Ernst Junger A German Officer in Occupied Paris The War J
ournals, 1941-1945 Foreword by Elliott Neaman will surprise you. The cover-picture of this book by Columbia University Press attracted my imagination: I can see worry, compassion, curiosity. And the story of Ernst Junger is peculiar.
He wasn't a great scholar, all the opposite; he was a constant worry for his parents. Army was his destiny although young Ernst was also a man attracted by reading and writing. The first book he will published will be released on 1920.
Although he joined movements of right, what Ernst wanted to do was to be a writer and for this reason with his wife and son they all went to Berlin at some point.
Ernst starts to be infatuated by Paris during that period.
Junger distanced himself from Nazis and their dangerous ideas. Hitler would have wanted to meet Junger, but Junger didn't never meet him because he didn't reciprocate respect.
Important men of letters joined the regime. Let's remember that also Thomas Mann did it.
When the war broke out Junger was conscripted as a lieutenant, reaching later the rank of captain. From 1941 to 1945 he lived in Paris although for some time he visited the Cucasus and the end of these journals will be written at home in Kirchhorst. His headquarter was the Hotel Majestic. He soon began to become part of the Resistance against Hitler.
Junger will also take part at a complot for trying to kill Hitler, although it won't work and many people were captured, or tried to kill themselves for escape the nazi's revenge.
When in Paris, he found, being a writer as well, the best humus and was introduced in the best circles of men and women of culture: he was first of all a thinker. In an entry of one of his journals he will write "Subject for Study: the ways propaganda turns into terror. The beginnings in particular contained much that people are going to forget. That's when power walks on cats's paws, subtle and cunning."
In another entry he tells the story of an execution of a soldier who escaped away and found help and refugee in the house of a girl.
He is devastated by the idea of the end of a life that it is predictably driven by men.
Junger described vividly how he proceeded with his journals: "...I don't usually update my notes until the following day, and I do not date them on the day of their writing but rather the day they occurred."
Once in Monte Carlo he won't forget of telling the exciting visit at the reptile musem. Junger loved nature and descriptions are accurate, long, exhaustive. He locked up all his journals and letters for security.
Avid reader, he divorated wagons of french books although his visits could be also pretty particular. Ernst didn't forget to visiting the little cemetery of the Trocadero:
"Things glow in their after-image and often more beautifully in memory before they dissolve into the nameless void" he will write or the one of Montparnasse this time for searching
for Baudelaire's grave, the one of Roussel. To him "Ordinary people in this seas of graves ...Like tracks in the sand, they are soon erased by the wind." Although no one is dead till is remembered on this Earth. Visiting Pere Lachaise, he found a big diversification, richness of its variety.
Reading last letters of people executed, Ernst writes that "Man seems to emerge from his blind will and realize that love is the most intimate of all connections."
Ernst felt that was at home when he visited antiquarian bookshops, book dealers, old workshops.
"I feel so at home, it's as thought I had lived among them for five hundrad years."
Prudent in sharing sensitive information through the pages of his journals and letters, Ernst in strickt connection with people in Russia thinks that the hard condition of the place and the personal situation of a lot of soldiers, with frozen part of the bodies would be so terrifying that he writes: "Who would not prefer to be among the dead?"
Fascinated by One Thousand and one Nights, his dreams are sometimes articulated and often reported in journals.
Sharks, people who committed atrocities, Ernst Junger imagines a nihilistic world: "They have an inherently satanic will that takes cold pleasure in destroying human beings. perhaps even humanity."
French government is supporting all of it, adds in the entry of his journal, Junger.
In the while Ernst is introduced at Cocteau, Weimer and Poupet during a party.
But...What are books for Ernst Junger? "It is wonderful to find thoughts, words, and sentences in them that make the reader suspect that the narrative is leading him down a man-made trail through uncharted forests, deep and unfamiliar. Thus, he is led through regions with unknowhn borders, and only occasionally do tidings of plenty reach him like a breath of fresh air."
Not only. in general he tended to read all books but he minimally touched the ones he thought were plenty of lurid description and where there wasn't any gentle touch in descriptions. His opinions of books, authors, are written down with clarity, and with a fertile mind attracted by a vision not just limited at a topic or two, but in perennial expansion in the most diversified fields of knowledge. He could read various books per times. Once he wrote that he completed more or less the same days The Life of Jesus by Renan and The Bronte Family by Robert de Traz, rereading books he appreciated in the past. His reading was continuous and in a daily base, as also the one of answering and receiving letters or writing, intrigued also by books of authors with which he started to interact in Paris as Cocteau was. Conrad with An Outpost of Progress will let him think a lot. "A story that superbly describes the tranformation of civilized optimism into utter bestiality."
The biggest critic moved by Ernst regarding resistance and their opponent is the weakness of the most in particular middle class and aristocracy, but "They lack the authority and ability to oppose minds motivated only by violence."
There are important reflections about what Hitler was doing to sick people, Jewish, and also... in the future who will dominate Earth: humans or automatons?
I found fascinating the description of the day he spent with Picasso; his dissertations about life and death are truly fascinating. A trip in the Caucasus, and then his return to Paris on 1943 for leaving again in 1944. In one of his final entries Ernst wrote some verses written by Marcel Arland: "I love candied grapes / Because they have no taste, /I love camellias/ Because they have nof ragrance/ And I love rich men/ Because they have no heart./
I lost the count of books read by Ernst, mainly for trying to understand also what it was going on. He was also a voracious reader of The Bible. Trying to find rationality in an irrational moment is where possible indispensible for not become crazy, or hallucinated. Of course Junger didn't read a lot just for this reason. He was a writer and a man of culture, but he also searched to my point of view a sense, in history, religion, philosophy, sociology, art, a sense. Wherever it could be possible to finding some of it.
Remarkable book, stunning journals, informative, pretty stimulating, and in grade to add something more to our existence.
Highly recommended to everyone. A perect gift if you know someome in love for diaries, journals, history, Paris.
I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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