Jünger’s war diaries, translated here with damning clarity by Thomas and Abby Hansen, are a fascinating, refined and disturbing record of the moral disasters of Nazism and collaboration ... Jünger’s aesthetic sensibility is so refined that he seems insensate to his surroundings ... A diary is always written to be read. Jünger, conscious of his fame and position, wrote with posterity in mind. A fellow-traveler on the road to murder, he describes the microcosm of collaboration, but casts a pall of mystical speculation over the chains of command and guilt.
Our diarist is no ordinary German officer ... these diaries are not only a remarkable document of the time, but bring us close to a strange but highly original person, always capable of a fresh response to the natural world, the atmosphere of Paris, and the hideous events that force themselves on his knowledge. Many of Jünger’s texts have an inhuman chill; these diaries reveal his humanity. The translators have given us a fluent, idiomatic English text, with only a few, though striking, slips ... editors...earn the reader’s gratitude by providing a list briefly identifying all the people mentioned by name in the text (though unfortunately not an index). Readers will also find indispensable the introductory biographical essay by Elliot Neaman, author of A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the politics of literature under Nazism (1999).
Always intended for eventual publication, the journal eschews soul-searching and avoids anything overtly confessional ... Overall, Jünger remains essentially contemplative, an observer by instinct ... the stark and appalling descriptions of what he saw on the Eastern Front recall Goya’s famous etchings of the disasters of war ... He despises the forces, industrial and ideological, that reduce people to machines or automatons ... Such high-minded ideals don’t preclude shrewd understanding about life in a police state ... Some critics argue that his transcendental-mystical bent tends to aestheticize horror and suffering, which to some extent it certainly does. Still, Jünger himself deserves to be honored as a serious, if morally and politically complicated, European humanist.
Jünger details battlefield atrocities, but the book also raises universal questions. Is tyrannicide justified? When does a man really come of age? At what point does a human become a mere beast? ... although his diary strives for aesthetic heights it also betrays some hormonal chaos. Women, masked by pseudonyms, who weave in and out of the text, were almost certainly mistresses ... He seemed to be excited by this mix of sex and war ... This combination of living the life of a flaneur, interspersed with a record of the many books that he read, his use of spare moments to hunt down beetles for his collection, his detailed analysis of his dreams, seems at times to squeeze out real life. 'Mein Gott!' you want to shout, have you forgotten there’s a war on? ... The diaries are full of curiosity, the enduring enthusiasm of an autodidact, but they are not suffused with regret, or indeed with warmth.
Now translated into English for the first time, his second world war diaries show readers a middle-aged Captain Jünger as he revealed a private self, no doubt with an eye to eventual publication: camera-like, complicit, revelling in civilized pursuits by day; weary, frightened and guilty-feeling at night. Aphorisms, philosophical half-thoughts and religious musings jostle with odd, though seldom funny, dreams. Small pleasures flank sudden horrors. Jolting images appear and vanish as if on the surface of a lake. None of it adds up. No line is drawn or balance struck. Jünger, the political conservative who scorned modernity’s disorder, wrote a very modern, unconservative prose ... A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer.
There are suggestions and glimpses all along of a general despondent gloom, but Jünger rarely elaborates on them, keeping things succinct ... Yet in this odd mishmash, there's much that is personally revealing too; certainly a good (if not fully three-dimensional) picture of the man emerges ... Jünger's chivalric world-view will hardly convince, and readers are unlikely to be changed anywhere near as much as Jünger might wish or imagine... but, even for all its limitations, A German Officer in Occupied Paris is a remarkable slice of World War II, and makes for fascinating reading.
Jünger’s war journals convey in sensuous, lyrical—yet often chillingly detached—prose daily life in the French capital as well as dire conditions along the Eastern Front between Germany and Russia and the privations his wife and family endured at home in Germany ... A unique historical testimony.
