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 19446). 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:
Two men – the narrator and Brother Otho (not to be distinguished from Jünger himself and his own brother, the poet Friedrich Georg) are aesthetes, scientists, and soldiers who have retired from war to a remote cliffside hermitage, where they work on a Linnaean classification of the region’s flora, and harbour a lot of pet snakes. Far below lies the Grand Marina, a limpid lake surrounded by the farms, the vineyards, and cities of a venerable civilisation. To the north there stretches an expanse of steppe-land where pastoral nomads drive their herds. Beyond that are the black forests of Mauritania, the sinister realm of the Chief Ranger (Oberförster) with his pack of bloodhounds and gang of disciplined freebooters in whose ranks the brothers once served.
The Oberförster is planning to destroy the Grand Marina:He was one of those figures whom the Mauritanians respect as great lords and yet find somewhat ridiculous – rather as an old colonel is received in the regiment on occasional visits from his estates. He left an imprint on one’s mind if only because his green coat with its goldembroidered ilexes drew all eyes to him . . . (His own eyes), like those of hardened drinkers, were touched with a red flame, but expressed both cunning and unshakeable power – yes, at times, even majesty. Then we took pleasure in his company and lived in arrogance at the table of the great . . .
As evil spreads over the land ‘like mushroom-spawn over rotten wood’, the two brothers plunge deeper and deeper into the mystery of flowers. But on a botanical expedition to the Mauritanian forest in search of a rare red orchid, they stumble on the Oberförster’s charnel house, Köppels-Bleck, where a dwarf sings gaily as he scrapes at a flaying bench:Over the dark door on the gable end a skull was nailed fast, showing its teeth and seeming to invite entry with its grin. Like a jewel in its chain, it was the central link of a narrow gable frieze which appeared to be formed of brown spiders. Suddenly we guessed that it was fashioned of human hands. . .
The brothers’ discovery of the orchid gives them a ‘strange feeling of invulnerability’ and the strength to continue their studies. But one day, just before the Oberförster launches his attack on the Marina, they are visited by one of his henchmen, Bracquemart, and the young Prince of Sunmyra.
Bracquemart is a ‘small, dark, haggard fellow, whom we found somewhat coarse-grained but, like all Mauritanians, not without wit.’ The Prince, on the other hand, is ‘remote and absent-minded’ with an ‘air of deep suffering’ and the ‘stamp of decadence’. This pair, of course, is planning a coup d’état, which fails when the Oberförster unleashes his bloodhounds. The leader of the pack is called Chiffon Rouge, i.e. Red Flag, and, in a scene of appalling ferocity,
everyone gets mangled and killed except for the two brothers, who are saved by the miraculous intervention of their own pet lance-head vipers. Later, at Köppels-Bleck, they find the heads of the two conspirators on poles, Bracquemart having killed himself first ‘with the capsule of poison that all Mauritanians carry’. But on the ‘pale mask of the Prince from which the scalped flesh hung in ribbons . . . there played the shadow of a smile intensely sweet and joyful, and I knew then that the weaknesses had fallen from this noble man with each step of his martyrdom . . . ’ — which description can be compared to the photo of Adam von Trott, as he heard the death sentence, in the People’s Court, five years after Jünger wrote his book.7
On the Marble Cliffs sold 35,000 copies before it was suppressed early in 1940. How it slipped through the censor machine of Dr Goebbels is less of a mystery when one realises that Bracquemart was modelled on Dr Goebbels himself who was flattered and amused by it, and later alarmed by its popularity among the officer caste. Jünger himself claimed then – as now - that the fable is not specifically anti-Nazi, but ‘above all that’. And I don’t doubt that he conceived it as a contemptuous, sweeping, Spenglerian statement on the destruction of the old Mediterranean-based civilisation of Europe: the Oberförster could, at a pinch, stand for Stalin as well as Hitler.
At a meeting of the Nazi Party, Reichsleiter Boulher is supposed to have said: ‘Mein Führer, this time Jünger has gone too far!’ but Hitler calmed him down and said: ‘Let Jünger be!’ All the same, the writer’s friends advised him to get into uniform; and so by the fall of 1939 he found himself with the rank of Captain, posted to the Siegfried Line, convinced, by now, that the private journal was the only practical medium for literary expression in a totalitarian state.
In his introduction to his diaries, Jünger invokes the story of seven sailors who agreed to study astronomy on the Arctic island of St Maurice during the winter of 1633, and whose journal was found beside their bodies when the whaling ships returned the following summer. The fate of Jünger’s journal is to be that of Poe’s ‘Ms. found in a Bottle’ – arecord thrown into an uncertain future by a man who may die tomorrow, yet who cherishes his writing as a man ‘cherishes those of his children who have no chance of surviving’.
Their German title, Strahlungen, means ‘Reflections’ – in the sense that the writer collects particles of light and reflects them onto the reader. They are surely the strangest literary production to come out of the Second World War, stranger by far than anything by Céline or Malaparte. Jünger reduces his war to a sequence of hallucinatory prose poems in which things appear to breathe and people perform like automata or, at best, like insects. So when he focuses on occupied Paris, the result is like a diorama in the Entomological Department of a natural history museum.
The opening pages find Jünger in April 1939 at a new house in Kirchhorst near Hanover, putting the final touches to On the Marble Cliffs and having bad dreams about Hitler, whom he calls by the pseudonym of Kniébolo. By winter time, he is exchanging desultory fire with the French batteries across the Rhine. He saves the life of a gunner, and gets another Iron Cross. Among his reading: the Bible, Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. He sleeps in a reed hut, in a sleeping-bag lined with rose-coloured silk, and on his forty-fifth birthday a young officer brings him a bottle of wine with a bunch of violets tied round the neck.
After the invasion of France, there is a gap until April 1941 when he surfaces in Paris as ‘Officer with Special Mission attached to the Military Command’ – his job: to censor mail and sound out the intellectual and social life of the city. And he remains in Paris, with interruptions, until the Americans are at the gates.
He presents himself as the zealous Francophile. They and Germany have everything to offer each other. Indeed, everything does point to collaboration. Pétain’s armistice is still popular; anti-Semitism flourishing; and Anglophobia given an enormous boost by the sinking of the French fleet at Mersel-Kebir. There is even talk of avenging Waterloo and, when Stalin enters the war, ‘Les Anglo-Saxons travaillent pour Oncle Jo.’ Besides, Jünger’s French friends are determined the war shall cramp their style as little as possible. And how wellmannered the newcomers are! What a relief after all those years of Americans in Paris!
In the first weeks, Captain Jünger is a tourist in the city of every German soldier’s dream. He lives at the Hotel Raphäel, and goes on long walks alone. He inspects the gargoyles of Nôtre-Dame, the ‘Hellenistic’ architecture of La Madeleine (‘A church if you please!’), and notes that the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde is the colour of a champagne sorbet. With his friend General Speidel, he goes to the Marché aux Puces; idles the hours away in antiquarian bookshops, and, sometimes, goes to watch a revue of naked girls: many are the daughters of White Russian émigrés, and with one small, melancholic girl he discusses Pushkin and Aksakov’s Memoirs of Childhood.
Paris is full of strange encounters. On Bastille Day, a street-player sets aside his violin to shake his hand. He rounds up drunken soldiers from a hôtel de passe and talks to a gay, eighteen-year-old whore. On 1 May he offers lilies-of-the-valley to a young vendeuse: ‘Paris offers all manner of such meetings. You hardly have to look for them. No wonder: for she is built on an Altar of Venus.’ He takes another girl to a milliner’s, buys her a green-feathered hat ‘the size of a hummingbird’s nest’, and watches her ‘expand and glow like a soldier who has just been decorated’. Meanwhile, his wife reports from Kirchhorst the contents of her very intellectual dreams.
Then the restaurants. He gets taken to Maxim’s but takes himself to Prunier – ‘the little dining room on the first floor, fresh and smart, the colour of pale aquamarine.’ ‘We lived off lobster and oysters in those days,’ he told me — though by 1942 the average Parisian was next to starving. One night he dines at the Tour d’Argent: ‘One had the impression that the people sitting up there on high, consuming their soles and the famous duck, were looking with diabolical satisfaction, like gargoyles, over the sea of grey roofs which sheltered the hungry. In such times, to eat, and to eat well, gives one a sensation of power.’
Jünger’s entry into the higher circles of collaboration begins with a lunch on the Avenue Foch, given for Speidel by Ferdinand de Brinon, Vichy’s unofficial ambassador to the Occupant. There is a vase of startling white orchids ‘enamelled, no doubt, in the virgin forest to attract the eyes of insects’. There is Madame de Brinon, Jewish herself but sneering at the youpins (Jews). There is Arletty, whose latest film is showing in the cinemas. (After the Liberation, accused of a German lover, she will turn those eyes on the judge and murmur ‘Que je suis une femme ... ’ and get off.) But the star of the party is the playwright Sacha Guitry, who entertains them with anecdotes: of Octave Mirbeau, dying in his arms and saying: ‘Ne collaborez, jamais!’ — meaning: ‘Never write a play with someone else!’
At a lunch in Guitry’s apartment, Jünger admires the original manuscript of L‘Education sentimentale and Sarah Bernhardt’s golden salad bowl. Later he meets Cocteau and Jean Marais, ‘a plebeian Antinous’, and Cocteau tells how Proust would receive visitors in bed, wearing yellow kid gloves to stop him from biting his nails, and how the dust lay, ‘like chinchillas’, on the commodes. He meets Paul Morand, whose book on London describes the city as a colossal house: ‘If the English were to build the Pyramid, they should put this book in the chamber with the mummy.’ Madame Morand is a Rumanian aristocrat and keeps a grey stone Aztec goddess in her drawing room: they wonder how many victims have fallen at its feet. When Jünger sends her a copy of The Worker, she sends a note to his hotel: ‘For me the art of living is the art of making other people work and keeping pleasure for myself.’
Thursday is the salon of Marie-Louise Bousquet, the Paris correspondent of Harper’s Bazaar, who introduces her German guest to his French ‘collaborationist’ colleagues – Montherlant, Jouhandeau, Léautaud, and Drieu la Rochelle, the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, whose
own war book, La Comédie de Charleroi, is a tamer counterpart to Storm of Steel — Drieu who will kill himself after several attempts, in 1945, leaving a note for his maid: ‘Celeste, let me sleep this time.’ On one of these Thursdays, Jünger brings an officer friend and his hostess says: ‘With a regiment of young men like that, the Germans could have walked over France without firing a shot.’
Then there is Abel Bonnard, a travel writer and Vichy Minister of Education, who loved German soldiers and of whom Pétain said: ‘It’s scandalous to entrust the young to that tapette.’ They talk of sea voyages and paintings of shipwrecks – and Jünger, who sees in the shipwreck an image of the end of the world in miniature, is delighted when Bonnard tells of a marine artist called Gudin, who would smash ship models in his studio to get the right effect.
He visits Picasso in his studio in the rue des Grands Augustins. The master shows a series of asymmetrical heads which Jünger finds rather monstrous. He tries to lure him into a general discussion of aesthetics but Picasso refuses to be drawn: ‘There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what’s in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is colour?’
What Am I Doing Here? Page 28
