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A review by dkevanstoronto
A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Jünger
5.0
A German Officer in Occupied Paris by Ernest Junger, is not a pleasant book to read despite all the wonderful art and philosophy.. However I highly suggest anyone who wants to understand the war and what brilliance German intellectual culture was before the war to read this book. It is a classic by one of the foremost intellectuals in Europe, but it presents a moral challenge that no one will find easy to come to terms with.
Germany between the 30 Years War (1618-1648) and the Second World War (1939-1945) had the ideal and mythos of being a land of Poets and Philosophers (das Land der Dichter und Denker). This tradition never went away but it was diminished in the shadow of the horrific and brutal Nazi regime that lasted a mere twelve years and made the world unrecognizable with brutalities that rival or exceed the worst that history has to offer. That regime and its brutal love of death conjured into existence a world very different from what came before, and has made our cultural understanding of Germany distorted.
This book will help you see how that transition and eclipse came from the depths of hell with atrocities that can never be forgotten. It does this by being the journals of one of the most erudite, philosophical and astute thinkers and cultural commentators in German that you will ever read. Ernest Junger describes his life as an officer in Occupied Paris who was transferred to the Russian front before being transferred back to Paris.
Here the devastation is laid bare, you can't deny the holocaust and war of extermination that was the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Junger gives full account of what happens. However in all of this mass homicidal madness Junger somehow floats above this. He is a man of high culture, sensibilities and taste who has his days filled with thoughts of high art and philosophy and his nights full of nightmares where the moral judgment is all too clear. Junger survives with his sanity by knowing full well to stop thinking of the high ideals of life, art and the moral certainties of religious faith is fatal. To dwell too precisely on what is happening he would succumb in a moment; broken by the devastation moral and physical all around him.
As the artist Coteau said of Junger, "some hands were dirty with atrocities, some had clean hands, but Junger had no hands at all". One is reminded of Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno Canto III):
"Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.
The heavens expelled them, but hell will not take them.
Even the damn souls in hell glory over them"
Germany between the 30 Years War (1618-1648) and the Second World War (1939-1945) had the ideal and mythos of being a land of Poets and Philosophers (das Land der Dichter und Denker). This tradition never went away but it was diminished in the shadow of the horrific and brutal Nazi regime that lasted a mere twelve years and made the world unrecognizable with brutalities that rival or exceed the worst that history has to offer. That regime and its brutal love of death conjured into existence a world very different from what came before, and has made our cultural understanding of Germany distorted.
This book will help you see how that transition and eclipse came from the depths of hell with atrocities that can never be forgotten. It does this by being the journals of one of the most erudite, philosophical and astute thinkers and cultural commentators in German that you will ever read. Ernest Junger describes his life as an officer in Occupied Paris who was transferred to the Russian front before being transferred back to Paris.
Here the devastation is laid bare, you can't deny the holocaust and war of extermination that was the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Junger gives full account of what happens. However in all of this mass homicidal madness Junger somehow floats above this. He is a man of high culture, sensibilities and taste who has his days filled with thoughts of high art and philosophy and his nights full of nightmares where the moral judgment is all too clear. Junger survives with his sanity by knowing full well to stop thinking of the high ideals of life, art and the moral certainties of religious faith is fatal. To dwell too precisely on what is happening he would succumb in a moment; broken by the devastation moral and physical all around him.
As the artist Coteau said of Junger, "some hands were dirty with atrocities, some had clean hands, but Junger had no hands at all". One is reminded of Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno Canto III):
"Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.
The heavens expelled them, but hell will not take them.
Even the damn souls in hell glory over them"