Another key contact in Paris for Jünger was the salon of Florence Gould (Lady Orphington in the journals),[23] where he rubbed shoulders with Braque, Picasso, Sacha Guitry, Julien Gracq, Paul Léautaud, and Jean Paulhan, one of the founders of the resistance newspaper Lettres Françaises.[24] Paulhan was arrested and jailed by the Gestapo during the war.
Jünger frequented the luxury hotel George V, where a roundtable of exclusive French and German intellectuals met, including the writers Morand, Cocteau, Montherlant as well as the publisher Gaston Gallimard. The renowned legal scholar (and early exponent of the Nazi regime) Carl Schmitt often attended, as did Speidel and the Paris correspondent of a Frankfurt newspaper, Friedrich Sieburg, who had written a bestseller about France in the interwar years, Like a God in France. Jünger operated on the edge of politics in Paris, rather like a butterfly fluttering among both resistors and collaborators. He didn’t trust the generals, who had taken a personal oath to Hitler, to be able to carry out a coup. Jean Cocteau later quipped: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”[25]
Cocteau’s witticism notwithstanding, the accusation was not entirely fair. When Jünger saw an opportunity to help save Jews at an acceptable level of risk, he did act. He passed on information, for example, through intermediaries to the French Resistance about upcoming transports and thus saved Jewish lives. The German playwright and novelist Joseph Breitbach, who lived in Paris from 1931 through the end of the occupation, was one of them. He publicized this fact after the war.[26]
In addition to the secret diaries, Jünger also worked during the war on an essay that was published after the war (in Amsterdam, after being denied publication rights by the occupation authorities). It was called The Peace. In this unapologetic, religiously infused essay, Jünger conceived of the period from 1918 to 1945 as a long European civil war. He discussed the explosion of technology that had brought with it an exponential increase in the ability to create destruction. He described the failure of the League of Nations and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The victors, he warned, should not take revenge on the vanquished. The war was won by one side, he intoned, but the peace must be won by all. History was represented as a vale of tears and all of mankind as equal subjects of suffering (the line between victim and victimizer thereby diminished). Jünger had read the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, from beginning to end twice during the war years. The Peace was imbued with a Christian sense that the new world must be accompanied by a religious revival, the only means to conquer the nihilism of the previous decades. Jünger divided his own work into Old Testament writings of his nationalist phase followed by a new gospel of religiosity and humanism.
Beginning in the spring of 1941, Jünger complained in his journals of insomnia, depression, and general exhaustion. When he started losing weight in early 1942, a physician “friend,” the Doctoresse, ordered various cures for his ills. Despite his weakened condition, he was ordered to tour the eastern front in October 1942 and decided he had no viable grounds to back out. The mood in the Caucasus was grim, as the Russian army began to encircle the German Sixth Army in the city of Stalingrad (today Volgograd). Hitler had taken over tactical planning on the eastern front and began making dilettantish and fatal mistakes, such as prohibiting his generals from undertaking strategic retreats. Clausewitz must be turning over in his grave, Jünger thought to himself. Death, human and animal suffering, and devastation littered the military landscape, more like the Thirty Years’ War, Jünger mused, than World War I.
At a New Year’s Eve party at staff headquarters, Jünger heard direct confirmation that Jews were being exterminated in trains that carried them into tunnels filled with poison gas.[27] Jünger mentioned the harsh treatment of Jews in Paris several times and the shame he felt about being in uniform, when he noticed three young girls wearing yellow stars.[28] On 27 March 1942, the first transport of Jews left Compiégne for Auschwitz. In July, thousands of French police were seen rounding up Jews on the streets of Paris. He noted on 18 July,
Never for a moment may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering. What kind of human being, what kind of officer, would I be otherwise? This uniform obligates me to provide protection wherever possible.
To his credit, he never attempted to justify or explain away the Holocaust, even though the brutality of the eastern front did not affect Jews alone. But he did place these “wicked crimes” in a cosmic context that deprived individual actors of agency. “Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians,” he wrote. Two years to the day after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, he observed with bitterness that demagogues brought Germany into a war with the Soviets that could have been avoided, leading to atrocities against the Jews, which “enrage the cosmos against us.”[29] At the end of 1942, he made three New Year’s resolutions, the second of which reads, “Always have a care for unfortunate people.”
Jünger’s tour on the eastern front is notable for its sharp contrast to his privileged existence in Paris. There he was able to enjoy the luxury of French comforts, good food, and socializing among refined company, despite increased rationing of almost all commodities as the war progressed. But even on the eastern front, he discovered that his reputation as an author was a tremendous help:
I had no idea that little things like a pocket mirror, knife, sewing thread, or string are precious items here. Luckily I constantly come across people who help me. Not infrequently they are some of my readers, whose help I count among my fortune.[30]
On 11 January 1943, Jünger took the night train from Lötzen (today Giżycko in northeastern Poland), stopping in Leisnig, halfway between Leipzig and Dresden. He arrived home in Kirchorst on 9 February. He calls his wife “Perpetua” in the diaries, and she frequently appeared in his dreams while in Paris. But marital troubles dominated the visit in Kirchhorst. Many female accomplices are mentioned in the diaries, including Camillea, Charmille, Mme. d’Armenonville, Mme. Dancart, and most often the Doctoresse.[31] These were probably all the same person, Sophie Ravoux, with whom Jünger had an intimate affair.[32] The Russian writer Umm El-Banine, who opened many doors for him in Paris, was also probably a lover.
26
See Horst Mühleisen, “Im Bauch des Leviathan: Ernst Jünger, Paris und der militärische Widerstand,” in
31
Schwilk tracks down all various female relationships in
32
See Mitchell,