. They gleamed silver as they lumbered away like titanic war chariots overhead. Still, I could sense spring in such power, so that even this cheered me. Potent life everywhere.

I read Kipling in the waiting room. His later dandyism combines with a good knowledge of all those aspects of morality and amorality that are necessary for dominance. Good alloy: from his Germanic forebears comes the wide-ranging, broad territorial consciousness of power; his Latin blood endows him with a formal and social component; and then—possibly absorbed from ancient Celts—a further metaphysical bonus, a kind of second sight into the mysteries of the world and its peoples, archipelagoes, and landscapes.

In terms of the common mold, the Germans have assimilated less felicitously, yet among them, there is greater probability that a solitaire, a Koh-i-Noor, can emerge from the slag of the melting pot.

Went to the garden center on my way back. Bleeding Heart, in spikes of most delicate jade tipped with gleaming reddish jasper—one of my favorite flowers—had already broken through the prepared soil along the borders. The power of the Earth Spirit in such organisms is enchanting, extraordinary. These are organs at the womb of our good little mother: the old Earth, who is still the youngest of red-skirted lasses. How desirable then, that our whole body should finally merge with hers at the end of this great pageant.

In the evening as I write these journal entries, one of the heaviest attacks on Misburg is taking place. Reconnaissance planes first laid down a veritable avenue of orange-yellow flares. The bombardment followed immediately.

I was a racecar driver arriving home with a huge trophy in my arms. I called to my wife to set the table in the garden because we were expecting guests:

“Put the trophy on the table too, and all the prizes from the cabinets along with it. You can also take some of the ribbons and the other award stuff off the walls.”

Was exhausted and, during all of this, had the manners of the arrogant champion completely addicted to the applause of the masses.

As usual, when I awoke, this intrusion into my habits and into the nature of a completely foreign, not to say contrary, existence, was disturbing.

Finished reading À Rebours [Against the Grain]. In theological terms, Huysmans’s merits do not extend beyond the late Romantic impulse. Aesthetic, but not moral, disgust also forces him to seek refuge in the old fortresses. Léon Bloy, who incidentally is mentioned in À Rebours, is in this sense, incomparably more vibrant. Still, Huysmans has exerted significant influence, especially when he fished in the lagoons and backwaters where no one else’s net reaches. The primary spark for revelations that acknowledge no gradations of health often springs from unhealthy circumstances and neurotic influences. At this moment, the most delicate glasses in the sideboard are starting to vibrate as the squadrons approach.

In areas of style, the same applies to the palette he uses to decorate his prose. In this outrageous adulteration and fraying of colors, in these esoteric festivals of the retina, décadence celebrates its triumphs and awakens sixteenth and thirty-second notes of a new sensibility. The mania to discern and describe the last ray of light at the margins of the invisible produces prose that sometimes reminds one of de Sade and owes him an obvious debt. How different is this scale to that of a Memling; his conjures the pure spectrum of the rainbow with its clear, gemlike colors.

And yet the degeneration of high style can be commendable, for there can no more be a hierarchy of primitivism and décadence in pure literature than in morality and immorality. There is only perception and object, eye and light, author and the world, and optimal expression will always be the victim between them.

Back in Burgdorf. The weather was somewhat cooler, which explains why I spotted only a few lone red specimens of Aphodius. They were no longer spinning gossamer strands in the air. In my mind, I sometimes like to let the legions of Coprophagi [beetles] pass in review. They are the most harmless of guilds in this motley world, and they do not even take nourishment from vegetation, except when cleaning up its digested remains. They lead a holy sort of life; the scarab has even been canonized. Their horns, antlers, and growths are extraordinary; these can be found in many animal species that also rely on vegetation for their nourishment. But they are not so much weapons as they are heraldic crests symbolizing the strength of wood and root. Finally, there are those magnificently colored types—true gems. I can recall once on Rhodes when I was on the edge of a meadow and touched a little piece of donkey manure with my foot; it crumbled into half a dozen gleaming emeralds. There was the green Onitis [scarab beetle] feasting away. This is the true alchemy of the Great Mother, as she creates diamonds from dung and distills golden life from decay.

While driving, pondered political systems in which progressive and conservative forces must be congruent—the only systems that offer anything better to hope for. To this end, the historical consolidation of parcels of land over great areas under the Empire should promote variety while at the same time stabilizing the land by letting it occasionally lie fallow. The growing independence and freedom of these organic areas must submit more rigorously to the integration of technology. The ultimate expression of this is the World State as a machina machinarum [engine of engines]. Fatherland and Motherland. The New Order must resemble logical clockwork, where the main wheel of centralization drives the smaller gears of decentralization. The significant innovation here is that the conservative powers will no longer function as restraints, but rather as a driving force.

The extension of suffrage could be further expanded if one were also to include children in addition to women, children who would then be represented by their fathers during elections. This would embody both a greater liberality and stability, a barrier to the influence of radical, purely intellectual, or literary impulses, to which a married man is less likely succumb. The patres will have to come to the fore again. Rural areas would also gain influence against the popular parties so frantically active in the big cities.

Furthermore, abstentions could also be mobilized by counting them as votes for the incumbent government, because it may be logically assumed that a voter who is too lazy to make it to the polls is not dissatisfied with prevailing conditions. The nonvoters represent a passive element of value.

Speeches in our parliaments would have to be read aloud, as in Mirabeau’s age. That would lend weight to the arguments and reduce the amount of empty rhetoric. The unalterable—not the intellectual—composition of the people should also be mirrored in the parliaments. Insofar as practice comes into its own at the expense of theory, the influence of unpredictable figures is also kept in check.

I am reading Petronius in Heinse’s pleasant translation. Of all the characters that appear in the novel, that of Trimalchio is the most convincing. He is one of those great hits of world literature and has all their unmistakable attributes: validity for every age and every place. When and wherever speculation thrives under diminished authority, figures like Trimalchio will emerge, as they most probably will after this war. Just as Homer described the topos of the returning hero, Petronius described the topos of the war profiteer. This is his great achievement. He is the author of a species nova [new species] of a “good” sort.

This morning Alexander, who is in bed with a cold, showed me a fairytale he had written. In it, five apprentices were transformed into frogs.

Perpetua, Hanne Wickenberg, and I were at the table together around noon because it was laundry day. I told a few witticisms in a mood that Hanne described with the Lower Saxon adjective wählig, a word that connotes a kind of relaxed comfort with an added dash of the erotic.

Later in the garden, attending to the business of weeds. Because their roots and shoots are so fragile, they have to be pulled out more carefully than a Guinea worm,[47] so that they don’t tear.

During the night, Kniébolo appeared to me again; I was setting up a room for him to be used for a conference with the English. The result was the proclamation of the gas war. I realized that whatever was going to happen, it meant profit for him, for he had attained a level of nihilism that excluded him from the participants. For him every single death, no matter on which side, signified profit. I thought to myself: “yes, that’s why you also had all those hostages shot; now you’ll get back interest a thousandfold at the expense of the innocent.”

And finally this: “soon you will have achieved almost everything you have craved from the outset.”

All this was in a tone of almost noncommittal disgust, for my roof had been shot to pieces, and I was annoyed that it was raining on my South American insects. This, of course, made them soft and flexible; it even seemed to me as if life had returned to them.

When a March evening arrives after one of the first warm days, an amazingly pungent vapor rises from the plowed furrows that were fertilized a few weeks earlier. Its elements comprise highly concentrated animal fumes underscored by decay and combined with pulsing fecundity from the ferment of life in its legions of microbes. This is a smell in which melancholy and high spirits merge—enough to make you go weak in the knees. This is the radical estrus of the Earth and her womb, of the terra cruda nuda [raw naked earth]—the source of every flower’s scent. Health and vital energy also dwell in it, and the ancient doctors were not wrong when they prescribed sleeping in stables to cure wasting diseases.

Snowdrops and crocus are wilting, but for all that, the thimbleweed, violets, and yellow narcissus are starting to bloom.

I am reading Johann Christian Günther’s poems in a beautiful old Breslau edition I have had among my books for a long time. This is hearty fare, sort of a ginseng root of the baroque. They include observations like the following:

[And suddenly her head lay in my lap. / And Zephyr out of envy, her breast did half reveal, / where Philomen at once, as far as she allowed him, / With gentle fingers stroked her beauty’s rosy bud.]

“J’espère que les chose s’arrangeront.” [I hope things will work out.][48]

Parting words of my Parisian barber last August. Even if not quite right for this situation, nonetheless well meant and, when taken in the right spirit, an example of the best of French rationality.

Radiant Sunday morning until huge bomber formations appeared and hit an oil or rubber depot in Hannover, producing fire clouds that obscured the sky like an eclipse of the sun.

Letters that come to us from regions farther to the West carry warnings about the low-flying aircraft. When they appear, children in particular are threatened.

Novalis writes in his Hymns to the Night:

[Love is given freely / And there is no more separation / Life surges in its fullness / Like an infinite sea—]

With the elimination of the subdivisions of lands, earthly conflicts will decline. Separation and jealousy. Note here the superior answer Jesus gives to the question asked by the Sadducees about whom the woman who had known many men would be reunited with after death.[49] We advance to the highest spiritual component of love. All earthly contact is a mere metaphor of this.

[For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven…]

English and American troops are positioned in Limburg, Giessen, Aschaffenburg, and in the outer precincts of Frankfurt.

Squadrons overhead in the morning, during which I worked partly in the garden and partly at my desk, thinking all the while that with each of the resounding booms that follow the screaming of the bombs, dozens and perhaps hundreds of people have been annihilated. And this is going on in a terrain of pure horror that lacks any mountain peak where one could receive the absolutio in articulo mortis [absolution at the moment of death].

We have to keep in mind that this carnage elicits satisfaction in the world. The situation of the German is now like what the Jews experienced inside Germany. Yet it is still better than seeing the Germans with their illegitimate power. Now one can share their misery.

Fiftieth birthday. This is the midpoint of life, when it is measured with the scale rather than the yardstick. Yet in this century, it is also an advanced age, considering the long, dangerous climb, especially of someone who never shirked his duties and was always put into harm’s way in both great wars—in the first one, into the frenzy of the war of attrition, and in the second, into the dark perils of the demonic world.

This new year of life began with a solitary nighttime vigil, during which I permitted myself a small ceremony using the following readings:

The poem by Droste-Hülshoff recaptures one of the ancient, secret hurdles in my life and, at the same time, utters a powerful exhortation to modesty. In that respect, it fits this double occasion of birthday and Maundy Thursday well.

The Trost-Aria also has wonderful passages like these:

[Finally the aloe is in bloom, / Finally the palm tree bears its fruit; / Finally vanish fear and pain; / Finally agony is abolished; / Finally we see the vale of joy, / Finally, finally, come all of you.]

Rosenkranz visited in the afternoon. Together we planted a butterfly bush in the garden in order to attract that insect. Later General Loehning joined us; yesterday, he lost his apartment and all his property in Hannover, yet nowadays, such things are no more disturbing than it used to be to move from one house to another. Perpetua set a bounteous table and had not only wine but a bottle of champagne, so we feasted merrily.

Americans in Brilon and Paderborn. Out on the streets there is a sort of surge of unrest, of fever, which is typical when a front is advancing. The farmers are beginning to bury their silver and provisions, and are preparing to go off into the moor. Behind the village, defensive ditches are being dug. Should a firefight erupt between the large gun emplacements at Stelle and tanks approaching along their route of advance toward Celle—as is planned—then all these villages and farms that survived the Thirty Years’ War are doomed. I paced through the house and its rooms, especially my study and the library.

Ernstel. When someone in a family dies, it can seem as if a forward scout has been sent ahead at the approach of great danger. For wisdom prevails there, but we do not know the situation.

Began reading Evelyn Henry Wood, Vom Seekadetten zum Feldmarschall [From Midshipman to Field Marshal (1906)], specifically to learn about the English fleet, one of the great institutions and formative establishments of our world, like the Jesuit order, the Prussian General Staff, or the city of Paris.

The book begins with the siege of Sebastopol. Wood takes part as a midshipman in a battery landed from the HMS Queen. During these last years, I have come upon different descriptions of this episode in the course of my reading, such as Tolstoy’s and Galliffet’s. It’s no coincidence that the truly grave and painful side of modern warfare (those aspects that will cause him suffering) come up early and powerfully in all encounters that have to do with Russia. One can already sense this in 1812 and also at the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig [1813]. The Russian element comes clearly to the fore. The Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War predict all the horrors of subsequent wars of attrition, and by now, our eyes have seen unspeakable hells like those of Stalingrad or the Second Sebastopol. When Spengler warned against any incursion into Russia because of its size, he was right, as we have seen in the meantime. Any such invasion justified on metaphysical grounds is even more spurious because one approaches one of the great repositories of hardship, a Titan, a genius in the stamina of suffering. Within that sphere of influence, one will learn to know agony in a way that surpasses imagination.

And yet it seems to me as though the Germans may have learned something there. I sense this occasionally in conversations with soldiers returning from the cauldron battles.

In the afternoon went with Fritz Meyer to the Oldhorst Moor to survey the land. The second bloom of the year is beginning to die back in the garden. I got particular joy from a carpet of yellow narcissus, violets, and bush anemones. The intensity of two complementary colors is enhanced by adding white. It seems to radiate a concealed harmony of the whole and its parts. Perhaps the play of colors is revealing the same truth that the Pythagorean theorem does for geometry.

Before the storm. In the afternoon had a visit from General Loehning and Diels, who has been released from prison. Diels brought his wife, Göring’s sister, who divorced him.[50] Diels was in a good mood; Loehning had stuck him into the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal. Later a junior officer appeared carrying a letter from Manfred Schwarz asking that this courier should be given a copy of my essay on peace, so that Manfred could take it with him to southern Germany. So it seems that the essay is beginning to have some effect independent of its author.

At the same time, I had the leaders of the Volkssturm [Civil Defense] in my library so that I could issue orders to them. During the past weeks, I haven’t gotten around to recording the details, which are gripping and very complex. The Volks­sturm was founded by the Party; its orders come from Burgdorf. But it also relies on cooperation with the mayors, rural leaders, the Arbeitsdienst,[51] and the military units. This brings a host of delicate contacts into play. The approaching catastrophe exposes the conditions more blatantly. I gather from radio reports that many local authorities are inclined to order a few minor executions as they make their exits. This creates respect and makes it easier to flee. One would not like to abet their efforts and make their departure any easier—especially not at one’s own risk.

The Volkssturm leaders are farmers; in this landscape, the old Guelph traditions are the ultimate political reality. We talked through a plan to construct tank barriers. When we broke up, confused and dazed, someone said, “The farms must be kept intact.” That, of course, is not up to us alone, but I had the impression that every man agreed in his heart.

I dreamed about Ernstel for the first time, at least at that deep stratum where memory resides. He died, and I embraced him. I heard his last words, which expressed the hope that we would see each other again.

In addition to him (he was wearing a dark blue sailor’s uniform), I also dreamed of Pfaffendorf, my comrade from World War I. His character had changed without sacrificing any of his style. He had become a notary in a medium-size city and gave a banquet for me where a lot of strange and, to some extent, intimidated guests were present. Upon awaking, I realized that he must have been in Kassel, which fell yesterday after a brief but violent struggle.

In the morning, I received a visit from the Feldmeister[52] of the large gun battery, who wanted to know how I was planning to assemble the Volkssturm when the tanks approached. Because I keep my own counsel on such matters, I told him that I was still awaiting orders and weapons. He then revealed to me his intention to “level” the P.O.W. camps, as he put it, with his long-range guns.

Since one should try to rebut madmen whenever possible in their own terms, I answered him that doing so would only achieve the opposite of his intentions—namely that blowing up the camps with the first rounds would disperse the inmates (already driven to extremes) across the whole country. Then I had to put my cards on the table and tell him that I would resist that with force and appeal to the people. Here, I got to know a person who combines obtuse intelligence with brutality, as is so common in our world. The characters of those types who influence broad historical events are composed of the following ingredients: one quarter each of technical intelligence, stupidity, bonhomie, and brutality—that that is the mixture one must know in order to comprehend the contradictions of our age.

In the afternoon, collated a copy of my “Essay on Peace” with the junior officer. In the evening, he left with two copies after I had written a brief foreword. I am dedicating the work to my dear Ernstel.

The English are still at the Weser River, but they will cross it in a few days. The Gauleiter[53] of Hannover has circulated a bloodthirsty appeal calling for a fight to the last man, but Loehning knew that he was already taking measures to save his own skin. The farmers are burying objects, stowing some in their cellars, and destroying others.

The increased traffic on the streets means that all sorts of acquaintances drop by. Today it was a Lieutenant Wollny, who is on his way to the Weser. He brought me news from Niekisch. It seems that plans are in place for the “liquidation” of all prison inmates. Niekisch succeeded in getting a letter to his wife in which he wrote that this was probably the logical conclusion to his fate. All his prophecies, especially the ones in his work Hitler, ein deutsches Verhängnis [Hitler, a German Disaster], have come to pass. His wife still cherishes the hope that this will not end in slaughter. I always think about his fate with a particularly bitter feeling.

I saw a huge oak that was festooned like a Christmas tree with swordfishes longer than a man. The color of the creatures turning on their silken fishing lines shimmered from deep nacreous blue to all the hues of the rainbow. From a distance, I saw the bauble at which Neptune, Diana, and Helios were all at work, and I could also hear its music box sound.

English armored point units have now crossed the Weser and are said to be at Elze. The Volkssturm was mobilized and is supposed to be guarding the anti-tank barriers. This meant that I had to drive to Burgdorf to get information.

The roads were already crowded with refugees streaming eastward. Burgdorf was throbbing with excitement. Baskets and household items were being hauled down into cellars. I spoke with the Volkssturm leaders and the Kreisleiter;[54] their vital spirits seem to have been drained from them. Orders were handed down detailing our resistance, especially with respect to firing on tanks, yet these were fairly pro forma because in the next rooms, people were already packing up. I briefly expressed my objections to any rape of prisoners and discovered no intention to do so.

The farmers of Lower Saxony are beginning to act rationally now that their properties are at stake. Of course, it is still very dangerous to express any desire to hold onto them, and many a mayor who tried to do so has been stood up against the wall. Still, I think I’ve done my best to support the old estates. It was to my credit during all this that no one thought me cowardly.

In two or three days, our parish will see foreign troops. This pageant has not been repeated since the Napoleonic Wars, if we discount 1866[55] for the moment. During this transition period, I miss Ernstel terribly.

A sunny morning after a cool night. Long columns of prisoners are still marching to the East. Low-flying aircraft are scouring the road; we can hear the rolling salvos of their guns. Farther forward they seem to have found a target: A pack of horses comes galloping back with flowing manes and empty saddles. Now and then prisoners come in to seek cover. As a result, the barn is overflowing with a troop of Russians that dived into a pile of carrots. Perpetua passes out slices of bread to them. Then there are the Poles. I ask one of them if he wants to march as far as the eastern border:

“Oh no, not for a year. First Russian must go.”

Signs of new conflicts are already emerging.

Right after dinner, the voice of the radio announcer comes on:

“The tanks are continuing their advance toward the Northeast and are now threatening the district capital.”

The road becoming devoid of travelers. You can see farmers driving their wagons into the moor; their white and red featherbeds catch the eye from a great distance. Even our neighbor Lahmann has hitched up his team—“for the horses’ sake”—as he himself wants to go out into the field to plant potatoes.

In the afternoon, I “rammed” some radishes [into the soil], slept, and finished reading Wood, while refugees looked in on us occasionally. Because I undertook yesterday’s trip in the rain, now I unfortunately have a bad cold. I am noting this less on account of my discomfort than because circumstances like these require extremely keen powers of observation.

Otherwise, conditions are not unpleasant. Party orders, food rationing cards, police regulations—have lost all authority. The radio station in Hannover has terminated its broadcasts. Those voices that for years used to wallow in false pathos fall silent in the hour of danger just when the populace urgently needs updates about the situation. Not even air-raid sirens sound anymore.

Peaceful night. I had taken quinine, which relieved the flu somewhat. I read a few of Turgenev’s hunting stories beforehand. I have admired these greatly for a long time, even though I am bothered by the detail of the extravagant Parisian gun that he carries in these forests.

My dear father’s birthday. He was so eager to know how this war would end and what the new world that it brought would look like. But surely he did find out—I am thinking here of the nice observation by Léon Bloy that at the moment of death a spirit experiences history tangibly.

The English are said to be near Pattensen, Braunschweig, and even on the coast. Refugees are still fleeing the city.

In the afternoon, violent explosions in the area; there were immense black clouds around Winsen an der Aller. By contrast it’s very pleasant that around here the pressure that came along with the twelve years of Party rule—pressure that I could feel even during the campaign in France—has gone up in smoke.

Artillery shelling in the evening, probably over near Herrenhausen, accompanied by illuminated target locators.

Took quinine again. During the night, the road was crowded with soldiers flooding back in disarray. A young junior officer came inside, and Perpetua outfitted him with a hat and raincoat.

Dr. Mercier returned from the Weser this morning. I presented him with a carbon copy of my essay on peace.

All day long, fierce artillery shelling could be heard here and there across our wide moor and marshland. You get the feeling that the Americans have seeped into this landscape as if it were a piece of blotting paper.

By the afternoon, rumors circulate that we are surrounded. In the evening, not far away, we hear pistol and rifle shots.

Restless night. After dawn, the artillery battery near Stelle opens fire in the thick fog in rapid, crackling salvos right past our house. Its inhabitants, more or less dressed, rush out into the garden and seek the shelter. I am writing this in my study amid new salvos that make the house reverberate like an anvil under the blacksmith’s hammer blows.

Later the sun breaks through. In the afternoon, two American armored cars from Neuwarmbüchen drive into the village, take four anti-aircraft gunners prisoner, and turn around again. We also hear that other tanks have shown up in Schillerslage, in Oldhorst, and in other towns. The gun emplacement at Stelle continues to pepper the outskirts of town with anti-tank shells as it keeps up the shelling. We can still hear them hammering away in the first half of the night and watch their tracer rounds fly over the house toward Grossburgwedel. Later, intense exchanges of fire in the woods around Colshorn.

We are awakened at dawn by the rumbling of tanks. The Stelle artillery emplacement does not open fire. We hear that its crew has scattered during the night after using their last shells to blow up their own guns; their Feldmeister, who wanted to escape in civilian clothes, has committed suicide. That was the man who had plans to level the prison camps. Now his body is lying in the firehouse.

At nine o’clock, a powerful, ever-increasing grinding sound announces the approach of the American tanks. The road is deserted. In the morning light, through bleary eyes, it looks even bleaker and more airless. As so often in life, I am the last man in the district who has the authority to give orders. Yesterday, I issued the only order in this connection: to guard the tank barrier, then open it as soon as the point unit comes into view.

As always in such situations, unforeseen things happen, as I learn from observers. The barrier is located at a piece of land, the “Lannewehrbusch,” of the old Landwehr[56]—a patch of forest that my father once purchased. Two strangers show up there armed with grenade launchers and take up positions at the edge of the forest. They are spotted and cause the forward unit to halt during the considerable time it takes to send riflemen forward, who disarm and capture them.

Then a solitary hiker appears and remains standing on a forest path not far from the barrier. At the moment when the first gray tank with its five-pointed star appears, he releases the safety catch on his pistol and shoots himself in the head.

I stand at the window and look out over the bare garden and across the high road. The grinding rumble is getting nearer. Then, like a mirage, a gray tank with its gleaming white star glides slowly past. Following it in close formation come armored vehicles—myriads of them pass by for hours and hours. Small aircraft hover overhead. The pageant makes an impression of highly coordinated effort in its military and mechanical uniformity—as if a procession of dolls were rolling past, a parade of dangerous toys. At times, the order to halt spreads through the column. Then we can see the marionettes bend forward and then again backward when they start up again—as if jerked on their strings. As often happens when the eye becomes fixed on particular details, I notice especially the radio antennae that sway above the tanks and their escort vehicles: they give me the impression of an enchanted fishing expedition, perhaps out to catch the Leviathan.

Seamlessly, slowly, yet irresistibly, the flood of men and steel surges past. The quantities of explosives transported by such an army column endow it with a terrifying mystique. And, as in 1940 on the roads approaching Soissons, I sense the incursion of a mighty superpower into a completely crushed region. And the feeling of sadness that gripped me then returns as well. A good thing that Ernstel cannot see this; it would have hurt him too much. Recovery from such a defeat will not be the same as after Jena or Sedan.[57] This portends a change in the lives of populations; not only must countless human beings die, but much of everything that used to motivate our deepest being perishes in this transition.

We are capable of recognizing necessity, even of understanding and desiring and loving it as well—and yet at the same of being overcome with intense anguish. One must know this in order to comprehend our age and its people. What are birth pangs or the pain of death in light of this drama? Perhaps they are identical, just as sunset is simultaneously sunrise for new worlds.

“Defeated earth grants us the stars.”[58] This aphorism is coming true in a spatial, spiritual, and otherworldly sense. Supreme effort implies a supreme, though as yet unknown, goal.