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

Take yourself back in time to the summer of 1942, in Nazi-occupied Paris. A middle-age German officer in a gray uniform strolls down the Avenue Wagram, an army eagle insignia perched above his right breast pocket. The man is of medium height, of compact build, with chiseled thin features and graying hair around the temples. He turns to follow the Right Bank and inspect the bouquinistes, whose antiquarian books, cards, journals, and prints overflow from small well-worn shacks. Walking north, past the Arc de Triomphe, he stops at a stationery store on the Avenue Wagram and is jolted by the expression on the face of the girl behind the counter. Later he will write in his journal,

It was clear that she was staring at me with deep hatred. The pupils of her light blue eyes were like pinpoints; she met my gaze quite openly with a kind of relisha relish with which the scorpion pierces his prey with the barb in his tail.

He leaves the shop in deep thought. The walk ends at the nearby Htel Majestic, the headquarters of the German High Command in Paris. Captain Jnger takes a seat at a table overflowing with mail written by German soldiers to friends and loved ones at home. He reads each piece carefully, marking out lines of sensitive information before placing the envelope in one pile or another bound for the home front. As a military censor, he is tasked with reading French newspapers and other publications for signs of insubordination. A not uninteresting assignment for a writer whose job it is to enter the minds of others.

Who was this man?

He was born in 1895 under the Wilhelmine empire, marched off to war in 1914, and ended service as a highly decorated hero. He worked as a writer in Berlin at the height of Weimar Germanys cultural rebirth, beginning in 1927, and stayed in the capital just long enough to see Hitler seize power. He fought as a captain in World War II, spending much of his time in occupied Paris close to a resistance circle of aristocratic Prussian generals. He lived out much of the rest of his life in a small Swabian village through the period of the cold war and after the downfall of communism. He lived long enough to see Germany reunified and died in 1998, a celebrated centenarian and Olympian figure.

Jnger was the oldest of six children, two of whom did not survive infancy. From his father Ernst Georg, a chemist, he inherited the sharp analytical skills of a scientist, and from his mother Karoline Lampl, he received artistic capacities and an eye for natural beauty.

In 1913 Jnger realized his first youthful desire for actual adventure. He crossed the French border, fibbed about his age, and joined the Foreign Legion. He was shipped off to Algeria but had no desire to become a legionnaire. Escaping from the camp in Oran, he darted off to discover Africa on his own. Quickly captured by Foreign Legion soldiers, he was held until his father arranged for his release through the German Foreign Office. The furtively proud father instructed the boy to have a photograph taken before departing. The adventure, as we will see, will come to play a central role in his life experiences, then distilled into ice-clear form in his writings.

Jngers father promised the precocious young man an adventure excursion to Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, as long he finished school. Then came the war fever of August 1914. Jnger rushed to Hanover and volunteered for the Seventy-Third Regiment of General Field Marshal Prince Albrecht von Preussen. After hurrying through an alternative high school degree, he shipped out at years end and was in battle by early January 1915 on the western front. Promoted the following autumn to lieutenant, in the latter stages of the war he was part of a new group of assault troops, sent in small numbers to infiltrate enemy trenches. This innovative shock strategy was more effective than mass lines of infantry, which were chewed up by the enemys machine guns, but required more skill and individual initiative. After suffering fourteen battle wounds, Jnger received the Pour le Mrite on 22 September 1918, the highest honor awarded by the Prussian military, rarely given either to soldiers of the infantry or to warriors of his tender age.

The venturesome boy was exhilarated by the war experience. He carried a copy of Homer in his pocket and imagined himself a Greek hero of the Trojan War. The copious notes he took of these battle experiences were self-published in 1920 as In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel). The work was picked up by various publishers in the decades that followed and, along with several other essays from the 1920s, established Jngers reputation as one of Germanys foremost authors of the war generation. He was recognized as a leader of the New Nationalists, intellectual veterans of the postwar period who inflated the memory of the war into mythic proportions and pitted themselves against the liberal tendencies of the Weimar Republic, especially against its fulfillment policies such as the payment of reparations, downsizing the army, and regaining good standing among the nations of Europe.

The Treaty of Versailles forced the German government to reduce its standing army to one hundred thousand troops. Although now under a republican government, it retained the imperial adjective to designate the Reichswehr and was filled with antidemocratic aristocrats. Jnger enthusiastically wrote treatises on storm trooper tactics, but he was put off by the empty socializing and boozing of the fraternizing officers. While studying the natural sciences in Leipzig, he joined the illegal paramilitary Freikorps and the legal veterans group Stahlhelm and began a career in journalism, writing for a score of right-wing newspapers, including the Nazi Vlkischer Beobachter. He became a leading exponent of the young German intellectual right, which advocated for an authoritarian alternative to the Weimar democracy. These Ideas of 1914 had been foreshadowed by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 bestseller, The Decline of the West and Moller van den Brucks The Third Reich, published in 1923. The young nationalist critique of parliamentary political systems followed in many ways the path laid out by Carl Schmitt in his seminal 1923 treatise, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.

In these years, Jnger worked to establish a Central Council that would unite workers and soldiers until a Fhrer could be found who could put the revolution into practice. This was a National Bolshevik strategy and explains his close friendship with Ernst Niekisch, a politician and writer from Saxony who founded the journal Widerstand, with the aim of grafting Soviet Bolshevism onto Prussian nationalism. In the War Journals, Niekisch is referred to twelve times under the pseudonym Cellaris. He was a key figure for understanding the ambiguous position Jnger held on the right-wing spectrum of pre-Nazi politics in Germany. Jnger was deeply concerned about Niekischs fate during World War II and received updates from military contacts who knew how he was being mistreated by the Nazis. (Niekisch was arrested in 1937 and spent the war years in a Gestapo jail, where he was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, a broken, nearly blind man).