Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy
The dissident thinker predicted our disordered times
“Ancient chivalry is dead"
(Rasemann/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
BY ARIS ROUSSINOS
Aris Roussinos is a former war reporter and a contributing editor at UnHerd.
arisroussinos
December 27, 2021
With its modern themes of detachment and alienation, the recent revival of Ernst Jünger’s early work by the internet dissident Right is an understandable urge. When I was a younger man, Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his hallucinatory account of his experiences as a stormtrooper commander in the trenches, was, like Malaparte’s Kaputt and Graves’s Goodbye to All That, a major formative experience in my desire to experience war and, callow though it now sounds, prove myself in it.
Perhaps it’s natural, then, that in later life, the sombre reflections of the middle-aged Jünger as expressed in his recently translated wartime diaries, a husband and father disenchanted with the modern world around him, now seem so compelling.
The diaries open in 1941, with the 46-year-old Jünger serving in an administrative capacity on the general staff of the German army occupying Paris. Initially féted by the Nazi party for the proto-fascist tone of his early works, Jünger publicly rejected the regime’s advances and came under suspicion as a result, his house searched by the Gestapo and the threat of persecution always hanging over him. A central figure in Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Jünger, who stated he “hated democracy like the plague”, had come to despise the Nazi regime at least as much. Ultimately, he was far too Right-wing to accept Nazism.
Jünger’s intellectual circle had aimed to transcend liberal democracy through fusing Soviet bolshevism with Prussian militarism, yet the illiberal regime that actually came to power was wholly repugnant to him. “The Munich version — the shallowest of them all — has now succeeded,” he wrote, “and it has done so in the shoddiest possible way,” filling him with dread that Hitler would drive Germany and Europe towards disaster and discredit radical alternatives to liberalism for generations to come.
Jünger’s two closest friends, the National Bolshevik Ernst Nieckish and the philosopher of law Carl Schmitt, each met different fates under the new Nazi order: Nieckish jailed as a dissident until his liberation by the Red Army in 1945, and Schmitt as the regime’s foremost legal theorist. Jünger remained friends with both. For Jünger, the internal exile, dissidence would come in the veiled form of his dreamlike novella On the Marble Cliffs, published on the cusp of war in 1939, in which he predicted the disaster and bloodshed the Nazis would bring in their train. Carefully monitored and shunted off to a desk job in France, Jünger spent his war as a flâneur along the quais of Paris, buying antiquarian books, conducting numerous love affairs, and recording his impressions of the city he loved.
A fêted intellectual, and a lifelong francophile, he befriended the city’s cultural elite, socialising with Cocteau and Picasso as well as the collaborationist French leadership and literary figures such as the anti-semitic novelist Céline, a monster who “spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews — astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it”. For Jünger, Céline represented the very worst type of radical intellectual: “People with such natures could be recognised earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays they hide under the cloak of ideas.”
While listening to Céline’s ravings about Jews with polite horror, Jünger was embroiled in an affair with Sophie Ravoux, a German-Jewish doctor, and helping to conceal other Jews in hiding, as well as warning the French resistance about imminent deportations. He records the first reports of mass executions in the east, shared among the army leadership, initially with disbelief and then with horror, disgust and shame. Generals back from the east recount meetings with figures like “a horrifying young man, formerly an art teacher, who boasted about commanding a death squad in Lithuania… where they butchered untold numbers of people”, or share third-hand rumours about “men who have single-handedly slain enough people to populate a midsize city. Such reports extinguish the colours of the day. You want to close your eyes to them, but it is important to view them like a physician examining a wound.”
Yet Jünger’s detachment comes, at times, close to inhumanity. “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported,” he notes, immediately before examining antique engravings in an antiquarian bookshop: “Looking at pictures does me good when I’m upset.” He records, with genuine disappointment, the cold looks of hatred he is given by French shopgirls or diners in exclusive restaurants, yet feels their distaste is inappropriately applied to such a deep thinker such as himself, an inward dissident after all.
For Jünger, the real spiritual war is elsewhere: “I find myself entangled in very different conflicts from those of the hostile nations. The solution to those conflicts is secondary,” he writes with cool detachment, pondering his place in the catastrophe around him. “Ideologically, this Second World War is completely distinct from the first… And again the fronts have been drawn up completely differently from the way they look on the map.”
What was the war about, then, for Jünger? During World War I, he declares, “We confronted the question of whether man was more powerful than machines”, but “we are now concerned with the problem of whether humans or automatons will dominate the earth”.
By 1944 Jünger floated on the fringes of two army plots against Hitler, without ever committing himself. He had — correctly as it turns out — no faith in the capacity of the generals around him to bring their task to successful fruition. Flirting with the French and German resistance movements just as he served the regime he despised, Jünger lived his concept of the “anarch”, the internal exile who conforms outwardly to the spirit of the times while fostering his own inward, secret rebellion. As Cocteau later quipped, “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”
A symbolist writer like the decadent Huysmans, Jünger experiences Allied air raids with the same distant, aesthete’s view, standing on a rooftop to observe the bombs fall. A lifetime experimenter with hallucinogens, he experiences the war as a vast trip: “When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theatre — pure power affirmed and magnified.” An entomologist and biologist by training, Jünger writes of his almost unnatural detachment that he needs to observe the war’s characters “as if these were creatures like fish in a coral reef or insects on a meadow”.
But, then, insect and animal metaphors abound throughout the diaries. On almost every page, he records encounters with snakes, real or dreamed, seen in shops or museums or carved on statues. “The primal force of these creatures lies in the fact that they embody life and death, as well as good and evil,” he observes: “the serpent, a tellurian animal, is a powerful medicine.” Indeed, the snake appears as his daimon throughout the book, no doubt a reflection of his own cold-blooded, chthonic nature. He literally basks in the sunlight reflected from Paris’ limestone walls, observing that its warmth “awakens a primeval little lizard’s soul in me”.
Throughout the diaries, Jünger’s inner world appears richer and more meaningful than the war around him. Almost every entry begins with a summary of his latest dream, whether recorded as such or described in laconic terms as if it were a real event. He catalogues these dreams obsessively: “In the night, I dreamt of the trenches of World War I”; “Toward morning, dreams of earthquakes — I saw houses swallowed up”; “At night dreams of ancient cave systems on Crete, where soldiers were swarming like ants”; “Dreamed of being burdened with the corpse of a murdered man without being able to find a place to conceal it.”
What is behind this obsession? Through dreams we communicate with the dead, he notes offhandedly, as well as our innermost self. Indeed, Jünger comes uncannily close to Jung throughout the book: he records strange omens and premonitions, claims that certain generals of his acquaintance are imbued with the power of prophecy, records strange synchronicities and deploys obscure alchemical metaphors. As the diaries go on and Germany’s fortunes worsen, the magical element begins to predominate.
He discusses the esoteric writers Guénon and Eliade with Schmitt, debating the magic of the mandrake root and the symbolism of the moon, of the sea and of woman (to him a largely interchangeable category of person). Like Robert Graves, his English analogue, Jünger’s exultation with the First World War fruited into occult mysticism. He dreams of re-enchanting a world lost to technology and secular liberalism: “The ancient gods still stand before us with their magical presence, perhaps even in competition,” he observes, and he means this literally.
Reading the Bible, he records his growing interest in Christianity over the course of the war. “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?” he asks himself: “Only prayer… 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 recognises the right thing to do and does good. You can be sure that is a man who prays.”
For Jünger, prayer is powerful magic, an efficacious antidote to modernity: “It possesses a conductive power.” Without prayer, “our freedom of will and powers of resistance diminish; the appeal of demonic powers becomes more compelling, and its imperatives more terrible.”
Jünger’s reference to demonic power is here entirely literal. As the years pass, he begins to view Hitler — who he codenames “Kniébolo”— not as a malicious charlatan who has perverted his conservative revolution but as a genuinely demonic figure, possessing a “a certain diabolical greatness” that is “elemental, infernal” and who “feeds” on the forces unleashed by modernity in a way the “liberal intelligentsia” are incapable of understanding. “In their innermost inclinations,” Jünger observes, “minds like Kniébolo’s are bent on the most comprehensive homicide possible. They seem to belong to a world of corpses that they want to populate — they find the stench of the slain pleasant.”
At the height of the war, while the Holocaust was a marginal concern of the Allies, Jünger would return again and again to “these atrocities perpetrated against the Jews, which enrage the cosmos against us”. The Nazi leadership are “demonic powers” channeling occult forces: “these people are probing the planet, and the fact that they choose the Jews as their primary victims cannot be a coincidence,” he writes, “Their highest-ranking executioners have a kind of uncanny clairvoyance that is not the product of intelligence but of demonic inspiration. At every crossroads, they will find the direction that leads to greater destruction.” Of Hitler, Junger writes that “I sometimes have the impression that the world spirit has chosen him in a subtle way. There are secrets here that other tribes will never comprehend.”
It is essential to remember that Jünger was an opponent of National Socialism from the far-Right: “Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.” For him, the Nazis were the worst embodiment of modernity, which turned humans into automata, mere machines without souls. His fear was that the Nazi interlude would discredit the search for a Right-wing escape route from modernity: “It is also Kniébolo’s role to discredit good ideas by carrying them aloft on his shield.” He writes that “when you have been party to such individual fates and begun to comprehend the statistics that apply to the wicked crimes carried out in the charnel houses, an enormity is exposed that makes you throw up your hands in despair”. An ultranationalist, Jünger writes that “I am aggrieved to feel such things beginning to influence my relationship, if not to my Fatherland, then to the German people”.
As with the fatherland, so with war, whose seductive power captured the younger Jünger. On a trip to the Eastern Front, the 47-year-old Jünger is forced to duck for cover from Russian machine-gun fire: “I have long since passed the age,” he observes, relatably, “when I find such things amusing.” Awarded Germany’s highest military decoration by Ludendorrf at the age of 22, he reflects that the ancient general warned him “‘it is dangerous for one so young to be decorated with the highest honour.’ Back then I considered it pedantic, but today I know that it was right.” The older Jünger has lost his taste for battle’s glittering accoutrements: “I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much. Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.”
Eventually, Jünger’s eldest son, little Ernstel, is arrested by the Nazi regime for making defeatist comments about the war to his fellow sailors. He is later assigned to the Italian front on a dangerous anti-partisan mission. There, he was killed by a bullet to the head beneath Carrara’s marble cliffs; his father would never be certain he was not secretly executed by the SS. “Such a good lad,” the heartbroken Jünger would write in his diary, “Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father. Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.” Whatever attraction war ever held for Jünger is now gone for good. Ordered back to Germany after the failure of the Stauffenberg plot, his superiors hanging from meathooks, he lived under constant threat of arrest and execution like the survivors of his elite Paris circle: “Some have been hanged, poisoned, imprisoned; others have been dispersed and surrounded by thugs.”
In his Saxon farmhouse, he reads and tends his garden as the war drives ever closer. The bombs he observed with cool detachment in Paris are less aesthetically appealing when they land on his own Hannover: “The places where I had lived as a child, as a schoolboy, as a young officer — all had been levelled.” Hurrying to the basement shelter with his young children under his arms as shrapnel whips around them, Jünger the warrior, who found liberation in its chaos, has been replaced by Jünger the husband and father, a helpless victim of war’s ever-spreading destruction.
In his farmhouse, he devotes himself to writing his Appeal to the Youth of Europe, an early call for the political unification of his beloved home continent as a potential fortress from the twin horrors of modernity and liberalism. His greatest fear is that with Germany defeated, Europe will succumb to liberalism, and its most soulless and destructive manifestation, Americanism. “America is conquering the places of ancient culture — I mean that aspect of America that has been more evident in modern Berliners with each advancing year.” He writes in horror “of American values, which will be further promoted by the obliteration of our old cities”, anticipating the postwar future, our present, with dread.
Viewing the ruins of Dusseldorf, he fears that “this too is one of the stepping-stones to Americanism; in place of our old haunts, we shall have cities that are the brainchildren of engineers”. It was Jünger’s fate to command the detachment that surrendered to the first American tanks approaching his beloved Saxon village: “I sense the incursion of a mighty superpower into a completely crushed region… much of everything that used to motivate our deepest being perishes in this transition.”
For Jünger, America’s victory was Europe’s defeat, and that of any means of transcending liberal modernity. Like post-liberals today, he roots the horrors of the 20th century in modernity, observing that “the destruction of the Old World begins to manifest itself with the French Revolution… It is thus out of pure self-preservation that we might contemplate other systems of organisation than those established in 1789.” He dreams of transcendent modernities beyond the nation-state, “political systems in which progressive and conservative forces must be congruent”, where “conservative powers will no longer function as restraints, but rather as a driving force.”
This dream would not see reality in his lifetime. A dissident against the Nazis, Jünger refused to submit himself to denazification under British occupation, and found himself blacklisted as a result. Just as he did with Hitler’s regime, Jünger lived and died a dissident against the liberal regime that replaced it, outwardly conforming but never submitting. He despised democracy just as he despised the gullible and easily-swayed demos who had brought Hitler to power. And he despised the liberals who had given themselves over “completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”, setting in train the nightmares of the 20th century, just as he despised the “young conservatives who first support the demos because they sense its new elemental power, and then fall into the traces and are dragged to their deaths”.
Yet over the decades, as the old warrior devoted himself to writing a series of dreamlike and prophetic novels, collecting insects and experimenting with LSD, his reputation soared. At the age of 101, in his penultimate year of life, Ernst Jünger converted to Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification, fêted by dignitaries like Kohl and Mitterand. The anarch died as he lived, both at odds with and celebrated by the disastrous century his life embodied, a dissident thinker of great esoteric power now thrust back to relevance by our own disordered times.
Join the discussion
Ferrusian Gambit
Aris seems to have this revisionist theory of British history that many of those in the Anglo-Catholic worldview seem to have which seems to place all the “evils” of liberalism in America, despite the fact that in a great many ways it was Britain that was the harbinger of most. Today’s American empire stands on the world built by the eminently liberal British Empire. Any look at the history of High Toryism suggests that, quite underlike altar and throne reaction in Europe, it was largely made up of self-satisfied squireocracy who were just as prone to take advantage of liberal reforms for their own enrichment and whose interest in the poor was mainly sentimental rhethotic whose actual contributions were rather pitiful compared to the use systems of alms giving that existed in Catholic countries. Remember the High Tory Lord Salisbury would openly declaim Britain as the ‘preminent protestant power’, and representing a kind of liberity Catholic countries didn’t have, at the height of the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes dreamed of united the US back into a great Anglosphere empire of liberalism.
Because of this Aris doesn’t say it, Junger (and his forebears like Nietzsche or Napoleon) considered Britain as much as the US as the embodiment of the liberalism they despised, if anything the US being an a consequence of what they saw as the fundamental problems with Anglo-Saxon and protestant culture. These were after all the kind of people who saw the Boers or the Germans as fighting for ‘kultur’ against British money interests.
It feels to me that this crypto-Catholic worldview, like some kind of reverse black legend on Britain instead of Spain, that is taking hold on certain parts of the paternalistic anti-Thatcher right that wants to wipe out the glory of the last 500 years of British history. England’s heroic rejection of Papal authority and superstition, our bucaneering privateers and adventurers, Manchester liberalism, the industrial revolution, the economic revolution of the British Empire, Britain great contributions in science (Newton, Darwin, Maxwell etc.) and invention (antibiotics, civil engineering) were all of course nothing but base trash. The way we brought civilization, culture, science, law and commerce to huge parts of the globe such Africa, North America, India or Ireland, despite how ungratefully it was received. And by contrast the real glory of Britain was some imagined Morris Dancing merrie England of simpering peasants and knights in armour that springs from the fevered brain of Walter Scott or William Morris, quitely ignoring the decline, poverty and misery that actually obtained in much of the supposedly cultural superior Catholic world in reality.
Tony Buck
As a Catholic who respects what was good in the Protestant tradition, notably in Britain, I feel a nostalgic sadness at the death of that tradition in the 1960’s – in the pivot year of 1965 to be precise, but the last curtain only falling a generation later when Mrs T (in some ways an embodiment of that tradition) resigned on 22 November 1990.
But as its name shows, Protestantism, despite its virtues, is only a Protest Movement, with the limitations that imposes. There is, for example, no united Protestant Church with an agreed Catechism; and under Protestant doctrine, there never can be, except at a mystical level.
Protestantism was held together and prospered because of its hostility to Rome – and even more, because of Rome’s hostility to it !
But when, c.1960, kindly old Angelo Roncalli removed much of Rome’s hostility, Protestantism was done for – especially as few Protestants now believe a Pope to be “the Romish Anti-Christ” or his Church to be the “w***e of Babylon.”
Hence the Protestant nation par excellence, the USA, is now fragmenting, along with its Protestantism.
Medieval nostalgia is mere dreaming and will get us nowhere. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has some useful ideas. Though, it itself is in the throes of a painful rebirth, now that its imperial Roman tradition (which too died in the 1960’s) is falling down.
Emre Emre
That was a very interesting read and find. I find Mr Roussinos reliably brings an impressive depth to the topics he writes about.
Like post-liberals today, he roots the horrors of the 20th century in modernity, observing that “the destruction of the Old World begins to manifest itself with the French Revolution… It is thus out of pure self-preservation that we might contemplate other systems of organisation than those established in 1789.”
Reading this, I wanted to highlight the irony of the Americans instead being the earlier ones to recognise their past demons coming from modernity, and moving on to a path of abandoning Junger’s hated liberalism replacing it with Wokeism which is much more receptive to all kinds of esoteric ideas, witches, and alternative realities than modernist liberalism would ever be.
Tony Buck
The only Munich Putsch known either to me or to Google is that of 1923.
There was a very short-lived Munich Soviet Republic c Nov18-Feb19 but as Hitler was already fanatically anti-Communist it was certainly no doing of his !
Either you or your source material are very confused or very dishonest.
Collectivism united fascism /Nazism with Communism – but the Nazis were fanatical racists, militarists and nationalists; whereas the Reds weren’t.
The two groups hated and murdered each other despite their joint collectivism.
Simon Denis
Quite. As a thumbnail sketch, Kniebolo’s movement appeared economically left but culturally right. It therefore did obtain a measure of support from disillusioned members of Germany’s elite. They turned from “National Liberal” to “National Socialist”, because where Liberalism had been the doctrine of La Belle Epoque, Socialism – thanks to war, revolution and market failure – appeared to be its natural successor.
Of course, they were duped. Kniebolo’s apparent conservatism was a sham. To start with it was neither clerical nor social. Old style nationalism, for example, took ethnicity as an important ingredient in the identitarian mix; Kniebolo disregarded all the other ingredients entirely. In foreign policy, meanwhile, he was a compulsive gambler where the elite diplomats would have been happy to pocket the gains of 36 and 38 without further aggravation.
Does this in any ordinary sense, indicate a regime from the “right”? Personally, I think not. It is surely a radical variant on the totalitarian message inherent in socialism.
Ferrusian Gambit
How do you account then for the fact that British ex-colonies are, on average, far more prosperous and well-governed than their French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese or even Dutch equivalents?
That’s not to deny that bad things happened. They did. But as Niall Ferguson’s Empire shows there was also something unique about the British Empire and its impact in the lands it ruled.
Tony Buck
More correctly, a right-wing variant of the totalitarian message.
The Nazis were a bunch of militarist thugs from provincial Germany, who were crafty enough to borrow clever stratagems from the Bolsheviks, notably street fighters, rabble-rousing oratory and the Terror State.
But Hitler was a Faustian figure, gradually losing even his sincere youthful nationalism to the satanic (thus nihilistic) hate and brutality conquering him. Murder of the Jews – God’s covenanted people – was clearly a term of the Pact he had made with his demonic controllers.
M V
Looked under the line to post the same thing. Sounds like a weak willed and spiritually lost man, unable or unwilling to do anything about an evil he had clearly identified. Leading him to seek escape in esoteric pursuits and dream worlds, the kind of intellectual onanism that’s a common endpoint for this type of scoundrel. That all of this was from ‘the right’ is what’s interesting, I suppose.
David McDowell
Quite and the fact that Junger had no plausible alternative suggests that he had no alternative to offer.
Ferrusian Gambit
I know. The problem is Britain needs a reaffirmation of its Protestant backbone of the strong, self-reliant individual that made it the largest and richest empire the world has ever seen. Unfortunately it is in danger of being overrun by alien enervating forces, whether that be French Marxist thinking, Islam or Catholicism.
Aris Roussinos is a former war reporter and a contributing editor at UnHerd.
arisroussinos
December 27, 2021
With its modern themes of detachment and alienation, the recent revival of Ernst Jünger’s early work by the internet dissident Right is an understandable urge. When I was a younger man, Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his hallucinatory account of his experiences as a stormtrooper commander in the trenches, was, like Malaparte’s Kaputt and Graves’s Goodbye to All That, a major formative experience in my desire to experience war and, callow though it now sounds, prove myself in it.
Perhaps it’s natural, then, that in later life, the sombre reflections of the middle-aged Jünger as expressed in his recently translated wartime diaries, a husband and father disenchanted with the modern world around him, now seem so compelling.
The diaries open in 1941, with the 46-year-old Jünger serving in an administrative capacity on the general staff of the German army occupying Paris. Initially féted by the Nazi party for the proto-fascist tone of his early works, Jünger publicly rejected the regime’s advances and came under suspicion as a result, his house searched by the Gestapo and the threat of persecution always hanging over him. A central figure in Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Jünger, who stated he “hated democracy like the plague”, had come to despise the Nazi regime at least as much. Ultimately, he was far too Right-wing to accept Nazism.
Jünger’s intellectual circle had aimed to transcend liberal democracy through fusing Soviet bolshevism with Prussian militarism, yet the illiberal regime that actually came to power was wholly repugnant to him. “The Munich version — the shallowest of them all — has now succeeded,” he wrote, “and it has done so in the shoddiest possible way,” filling him with dread that Hitler would drive Germany and Europe towards disaster and discredit radical alternatives to liberalism for generations to come.
Jünger’s two closest friends, the National Bolshevik Ernst Nieckish and the philosopher of law Carl Schmitt, each met different fates under the new Nazi order: Nieckish jailed as a dissident until his liberation by the Red Army in 1945, and Schmitt as the regime’s foremost legal theorist. Jünger remained friends with both. For Jünger, the internal exile, dissidence would come in the veiled form of his dreamlike novella On the Marble Cliffs, published on the cusp of war in 1939, in which he predicted the disaster and bloodshed the Nazis would bring in their train. Carefully monitored and shunted off to a desk job in France, Jünger spent his war as a flâneur along the quais of Paris, buying antiquarian books, conducting numerous love affairs, and recording his impressions of the city he loved.
A fêted intellectual, and a lifelong francophile, he befriended the city’s cultural elite, socialising with Cocteau and Picasso as well as the collaborationist French leadership and literary figures such as the anti-semitic novelist Céline, a monster who “spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews — astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it”. For Jünger, Céline represented the very worst type of radical intellectual: “People with such natures could be recognised earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays they hide under the cloak of ideas.”
While listening to Céline’s ravings about Jews with polite horror, Jünger was embroiled in an affair with Sophie Ravoux, a German-Jewish doctor, and helping to conceal other Jews in hiding, as well as warning the French resistance about imminent deportations. He records the first reports of mass executions in the east, shared among the army leadership, initially with disbelief and then with horror, disgust and shame. Generals back from the east recount meetings with figures like “a horrifying young man, formerly an art teacher, who boasted about commanding a death squad in Lithuania… where they butchered untold numbers of people”, or share third-hand rumours about “men who have single-handedly slain enough people to populate a midsize city. Such reports extinguish the colours of the day. You want to close your eyes to them, but it is important to view them like a physician examining a wound.”
Yet Jünger’s detachment comes, at times, close to inhumanity. “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported,” he notes, immediately before examining antique engravings in an antiquarian bookshop: “Looking at pictures does me good when I’m upset.” He records, with genuine disappointment, the cold looks of hatred he is given by French shopgirls or diners in exclusive restaurants, yet feels their distaste is inappropriately applied to such a deep thinker such as himself, an inward dissident after all.
For Jünger, the real spiritual war is elsewhere: “I find myself entangled in very different conflicts from those of the hostile nations. The solution to those conflicts is secondary,” he writes with cool detachment, pondering his place in the catastrophe around him. “Ideologically, this Second World War is completely distinct from the first… And again the fronts have been drawn up completely differently from the way they look on the map.”
What was the war about, then, for Jünger? During World War I, he declares, “We confronted the question of whether man was more powerful than machines”, but “we are now concerned with the problem of whether humans or automatons will dominate the earth”.
By 1944 Jünger floated on the fringes of two army plots against Hitler, without ever committing himself. He had — correctly as it turns out — no faith in the capacity of the generals around him to bring their task to successful fruition. Flirting with the French and German resistance movements just as he served the regime he despised, Jünger lived his concept of the “anarch”, the internal exile who conforms outwardly to the spirit of the times while fostering his own inward, secret rebellion. As Cocteau later quipped, “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”
A symbolist writer like the decadent Huysmans, Jünger experiences Allied air raids with the same distant, aesthete’s view, standing on a rooftop to observe the bombs fall. A lifetime experimenter with hallucinogens, he experiences the war as a vast trip: “When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theatre — pure power affirmed and magnified.” An entomologist and biologist by training, Jünger writes of his almost unnatural detachment that he needs to observe the war’s characters “as if these were creatures like fish in a coral reef or insects on a meadow”.
But, then, insect and animal metaphors abound throughout the diaries. On almost every page, he records encounters with snakes, real or dreamed, seen in shops or museums or carved on statues. “The primal force of these creatures lies in the fact that they embody life and death, as well as good and evil,” he observes: “the serpent, a tellurian animal, is a powerful medicine.” Indeed, the snake appears as his daimon throughout the book, no doubt a reflection of his own cold-blooded, chthonic nature. He literally basks in the sunlight reflected from Paris’ limestone walls, observing that its warmth “awakens a primeval little lizard’s soul in me”.
Throughout the diaries, Jünger’s inner world appears richer and more meaningful than the war around him. Almost every entry begins with a summary of his latest dream, whether recorded as such or described in laconic terms as if it were a real event. He catalogues these dreams obsessively: “In the night, I dreamt of the trenches of World War I”; “Toward morning, dreams of earthquakes — I saw houses swallowed up”; “At night dreams of ancient cave systems on Crete, where soldiers were swarming like ants”; “Dreamed of being burdened with the corpse of a murdered man without being able to find a place to conceal it.”
What is behind this obsession? Through dreams we communicate with the dead, he notes offhandedly, as well as our innermost self. Indeed, Jünger comes uncannily close to Jung throughout the book: he records strange omens and premonitions, claims that certain generals of his acquaintance are imbued with the power of prophecy, records strange synchronicities and deploys obscure alchemical metaphors. As the diaries go on and Germany’s fortunes worsen, the magical element begins to predominate.
He discusses the esoteric writers Guénon and Eliade with Schmitt, debating the magic of the mandrake root and the symbolism of the moon, of the sea and of woman (to him a largely interchangeable category of person). Like Robert Graves, his English analogue, Jünger’s exultation with the First World War fruited into occult mysticism. He dreams of re-enchanting a world lost to technology and secular liberalism: “The ancient gods still stand before us with their magical presence, perhaps even in competition,” he observes, and he means this literally.
Reading the Bible, he records his growing interest in Christianity over the course of the war. “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?” he asks himself: “Only prayer… 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 recognises the right thing to do and does good. You can be sure that is a man who prays.”
For Jünger, prayer is powerful magic, an efficacious antidote to modernity: “It possesses a conductive power.” Without prayer, “our freedom of will and powers of resistance diminish; the appeal of demonic powers becomes more compelling, and its imperatives more terrible.”
Jünger’s reference to demonic power is here entirely literal. As the years pass, he begins to view Hitler — who he codenames “Kniébolo”— not as a malicious charlatan who has perverted his conservative revolution but as a genuinely demonic figure, possessing a “a certain diabolical greatness” that is “elemental, infernal” and who “feeds” on the forces unleashed by modernity in a way the “liberal intelligentsia” are incapable of understanding. “In their innermost inclinations,” Jünger observes, “minds like Kniébolo’s are bent on the most comprehensive homicide possible. They seem to belong to a world of corpses that they want to populate — they find the stench of the slain pleasant.”
At the height of the war, while the Holocaust was a marginal concern of the Allies, Jünger would return again and again to “these atrocities perpetrated against the Jews, which enrage the cosmos against us”. The Nazi leadership are “demonic powers” channeling occult forces: “these people are probing the planet, and the fact that they choose the Jews as their primary victims cannot be a coincidence,” he writes, “Their highest-ranking executioners have a kind of uncanny clairvoyance that is not the product of intelligence but of demonic inspiration. At every crossroads, they will find the direction that leads to greater destruction.” Of Hitler, Junger writes that “I sometimes have the impression that the world spirit has chosen him in a subtle way. There are secrets here that other tribes will never comprehend.”
It is essential to remember that Jünger was an opponent of National Socialism from the far-Right: “Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.” For him, the Nazis were the worst embodiment of modernity, which turned humans into automata, mere machines without souls. His fear was that the Nazi interlude would discredit the search for a Right-wing escape route from modernity: “It is also Kniébolo’s role to discredit good ideas by carrying them aloft on his shield.” He writes that “when you have been party to such individual fates and begun to comprehend the statistics that apply to the wicked crimes carried out in the charnel houses, an enormity is exposed that makes you throw up your hands in despair”. An ultranationalist, Jünger writes that “I am aggrieved to feel such things beginning to influence my relationship, if not to my Fatherland, then to the German people”.
As with the fatherland, so with war, whose seductive power captured the younger Jünger. On a trip to the Eastern Front, the 47-year-old Jünger is forced to duck for cover from Russian machine-gun fire: “I have long since passed the age,” he observes, relatably, “when I find such things amusing.” Awarded Germany’s highest military decoration by Ludendorrf at the age of 22, he reflects that the ancient general warned him “‘it is dangerous for one so young to be decorated with the highest honour.’ Back then I considered it pedantic, but today I know that it was right.” The older Jünger has lost his taste for battle’s glittering accoutrements: “I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much. Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.”
Eventually, Jünger’s eldest son, little Ernstel, is arrested by the Nazi regime for making defeatist comments about the war to his fellow sailors. He is later assigned to the Italian front on a dangerous anti-partisan mission. There, he was killed by a bullet to the head beneath Carrara’s marble cliffs; his father would never be certain he was not secretly executed by the SS. “Such a good lad,” the heartbroken Jünger would write in his diary, “Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father. Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.” Whatever attraction war ever held for Jünger is now gone for good. Ordered back to Germany after the failure of the Stauffenberg plot, his superiors hanging from meathooks, he lived under constant threat of arrest and execution like the survivors of his elite Paris circle: “Some have been hanged, poisoned, imprisoned; others have been dispersed and surrounded by thugs.”
In his Saxon farmhouse, he reads and tends his garden as the war drives ever closer. The bombs he observed with cool detachment in Paris are less aesthetically appealing when they land on his own Hannover: “The places where I had lived as a child, as a schoolboy, as a young officer — all had been levelled.” Hurrying to the basement shelter with his young children under his arms as shrapnel whips around them, Jünger the warrior, who found liberation in its chaos, has been replaced by Jünger the husband and father, a helpless victim of war’s ever-spreading destruction.
In his farmhouse, he devotes himself to writing his Appeal to the Youth of Europe, an early call for the political unification of his beloved home continent as a potential fortress from the twin horrors of modernity and liberalism. His greatest fear is that with Germany defeated, Europe will succumb to liberalism, and its most soulless and destructive manifestation, Americanism. “America is conquering the places of ancient culture — I mean that aspect of America that has been more evident in modern Berliners with each advancing year.” He writes in horror “of American values, which will be further promoted by the obliteration of our old cities”, anticipating the postwar future, our present, with dread.
Viewing the ruins of Dusseldorf, he fears that “this too is one of the stepping-stones to Americanism; in place of our old haunts, we shall have cities that are the brainchildren of engineers”. It was Jünger’s fate to command the detachment that surrendered to the first American tanks approaching his beloved Saxon village: “I sense the incursion of a mighty superpower into a completely crushed region… much of everything that used to motivate our deepest being perishes in this transition.”
For Jünger, America’s victory was Europe’s defeat, and that of any means of transcending liberal modernity. Like post-liberals today, he roots the horrors of the 20th century in modernity, observing that “the destruction of the Old World begins to manifest itself with the French Revolution… It is thus out of pure self-preservation that we might contemplate other systems of organisation than those established in 1789.” He dreams of transcendent modernities beyond the nation-state, “political systems in which progressive and conservative forces must be congruent”, where “conservative powers will no longer function as restraints, but rather as a driving force.”
This dream would not see reality in his lifetime. A dissident against the Nazis, Jünger refused to submit himself to denazification under British occupation, and found himself blacklisted as a result. Just as he did with Hitler’s regime, Jünger lived and died a dissident against the liberal regime that replaced it, outwardly conforming but never submitting. He despised democracy just as he despised the gullible and easily-swayed demos who had brought Hitler to power. And he despised the liberals who had given themselves over “completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”, setting in train the nightmares of the 20th century, just as he despised the “young conservatives who first support the demos because they sense its new elemental power, and then fall into the traces and are dragged to their deaths”.
Yet over the decades, as the old warrior devoted himself to writing a series of dreamlike and prophetic novels, collecting insects and experimenting with LSD, his reputation soared. At the age of 101, in his penultimate year of life, Ernst Jünger converted to Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification, fêted by dignitaries like Kohl and Mitterand. The anarch died as he lived, both at odds with and celebrated by the disastrous century his life embodied, a dissident thinker of great esoteric power now thrust back to relevance by our own disordered times.
Join the discussion
Ferrusian GambitAris seems to have this revisionist theory of British history that many of those in the Anglo-Catholic worldview seem to have which seems to place all the “evils” of liberalism in America, despite the fact that in a great many ways it was Britain that was the harbinger of most. Today’s American empire stands on the world built by the eminently liberal British Empire. Any look at the history of High Toryism suggests that, quite underlike altar and throne reaction in Europe, it was largely made up of self-satisfied squireocracy who were just as prone to take advantage of liberal reforms for their own enrichment and whose interest in the poor was mainly sentimental rhethotic whose actual contributions were rather pitiful compared to the use systems of alms giving that existed in Catholic countries. Remember the High Tory Lord Salisbury would openly declaim Britain as the ‘preminent protestant power’, and representing a kind of liberity Catholic countries didn’t have, at the height of the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes dreamed of united the US back into a great Anglosphere empire of liberalism.
Because of this Aris doesn’t say it, Junger (and his forebears like Nietzsche or Napoleon) considered Britain as much as the US as the embodiment of the liberalism they despised, if anything the US being an a consequence of what they saw as the fundamental problems with Anglo-Saxon and protestant culture. These were after all the kind of people who saw the Boers or the Germans as fighting for ‘kultur’ against British money interests.
It feels to me that this crypto-Catholic worldview, like some kind of reverse black legend on Britain instead of Spain, that is taking hold on certain parts of the paternalistic anti-Thatcher right that wants to wipe out the glory of the last 500 years of British history. England’s heroic rejection of Papal authority and superstition, our bucaneering privateers and adventurers, Manchester liberalism, the industrial revolution, the economic revolution of the British Empire, Britain great contributions in science (Newton, Darwin, Maxwell etc.) and invention (antibiotics, civil engineering) were all of course nothing but base trash. The way we brought civilization, culture, science, law and commerce to huge parts of the globe such Africa, North America, India or Ireland, despite how ungratefully it was received. And by contrast the real glory of Britain was some imagined Morris Dancing merrie England of simpering peasants and knights in armour that springs from the fevered brain of Walter Scott or William Morris, quitely ignoring the decline, poverty and misery that actually obtained in much of the supposedly cultural superior Catholic world in reality.
Tony BuckAs a Catholic who respects what was good in the Protestant tradition, notably in Britain, I feel a nostalgic sadness at the death of that tradition in the 1960’s – in the pivot year of 1965 to be precise, but the last curtain only falling a generation later when Mrs T (in some ways an embodiment of that tradition) resigned on 22 November 1990.
But as its name shows, Protestantism, despite its virtues, is only a Protest Movement, with the limitations that imposes. There is, for example, no united Protestant Church with an agreed Catechism; and under Protestant doctrine, there never can be, except at a mystical level.
Protestantism was held together and prospered because of its hostility to Rome – and even more, because of Rome’s hostility to it !
But when, c.1960, kindly old Angelo Roncalli removed much of Rome’s hostility, Protestantism was done for – especially as few Protestants now believe a Pope to be “the Romish Anti-Christ” or his Church to be the “w***e of Babylon.”
Hence the Protestant nation par excellence, the USA, is now fragmenting, along with its Protestantism.
Medieval nostalgia is mere dreaming and will get us nowhere. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has some useful ideas. Though, it itself is in the throes of a painful rebirth, now that its imperial Roman tradition (which too died in the 1960’s) is falling down.
Emre EmreThat was a very interesting read and find. I find Mr Roussinos reliably brings an impressive depth to the topics he writes about.
Like post-liberals today, he roots the horrors of the 20th century in modernity, observing that “the destruction of the Old World begins to manifest itself with the French Revolution… It is thus out of pure self-preservation that we might contemplate other systems of organisation than those established in 1789.”
Reading this, I wanted to highlight the irony of the Americans instead being the earlier ones to recognise their past demons coming from modernity, and moving on to a path of abandoning Junger’s hated liberalism replacing it with Wokeism which is much more receptive to all kinds of esoteric ideas, witches, and alternative realities than modernist liberalism would ever be.
Tony BuckThe only Munich Putsch known either to me or to Google is that of 1923.
There was a very short-lived Munich Soviet Republic c Nov18-Feb19 but as Hitler was already fanatically anti-Communist it was certainly no doing of his !
Either you or your source material are very confused or very dishonest.
Collectivism united fascism /Nazism with Communism – but the Nazis were fanatical racists, militarists and nationalists; whereas the Reds weren’t.
The two groups hated and murdered each other despite their joint collectivism.
Simon DenisQuite. As a thumbnail sketch, Kniebolo’s movement appeared economically left but culturally right. It therefore did obtain a measure of support from disillusioned members of Germany’s elite. They turned from “National Liberal” to “National Socialist”, because where Liberalism had been the doctrine of La Belle Epoque, Socialism – thanks to war, revolution and market failure – appeared to be its natural successor.
Of course, they were duped. Kniebolo’s apparent conservatism was a sham. To start with it was neither clerical nor social. Old style nationalism, for example, took ethnicity as an important ingredient in the identitarian mix; Kniebolo disregarded all the other ingredients entirely. In foreign policy, meanwhile, he was a compulsive gambler where the elite diplomats would have been happy to pocket the gains of 36 and 38 without further aggravation.
Does this in any ordinary sense, indicate a regime from the “right”? Personally, I think not. It is surely a radical variant on the totalitarian message inherent in socialism.
Ferrusian GambitHow do you account then for the fact that British ex-colonies are, on average, far more prosperous and well-governed than their French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese or even Dutch equivalents?
That’s not to deny that bad things happened. They did. But as Niall Ferguson’s Empire shows there was also something unique about the British Empire and its impact in the lands it ruled.
Tony BuckMore correctly, a right-wing variant of the totalitarian message.
The Nazis were a bunch of militarist thugs from provincial Germany, who were crafty enough to borrow clever stratagems from the Bolsheviks, notably street fighters, rabble-rousing oratory and the Terror State.
But Hitler was a Faustian figure, gradually losing even his sincere youthful nationalism to the satanic (thus nihilistic) hate and brutality conquering him. Murder of the Jews – God’s covenanted people – was clearly a term of the Pact he had made with his demonic controllers.
M VLooked under the line to post the same thing. Sounds like a weak willed and spiritually lost man, unable or unwilling to do anything about an evil he had clearly identified. Leading him to seek escape in esoteric pursuits and dream worlds, the kind of intellectual onanism that’s a common endpoint for this type of scoundrel. That all of this was from ‘the right’ is what’s interesting, I suppose.
David McDowellQuite and the fact that Junger had no plausible alternative suggests that he had no alternative to offer.
Ferrusian GambitI know. The problem is Britain needs a reaffirmation of its Protestant backbone of the strong, self-reliant individual that made it the largest and richest empire the world has ever seen. Unfortunately it is in danger of being overrun by alien enervating forces, whether that be French Marxist thinking, Islam or Catholicism.
The beauty and savagery of Ernst Jünger’s wartime diaries
The publication of these extraordinary, sometimes hallucinatory diaries reveals one of the great witnesses to 20th-centuryEurope’s catastrophe.
By Paul Lay
Ernst Jünger’s Second World War was less dramatic than his first; it could hardly be otherwise. In the First World War, the man who was to die in his bed in 1998 at the age of 102, revered as a German literary giant, fought from early 1915 to the conflict’s end as an infantry soldier in the Hanoverian Fusiliers. He was wounded 14 times, often seriously, but somehow survived. In the final days of the conflict, he was a storm trooper – the specialist assault troops who represented imperial Germany’s last throw of the dice – becoming the youngest officer to be awarded his country’s highest military honour, the Pour le Mérite.
Storm of Steel, Jünger’s account of his experiences, published in 1920, is arguably the finest, most visceral account of battle since the Iliad. Its unpitying, relentless narrative, Nietzschean in tone, has little in common with the nostalgic regret of Britain’s war poets and their Christian notions of sacrifice and pity. Conflict, for Jünger, is to be relished, the ultimate test, life enhanced by the proximity of death.
This was just the first stage in one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century. Jünger, the son of a chemical engineer and a mother of artistic bent, had inherited both aspects of his parents’ make-up. He hinted at his own contribution – that of the warrior – when he ran away to join the French Foreign Legion at the age of 18. He was drawn back by his father’s promise of a trip to Mount Kilimanjaro. Two years later, Europe went to war and Jünger fulfilled his calling. This time his parents could do nothing about it.
A lifelong opponent of liberalism and democracy, after Germany’s defeat he became enveloped in far-right politics, inhabiting the same paramilitary milieu that produced Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, though Jünger looked down on the vulgar Austrian corporal and his anti-Semitism. Moving to Berlin at its cultural peak in 1932, on the eve of the Nazi takeover, he wrote The Worker, in which he outlined a world of passive proletarians guided by an elite of warrior-poets (who could he have had in mind?). This blueprint for national Bolshevism owed something to Sparta and the thinking of his long-time friend Carl Schmitt, a similarly caustic opponent of liberal democracy, who has become a fashionable figure to cite in our age of uncertainty. Schmitt is the theoretician to Jünger’s practitioner and crops up again and again in Jünger’s Second World War diaries, begun in 1941 and now published in English for the first time.
Jünger is a captain in occupied Paris when the diaries begin, with responsibilities for censorship, something he had recent experience of. Jünger’s loathing of Hitler had been made dangerously explicit in his fable On the Marble Cliffs, written in 1939, which owes much to HG Wells’s War of the Worlds in its account of a peaceful, lotus-eating, culturally sophisticated people crushed by monstrous brutes. When it approached best-seller status, it was suppressed by Goebbels, an act made more painful for Jünger by the parallel success of Mythus, an anti-Catholic, racist rant by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, which Jünger judged “the dullest collection of platitudes imaginable”. Even Hitler objected to its paganism.
In love with Paris and an ardent Francophile, Jünger did not seek the typical spoils of the conqueror. He enjoys the company of Sacha Guitry, the French actor and director, who invites him to his apartment where he presents him with letters by Mirbeau, Bloy and Debussy. Friends include Braque, Picasso and Cocteau – “like someone who dwells in a special but comfortable hell” – though he disliked the rabidly anti-Semitic Celine.
His affair with the “Doctoresse” – the physician Sophie Ravoux – aroused suspicion in his wife Gretha, whom he referred to as “Perpetua”. Neglected in Germany, she threatened him with divorce. Much wine is drunk and, for a while, the cuisine maintains prewar standards. A bibliophile and aesthete, Jünger wanders the bookshops of the Right Bank, often, sensibly, out of uniform: the threat of assassination was real, the everyday resentment tolerable. His purchases included a print of the Temptation of St Anthony by Jacques Callot, best known, appropriately, for his grim depictions of the Thirty Years War.
Jünger’s fascination with beauty and savagery – the beauty of savagery, even – may explain his love of the animal world, that of insects in particular. He was to become a lepidopterist and coleopterist of international standing; he often looks on people as he looks at butterflies and beetles.
He has “an exaggerated curiosity” to witness an execution of a deserter. He observes the blowflies resting on the ash tree to which the condemned will be bound for the firing squad. “No place of execution can be sufficiently sanitised to efface all vestiges of the knacker’s yard,” he judges in cold prose.
Slowly, however, something nags at him. In a Parisian cinema, newsreels of German tanks and other “weapons of annihilation”’ grinding through North Africa and the Balkans remind him of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and he describes them as an arsenal of “life-forms that harden like crustaceans, toads, crocodiles and [inevitably] insects”. Kniébolo, his cautious nickname for the Führer, crops up with increasingly bitter and contemptuous frequency in the diaries (Jünger was on the fringes of the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler, though ultimately he disapproved of such schemes).
As the deportations begin in Paris, in July 1942, he recalls the cries of Jewish children separated from their parents. “Never for a moment,” he records, “may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering… This uniform obligates me to provide protection wherever possible.” Just three days later, however, normal service resumes: “Called on Picasso in the afternoon.”
Similarly, the wife of his local pharmacist is deported. Jünger again expresses his disgust at the blind eye turned to the “sufferings of the vulnerable”. But a stroll up the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to its bookshops, is his antidote: “Looking at pictures does me good when I’m upset.”
The absence of pity in such passages is striking, but Jünger is, at the same time, feeling his way to Christianity in a not altogether successful attempt to introduce pity into his world-view. His mission to read the Bible in its entirety, detailed in the Diaries, is, at first, typically systematic: Psalm 139, becomes, for example, an “expression of divine physics”. But Christianity begins to inform his observations in a more profound way. In November 1942, posted to the Caucasus as the disaster of Stalingrad begins to unfold, he ponders the miracle of vaccination – typhus was rife – and considers it in explicitly Christian terms: having compared it to baptism, he decides “the more precise analogy to the spiritual world is perhaps represented by holy communion. We use the living experience that others have collected for us through sacrifice… The lymph of the lamb that has suffered for us.”
Other images he conjures of the Caucasus are biblical in another sense – of plague, of smiting – but also hark back further. He visits a market, barely functioning: “The prices are those of famine times… Listeners were crowded around a singing beggar with a freshly bandaged arm stump. It seemed that they were listening less to the music than to the long, drawn-out text. It was a Homeric image.”
Trying to make sense of the horror, he turns, too, to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the classic description of the “transformation of civilised optimism into utter bestiality”. It leads to some revealing insights on the differences between England and Prussia, and the Anglo-Saxon gift for “constancy in transitional situations”, which Kipling, he asserts, missed, but Conrad, the outsider, grasped. The difference, Jünger claims, “lies in the fact that the Englishman can tolerate a significantly greater dose of anarchy” than the Prussian. It is, he continues, “the advantage of the seaman over the landlubber”.
As those Anglo-Saxons and their allies advance eastward into Germany, Jünger has visions – he is a devoted recorder of dreams – of Europe’s ancient settlements replaced by “cities that are the brainchildren of engineers”. Like many pan-Europeans, he is firmly anti-American, loathing the prospect of a mass consumer society. Looking out on the ruins of Düsseldorf and Cologne, he envisages a “stepping stone to Americanism”. He would prefer that only herds of sheep graze among the ruins, a mirror of the plan put forward by Henry Morgenthau, the US treasury secretary who wished to maintain postwar Germany as a purely agrarian affair, never again to put its industry at the service of war – a theme explored more recently by the German artist Anselm Kiefer.
Jünger’s son Ernstel, accused of “defeatist” remarks, is posted to northern Italy in late 1944, where there is bitter fighting. It turns out to be a death sentence. This is the Gotterdämmerung (Jünger is a Wagnerian who seems to grasp, as so many leading Nazis did not, the warnings inherent in the composer’s work). Who cannot recall at this point Hans Sachs’s declaration at the end of Die Meistersinger that: “Even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German art!”?
Jünger, amid the twilight, is an embodiment of it as he desperately seeks a pattern in Europe’s history, which ultimately becomes a lament: “Intense air raids in the night: La frousse. Then comes the reckoning: from Charlemagne to Charles V, from the Reformation to the chaos of World War One.”
With the publication of these extraordinary, sometimes hallucinatory diaries. English speakers have the chance to read one of the great witnesses to 20th-century Europe’s catastrophe. One whom, they may judge, cast too cold an eye, on life, on death.
Paul Lay is editor of History Today
A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945
Ernst Jünger, translated by Thomas S Hansen and Abby J Hansen
Columbia University Press, 496pp, £30
A Dandy Goes to War
Review of 'A German Officer in Occupied Paris' By Ernst Jünger
The publication of these extraordinary, sometimes hallucinatory diaries reveals one of the great witnesses to 20th-centuryEurope’s catastrophe.
By Paul Lay
Ernst Jünger’s Second World War was less dramatic than his first; it could hardly be otherwise. In the First World War, the man who was to die in his bed in 1998 at the age of 102, revered as a German literary giant, fought from early 1915 to the conflict’s end as an infantry soldier in the Hanoverian Fusiliers. He was wounded 14 times, often seriously, but somehow survived. In the final days of the conflict, he was a storm trooper – the specialist assault troops who represented imperial Germany’s last throw of the dice – becoming the youngest officer to be awarded his country’s highest military honour, the Pour le Mérite.
Storm of Steel, Jünger’s account of his experiences, published in 1920, is arguably the finest, most visceral account of battle since the Iliad. Its unpitying, relentless narrative, Nietzschean in tone, has little in common with the nostalgic regret of Britain’s war poets and their Christian notions of sacrifice and pity. Conflict, for Jünger, is to be relished, the ultimate test, life enhanced by the proximity of death.
This was just the first stage in one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century. Jünger, the son of a chemical engineer and a mother of artistic bent, had inherited both aspects of his parents’ make-up. He hinted at his own contribution – that of the warrior – when he ran away to join the French Foreign Legion at the age of 18. He was drawn back by his father’s promise of a trip to Mount Kilimanjaro. Two years later, Europe went to war and Jünger fulfilled his calling. This time his parents could do nothing about it.
A lifelong opponent of liberalism and democracy, after Germany’s defeat he became enveloped in far-right politics, inhabiting the same paramilitary milieu that produced Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, though Jünger looked down on the vulgar Austrian corporal and his anti-Semitism. Moving to Berlin at its cultural peak in 1932, on the eve of the Nazi takeover, he wrote The Worker, in which he outlined a world of passive proletarians guided by an elite of warrior-poets (who could he have had in mind?). This blueprint for national Bolshevism owed something to Sparta and the thinking of his long-time friend Carl Schmitt, a similarly caustic opponent of liberal democracy, who has become a fashionable figure to cite in our age of uncertainty. Schmitt is the theoretician to Jünger’s practitioner and crops up again and again in Jünger’s Second World War diaries, begun in 1941 and now published in English for the first time.
Jünger is a captain in occupied Paris when the diaries begin, with responsibilities for censorship, something he had recent experience of. Jünger’s loathing of Hitler had been made dangerously explicit in his fable On the Marble Cliffs, written in 1939, which owes much to HG Wells’s War of the Worlds in its account of a peaceful, lotus-eating, culturally sophisticated people crushed by monstrous brutes. When it approached best-seller status, it was suppressed by Goebbels, an act made more painful for Jünger by the parallel success of Mythus, an anti-Catholic, racist rant by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, which Jünger judged “the dullest collection of platitudes imaginable”. Even Hitler objected to its paganism.
In love with Paris and an ardent Francophile, Jünger did not seek the typical spoils of the conqueror. He enjoys the company of Sacha Guitry, the French actor and director, who invites him to his apartment where he presents him with letters by Mirbeau, Bloy and Debussy. Friends include Braque, Picasso and Cocteau – “like someone who dwells in a special but comfortable hell” – though he disliked the rabidly anti-Semitic Celine.
His affair with the “Doctoresse” – the physician Sophie Ravoux – aroused suspicion in his wife Gretha, whom he referred to as “Perpetua”. Neglected in Germany, she threatened him with divorce. Much wine is drunk and, for a while, the cuisine maintains prewar standards. A bibliophile and aesthete, Jünger wanders the bookshops of the Right Bank, often, sensibly, out of uniform: the threat of assassination was real, the everyday resentment tolerable. His purchases included a print of the Temptation of St Anthony by Jacques Callot, best known, appropriately, for his grim depictions of the Thirty Years War.
Jünger’s fascination with beauty and savagery – the beauty of savagery, even – may explain his love of the animal world, that of insects in particular. He was to become a lepidopterist and coleopterist of international standing; he often looks on people as he looks at butterflies and beetles.
He has “an exaggerated curiosity” to witness an execution of a deserter. He observes the blowflies resting on the ash tree to which the condemned will be bound for the firing squad. “No place of execution can be sufficiently sanitised to efface all vestiges of the knacker’s yard,” he judges in cold prose.
Slowly, however, something nags at him. In a Parisian cinema, newsreels of German tanks and other “weapons of annihilation”’ grinding through North Africa and the Balkans remind him of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and he describes them as an arsenal of “life-forms that harden like crustaceans, toads, crocodiles and [inevitably] insects”. Kniébolo, his cautious nickname for the Führer, crops up with increasingly bitter and contemptuous frequency in the diaries (Jünger was on the fringes of the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler, though ultimately he disapproved of such schemes).
As the deportations begin in Paris, in July 1942, he recalls the cries of Jewish children separated from their parents. “Never for a moment,” he records, “may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering… This uniform obligates me to provide protection wherever possible.” Just three days later, however, normal service resumes: “Called on Picasso in the afternoon.”
Similarly, the wife of his local pharmacist is deported. Jünger again expresses his disgust at the blind eye turned to the “sufferings of the vulnerable”. But a stroll up the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to its bookshops, is his antidote: “Looking at pictures does me good when I’m upset.”
The absence of pity in such passages is striking, but Jünger is, at the same time, feeling his way to Christianity in a not altogether successful attempt to introduce pity into his world-view. His mission to read the Bible in its entirety, detailed in the Diaries, is, at first, typically systematic: Psalm 139, becomes, for example, an “expression of divine physics”. But Christianity begins to inform his observations in a more profound way. In November 1942, posted to the Caucasus as the disaster of Stalingrad begins to unfold, he ponders the miracle of vaccination – typhus was rife – and considers it in explicitly Christian terms: having compared it to baptism, he decides “the more precise analogy to the spiritual world is perhaps represented by holy communion. We use the living experience that others have collected for us through sacrifice… The lymph of the lamb that has suffered for us.”
Other images he conjures of the Caucasus are biblical in another sense – of plague, of smiting – but also hark back further. He visits a market, barely functioning: “The prices are those of famine times… Listeners were crowded around a singing beggar with a freshly bandaged arm stump. It seemed that they were listening less to the music than to the long, drawn-out text. It was a Homeric image.”
Trying to make sense of the horror, he turns, too, to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the classic description of the “transformation of civilised optimism into utter bestiality”. It leads to some revealing insights on the differences between England and Prussia, and the Anglo-Saxon gift for “constancy in transitional situations”, which Kipling, he asserts, missed, but Conrad, the outsider, grasped. The difference, Jünger claims, “lies in the fact that the Englishman can tolerate a significantly greater dose of anarchy” than the Prussian. It is, he continues, “the advantage of the seaman over the landlubber”.
As those Anglo-Saxons and their allies advance eastward into Germany, Jünger has visions – he is a devoted recorder of dreams – of Europe’s ancient settlements replaced by “cities that are the brainchildren of engineers”. Like many pan-Europeans, he is firmly anti-American, loathing the prospect of a mass consumer society. Looking out on the ruins of Düsseldorf and Cologne, he envisages a “stepping stone to Americanism”. He would prefer that only herds of sheep graze among the ruins, a mirror of the plan put forward by Henry Morgenthau, the US treasury secretary who wished to maintain postwar Germany as a purely agrarian affair, never again to put its industry at the service of war – a theme explored more recently by the German artist Anselm Kiefer.
Jünger’s son Ernstel, accused of “defeatist” remarks, is posted to northern Italy in late 1944, where there is bitter fighting. It turns out to be a death sentence. This is the Gotterdämmerung (Jünger is a Wagnerian who seems to grasp, as so many leading Nazis did not, the warnings inherent in the composer’s work). Who cannot recall at this point Hans Sachs’s declaration at the end of Die Meistersinger that: “Even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German art!”?
Jünger, amid the twilight, is an embodiment of it as he desperately seeks a pattern in Europe’s history, which ultimately becomes a lament: “Intense air raids in the night: La frousse. Then comes the reckoning: from Charlemagne to Charles V, from the Reformation to the chaos of World War One.”
With the publication of these extraordinary, sometimes hallucinatory diaries. English speakers have the chance to read one of the great witnesses to 20th-century Europe’s catastrophe. One whom, they may judge, cast too cold an eye, on life, on death.
Paul Lay is editor of History Today
A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945
Ernst Jünger, translated by Thomas S Hansen and Abby J Hansen
Columbia University Press, 496pp, £30
A Dandy Goes to War
Review of 'A German Officer in Occupied Paris' By Ernst Jünger
HISTORY
Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.
One might ask why it has taken 70 years for Jünger’s diary to appear in English translation, for there is no more detailed account of the occupation from the German point of view. But Jünger was always controversial, up to his death in 1998 at the age of 102. In Germany, polite opinion has never forgiven him for Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I that saw in the experience of combat an ultimate test of manhood. “The finest, most visceral account of battle since the Iliad,” according to the New Statesman, his book made him a hero among German nationalists and ensured his privileged status in Nazi Germany. As it happens, Jünger was anything but a Nazi.
Born in 1895, the son of a chemist, Jünger got off to an unpromising start. A chronic discipline problem, he was repeatedly forced to change schools until at last in 1913 he lied about his age, joined the French Foreign Legion, and found himself in the Algerian desert. By the time that the German foreign office could extricate him, World War I was looming. He enlisted immediately, and, for the first time in his life, he flourished.
World War I, for Jünger, was not the grinding mechanized mass-slaughter we know from the war poets. Serving for the duration, he watched the replacement of sanguinary frontal assaults by storm-troop tactics, where small detachments of well-armed soldiers trained in hand-to-hand combat would overrun selected points and break through the enemy’s rear. Such a form of warfare rewarded personal initiative and bold leadership, which Jünger took as the principal lesson of the war. By the time he won the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military honor, he had already been wounded 14 times in combat.
After the war, Jünger studied zoology, where he cultivated the acute observational skills that distinguish his writing. He came to despise the Weimar Republic and flirted with nationalist groups, including—briefly—the Nazi Party. In 1926, he sent one of his books to Hitler, who proposed a meeting. By the time it fell through, Jünger was already having misgivings. He decided that Nazi racial ideology was embarrassing (“peinlich”), and he thereafter held aloof, making certain that he and Hitler never met personally.
Jünger was far too capricious and eclectic a thinker to fit into any straitjacket. Had the Nazis read Storm of Steel carefully, they would have noticed that it was strikingly free of nationalist or political content. Jünger’s belief system was an idiosyncratic mysticism that drew equally from science and religion; by temperament he was essentially a German romantic, for whom intense personal experience led to an understanding of the fundamental unity of nature. As a result, his circle of friends was as wide as could be, including the dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters and even Communists or Communist sympathizers such as Ernst Niekisch.
All this brought him into open conflict with Joseph Goebbels, who recognized an enemy in Jünger and attacked him in print. For his part, Jünger never joined the Nazi Party, and he refused to let his writings appear in Nazi publications. Twice his rooms were searched by the Gestapo, looking for incriminating documents about his Communist acquaintances. Under the circumstances, it defies belief that Jünger ever dared keep a diary, let alone one of such uninhibited candor as the one he kept from April 1941 to August 1944 during his tour of duty in occupied Paris.
Shortly after his arrival, a German officer was assassinated in Nantes and Hitler decreed that a hundred randomly selected hostages be shot in reprisal. Before their execution, they wrote final letters, which Jünger was given to translate. Affected by their dignity and composure, he was struck by how often the same words recurred, particularly courage and love. The conduct of those facing death always interested him, and as the war progressed, he began collecting accounts of shipwreck and starvation.
The most disagreeable act Jünger was called upon to perform was supervising the execution of a recaptured deserter. Jünger pitied him (he had been denounced by the French girlfriend who had been concealing him) and even considered backing out of the ordeal by feigning illness. But he decided it would be “shabby” to foist the duty on someone else and that he could see it through with less brutality than anyone else. The account of that execution, carried out in the pleasant Bois de Boulogne, has drawn more criticism in Germany than any other incident in the diary. Jünger was condemned for reshaping his published account from the version in the original manuscript, which he indeed did, although not to minimize his culpability but to sharpen its literary quality.
But this was the point of the criticism, that by taking refuge in a self-indulgent aestheticism, Jünger fled the moral choices imposed by the war. To be sure, to dip into the diary at random is to get the impression of a dandy and flâneur. A literary celebrity, Jünger enjoyed entrée to the highest circles. He could visit Picasso and Braque in their studios and debate their art in fluent French, or ponder the meaning of dreams with Jean Cocteau (“someone who dwells in a special, but comfortable, hell”), who sent him passes to screenings of surrealist films. With seemingly endless leisure time, he took long walks and indulged his habit of exploring cemeteries, writing lyrical but precise accounts of the tombstones, their inscriptions, and the plant and insect life teeming around them. He even found time to contemplate the city’s curious dog cemetery.
At times Jünger does not even seem to know he was fighting a war. After the D-Day landings, he went to bed reading a 14th-century chronicle of the life of Saint Louis. Not even an air raid could ruffle his coolness; his entry of September 15, 1943, is typical. He began the day interpreting one of his tormented zoological dreams, later inspecting the Gothic church of Saint-Séverin with his Parisian mistress, and then later, at the sound of the air sirens, went to his hotel rooftop to observe the bombardment and see planes torn apart by flak and watch as “something of considerable size, sepia-brown, gathered speed as it fell—most likely a man attached to a smoldering parachute.” Yet after all that, as he did every night, he could still take a book to bed:
Read further in Huxley, whose lack of structure is tiresome. His is a case of an anarchist with conservative memories who opposes nihilism. In this situation, he ought to employ more imagery and fewer concepts. As it is, he seldom exploits the real strength of his talent.
Jünger could have been writing about himself here. It is this ice-cold detachment—the plummeting pilot and then the literary criticism—that makes him repellent to the casual reader.
But to read the diary in chronological order is to realize that Jünger’s submersion in art and literature was his way of preserving his humanity while serving the machinery of a lethally violent state. One way of doing this was through a voracious program of reading, chiefly literature and history, often reading two or three books at once. One is not surprised at the German and French reading but at the abundance of English writers, whom he read in the original—Melville, Joyce, Poe, Conrad, Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, the Brontës, ad infinitum. The range is also remarkable. Jünger pivots from the 1772 fantasy Diable amoureux to a biography of the painter Turner to Crime and Punishment. And throughout the entire diary, one finds him reading the Bible, cover to cover, which he began shortly after his posting to Paris.
One is surprised to see how little Jünger has to say about the actual course of the war. Major events, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s declaration of war on America, pass by unmentioned or with a stray comment. Here we see the fatalism of the jaded World War I veteran, who has long stopped believing that “decisive” battles decide anything. But Jünger’s real interest, to which he pays acute attention, is the process of moral corruption that he sees as the inescapable legacy of the lemurs, his code word for the Gestapo and other servants of Nazi tyranny. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his obsessive recording of all that he can learn about German war crimes.
For American readers curious about the extent of German knowledge and complicity in genocide, this is the central question. Even as well-connected a celebrity as Jünger had to rely on the occasional visitor from the Russian front to learn firsthand of Nazi atrocities. It is not until November 4, 1941, five months after the invasion of Russia, that he first records a “hideous mechanism for executing prisoners,” which required them to strip and be measured by a weighing machine that was actually a lethal air gun. By March 1942, he was fully informed about the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, the units charged with the organized killing of political enemies, primarily Jews, behind the front lines: “certain butchers…who have singlehandedly slain enough people to populate a midsize city.”
If I correctly understand his cryptic entry, Jünger learned of the results of the Wannsee Conference from General Jodl, chief of the operations staff, on February 8, 1942, just 19 days later. And so when Jünger described his first sight of yellow stars in Paris on June 7, 1942, he knew full what it portended.
On Rue Royale, I encountered the yellow star for the first time in my life. Three young girls who were walking past arm in arm were wearing it. This badge was distributed yesterday, and those who received it had to part with a point from their clothing ration in return. I then saw the star more frequently that afternoon. I consider things like this, even in my own personal history, a significant date—I was immediately embarrassed to be in uniform.
For all the criticism that Jünger has served up a self-serving exculpatory diary, the truth is that he leaves his most selfless acts unmentioned. It is known that he gave advance warning to Jews facing deportation: The writer Joseph Breitbach was one, as he subsequently confirmed, and Walter Benjamin was possibly another.
None of this, for obvious reason, could be committed to paper, nor could the names of Adolf Hitler or any of his henchmen. Instead, their appearances are marked by Jünger’s felicitous code names. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, is “Grandgoschier,” a character from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel meaning “Big Throat.” SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is “Schinderhannes,” the name of a notorious German highwayman but also a pun on horse knacker. And Hermann Goering is simply “Head Forester,” citing the most fatuous of his many official titles.
Jünger thought a great deal about the mystic and symbolic power of sounds, and he reserved his most apposite pseudonym for Hitler, “Kniébolo,” a name that is at once menacing and absurd. It suggests a kneeling demon (Diabolos), a leitmotif of the diary as Jünger became ever more convinced of Hitler’s essentially Satanic character—in the literal biblical sense. Reducing Hitler the man to Kniébolo was congenial to Jünger’s way of dealing with the world, which was through metaphysical symbols and archetypes. One begins reading the diary with mild annoyance at Jünger’s fastidious recording of his dreams but soon realizes that they are part and parcel of the same actively questing mind, in which conversation and reading, art and dreams, all strain to make sense of the senseless. The result is a miracle of the diarist’s art, a diary as eventful and consequential as those of Samuel Pepys or James Boswell, but with an inner life.
Given the exceptional importance of Jünger’s diary, it deserved an impeccable translation and editorial notes. Distressingly, it has not received them. While the foreword delivers an excellent account of Jünger’s life and the importance of the diary, it does not say nearly enough about its publication history and revisions over the years. Unaccountably, and senselessly, it omits his preface to the original publication, Strahlungen (Rays or Emanations). There he gives his fullest account of how he edited the diaries for publication, refusing to censor or retouch, even for purposes of clarity, while skipping some personal details for reasons of taste (unlike James Joyce, whose Ulysses “registered every possible circumstance for using the toilet”).
The missing foreword also sheds light on the great question hanging over the diary, which is why Jünger, who was intimately associated with many of the July 20 conspirators against Hitler, did not join the coup. Above all, it would have been valuable to hear Jünger’s justification of keeping a wartime diary in the first place: “In a totalitarian state it remains the last possible conversation.”
A German Officer in Occupied Paris has won universal praise, but no reviewer has called attention to its errors of translation. For example, Hitler is described as insisting on taking personal command of “two tank battalions” after the D-Day landings, when the German text reads “two panzer corps,” the difference between 2,000 men and 100,000. Literary translators are not expected to be military historians, but, given the topic, they might have consulted one.
Other errors show embarrassing carelessness. For example, the final entry of the book describes the dramatic entry of American troops in Jünger’s town on April 11, 1945. Just before their arrival, the soldiers commanding the local artillery unit destroyed their guns and dispersed, while their commander, “who wanted to escape in civilian clothes, committed suicide”; in fact, according to the original German text, he was killed by his own men.
Even worse is the rendering of the entry for August 10, 1944, when Jünger was preparing to abandon Paris on the eve of its recapture by the Allies. On that day, we are told, he bought a small notebook like those he used “when I was a journalist in more stirring times.” The reader will wonder what times were more stirring than the summer of 1944. In fact, the German text explains quite clearly that he bought a notebook “of the sort which in more dangerous situations I substitute for the big diary.”
We naturally assume that a translation published by a university press will achieve a minimal accuracy in translation, and we do not expect our reviewers to search for errors. I would not have spotted these errors (and others) had I not by chance read the German original shortly before the translation appeared.
For the moment, though, it is all we have in English. Even in its imperfect and incomplete form, it should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the horrific events of the past century. There is still ample material here to debate the moral choices made—and evaded—by Jünger, and to ponder Cocteau’s final verdict, who liked Jünger but whose aloofness troubled him: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”
Michael J. Lewis, a longtime Commentary contributor, teaches modern architecture and American art at Williams College and is the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal.
Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.
One might ask why it has taken 70 years for Jünger’s diary to appear in English translation, for there is no more detailed account of the occupation from the German point of view. But Jünger was always controversial, up to his death in 1998 at the age of 102. In Germany, polite opinion has never forgiven him for Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I that saw in the experience of combat an ultimate test of manhood. “The finest, most visceral account of battle since the Iliad,” according to the New Statesman, his book made him a hero among German nationalists and ensured his privileged status in Nazi Germany. As it happens, Jünger was anything but a Nazi.
Born in 1895, the son of a chemist, Jünger got off to an unpromising start. A chronic discipline problem, he was repeatedly forced to change schools until at last in 1913 he lied about his age, joined the French Foreign Legion, and found himself in the Algerian desert. By the time that the German foreign office could extricate him, World War I was looming. He enlisted immediately, and, for the first time in his life, he flourished.
World War I, for Jünger, was not the grinding mechanized mass-slaughter we know from the war poets. Serving for the duration, he watched the replacement of sanguinary frontal assaults by storm-troop tactics, where small detachments of well-armed soldiers trained in hand-to-hand combat would overrun selected points and break through the enemy’s rear. Such a form of warfare rewarded personal initiative and bold leadership, which Jünger took as the principal lesson of the war. By the time he won the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military honor, he had already been wounded 14 times in combat.
After the war, Jünger studied zoology, where he cultivated the acute observational skills that distinguish his writing. He came to despise the Weimar Republic and flirted with nationalist groups, including—briefly—the Nazi Party. In 1926, he sent one of his books to Hitler, who proposed a meeting. By the time it fell through, Jünger was already having misgivings. He decided that Nazi racial ideology was embarrassing (“peinlich”), and he thereafter held aloof, making certain that he and Hitler never met personally.
Jünger was far too capricious and eclectic a thinker to fit into any straitjacket. Had the Nazis read Storm of Steel carefully, they would have noticed that it was strikingly free of nationalist or political content. Jünger’s belief system was an idiosyncratic mysticism that drew equally from science and religion; by temperament he was essentially a German romantic, for whom intense personal experience led to an understanding of the fundamental unity of nature. As a result, his circle of friends was as wide as could be, including the dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters and even Communists or Communist sympathizers such as Ernst Niekisch.
All this brought him into open conflict with Joseph Goebbels, who recognized an enemy in Jünger and attacked him in print. For his part, Jünger never joined the Nazi Party, and he refused to let his writings appear in Nazi publications. Twice his rooms were searched by the Gestapo, looking for incriminating documents about his Communist acquaintances. Under the circumstances, it defies belief that Jünger ever dared keep a diary, let alone one of such uninhibited candor as the one he kept from April 1941 to August 1944 during his tour of duty in occupied Paris.
Shortly after his arrival, a German officer was assassinated in Nantes and Hitler decreed that a hundred randomly selected hostages be shot in reprisal. Before their execution, they wrote final letters, which Jünger was given to translate. Affected by their dignity and composure, he was struck by how often the same words recurred, particularly courage and love. The conduct of those facing death always interested him, and as the war progressed, he began collecting accounts of shipwreck and starvation.
The most disagreeable act Jünger was called upon to perform was supervising the execution of a recaptured deserter. Jünger pitied him (he had been denounced by the French girlfriend who had been concealing him) and even considered backing out of the ordeal by feigning illness. But he decided it would be “shabby” to foist the duty on someone else and that he could see it through with less brutality than anyone else. The account of that execution, carried out in the pleasant Bois de Boulogne, has drawn more criticism in Germany than any other incident in the diary. Jünger was condemned for reshaping his published account from the version in the original manuscript, which he indeed did, although not to minimize his culpability but to sharpen its literary quality.
But this was the point of the criticism, that by taking refuge in a self-indulgent aestheticism, Jünger fled the moral choices imposed by the war. To be sure, to dip into the diary at random is to get the impression of a dandy and flâneur. A literary celebrity, Jünger enjoyed entrée to the highest circles. He could visit Picasso and Braque in their studios and debate their art in fluent French, or ponder the meaning of dreams with Jean Cocteau (“someone who dwells in a special, but comfortable, hell”), who sent him passes to screenings of surrealist films. With seemingly endless leisure time, he took long walks and indulged his habit of exploring cemeteries, writing lyrical but precise accounts of the tombstones, their inscriptions, and the plant and insect life teeming around them. He even found time to contemplate the city’s curious dog cemetery.
At times Jünger does not even seem to know he was fighting a war. After the D-Day landings, he went to bed reading a 14th-century chronicle of the life of Saint Louis. Not even an air raid could ruffle his coolness; his entry of September 15, 1943, is typical. He began the day interpreting one of his tormented zoological dreams, later inspecting the Gothic church of Saint-Séverin with his Parisian mistress, and then later, at the sound of the air sirens, went to his hotel rooftop to observe the bombardment and see planes torn apart by flak and watch as “something of considerable size, sepia-brown, gathered speed as it fell—most likely a man attached to a smoldering parachute.” Yet after all that, as he did every night, he could still take a book to bed:
Read further in Huxley, whose lack of structure is tiresome. His is a case of an anarchist with conservative memories who opposes nihilism. In this situation, he ought to employ more imagery and fewer concepts. As it is, he seldom exploits the real strength of his talent.
Jünger could have been writing about himself here. It is this ice-cold detachment—the plummeting pilot and then the literary criticism—that makes him repellent to the casual reader.
But to read the diary in chronological order is to realize that Jünger’s submersion in art and literature was his way of preserving his humanity while serving the machinery of a lethally violent state. One way of doing this was through a voracious program of reading, chiefly literature and history, often reading two or three books at once. One is not surprised at the German and French reading but at the abundance of English writers, whom he read in the original—Melville, Joyce, Poe, Conrad, Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, the Brontës, ad infinitum. The range is also remarkable. Jünger pivots from the 1772 fantasy Diable amoureux to a biography of the painter Turner to Crime and Punishment. And throughout the entire diary, one finds him reading the Bible, cover to cover, which he began shortly after his posting to Paris.
One is surprised to see how little Jünger has to say about the actual course of the war. Major events, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s declaration of war on America, pass by unmentioned or with a stray comment. Here we see the fatalism of the jaded World War I veteran, who has long stopped believing that “decisive” battles decide anything. But Jünger’s real interest, to which he pays acute attention, is the process of moral corruption that he sees as the inescapable legacy of the lemurs, his code word for the Gestapo and other servants of Nazi tyranny. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his obsessive recording of all that he can learn about German war crimes.
For American readers curious about the extent of German knowledge and complicity in genocide, this is the central question. Even as well-connected a celebrity as Jünger had to rely on the occasional visitor from the Russian front to learn firsthand of Nazi atrocities. It is not until November 4, 1941, five months after the invasion of Russia, that he first records a “hideous mechanism for executing prisoners,” which required them to strip and be measured by a weighing machine that was actually a lethal air gun. By March 1942, he was fully informed about the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, the units charged with the organized killing of political enemies, primarily Jews, behind the front lines: “certain butchers…who have singlehandedly slain enough people to populate a midsize city.”
If I correctly understand his cryptic entry, Jünger learned of the results of the Wannsee Conference from General Jodl, chief of the operations staff, on February 8, 1942, just 19 days later. And so when Jünger described his first sight of yellow stars in Paris on June 7, 1942, he knew full what it portended.
On Rue Royale, I encountered the yellow star for the first time in my life. Three young girls who were walking past arm in arm were wearing it. This badge was distributed yesterday, and those who received it had to part with a point from their clothing ration in return. I then saw the star more frequently that afternoon. I consider things like this, even in my own personal history, a significant date—I was immediately embarrassed to be in uniform.
For all the criticism that Jünger has served up a self-serving exculpatory diary, the truth is that he leaves his most selfless acts unmentioned. It is known that he gave advance warning to Jews facing deportation: The writer Joseph Breitbach was one, as he subsequently confirmed, and Walter Benjamin was possibly another.
None of this, for obvious reason, could be committed to paper, nor could the names of Adolf Hitler or any of his henchmen. Instead, their appearances are marked by Jünger’s felicitous code names. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, is “Grandgoschier,” a character from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel meaning “Big Throat.” SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is “Schinderhannes,” the name of a notorious German highwayman but also a pun on horse knacker. And Hermann Goering is simply “Head Forester,” citing the most fatuous of his many official titles.
Jünger thought a great deal about the mystic and symbolic power of sounds, and he reserved his most apposite pseudonym for Hitler, “Kniébolo,” a name that is at once menacing and absurd. It suggests a kneeling demon (Diabolos), a leitmotif of the diary as Jünger became ever more convinced of Hitler’s essentially Satanic character—in the literal biblical sense. Reducing Hitler the man to Kniébolo was congenial to Jünger’s way of dealing with the world, which was through metaphysical symbols and archetypes. One begins reading the diary with mild annoyance at Jünger’s fastidious recording of his dreams but soon realizes that they are part and parcel of the same actively questing mind, in which conversation and reading, art and dreams, all strain to make sense of the senseless. The result is a miracle of the diarist’s art, a diary as eventful and consequential as those of Samuel Pepys or James Boswell, but with an inner life.
Given the exceptional importance of Jünger’s diary, it deserved an impeccable translation and editorial notes. Distressingly, it has not received them. While the foreword delivers an excellent account of Jünger’s life and the importance of the diary, it does not say nearly enough about its publication history and revisions over the years. Unaccountably, and senselessly, it omits his preface to the original publication, Strahlungen (Rays or Emanations). There he gives his fullest account of how he edited the diaries for publication, refusing to censor or retouch, even for purposes of clarity, while skipping some personal details for reasons of taste (unlike James Joyce, whose Ulysses “registered every possible circumstance for using the toilet”).
The missing foreword also sheds light on the great question hanging over the diary, which is why Jünger, who was intimately associated with many of the July 20 conspirators against Hitler, did not join the coup. Above all, it would have been valuable to hear Jünger’s justification of keeping a wartime diary in the first place: “In a totalitarian state it remains the last possible conversation.”
A German Officer in Occupied Paris has won universal praise, but no reviewer has called attention to its errors of translation. For example, Hitler is described as insisting on taking personal command of “two tank battalions” after the D-Day landings, when the German text reads “two panzer corps,” the difference between 2,000 men and 100,000. Literary translators are not expected to be military historians, but, given the topic, they might have consulted one.
Other errors show embarrassing carelessness. For example, the final entry of the book describes the dramatic entry of American troops in Jünger’s town on April 11, 1945. Just before their arrival, the soldiers commanding the local artillery unit destroyed their guns and dispersed, while their commander, “who wanted to escape in civilian clothes, committed suicide”; in fact, according to the original German text, he was killed by his own men.
Even worse is the rendering of the entry for August 10, 1944, when Jünger was preparing to abandon Paris on the eve of its recapture by the Allies. On that day, we are told, he bought a small notebook like those he used “when I was a journalist in more stirring times.” The reader will wonder what times were more stirring than the summer of 1944. In fact, the German text explains quite clearly that he bought a notebook “of the sort which in more dangerous situations I substitute for the big diary.”
We naturally assume that a translation published by a university press will achieve a minimal accuracy in translation, and we do not expect our reviewers to search for errors. I would not have spotted these errors (and others) had I not by chance read the German original shortly before the translation appeared.
For the moment, though, it is all we have in English. Even in its imperfect and incomplete form, it should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the horrific events of the past century. There is still ample material here to debate the moral choices made—and evaded—by Jünger, and to ponder Cocteau’s final verdict, who liked Jünger but whose aloofness troubled him: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”
Michael J. Lewis, a longtime Commentary contributor, teaches modern architecture and American art at Williams College and is the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal.
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