A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945

Ernst Jünger

Published by Columbia University Press 2018

A German Officer in Occupied Paris

The War Journals, 1941-1945

Ernst Jünger
Translated by: Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen
Preface by: Elliot Neaman

In the series European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

https://doi.org/10.7312/jung12740

Overview
Contents

About this book

Ernst Jünger, one of twentieth-century Germany’s most important and controversial writers, faithfully kept a journal during the Second World War in occupied Paris, on the eastern front, and in Germany until its defeat—writings that are of major historical and literary significance. These wartime journals appear here in English for the first time.

Author / Editor information

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was a major figure in twentieth-century German literature and intellectual life. He was a young leader of right-wing nationalism in the Weimar Republic. Among his many works is the novel On the Marble Cliffs, a symbolic criticism of totalitarianism written under the Third Reich.

Elliot Neaman is professor of history at the University of San Francisco and the author of A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (1999).

Thomas Hansen, a longtime member of the Wellesley College German Department, is a translator from the German.

Abby Hansen is a translator of German literary and nonfiction texts.

Reviews

Bruce Chatwin, New York Review of Books (review of French edition):
Once read, these [journals] are never forgotten. 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.

Through these journals, we see Jünger consorting with resistors and collaborators, intellectuals and artists, drinking champagne, dining in sumptuous restaurants, and accompanying other officers to nightclubs, where naked women perform. Wandering around the city, he combs through antiquarian bookshops, stops in at galleries, discusses literature with friends, and acutely observes plants and flowers change with the seasons. He recounts in detail his dreams, nightmares, and musings on war. . . . A unique historical testimony.

Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, and senior fellow, Hoover Institution:
Ernst Jünger’s record of German-occupied Paris and the battlefields of the Caucasus is a treasure trove for readers interested in the history of the Second World War. Even more, though, it is a literary accomplishment of the first order, a document of European modernism, in which this master stylist leaves traces of the violence of the age between the lines of his crystalline prose.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
FOREWORD Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE Publicly Available Download PDF	xxvii
1. FIRST PARIS JOURNAL Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. NOTES FROM TH E CAUCASUS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
3. SECOND PARIS JOURNAL Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
4. KIRCHHORST DIARIES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	341
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	405
GLOSSARY OF PROPER NAMES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	423
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	443

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;General/trade;

eBook

Published: January 14, 2019
ISBN: 9780231548380