Journal
Volume 1, 1941–1943, and Volume 2, 1943–1945
1951
RESEARCHING FOR MY BOOK Paris in the Third Reich, I was just in time to catch some German officials or soldiers who had played a part in the occupation, for instance Dr. Ernst Achenbach of the Embassy and Gerhard Heller, the military censor who controlled French publication. Understandably, they tried to put themselves in the best possible light, claiming to have acted as much in French interests as in German. Ernst Jünger was different. A staff
officer, exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally observant, he kept a day-by-day record of his life in Paris, afterwards publishing it with the title Strahlungen, and Journal in its French translation. Much more than a timely self-portrait, these diaries fix for posterity the historic moment when the long-drawn contest for power in continental Europe appeared to have ended conclusively in German victory and French defeat.
After the war, Jünger was apparently in the habit of staying in Paris with a French lady. We arranged to meet at her address. He opened the front door and in spite of his eighty-seven years led the way up several flights of stairs. Born in 1895, he appeared to be a holdover from the era of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck. His soldiering began with an improbable spell in the French Foreign Legion, on the wrong side, so to speak. A German infantryman, he spent virtually the entire First World War in the trenches on the Western front. Wounded fourteen times, he was the youngest soldier ever to win the Pour le Mérite, the Kaiser’s medal for bravery. By the time of his death in 1998, he was the last living holder of that now anachronistic award. In Stahlgewittern, published in 1920 and usually translated as The Storm of Steel, is a lightly fictionalized account of his First War experience; it made him one of Germany’s most celebrated authors. Two years later, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Combat as an Internal Experience) was about the psychological value of warfare. In his view, battle is the proper test of a human being. I asked him how come he had been able actually to enjoy the First War. His answer was simple: “Killing Frenchmen.”
Not a Nazi, Jünger was one of the first to ascribe demonic powers to Hitler, referring to him in his diary as Kniébolo (a name of unknown origin). Close enough to the central Nazi tenet that the strong engage in a Darwinian struggle for supremacy and the weak go to the wall, he could nonetheless pass as a fellow traveler of Nazism. A Captain in his late forties, Jünger had rejoined his regiment in time for the blitzkrieg of May and June 1940. An earlier diary, Gärten und Strassen (Gardens and Streets), describes a leisurely march through France, more like a parade that comes to the happy ending of luncheon with French friends in a favorite Paris restaurant.
Trying to analyze why France had fallen in 1940, the eminent historian Marc Bloch wrote a book with the self-explanatory title L’Etrange Défaite (The Strange Defeat). To Jünger, there was nothing strange about it. The French had shown themselves unwilling to fight and die for their country. The Pétain government’s policy of collaboration accepted that Germany had to have its own way.
Civilized, very well read, a linguist, botanist and zoologist, Jünger spent his time in Paris buying prints and books and visiting churches and museums. Recording the regular invitations he received to meet or dine with famous French artists and social celebrities, he passes no outright judgment on their friendliness. He extended the same amoral and apolitical approach to his military colleagues. Returning from the Eastern Front, a Colonel Schaer tells him there will be no more mass shootings; the sentence is completed with the neutral words, “now one has moved on to gas.” The most senior of his German friends was General Hans Speidel, then the Chief of Staff of Field-Marshal Rommel but transformed after the war into the General commanding NATO. As we talked, Jünger kept telling me that on Speidel’s orders he had written a paper about the power struggle in France between the Military Governor with the army at his disposal, and the SS. The paper would show the Military Governor in a good light but unfortunately all copies had been lost or destroyed. From the way he spoke, I suspected that snobbery had played a role. SS General Karl Oberg and his deputy SS Standartenführer Helmut Knochen, the real rulers of France, were too uncouth to be invited into Paris drawing rooms.
Occasionally, Jünger’s inner self comes through. One summer night in 1942 he dined at the Tour d’Argent. The Seine could be seen from the dining room of this most renowned restaurant and he writes up in beautifully overblown prose the pearly color of the water and the reflection of the weeping willows on the riverbank. Then: “One has the impression that the people seated at tables up there like gargoyles, feeding on soles or the special duck, take devilish pleasure in looking at the grey sea of roofs under which some of the starving eke out their lives. In times like these, eating well and eating a lot induces the feeling of power.”
Several pages of even colder brilliance describe the duty Jünger once had of commanding an execution squad. A German non-commissioned officer had deserted to live with a French woman. When he turned to crime and abuse, she denounced him. The man was tied to a tree whose bark had been ripped by previous firing squads, and within the strips bluebottle flies were busy nestling. Twenty-four hours after D-Day, a convoy of heavy armor went by in the street on its way to the front. The sight of the youthful crews prompted a perfect example of the dark romancing common to anyone who believes with Jünger that war is a fine and worthwhile test of a human being. The diary entry reads: “The approach of death glowed outward from them, the glory of hearts that consent to be effaced in fire.”