In addition to documenting topical events, Jünger’s journals also record the inner life of the man. He was a voracious reader, a prolific writer, a passionate entomologist, and a thinker given to mystical speculation who also suffered occasionally from depression. As a result, these journals are filled with notes on reading that record his subjective responses to French, Russian, English, and American writers, both classical and contemporary. They chronicle his musings and his intellectual growth—and closely related—his avid book collecting activity among the antiquarian booksellers of Paris. As he reads, he frequently takes issue with the thought processes of the writers who fascinate him. These often stimulate his personal brand of mysticism regarding the nature of the cosmos and the relationship of man to God. After finishing his first reading of the Bible, he begins again, this time consulting scholarly commentary to explicate the texts. These traditions reinforce his own piety and encourage mystical and mythically tinged speculation about history, linguistics, and science. In fact, this restless and deeply irrational aspect of Jünger’s mind conflicts with his scientific training to the extent that piety ultimately motivates a skeptical rejection of Darwin that sounds quaint today.
Science, however, is always central to Jünger’s activity and world view. In 1923 he began to study zoology and philosophy in Leipzig, and although he abandoned his studies to concentrate on writing, his life-long passion for insects—especially collecting beetles—never waned. These journals detail how his curiosity about nature provides both a respite from human company and a glimpse of creation in a microcosm. Jünger’s aesthetic appreciation of nature—for example, the exhilaration he finds in the rich iridescence of a dung beetle’s carapace—is essentially the same reflexive aesthetic he records at the sight of a bomber squadron at sunset. His next stage of reflective thought, however, quickly juxtaposes the first impression with the reality of mechanized death.
The literary style of these journals—particularly of this translation—requires a few remarks. Readers of Jünger sometimes become impatient when they perceive a putative coldness, apparent distance, or lack of emotional engagement with people and events. This objective detachment in his style correlates with the principles of the man himself. The cool, sometime impersonal tone of many journal entries are devices to maintain the rhetorical defenses of a military man trained to endure hardship with stoic discipline and respond to the world with strict categories. Such training can color many facets of life, not just those moments that demand endurance. Jünger’s laconic notations may strike some readers as callous in situations when sentiment might seem more fitting. Yet Jünger preferred not to commit too much sentiment to his journal, which he conceived as a manuscript for public consumption and not as a therapeutic exercise. We hear in his style the attempt to maintain an authoritative literary voice that is personal and dynamic but seldom genuinely confessional. This deliberate pose can be corroborated in another work, specifically by tracing the stylistic redactions Jünger made over the course of the several editions of Storm of Steel, his World War I narrative. He drastically edited the style of that memoir by toning down or removing indications of his youthful, subjective voice. Something similar happens to the compositional process of these wartime journals. He states candidly that he does not necessarily consider the first draft of any memoir to be the most authentic and admits that he has edited, expanded, and redacted this material over time.
One stylistic trait that helps to create Jünger’s remote narrative voice is his frequent use in German of the impersonal pronoun man. English can translate this as “one,” e.g., “One can see from the example….” Jünger’s style thus often has a generalized impartiality that could be avoided by using the first-person pronouns I or we (which he used less frequently). An English translation that respects this feature in every case produces a stilted, awkward manner alien to English readers. As a result, we have adopted the tendency followed by other English translators of Jünger and in places chosen more colloquial English pronouns in order to create an idiomatic and readable English text appropriate to journal writing. To be sure, this may at times produce expressions like “You can see this when you examine….” instead of “One can see this when one examines….” Similarly: “I feel a sense of disbelief,” rather than, “One feels a sense of disbelief.”
Counter examples abound in these journals that contradict the charge of emotional detachment. Passages show the writer—the man—expressing deep filial piety, familial devotion, love and affection toward women, delight in nature, pervasive melancholy, despair at the destruction of his culture by war, empathy for victims, or outrage at the cruelty perpetrated by the National Socialist regime. Especially moving are those journal entries during the weeks made after the death of his son, Ernstel, who is killed in action in November 1944.
Many of Jünger’s conventions are familiar from journal-writing style. For example, he omits pronouns to produce a shorthand entry like, “Was in the city yesterday.” Furthermore, his entries frequently do not separate the world of real experience from that of dreams. His dream journal is thus sometimes integrated into the narrative of the day and given the same weight as the account of waking activity, with the result that a paragraph about familiar routines might shift without warning to a setting of classical ruins teeming with snakes.
The journals use distinctly different levels of style for different subject matter. Jünger’s appreciation of natural beauty can border on the lyrical, while descriptions of military or daily routines can have the crisp concision of objective reportage. When he speculates on mystical themes, however, his vocabulary frequently uses neologisms—or employs familiar vocabulary in personal and metaphorical ways—to create allusions to arcane or imagined reality. Furthermore, his command of French often permeates his native German and introduces concepts that depart from traditional German vocabulary. This translation renders idiosyncratic inventions with more familiar terms to enhance clarity.
Occasional footnotes have been added to explain particular historical references or unfamiliar linguistic features. The index of personal names (as well as nicknames and pseudonyms) will be helpful in establishing identities of persons mentioned. Brief explanations of possibly obscure concepts, foreign words and phrases, as well as translations are inserted in brackets in the text. Dates of historical events may also be included if they clarify the context. All material within square brackets is the work of the translators, not the author.
We wish to express our gratitude to Ms. Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press for her perseverance in undertaking this ambitious project, as well as to professors Barry Lydgate, Randall Colaizzi, and Jens Kruse for their advice on aspects of French, Latin, and German passages respectively.
Mr. Tobias Wimbauer of Hagen, Germany, whose knowledge and appreciation of Ernst Jünger and his works is as deep as it is wide, deserves special mention for his support and suggestions. He helped clarify many a puzzle.
1
FIRST PARIS JOURNAL
1941
Arrived before dawn at the railroad freight yard in Avesnes, where I was jolted out of a deep sleep. This made me aware of a beautiful dream: I was both a child and a grown man traveling along my old route to school from Wunstorf to Rehburg, a trip we always took by narrow-gauge railroad. I got out in Winzlar and followed the tracks on foot. It was night, for in the area around my father’s house I could see shots being fired, high and bright, through the darkness. But at the same time, it was also day, and to my left the fields were bathed in sunshine. One of them was covered with green seedlings, and I could see my mother waiting there, a magnificent young woman. I sat down beside her, and when I got tired, she picked up the edge of the field like a green blanket and pulled it over us.