What Am I Doing Here? (37 page)

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:

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:

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?'

 

But Paris is not all holiday. Shortly after his arrival, Captain Jünger is ordered to the Bois de Boulogne to supervise the execution of a German deserter, who has been sheltered by a Frenchwoman for nine months. He has trafficked on the black market. He has made his mistress jealous, even beaten her, and she has reported him to the police. At first, Jünger thinks he will feign illness, but then thinks better of it: ‘I have to confess it was the spirit of higher curiosity that induced me to accept.' He has seen many people die, but never one who knew it in advance. How does it affect one?

There follows one of the nastiest passages in the literature of war – a firing squad painted in the manner of early Monet: the clearing in the wood, the spring foliage glistening after rain, the trunk of the ash tree riddled with the bullet holes of earlier executions. There are two groups of holes, one for the head and one for the heart, and inside the holes a few black meat flies are sleeping. Then the arrival - two military vehicles, the victim, guards, grave diggers, medical officer and pastor, also a cheap white wood coffin. The face is agreeable, attractive to women; the eyes wide, fixed, avid ‘as if his whole body were suspended from them'; and in his expression something flourishing and childlike. He wears expensive grey trousers and a grey silk shirt. A fly crawls over his left cheek, then sits on his ear. Does he want an eye band? Yes. A crucifix? Yes. The medical officer pins a red card over his heart, the size of a playing card. The soldiers stand in line; the salvo; five small black holes appear on the card like drops of rain; the twitching; the pallor; the guard who wipes the handcuffs with a chiffon handkerchief. And what about the fly that danced in a shaft of sunlight?