When he departed again for Paris on 18 February, he left behind letters and diary entries that his wife Gretha read with an eagle eye and sharp intuition. Gretha had already been upset about his pleasurable lifestyle in Paris while she had to manage a household and deal with Allied bombing raids. She might have forgiven his sexual escapades were it not for an emotional coldness she felt in his presence during his stay. “Perpetua” turns out to be an apt nickname because it recalls those women who did housekeeping chores in Catholic monasteries. She wrote him on 20 February 1943, threatening a divorce. Jünger managed to patch things up with her but not without many protestations of his love and devotion, as well as some soul-searching. She demanded that he completely cut off contact with the despised Sophie Ravoux, the relationship with whom, Jünger maintained, was entirely platonic.
All of this is barely mentioned in the war journals. One has to read between the lines, as in this diary entry:
A word to men. Our position with respect to two different women can resemble that of the judge pronouncing a Solomonic verdict, yet we are also the child. We deliver ourselves into the custody of the one who does not want to cut us in half.[33]
Gretha was not the only observer to resent Jünger’s Nietzschean penchant for turning his life into a work of art. Although the war journals offer a unique perspective from “inside the Belly of the Leviathan” as Jünger put it, some critics have accused the writer of posing as a flâneur and dandy while others suffered. In one famous scene, Jünger climbed up to the roof of the Hotel Raphael and, holding a glass of red burgundy, observed bombers flying over Paris, as fires engulfed the city and "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.”[34] On 27 May 1943, however, there were no air strikes over Paris. The strawberry swimming in red burgundy may have been, as Tobias Wimbauer speculates, derived from an erotic impulse rather than an actual observation of events.[35]
Whatever moral judgment one wishes to make about the aesthetics of violence, which is evident in many places in the journals, Jünger’s account is an indispensable firsthand reflection of Paris under the German occupation and provides sharply observed portraits of contemporaries as they struggled with the destruction of Europe at the end of a second Thirty Years’ War.
In the winter of 1943–1944, Jünger’s reflections turned gloomy and often apocalyptic as he systematically studied the entire Old and New Testaments. Jünger viewed the war through the lens of God’s judgment for the evil perpetrated by mankind, as well as the promise, with the return of God through Christ, of everlasting grace and renewal. He was too sophisticated to take the gospels literally, and furthermore he had been brought up by his positivist, scientifically trained father to be skeptical.[36] Nevertheless, he viewed the period as if the two world wars were a test for mankind. He held out hopes for a renewal of Christianity after a descent into nihilism. His “Appeal to the Youth of the World,” The Peace treatise, was written in this spirit and was suffused with his Bible studies. Throughout 1944 he tinkered with the script, and the intended audience expanded beyond youth, to include a general appeal for a postwar metahistorical transformation of all nations.
In 1944 news of Allied armies conquering Italy and the Soviets pushing into Eastern Prussia and Poland confirmed his worst fears about Germany’s fate. He noted with deep sadness the destruction of German cities, of which he learned through letters from friends and saw firsthand during his travels by train from Paris back to Kirchhorst while on furlough.
On 27 March 1944, Jünger was visited in Paris by Lieutenant Colonel Cäsar von Hofacker, a liaison between Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel and the group of officers around Hofacker’s cousin, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who was the central figure in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. On that afternoon, Hofacker took a walk with Jünger on the Avenue Kléber and informed him that Stülpnagel was under observation and Jünger himself was viewed with suspicion. Hofacker suggested he leave Paris and go to Marseilles for a while. The young colonel also filled him in on many of the details of the plot, called Operation Valkyrie, and listed the main conspirators. On 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg brought a bomb in an attaché case into Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia. Stauffenberg left just before the explosion, which injured but did not kill Hitler, shielded as he was by a heavy concrete table.
Jünger had also came into contact with officers involved in the Rommel Plan to arrest and replace Hitler.[37] In fact, Rommel had been given Jünger’s treatise The Peace through an intermediary, was impressed by the ideas, and may have been spurred to act by them.[38] The Westlösung (or Western Solution) envisaged imprisoning Hitler sometime in May 1944, when he was inspecting the Atlantic Wall, an extensive system of fortifications built to defend against the expected Allied landing in the west. Inexplicably, Hitler continued to direct the war effort from Berchtesgaden, his outpost and home in the Bavarian Alps. After the invasion of Normandy, Hitler announced an unexpected visit for 19 June to Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, fifty-eight kilometers from Paris. Speidel and Rommel had an ideal opportunity to strike. But as so often in Hitler’s life, he was spared by a lucky intervention. The bombing of England with V-1 rockets had begun from French territory on 15 June. On 18 June, one of the rockets strayed off course and came down near Margival, nearly hitting the Führer’s headquarters Wolfschlucht II, where Hitler was meeting with General Rundstedt. Shaken by the near miss and depressed about the viability of his new wonder weapons, he returned abruptly to Bavaria.
The failed Rommel plan to arrest Hitler was now replaced by the Stauffenberg plot to kill the dictator. On the early evening of 20 July, Hofacker called Stülpnagel and reported that Hitler was dead.[39] Thereupon Stülpnagel ordered the arrest of more than a thousand SS and Sicherheitsdienst agents. He had already set in motion plans to have them face mass executions. But at twenty to eight the same evening, the German radio reported that Hitler had survived. Chaos now reigned in the Hôtel Majestic. Jünger spent the day hunting butterflies in the forest around Saint Cloud[40] and made only veiled references in the journals to the sense of heightened danger when he came back to headquarters.
The news from Berlin was contradictory. Was this a trick by Goebbels to buy time? The commanding general in the west, Hans Günter von Kluge, would have to make a decision without knowing the true state of affairs. Kluge had known about the plot through one of its instigators, Henning von Tresckow, but when it came time to act he decided that there could be no coup while Hitler was still possibly alive. General Rommel, the only military leader in Nazi Germany who could have led a rebellion against the living Führer, had been badly injured just three days before Operation Valkyrie. All of the prisoners were released, including the top SS commanders Carl-Albrecht Oberg and Helmut Knochen.
Jünger’s confidante Hofacker was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris on 26 July, brutally tortured. and eventually sentenced to death by the infamous People’s Court. Under torture, he revealed details about General Rommel’s involvement in the German Resistance, but he did not disclose the participation of Jünger and the officers around Stülpnagel in Paris.
35
See Tobias Wimbauer, “Kelche sind Körper: Der Hintergrund der Erdbeeren in Burgunder-Szene,”
36
See Jünger,
39
Schwilk fills in the details Jünger leaves out in the journals in