The Devil's Captain

Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944

Allan Mitchell

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857451156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Französische Geschichte

Author of Nazi Paris, a Choice Academic Book of the Year, Allan Mitchell has researched a companion volume concerning the acclaimed and controversial German author Ernst Jünger who, if not the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, certainly was the most controversial. His service as a military officer during the occupation of Paris, where his principal duty was to mingle with French intellectuals such as Jean Cocteau and with visiting German celebrities like Martin Heidegger, was at the center of disputes concerning his career. Spending more than three years in the French capital, he regularly recorded in a journal revealing impressions of Parisian life and also managed to establish various meaningful social contacts, with the intriguing Sophie Ravoux for one. By focusing on this episode, the most important of Jünger's adult life, the author brings to bear a wide reading of journals and correspondence to reveal Jünger's professional and personal experience in wartime and thereafter. This new perspective on the war years adds significantly to our understanding of France's darkest hour.

Chapter 1

THE LONER

Einzelgänger. Not only does the German term for a loner have a more syncopated phonetic rhythm, it also has a distinctly different implication. We think of the English expression as describing a person who spends much time alone and who generally prefers to be alone. Yet that interpretation would hardly include Ernst Jünger, who was very much a man of this world, one who manifestly sought and often enjoyed the company of others. At the same time, as the German word literally suggests, he was an individual who habitually chose to go his own way. This independent streak was in fact quite evident even in his childhood, and it became all the more pronounced as he grew to maturity. As a boy he became a compulsive solitary collector of various things—stones, roots, beetles, insects, butterflies, and so forth—a personality trait still apparent as a grown man in his reading and writing, which retained an idiosyncratic character. In that sense he remained not a joiner but a loner.

Born in Heidelberg on 29 March 1895, Jünger moved with his family before the century’s end to Hanover, a middling north-German city around which his life would thereafter revolve. His early education was conspicuously marked by constant movement and indifferent performance. By 1907 he had already attended eight different schools and acquired the reputation of a moody and rebellious pupil. Let it be said that Jünger was by no means the only schoolboy of the Wilhelmine era to suffer under the repressive academic regime of that time, well portrayed in Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat and famously adapted for the film Der blaue Engel. But Jünger’s case seemed to be extreme, and one of his biographers has qualified this early experience as simply “catastrophic.”¹ Judging from later references in his journals, the curriculum to which he was exposed consisted of one long course in great books, notably works by Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Cooper, Mark Twain, and of course Karl May, plus the currently fashionable philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. How much a disaffected teenager like Jünger actually absorbed from this widely dispersed reading, however, must remain an open question.²

Understandably, then, to break away from these unsatisfactory circumstances became for Jünger a strong motivation. More to his liking than the classroom, where he often dozed and daydreamed, was his simultaneous stint in the Wandervogel, a kind of loose woodsy Boy Scout organization that attracted the youth of prewar Germany to hiking and camping. Another significant venture, as it turned out, was Jünger’s brief participation in 1909 with a student exchange program in France, where he spent a week in a village between Maubeuge and St.-Quentin, not far from the Belgian border, south of Brussels. There, for the first time, he was exposed to the French language, which was to become one of his major preoccupations as an adult. Meanwhile, he passed on listlessly into an Oberrealschule near Hanover, where he read a smattering of standard German literature (Goethe, Schiller, Lessing) and gained a superficial acquaintance with classical authors (Herodotus, Homer, Tacitus). It is important to keep in view that, all in all, Ernst Jünger acquired only a spotty and undistinguished formal education that left him with no systematic grounding in any intellectual discipline.³

The most bizarre episode of Jünger’s formative years was unquestionably his flight in 1913, at age seventeen, to join the French Foreign Legion. He departed clandestinely from Hanover to Marseille and then shipped out to Algeria armed only with his broken French. No sooner was he forced to submit to the orders of the Legion’s officer corps (many of whom were German) than he decided to flee onward to Morocco, where he was immediately captured and imprisoned. Fortunately, his father had useful connections and was soon able to free the terrified boy and return him to Germany, all of which took less than two months and landed Jünger back in school—though not for long. A few months later the Kaiserreich entered the First World War. Jünger promptly enlisted in a local infantry unit, about which he later wrote: “No enthusiasm was so deep and powerful as on that day.”⁴ Just before leaving for active duty, during his three months of basic training, he was allowed to pass a premature examination for the Abitur (normally still a year off for him), the traditional baccalaureate degree ending secondary schooling and providing admission to a university. This wartime improvisation, when he was not yet twenty years old, remained his highest academic achievement—unless one counts a number of honorary titles and prizes awarded him at a senior age.

Jünger was at first stationed in Lorraine near the Aisne-Marne Canal, north of the roadway leading from Reims to Verdun. Like all soldiers on both sides of the conflict, he discovered a war not of movement but of mud. Held somewhat back of the front lines, without encountering a single French combatant, he initially bided his time reading, writing, target shooting, and whoring (about which he was always discreet in his journals). After a seven-week course of officer training, he was assigned to a reserve unit in northwestern France between Arras and Cambrai, an area where he spent most of the war. Although still not yet engaged in heavy combat, he did see death and received his first wound from enemy shrapnel in April 1915, causing a brief debilitating nervous collapse. Recovered, he became a squadron commander (Fähnrich), and then in November he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.⁵

For the next seven months Jünger led a rather idyllic existence behind the front, dining in local restaurants, drinking quantities of Burgundy wine, and courting a French girl named Jeanne Sandemont. After his earlier escapade on a school exchange and his aborted tour with the Foreign Legion, this was his third direct experience with France and the French language. Jeanne proved to be an apt and willing teacher, so that we may date from this period Jünger’s passable proficiency as a French speaker. Another activity requires attention. At this time he also began to make regular entries in a notebook to which he confided his personal adventures of wartime, faintly imagining himself as a sort of modern Ulysses, thanks to his recollections of the Iliad, read at school. The eventual outcome was an account entitled In Stahlgewittern, which would become his first and perhaps most fully realized literary work, to be published right after the war.⁶

The year 1916 brought the Battle of the Somme, the end of his dalliance with Jeanne, and his initiation to sustained frontline military action. Twice more wounded, he was awarded the Iron Cross second-class and shortly thereafter the Iron Cross first-class, before becoming a company commander—not bad for a lad of twenty-one. After a brief tour back in Lorraine, he returned to Flanders fields, where he sustained four more wounds. The last of these was most serious, a shot to the lung. Thereupon he was given the highest possible military award in the Prussian army, Pour le Mérite, which became not only his greatest pride, but, as it proved, his surest protection in later life. Let it be noted that during spells of convalescence, under various circumstances, Jünger developed into a prodigious reader, devouring whatever books and other publications happened to fall into his hands. This autodidactic exercise was likewise characteristic of his second passion, collecting insects and beetles that he randomly found while scouring French gardens and woods.⁷

Withal, these events during the war unquestionably constituted for Ernst Jünger the most overwhelming experience of his life. In later years he returned again and again to the earlier forays in combat, and his record of them expressed his best and most basic talent. His later journals, including those portraying his long stay in occupied Paris from 1941 to 1944, thus represented a methodological extension and amplification of his earlier testimony concerning the First World War.⁸

The end of that conflict was of course an inglorious chapter in the history of modern Germany. Still suffering from his lung wound, Ernst Jünger played no notable part in those events, spending much of the war’s final months on furlough near Hanover. He could muster no enthusiasm for the revolution of 1918 that sent the Kaiser packing to Holland. Neither could he regret Wilhelm’s disappearance, which seemed inevitable. There is no need here to review in detail the postwar working (and later reworking) of In Stahlgewittern, except to list three features of it that obviously foreshadowed his future journals. First, Jünger always stands front and center. His recitation is intensely personal in describing the struggles of a courageous young officer at the front. Appropriately, the several editions of this book generally displayed a photo of Jünger wearing a military trench coat unfolded in such a way as to expose his Pour le Mérite and the other medals. Second, while the emphasis is on his personal experience as a soldier (there is nothing of grand strategy), Jünger does not neglect to offer occasional philosophical speculations about the larger meaning of the war. Both in style and substance these were certainly influenced by Nietzsche, but even more conspicuously by Oswald Spengler, whose Untergang des Abendlandes appeared just as combat came to a close. To a much lesser extent one may find some faint traces of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, who served merely to reinforce a theme of European decadence. Throughout, Jünger’s more abstract thoughts had a residue of deep pessimism about a society condemned to pass through fire and despair. Third, as Jünger saw it, the most egregious trait of this unavoidable transition was a mechanization of public life that threatened to eclipse the human element. The age of chivalry is gone, he believed, replaced by trends evident in the evolving nature of warfare—heavy artillery, automatic weapons, tanks, airplanes—and the machine is sure to dominate the world of tomorrow.⁹

These dark thoughts were offset to some extent in 1922, shortly after the publication of In Stahlgewittern, when Jünger met Gretha von Jeinsen, a teenager more than ten years his junior, and they suddenly fell in love. Their prolonged courtship and subsequent marriage in 1925 probably determined a number of changes in his personal life. He considerably toned down his excessive smoking, drinking, and experiments with drugs. He also gave up the hyperactive sexual activities that had come so easily to a handsome young decorated officer in the Reichswehr. Moreover, he soon abandoned his military career altogether, presumably for good, in order to take up the semi-bohemian existence of a writer. Thus, during the interlude of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Jünger began to emerge as a man.¹⁰ We may add a speculative footnote. In his journals Jünger invariably referred to his wife as “Perpetua,” undoubtedly thereby emphasizing her steadfastness as his beloved partner. What he may not have known, since he was not raised as a Roman Catholic, is that this term was commonly applied in monasteries and parish residences to women who performed household chores, sewing, and cooking for priests. Perhaps more than Jünger realized, living in a domestic relationship with more affection than passion, his nickname for Gretha was well chosen.¹¹

In the meantime, often at loose ends in his public life, Jünger experienced the years of the Weimar Republic as something of a blur. Like most Germans, he reacted with indignation to the Versailles Treaty, perceiving it as “devastating,” and it remained an object of his deep resentment.¹² At the time of the infamous Kapp Putsch in 1920 he was ailing with influenza and took no part. In Berlin he was first attached to the Ministry of War but was bored with the bureaucracy and, as noted, soon resigned from the Reichswehr. The first attempt to convert his wartime experiences into literary fiction resulted in a short, mediocre autobiographical novel, Sturm, about a young officer at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.¹³ Discouraged, he moved to Leipzig and enrolled at the university there as a student of biology. As usual, however, he found no focus and frittered his time away, accurately describing himself as an academic “parasite.”¹⁴ Two months in Naples, ostensibly to study marine biology, were spent mostly visiting tourist sites. He did continue to read widely and began to dabble in political journalism, even submitting an essay about “national revolution” that was published in the Nazi Party’s main press organ, the Völkischer Beobachter. Finally, just before 1933, he completed a curious volume entitled Der Arbeiter, which had little or no affinity with Karl Marx aside from an express wish to be rid of bourgeois society. Rather than a proletarian, Jünger’s “worker” was a kind of Nietzschean superman caught in a Spenglerian scenario of inevitable collapse. Yet in this pessimistic blend of nationalism and socialism there remained a faint odor of optimism about the outcome. Jünger persisted in seeking some new order that would eventually replace the humdrum republic in which he was living.¹⁵

After his marriage Jünger returned briefly to Berlin in 1927 with his wife and newborn son, but again he became restless. He took flying lessons, made a quick trip to Paris (where he recorded only a few solemn moments spent at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), cultivated some marginal political figures like Ernst Niekisch and Ernst von Salomon, and published a batch of miscellaneous essays—on flowers, fruits, fishes, animals, crystals, books, dreams, etc.—which he entitled Das abenteuerliche Herz.¹⁶ At the least, this volume demonstrated that Jünger could write about something besides war. Meanwhile, he enjoyed a minor literary reputation by the success of In Stahlgewittern, which was later translated into English (Storm of Steel), as well as Spanish and French. When asked, he typically proclaimed his work to be “part of Germany’s moral and intellectual armament for the next war.”¹⁷

Doubtless, the likelihood of a future armed conflict was considerably enhanced by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Although he found no reason to lament the departed republican regime, Jünger was hardly tempted to join Hitler’s victorious movement and instead adopted his customary stance of individualism. As he put it himself: “Thus I provisionally take up the position of an outsider.”¹⁸ The only blemish in that statement was the adverb. In truth, there was nothing provisional about his unwillingness to support a dominant political program. Rather, ever the loner, he kept his distance from Nazism—a complex issue that will later require further examination. Did he, then, as some have suggested, undergo an “inner emigration” in the 1930s? Surely this term is inappropriate here, since it implies that Jünger silently and secretly displaced his allegiances, whereas he remained, as before, an inveterate non-participant.¹⁹ This stubborn indifference to German political organizations was reinforced by his move at the end of 1933 from Berlin to Goslar, a town where he readily adapt...