‘A German Officer in Occupied Paris’ by Ernst Jünger review

Ernst Jünger is such a significant figure in European literature, politics and culture that it is surprising – and slightly shameful – that these extraordinary diaries have had to wait so long for an English language translation. Still, better late than never.

Jünger is best known in the Anglophone world for his first and most famous book The Storm of Steel, a distillation of his experiences as a wounded and decorated front line junior officer during the First World War. Always in print, the book has long been recognised as a classic of war literature for the vivid intensity of its descriptions. It is, however, very different from other, pacifically inclined works such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On the Western Front or Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire.

For Jünger was a warrior who positively relished the savage element of modern, industrialised conflict, believing that it had tempered a new type of man. This was the theme of his voluminous writings through the 1920s and he became a hero of the Nationalist Right during the Weimar Republic, which he scornfully rejected.

Courted by the Nazis, Jünger resisted their advances with aristocratic disdain, refusing all offers to become a stooge member of their official writer’s institutes. By the outbreak of the Second World War, he was well aware of the criminal nature of the regime and wrote a prophetic allegory, On the Marble Cliffs, which foretold the coming of the Death Camps with uncanny prescience.

The novel was banned by Goebbels when it threatened to become a bestseller, but by then Jünger was back in uniform. He was stationed in occupied Paris, where he was responsible for censoring military mail.

These journals cover his years in the French capital and give us an intimately revealing picture of an exceptionally gifted and conflicted man at the heart of a world at war.

Jünger’s duties left him plenty of time to explore the cultural milieu in Paris. Because of his privileged position, he was pursued by such luminaries as the painters Picasso and Braque, the notoriously antisemitic writer Céline and the artist and filmmaker Cocteau, when he was not rummaging through the bookstalls along the Seine in search of rare first editions – bibliophilia being one of his many passions – or haunting Paris’ cemeteries to commune with the dead.

Another enthusiasm was the natural world – Jünger was a fanatical lepidopterist. A typical entry in these journals will report his current reading – anything from Saint-Simon to Balzac to Conan Doyle – comment on rumours of atrocities on the Eastern Front, relate his feelings while supervising the execution of a deserter, observe some rare plant, describe his disturbing nightly dreams and round off with a philosophical aphorism. It is a measure of the breadth of his mind that such apparently random reflections make a pattern that does not seem completely incongruous.

Critics of Jünger accuse him of being a dandy: a dilettante concerned with the pursuit of his own refined pleasures and coldly immune to the suffering around him. These journals give scant support to such a view. Given that Jünger had to be circumspect lest the diaries fall into the hands of the Gestapo, reading between the lines his abhorrence for Hitler – he calls him by the private code name ‘Kniébolo’ – and his sympathy for the war’s innocent victims shines through.

Jünger had good reason to tread carefully. On the fringes of the Stauffenberg conspiracy, he knew several of the officers involved in the plot and was secretly writing The Peace, an idealistic plea for a non-Nazi postwar Europe. After leaving Paris in a hurry just before the invading Allies arrived, he was discharged from the Army and spent the last months of the war at his home near Hanover.

His eldest son, Ernstl, was not so lucky. Sent to a punishment battalion on the Italian front for making anti-Hitler remarks, he was killed near the marble quarries of Carrera, aged 18. Jünger’s grief for his boy is eloquently expressed in the final pages of these diaries, giving the lie to those who damn him as a cold-hearted automaton.

The overall impression left by these journals is that of a cultivated Renaissance man out of his time; a knightly chevalier fastidiously holding the brutish modern world at bay at gauntlet’s length. Yet Jünger – so fascinatingly contradictory – was also a modern man. He was the first writer to describe his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs (Albert Hoffman, the chemist who synthesised LSD, was a friend) and his writings are full of futuristic fantasies.

To declare a personal interest, I knew Jünger in the late 1980s when I travelled to the Swabian manor house where he lived surrounded by his enormous collection of beetles and relics from the First World War. I had intended just to interview him, but ended by staying under his roof for three weeks as a sort of unpaid secretary, helping him with his English correspondence, accompanying him on walks, digging his garden, noting his aphorisms, collecting his cigarette butts and even taking an acid trip with him.

By then nearly 90, Jünger had become the Grand Old Man of German letters, the recipient of literary prizes, consulted by European leaders Mitterrand and Kohl. Though still attacked by the Left for his youthful nationalist militarism, he had become almost Green in his politics, warning of the dangers of environmental destruction.

The youngest old man I had ever met, Jünger died in March 1998, aged 102, still writing and soon after converting to Roman Catholicism. These journals can only add to his reputation as one of the 20th century’s most remarkable men. There is no one else quite like him in literature.

• A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals 1941-1945 
  Ernst Jünger, translated by Thomas S. Hansen & Abby J. Hansen 
  Columbia 496pp £30

Nigel Jones is the author of Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (Head of Zeus, 2014).