What Am I Doing Here? (36 page)

But that day will not bring back the things we loved: the high, clear days and the blue icecaps on the mountains; the lines of white poplars fluttering in the wind, and the long white prayer-flags; the fields of asphodels that followed the tulips; or the fat-tailed sheep brindling the hills above Chakcharan, and the ram with a tail so big they had to strap it to a cart. We shall not lie on our backs at the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We will not read Babur's memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way around the rose bushes. Or sit in the Peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh. We will not stand on the Buddha's head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry-dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes - the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow-melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields, the sweet, resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or the whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet.

 

Diaries
,
Volumes I-III
by Ernst Jünger (Christian Bourgois, 1981)

 

 

 

 

 

O
n 18 June 1940, Mr Churchill ended his speech to the Commons with the words ‘This was their finest hour!' and, that evening, a very different character, in the grey officer's uniform of the
Wehrmacht,
sat in the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld's study at the Château de Montmirail. Her uninvited guest was a short, athletic man of forty-five, with a mouth set in an expression of self-esteem and eyes a particularly arctic shade of blue. He leafed through her books with the assured touch of the bibliomane and noted that many bore the dedications of famous writers. A letter slipped from one and fell to the floor – a delightful letter written by a boy called François who wanted to be a pilot. He wondered if the boy was now a pilot. Finally, after dark, he settled down to write his diary. It was a long entry – almost two thousand words – for his day, too, had been eventful.

In the morning, he had discussed the risks of getting burned alive with a tank driver in oil-soaked denims: ‘I had the impression that Vulcan and his “ethic of work” was incarnate in such martial figures.' After luncheon, he had stood in the school playground and watched a column of ten thousand French and Belgian prisoners file past: ‘ . . . an image of the dark wave of Destiny herself . . . an interesting and instructive spectacle – in which one sensed the ‘mechanical, irresistible allure peculiar to catastrophes'. He had chucked them cans of beef and biscuits and watched their struggles from behind an iron grille; the sight of their hands was especially disturbing.

Next, he had spotted a group of officers with decorations from the Great War, and invited them to dine. They were on the verge of collapse, but a good dinner seemed like a reversal of their fortunes. Could he explain, they asked, the reasons for their defeat? ‘I said I considered it the Triumph of the Worker, but I do not think they understood the sense of my reply. What could they know of the years we have passed through since 1918? Of the lessons we have learned as if in a blast furnace?'

 

The absent duchess had reason to thank the man who nosed in her private affairs. Captain Ernst Jünger was, at that moment, the most celebrated German writer in uniform. No catastrophe could surprise him since for twenty years his work had harped on the philosophical need to accept death and total warfare as the everyday experience of the twentieth century. Yet he tempered his assent to destruction with an antiquarian's reverence for bricks and mortar, and had saved the château.

Indeed, he had saved a lot of things in the blitzkrieg. A week earlier, he had saved the Cathedral of Laon from looters. He had saved the city's library with its manuscripts of the Carolingian kings. And he had employed an out-of-work wine waiter to inspect some private cellars and save some good bottles for himself. Bombs, it was true, had fallen in the La Rochefoucaulds' park. A pavilion had burned out, leaving in one window a fragment of glass that ‘reproduced exactly the head of Queen Victoria'. Otherwise, after a bit of tidying up, the place was just as its owners had left it. Moreover, Captain Jünger had other reasons for feeling pleased with himself.

‘
The Maxims
[of La Rochefoucauld] have long been my favourite bedside reading. It was an act of spiritual gratitude to save what could be saved. For properties of such value, the essential is to protect them during the critical days.'

Easier said than done! ‘The route of the invasion is strewn with bottles, champagne, claret, burgundy. I counted at least one for every step, to say nothing of the camps where one could say it had rained bottles. Such orgies are in the true tradition of our campaigns in France. Every invasion by a German army is accompanied by drinking bouts like those of the gods in the
Edda
.'

A junior officer remarked how strange it was that the looting soldiers destroyed musical instruments first: ‘It showed me in a symbolic fashion how Mars is contrary to the Muses . . . and then I recalled the large painting by Rubens illustrating the same theme . . . ' How strange, too, that they left the mirrors intact! The officer thought this was because the men wanted to shave – but Jünger thought there might be other reasons.

 

 

These diaries – three volumes of them – have recently reappeared in France, where the translation of Jünger's work is a minor literary industry. To English-speaking readers, however, he is known by two books -
Storm of Steel
(1920), a relentless glorification of modern warfare, and
On The Marble Cliffs
, his allegorical, anti-Nazi capriccio of 1939 that describes an assassination attempt on a tyrant and appears, in retrospect, to be a prophecy of the von Stauffenberg bomb. plot of 1944.

Yet Jünger's partisans – more French perhaps than German – claim for him the status of ‘great writer', a thinker of Goethean wisdom, whose political leanings toward the extreme right have robbed him of the recognition he deserves. Certainly, the scale of his erudition is titanic: his singularity of purpose is unswerving, and even at eighty-five he continues to elaborate on the themes that have held his attention for over sixty years. He is – or has been - soldier, aesthete, novelist, essayist, the ideologue of an authoritarian political party, and a trained taxonomic botanist. His lifelong hobby has been the study of entomology: indeed, what the butterfly was to Nabokov, the beetle is to Jünger – especially the armourplated beetle. He is also the connoisseur of hallucinogens who took a number of ‘trips' with his friend Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of lysergic acid.
⁵

He writes a hard, lucid prose. Much of it leaves the reader with an impression of the author's imperturbable self-regard, of dandyism, of cold-bloodedness, and, finally, of banality. Yet the least promising passages will suddenly light up with flashes of aphoristic brilliance, and the most harrowing descriptions are alleviated by a yearning for human values in a dehumanised world. The diary is the perfect form for a man who combines such acute powers of observation with an anaesthetised sensibility.

 

He was born in 1895, the son of a pharmacist from Hanover. By 1911, bored by the conventional world of his parents, he joined the Wandervogel Movement and so became acquainted with the values of Open Air, Nature, Blood, Soil, and Fatherland: already he was the expert beetle-hunter who spent many happy hours with his killing bottle. Two years later, he ran away to the Sahara and joined the Foreign Legion, only to be brought back by his father. In 1914, on the first day of war, he enlisted in the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers and emerged in 1918, ‘punctured in twenty places', with the highest military decoration, the
Croix pour le Mérite
, an enlarged sense of personal grandeur, and in possession of a meticulous diary that recorded the horrific beauty of trench warfare and the reckless gaiety of men under fire. The Fall of Germany was thus the making of Jünger.

Storm of Steel
made him the hero of a generation of young officers who had given all and ended up, if lucky, with the Iron Cross. Gide praised it as the finest piece of writing to come out of the war. Certainly, it is quite unlike anything of its time – none of the pastoral musings of Siegfried Sassoon or Edmund Blunden, no whiffs of cowardice as in Hemingway, none of the masochism of T.E. Lawrence, or the compassion of Remarque. Instead, Jünger parades his belief in Man's ‘elementary' instinct to kill other men – a game which, if played correctly, must conform to a chivalric set of rules. (In a later essay, ‘Battle as Inner Experience', he sets forth his views on the innate gratifications of hand-to-hand fighting.) Finally, you end up with a picture of the war as a grim, but gentlemanly, shooting party. ‘What a bag!' he exclaims when they capture 150 prisoners. Or: ‘Caught between two fires, the English tried to escape across the open and were gunned down like game at a
battue
.' And how strange it was to gaze into the eyes of the young Englishman you'd shot down five minutes before!

Even in his early twenties, Jünger presents himself as an aesthete at the centre of a tornado, quoting Stendhal, that the art of civilisation consists in ‘combining the most delicate pleasures . . . with the frequent presence of danger'. At Combles, for example, he finds an untenanted house ‘where a lover of beautiful things must have lived'; and though half the house gets blown to bits, he goes on reading in an armchair until interrupted by a violent blow on his calf: ‘There was a ragged hole in my puttees from which blood streamed to the floor. On the other side was the circular swelling of a piece of shrapnel under the skin.' No one but a man of Jünger's composure could describe the appearance of a bullet hole through his chest as if he were describing his nipple.

 

After the war, he took up botany, entomology, and marine biology, first at Leipzig, then in Naples. Like so many others of his generation, he was saturated by the garbled form of Darwinism as doctored for nationalist purposes. Yet he was too intelligent to fall for the cruder versions of the theory that led members of the German scientific establishment to condone the slaughter of Gypsies and Jews - recognising, as he did, that any theory is also the autobiography of the theorist and can but reflect an ‘infinitesimal part of the whole'. His pleasures in biology tended toward the Linnaean classification of species – aesthetic pleasures that offered him a glimpse of the Primordial Paradise as yet untainted by Man. Moreover, the insect world, where instincts govern behaviour as a key fits a lock, had an irresistible attraction to a man of his utopian vision.

By 1927, he was back in Berlin where his friends were a mixed bag that included Kubin, Dr Goebbels, Bertolt Brecht, and Ernst Toller. He became a founding member of the National Bolshevist Caucus – a zealous, extremist political party that flourished for a while in late Weimar, negligible in its effect on history, though not without interesting theoretical implications. These so-called ‘Prussian Communists' hated capitalism, hated the bourgeois West, and hoped to graft the methods of Bolshevism onto the chivalric ideals of the Junkers. Their leader, Ernst Niekisch, visualised an alliance of workers and soldier-aristocrats who would abolish the middle classes. Jünger himself was the ideologue of the movement and, in 1932, published a book that was to have been its manifesto.

The Worker
(
Der Arbeiter
) is a vaguely formulated machine-age utopia whose citizens are required to commit themselves to a ‘total mobilization' (the origin of the term is Jünger's) in the undefined interests of the State. The Worker, as Jünger understands him, is a technocrat. His business, ultimately, is war. His freedom – or rather, his sense of inner freedom – is supposed to correspond to the scale of his productivity. The aim is world government - by force.

Not surprisingly, the movement petered out. Niekisch was later arrested by the Gestapo and was murdered, in 1945, in jail. As for Jünger, his war record gave him a certain immunity from the Nazis and he retreated into a private, almost eremitic, life of scientific contemplation and
belles lettres.
Though he deplored Hitler as a vulgar technician who had misunderstood the metaphysics of power, he did nothing to try to stop him, believing anyway that democracy was dead and the destiny of machine-age man was essentially tragic: ‘The history of civilization is the gradual replacement of men by things.' Yet, again and again, he insists that the wars of the twentieth century are popular wars – wars, that is, of the People, of the
canaille
, and not of the professional soldier. From his viewpoint, albeit an oblique one, National Socialism was a phenomenon of the left.

 

Throughout the middle Thirties, Jünger wrote essays, travelled to the tropics, and kept a cold eye on the Fatherland. By 1938, at the time of the Generals' Plot, he seems to have flirted with resistance to Hitler, and one night at his house at Ueberlingen, near Lake Constance, he met a young, patriotic aristocrat, Heinrich von Trott zu Solz (whose elder brother, Adam, was the ex-Rhodes scholar and friend of England who would be hanged for his part in the von Stauffenberg plot of July 1944
⁶
). What passed between them, Jünger does not relate. What is certain is that the visit gave him the idea for a story.

On the Marble Cliffs
is an allegorical tale, written in a frozen, humourless, yet brilliantly coloured style that owes something to the nineteenth-century Decadents and something to the Scandinavian sagas. The result is a prose equivalent of an art nouveau object in glass, and the plot is much less silly than it sounds in precis: